The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection

The Marlowe Papers on Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 12:57:00 +0000

Purchase tickets today for The Marlowe Papers: A One-Man Play at Otherplace at the Basement (24 Kensington St, Brighton). This is an exciting new stage version of Ros Barber's critically acclaimed verse novel The Marlowe Papers which will run from January 26-January 30.

Was Marlowe Faustus? Ros Barber @ London Art House, November 14

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 11:45:00 +0000

Dr. Ros Barber, contributor to this blog and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for her highly acclaimed verse novel The Marlowe Papers, will be presenting at the Marlowe Society's inaugural Annual Christopher Marlowe Lecture on the topic "Was Marlowe Faustus?" Here is a summary of Dr. Barber's lecture:

"We do not know exactly when Doctor Faustus was written, but Robert Greene's 1588 allusion to Marlowe associates him, very early in his career, with a famous magician. Faustus is the protagonist with whom Marlowe is most often conflated: the scholar A.L.Rowse said 'Marlowe is Faustus'. Is this simply a case of reading the author's life backwards through the lens of his public atheism and subsequent sticky end? Were elements of Marlowe's biography written in to the play after his death? Did those who knew him personally think of him as Faustus? This talk explores evidence that illuminates Marlowe's relationship with his most famous protagonist."

Click here to purchase tickets. The London Art House is located at 2-18 Britannia Row, Islington, London.

Ros Barber at Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 11:45:00 +0000

Click here to listen to the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society's Ros Barber discuss the underlying reasons for the Shakespeare authorship question. Dr. Barber recently attended the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship conference in Ashland, Oregon, to give a paper on "The Value of Uncertainty." The recording is from Jefferson Public Radio, Ashland, Oregon, 23 Sep 2015.

Sam Blumenfeld, 1926-2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 17:48:00 +0000

It is with great sorrow that I report the passing of Sam Blumenfeld. In 2008, Sam called me up to float the idea of my starting a blog on the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory. It was Sam's phone call that inspired me to give it a shot.

My first communication with Sam was in 1993. I was 25 years old and teaching high school English in the South Bronx, and I was horrified by how many incoming 9th graders struggled with reading. It was Sam's Alpha-Phonics reading system that assisted me in teaching kids the right way to read - kids who had sadly graduated from New York City public middle schools as shockingly poor readers. Alpha-Phonics, I had discovered, was the quickest way to repair the damage of dubious reading strategies, such as look-say and whole language, or flat-out ineffective reading instruction in general. Alpha-Phonics was a godsend, and I employed "guerilla" teaching by sneaking his intensive, systematic system into my daily class lessons so that I could ensure that at least my students became proficient in letter-sound relationships. Along with Rudolf Flesch, I consider Sam to have been the most effective, articulate, and influential critic of bad reading methods in American schools, methods he was not afraid to label "educational malpractice."

Sam was a legendary pioneer in America's flourishing homeschool movement, in part because Alpha-Phonics empowered thousands upon thousand of parents to teach their kids how to read correctly, and he was a tireless proponent of common sense pedagogical strategies, such as intensive, systematic phonics. I attended homeschool conferences with Sam, and I saw firsthand how parents couldn't wait to thank him for his how-to instructional materials and relentless defense of homeschooling in countless publications and forums. Browse the Amazon reader reviews of his Alpha-Phonics reading system and you'll get a sense of the positive impact he had on so many lives.

To calculate how many speeches Sam has given in his lifetime at conventions and conferences is impossible, but they are in the many hundreds. I know that he had lectured in all 50 states.

Sam was born in New York City, was a World War II veteran of the Italian campaign, was fluent in French, and was widely published on a diverse range of topics (one of his first "big" pieces was "How to Marry a Rockefeller," Esquire, 1974). He truly led an exciting life, and here's one of my favorite anecdotes of his: "I did meet Ayn Rand when I was editor at Grosset & Dunlap. Took her to lunch. I then attended the Objectivist lectures given by her protege Nathaniel Branden. Rand would come at the end of each lecture and answer questions. After the lecture, a group of us would retire to the bar in the hotel for further dicussion. Alan Greenspan was part of that group. Of course, Rand later broke off with Branden because he was in love with a younger woman."

Sam was a passionate Marlovian, and in the 1960s he was a close acquaintance of Calvin Hoffman, who pioneered the "Marlowe as hidden hand behind Shakespeare" theory in the mid 1950s. Two years ago, Sam turned over to me all of his correspondences between Hoffman and him - what a treasure trove for Marlovians!

In 2009, I had a former student of mine interview Sam regarding the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory. Click here for the interview.

Also in 2009, Sam - along with Peter Farey, Dr. Ros Barber, Daryl Pinksen, Mike Rubbo, Isabel Gortázar, and myself - co-founded the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

Sam was a kind and generous man who valued authentic conversation and lively debate, and he was so well-versed on so many issues. Until the very end, he was a fiercely passionate advocate of causes near and dear to his heart, especially the absolutely vital mission of teaching children - and even adults - how to read.

Rest in peace, Sam.

Ros Barber on the "New" Shakespeare Portrait

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 May 2015 22:53:00 +0000

Click here for Ros Barber's fantastic piece, "Why the 'New Shakespeare Portrait' Is Not Shakespeare," in the Huffington Post. Ros Barber, a regular contributor to this blog and a co-founder of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, is the author of The Marlowe Papers.

The Similarity Between the Marlowe and Shakespeare Coats of Arms by Dave Randall, with Donna N. Murphy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:16:00 +0000

A short time ago I was looking up something in Burke’s The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales when I decided to check the entries for Marlowe.¹ There are several coats-of-arms for various branches of the Marlowe family listed; most are what are called "canting arms" and display a heraldic device called a martlet, which is basically a sparrow without feet, and are a pun between "martlet" and "Marlowe." The one that caught my eye, however, was this entry: "Marlow, or Marley, Or, a bend sable":

These arms are identical to those granted to John Shakespeare in 1596, minus the spear which appears on the Shakespeare arms:

Since there is no date associated with the Marlow/Marley arms, it is probable that they were in use prior to what is called the "first visitation" in 1483, when all of the arms in England were first recorded and a comprehensive list compiled by the heralds.

Since we know little about John Marlowe's ancestry, we cannot say whether he was from a family entitled to bear arms, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility; many relatively humble people (like Shakespeare's mother) were from armigerous families. We also do not know if Marlowe was related to the branch of the family that used these arms. Yet this may not have mattered, if the point was to associate the names “Shakespeare” and “Marlowe” via heraldry.

Might this be another authorship clue? Might some friend of Marlowe have influenced or bribed William Dethick, the Garter King of Arms who granted John Shakespeare his arms, to assign the Shakespeares a coat-of-arms almost identical to the Marlowes? Might he have done so to signal “those in the know” regarding the true authorship of the “Shakespeare” works?

In 1602, York Herald of Arms Ralph Brooke accused Dethick of improperly granting a coat-of-arms to 23 “mean persons,” including Shakespeare. He also alleged that Shakespeare’s design was too close to that of Lord Mauley:

With the aid of William Camden, playwright Ben Jonson’s former mentor, Dethick successfully defended his decisions regarding Shakespeare and the design of the coat of arms.² It was Jonson who satirized Shakespeare’s coat-of-arms via the character Sogliardo in Every Man Out of his Humour (wr. 1599), and then later sang Shakespeare’s praises in the Bard’s First Folio, 1623. Diana Price has proposed that Jonson knowingly differentiated between the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon and the main author of the Shakespeare canon.³

In sum, if all of this is merely a coincidence, it is a very strange one.

© Dave Randall and Donna N. Murphy, April 2015

¹Burke, Bernard. The General Armory of England, Scotland, and Wales (London: Harrison and Sons, 1864), Vol. II.

²Donaldson, Ian. Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 160-161.

³Price, Diana. Shakespeare's Unauthorized Biography (Shakespeare-authorship.com, 2012), 66-75, 202-15.

Looking for William Hall by Donna N. Murphy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 11:33:00 +0000

In The Shakespeare Conspiracy, Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman set down four intriguing occurrences in archival records (dated between 1592 and 1603) of the name William or Will Hall, plus one of Hall, that appeared to connect him to the world of British intelligence.¹ The authors conjectured that William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon was a secret agent who employed the name as an alias when engaged in intelligence activities. The name would help explain the enigmatic dedication to Shake-speares Sonnets. Assuming that the one space in the dedication was a code that meant no space, while dots meant spaces, one could find a hidden message that Mr. W. Hall was the begetter or author of the Sonnets.² The dedication begins:

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.

Peter Farey listed these occurrences and wondered whether William Hall might have been a cover name for Christopher Marlowe. He added that he had not confirmed the information in the Phillips and Keatman book.

I attempted to make the confirmation. I was already suspicious because Phillips and Keatman claimed that the inverted dot/space cipher was described in a 1608 published pamphlet by Thomas Hariot. In fact, Hariot published only one work, in 1585. Phillips and Keatman listed their sources for William Hall as: Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC) Cecil 4; State Papers (SP) Hamburg III; Public Records Office (PRO) SP 106/2; and HMC Cecil 20. Oddly, they did not list as sources the Canterbury Archives and Chamber Treasurer accounts which they seemed to cite.

At the Folger Shakespeare Library, I checked the Cecil Papers both via the Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury Preserved at Hatfield House and via the Cecil Papers electronic database now available online from ProQuest. I looked for any occurrences of William or W. Hall with various spellings and abbreviations from 1580-1620 which could in any way be interpreted as related to intelligence activities. I also checked the Public Records Office Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1580-1610, and List and Analysis of State Papers Foreign, only available for 1589-1596. I did not have access to SP Hamburg III.

I found none of the instances that Phillips and Keatman cited. The best I could come up with in terms of an interesting reference to “Hall” was a note by Sir Robert Sidney to the Earl of Essex dated Sept. 24, 1596, Flushing, stating this his letter was so short because he “found this bearer, Mr. Hall, ready to start” (HMC Cecil Part VI, p. 398). But this gives us no first name, nor can we tell whether Mr. Hall was employed by Sidney or Essex, or merely someone willing to carry a letter.

