‘AS THE DIALL HAND TELLS ORE’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER, NOT SHAKESPEARE, AS AUTHOR
by helen hackett Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021
The manuscript poem beginning ‘As the diall hand tells ore’ (hereafter the Dial Hand poem) appears to be a court epilogue of 1599. It has provoked animated debate, with some scholars claiming it as a ‘new’ Shakespeare work; it was included as such in the RSC Complete Works (2007). Other candidates for its authorship, because of their use elsewhere of its trochaic metre, are Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker. This investigation finds weaknesses in the case for Shakespeare, not least in the fact that there is no other occurrence of such hyperbolic panegyric of Elizabeth I in his oeuvre. Jonson’s case too is flawed. Dekker emerges as the strongest con- tender, for reasons including his recurrent preoccupation with dials and temporal cycles, his extensive composition of royal panegyric, the strong similarities between the Dial Hand poem and the epilogue to his Old Fortunatus (also performed at court in 1599), and a verbal echo of the Dial Hand poem in his Whore of Babylon (1605). The Dial Hand poem refers to Shrovetide, making Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599)—a play all about the inception of Shrovetide festivities—almost certainly the play to which the epilogue belongs.
The manuscript poem beginning ‘As the diall hand tells ore’ has been at the centre of animated scholarly debate in recent years. (For convenience, it will hereafter be referred to as the Dial Hand poem.) Some have claimed it as that elusive and headline-grabbing find, a ‘new’ Shakespeare work. Other candidates for its author- ship are Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker, though less attention has been paid to their claims. This investigation will explore the case for each author, and present evidence to suggest that Dekker emerges as the strongest contender. As I will explain, there are persuasive reasons to believe that the poem is in fact a court epilogue for his play The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Readers will recall that the Dial Hand poem was first brought to light in 1972 by William A. Ringler, Jr and Steven W. May, who found it in the manuscript miscellany of Henry Stanford, a tutor in the household of George Carey, Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain (Fig. 1).1
I am grateful to Katherine Duncan-Jones, Michael Hattaway, Steven W. May, and Tiffany Stern for their comments on drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to Colin Burrow, the period editor for RES, and to the journal’s anonymous readers for their suggestions. 1 William A. Ringler, Jr. and Steven W. May, ‘An Epilogue Possibly by Shakespeare’, Modern Philology 70 (Nov 1972), 138–9. The manuscript is Cambridge University Library Dd.5.75, f.46. See also, Steven W. May and William A. Ringler, Jr., Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559-1603, vol. 1 (London, 2004), 363, EV2916.
The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 63, No. 258 ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved doi:10.1093/res/hgr046 Advance Access published on 27 May 2011 ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 35 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021
FIG. 1. Cambridge University Library MS Dd.5.75, detail of f.46. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
The poem is headed ‘to ye Q. by ye players 1598’, and reads as follows: As the diall hand tells ore / ye same howers yt had before still beginning in ye ending / circuler account still lending So most mightie Q. we pray / like ye diall day by day you may lead ye seasons on / making new when old are gon. that the babe wch now is yong / & hathe yet no vse of tongue many a shrouetyde here may bow / to yt empresse I doe now that the children of these lordes /sitting at your counsell bourdes may be graue and aeged seene / of her yt was ther father Quene once I wishe this wishe again / heauen subscribe yt wth amen. Ringler and May took it that that the poem’s reference to Shrovetide referred to a court performance in that season. This would mean that the date 1598 should be read as 1599 by the modern calendar, since Shrovetide, the days leading up to Lent, would have fallen before the old-style New Year of 25 March. They found records of two court performances at Shrovetide 1599, one on Quinquagesima Sunday (also known as Shrove Sunday, 18 February) by the Lord Admiral’s Men, and one on Shrove Tuesday (20 February) by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Given Stanford’s place in the Lord Chamberlain’s household, they conjectured that the latter performance was more likely to be the one to which the epilogue belonged, and that it was likely to have been a play by Shakespeare, the chief playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s company at this time. They also explored the possibility that the epilogue might be by Shakespeare himself, partly on grounds of its trochaic metre, which occurs in a number of songs and poems in Shakespeare’s plays. The Dial Hand poem was included in appendices to the 1974 and 1997 editions of the Riverside Shakespeare as possibly by Shakespeare.2 In 2005 James Shapiro explored the idea that it might be a court epilogue for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the grounds of the trochaic metre and rhyming couplets, which also
2 ‘An Epilogue by Shakespeare?’, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974), 1851–2; 2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin (New York, 1997), 1978. 36 HELEN HACKETT occur in Oberon’s closing speech and in the epilogue by Puck (presumably a playhouse epilogue which the Dial Hand poem would have replaced for court performance).3 Juliet Dusinberre, however, favoured As You Like It, tracing in the Dial Hand poem references to the dial which Touchstone consulted earlier in the play (2.7.20–33),4 and to the large sundial at Richmond Palace, newly refurbished in early 1599, where she believes As You Like It was performed.5 Then, in 2007, the poem appeared, with some fanfare, in the RSC Complete Works. The editors, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, stated that the poem’s attribution is ‘absolutely secure’,6 and Bate enthused in a press article about this ‘gorgeous little court epilogue’. In seeking to engage a wide readership he even playfully suggested that anyone might find just such a lost Shakespearean gem: ‘Do check your attic ...When plays were put on at court, it was a requirement that there should be a prologue and an epilogue tailor-made for the occasion. Shakespeare was probably in the habit of dashing some lines down on the back of an envelope and then chucking them away. By chance, this one example has survived ...it’s a precious addition to the canon.’7 The poem was discussed and read aloud on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme,8 and the story spread rapidly through the media. Under the headline ‘the Shakespeare poem on the back of an envelope’, The Daily Mail reported that ‘a ‘‘new’’ poem by William Shakespeare has been published for the first time. He was our greatest dramatist, but even William Shakespeare wasn’t above buttering up his sovereign.’9 Yet scholarly opinion on the attribution of the Dial Hand poem has been far from unanimous. In 1988 May published an edition of Stanford’s anthology, and at that point felt that the verses ‘could hardly be Shakespeare’s’.10 In 2002, Brian Vickers offered the epilogue as a less unlikely candidate for addition to the Shakespeare canon than ‘Shall I die?’, a poem included in the Oxford Shakespeare and up to that time the recipient of more media attention than the
