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Friday, January 16, 2026

Hartmut Ilsemann's Stylometrics, Edward de Vere, George Chapman and Anthony Munday.

In researching matters around the play Fidele and Fortunio: Two Italian Gentlemen, published in London, in 1585, I was presented with a variety of computer analyses comparing the play to several by Chapman and by Munday. For the main analysis, word frequencies and n-grams were compared. “Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber (1587?) and The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (1598) were not in the database,” therefore a second comparison was made employing the Wcopyfind plagiarism program.

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.

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.

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Shakespeare's Stormy French Reading List: Du Bartas' Tempest and Rabelais'.

In this series:

Having begun with Du Bartas quotes concerning nightingales and larks [link], we now move on to Du Bartas' tale of the Prophet Jonah in the Third Book of the Fourth Day of the Second of the Divine Weeks. Jonah having fled by ship from the mission he was given by God brings upon the ship and all aboard a mighty tempest.

Du Bartas's original reads:

Calez , dit le patron, calez voile: baissez

Et misane, & beau-pré. Mais les vents courroucez

Deslachent sur sa face une bourasque forte,

Qui son jargonde mer, bou-bourdonnante emporte.

Des hommes esperdus le confus hurlement,1


["Trim the sails," said the captain, "trim the sails: lower
The mizzen and the bowsprit." But the furious winds
Unleashed a strong squall upon his face,
Which carried away his jargon-filled, roaring speech.
The confused howling of the bewildered men,...]

In Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas's Weeks, this is rendered:

Strike, strike our saile (the Master cryes) amain,

Vaile misne and sprit-sail: but hee cryes in vain ;

For, in his face the blasts so bluster ay,

That his Sea-gibb'rish is straight born away.

Confused cryes of men dismay'd in minde,2

While it is not always the case, here Sylvester has managed a literal translation.

Shakespeare's Tempest being a play, these general descriptions take on flesh. The Captain gives his orders through the boatswain:

Boteswain. Heigh my hearts, cheerely, cheerely my harts: yare, yare:

Take in the toppe-sale: Tend to th’Masters whistle :

Blow till thou burst thy winde, if roome enough.

*

Botes. Downe with the top-Mast: yare, lower, lower,

A cry within. Enter Sebastian, Anthonio & Gonzalo.

upon this howling: they are lowder then the weather,

or our office: yet againe? What do you heere? Shal we

give ore and drowne, have you a minde to sinke ?

Sebas. A poxe o’your throat, you bawling, blasphemous incharitable Dog.

*

Botes. Lay her a hold, a hold, set her two courses off to Sea againe, lay her off.3

The howling wind does not need to be described. It is being provided by stage machinery. Shakespeare does not repeat or approximate Sylvester's term “ Sea-gibb'rish” but the fact is not sufficient to tell us whether he was working from Du Bartas's original or Sylvester or both or neither.

Now Du Bartas amplifies the storm into an assault by canon.

Comme plusieurs canons braquez contre une tour

Faisans un rang de trous rez-terre tout autour,

Esbranlent bien le mur. Mais le dernier tonnerre

D'un fer aislé de feu le renverse par terre .4


[Like several cannons aimed against a tower,
Making a row of holes all around at ground level,
They shake the wall. But the final thunderclap
Of a winged iron projectile of fire knocks it to the ground.,]

Sylvester's translation of the Divine Weekes renders it:

As, many Canons, 'gainst a Castle bent,

Make many holes, and much the rampire rent.

And shake the wall, but yet the latest shock

Of fire-wing'd Bullets batters down the Rock

He takes a number of minor liberties in order to maintain his rhyme-schema.

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ariel recounts the storm he has risen to terrify those on the King's ship:

I flam’d amazement, sometime I’ld divide

And burne in many places; on the Top-mast,

The Yards and Bore-spritt, would I flame distinctly,

Then meete, and joyne. Joves Lightning, the precursers

O’th dreadfull Thunder-claps more momentarie

And fight out-running were not;...

The canons needed not be expressly mentioned in the play. The audience is only too aware of them without a word. Instead the flash and crack of them firing blank rounds, and the sulfur smell wafting over the audience is described to heighten the effect:

the fire, and cracks

Of sulphurous roaring, the moil...5

It should be noted that Shakespeare specifically mentions the boresprit6 (beau-pré7, beau / bore) that Sylvester has rendered as “sprit-sail”. Still, it is not nearly enough to clinch our investigation for us.

But those who have read my “The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais” know that Ariel is understood to have described the storm effect called “St. Elmo's Fire”.8 The Rabelais, is a much clearer, direct source for Ariel's speech:

les categides, thielles, lelapes, et presteres enflamber tout autour de nous par les psoloentes, urges, elicies, et aultres ejaculations etherees


[the catapults, javelins, thunderbolts, and fiery projectiles ignited everything around us with the whistling sounds, surges, flashes, and other ethereal emanations.]