Graham Phillips, sometimes writing with Keatman, penned thirteen books investigating historical mysteries, including The Virgin Mary Conspiracy, Alexander the Great: Murder in Babylon, and The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant. With such a prodigious output on a wide variety of subjects, it would not be surprising to find that some information provided in The Shakespeare Conspiracy was incorrect. I attempted to contact Phillips through his website, but the email address posted is no longer valid. We should, of course, continue to search for aliases employed by Christopher Marlowe, but at this point I am skeptical that “William Hall” was one of them.

© Donna N. Murphy, March 2015

¹Phillips, Graham and Martin Keatman. The Shakespeare Conspiracy. London: Random House, 1994. 158-173; 180-181; 215.
² Sidney Lee proposed that printer William Hall, who was apprenticed to John Allde in 1577-1584, was "W.H." for the same reason. See Robert Fleissner's Shakespeare and the Matter of the Crux: Textual, Topical, Onomastic, Authorial, and Other Puzzlements (Lewistown, PA: Mellen Press, 1991), 67-100; 243-247.

“I live to die, I die to live” by Ros Barber

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 18:26:00 +0000

On Bastian Conrad’s English language Marlowe pages, I was interested to find a new claim for Marlovian theory that I hadn’t encountered before. From 1602, the title pages of several editions of Venus and Adonis were decorated with an illustration showing a human skull with wings, balanced on the globe of the Earth, and above it an open book containing the words (in modern spelling) “I live to die, I die to live”.

Under Marlovian theory, Christopher Marlowe faked his death in May 1593 in order to escape being executed for atheism and heresy, and Venus and Adonis was his first publication under the name William Shakespeare, so “I live to die, I die to live” might seem a very suitable motto to place upon it.

Nevertheless it is vitally important that all researchers seek to disprove their theories, especially when it comes to theories relating to the authorship question, for you can be quite sure that if you don’t attempt to disprove your theory, somebody else will, and thereby cast doubt on the quality of your pronouncements more generally.

Modern research tools such as Early English Books Online make it possible to do this rather easily, if one has access to them. On examining every digitized title page for Venus and Adonis that is available, it was clear that this image was introduced in 1602 by the publisher William Leake.

A 1599 edition of Venus and Adonis printed “by R.Bradocke for William Leake, dwelling in Paule’s churchyard at the signe of the greyhound” did not utilize this image. But William Leake’s 1602 edition, and those he published subsequently, depicted the winged skull and the open book with its motto. The reason becomes obvious almost immediately. William Leake had moved premises and was now to be found, according to the title page, “dwelling at the sign of the Holy Ghost, in Paules Churchyard”. The winged skull was the sign of the Holy Ghost, and “I live to die, I die to live” was the Holy Ghost’s message of everlasting life.

A survey of other William Leake publications confirms this; for a decade from 1602, nearly all of his publications bear this image (complete with “I live to die, I die to live”) on their title pages including:

• John Jewel’s Sermons (1603)

• John Lyly’s Euphues and His England (1605)

• Henry Smith’s Sermons (1605)

• Robert Linaker’s A Comfortable Treatise (1607)

• Leonard Wright’s A Pilgrimage to Paradise (1608)

Presumably, no one is going to argue that these writers, too, faked their deaths to avoid being killed.

In 1613, Leake changed his device to a wordless, blazing book. But it’s clear that from 1602 to 1612, the winged skull with its motto that decorated Venus and Adonis – and many other books besides – was simply a marker of the William Leake brand.

Ros Barber Wins Hoffman Prize

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 13:57:00 +0000

Congratulations to our great friend, Dr. Rosalind Barber, for co-winning the 2014 Hoffman Prize for her paper entitled “‘Shortly he will quite forget to go’: Marlowe and the Faustus Epigrams.” The prize is awarded by the King's School for a "distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe."

This is Ros’s second Hoffman. She won the prize in 2011 for her debut novel, The Marlowe Papers.

Congratulations, Ros!

Rethinking the Sonnets: Ros Barber's Groundbreaking Article on Marlovian Perspective Now Available

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 21:58:00 +0000

Click here to read the first article exploring a "Marlovian" perspective on Shakespeare's Sonnets to be published in a peer-reviewed history journal: Rethinking History (June 2010). Ros Barber's "Exploring Biographical Fictions: the Role of Imagination in Writing and Reading Narrative" is now free to read on open access.

Stylometrics and Edward II by Peter Farey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:17:00 +0000

One piece of stylometric evidence which seems at first sight to throw quite a large spanner into the Marlovian works appears in Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship, edited by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney.¹ The book itself is not concerned with the Shakespeare authorship question as such, but with whether certain parts of Shakespeare's works or apocrypha are either by him or by a collaborator. For example, Craig argues quite convincingly for Marlowe having made significant contributions to parts one and two of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy.

It is in a chapter called 'The authorship of The Raigne of Edward the Third' (by Timothy Irish West), however, that the item having most significance for the Marlovian theory appears. It is a chart (Fig.6.8, p.130) in which he is simply testing the validity of an approach being used to see whether Shakespeare wrote either the 'Countess' scenes (I.ii–II.ii) or the 'French campaign' scenes (III.i–IV.iii) in Edward III.

In this graph there are 90 shaded circles representing segments of 6000 words each from 27 plays which are taken to be solely by Shakespeare. There are also 236 diamond shapes representing 6000-word segments from 85 other single-author plays written between 1580 and 1619.

The horizontal (X) axis represents the extent to which each segment includes lexical words²which have been identified as more characteristic of Shakespeare's works than the others'. The vertical (Y) axis shows the extent to which it uses words more typical of the others' works than Shakespeare's.³ Not surprisingly, they divide into two fairly distinct clusters – the circles in one and the diamonds in another.

In this particular chart, West has removed the three 6000-word segments of Marlowe's Edward II from the data, and treated them as if it were all of unknown authorship. Shown as black triangles on the chart, all three fall quite clearly within the 'other authors' cluster, and not within the 'Shakespeare' one. Here is the result. (The caption should of course read 'segments of Edward II', not 'segments of Edward III'.)

Against this, he shows (pp.127–8) segments from Shakespeare's King John, Henry IV (part 1) and Henry V, all of which fall in the 'Shakespeare' cluster, albeit at the edge nearest to the other one.

There is no doubt that this is a fairly strong piece of evidence that the author of Edward II (i.e. Marlowe) was not also the author of the Shakespeare canon. A few points need to be borne in mind, however, before we all admit defeat.

1. Although the data for Edward II are ignored in arriving at the characteristic words for the 'other authors', all of the rest of Marlowe's plays (except Dido, because of the possible input by Thomas Nashe) are included, whereas they would all need to be ignored too if the intention was to assess Marlowe as a Shakespeare authorship candidate – which it wasn't.

2. The three Henry VI plays, Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew – those which because of time proximity are most likely to have similarities to Marlowe – play no part in this calculation.

3. This also means that there is no play in the 'Shakespeare' set which is known to have been written less than five years or so after Edward II.

4. Furthermore, the Shakespeare set includes plays as late as The Tempest, written some twenty years later.

This question of date is of crucial importance in any stylometric attempt to assign authorship. Let me give an example which is in essence a very much simplified version of the method employed by Craig and Kinney (and West).

Suppose that there are two bodies of work, one which we will ascribe to playwright A and the other playwright B.

We work out that the frequency with which they each use the words 'most' and 'then' differs greatly. In fact, if we add up the total for both words in a play by either of them and find what percentage of them are 'most' we can be fairly sure that:

* if it's less than 40%, it's by playwright A

* if it's more than 40%, it's by playwright B

(In fact this works for all of A's 21 plays bar one, and all of B's 16 except two. You would need to get a bit more complicated to get 100% in each case!)

Now let’s imagine that we have a play where we suspect collaboration between the two playwrights. We find that Acts 1 & 2 are well below 40% (so probably playwright A) and Acts 3 & 5 well above (playwright B). Act 4 is more doubtful at 43%.

So does this tell us anything at all about whether the two playwrights are different people? No. In fact playwright A is Shakespeare before 1600, and playwright B is Shakespeare after 1600. And Twelfth Night (1601?) was the play in question, if you were wondering.

What we can see, therefore, is that to claim that this tells us they were different people is circular reasoning. If you start with an assumption that they are two different people, and take no account of time, then it’s hardly surprising that this is just what the figures will seem to show.

Don't get me wrong, though. This is a powerful piece of evidence against the Marlovian theory, and it would be wrong to think otherwise.

¹Craig, Hugh; Kinney, Arthur F. (2009). Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge University Press.
²According to Craig & Kinney (p.224), "Words can be classified into functional words and lexical words (with just a few doubtful cases). Function words have a grammatical function; examples are the, and, she, before, and of. [...] Lexical words [are] nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs which can be substituted for each other in a given sentence." They give king and mother as examples.
³The most characteristic words for Shakespeare (the horizontal axis) are found by calculating the proportion of 'Shakespeare' segments within which a given word appears and adding this to the proportion of 'others' segments within which it does not appear (giving a theoretical maximum of +2). The 500 words with the highest scores are the ones used. For the vertical axis, the same procedure is followed, but finding those words with the highest combination of proportions 'within the others' and 'not within Shakespeare'.

Is the Corpus Christi Portrait Marlowe?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 15:09:00 +0000

Click here to read The Marlowe Society's post on the June 23 Times (U.K.) article concerning doubts about Marlowe being the sitter of the famous Corpus Christi portrait. Click here for Ros Barber's June 25 letter to the Times regarding this matter (via our International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society Facebook page).

