As the result, I have gathered vast ranges and profound depths of information in the folders into which I place my ore for transportation to the surface. With luck, an almost inexplicable alchemy will make a bin of the ore here and there into a small bit of silver and gold. But even the metaphor of alchemy has its limitations and most of the processing arrives at iron — essential for building but not particularly precious.
Because there is a vast labyrinthine Internet sufficiently well indexed that the tiny corner which has been dedicated to collecting millions of digital facsimile editions of the written / printed word, from ancient times to the present, can be accessed, I can accomplish an astonishing amount mining alone. Far more, as it turns out, than I could accomplish by signing onto a corporation, profit or non-profit.
Nearly as much of the search, it very much bears mentioning, is done in the notes and bibliographies in those facsimile books. The pre-Internet world built an impressive and vitally important part of the Internet search machinery.
The necessarily slapdash indexing system that I have managed to cobble together over the years for thousands of harvested items struggles mightily to facilitate access to tens of thousands. More and more of the ore sits waiting in its folder. So much more that it can even be difficult to recall what sits waiting exactly where. So much more than there is likely to be time to process in the end.
All of this said, I have long been considering options to better organize this ore and to turn as much as possible into useful information. Looked at from any number of sides, it comes to me that there is much more useful information to be had than is generally subsumed into the essay form.
Publishing raw notes, references and data can provide a valuable service. To shift to a new metaphor, they are the seeds for essays many of which I will not be available to write. They will also seed those I am able to write. But what should be the format?
As fate would have it, these thoughts have come together at the same time that Anne Katherine, a member of my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook group, has asked “can anyone point me to documentation about Bohemia having a sea coast in the 16th century?” It is a question that has had to wait its turn in the quasi-eternal queue. This seemed a promising candidate for the first safety deposit box (0001) in my new Shakespeare Authorship Vault blog. If the pieces came properly together I would have: 1) an introductory essay (this); 2) an essay to answer Ms. Katherine's question (pending); and could withdraw and display a box filled with the collection of the materials consulted in the process of chasing down the answer (the final step).
So far, this seems to be coming together provisionally well. The first item of information to be passed along is that the search has taken vastly too much time. In the better questions it always does. They actually resolve into numerous tiny but absolutely essential processual queries each of which can take days to answer as precisely as is possible.
The first clue, in this instance, was a common reference in 1880 editions of Robert Greene's Pandosto or Dorastus and Fawnia to a German essay on the mysterious source for Greene's work which is the main source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. For one example:
In a series of articles contributed to Englische Studien (1878, 1888), Caro traced the germ of the romance to certain events which occurred in the fourteenth-century history of Poland and Bohemia. Duke Ziemowit of Massow, conceiving suspicions of his wife, cast her into prison, where she bore a son. By the duke's orders, the queen was strangled, but the boy, carried away in secret, was brought up by a peasant woman. The king never ceased to lament his action, and eventually his son was restored to him. We may see in the unfortunate wife the prototype of Bellaria and Hermione, and in the cup-bearer Dobek that of Franion and Camillo. Caro further imagined that in Dorastus' description of himself as "a knight born and brought up in Trapolonia” , there is a reference to Massow. The name Sicilia he took to be a corruption of Silesia. It is significant in this connection, that Greene makes the wife of Egistus a daughter of the Emperor of Russia.1
This quote has been waiting to be used toward the question as to whether or not Bohemia had a seashore at any time in its medieval or early modern history. It turns out to be the essential first step.
To this I will add that German journals such as the Englische Studien were among the better sources of Shakespeare scholarship in their day. In general, the German scholarly journals added immeasurably to Shakespeare studies in German and English. This particular journal, however, seems only to have published work in German.
1 Greene, Robert. Pandosto or Dorastus and Fawnia (1588, 1907). P.G. Thomas, ed. xv-xvi.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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