54 4. Shakespeare Authorship Doubt in 1593 Around the time of Marlowe’s apparent death, the name William Shakespeare appeared in print for the first time, attached to a new work, Venus and Adonis, described by its author as ‘the first heir of my invention’. The poem was registered anonymously on 18 April 1593, and though we do not know exactly when it was published, and it may have been available earlier, the first recorded sale was 12 June. Scholars have long noted significant similarities between this poem and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander; Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen describe ‘compelling links between the two poems’ (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, 2007: 21), though they admit it is difficult to know how Shakespeare would have seen Marlowe’s poem in manuscript, if it was, as is widely believed, being written at Thomas Walsingham’s Scadbury estate in Kent in the same month that Venus was registered in London. The poem is preceded by two lines from Ovid’s Amores, which at the time of publication was available only in Latin. The earliest surviving English translation was Marlowe’s, and it was not published much before 1599. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen admit, ‘We don’t know how Shakespeare encountered Amores’ and again speculate that he could have seen Marlowe’s translations in manuscript. Barber, R, (2010), Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare: Exploring Biographical Fictions DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex. Downloaded from www. rosbarber.com/research. 55 Ovid’s poem is addressed Ad Invidos: ‘to those who hate him’. If the title of the epigram poem is relevant, it is more relevant to Marlowe than to Shakespeare: personal attacks on Marlowe in 1593 are legion, and include the allegations in Richard Baines’ ‘Note’ and Thomas Drury’s ‘Remembrances’, Kyd’s letters to Sir John Puckering, and allusions to Marlowe’s works in the Dutch Church Libel. The poem from which the epigram is taken closes (in Marlowe’s translation): Then thogh death rackes my bones in funerall fire, Ile liue, and as he puls me downe, mount higher. Celebrating the immortality of a poet through his verse, they may also be read – within the Marlovian authorship paradigm - as a more literal reference to the poet’s triumph over death. From the wording of the dedication to Southampton, it appears that the author expects the young earl to know who he is (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, 2007: 27). Beyond the dedication, no link between William Shakespeare and Southampton, or his guardian Lord Burghley, has ever been established. Christopher Marlowe, however, was known to Lord Burghley as early as 1587 when the Privy Council intervened to ensure he was awarded his MA from Cambridge, and as late as 1592, when Sir Robert Sidney, Governor of Flushing in the Low Countries, sent Marlowe to Burghley under suspicion of coining (Wernham, 1976: 344-5). As Marlowe was not prosecuted for this potentially capital offence, it is not unreasonable to conclude, as Riggs and other scholars have done, that he was working for Burghley at the time. If Burghley conducted business from Cecil House, where Southampton lived as his ward, a possible means by which Marlowe might have met Southampton can be established. This is not to say that William Shakspere and the Earl of Southampton cannot have met, only that Barber, R, (2010), Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare: Exploring Biographical Fictions DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex. Downloaded from www. rosbarber.com/research. 56 the Marlovian paradigm offers corroborating external evidence when the orthodox paradigm offers none. The first recorded purchaser of Venus and Adonis, Richard Stonley, was, perhaps not coincidentally, an employee of Lord Burghley. His usual taste was for sermons and histories, and his uncharacteristic purchase of poetry might feasibly be explained by his employer’s potential interest in a book dedicated to his ward (Duncan- Jones and Woudhuysen, 2007: 30). Another early reader, the soldier William Reynolds, also had an interest in Burghley and wrote to give his personal interpretation of the poem to the Lord Treasurer in a letter dated 21 September. That another letter, dated five days earlier but intended to escape the eye of authority, may contain a more significant reaction to Venus and Adonis has not generally been considered. In Autumn 1593, Gabriel Harvey’s A nevv letter of notable contents With a straunge sonet, intituled Gorgon, or the wonderfull yeare was published. It comprises a twenty-six page letter dated 16 September 1593, addressed to the printer, John Wolfe, followed by three pages of poetry that scholars of Elizabethan literature find notoriously obscure. McKerrow writes: ‘it was doubtless intended to have some meaning, but … I have in vain attempted to discover what this may be’ (McKerrow, 1958a: V5, 102). A majority