3 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London, 2005), 85–6. 4 William Shakespeare, As You Like It,inThe Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York, 1997). All further references to Shakespeare’s works will be to this edition unless otherwise stated. 5 Juliet Dusinberre, ‘Pancakes and a date for As You Like It’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54.4 (Winter 2003), 371–405, esp. 381–5; William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London, 2006), 37–42, 349–54. 6 ‘To the Queen’, in The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke, 2007), 2433, 2395. 7 Jonathan Bate, ‘Is there a lost Shakespeare in your attic?’, Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2007,
into the possible authorship and occasion of the Dial Hand poem and its relation to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 As You Like It, and concluded that ‘the debates over both dates and venues for the earliest performances of As You Like It along with the authorship of the dial poem must ...remain open’.13 In the same year, Tiffany Stern reminded us that pro- logues and epilogues were detachable and transferable pieces of text, and were often by a different author from the play with which they were performed;14 hence, even if the Dial Hand poem does seem for several reasons to fit either A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, it need not be by Shakespeare. It is therefore well worth investigating further the cases for authorship by Jonson or Dekker, the two dramatists of the period who, alongside Shakespeare, most favoured the trochaic metre which is present in the poem.15 The invaluable Bibliography and First-Line Index of Elizabethan Poetry compiled by May and Ringler establishes that by the end of 1603 Shakespeare had used trochaics some fourteen times, in six plays and one poem.16 Jonson, meanwhile, had used them seven times, in his plays Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and Poetaster (1601),17 and Dekker too offers seven occurrences, across four plays.18 We have to bear in mind that both Jonson and Dekker wrote their first complete plays later than Shakespeare—Jonson in 1598, Dekker in 1599—so these are quite high frequen- cies for trochaics over the short period between then and the end of 1603. Data for
11 Brian Vickers, ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ (Cambridge, 2002), 428–9. 12 William Shakespeare, Shakepeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen (London, 2007), 467. 13 Michael Hattaway, ‘Dating As You Like It, epilogues and prayers, and the problems of ‘‘As the dial hand tells o’er’’ ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2 (Summer 2009), 154–67, esp. 167. 14 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), 109–18. 15 Dusinberre, ‘Pancakes’, 377; As You Like It, ed. Dusinberre, 349–50; Hattaway, 159. 16 May and Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry, I:293, EV1654, Merchant of Venice 2.8.65–75; I:386, EV3334, Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.68-71; I:503, EV5472, Much Ado 5.3.3–10; I:718, EV9413, Hamlet, 4.5.23-39; II:944, EV13496, ‘Let the bird of loudest lay’; II:1229, EV18307, Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.97–116; II:1251, EV18714, Much Ado 5.3.12–21; II:1404, EV21461, Merchant of Venice 3.2.63–72; II:1459, EV22472, Merchant of Venice 2.9.62–77; III:2016, EV32403, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2.9–30; III:2017, EV32415, Merchant of Venice 3.2.131–8. To these can be added Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.90–7 and Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.102–21 and Epilogue. 17 May and Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry, I:800, EV10906; II:986, EV14181; II:1189, EV17614; II:1279, EV19207; II:1597, EV24898; III:1661, EV26040; III:1773, EV28084. 18 May and Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry, I:584, EV6992; I:628, EV7781; III:1733, EV27353; III:1743, EV27537; III:1771, EV28055; III:1772, EV28056; III:1772, EV28062. 38 HELEN HACKETT the period after 1603 has not yet been systematically compiled, though all three authors continued to use trochaics, as we shall see below.19 Hattaway favours not only Jonson’s claim over Shakespeare’s, but also notes that the conceits of the Dial Hand poem closely resemble those of the court epilogue to Dekker’s Old Fortunatus,20 which was performed at court by the Lord Admiral’s Men on 27 December 1599.21 The play was framed by two aged pilgrims to the
temple of Eliza, who spoke both the prologue and the following epilogue: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 1st old man: O deere Goddesse, Breathe life in our nombd spirits with one smile, And from this cold earth, we with liuely soules Shal rise like men (new-borne) & make heau’n sound With Hymnes sung to thy name, and praiers that we May once a yeere so oft enioy this sight, Til these yong boyes change their curld locks to white, And when gray-winged Age sits on their heads, That so their children may supply their Steads, And that heau’ns great Arithmetician, (Who in the Scales of Nomber weyes the world) May still to fortie two,22 add23 one yeere more, And stil adde one to one, that went before, And multiply fowre tennes by many a ten: To this I crie Amen. All.: Amen, Amen.24 Here, as in the Dial Hand poem, we have the conceits of Elizabeth’s reign ex- tending into an infinite perpetuity, and of her subjects’ children becoming old in her service while she remains the same. Old Fortunatus is closely linked with another Dekker play, The Shoemaker’s Holiday. As R.L. Smallwood and Stanley
19 The most prolific author over the period 1559–1603 of trochaic tetrameter couplets is Nicholas Breton, who wrote twelve poems in this form and metre (May and Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry, III:2121, aa4trochaic). However, he was not a dramatist, and was not connected with the playing companies; nor are his panegyrics of Elizabeth similar in style, content, or quality to the Dial Hand poem. Meanwhile, Thomas Lodge wrote some tro- chaics (May and Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry, I:342, EV3442; I:591, EV7139; I:69, EV8172; II:1029, EV14987; II:1109, EV16413; II:1259, EV18870; II:1264, EV18952; III:1859, EV29625; and III:1878, EV29936), but by 1599 he was a Catholic, he had ceased to write plays, and he was mainly active as a physician and translator; his last volume of original poetry was published in 1596. See Alexandra Halasz, ‘Lodge, Thomas (1558–1625),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online Jan 2008,
Wells have noted, they were ‘both of them called to Court for the Christmas revels of 1599-1600, both published (with title-page advertisement of their Court per- formance) in 1600, and both somewhat unusual, in the context of Dekker’s overall dramatic work, in being written independently of collaboration.’25 The Shoemaker’s Holiday is all about Shrovetide: the holiday of the title is Shrove Tuesday, whose origins as a holiday for apprentices are explained and mythologized by the play.
What if the Dial Hand poem’s mention of Shrovetide referred not (or not only) to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 a date of performance, but to the theme of the play which it closed? The Shoemaker’s Holiday, for these and other reasons, must surely be a strong con- tender for the play to which the epilogue belongs.
