Chapman and Munday were chosen for comparison because each has been forwarded as the author of the play at one time or another. Munday's initials were long rumored to appear on a dedication letter in the front of a copy of the play that had since disappeared. A quote from F&F appeared under Chapman's name in Robert Allot's England's Parnassus.1
The particular methodologies applied went by names such as “nearest shrunken centroid,” “support vector machine,” and “Burrowsian Delta methodology”. The author of the study was Hartmut Ilsemann of English Department of Leibniz University, Hannover2 — by all appearances, a respected expert in such matters.
A 17-page overview of Mr. Ilsemann's computer analysis, informs us that he has been introduced to this play and most of his background information by a 1915 article, by one T. M. Parrott, in the journal Modern Philology entitled “The Authorship of Two Italian Gentlemen”.3 Tellingly, among the sources Ilsemann cites for his paper no actual plays by Munday or Chapman are listed. These have been “read” only by the computer programs which he uses.
Those who have followed my work on computer stylometrics know that I have ascribed its manifold failures in our realm to a lack of background knowledge about Tudor and Stuart literature. Unfortunately, n-grams have led us astray once again. According to Mr. Ilsemann:
The clearest verdict can be found in the Růžička metric with words, word bigrams and character trigrams. They are very clear in their choice of Chapman.
A wholly objective scholar does not make findings. The n-grams do. Luckily, we can now remove all flesh and blood — all bias — and, thereby, all question.
For his part, Mr. Ilsemann does intersperse wide ranging generalities about qualities in the work of Munday and Chapman but they are so insubstantial that they provide no operable facts. He informs his reader that:
Stylistically, thematically, and rhetorically, Fidele and Fortunio aligns well with Chapman’s early work. It feels like an experimental play by a young, intellectually ambitious author — consistent with Chapman’s emerging voice in the 1580s–90s.4
What does “an experimental play by a young, intellectually ambitious author” feel like? If the n-grams gave the “clearest verdict” for Munday, surely the play would feel like “a poorly written play by a young ambitious author,” or thereabouts
Our dispassionate scholar clearly has not read any considerable amount from the works of either author much less from the corpus of late 16th century Elizabethan theater. Nor has he brought such expertise onboard.
Mr. Ilsemann would seem to have no
partisan interest of any sort except one. He is dedicated to the
proposition — so often disproven — that the authorship of any
text can be determined solely from the computer-mathematical analysis
of word frequencies and n-grams.
Before we even get to issues of textual evidence, however, we must address a mortal flaw in Isleman's paper. Mr. Parrott's fine article was published in 1915. At that point, only one damaged copy of the play was known to exist. That copy lacked the front matter (title-page, etc.). In 1933, The Malone Society's W. W. Greg announced the physical discovery of two more rumored copies with front matter intact. Parrott had been all but certain that the rumored copies did not actually exist.
The title page of both copies advertised that it was:
Translated out of Italian, and set downe according as it hath beene presented before the Queenes moste excellent Maiestie.5
One copy included a dedication to a “Maister John Heardson”, signed “Your woorships to his power. A. M.”
Among the many facts that contradict Mr. Ilsemann's computer analysis is that John Heardson was the younger brother of Thomas Herdson, one of a long line of Herdsons prominent in the Drapers Guild, in London and Kent.6 Anthony Munday was the son of Christopher Munday a member of the Drapers Guild who practiced the trade of printing. Anthony worked hard to maintain connections with the Drapers, as well as the nobility of England, through the dedications to his works, and was by all appearances a member of the Drapers throughout his life as well.
By the 1588 publication of A banquet of daintie conceits, a dizygotic twin of our play, A.M. is signing himself, on the title page, “seruaunt to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie.” He is also wielding Anthony Munday's signature motto, taken from Cicero: Honos Alit Artes (“Honor Nurtures the Arts”). For the next decade his title pages would declare him to be a “Messenger of her Maiesties chamber”.7
By best evidence, in 1584/5 George Chapman was a servant to Ralph Sadler, an officer of the court. He had borrowed a considerable amount from a loan shark in order to equip himself for the position. Sadler died early in 1587. Like a great many young men deeply indebted through their failed attempts to gain status, Chapman hired himself out as a soldier to fight in the Netherlands. No literary product is generally attributed to him until 1594 (10 years after F&F was acted before the queen).
Folgerpedia for 1584 states that F&F was probably the play performed by the Children of the Chapel Royal on February 2nd as part of the festivities surrounding the ceremonial knighting of the new Mayor of London, Edward Osborne, of the Clothworkers Company — upon what evidence they do not say. The high number of Latin squibs in the play does strongly suggest that it was written to be performed by the Children for whom Latin was often included in their plays in order to allow them to proudly display their learning before a highly educated audience. Public playing companies avoided foreign languages the which tended to turn away audiences. University plays were generally entirely in Latin in order to provoke a higher level of fluency.
The Children's performances were held at Blackfriars theater. Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, held the lease of the Blackfriars at the time and chose the plays performed together with his secretary, John Lyly. Prior to becoming a messenger of the queen's chamber, Munday proudly and constantly announced on his title pages that he was a servant to the Earl of Oxford.
Oxford must have valued Munday highly as none of the other plays selected for Blackfriars was nearly so bad. Blank verse had not yet become the rule for Elizabethan plays though prose was preferred over the old fourteener couplet forms. F&F, however, is a mish-mash of verse forms, most accomplished through word inversions and vague scansion. At least one type of couplet was invented by Munday himself and apparently never employed again after his A banquet of daintie conceits,
Surely, George Chapman — among the finer poets of his or any other time — would have been horrified to discover that he was associated with such abominable poetry, even in his early 20s. Over time, Munday would graduate from an abominable to a mediocre poet. He would write no more plays in any other forms than blank verse and prose.
1 Another appears under the initials S.G. Once thought to have referred to Stephen Gosson, but Gosson was such a bitter enemy of plays that he was never taken seriously as a candidate.
2 Shakespeare Statistics https://www.shak-stat.engsem.uni-hannover.de/
3 Parrott, T. M. “The Authorship of Two Italian Gentlemen.” Modern Philology, Sept. 1915. 65-75.
4 Ilsemann, Hartmut. “Chapman in the Shadows: Computational Attribution and the Case of Fidele and Fortunio
Introduction.”
5 “Supplement prepared by the General Editor. Dec. 1933. W. W. Greg.” issued for insertion in The Malone Society 1919 edition of Fidele and Fortunio Two Italian Gentlemen.
6 Apparently, John's membership and status in the Drapers Guild can only be inferred.
7 The works he published under his numerous pen-names did not, as the rule, include the motto or the declaration.
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 V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
No comments:
Post a Comment