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Developments in the Shakespeare Authorship Problem

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Developments in the Shakespeare Authorship Problem Developments in the Shakespeare authorship problem A summary of PhD research carried out at Brunel University 2010–13 Dr Barry R. Clarke PhD thesis This work is a summary of the PhD thesis awarded without amendments to the author by Brunel University, UK, in January 2014 entitled “A linguistic analysis of Francis Bacon’s contribution to three Shakespeare plays: The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest”. About the author Barry’s paper ‘The Virginia Company and The Tempest’ appeared in The Journal of Drama Studies (July 2011). He has degrees in theoretical physics with publications in quantum mechanics and also writes mathematical puzzles for The Daily Telegraph and Prospect magazine. Books of puzzles include Puzzles for Pleasure (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Challenging Logic Puzzles Mensa (Sterling, 2003), and Mathematical Puzzles and Curiosities (Dover, 2013). Website: http://barryispuzzled.com Acknowledgements I am grateful to Nigel Cockburn whose work has served as an important point of departure on this journey and to Professor William Leahy for the opportunity to carry out this PhD research. Copyright © 2014 by Barry R. Clarke All rights reserved. Bibliographical note This work is intended for public circulation. Contents Introduction 1 Part One: The Inns of Court 7 1.1 Players 7 1.2 Writers 9 1.3 Productions 11 1.3.1 Play characteristics 11 1.3.2 The Comedy of Errors 12 1.3.3 Love’s Labour’s Lost 13 1.3.4 A Thomas Nashe play? 15 1.4 Shakespeare’s exclusion from the 1594–5 revels 17 Part Two: The Virginia Colony 21 2.1 The Sea Venture and The Tempest 21 2.2 Shakespeare’s exclusion from The Tempest 25 Part Three: Francis Bacon 28 3.1 Interest in drama 28 3.2 Parallels with Gesta Grayorum 31 3.3 Parallels with The Comedy of Errors 36 3.4 Parallels with Love’s Labour’s Lost 40 3.5 The Virginia Company 43 3.5.1 Bacon’s connection to company 43 3.5.2 Company pamphlets 45 3.6 Parallels with The Tempest 49 Conclusion 56 Introduction There is no test that can exclude William Shakespeare of Stratford from having contributed to any of the plays in the First Folio. However, there are arguments against his origination of certain plays. The idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford was not the sole contributor to certain plays under his name is already a legitimate area of academic study. For example, The Troublesome Reign of John almost certainly contains the hand of George Peele,1 the first two Acts of Pericles have been attributed to George Wilkins,2 and parts of Timon of Athens have been credited to Thomas Middleton.3 Shakespeare’s name appears on the First Folio collection of 36 plays that was printed by Isaac Jaggard and William Blount in 1623. The dedication to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery by John Heminge and Henry Condell, two members of the Kings Men, refers to “our Shakespeare” and the “humble offer of his plays”, Ben Jonson’s second tribute mentions the “Sweet Swan of Avon”, while Leonard Digges in a eulogy to “the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare” writes “thy Stratford Moniment [sic]”. Without further information, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that William Shakespeare of Stratford was their principal author. However, there are certain facts that raise suspicion. No letters and no play manuscripts survive for Shakespeare which seems to be atypical for a contemporary playwright.4 A single person with 1 Brian Vickers, ‘Unique matches of three [or more] consecutive words in The Troublesome Reign with comparable strings in other plays by Peele’ in The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, Appendix, ed., Charles R. Forker (Manchester University Press, 2011). The second quarto (1611) has “Written by W. Sh” and the third quarto (1622) is attributed to “W. Shakespeare”. 2 MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare:Pericles as Test Case (Oxford University Press, 2003). 3 S. Wells and G. Taylor, eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, second edition (Oxford University Press, 2005), p.943. 4 See Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (Greenwood Press, 2001). 