‘Beauty, like a dial hand’: the case for Shakespeare As Ringler and May note, trochaic metre ‘was a favourite with Shakespeare, who used it in more than 20 songs and poems in his plays, from the earliest to the latest’.26 (Of course, the case for additions by Middleton to the witch scenes in Macbeth is partly based on their deviation from Shakespeare’s characteristic tro- chaics.27) Shakespeare’s candidacy for authorship of the Dial Hand poem may also be supported by its uninflected genitives: ‘diall hand’ (for ‘dial’s hand’), and ‘father Quene’ (for ‘fathers’ Queen’), a grammatical idiosyncrasy which is found elsewhere in Shakespeare. However, Jonson uses it too,28 and ‘dial hand’ need not be an inflected genitive anyway; the expression ‘dial hand’ or ‘dial-hand’, like ‘clock face’, is perfectly acceptable. A stronger piece of evidence is the fact that the only other occurrence of the phrase ‘dial hand’ in the printed literature of the period is in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 104.29 This opens: ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old; / For as you were when first your eye I eyed, / Such seems your beauty still’. Although this is a lyric of personal affection rather than an exercise in royal panegyric, the theme of immutability and eternal youth resembles the Dial Hand poem. The sonnet goes on to invoke seasonal cycles, then exclaims: ‘Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial hand, / Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; / So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, / Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived’ (ll.1-3, 9–12). The simile describes how the dial hand moves without appearing to do so, by small slow increments, whereas the Dial Hand poem describes the
25 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. R.L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells (Manchester, 1979), 3. All further references to The Shoemaker’s Holiday will be to this edition unless otherwise stated. 26 Ringler and May, ‘Epilogue’, 149. 27 E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930), I:472; Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, gen. eds, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford, 2007), 390. 28 Hattaway, 160. 29 Confirmed by searches on ‘dial hand’ and ‘dial’s hand’ in Early English Books Online (EEBO), the Oxford English Dictionary, Literature Online (LION), and Google Books. 40 HELEN HACKETT endless circling round of the dial hand, always returning to its starting point. Nevertheless, both images use observation of details of the dial hand’s behaviour as a means of developing a meditation on the processes of time in a human life. Dusinberre, making her case for the Dial Hand poem as a court epilogue for As You Like It, notes that the poem’s apparent occasion of Shrovetide might be reflected in the mention of pancakes in that play (1.2.54–5), and points out that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 the poem’s opening lines about beginning in ending might pick up on similar terms in the play’s closing lines: ‘We’ll so begin these rites / As we do trust they’ll end, in true delights’ (5.4.186–7). However, she is probably misguided to associate the dial hand with the sundial at Richmond Palace. In both the Dial Hand poem and Sonnet 104 the hand is unlikely to belong to a sundial; the pointer on a sundial was referred to as a gnomon, not a hand.30 However, a dial hand may belong to either a public clock or a personal watch. Public clocks, usually on towers, and often with dials inscribed with hour markings, were in widespread use from the fourteenth century, and were erected by rulers and civic communities as displays of wealth and prestige.31 Personal, portable timepieces were also in use by the late sixteenth century, and were often referred to as dials as well as watches (see examples from Dekker below).32 It is important to be aware that until the 1650s, when Christian Huygens brought a new accuracy to timekeeping by constructing the first pendulum clock, clocks and watches generally had no minute hands, only hour hands.33 Some clockmakers did experiment with minute hands in the sixteenth century, but these were rare.34 The standard type of clock, then, was one-handed, and the dial hand would rotate slowly, moving round only one-twelfth or one- twenty-fourth of the circumference of the dial in each hour.35 The motion of the dial hand is therefore not, as modern readers might assume, an image of time racing on, but an image of steady slowness, of progress which is inexorable yet barely perceptible. David S. Landes writes eloquently of the socio-cultural
30 See OED entries for ‘hand’ and ‘gnomon’, and see Robert van Gent, ‘Sundial’, at Epact: Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe,
while the urgent ticking of the second hand was unknown. Shakespeare’s dial hand Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 is an hour hand, and as such he deploys it skilfully in Sonnet 104 to suggest the complex simultaneity of time standing still and time inexorably moving on. Othello similarly invokes the near-inertia of the dial hand: ‘Alas, to make me / The fixe`d figure for the time of scorn / To point his slow unmoving37 finger at’ (4.2.55–7). The number of references to dials in other works by Shakespeare suggests that the motif resonated in his imagination.38 Dusinberre dwells particularly on the description by Jaques of Touchstone’s disquisition on his personal dial: And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking on it with lack-lustre eye Says very wisely ‘It is ten o’clock.’ ‘Thus may we see’, quoth he, ‘how the world wags. ’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more ’twill be eleven. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.’ When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time My lungs began to crow like chanticleer, That fools should be so deep-contemplative, And I did laugh sans intermission An hour by his dial. (As You Like It, 2.7.20–33) For Dusinberre this is evidence that the Dial Hand poem was a court epilogue for this play. We might note, however, that the lesson Touchstone draws from the dial, that ‘from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, / And then from hour to hour we rot and rot’, is quite contrary to the use of the dial to represent Elizabeth’s mi- raculous longevity and eternal youth in the Dial Hand poem, and is unlikely to have been welcome to her ears. The sentiment would have been extremely tactless in the circumstances of a court performance (unless perhaps we regard the Dial Hand epilogue as deliberately deflecting this message away from Elizabeth, and implying that such rotting by the hour applies only to lesser mortals). The passage
36 Landes, 92–3. 37 The Norton Shakespeare follows the Folio in giving ‘slow and moving’, but I prefer the Quarto version ‘slow unmoving’. Professor Tiffany Stern suggests (private correspondence, 10 July 2010) that a ‘slow unmoving finger’ must belong to a sundial while a ‘slow and moving finger’ must belong to a clock, but I think we can read ‘slow unmoving’ less literally to refer to the hour hand of a clock which moves so slowly as to appear unmoving. 38 See All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.5.5–6; Henry IV Part 1, 5.2.81–4; Henry V, 1.2.205–12; Othello, 4.1.169–70; Richard II, 5.5.49–54; Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.99; Sonnet 77, l.2. 42 HELEN HACKETT about Touchstone’s dial is therefore a less than convincing ingredient in the case for the Dial Hand poem as a court epilogue by Shakespeare for As You Like It. Other wider factors also impair the case for Shakespeare’s authorship of the poem.
