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Triangulating Shakespeare Through Sixteenth-Century Prose Pamphlets View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St. John's University: St. John's Scholar St. John's University St. John's Scholar Theses and Dissertations 2020 Hidden in Detail: Triangulating Shakespeare through Sixteenth- Century Prose Pamphlets Scott Donald Koski Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons HIDDEN IN DETAIL: TRIANGULATING SHAKESPEARE THROUGH SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE PAMPHLETS A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY to the faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH of ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES at ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY New York by Scott Koski Date Submitted ______________ Date Approved _________________ ___________________________ ______________________________ Scott Koski Dr. Steve Mentz © Copyright by Scott Koski 2020 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT HIDDEN IN DETAIL: TRIANGULATING SHAKESPEARE THROUGH SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE PAMPHLETS Scott Koski Part of what has led to fetishizing Shakespeare both inside and outside of the academy is the inexplicable way he arrived on the London writing scene. Though scholars have searched for years trying to trace the path that led a young Shakespeare out of rural Warwickshire to the bustling streets of London, very little is known about the man himself in the time leading up to his arrival and first being called an “upstart crow” by Robert Greene in 1592. This void has become known as the “lost years,” and because there is so little information save a few documents bearing Shakespeare’s name, the mystery itself serves to feed the myth. The problem, as I see it, is in the approach: we are always looking for Shakespeare. The narrative built over the last few hundred years has at its core an assumption such genius must have been as recognized back then as it is today, and by virtue it must have left a trace. In this dissertation I plan to take a much different approach to those infamous “lost years,” looking beyond Shakespeare out into the periphery of the literary landscape that led up to his appearance in 1592. By focusing primarily on the genre of pamphlets and exploring not just the writers themselves but the conversations they were having about writing and what it meant to be a professional author, I feel it possible to better understand the environment that helped mold the figure we know as Shakespeare. As a foundation, I will examine writers like Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Gabriel Harvey, and the controversies involving these men within London’s late 16th century literary landscape—controversies traditionally overlooked as having little to no bearing on Shakespeare’s ascent in popularity. By decentering Shakespeare, my goal in this work is to demystify some of the legend created by our cultural obsession with the Bard, and in doing so breathe new life into a genre long overshadowed by that very obsession. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Taking Stock of England’s 16th Century ‘Paper Soldiers’: .............................................................. 1 Chapter One: Expanding the Scope of Shakespeare’s “Rival Poet” Sonnets Beyond the Usual Suspects ............ 8 Chapter Two: The Marprelate Controversy and its Aftermath: The Training Grounds for Polemics in the Elizabethan Literary Marketplace. ................................................................................................. 50 Chapter Three: The Defence of Robert Greene: Architect of a Celebrity Turned Derelict .................................... 92 Chapter Four: Quibbling to Quarrelling: An Exploration of the Nashe/Greene/Harvey Controversy ................ 127 Chapter Five: Harvey’s Four Letters and its Aftermath: Lessons Learned from an Insecure Pendant .............. 165 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 203 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 A Notable Discovery of Coosenage…..…….…………………………………111 Figure 2 The Defence of Conny catching….……………………………………………116 iii Introduction: Taking Stock of England’s 16th Century ‘Paper Soldiers’: Compared to most of his contemporaries, Shakespeare was markedly tight-lipped for most of his writing career, a fact that compounds the enigmatical nature of the man’s life and often leads scholars down the road of speculation. To mitigate this lack of information, scholars and biographers (e.g. James Shapiro, Katharine Duncan-Jones, and Jonathan Bate, etc.) often turn their attention to the work Shakespeare produced in the 1590s and after if for no other reason than there seems to be surer footing from which to make claims; however, such moves also tacitly sideline earlier works in favor of the more polished and celebrated plays. For the early modernist, this could be taken as merely a strategy of practicality, akin to a Romanticist’s focus primarily on Keats’ annus mirabilis. Unconsciously though, it may serve to reinforce the