Worth Repeating: On the Shakespeare "Front"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 17:42:00 +0000

A recent exchange on the "Oxfraud" Facebook page (commencing June 6), which consists of comments by International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society members Peter Farey and Daryl Pinksen, has prompted this blog to re-post two older blog articles on the issue of Shakespeare being a front for another, possibly blacklisted writer. In "Philip Yordan: A Modern-Day Shakespeare?" Daryl Pinksen examines some compelling parallels between Marlowe and the Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s. In "William Shakespeare, Businessman - Forgotten Genius," Anthony Kellett also explores the life of a literary front man. We welcome your comments to these provocative pieces.

Monsieur Le Doux was European scholar Catharinus Dulcis (1540-1626) by Geoffrey Caveney and Peter Farey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 May 2014 15:53:00 +0000

Readers of this blog are probably well familiar with Monsieur Le Doux, who in 1595 was a tutor at the home of Sir John Harington in Rutland, was instructed on the gathering of intelligence for the Earl of Essex and Anthony Bacon in 1596, and whose name appears briefly in Thomas Birch's Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth and in Bacon's papers. We had believed until very recently that Le Doux might have been an identity for the surviving Christopher Marlowe in hiding. But we now know this was not the case.

In fact, this Monsieur Le Doux was Catharinus Dulcis or Catherin Le Doux, a reputable European scholar of the Italian and French languages. He was born in Savoy in 1540, worked for a long time as an itinerant tutor to young noblemen, and became a professor of Italian and French at the University of Marburg in Germany in 1605. He compiled an Italian-Latin dictionary, translated works by Tasso and Terence, and wrote a comedy of his own, Tobie (Tobias). Much information about his life can be found at this German website.

Marburg was the world's first Protestant-founded university, and in fact Dulcis's Protestant beliefs were the reason he had to leave the Continent and stay in England as Monsieur Le Doux in the period 1594-1596.

Co-author Caveney first discovered the identity of Le Doux as Dulcis in a letter Dulcis wrote from London in November 1594 to Sir John Skene. It appears on pp. 156-157 of the book Memorials of the family of Skene of Skene..., published in 1887. The letter is written in French and signed "Le Doulx," and below it, "CATHARINUS DULCIS". Among other things in the letter, he mentions the kindness and courtesy of Anthony Bacon.

Further research by the two of us has uncovered abundant confirming information that clearly shows that this man must have been Monsieur Le Doux. Dulcis's own autobiographical sketch Vitae Curriculi Breviarium, written in Latin, mentions his time in England working for Essex and Bacon and even tutoring for the Haringtons, the main activity of Le Doux that we knew of from Bacon's papers. This work of Dulcis also mentions Antonio Perez, Mittelburg, Baron Zeirotine, Count Maurice of Nassau, Archduke Albert and Henri d'Eberbach, all figures who appeared in Le Doux's correspondence as we knew it.

Finally, co-author Farey examined a letter by Dulcis in 1607 and found that the handwriting and signature are so similar to those found in the letters that we have of Monsieur Le Doux, that it is quite clear that they were written by the same person.

© Geoffrey Caveney and Peter Farey, May 2014

DIO, the International Journal of Scientific History on Marlowe-as-Shakespeare

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 12:09:00 +0000

Click here to read Dennis Rawlins's truly compelling (and highly amusing) paper entitled "Marlowe Created Shakespeare" in the latest issue of DIO, the International Journal of Scientific History. Since 1991, DIO has held an interest in exposing historical hoaxes of various types (read about their work regarding the North Pole discovery here in the New York Times). International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society members Peter Farey, Ros Barber, and Samuel Blumenfeld receive nice plugs in Rawlins's must-read paper.

A Brief History of the Marlovian Shakespeare Authorship Theory

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 01:44:00 +0000

Courtesy of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust.

Did Christopher Marlowe Fake His Death?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 16:29:00 +0000

Read Ros Barber's piece "Did Christopher Marlowe Fake His Death?" in today's Huffington Post. Ros, a regular contributor to this blog, is the author of The Marlowe Papers and a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

Romeo and Juliet and Marlowe and Nashe by Donna N. Murphy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 22:47:00 +0000

Marlovians have long maintained that Christopher Marlowe, about to be imprisoned and probably executed as a “heretic,” faked his own death and afterwards wrote work that was published under the name “William Shakespeare.” My research has additionally found linguistic evidence that Marlowe’s friend Thomas Nashe, like Marlowe hounded by the Church of England, pretended to die and assumed the identity of Thomas Dekker (see The Mysterious Connection between Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker and T. M.: An English Renaissance Deception?). In The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum, I maintain that Marlowe and humorist Nashe co-authored plays, including some within the Shakespeare canon. Following is a selection of material from my chapter on Romeo and Juliet.

In Romeo and Juliet, the excellent plotting, the poetry of love, and the language of the nobility is, in my view, Marlowe’s, but Nashe penned lines by servants and by Mercutio, who even as he is dying makes a pun, “Tomorrow you shall find me a grave man.” Listen, and you can hear the difference¹

Marlovian:

Romeo. But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

That thou her maid art far more fair than she. (II.i.44-48)

Nasheian:

Mercutio. The pox of such antick, lisping, affecting fantasticoes, these new turners of accents!—‘By Jesu, a very good blade!—a very tall man! A very good whore.’—Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers... (II.iii.26-31)

Romeo and Juliet and Marlowe

Marlowe’s work is tied in rare ways to Romeo and Juliet. To demonstrate this, I ran word juxtapositions through the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO), a searchable database made up of over 32,000 texts of works written from 1472 to 1700 at the time of my study. I have adopted the following EEBO terminology: “fby.10” = “followed by,” the second term follows within ten words of the first term; “near.20” = the second term occurs within twenty words either before or after the first; and “*” = a placeholder for endings.

1. Shakespeare and Marlowe works contain the only two occurrences in EEBO of Gallop* apace near.100 Phoebus* near.100 night*. The speakers in both excerpts express their desire for night to come quickly by telling Phoebus and his horses to “gallop apace” through the sky.

Romeo and Juliet:

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a waggoner

As Phaëton would whip you to the west

And bring in cloudy night immediately.

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,

That runaways’ eyes may wink, and Romeo

Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen. (III.ii.1-7)

Marlowe’s Edward II:

Gallop apace, bright Phoebus, through the sky,

And dusky night, in rusty iron car,

Between you both shorten the time, I pray,

That I may see the most desirèd day

When we may meet these traitors in the field. (Sc. xvi.44-8)

2. Romeo and Juliet and Marlowe's translation of Lucan’s First Book sport the only two occurrences in EEBO of Cloud* near.100 meteor* near.100 torch* near.100 night*. The passages also juxtapose “day,” “light,” and “east.” Now, works did circulate in manuscript, but it is worth noting that Lucan’s First Book, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Marlowe's Hero and Leander were unpublished when Romeo and Juliet was written.

Romeo and Juliet:

Romeo. No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

Juliet. Yon light is not daylight; I know it, I.

It is some meteor that the sun exhaled

To be to thee this night a torchbearer

And light thee on thy way to Mantua. (III.v.7-15)

Marlowe’s Lucan’s First Book:

And sundry fiery meteors blazed in heaven,

Now spear-like, long, now like a spreading torch;

Lightning in silence stole forth without clouds,

And from the northern climate snatching fire

Blasted the Capitol; the lesser stars,

Which wont to run their course through empty night,

At noonday mustered; Phoebe having filled

Her meeting horns to match her brother’s light,

Strook with th’ earth’s sudden shadow, waxèd pale;

Titan himself throned in the midst of heaven

His burning chariot plunged in sable clouds,

And whelmed the world in darkness, making men

Despair of day, as did Thyestes’ town,

Mycenae, Phoebus flying through the east. (529-42)

3. Below are the only two occurrences of “Sweetest flower near.20 field” in EEBO for forty years before and after the excerpts were written. Romeo and Juliet is describing Juliet, who is not quite fourteen, while The Jew of Malta’s subject, Abigail, is scarce fourteen. This juxtaposition seems to indicate the same mind at work.

Romeo and Juliet:

Death lies on her like an untimely frost

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field (IV.iv.55-6)

Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta:

A fair young maid, scarce fourteen years of age,

The sweetest flower in Cytherea’s field (I.iii.13-4)

4. Following are two out of three of the occurrences of “amorous rite*” for forty years before or after the works’ composition. The third occurrence is in George Chapman’s play All Fools, printed in 1605.

Romeo and Juliet:

Lovers can see to do their amorous rites (III.ii.8)

Marlowe’s Hero and Leander:

Some amorous rites or other were neglected (Sestiad II.64)

5. Other striking parallels include:

Romeo and Juliet:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. (II.i.44-5)

Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta:

But stay, what star shines yonder in the east?

The lodestar of my life, if Abigail. (II.i.41-2)

6. Romeo and Juliet:

Come, death, and welcome (III.v.24)

Marlowe’s Edward II:

Then come, sweet death, and rid me of this grief (Sc. xxvi.92)

7. Romeo and Juliet:

Eyes, look your last!...

The dashing rocks thy seasick weary barque! (V.iii.112, 118)

Marlowe’s II Tamburlaine:

Now, eyes, enjoy your latest [last] benefit…

Through rocks more steep and sharp than Caspian cliffs (V.iii.224, 241)

In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo refers to viewing his deceased wife, Juliet, in the last scene of the play, before he kills himself. In II Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine refers to viewing his deceased wife, Zenocrate, in the last scene of the play, before he dies.

Other Marlowe Connections

Beyond linguistic ties, biographical connections exist as well. Juliet was sixteen years old in the main source for Romeo and Juliet, Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, and scholars are not sure why Shakespeare made her younger. According to the play, Juliet was born on Lammas Eve (August 20). As Louis Ule noted, Marlowe had a sister named Joan (or Jane) who was baptized on Lammas Eve and married young, at age 12 ½. She died in childbirth a year later, when she was the same age as Juliet.² Marlowe had a personal reason to view the death of a newly married girl not yet fourteen years old as particularly tragic.