‘The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured’: the case against Shakespeare Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 One of these is the poem’s inclusion of the word ‘circular’, which does not appear anywhere else in his works. This is not conclusive; there are other words which have only single occurrences in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Further, stronger objections are the absence of such hyperbolic panegyric of Elizabeth anywhere else in Shakespeare’s works, and moreover the sparseness of explicit references to the Queen of any kind in his writings. Shapiro remarks of the Dial Hand poem that it was ‘brave’ of Shakespeare ‘to broach the touchy subject of Elizabeth’s age’.39 In fact, numerous panegyrics from this late phase of the reign, including the epilogue to Dekker’s Old Fortunatus quoted above, dwelt upon the Queen’s longevity and her notional triumph over time. The theme may seem unusual to Shapiro simply because Shakespeare did not participate in it. Among other authors, a preoccupation with Elizabeth’s age, expressed in conceits of her eternal youth and even her immortality, was widespread as the century closed and her subjects negotiated the underlying reality—inevitable and imminent—of their monarch’s death and a change of regime. In 1594, for instance, the Queen visited her chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley at his seat of Theobalds, where a ‘Hermit’s Oration’ was presented. Burghley himself, increasingly infirm and in retreat from the public scene, was represented by the hermit, whereas Elizabeth was told, ‘with theis same eyes doe I behold you the self-same Queene, in the same esteate of person, strength and beautie, in which soe many yeares past I beheld yow, finding noe alteration but in admiration, in soe much as I am perswaded, when I looke aboute me on your trayne, that Time, which catcheth everye body, leaves only you untouched.’40 Elizabeth was often represented as the moon-goddess Diana or Cynthia, not only because of this goddess’s virginity, but also because the cyclical self-renewal of the moon could be used to compliment her on her supposed immutability.41 The underlying idea was that her triumph over the flesh by remaining the Virgin Queen had brought with it a miraculous triumph over fleshly decay. An ‘Ode: Of Cynthia’ performed before Elizabeth and published in 1602 closed as follows: Landes and Seas shee rules below, Where thinges change, and ebbe, and flowe,
39 Shapiro, 87. 40 John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London, 1823), III:243. 41 See Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke, 1995), 174–86. ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 43
Spring, waxe old, and perish; Only Time, which all doth mowe, Her alone doth cherish. Times yong howres attend her still, And her Eyes and Cheekes do fill With fresh youth and beautie: All her louers olde do grow,
But their harts, they do not so Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 In their Loue and duty.42 As in the Dial Hand poem, here Elizabeth’s immunity to change, embodying her personal motto, semper eadem, is accentuated by contrast with the declining youth and vitality of her courtiers. Shakespeare did not write such lavish praises of the Queen. In fact, unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not write very much about her at all. Of course numerous critics have proposed interpretations which find aspects of Elizabeth in Cleopatra, or Gertrude, or Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines, and so on. However, if we seek direct, clearly identifiable references to Elizabeth by Shakespeare, the list is quite short. There is Oberon’s vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream of a ‘fair vestal throne`d by the west’, an ‘imperial vot’ress’ (2.1.155– 64), an ambiguous compliment of which more below. There is the fairy blessing on the owner of Windsor Castle in The Merry Wives of Windsor (5.5.53–7), a fairly neutral passing reference in itself, but one which is spoken by a Fairy Queen impersonated by Mistress Quickly, suggesting a parodic attitude to Gloriana. In Henry V, Essex is described as ‘the general of our gracious Empress’ (5.0.30), but this occurs in a passage which strongly foregrounds Essex’s glory and popularity rather than Elizabeth’s. Sonnet 107 states ‘The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured’ (l.5); if this is a reference to the death of Elizabeth, then the sonnet is strikingly lacking in regret, instead celebrating the new reign as ‘this most balmy time’ (l.9) and implying that Elizabeth was a tyrant (‘thou in this shall find thy monument / When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent’, ll.13–14). Finally, in Henry VIII, Cranmer prophesies the future glories of Elizabeth’s reign—in a passage almost certainly by John Fletcher (5.4.14–62). As a collection, these ref- erences to Elizabeth are at best muted and ambiguous in their compliments, and at worst downright hostile. We might add the case of Richard II, a play which does not directly refer to Elizabeth but whose possible association with the Essex Rebellion, and undoubted broaching of themes that were highly controversial in the 1590s, supports a view of Shakespeare as in tune with critical currents in Elizabethan politics. Shakespeare’s association with the Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, connects him with
42 ‘Diverse Poems of Sundry Authors’, in Francis Davison, A Poetical Rapsody (London, 1602), sig.L7v. 44 HELEN HACKETT
Essex’s faction of young men harbouring increasing disaffection and frustration towards Elizabeth and her policies.43 Stern suggests that, as resident playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men, Shakespeare may have been responsible for supplying pro- logues and epilogues for many plays performed by the company, and that those seeking additions to the Shakespeare canon would do well to look among such pieces.44 One candidate is the epilogue to Locrine, a tragedy published in 1595 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 which has been attributed to Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, but whose title page described it as ‘Newly set foorth, ouerseene and corrected, By VV. S.’.45 Stern, following Sonia Massai, believes that the epilogue is ‘undoubtedly’ by Shakespeare.46 If so, it is in a very different vein from the Dial Hand poem: drawing from the plot of Locrine a warning to traitors, it concludes: as a woman was the onely cause That ciuill discord was then stirred vp, So let vs pray for that renowned mayd, That eight and thirtie yeares the scepter swayd, In quiet peace and sweet felicitie, And euery wight that seekes her graces smart, wold that this sword wer pierced in his hart.47 This is dutiful, formulaic stuff, entirely lacking the gracious compliment and inventive imagery of the Dial Hand poem. They seem unlikely to be by the same author. From Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 Shakespeare biography onwards, a mythology of a close patronage relationship between Shakespeare and Elizabeth has been con- structed and elaborated, and it can be difficult for us to detach ourselves from this.48 For Rowe, a key piece of evidence that Elizabeth ‘without doubt gave him many gracious Marks of her Favour’ was Oberon’s aforementioned vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the most sustained depiction of Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s works:49 That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, Flying between the cold moon and the earth Cupid, all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throne`d by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
43 See Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton, 2009), 125–32. 44 Stern, 111. 45 The Lamentable Tragedie Of Locrine (London, 1595), title page. 46 Stern, 111. 47 Locrine, sig.K4v. 48 See Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth, passim. 49 Nicholas Rowe, ‘Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear’, in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, vol. 1 (London, 1709), viii. ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 45
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon, And the imperial vot’ress passe`d on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. (2.1.155–64)
Elizabeth here is once again associated with the moon for ostensible praise of her immunity to fleshly desire. In the context of the play, however, this has turbulent implications, because Elizabeth’s imperviousness to Cupid’s arrows deflects sexual Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 desire onto the flower, which in turn becomes the love-charm. Elizabeth is thereby ultimately responsible for the erotic confusions of the play, including the humi- liating subjugation of Titania to lust for an ass—a decidedly iconoclastic treatment of a Fairy Queen. Titania’s desire may be seen as a displaced acknowledgement of Elizabeth’s desire, and serves to bring this unruly female monarch back under male control. At the same time, the terms of Oberon’s vision place Elizabeth at odds with the values of youth, marriage, and fertility which are celebrated in the play as a whole: the moon with which she is associated is ‘cold’, ‘chaste’, and ‘wat’ry’, and the imperial votaress is an aloof, spectral figure as she glides out of the scene.50 This, then, is a passage which looks like panegyric but at the same time implies more critical sentiments toward the figure of Elizabeth. Perhaps we could read the Dial Hand poem in a similar way, as a formal exercise in panegyric, but one which in dwelling on the passage of time actually draws attention to the issue of the Queen’s ageing. Shapiro writes percipiently: ‘there’s a slight undertow to the conceit, the claustrophobic sense of being trapped in time, the uncomfortable thought that Elizabeth will still be around in a half-century’.51 As with Oberon’s vision, perhaps we can find antithetical sentiments in the Dial Hand poem, and read these as being held in tension to produce purposeful ambiguity and imply scepticism about the poem’s own extravagant claims. Such a reading could be supported by reference to the materials that surround the poem in Stanford’s commonplace book, which include a strident poetic complaint from earlier in Elizabeth’s reign about her failure to marry and secure the succession; a somewhat equivocal speech to Parliament on this subject made by Elizabeth in 1576; and a scandalous poem on an unnamed hypocritical female ruler, almost certainly Elizabeth, who flaunted her wisdom and virginity but, the poem alleges, secretly bore three bastards.52 As May points out, these were the kinds of direct political criticism that could only circulate in manuscript rather than print, and along with other ingredients in the miscellany they ‘reflect Stanford’s taste for
50 See Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘ ‘‘Shaping fantasies’’: figurations of gender and power in Elizabethan culture’, Representations 1 (1983) 61-94; Helen Hackett, William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Writers and Their Work (Plymouth, 1997), 5–31; Helen Hackett, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Stanley Wells (London, 2005), xl–xlvii. 51 Shapiro, 86. 52 May, Stanford’s Anthology, 154, Item 220; 84–8, Item 112; 187–8, Item 275. 46 HELEN HACKETT satire, libel, and riddles of all kinds’.53 Marcy L. North observes that ‘Stanford’s interest in political issues of Elizabeth’s reign ...influenced his selection, though the variety of his inclusions does not point to a single vision of Elizabeth’.54 The Dial Hand poem itself perhaps views Elizabeth with a kind of double vision by embedding an ironical consciousness of the Queen’s real mortality within the idealizing excesses of panegyric. As with other hyperbolic panegyric of
the 1590s, its assertion of the Queen’s triumph over time, in this case almost to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 the point of absurdity in claiming that she will outlive generations of courtiers, may be seen as implicitly calling attention to the stark reality of Elizabeth’s phys- ical decay and inevitable mortality. Viewed in these terms, the Dial Hand poem might perhaps be made to sit alongside Shakespeare’s other rather scant and sceptical writings about Elizabeth. However, as we have seen, considerable straining and manoeuvring is necessary to make the poem fit the rest of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. It is surely worthwhile to investigate the cases for the other two principal claimants, Jonson and Dekker.