of scholars have agreed that this poetry contains allusions to Marlowe,56 but there is no consensus as to what Harvey is trying to communicate. More recently, the tendency of scholars to interpret literally the line ‘He and the Plague contended for the game’, and the unlikelihood that Harvey would be 56 Hale Moore summarises the scholarly reactions to Gorgon up to 1926, and offers a deeper exploration of the Marlowe allusions, in MOORE, H. (1926) Gabriel Harvey's References to Marlowe. Studies in Philology, 23, 337-357. Gorgon’s references to Marlowe are noted by BAKELESS, J. E. (1942) The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe., Cambridge, Harvard University Press. The Feaseys note Gorgon’s allusions to Marlowe and their similarities to a section of Harvey’s Pierces Supererogation (April 1593) which is also taken to be about Marlowe: FEASEY, L. & FEASEY, E. (1949) The Validity of the Baines Document. Notes and Queries. Barber, R, (2010), Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare: Exploring Biographical Fictions DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex. Downloaded from www. rosbarber.com/research. 57 misinformed as to the circumstances of the poet’s demise, as well as the fact that four months on, Marlowe’s death was surely no longer topical, prompted Charles Nicholl to suggest that Gorgon is not about Marlowe at all, but about the no-account braggart Peter Shakerley, with the poem using Marlowe ‘as a reference point’ (Nicholl, 2002: 149). J.A. Downie and Constance Brown Kuriyama have accepted this conclusion (Downie, 2007: 257, Kuriyama, 2002: 151), perhaps with an eye to mounting a defence against the non-Stratfordian theory shortly to be elucidated. But the Shakerley interpretation does not explain the remarkable similarities, noted by the Feaseys, between Harvey’s attacks on the subject of this poem and his previous attacks on Marlowe; plus it raises a number of new problems that Nicholl, Downie and Kuriyama have not addressed. One of these concerns timing. Harvey’s letter is dated two days before Shakerley was buried on 18 September. Nicholl suggests ‘he would have died a few days earlier: the grave-diggers were busy this plague summer’; yet plague victims were buried very quickly precisely to prevent a backlog building up, and if Shakerley died of the plague in London (as Nicholl concludes) he would have been buried very rapidly indeed. Vanessa Harding, in her paper Burial of the plague dead in Early Modern London, writes ‘It is true that plague victims were buried quickly, but the interval between death and burial was rarely longer than two or three days anyway’ (Harding, 1993). In other words, if Shakerley died of the plague and was buried on 18 September it is unlikely he was dead before the 16th when Harvey’s letter is dated. Even allowing a normal, non- plague burial interval of two to three days, the earliest date we might consider for Shakerley’s death is 15 September. and the news of his death would then need to travel the fifty-five miles from London to Saffron Walden. From figures produced by Alan Brayshay, a royal letter to a person of importance might be expected to cover such a Barber, R, (2010), Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare: Exploring Biographical Fictions DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex. Downloaded from www. rosbarber.com/research. 58 journey in around 14 hours (Brayshay et al., 1998).57 A letter between private citizens was not allowed to travel in the royal mail bag until the 1630s and could be expected to take considerably longer. As Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe state in their study Letter Writing in Renaissance England, ‘“mailing” a letter in England was no simple matter… the likelihood of a letter arriving in a timely fashion was iffy at best’ (Stewart and Wolfe, 2004: 121). The timing is not impossible, but tight enough that Shakerley’s candidacy as the poem’s subject should be considered unlikely. Other problems with the Shakerley theory will be elucidated below, but it is not in any case necessary to formulate an alternative to Marlowe, since it is possible to interpret and contextualise the poem such that the two chief objections to Marlowe as the subject of Gorgon are eliminated. Firstly, as I will show below, there are indications in the poem itself that ‘the Plague’ was intended metaphorically rather than literally. Secondly, if we allow ourselves to contemplate the possibility that Gorgon encapsulates Harvey’s belief that Marlowe is the author of Venus and Adonis, and may still be alive – in other words, that Harvey is writing from within a Marlovian authorship paradigm - the poem is perfectly topical. Harvey refers to the Gorgon poem as ‘Newest Trifle’: ‘I terme it a Trifle for the manner: though the matter be in my conceit, superexcellent; in the opinion of the world, most admirable; for priuate consideration, very notable; for publique vse, passing memorable; for a point, or two, excee[d]ing monstrous.