In 1589, Marlowe got into a fight with William Bradley for an unknown reason. Marlowe’s friend Thomas Watson came upon them and drew his sword, saying that he did so to separate them and to preserve the peace. Marlowe withdrew and Bradley and Watson dueled, with Watson stabbing Bradley to death, he said, in self-defense. Marlowe’s biographer John Bakeless suggested that this incident inspired the scene in Romeo and Juliet where Romeo comes between the dueling Mercutio and Tybalt in order to separate them, instead giving Tybalt an opening to stab Mercutio to death.³

Romeo and Juliet’s tone is quite different from The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which took a medieval, moralistic approach. In his Epistle, Brooke droned on about “A couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire; neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends; conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity).”⁴ Instead, the tone of Romeo and Juliet is of an impetuous, exuberant, passionate young love: exactly the same tone as Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Indeed, Harold R. Walley envisioned Shakespeare penning Romeo and Juliet with Hero and Leander at his elbow.⁵

Shakespeare squirreled away two sonnets in Romeo and Juliet — poems of fourteen lines that express a single thought. The first is in the Prologue, and the second is cleverly incorporated into the lovers’ first meeting:

Romeo. If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this.

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?

Juliet. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo. O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:

They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet. Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo. Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
(I.v.92-95)

Paul H. Kocher and Roy T. Eriksen located sonnets within Marlowe’s plays I and II Tamburlaine.⁶ For example:

Marlowe’s I Tamburlaine:

What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?

If all the pens that ever poets held

Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,

Their minds and muses on admirèd themes;

If all the heavenly quintessence they still

From their immortal flowers of poesy,

Wherein as in a mirror we perceive

The highest reaches of a human wit;

If these had made one poem’s period,

And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads,

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest. (V.i.160-73)

While Marlowe’s sonnets were unrhymed, he proved himself a master of rhyme in Hero and Leander, and included the paired sake/take line endings found in Romeo and Juliet.

Marlowe’s Hero and Leander:

If not for love, yet, love, for pity sake,

Me in thy bed and maiden bosom take (Sestiad II.247-8)

Romeo and Juliet and Nashe and Dekker

While much of Romeo and Juliet is Marlovian, portions are just as surely Nasheian or, as Stanley Wells responded to his own question about where the Bard derived the style of the Nurse’s speech at I.iii.12-60, “I suspect it is relevant that, at about the time the play was composed, Thomas Nashe was demonstrating his capacity in what he calls the ‘extemporal vein.’”⁷

Let us begin by discussing two rare similarities in EEBO shared by Romeo and Juliet, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker (whom I find to have been one and the same person).

1. In Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron-Walden we hear: “Then there would be old scratching…Not Tibault or Isegrim, Prince of Cats, were ever endowed with the like Title./ Respondent. Since you can make so much of a little, you shall have more of it,” “A common Mountebank Rat-catcher,” and “What a stomach I had to have scratched with him” (H3r-v, L1r, O4r). Nashe sometimes worked from memory without double-checking for accuracy, a trait editor Ronald B. McKerrow found disturbing as this made it difficult to identify references in Nashe’s works.⁸ Here Nashe misremembered “Tybert,” the name of the cat in William Caxton’s 1481 translation of the moral fable Reynard the Fox, as “Tibault.” As Joan Ozark Holmer pointed out, Nashe derived “Isegrim” from the name of a female cat in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, a book which also contains the phrase “prince of cats.” Holmer maintained that Nashe’s “prince of cats” is a vocative addressing Gabriel Harvey, whom Nashe later called a “rat catcher.”⁹

In Romeo and Juliet appears “Benvolio. Why, what is Tybalt?/ Mercutio. More than Prince of Cats,” plus “Tybalt, you rat-catcher…Good King of Cats…scratch a man to death” (II.iii.17-8 and III.i.74, 76, 101). Here the thinking is quite like Nashe’s. Tybalt, like Gabriel Harvey (as Nashe portrays him), is an arrogant enemy. “Prince of cats” and “rat catcher” refer to the same person, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Harvey in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, although in neither instance are these epithets located near each other, as might be expected if one author were copying another. Both works collocate “prince of cats” and “more,” and both equate scratching with fighting.

Finally, in Dekker’s Satiro-Mastix, we find “A Scratching of men’s faces, as though you were Tyber the long-tail’d Prince of Rats” (L3v), addressed to the arrogant enemy, Horace. Again there is a faulty memory, with “Tyber” instead of “Tybert.” Tyber is associated with scratching men, as Tybalt “scratched” Mercutio. The juxtaposition of the name “Tyber” with “prince of rats,” however, takes us back in indirect fashion to Nashe’s commixture of the same two sources: Caxton’s Reynard the Fox for Tiber/Tibault, and Baldwin’s Beware the Cat for prince of cats/rats. To me, the same mind appears to be at work in all three pieces. These are the only appearances of Tib* near.30 prince* of rat*/cat* in EEBO.

2. The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, Nashe and Dekker all share the rare word “fantastico*.” Romeo and Juliet: “The Pox of such limping antique affecting fantasticoes these new tuners of accents” (1597 Quarto E1v). The First Folio version of Romeo and Juliet has “phantacies” (II.iii.27), but this is often emended to “fantasticoes” because it makes better sense. In Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron-Walden is: “These new fangled Galiardos, and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas, I prostitute my pen in hopes of gain” (E3v). The word also occurs in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus: “I have reveled with kings, danc’d with Queens, dallied with Ladies, worn strange attires, seen fantasticoes” (E1r). I find but one other appearance of “fantastico(s)” in an English sentence in EEBO, The Good Woman’s Champion by I. A., 1650. The Romeo and Juliet and Old Fortunatus occurrences are the only examples listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bawdy Language

3. Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s bawdiest play, and Nashe was a notoriously bawdy author. He wrote a sexually explicit, humorous poem which circulated in manscript (it was far too risqué to have been approved for publishing) about a man’s visit to a brothel entitled The Choice of Valentines. Compare Romeo and Juliet: “I conjure thee…By her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh/ And the demesnes [region] that there adjacent lie” (II.i.18-20) to Nashe’s Choice of Valentines: “First bare her legs, then creep up to her knees./ From thence ascend unto her manly thigh./ (A pox on ling’ring when I am so nigh)” (102-4), and Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron-Walden: “In the demesnes or adjacents” (M3v).

4. Both Shakespeare and Nashe associate “setting up one’s rest” with resting little during the night because of a couple’s love-making. Romeo and Juliet: “The County Paris hath set up his rest/ That you shall rest but little” (IV.iv.33-4) vs. Nashe’s Terrors of the Night: “You that are married and have wives of your own, and yet hold too near frendship with your neighbors; set up your rests, that the Night will be an ill neighbor to your rest” (H2r).

5. Both Shakespeare and Dekker mix the proverb about the weakest going to the wall with the female sex to create bawdy puns. Romeo and Juliet: “Samson. I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s./ Gregory. That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall./ Samson. ‘Tis true, and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall; therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall” (I.i.10-7) vs. Dekker’s The Bloody Banquet: “Oh always the weakest goes to the wall, as for example, knock down a sheep and he tumbles forwards, knock down a woman and she tumbles backwards” (C2v). The same type of sexual punning occurs in Nashe’s Choice of Valentines: “Poor Priapus, whose triumph now must fall,/ Except thou thrust this weakling to the wall” (257-8). Priapus is the god of male genitalia. Note also Nashe’s Preface to Astrophel & Stella: “No bones to take the wall of Sir Philip Sidney” (M2v).

Assorted Similarities

6. Romeo and Juliet: “For then she could stand high-lone” (I.iii.38) vs. Dekker’s Blurt Master Constable: “When I could not stand a high-lone” (D2v). Stand*/stood near.20 high lone is rare in EEBO. “High lone” means alone, without support.

7. Romeo and Juliet: “Let wantons light of heart/ Tickle the sense-less rushes with their heels” (I.iv.35-6) vs. Dekker’s Blurt Master Constable: “Lady, bid him whose heart no sorrow feels/ Tickle the rushes with his wanton heeles” (A4v). Rushes near.30 tickle* near.30 wanton* is also rare in EEBO.

8. Romeo and Juliet: “Then music with her silver sound—/ Why ‘silver sound’, why ‘music with her silver sound?’…It is ‘music with her silver sound’ because musicians have no gold for sounding./ Then music with her silver sound” (IV.iv.154-5, 165-7) vs. Dekker’s Old Fortunatus: “Here’s no sweet Music with her silver sound” (B3v). The source of “Music with her silver sound” is The Paradise of Dainty Devices by Richard Edwards, 1585; the phrase is otherwise rare in EEBO.

9. Romeo and Juliet: “Mercutio. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night./ Romeo. Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you?/ Mercutio. The slip, sir, the slip” (II.iii.42-6) vs. Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler: “Aye me, she was but a counterfeit slip, for she not only gave me the slip” (F1v). Both excerpts pun by mixing the expression “to give the slip,” meaning to escape, with the knowledge that a counterfeit coin is called a “slip.”

10. Romeo and Juliet: “Nay, good goose, bite not.” (II.iii.73) vs. Nashe’s Strange News: “Good bear, bite not.” (T3v), repeated two times in Have With You to Saffron-Walden (T3r) after Gabriel Harvey criticized Nashe for the phrase in Pierce’s Supererogation.

11. Romeo and Juliet: “Nurse. My fan, Peter./ Mercutio. Good Peter, to hide her face, for her fan’s the fairer face” (II.iii.98-100) vs. Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday: “Wife. I must get me a fan or else a mask./ Roger. So you had need, to hide your wicked face” (III.ii.45-6).

For additional similarities between Romeo and Juliet and the works of Marlowe, Nashe and Dekker, and for more in-depth explanation, please see the chapter about the play in The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare and Anonymous Plays.

© Donna N. Murphy, January 2014

Donna N. Murphy is the co-winner the 2010 Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe.

¹Sources for quotes: Christopher Marlowe. The Complete Plays, edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Christopher Marlowe. The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin Books, 2007); and William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker, sources are the original works in The Early English Books Online database, usually the first editions. Spelling and orthography have been modernized.