‘As circular as infinite’: the cases for and against Jonson Hattaway favours Jonson’s claim to the Dial Hand poem, because of his use else- where of trochaic tetrameters; the presence of some similar songs in his masque for Lord Haddington’s wedding (1608) and in the Masque of Oberon (1611);55 and the use of the word ‘circular’, which occurs elsewhere in Jonson but not, as we have seen, in Shakespeare.56 One of Jonson’s trochaic songs is ‘Queen and hunt- ress, chaste and fair’ in Cynthia’s Revels, which praises Elizabeth as ‘Thou that mak’st a day of night, /Goddess, excellently bright’, an exercise in panegyric not dissimilar to the Dial Hand poem.57 This play was closely associated with the Queen: it was performed before her in 1600 by the children of her chapel, it participated in contemporary praise of her as Cynthia the moon goddess, and it called on her to intervene and make a judgement at the close of the action. Thus, the panegyrical stance and manner of the Dial Hand poem are not at odds with Jonson’s other works in the way that they are for Shakespeare.
53 May, Stanford’s Anthology, lix–lx. 54 Marcy L. North, ‘Queen Elizabeth compiled: Henry Stanford’s private anthology and the question of accountability’, in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC, 1998), 185–208, esp.191. 55 Ben Jonson, The Haddington Masque (1608), in The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, 1969), 110–13; Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Faery Prince: A Masque of Prince Henries,inBen Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 7 (Oxford, 1925–52), 337–56. 56 Hattaway, 159–60. 57 Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels,inThe Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. G.A. Wilkes, 4 vols (Oxford, 1981), 5.6.1–18. ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 47
Jonson would, after all, go on to become the leading literary celebrant and idealizer of the Stuart monarchy in his court masques. Indeed, Oberon has a strong theme of regal triumph over time: Prince Henry as Oberon is as unable to decay as the Spring, while in his palace dwell the noblest knights of the earth, ‘crown’d with lasting youth’.58 His father James stayes the time from turning old,
And keepes the age vp in a head of gold. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 That in his owne true circle, still doth runne; And holds his course, as certayne as the sunne. He makes it euer day, and euer spring, Where he doth shine, and quickens euery thing Like a new nature.59 Here the circle is that of the sun’s apparent course around the earth, not that of a timepiece. The idea of the monarch as presiding over perpetual cycles of renewal is not dissimilar to the Dial Hand poem, but it is also related to Jonson’s distinctive and differently inflected invocations of circularity and roundness elsewhere in his works, where the emphasis is not upon temporal cycles but upon wholeness and integrity as noble virtues. This may be seen in Epigram 128, ‘To Sir Thomas Roe’: ‘He that is round within himself, and straight, / Need seek no other strength, no other height / ...Be always to thy gathered self the same.’60 Jonson’s uses of the word ‘circular’ all denote divine harmony, proportion, and order rather than the cycles of time. In ‘Eupheme’, for instance, a set of elegies for Lady Venetia Digby, her mind is praised for making ‘a flight, / As circular as infinite’, while in The New Inn ideal love is ‘a spirituall coupling of two soules ...circular, eternall’.61 He also shows a striking lack of interest in dials and timepieces: where he does mention dials, he does so in a rather neutral way, using them as images of precision and decorum rather than to invoke meditations on time and mutability. In Every Man Out of his Humour, for example, Puntarvolo tells a gentlewoman that compliment is ‘the dial of the thought, and guided by the sun of your beauties’.62 He is in any case clearly referring here to a sundial (with a gnomon), not a clock-dial (with a hand). Moreover, Jonson was in disgrace in early 1599, making it unlikely that he would have been commissioned to write a court epilogue at this time. In September 1598, he was indicted for killing the actor Gabriel Spencer; while in
58 Jonson, Oberon, 344 ll.71–3, 346 ll.145–9. 59 Jonson, Oberon, 353 ll.350–6. 60 Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt, 2nd edn (London, 1988), 69, ll.3–4, 9. 61 Ben Jonson, ‘Eupheme 4: The Mind’, in Poems, ed. Parfitt, 238, l.32; The New Inne (London, 1631), sig.E3v. See also, The Masque of Beauty (1608), in Complete Masques, ed. Orgel, 69–70, and ‘The Vision of Ben Jonson, on the Muses of His Friend M. Drayton’, in Poems, ed. Parfitt, 267, l.19. 62 Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour,inComplete Plays, ed. Wilkes, I:314, 2.2.16–21. See also Cynthia’s Revels,inComplete Plays, ed. Wilkes, II:95, 5.4.542–4. 48 HELEN HACKETT prison he converted to Catholicism. He escaped hanging by benefit of clergy, but his goods were confiscated and he was branded on the thumb as a convicted felon. In late January 1599 he was in prison again, this time for debt. The next evidence of his work as a dramatist is not until August 1599, when he received a payment from Philip Henslowe for a collaboration with Dekker.63 For several reasons, then, the case for Jonson as author of the Dial Hand poem, which seems to belong to
Shrovetide 1599, is at best uncertain. This leads us to Dekker. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021
‘A miraculous Mayden circle’: the case for Dekker Dekker wrote at least nine songs in trochaic metre, and most of these are close in date to the Dial Hand poem: there are three in Old Fortunatus (1599), one in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), and two in Patient Grissell (1603).64 Moreover, Dekker made recurrent use of dials in his plays and pamphlets in ways at least as varied and inventive as Shakespeare’s. Indeed a survey of his works suggests a preoccupation with dials, as Dekker responded creatively to their rich and diverse significations of time and mutability, fixity, and unfixity. In the pamphlet News From Hell, men who risk the pox in the ‘sinnes of the Suburbes’ are in denial about time and mortality; they behave as if, ‘since man is the clocke of time, they’le all be tymes Sextens, and set the Diall to what howres they list.’65 Meanwhile, The Gull’s Hornbook advises a gallant visiting St Paul’s to view the tombs of the great, then to observe ‘the great Dyall’, and set his watch by it; his fixation on fashion, which makes him glad of any excuse to take out and show off his watch, is underwritten by the dial’s intimations of mortality.66 In The Roaring Girl (written with Middleton), Sebastian Wengrave and his father Sir Alexander tease out a watch metaphor to debate the relative merits of youth and age: Sebastian claims that ‘his watch nere goes right / That sets his dyall by a rusty clocke’, while Sir Alexander retorts that ‘thou runst on, and iudgement, thy maine wheele, / Beats by all stoppes, as if the worke would breake’.67 A horse-courser in another Dekker text assesses the age and health of a horse ‘by looking vpon the Dyall within his
63 Ian Donaldson, ‘Jonson, Benjamin (1572–1637)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online Oct 2008,