1 such an extensive vocabulary must have had a library but no books have been traced to Shakespeare’s name. Nevertheless, in the absence of further evidence, the attribution to Shakespeare must still be the default position, for any reasonable doubt generated by comparisons with how contemporary playwrights typically lived is still insufficient to undermine the testimony of the First Folio. A better test of this default position would be a comparison of Shakespeare’s extant letters and prose works against the plays, but since no such material is available it is not possible to exclude him from making a contribution to this or that work. Other dramatists have the benefit of direct corroborative evidence, for example from Henslowe’s diary,5 but there is no record of Shakespeare receiving payment for a play that might point directly to his authorship priority. So it is reasonable to question what plays Shakespeare actually originated in the First Folio. However, is there sufficient evidence available to decide the matter? The problem as to which authors contributed to the canon of plays under Shakespeare’s name and at what date is an interesting philosophical one. How much we can know after over 400 years have passed and to what degree of certainty? What methods can be relied upon to reconstruct the history of contributions to a play? Various dubious methods have been invented to answer these questions. One such method relies on the mistaken view that an author necessarily includes autobiographical details in his play. Even if the correspondence of such facts is granted, what excludes the possibility that someone else might be providing these details? Furthermore, it turns out that a case for authorship based on the autobiographical interpretation of a play or sonnet can be constructed for any number of possible candidates, including Shakespeare, which suggests that this type of evidence is too weak to eliminate other suspects and leave just one 5 Henslowe’s diary lists payments to dramatists for plays, see Walter Greg, ed., Henslowe’s Diary (A. H. Bullen, 1904). 2 standing.6 As for the search for hidden messages in a play or sonnet, it is nothing but an illusion of discovery. Practitioners of this mode of enquiry fail to realise that their chosen method of decipherment is entirely arbitrary, and is one that introduces a high degree of flexibility into what can be ‘discovered’. In the universities, there are academics who are committed to the process of stylometric testing. Here, the frequency of certain words, their prefixes, or endings, in a document is taken to be a reliable marker of contribution. However, scribal, editorial, and compositorial intervention renders this method unreliable. Far from pointing to a particular author, one could instead be counting only the averaged-out effect of several hands that were engaged in the publication process. Furthermore, these researchers invariably restrict their investigation to a database of known dramatists and unjustifiably exclude the possibility that one or more prose writers might have been involved. Far more reliable is the practice of linguistic analysis,7 where a test for authorship depends on the comparison of phrases and collocations.8 These linguistic units are less vulnerable to outside intervention and carry a greater cognitive complexity than individual words. However, there is usually no measurement of the rarity of phrase parallels, a deficiency that needs to be remedied if they are to be informative. By exhaustively testing a target document for phrases that are rare in relation to a database of contemporary publications, and by identifying those authors who employed these phrases, a profile can be built up for those writers who record a significant number of parallels. This kind of 6 A case in point is Shake-speare’s Sonnets (1609). Several works have appeared showing how these poems delineate the life of Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, 17th Earl of Oxford, Henry Neville, and Shakespeare. The fact that this can be done for several candidates shows that this kind of argument is ineffective. Scientific method requires the testing and elimination of alternative possibilities, but these interpretative arguments take no care to do this, only focusing on facts that support the preferred candidate. 7 For example, Brian Vickers, ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8 A collocation consists of related but separated words. 3 method can only be a test for contribution not origination, and it is the one developed here. There are good reasons for thinking that Shakespeare of Stratford did not originate all of the plays under his name, that some of them were acquired from the London Inns of Court law schools for later revision. Arguments for this position are quite strong for two plays, The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost, which appear to have convincing connections to the 1594–5 Gray’s Inn Christmas revels. A detailed contemporary account of these festivities has been left to us in the Gesta Grayorum, which was published in 1688 by William Canning. It turns out that there are striking correspondences between these two plays and the Inns of Court traditions and revels. Here, the argument for Shakespeare’s exclusion proceeds from the evidence that leading up to Christmas 1594–5, professional playing companies and writers were not being employed by Gray’s Inn, and that they usually engaged their own members. As for plays that are not traditionally associated with the Inns of Court, there is also strong evidence that The Tempest relies, at least in part, on the events surrounding the shipwreck of the Sea Venture at Bermuda in 1609, an expedition that was intended to resupply the new Virginia colony.
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