²Louis Ule, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607). A Biography (New York: Carlton Press Corp, 1995), 2-3.

³John Bakeless, Christopher Marlowe: the Man in his Time (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1937), 157.

⁴Arthur Brooke, Brooke’s ‘Romeus and Juliet,’ ed. J. J. Munro (London: Chatto & Winders, 1908), epistle To the Reader, as quoted in Harold R. Walley, “Shakespeare’s Debt to Marlowe in Romeo and Juliet,” Philological Quarterly 21 (1942): 257-67, 259.

⁵Walley, 267. Others have speculated that Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis with Hero and Leander nearby.

⁶Paul H. Kocher, “A Marlowe Sonnet,” Philological Quarterly 24 (1945): 39-45, 39-40; and R. T. Eriksen, “Marlowe’s Petrarch: In Morte di Madonna Laura,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 29 (1986): 13-25.

⁷Stanley Wells, “Juliet’s Nurse: the uses of inconsequentiality,” in Shakespeare’s Styles, ed. Philip Edwards, et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 51-66, 64.

⁸See discussion in Donald J. McGinn, “Nashe’s Share in the Marprelate Controversy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 59 (1944): 952-84, 972-3.

⁹Joan Ozark Holmer, “Nashe as ‘Monarch of Witt’ and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37 (1995): 314-43, 315-7.

Pylius, Socrates and Maro by Peter Farey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 09:04:00 +0000

As most regular readers of this blog probably know, some years ago I came up with an interpretation of the poem on Shakespeare's monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon Avon, which gave it a distinctly Marlovian slant. But for those who haven't heard of this, the latest version of my interpretation, and the reasons why I claim that it must have been intentional, can be found on the IMSS website. What I have not done so far, however, other than in online discussion, is to consider the two lines of Latin which precede the poem. In Latin our "U" and "V" were the same letter, so for ease of reading I have shown all of the "V"s in the original as "U"s:

IUDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MÆRET, OLYMPUS HABET

This might be translated word for word as:

In judgement a Pylius, in inspiration a Socrates, in art a Maro,
The earth covers, the people mourn, Olympus holds

The "Pylius" refers to Nestor of Gerenia, who in Greek mythology was the king of Pylos, Socrates is of course the well-known Greek philosopher, and "Maro" was the surname of the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, better known to us as Virgil.

It is also worth pointing out that the versions "Pylium", "Socratem" and "Maronem" are in the accusative case, and are therefore the objects of the verbs "tegit", "mæret" and "habet". As we in English normally put the verb before its object, it might be a bit clearer if we also switch the two lines, giving us:

The earth covers, the people mourn, Olympus holds
A Nestor in judgement, a Socrates in inspiration, a Virgil in art.

What is not clear is whether each verb corresponds with one of the names, or whether all three relate to all three names. We can see this when we compare Park Honan's translation with Katherine Duncan-Jones's. He has:

"The earth covers one who is a Nestor in judgement;
The people mourn for a Socrates in genius;
Olympus has a Virgil in art"¹

where Katherine Duncan-Jones prefers:

"The earth covers, the people mourn, Olympus holds [a man who was] a Pylius [=Nestor] in judgement, a Socrates in wisdom, a Virgil in literary skill"²

I'm not sure that it matters much, but having discussed this with some Latinists I feel slightly more comfortable with the Duncan-Jones version.

In my interpretation of the poem which follows this Latin couplet, however, I argued that there was an overt meaning which the author intended most people to think was meant, and a covert one recognizing what most of us here think of as being the more likely scenario. The latter told us that Christopher Marlowe was somehow "in" the monument with Shakespeare. Could there also be some hidden reference to Marlowe in these two lines?

First of all, let's consider "Terra tegit". Although the obvious, and clearly intentional, overt meaning is "the earth covers," can it be seen differently? I think so. The Vulgate Bible (Jeremiah 13.10) includes the words Quia adulteris repleta est terra quia a facie maledictionis luxit terra, which in the King James version was translated as "For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing the land mourneth". So "Terra" could be interpreted as "land", meaning either the country itself or the people of that country. And "tegit"? As I said, "covers" (or perhaps "buries") him would be the obvious meaning. On the other hand it is certainly possible to interpret the word as "hides" or "conceals". I think that most Marlovians would assume that by the 1620s Marlowe must have returned to England and be living in hiding, his identity concealed by at least some of the people, even the leading representatives, of the country. In other words, the land or country hides him.

"Populus mæret" (the people mourn). I wouldn't want to make too much of this one, but even five or six years after Shakespeare's death, and despite Marlowe's unsavoury reputation, there had still been more evidence of mourning over the apparent death of our Christopher than there had been over William.

For an inscription in an English church, the reference to the polytheistic Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods, rather than the Christian Heaven – or even the home of the Muses, Mount Parnassus – might be thought somewhat strange. If it is Marlowe we are talking about, however, a home among the heathen gods might be considered a better option than the Christian alternative! As George Peele put it, "Marley, the Muses darling for thy verse; / Fitte to write passions for the soules below" / If any wretched soules in passion speake."³ Would this mean that Marlowe must be dead, though? Not necessarily. The gods of Olympus might "have" him in similar way to how Satan "has" Doctor Faustus for twenty-four years.

If any Shakespearian scholar has discussed the choice of Nestor, Socrates and Virgil as exemplars, I have been unable to find it. Yet they all seem rather odd choices if it is the generally accepted Shakespeare they are supposed to refer to.

For a start, the use of Nestor is a bit of a back-handed compliment to him of all people. It is perhaps worth quoting what David Bevington says about the character as he is portrayed in Shakespeare's own Troilus and Cressida.⁴

"Nestor is [...] a tedious and senile old man, ready at a moment's notice to recall when 'I have seen the time' and to ramble on through sententious truisms about shallow boats giving way before 'ruffian Boreas' and the like as though he were actually adding something to what his fellow generals have already said. Their polite condescension suits his role as one who never has an idea of his own and is all too willingly led by the nose by someone as clever as Ulysses."

So what else do we know about him? What Nestor really stands out for is being a survivor. When Heracles attacked Pylos, Nestor's father and all eleven of his siblings were slaughtered; but not Nestor, who was away at the time. As a young man he survived battles with the Arcadians, the Eleians, and the Centaurs. He was apparently one of the Argonauts, who accompanied Jason on his search for the golden fleece, and lived to tell the tale. When the Calydonian boar attacked him and his fellow boar-hunters he escaped death by using his spear to pole-vault up into a tree! At Troy, when about to be killed, his son Antilochus came to his aid and was himself killed, thus providing a replacement corpse for the gods. Finally, Nestor's good judgement allowed him – almost alone among the Achaean generals at Troy – to return home in safety from overseas. And having done so he went on, some say, to survive until he was three hundred years old.⁵He should have been dead long ago, but in fact survived. Sound familiar?

The comparison with the philosopher Socrates is also a bit strained for a poet and playwright. On the other hand, in 399 AD Socrates was accused of impiety, as not believing in the gods recognized by the city (Athens), and corrupting its youth – in fact teaching them to judge both public and private morality by the light of reason. Again, sound familiar? The penalty proposed was death, and it was assumed that he would leave Athens, but he surprised everyone by remaining. All of his words were, of course, presented by someone else (Plato), as we claim that Marlowe's words were presented by Shakespeare. He was also (probably wrongly) accused of pederasty, particularly with Alcibiades.

Why Virgil? The poet usually associated with Shakespeare (and Marlowe) was Ovid, so can Virgil's biography, as believed at that time, give us a clue? Exiled at an early age, he lost everything, and reflected this situation in the first poem of the Eclogues, called The Dispossessed. He nevertheless had the support of Maecenas, the chief adviser to the ruler, and even of the ruler himself, Augustus. He was employed by them, being paid from public funds, to present propaganda on their behalf in the form of poetry – e.g. the Aeneid. Could this actually be telling us something about the relationship between a surviving Marlowe and the establishment in the form not only of members of the Privy Council, such as the Cecils, but also of the sovereign? The Aeneid was the work upon which Marlowe's earliest known play, Dido Queen of Carthage, was based, and Virgil was also thought to have dabbled in magic.

Now that brings us to an interesting point. The use of the names "Pylius" and "Maro" for Nestor and Virgil was really very unusual. I have discussed this essay with Anthony Kellett and Ros Barber – for whose input I am extremely grateful, it having provided and stimulated several ideas which would never have occurred to me otherwise. Ros has searched Early English Books Online and found very few examples of these names being used rather than the more familiar versions. Furthermore, as far as I can discover (and I would be most grateful if anyone can prove me wrong), there is in fact just one author who has used all three of the monument's names – "Pylius", "Socrates" and "Maro" – in his works. That author is Christopher Marlowe.

"Pylius" appears in his translation of Ovid's Amores – Book 3, Elegy 6 (the one where he finds himself unable to "perform" for his mistress). "Yet might her touch make youthful Pylius fire,⁶ / And Tithon⁷ livelier than his years require." What he, faithfully following Ovid, is saying is that she could even get the most ancient of men, like Nestor and Tithonus, going. This fits in very well with the idea of Nestor (like Marlowe, who should also have been dead long ago) being a survivor.

Socrates is mentioned in Edward II, when (1.4) Mortimer Senior is arguing that Edward should be allowed his minions: "The Roman Tully loved Octavius, / Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades." Most of Mortimer Senior's examples do seem to be a bit wide of the mark, and Socrates was probably unjustly accused of pederasty, so one cannot help recalling Baines's "quotation" from Marlowe that "All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools."

"Maro" appears in Doctor Faustus (3.1), when his travels with Mephistopheles are being described.

Then up to Naples, rich Campania,
Whose buildings fair and gorgeous to the eye,
The streets straight forth and paved with finest brick,
Quarter the town in four equivalents.
There saw we learned Maro's golden tomb.
The way he cut, an English mile in length,
Thorough a rock of stone in one night's space.