ness of the brevity of life and the imminence of death’. Landes goes on to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 describe how advances in the technology of chamber clocks and personal watches produced ‘a new kind of man, one who became more and more common with the growth of business and the development of a characteristically urban style of life ...by the late sixteenth century, the typical watch-wearer was North European and Protestant’.71 For Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, too, the history of time is essentially a history of work, and of the regulation of work in efforts to increase productivity.72 Dekker was undoubtedly a quintessentially urban man, born and bred in London,73 and returning again and again to the city and its street-life in works like The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600) and The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606). One of the most prolific writers and collaborators of his age, working furiously in a constant battle with debt, it is easy to see him as the kind of time-bound, wage-driven, metropolitan new man described by Landes, always keeping one eye on the clock and the inexorable march of the hand round its dial. Working as a play ‘fixer’ for Philip Henslowe, between 1598 and 1603 Dekker contributed to more than fifty plays, both his own and those of others which he revised, and the bibliography of his works comprises more than 140 titles.74 As well as all these dials, the word ‘circular’ also occurs in Dekker’s works, and with more connection with time and mutability than in Jonson’s usages, where, as we saw, it is always used to express Platonic order and harmony. In The Bellman of London (1608) Dekker develops from the term ‘circular’ an extended meditation on man as microcosm, and on cycles of growth and decay: The world is circular, So is man, for let him stand vpright and extend forth his armes to the length, A line drawen from his nauell to all the vtmost limits of his body, makes his body Orbiculer. And as man hath foure ages, Infancie, Child-hood, Youth and olde age: so hath
68 Thomas Dekker, O Per Se O. Or A New Cryer Of Lanthorne And Candle-Light (London, 1616), sig.H3r. 69 Like Shakespeare, Dekker sometimes uses a dial as an image of imprecision or unreli- ability: ‘Here is a Diall that false euer goes’ (The Owles Almanacke (London, 1618), 9). Extending this idea, in Part 2 of The Honest Whore, Infaelice builds up to confessing her infidelity to her husband by debating which of their watches is the more false (The Second Part Of The Honest Whore (London, 1630), sig.E2r). 70 Landes, 93. 71 Landes, 96. 72 Dohrn-van Rossum, passim. 73 See John Twyning, ‘Dekker, Thomas (c.1572–1632),’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online Jan 2008,
75 Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London (London, 1608), sig.A3r-v. 76 Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (Basingstoke, 1994), 2; Twyning; Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Dusinberre, 350. 77 A ‘lady eve’ is the eve of a Marian feast. Elizabeth was born on 7 September, on the eve of the feast of the birth of the Virgin Mary, and died on 24 March, on the eve of the feast of the Annunciation. 78 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare. 1603 (London, 1603), sig.B4r. 79 Thomas Dekker, Foure Birds of Noahs Arke (London, 1609), 6–7. ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 51 expression of loyalty, addressed to Titania, the Fairy Queen, ‘would you see your Lords / (In stead of sitting at your Councell boards) / Locking their graue, white, reuerend heads in steele? / If so, you cannot for all Fairie land / Find men to fit you better.’80 The play also addresses Titania as ‘Bright Empresse, Queene of maides’ (sig.C1r), just as the Dial Hand poem also hails Elizabeth as an ‘empresse’. These are strong indicators that these two works are by the same author. Our understanding of both of them is enhanced by Julia Gasper’s explanation that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 Dekker was a ‘militant Protestant’, one of those ‘who were determined to defend the Reformation ...Militant Protestants were deeply influenced by apoca- lyptic theology; this led them to envisage the world as a dualistic struggle, whose ultimate outcome must be the triumph of the True Church.’81 Gasper usefully describes The Whore of Babylon as a ‘comoedia apocalyptica’, a term she borrows from Foxe.82 It presents a vision of history drawn from the Book of Revelation, Foxe, and Spenser, centred on ‘Titania the Fairie Queene: vnder whom is figured our late Queene Elizabeth’ (sig.A1v). As the champion of the True Church, Titania is identified with the Woman Clothed with the Sun, and engages in apoca- lyptic conflict with the Whore of Babylon, who represents the Church of Rome. Dekker’s indebtedness to Spenser here is clear. He set out his allegorical purpose in his preface:
The Generall scope of this Drammaticall Poem, is to set forth (in Tropicall and shadowed collours) the Greatnes, Magnanimity, Constancy, Clemency, and other the incomparable Heroical vertues of our late Queene And (on the contrary part) the inueterate malice, Treasons, Machinations Vnderminings, & continual blody stratagems, of that Purple whore of Roome, to the taking away of our Princes liues, and vtter extirpation of their Kingdomes. (sig.A2r) This highlights the topicality of the play in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The providential preservation of Titania’s life is a recurrent preoccupation: she speaks of how plots were laid against her even from her cradle, but she was miraculously protected (sig.B4r); and the play shows her triumphing over conspirators, assassins, and, climactically, the Armada. Protestant millenarianism gave a particular edge to the idea of Elizabeth’s tri- umph over death and time, seeing her as God’s instrument to bring an end to time as we know it, and to begin a new age of godliness, an age beyond time. Time is a character in the play, and the prologue urges the audience to surrender to his powers to turn back the years: ‘winged Time that long agoe flew hence / You must fetch backe, with all those golden yeares / He stole, and here imagine still hee stands, / Thrusting his siluer locke into your hands. / There hold it but two howres’ (sig.A3r). There follows a dumb show reconstructing the famous pageant from Elizabeth’s coronation procession which presented Truth the daughter of
80 Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (London, 1607), sig.C2v. All further references will be to this edition. 81 Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford, 1990), 2–3. 82 Gasper, 62–108. 52 HELEN HACKETT
Time. Just as Elizabeth had done in 1559, Titania joyfully receives an English Bible from Truth (sig.A3v). Spectators would no doubt have been reminded of Elizabeth’s reported words in Richard Mulcaster’s widely circulated account of the 1559 pageants: ‘Tyme, quod she, and Tyme hath brought me hether’.83 As McLuskie comments on The Whore of Babylon’s dumb show, ‘Its full significance involves a complex interlocking set of symbolic codes including classical, historical and millennial ideas to reinforce the sense that Elizabeth’s accession was momen- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 tous in its fulfilment of prophecy as well as its immediate political consequences.’84 Thus the play wheels spectators back from the beginning of James’s reign to the beginning of Elizabeth’s, and from the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to the Armada victory, thereby emphasizing the continuum between past, present, and future within God’s providential plan. Temporal sequences are revealed as cycles, and ultimately as part of a timelessness beyond sequences and cycles, in which separate historical moments collapse into each other and become one. If we take all of this back to the Dial Hand poem, we gain several new insights. First of all, the prayer for Elizabeth’s