Reading Shakespeare’s mind SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 1 14/11/2016 10:05 SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 2 14/11/2016 10:05 Reading Shakespeare’s mind Steve Sohmer Manchester University Press SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 3 14/11/2016 10:05 Copyright © Steve Sohmer 2017 The right of Steve Sohmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC- BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 5261 1327 6 hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 4 14/11/2016 10:05 For Tully such stuff as dreams are made on In every man’s writings the character of the writer must lie recorded Thomas Carlyle, Essays on Goethe SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 5 14/11/2016 10:05 SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 6 14/11/2016 10:05 Contents List of figures viii Preface: impersonal Shakespeare ix PART I: Shakespeare, lovers, and friends 1 1 Joining the mice-eyed decipherers 3 2 Marlowe’s ghost in As You Like It 15 3 The dark lady of The Merchant of Venice 53 PART II: Queen Elizabeth’s Twelfth Night 75 4 Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night 77 5 Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night wordplay 89 6 Shakespeare and Paul in Illyria 100 7 Nashe and Harvey in Illyria 110 8 M.O.A.I. deciphered at last 126 9 Beginning at the beginning 134 10 Tributes private and public 146 Epilogue: personal Shakespeare 172 Longer notes 175 Bibliography 189 Index 200 SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 7 14/11/2016 10:05 Figures 1 Julian and Gregorian calendars, 1601–02 79 2 Farmer’s Almanacke, December 1601 80 3 Book of Common Prayer calendar, January 105 4 Twelfth Night, act 2, scene 5, from the Bodleian First Folio: digital facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Bodleian Library, Arch. G c.7, http://firstfolio. bodleian.ox.ac.uk 128 5 Map of Tudor London 137 6 Book of Common Prayer calendar, November 142 7 Internal Twelfth Night calendar 143 8 Coat of arms of Argonise and Carey 160 9 The Hunsdon Onyx, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Galleries, room 57a, case 10, lent by the Trustees of the Berkeley Will Trust (author’s photograph). Governors of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 163 SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 8 14/11/2016 10:05 Preface: impersonal Shakespeare In his Essays on Goethe (1828) Thomas Carlyle concluded, ‘In every man’s writings the character of the writer must lie recorded … his opinions, character, personality … are and must be decipherable in his writings.’1 But four lines later Carlyle confessed he found William Shakespeare stubbornly enigmatic: ‘Who knows or can figure what the Man Shakespeare was, by the first, by the twen- tieth perusal of his works?’ Eighty years later in The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare’s Art, Sidney Lee dismissed any ‘critical test whereby we can distinguish Shakespeare’s private utterances and opinions … Where is the critical chemistry which will disentangle, precipitate, isolate his personal views and sentiments?’2 Robert Browning, speaking as Shakespeare, sneered, ‘Which of you did I enable Once to slip into my breast There to catalogue and label What I like least, what love best?’3 Citing a multitude of such com- mentators, in 1991 Samuel Schoenbaum cautioned: ‘if we try to get at Shakespeare’s opinions by arbitrarily tearing passages from their context, we court hopeless perplexity’. Schoenbaum dubbed those foolhardy enough to try ‘personalists’ who ‘ignore Shakespeare’s dependence on written sources, rather than private experiences, for the material of his plays’.4 Despite Schoenbaum’s warning, the twenty-first century has seen a remarkable run of intrusive biographies which attribute Shakespeare’s opacity to crypto-Catholicism, wariness of tetchy censors, or a calculated self-distancing from the intrigues that roiled Tudor-Stuart England. These range from aggressive (Richard Wilson) to artful (Stephen Greenblatt) to measured (James Shapiro) to bizarre (Clare Asquith).5 The present book is not an attempt at biography. It proceeds from the modest assumption that Shakespeare’s plays are more SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 9 14/11/2016 10:05 x Preface: impersonal Shakespeare personal than we have recognized, that numerous characters and events he depicts were drawn from life, and that some of these may be recoverable. I intend to explore aspects of William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets which scholars have overlooked or