In Roma Gill's Mermaid edition, she provides the following footnote: "The poet Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was buried in Naples in 19 B.C., and posthumously acquired some reputation as a magician. His tomb stands at the end of the promontory of Posilippo between Naples and Pozzuoli; legend ascribes the tunnel running through this promontory to his magic art." So could the "arte Maronem" of the monument in fact be the sort of art referred to by the Evil Angel: "Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art / Wherein all nature's treasury is contained"? That Marlowe was inevitably associated with his characters' enthusiasms should go without saying. He was also known as Merlin at Cambridge, and was referred to by Gabriel Harvey as one of two "such mad and scoffing poets, that haue propheticall spirits as bred of Merlins race..."⁸

The main author of the works of Shakespeare, whoever he was, could indeed be reasonably described as having had the judgement of Nestor at his best, the inspiration of Socrates, and the literary art of Virgil. However, there is no obvious reason why these three names – and in particular those two specific forms, Maro and Pylius – should be chosen as in any way relevant to Shakespeare. No rationale. It's inexplicable. And it feels like that, like empty eulogizing. On the other hand (to sum up), if the referent is Marlowe there are very strong reasons for choosing those particular names (and forms of names) – biographical resonance, and the leaving of hints that when tracked down and put together (who used all three names?) points only in one direction.

¹Honan, Park (1999). Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford University Press. p.403.

²Duncan-Jones, Katherine (2001). Ungentle Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare. p.272.

³Peele, George (1593). The Honour of the Garter.
⁴Bevington, David (1998). ed. Troilus and Cressida. The Arden Shakespeare. pp.23–4.

⁵Graves, Robert (1955, 2011). The Greek Myths. 139.f. Penguin. p.546.
⁶In other words, she could make (old) Pylius's "fire" youthful.
⁷Tithonus was given immortality, but not eternal youth.
⁸ Harvey, Gabriel (1588). Introduction to Perimedes The Blacke-Smith, pp.A3-A3v.

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The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 04:00:00 +0000

It's been several years in the making, but well worth the wait. Donna N. Murphy's new book is out: The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare and Anonymous Plays. Inspired by Hoffman’s list of linguistic similarities between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Murphy refined the technique and became a specialist on the attribution of authorship of English Renaissance works, publishing a series of articles in Notes & Queries.

When she co-won the Hoffman Prize in 2010 for her entry on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and anonymous plays, she said her submission was a work in progress, and she needed to further investigate Marlowe’s friend, Thomas Nashe. She has finally published her path-forging work, which develops a vast web of linguistic interconnections indicating Marlowe, sometimes with Thomas Nashe, wrote certain Shakespeare and anonymous plays. Let’s ask her about it.

Q: You’ve said that The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum takes the Shakespeare authorship question directly to the doorsteps of Stratfordian scholars. What do you mean by this?

DM: My approach is scholarly. I make my case using linguistic Matches, Near Matches, Rare Scattered Word Clusters, Image Clusters, Logic, Biographical Connections and other similarities. I indicate when language similarities are due to deliberate parody as in the cases, I believe, of Marlowe and Nashe’s The Taming of a Shrew and Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, as opposed to when they help flag authorship. Some Stratfordians claim that stylometrics or computational stylistics show that Marlowe didn’t “become” Shakespeare. I find that Marlowe co-authored certain Shakespeare plays with Thomas Nashe, so that works scholars have been using as “pure Shakespeare” to determine Shakespeareian attributes are actually by two authors. With these kinds of studies, you have to compare apples and apples. They’ve been comparing apples and oranges.

Q: Why do you call it a “Continuum”?

DM: “Both” Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s styles changed over time, and Eliot Slater found that in Shakespeare, uncommon words tended to cluster chronologically, so I think chronology is quite important. I present clues that point to Marlowe’s Edward II and the first versions of II Henry VI and III Henry VI all being composed c. 1590, and then show that linguistically and stylistically, they are amazingly similar. But with the first version of II Henry VI, you also have to factor in co-authorship by Thomas Nashe of the Jack Cade scenes.

Q: The “Thomas Nashe” angle is something new for Marlovians. Why do you keep raising him?

DM: Because Nashe is a key piece in the Shakespeare authorship puzzle, plus I want to give him his due. Nashe was an incredibly funny author who possessed a bottomless vocabulary. Here are two excerpts from I Henry IV, written c. 1596-7, one Marlovian, the other Nasheian. In The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum, I go into detail about how I attribute authorship, but you can hear the difference:

Marlowe:

King Henry IV. So shaken as we are, so wan with care,

Find we a time for frighted peace to pant

And breathe short-winded accents of new broils

To be commenced in strands afar remote.

No more the thirsty entrance of this soil

Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood.

Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields,

Nor bruise her flow’rets with the armed hoofs

Of hostile paces. Those opposèd eyes,

Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,

All of one nature, of one substance bred,

Did lately meet in the intestine shock

And furious close of civil butchery. (I.i.1-13)

Nashe:

Falstaff. Bardolph, am I not fallen away vilely since this last

action? do I not bate? do I not dwindle? Why my

skin hangs about me like an like an old lady's loose

gown; I am withered like an old apple-john. Well,

I'll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some

liking; I shall be out of heart shortly, and then I

shall have no strength to repent. An I have not

forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I

am a peppercorn, a brewer's horse: the inside of a

church! Company, villanous company, hath been the

spoil of me. (III.iii.1-12)

Q: So one person didn’t write everything in the Shakespeare canon?

DM: No, although Marlowe wrote the lion’s share of it. Co-authorship of plays was common at the time, and in Shakespeare, Co-Author, Brian Vickers provided ample linguistic evidence of co-authorship in Shakespeare’s I Henry VI (with Thomas Nashe), Titus Andronicus (with George Peele), Pericles (with George Wilkins), Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton), and Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both with John Fletcher). What scholars haven’t been able to do is break out a play between Marlowe and Shakespeare, because the “two” sound so much alike.

In the “Shakespeare” portion of Titus Andronicus, I present intriguing evidence of the presence of Marlowe and the presence of the author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, i.e., “Shakespeare.” For example, regarding Christopher Marlowe, we know that he read the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (FQ) at least three years prior to their publication in 1590 (the rest of FQ appeared in 1596). The language of FQ heavily influenced I and II Tamburlaine, c. 1587. The 1590 edition of FQ was 18,081 lines long (606 pages), not counting dedications.

So far as I can determine, the earliest occurrence of the phrase “distressed plight” was in the FQ manuscript Marlowe read, where it appears twice: “Into most deadly danger and distressed plight” (II.12.11), and “To comfort me in my distressed plight” (III.5.35). Marlowe's I Tamburlaine picked up the last half of FQ’s III.5.35: “Ah, shepherd, pity my distressèd plight” (I.ii.7).

In the "Shakespeare" portion of Titus Andronicus, c. 1591-3, we find: “And rather comfort his distressèd plight” (IV.iv.32). Titus Andronicus did not take this language from I Tamburlaine, but rather directly from the line I Tamburlaine echoed in FQ, stitching on the word “comfort” from FQ III.5.35. It is not logical that two separate authors would remember the same line from Spenser’s 18,081-line poem.

Q: Wow, that’s incredible! I can see that The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum has the potential to be a real game changer for the Shakespeare authorship debate. You can read more about Donna’s book and order a copy at http://www.donnanmurphy.com

Donna Murphy is also the author of The Mysterious Connection between Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker and T. M.: An English Renaissance Deception? Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

A.D. Wraight and a Patron’s Property by Cecilia Busby

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 13:47:00 +0000

Having been inspired by Ros Barber’s recent The Marlowe Papers, I have been digging a little into the Shakespeare authorship question. For the most part, I find the arguments for Marlowe compelling – but I also have some sympathy with those orthodox Stratfordian scholars who take exception to the wild flights of fancy that have too often accompanied what would otherwise be strong arguments. Speculations like these do massive damage to the overall case, calling into question more firmly grounded arguments by association.¹

I’d like to give one example from my recent reading. In A.D. Wraight’s fascinating and thought-provoking book on Marlowe, The Story that the Sonnets Tell, there is a curious little chapter dedicated to the publication of Marlowe’s translation of Lucan in 1600 by Thomas Thorpe, later publisher of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Wraight is particularly interested in the dedication of this book to Edward Blount, sometime publisher of Marlowe and associate of Thomas Walsingham. She is convinced that this dedication is a cryptic message to Blount that “he has seen Marlowe alive and in person, and has received a manuscript of a ‘booke’ that he is going to bring to Blount”.²

The dedication to Blount is given “in the memory of that pure elemental wit, Chr. Marlow; whose ghoast or Genius is to be seen walke the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets” – a reference that Wraight takes to indicate that Marlowe himself has been seen, perhaps wrapped in the “sheets” (robes) of a Moor to guard against being recognised. In a characteristic building of one supposition on another, Wraight suggests that Marlowe “was probably a very good actor” and “may well have been careful to adopt a disguise that would completely conceal him”. ³Yet there is a simpler explanation for the remark: the “sheets” are the publications – the pages – in which his “genius” appears. If there is a hint of a cryptic message, it is likely to be in that parenthetical “at the least” which might hint that Thorpe was aware that more “sheets” in St Paul’s were haunted by Marlowe’s genius than was always (openly) acknowledged.

Wraight notes this “innocent reading” but dismisses it,⁴ mainly because she is so intrigued by the next part of the dedication, that appears tantalisingly conspiratorial. Thorpe instructs his friend to “be sure to have chang’d your lodgings” when he comes with his “booke”, and to make little marking of “your friends when you have found some way for them to come in at”. At the beginning of this little section Thorpe seems even more clear about what he is proposing: “you are to accommodate your selfe with some fewe instructions, concerning the property of a Patron, which you are not yet possest of”.