indefinite preservation, long into future ages, looks less like preposterous toadying and more like the kind of miraculous, provi- dential act of God that a militant Protestant might hope for, believing himself to be living in the last days when God might make anything happen. We might compare Spenser’s equally Protestant preoccupation with time and its cycles: with mutabil- ity, and the mission of poetry to make ‘for short time an endlesse moniment’.85 Moreover, Spenser’s obsession with time centres persistently on Elizabeth, and how ‘when as death these vitall bands shall breake, / Her name recorded I will leaue for euer’.86 Secondly, as in Spenser, the hyperbolic praise of Elizabeth in the Dial Hand poem need not bespeak a personal admiration or affection for Elizabeth. As The Faerie Queene proceeds, it becomes increasingly apparent that Spenser is not praising Elizabeth as she is, but holding up idealized figures for her to aspire to, and that he is disappointed by the gulf between the ideal and the reality. Similarly, as Gasper writes of The Whore of Babylon, ‘the play is a panegyric of Elizabeth but it is also much more, because idealisation is a form of implied criticism, intentionally or otherwise. Where Titania differs from the historical Elizabeth, this is because she approaches more closely to the ideal monarch the militant Protestants would have liked to see.’87 Thus to praise Elizabeth as a goddess whose reign will last forever is not necessarily to fawn upon her with extravagant personal flattery, but is rather a statement of allegiance to the Protestant English cause which she personifies, and a wish for its successful
83 Anon [Richard Mulcaster], The Passage of Our Most Drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth (London, 1558), sig.C2v. 84 McLuskie, 51. 85 Edmund Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’ (1596), in The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London, 1999), 449, l.433. 86 Spenser, ‘Colin Clovts Come Home Againe’ (1595), in Shorter Poems ed. McCabe, 362, ll.630–1. 87 Gasper, 80–1. ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 53 culmination in a new world order. Taking all of this into consideration, it makes good sense to think of the Dial Hand poem as a Spenserian poem; and while Shakespeare and Jonson were evidently aware of Spenser’s writing, Dekker is surely more Spenserian than either of them.88 His indebtedness to Spenser in works like The Whore of Babylon is clear and self-conscious, while Sandra S. Clark writes that Spenser and Dekker ‘shared important habits of mind, which are especially evident in their use of emblematic imagery as a mode of embodying Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 moral truths’.89 The Dial Hand poem is very much in accord with such a ‘habit of mind’. For a number of reasons, then, Dekker is a good deal more likely to be the creator of the Dial Hand poem than Shakespeare or Jonson. If we go on to look for a particular work by Dekker that the epilogue might fit, a number of factors point us towards The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
‘Every Shrove Tuesday is our year of jubilee’: a court epilogue for The Shoemaker’s Holiday? This play, based on Thomas Deloney’s prose work The Gentle Craft, concerns the rise of the shoemaker Simon Eyre to become Mayor of London, his hosting of a feast for apprentices on Shrove Tuesday which is attended by the King, and the establishment of this feast as an annual holiday. The Dial Hand poem’s mention of Shrovetide, then, might well refer to this theme of the play, rather than (or as well as) a Shrovetide performance date. Shrove Tuesday continued to be an occasion for exuberant pre-Lenten revelry among the apprentices of Elizabethan London.90 Eyre’s workmen proclaim the perpetuity of the festival and dedicate it to their patron saint: Firk: Every Shrove Tuesday is our year of jubilee; and when the pancake bell rings, we are as free as my Lord Mayor. We may shut up our shops and make holiday. I’ll have it called ‘Saint Hugh’s Holiday’. All: Agreed, agreed – ‘Saint Hugh’s Holiday’! Hodge: And this shall continue for ever. (xviii.221–7) Alison A. Chapman has written of how shoemakers in the early modern period were regarded as having special licence to create holidays and alter the festal calendar, and sets The Shoemaker’s Holiday in this context. She writes that
88 Shakespeare’s awareness of Spenser’s work is evident in such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear; while Jonson’s annotations on his copy of Spenser’s works show that he read Spenser attentively, and admired aspects of his writing. See James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh, 1995). However, neither author shows such a sustained and concerted engagement with Spenser as Dekker, nor do they share Spenser’s Protestant eschatological mindset as Dekker does. 89 Sandra S. Clark, ‘Dekker, Thomas’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Toronto, 1990), 212. 90 Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Smallwood and Wells, 41-2, 177 n.xvii.48–55. 54 HELEN HACKETT
‘the trade had become symbolically associated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with questions of calendrical and ritual order’—very much the themes of the Dial Hand poem—creating a ‘stereotype of the shoemaker as a calendar maker’.91 She notes that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry V, likewise plays of 1599, the closing year of the century, also allude to the shoemakers’ special relation to the festal calendar. Meanwhile Anthony Parr has noted the
frequent mentions of St Hugh throughout the play, as when Eyre tells the King Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 that ‘the Gentlemen Shoemakers shall set your sweet Majesty’s image cheek by jowl by St Hugh’ (xx.6–8). These subtly associate the Shrovetide holiday with another annual Elizabethan celebration, the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth on 17 November, which was in fact St Hugh’s Day.92 The linking of the two festivals accords with the play’s general theme of the bringing together of citizens, nobility and monarch in shared and harmonious festivity. Like Old Fortunatus, The Shoemaker’s Holiday was performed at court in the Christmas season of 1599–1600. The striking similarities between the court epi- logue to Old Fortunatus and the Dial Hand poem were mentioned above; Old Fortunatus’s court prologue, too, celebrates Elizabeth’s triumph over time, and is also spoken by the two aged pilgrims to the temple of Eliza:
2nd old man: I weepe for ioy to see so many heads Of prudent Ladies, clothed in the liuerie Of siluer-handed age, for seruing you, Whilst in your eyes youthes glory doth renue: I weepe for ioy to see the Sunne looke old, To see the Moone mad at her often change, To see the Starres onely by night to shine, Whilst you are still bright, still one, still diuine: I weepe for ioy to see the world decay, Yet see Eliza flourishing like May.93 The prologue at court for The Shoemaker’s Holiday addressed Elizabeth in very similar terms as ‘deere Goddesse’, ‘wonder of all eyes’, and a ‘saint-like’ figure before whom the players as her ‘meanest vassalls’ prostrate themselves ‘On bended knees’. It concludes in unmistakably Spenserian style: ‘Oh graunt (bright mirror of true Chastitie) / From those life-breathing starres your sun-like eyes, / One gratious smile: for your celestiall breath / Must send vs life, or sentence vs to death’ (82). Unlike Old Fortunatus, The Shoemaker’s Holiday was published with- out its court epilogue: could the Dial Hand poem be this missing piece? The Shoemaker’s Holiday ends with the King arriving to attend Eyre’s Shrove Tuesday feast, thus creating, in the words of the play’s modern editors,