And Panurge imagines demons rising around the ship in Rabelais' tempest in the direct fashion Ferdinand imagines them in Shakespeare:9

Je croy que touts les diables sont deschainez aujourd'huy 10


[I believe all the devils have got loose today.]

Not in the euphemistic style wielded by Du Bartas:

Le Pilote pendant sur l'escume d'un mont

Pense du Pole auant voir l'enfer plus profond.

Et puis precipité jusqu'à l'areine molle

Du plus bas de l'enfer pense voir le haut pole.

Et sentant l'ennemi & dedans & dehors,

Autant qu'il voit de flots croit voir autant de morts.11


[The pilot, suspended on the foam of a mountain,
Thinks of the Pole before seeing the deeper hell.
And then, plunged to the soft sand,
From the lowest depths of hell, thinks he sees the high pole.
And sensing the enemy both within and without,
For every wave he sees, he believes he sees as many dead.]

Sylvester's translation converts “the dead” into a general observation upon “death” in order to get his rhyme for which reason Shakespeare could not have gotten any idea of devils rising up from Du Bartas through him.

Interestingly, Du Bartas does get one image exactly in the fashion of Rabelais, and even more magically, when he observes that

le sifflement des chables,

Font chantres merueilleux, des concerts effroyables.12


[the whistling of the cables,
Create wondrous melodies, terrifying concerts.]

The image is particularly strong evidence that he, like Shakespeare, read Rabelais's tempest (in the original french), and surely all of his great Gargantua et Pantagruel:

commença... le mistral,... siffler à travers nos antennes... et autres éjaculations éthérées13


[the mistral began,... to whistle through our rigging... and other ethereal ejaculations]

But, by-and-large, the great popularity of Du Bartas' poem came from the fact that it was perceived as a Biblical epic. The over-sized lust for life of his even more enormously famous predecessor, inasmuch as he borrowed from him, had to be transformed to suit a religious rather than a literary audience.

This to say that both Du Bartas' and Shakespeare's tempests are clearly influenced by Rabelais' Gargantua et Pantagruel. In the original, for there would be no translation into another language until well after both were dead.

Most of the parallels between Du Bartas' and Shakespeare's tempest, as a result, can be attributed to Rabelais'. Some more limited number, however, suggest that Shakespeare had also read Du Bartas in the original. And the evidence does not end there.


1Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, Seigneur du. Les Peres, ov La Seconde Partie Dv Troisieme Iovr De La Seconde Sepmaine (1591). 17.

2 Sylvester, Joshuah. Bartas: his Devine weekes and works (1605-14) collated by Alexander Grosart in The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester (1880). II.248.

3 Shakespeare, William. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. IX. The Tempest. I.i.10-13, 43-4, 57-8.

4 Bartas. 18.

5 Shakespeare, I.ii.231-7.

6 Boresprit] bowsprit. We cannot know Sh.'s original spelling. Tudor spelling was irregular and numerous copyists/typesetters involved before publication.

7 Beau-pré] derivation: beau-proue. Proue = prow, bow

8 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais.” Virtual Grub Street. August 15, 2021. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-tempests-of-shakespeare-and-rabelais.html “St. Elmo’s Fire. During fierce storms sailors often saw sparkling lights dance around their masts. This effect, we have come to know, is caused by the air becoming highly ionized from lightning strikes.”

9 Shakespeare, I.ii.247-250. “the Kings sonne Ferdinand

With haire up-staring (then like reeds, not haire)

Was the first man that leapt; cride hell is empty,

And all the Divels are heere.”

10 Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua et Pantagruel, Clouzot ed. (1913). IV.160.

11 Du Bartas, 17.

12 Du Bartas, 17.

13 Rabelais, IV.156.

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Monday, December 08, 2025

A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.


Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-little-birdie-tells-me-shakespeare.html [state date accessed].


We have discovered that Shakespeare's description of Adonis's charger, in the poem Venus and Adonis, was almost certainly drawn from the collective wisdom of the horsemen of the 15th and 16th centuries rather than any particular text. That nothing, in particular, in his works can be shown to have been influenced by Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas Semaines, as was claimed by many traditional scholars in the early 20th century.

John of Gaunt's speech, in the play Richard the Second, however, was clearly influenced by a swatch from Du Bartas that appeared in a satirical French grammar, called Ortho-epia (1593), written under the name of John Eliot. (And maybe just a smidgen by Sylvester.) So then, Shakespeare knew of the then famous poem by Du Bartas and his work was at least indirectly influenced by it.

Eliot, it bears mentioning, has no surviving biography. A student of that very common name is discovered to have matriculated to Oxford in 1580. This is the sole evidence by which he is said to have attended university. It is estimated that, if he had enrolled at 18 years of age, he must have been born in 1562, and, as a result, this is given as his birth date in encyclopedia entries.

The rest of his biography has been created for him out of his own works all of which were translations from the French published between 1591 and 1593. Not a trace of him remains after 1593 which encyclopedia entries offer for the date of his demise. Gabriel Harvey mentions him, in his book Pierce's Supererogation, published that same year, but not by name.