For Wraight there is only one possible meaning of property here, that is, an object of ownership. What this object is, is made clear for her by Thorpe’s next statement, referring to “when I bring you the booke”. “Evidently Thorpe has been entrusted with a manuscript which he is to give to Blount”,⁵ and equally evidently, she argues, it cannot be the Book of Lucan since that “contains the letter from Thorpe that refers to the ‘booke’ he is promising to bring to Blount – which cannot mean itself”.⁶

However, a recent LRB review by John Kerrigan has made clear that in Shakespeare’s time there was another meaning of the word property which was considerably more dominant.⁷ In modern usage, property most often denotes objects which are owned, but it can also be understood as an innate characteristic of a thing, its properties. Thus, the property of ice is to be cold, of metal is to be pliable. For the Elizabethans, this meaning was also commonplace with respect to persons/statuses. Where Shakespeare uses the term he “usually employs the word to designate the quality of something”.⁸ In Elizabethan English, then, the “property” of a “Patron” would almost certainly have meant the characteristic qualities of such a man.

Taking this as the meaning of the word makes the rest of Thorpe’s dedication completely clear as a satirical set of instructions for how to behave as a Patron. Blount, he instructs, must “study them for your better grace as our Gallants do fashions” (in order to put on a brave show as a proper “Patron”). The instructions include: “you must be proud and think you have merit enough in you, though your are ne’er so emptie”; then, when Thorpe appears to “bring … the book” (i.e., to present the book he has dedicated to this grand Patron, which is indeed, contra Wraight, the translation of Lucan), Blount should “take physic, and keep state, assign me a time by your man to come againe, and afore the day, be sure to have chang’d your lodging”. In the meantime, he should “sweat with the invention of some pitiful dry jest or two which you may happen to utter” but show “litle (or not at al) marking of your friends when you have found some way for them to come in at”, and “if by some chance something has dropt from you worth the taking up weary all that come to you with the often repetition of it”. Far from being instructions to (secretly) let hidden friends in at the back door of his (skilfully changed) lodgings, this is a satire on the way great men (those likely to be addressed for patronage) make their clients wait on them; over-rate and over-repeat their own wit; and do not mark (acknowledge) the wit of their friends, if they even give them a chance to say anything at all! Read in this way, the dedication is a hilarious in-joke between two publishers about the manners of great men.

If it needed any further proof that this reading fits, the end of the dedication says it all: while Thorpe doubts not that, were Blount to “mould himself to [these things]” it would not suit him, he goes on to say: “One special virtue in our Patrons of these daies I have promist myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing”, i.e., Thorpe, unlike usual dedicators, requires no money of his Patron, “yet, thy love I will challenge as my peculiar Object both in this, and (I hope) many more succeeding offices”.

This small correction of a small part of the much larger argument Wraight makes should not be taken as a wholesale criticism of the book – I think there is a great deal of merit in her main argument. But perhaps it could serve as an illustration of the temptation to build labyrinthine twists and turns of conspiracy on very flimsy suppositions, and the dangers of so doing. It is possible to read secret messages into almost anything. Had Wraight stepped back for a second, she might have wondered why the news that Thorpe had spotted Marlowe, or instructions to meet secretly and deliver an important manuscript, would ever have been inserted into a printed dedication (necessitating cryptic and heavily disguised hints) when presumably Thorpe simply had to cross the churchyard and go and knock on Blount’s door.

Cecilia Busby has a PhD from the London School of Economics and taught Social Anthropology for a number of years at the universities of Edinburgh, Goldsmiths and Kent. She has published The Performance of Gender (2000, Athlone) and a number of academic papers. More recently she has turned to writing fiction for children and, as C. J. Busby, is the author of the Frogspell series.

¹As one of the reviewers of this piece has pointed out, orthodox Stratfordians are not guiltless of this tendency to ‘flights of fancy’ either.

²A.D. Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets Tell, Adam Hart, London: 1993, p. 378.

³Ibid., p. 380.

⁴Ibid., p. 379. The following quotations form Thorpe’s dedication are all from this source, and page.

⁵Ibid., p.381.

⁶Ibid., p.380, original emphasis.

⁷John Kerrigan, Fathers Who Live Too Long: Review of Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare, LRB, 35 (17), pp. 17-19.

⁸Ibid., p. 17.

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Director Jim Jarmusch: Christopher Marlowe Might Be Shakespeare

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:42:00 +0000

Director Jim Jarmusch, in an interview at Cannes this summer publicizing his latest film Only Lovers Left Alive, opines that Christopher Marlowe may have written the Shakespeare plays. Click here for video clip (Marlowe conversation begins at 3:43, with interesting commentary by actor John Hurt, as well, who plays Marlowe in the film).

Must Hear: Ros Barber vs. Charles Nicholl on Shakespeare Authorship

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 11:59:00 +0000

Click here to listen to an explosive debate between MSC contributor Ros Barber and author Charles Nicholl at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 4, 2013.

Shakespeare and Cambridge by Peter Farey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 12:40:00 +0000

Way back in 1916, the Master of Cambridge's Jesus College, Arthur Gray, pointed out something very strange.¹ Shakespeare's plays seem to display a surprising familiarity with Cambridge University jargon. Illustrating this he explained the following.

From the earliest days to times comparatively recent a candidate for a degree at Cambridge was required to maintain a syllogistical dispute in the schools, which disputation was called 'the Act '. If he was successful and admitted to the full privileges of a graduate he was said 'to commence' in Arts or a Faculty, and the ceremony at which he was so admitted was, and is, called at Cambridge 'the Commencement'. If the candidate went on to a higher degree he was said 'to proceed'.

He then referred to a passage from a speech in Timon of Athens (4.3) in which Timon is addressing Apemantus, and the words 'proceeded', 'degrees' and 'commence' all appear in quick succession:

Hadst thou, like us from our first swath proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords . . .
Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in't.

Gray also pointed out how the words 'act' and 'commence' seem to be associated in Shakespeare's mind, citing the following examples:

Learning is a mere hoard of gold till sack commences it and sets it in act and use.

(2 Henry IV, 4.3.24-26)

I from the orient to the drooping west,

Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
(2 Henry IV, Prologue 3–5)

When he to madding Dido would unfold
His father's acts, commenced in burning Troy!
(2 Henry VI , 5.2.117–8)

That the combination of 'acts' and 'commencement' was a peculiarly Cambridge thing is given support in Erasmus's Praise of Folie (tr. Thomas Chaloner, who was not a Cambridge alumnus), which has "At their Actes and Comencements ye dooe see theim swadled in with so many cappes, coyues, and furde hoodes as they weare." Erasmus spent five years (1510 to 1515) as Professor of Divinity at Queen's College there.

Making it clear that 'the Acts' were a peculiarly Cambridge procedure, Thomas Nashe, who was a contemporary of Marlowe at Cambridge also (according to the OED) wrote in his Strange Newes (p.279)

Acts are but idle wordes, and..Pumps and Pantofles...therefore do no Acts ... onelie ... to Oxford they trudge,..and there are confirmed in the same degree they took at Cambridge.

We should be careful not to jump to conclusions about the simple juxtaposition of the words 'act' and 'commence,' however, since 'commencement' was also used for the coming into force of some legislation, regulation, treaty or Act of Parliament.

Rather more interesting, therefore, is Gray's comment that the clearest evidence that it was from Cambridge, not from Oxford, that Shakespeare learnt University phrases is in Lear's complaint to Regan of his usage by Goneril:

'Tis not in thee ... to scant my sizes.
(King Lear, 2.2.346–8)

As Gray puts it, quoting Minsheu, Guide into Tonges (1617), a size "is a portion of bread and drink; it is a farthing [i.e. a small amount] which schollers in Cambridge have at the buttery." He continues, saying that "The 'abatement' of sizes was a College punishment, alternative to 'gating', to which there seems to be allusion in Lear's next words 'to oppose the bolt against my coming in'."

In 1923, Frederick Boas repeated Gray's observations, with approval, in his book Shakespeare and the Universities.²

Interestingly, however, there appears to be one bit of Cambridge jargon which was dismissed by Gray and ignored by Boas. It was the use of the word 'keep', in the sense of 'dwell'. Gray claimed that this was "common enough in Elizabethan English," but this is an opinion which I have so far been unable to substantiate.

Quite the opposite in fact, as was argued by William Stanley Melsome in 1945.³ He noticed that the use of the word 'keep', meaning to live, lodge, dwell, or reside is purely a Cambridge University term and was "not used elsewhere in the British Empire." He claimed that it was not used in that sense at Oxford, and that it occurs in Shakespeare in one form or another nineteen times. Here are some of them.

Knock at his study, where they say he keeps

To ruminate strange plots of dire revenge.

(Titus Andronicus, 5.2.5–6)

This Armado is a Spaniard that keeps here in court,

(Love's Labour's Lost, 4.1.97)

That his chief followers lodge in towns about him,

While he himself keeps in the cold field?

(3 Henry VI, 4.3.13–14)

... all the skyey influences

That dost this habitation where thou keep'st

Hourly afflict.

(Measure for Measure, 3.1.8–11)

Enquire me first what Danskers are in Paris,

And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,

(Hamlet, 2.1.7–8)

I will see you hanged like clodpolls ere I come

any more to your tents. I will keep where there is wit

stirring, and leave the faction of fools.

(Troilus and Cressida, 2.1.118–120)

My Lord Ulysses, tell me, I beseech you,

In what place of the field doth Calchas keep?

(Troilus and Cressida, 4.4.16–2)

We learn no other but the confident tyrant

Keeps still in Dunsinane,

(Macbeth, 5.4.8–9)

... it is in Gloucestershire.

'Twas where the madcap Duke his uncle kept –

(1 Henry IV, 1.3.241–2)

It is the most impenetrable cur

That ever kept with men.

(Merchant of Venice, 3.3.18–19

We may also note that it is a usage familiar to Marlowe too.

And more. Of my knowledge, in one cloister keep

Five hundred fat Franciscan friars and priests:

(Massacre at Paris, 1.2.84–85)

The Oxford English Dictionary supports this specifically Cambridge usage of 'keep' (intransitive) as "To reside, dwell, live, lodge." It is noted that it is still used in this sense colloquially at Cambridge, and the quotations they give are helpful.