misinterpreted, thereby better to understand the plays and the man. I will sift for clues to his relationships with people who mattered: family, friends, colleagues, patrons, lovers, enemies. Sieving for these traces – in effect reading Shakespeare’s mind – can be risky business; it is neither pure liter- ary criticism nor objective historiography, though it must respect the rubrics of both. Rather, my investigations rely on a fundamental tenet of criticism: no author, his milieu and his times, are entirely separable from his works. Every oeuvre constitutes an autobiogra- phy of the writer – and in the case of a great writer, of an age. In riddling his texts for the personal Shakespeare, of necessity I will engage with several cruces long believed inscrutable. Early readers have cautioned that some of my inferences may be received as doubtful and some of my interpretations exceptional. Not every reader will accept my solution to Malvolio’s M.O.A.I. conundrum in Twelfth Night, or agree that ‘Quinapalus’ is an anagram of ‘Aquinas’ and ‘Paul’. Opinion may bridle at the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote As You Like It to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the death of Christopher Marlowe and created the character of Jaques in the dead man’s image. Readers reluctant to entertain Emilia Bassano Lanier as the ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets may find it difficult to accept her religious heritage and flawed -mar riage as the inspiration for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Even those who accept Gabriel Harvey as the model for Malvolio may balk at acknowledging Thomas Nashe behind the mask of Feste (and that of Touchstone) – just as some may shrug off my explana- tion for the vengeance-seeking steward filing suit against Viola’s loyal Captain. I am keenly aware that each of my inferences will admit three interpretations: 1. The parallels are merely coincidental, and any relationship between Shakespeare’s text and actual persons living or dead is imaginary. 2. Shakespeare had the referent on his mind and it seeped into his text via subconscious activity. SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 10 14/11/2016 10:05 Preface: impersonal Shakespeare xi 3. Shakespeare intentionally created the connection, though he knew that only a handful of auditors would recognize it. I will vigorously maintain the latter, that is, there are numerous pas- sages in the plays which Shakespeare intended to be opaque to the mass audience but transparent to a coterie with specialized knowl- edge or personal connections. This is not to suggest Shakespeare wrote in some arcane code decipherable only by fellow Rosicrucians, Freemasons, or anti- Petrarchanists. I am merely suggesting that events in a writer’s life can and do inspire his choice of material and shape his language, sometimes in ways that only his intimates can recognize. This is hardly a radical notion. But I intend to press its boundaries. Those who seek affirmation of my views in current (or past) scholarly editions will not find reassurance; this book does not rehearse received wisdom but attempts to peer beyond it. Readers willing to restrain the impulse to pedanticism – that hobgoblin of progressive scholarship – may find that the solutions to Shakespeare’s enigmas offered here are the best we have. I owe sincere thanks to Professor Lisa Hopkins for encouraging my research on Christopher Marlowe and As You Like It, and to Ms Jocelyn Medawar, who gave me new insight into the play. As well, I owe an inestimable debt to my teachers, the late Dennis Kay, John Pitcher, Bill Carroll, the late Tony Nuttall, Gordon Kipling, and par- ticularly Barbara Everett and the late Emrys Jones for instruction and inspiration. Steve Sohmer Paris, 21 July 2014 Notes 1 Thomas Carlyle, Essays on Goethe (London: Cassell, 1905), 78. 2 Sidney Lee, The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare’s Art, address before the English Association, London, 11 June 1909 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), 7. 3 Robert Browning, ‘At the “Mermaid”’ (1876), in The Works of Robert Browning, Riverside Edition, 6 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin), V.333. 4 Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 360–1. Schoenbaum apparently never wrote a play. SOHMER 9781526113276 PRINT.indd 11 14/11/2016 10:05 xii Preface: impersonal Shakespeare 5 Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004); James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Clare Asquith, Shadowplay (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).