Over the past 150 years or so, a very strange fact has been established about Eliot. For some seemingly inexplicable reason, Shakespeare incorporated in his plays more than a little bit from Eliot's translations.

I have already had the pleasure of revealing the man behind the name. There is much more to come on the subject. But now is not the time.

What all of this doesn't answer is: “Did Shakespeare read Du Bartas in the original French?” Could he read literary French?

A reader might be confident that Du Bartas's

Le Monde est un theatre, où de Dieu la puissance,

La justice, l'Amour, le Savoir la Prudence,

Jouet leurs personnages1

is the model for a famous image from the play As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

But there would have been an available crib for Shakespeare, if he needed it, in the translation by Sylvester (notwithstanding the fact that neither Du Bartas's original nor Sylvester's translation did the Ronsard justice). Shakespeare could have been referencing Sylvester, not Du Bartas.

The world's a stage where God's omnipotence ,

His justice, knowledge, love, and providence

Do act the parts.2

But Shakespeare didn't need Sylvester, because both he and Du Bartas were referencing the French poet Pierre Ronsard:

Le Monde est le theatre, et les hommes acteurs;
La Fortune, qui est maistresse de la Sceine,
Appreste les habits, et de la vie humaine
Les Cieux et les Destins en sont les spectateurs.3

[The world is the stage, and men the actors;
Fortune, who is mistress of the play,
Prepares the costumes, and the human lives
The Heavens and the Destinies look down upon.]

The passage in Ronsard is a much more exact match for As You Like It. In fact, the passage in the play qualifies as translation.

As it turns out, a little birdie tells us the answer to our question. In Shakespeare's Winters Tale, “The Larke, that tirra-Lyra chaunts,”4 sings the identical song that it sings in the fifth day of Du Bartas La Semaine, in which the lark (alouette) and the nightingale (rossignol) are compared:

La gentille Alouete avec son tire-lire

Tire l'ire à l'iré tirelirant tire

Vers la voute du ciel: puis son vol vers ce lieu

Vire, & desire dire adieu Dieu, adieu Dieu.5

[The gentle Lark with her tire-lire
Tire l'ire à l'iré tirelirant draws
Towards the vault of the heavens: then turns her flight toward
The place, & her way to say to god God, to god God.]

Eliot chose “Tee-ree-lee-ree” for the song; Sylvester “Heer peer-l neer”. Shakespeare's onomatopoeia exactly matches Du Bartas's: “ tirra-Lyra”.

But Eliot's Ortho-epia is bi-lingual. With a bit of mental dexterity Shakespeare could pick out Du Bartas's lark song regardless that Eliot had modified it in the English translation.

But Du Bartas had made a mistake. He didn't know his birds as well as he thought. In the extended passage, the nightingales sang at daybreak (point du jour). Around 1587 he corrected his mistake, in a translation of his own, of the Scottish King James VI's poem Lepanto, and the translation was published in 1591.

In it, the lark finds its way into the conversation somehow. Its song a break in the midst of cruel war. The nightingale is nowhere to be found. (Perhaps because he prefers privacy.) The lark, instead, is properly the harbinger of the new day.

Aussi tost que l'aurore

Peinte d'or, de safran, de vermeillon encore

A banni la nuict ſombre, & qu'en tire-lirant

L'Alouëtte a donné d'un bec doux-souspirant

Un gai bon jour au jour,...6

[ As soon as the dawn
Painting with gold, saffron, and vermilion again
Banishes somber night, with tire-lirant,
The Lark, gives from a sweet-sighing beak,
A gay good day to the day,...]

Add to our results, then, the following exchange between Romeo and Juliet about the lark and the nightingale:

    Juliet. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
    It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
    That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
    Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
    Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:7
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day8
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

Still, Romeo cannot choose to leave if Juliet wishes it to be the nightingale and not yet day:

Romeo. Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven9 so high above our heads:

Juliet recalls that Lark's song is said to sweetly divide day from night:

Juliet. Some say the lark makes sweet division.10  

But now the song is not sweet for it divides she and Romeo.

Actually, this is only the beginning of the images Shakespeare borrowed from Du Bartas in the original French. But it will have to suffice for the present.


1Du Bartas. La Sepmaine (1579). 4-5.

2Sylvester, Joshua. The First Day of the First Week. ll.180-2.

3Ronsard, Pierre. Oeuvres ed. Blanchemain (1860), iv, 184

4The Winter's Tale, IV.iii.11-2.

5 Du Bartas Premiere Semaine (1585), V, 615ff

6 Du Bartas. Les Peres (1591). 79.

7 Painting with gold, saffron, and vermilion [Peinte d'or, de safran, de vermeillon]

8 A gay good day [Un gai bon jour]

9 the vault of the heavens [la voute du ciel]

10 The Lark, gives from a sweet-sighing beak, / A gay good day to the day, [L'Alouëtte a donné d'un bec doux-souspirant / Un gai bon jour au jour,...]

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