1504   in S. Tymms Wills & Inventories of Bury St. Edmunds (1850) 102,   I wyll yt he or they shall keep at Cambryge at scoole.

1601   P. Holland tr. Pliny History of the World I. 127   Among the mountaines of this tract, the Pygmæans, by report do keepe. [Philemon Holland was at Trinity College, Cambridge.]

1633   P. Fletcher Purple Island v. xxv. 53   Here stands the palace of the noblest sense; Here Visus keeps. [Phineas Fletcher was at King's College, Cambridge.]

1719   in R. Willis & J. W. Clark Architectural History of the University of Cambridge. (1886) II. 214   In ye Room where Mr Maynard keeps there was acted..a Pastoral.

Although Shakespeare's use of such Cambridge terms has been known about for many years, subsequent biographers have not had much to say on the subject. In fact, a quick look through a dozen or so of the more recent ones revealed nothing at all. Boas himself hazarded a guess as to how it might have happened, derived from Gray's original suggestion.

Kempe and two of his fellows in the first folio list of players were Cambridge graduates, while many of Shakespeare's dramatic predecessors and contemporaries – Marlowe, Greene and Nash, among others – had come from the same nursery of arts. This probably accounts for the curious fact that the dramatist shows familiarity with certain distinctively Cambridge terms.

Perhaps, if they knew about it at all, other biographers have found this explanation unconvincing, and preferred to remain silent. Non-Stratfordians, on the other hand, have naturally been less reticent. Knowing that William Shakespeare of Stratford didn't go to university at all, let alone Cambridge, how do the main alternative authors fair?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, attended St John's College, Oxford (1572–6?), so no points for him.

According to the Oxfordian Ramon Jiménez,⁴ Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford "matriculated at Cambridge at age eight, and was later awarded Masters’ Degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge," but this is slightly misleading. In fact Oxford matriculated as an impubes (immature) fellow-commoner of Queens' College, Cambridge, in November 1558, remaining for only one academic year and taking no degree. In August 1564, however, he accompanied the queen on progress to Cambridge, and to Oxford in September 1566 and, like others in the queen's retinue, was granted an unearned MA on both occasions. Being a fellow-commoner meant that he had the privilege of dining at the Fellows' table, and was therefore probably untroubled by the size of his 'sizes'.

Francis Bacon and his elder brother Anthony, being the sons of the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, were also fellow-commoners. They went up to Cambridge on 5 April 1573 and matriculated from Trinity College on 10 June. According to the ODNB, they stayed there until December 1575, although their period of residence was twice interrupted when plague broke out in the Cambridge area. Venn⁵ tells us that Francis "resided for two years." In 1594, on a trip north on behalf of the Queen, illness prevented him from getting any further than Huntingdon, so he took this opportunity to visit Cambridge and take his MA degree.

Bacon is certainly likely to have been familiar with the terms discussed here, but Christopher Marlowe, with six and a half years 'keeping' at Cambridge as a pensioner, is by far the most likely to have a Cambridge vocabulary in his blood. He went up to Corpus Christi College in late 1580, and left early in 1587. There is also, of course, very copious evidence of his being a regular customer at the buttery, from which those 'sizes' were privately ordered.

Of the other authorship 'candidates' with any sort of following these days only Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (although he was another privileged fellow-commoner) seems able nearly to match Marlowe for time spent at Cambridge.⁶

Peter Farey is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society and twice joint winner of the Hoffman Prize for "a distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe."

¹ Gray, Arthur (1916) "Shakespeare and Cambridge," in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, p.262.
² Boas, Frederick S. (1923) Shakespeare and the Universities. Blackwell, Oxford.
³ Melsome, W. S. (1945). The Bacon-Shakespeare Anatomy. G. Lapworth. p.188.
⁴Jiménez, Ramon. The Case for Oxford Revisited.
⁵Venn, J. & Venn, J. A., eds. (1922–1958). Alumni Cantabrigienses. Cambridge University Press.
⁶Venn, as above. Jarmusch Swinton

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The Bassano Fresco by Peter Farey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 08:36:00 +0000

In the comments on her essay "Marlowe and the Dark Lady" (September 2011), Maureen Duff mentioned a fresco in the town of Bassano del Grappa in Italy, some forty miles north-west of Venice, which appears to have been referred to in Othello. This connection was first suggested by Roger Prior in his article, "Shakespeare's Visit to Italy,"¹ where he argues that Shakespeare (whom he assumes is the man from Stratford-upon-Avon) must have visited Bassano at some time, so detailed is his apparent knowledge of the fresco itself and of the town's inhabitants.

This suggestion seems to have been ignored by Shakespearian scholars, but has been picked up by some non-Stratfordians, such as John Hudson,² who proposes Emilia (Bassano) Lanier as the true author, and the Oxfordian Richard Whalen. Surprisingly, Richard Paul Roe's book ³ makes no mention of it, and although it gets a mention in Ros Barber's The Marlowe Papers (p.431) no Marlovian has as far as I know written about it in any detail.

The particular passage in Othello which apparently contains the "fresco" references is when Iago – having planted the idea of Desdemona's infidelity with Cassio in Othello's mind, thus driving him into a jealous rage – reacts to Othello's demand for proof. (3.3.405-411)

It is impossible you should see this,
Were they as prime as Goats, as hot as Monkeys,
As salt as Wolves in pride, and Fools as gross
As Ignorance, made drunk. But yet, I say,
If imputation, and strong circumstances,
Which lead directly to the door of Truth,
Will give you satisfaction, you might have't.

This is a speech which clearly rankles in Othello, as later, having insulted and dismissed his wife in front of Lodovico, he exits with the words "Goats, and Monkeys." (4.1.265)

According to Prior, the fresco was on the front of a house in the "Piazzotto del Sale" – "the little square of salt." It was painted in 1539 by Bassano's most famous painter, Jacopo dal Ponte, usually known as Jacopo Bassano, having been commissioned by the Dal Corno family, whose house it was and who were the official sellers of salt in Bassano.⁴
Before looking at this fresco, however, it is perhaps worth noting that in the main square of Bassano there were two apothecary's shops. The owner of one of these had been known as "the Moor" after the sign of a Moor's head which hung outside his shop and, although this particular apothecary had retired by 1585, his family carried on the business for many years. The other was part-owned by someone called Giovanni Otello, a familiar surname in Bassano at the time. Although Cinthio's Hecatommithi, the main source of Othello, concerned both "the Moor" and "Disdemona" (sic), it was Shakespeare who introduced the name Othello for the main protagonist.

Not having seen the fresco itself, which has now been transferred to the museum in Bassano, I have to rely on the descriptions given by Roger Prior and John Hudson. They explain that it is divided into four horizontal bands, the second highest of which is a frieze depicting animals and musical instruments. Two of these animals are a goat with a monkey sitting beneath it. On the third band, roughly underneath them, is a large painting of a naked woman – Truth – who stands between two arched windows, and beneath her, on the lowest band, is a painting of the Drunkenness of Noah. The windows were fitted with slatted blinds, called "jealousies," which when opened appeared as doors partly concealing the naked Truth. The juxtaposition of the goat, the monkey, salt, drunkenness, jealousy, and the "door of Truth" seem to be far too obvious to be only coincidental.

If so, when might the author Shakespeare have visited Bassano del Grappa? To establish this, we need to look at the Bassano family, of which Emilia Lanier was a member. This family originated in Bassano, specializing in the manufacture and playing of musical wind instruments. Probably of Jewish origin, they had left the town by 1515, however, because of the anti-semitic policies of the town council. They settled in Venice, but five (of six) brothers emigrated to England in 1540, becoming members of Henry VIII's King's Music, and founders of the first recorder consort at the English court. By 1590, all of these brothers were dead, but their offspring, including Arthur, Edward, Andrea and Jeronimo, sons of the late Anthony Bassano, continued as instrument makers and court musicians. Emilia Lanier (née Bassano), daughter of Anthony's brother Baptista, was their cousin.

In August 1593, three of Anthony's sons – Arthur, Andrea and Jeronimo – received from the Crown a surprising and lucrative grant, a licence to export an average of over 100,000 calf-skins a year over a period of seven years. In fact, it was a licence the family held until 1621, with Edward also being included in 1607. It is therefore hardly surprising that neither Arthur nor Andrea (nor Edward, in fact) collected their quarterly payment as court musicians in person for the next three quarters and appear to have been away from London for seven months or so. The brothers had inherited a house in Venice, and Bassano was an important centre of the leather-working industry. As it happens, the Otello family had been prominent among the leather handlers of the town, and possibly still were.

Roger Prior suggests that the brothers must have invited Shakespeare to accompany them, having picked up an expert knowledge of the leather trade from his father, who was a glover. We, however, might consider the alternative proposed by Maureen Duff – Christopher Marlowe. His father was a shoemaker who had at one time actually been a "searcher" (inspector) of leather for the Shoemakers Company, the guild which covered virtually all leather-working trades. Was it in fact suggested by "the Crown" that they knew just the man for the job?

One thing we may still wonder is why the author of Othello seems to associate the fresco in Bassano so much with sexual arousal ("as prime as Goats, as hot as Monkeys, / As salt as Wolves in pride"). John Hudson, thinking that the author was Emilia Lanier, suggests that the brothers took their cousin on the trip with them. If, as is popularly believed, she was the "dark lady" of the Sonnets, perhaps he is right!

© Peter Farey, August 2013

Peter Farey is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, and twice joint winner of the Hoffman Prize for "a distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe."

¹ Roger Prior. "Shakespeare's Visit to Italy," The Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, Vol. 9 (2008). The University of Malta.
² John Hudson. "Goats and Monkeys" (accessed 12 August 2013).
³ Richard Paul Roe. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (2008). Harper Perennial.
⁴ The member of the family who probably had most influence on the fresco's symbolism and design, Lazzaro Dal Corno, had been awarded the title Conte Palatino by the Emperor Charles V, and the "County Palatine" was, of course, one of Portia's suitors in The Merchant of Venice.

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