91 Alison A. Chapman, ‘Whose Saint Crispin’s Day is it? Shoemaking, holiday making, and the politics of memory in early modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54.4.2 (Winter 2001), 1467–8. 92 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr, 2nd edn (London, 1990), xxiv–v. 93 Dekker, Old Fortunatus, sig.A2r. ‘AS THE DIALL HAND’: THE CASE FOR DEKKER 55
‘concluding harmony and festival, which involves the participants in all three plots and includes monarch, nobility, citizens, and apprentices’;94 this blends naturally into the Dial Hand poem’s own vision of the loyalty of subjects and its expression of homage to the monarch. The fable of Eyre’s Dick Whittington-like rise in status to a point where the King becomes a guest at his table may even be read as a parable of Dekker’s own rise to success at court; certainly, at least, the performance
of this citizen comedy before the Queen is echoed in the play’s own assertion of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 concord between the world of urban, timebound workers and a benign, timeless monarch. The King is unnamed: Smallwood and Wells note that ‘the ability to mix affably with his subjects, the successful wars with France, and the vigour with which they are taken up again at the end of the play, even the joking allusion to the tennis balls (xxi.25), all suggest Henry V’, perhaps alluding to Shakespeare’s play of the same year.95 They might equally, however, suggest Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, according with the dynastic theme of the Dial Hand poem, and indeed a production in 1954 presented him in this style.96 The Dial Hand poem expressed wishes for the progeny of loyal subjects to serve the monarch long into the future, and for a royal triumph over time; these sentiments also take up motifs from the play, as when Simon Eyre declares, ‘My liege, I am six-and-fifty year old ...Mark this old wench, my King. I danced the shaking of the sheets with her six-and-thirty years ago, and yet I hope to get two or three young Lord Mayors ere I die ...Care and cold lodging brings white hairs. My sweet majesty, let care vanish. Cast it upon thy nobles. It will make thee look always young’ (xxi.27–35). The Shoemaker’s Holiday was performed at court, as its title page tells us, ‘on New-yeares day at night’ 1600 (72). The first day of a new year and of a new century:97 it seems almost irresistible to identify this as the occasion of the Dial Hand poem, with its themes of ‘still beginning in ye ending’ and ‘making new when old are gon’. However, the Stanford manuscript dates the poem with abso- lute clarity to 1598 (Fig. 1). Even if we take the old-style calendar to apply here, the poem could still be dated no later than 24 March 1599 (new style). The most obvious explanation is that The Shoemaker’s Holiday had another, earlier perform- ance at court at Shrovetide 1599, with the Dial Hand poem as epilogue. The play could have been written by then: Dekker received his final payment for it from Henslowe on 15 July 1599.98 The Lord Admiral’s Men, for whom Dekker was writing at this time, did perform at court on Shrove Sunday 1599. If we posit such a performance, we lose the aptness of the Dial Hand poem for performance on 1 January 1600. On the other hand, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, with its Shrovetide theme, was certainly a highly appropriate play for court performance on Shrove
94 Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Smallwood and Wells, 22. 95 Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Smallwood and Wells, 24. 96 Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Smallwood and Wells, 51. 97 If we take the century to begin on 1 January 1600, not 1 January 1601, which would strictly be more correct. 98 Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Smallwood and Wells, 8–9. 56 HELEN HACKETT
Sunday; and, as we have seen, Dekker’s personal interest in dials, combined with the emphasis of late Elizabethan panegyric on temporal cycles, are more than enough to account for the circular motifs of the Dial Hand poem. In short, The Shoemaker’s Holiday fits the Dial Hand poem so well and in so many ways that it merits serious consideration as the play to which the epilogue belonged. The case for it is surely stronger than those for As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the only previous plays proposed. Of course, remem- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 bering Stern’s work, to suggest that the Dial Hand poem is an epilogue to a Dekker play is not necessarily to identify Dekker as the author of the poem. However, the prologue and epilogue to Old Fortunatus, never doubted as his, are so similar, and he is generally regarded as having worked alone in writing both this play and The Shoemaker’s Holiday and adapting them for court perform- ance. We surely should not ignore the persuasive evidence for Dekker as author of the Dial Hand poem, and for its function as a court epilogue for his Shoemaker’s Holiday.
Shaking off the Shakespeare obsession Responding to the media excitement about the RSC Shakespeare’s ‘discovery’ of the Dial Hand poem, Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars, called it a ‘mediocre poem’. Mark Anderson, an Oxfordian, dismissed it as ‘a choppy old thing’, probably part of the Earl’s juvenilia ‘written to a much younger queen and then pulled out for old times’ sake some two or three decades later’.99 More accurate is Bate’s aesthetic judgement on it as ‘a beautifully turned epilogue’: it is a well crafted poem and a gracious exercise in panegyric.100 Poised between retrospect and vision, past and future—‘making new when old are gon’—it traces elegant patterns of circularity and repetition (‘still beginning in ye ending’, ‘once I wishe this wishe again’). The stately metre conveys both the stillness of the moment and the onward pace of time. However, Shakespeare is by no means the only late Elizabethan author who wrote good poems. In order to pursue an objective enquiry into the Dial Hand poem’s authorship, we need to free ourselves of the obsession with finding lost Shakespearean works. We also need to free ourselves of the perennial desire to bring Shakespeare and Elizabeth into one another’s stories. The RSC Shakespeare caters to a fantasy of the Bard speaking directly and reverently to his Queen: the edition entitles the poem ‘To the Queen’, implying a personal address rather than the collective address signalled by the title in the Stanford manuscript, ‘to ye Q. by ye players’. The Daily Mail report even converted the RSC title into ‘To my Queen’.
99 Ron Rosenbaum, ‘Are those Shakespeare’s ‘‘balls’’?’, Slate, published online June 2008,
Yet, as we have seen, there is nowhere else in Shakespeare’s works where, as the Daily Mail put it, he ‘butter[ed] up his sovereign’. Dekker, on the other hand, praised Elizabeth frequently and rapturously, not just because he sought favour and was good at turning his hand to any job that came his way, but also because as a militant Protestant he believed in her as a symbol of religious truth, and as God’s instrument to end time as we know it and create a new heaven and new earth. While significant doubts attach to the cases for Shakespeare and Jonson, there are Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/res/article/63/258/34/1553972 by guest on 28 September 2021 many strong reasons to think that Dekker wrote the Dial Hand poem, and that it was a court epilogue for The Shoemaker’s Holiday. University College London