cultural mythos of Shakespeare’s genius, a type of thinking early modernists love to claim their exclusion from with one hand while silently perpetuating with the other. It would be hypocritical to not include myself within these ranks, for as much as my interests drift towards semi-canonical writers of this period, Robert Greene in particular, the impetus behind that curiosity can be attributed directly to an early introduction to and interest in Shakespeare, a trait I presume common amongst the majority of those who choose the early modern period as their field of study. There have of course been some calls in recent years to address this issue. In his 2017 article “Shakespeare in the 1580s,” Rory Loughnane states, “Rather than comparing 1 the achievement of the early works to the later, we should attempt to understand how his early works inform us about how Shakespeare established himself in the London dramatic scene of the late 1580s and early 1590s” (124). Loughnane makes an excellent point, that for too long we have looked at those rough-edged works in comparison with a Lear or a Hamlet, deeming them as inferior and thus less worthy of study and in doing so, dismissing useful information we may be able to gather from their pages. The same mindset applies to many of the works from contemporary writers of this era, and only in the past few decades have we seen a resurgence in interest and positive attitude from the academy towards such writers who once dominated the bookshelves of Cheapside and the stages of Bankside and Shoreditch.1 The first literary reference we have of Shakespeare, subsequently ending the “lost years”—a term “customary for biographers to refer to [the] seven-year period” devoid of any trace of Shakespeare—comes from Robert Greene in his 1592 pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (Ellis 8). Tucked away in a small section is the infamous “upstart crow” comment, with Greene warning three fellow playwrights to be cautious of this newcomer, but also the whole lot of actors in general. Greene, arguably the most popular writer of his time, though dismissed as little better than a hack by prominent Shakespearean scholars like Stephen Greenblatt,2 possessed a commanding presence, acting like a body to which all who wrote in London at that time gravitated towards. Orbiting around Greene we find friends and collaborators like Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, John Lyly, and Thomas Lodge, as well as enemies like the 1 It should be noted such interest is cyclical, passing in and out of fashion every few decades, and is by no means something rare or singular to this generation. 2 See Greenblatt’s Will in the World, 2004. 2 brothers Gabriel and Richard Harvey. Some of these names are remembered today, while others have faded into obscurity, overshadowed by the legacy of the man Greene once warned his cohort against. Much of what we study today was directly influenced by conversations these men (and others) were having in the pages of poems, plays, and pamphlets published during the late 1580s and early 1590s. However, because Shakespeare was never a part of those conversations, most of these writers and their works are dismissed when compared to “the genius of Shakespeare.” As hyperbolic as that may sound, keep in mind that very phrase is the title of Jonathan Bate’s 1997 best- selling book. Keeping with Loughnane’s sentiment of studying earlier works, what I propose in this dissertation is an in-depth study of primary texts focused chiefly on the genre of pamphlets, including, though not limited to, the aforementioned writers of this period. Littered within the pages of these pamphlets, regardless of their billed subject matter, are references to different styles, genres, works, and in some cases writers themselves, all of which help us understand how writers of this era understood their art and authorship itself. It must be kept in mind that through all these battles in print, Shakespeare was witness. Though he may not have played an active role, his absence was his presence, gnomonically speaking.3 Like a flashpoint in history, this brief period—1588 to 1592— saw writers begin to question how they define and differentiate themselves through audience, genre, and persona, each then acting like a model from which young writers, including Shakespeare, could draw upon as they, in turn, later attempted to carve out their 3 In “The Gnomonics of Dubliners” (1988), Bernard Benstock describes the concept of gnomon as “a nonappearance suggesting a presence made palpable only by the concept of its absence” (520). 3 own niche. Through comprehensive comparative analysis of specific works beyond the scope of where many have thought to look, interwoven with past and contemporary scholarship, I believe it possible to gain a better understanding of the tumultuous environment of the London writing scene, how it helped form the very concept of professional authorship for press and stage alike, and how it fostered the conditions needed to let someone like Shakespeare rise in popularity through the 1590s.
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