Brian McClinton The Shakespeare Conspiracies: untangling a 400-year web of myth and deceit Cover by Michael Waring and Timothy Lane " To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth"—Voltaire Aubane Historical Society www.aubane.org Brian McClinton was born in Belfast in 1945 and educated at Belfast Boys’ Model, Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and Trinity College, Dublin. A retired teacher who lives in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, he has had a lifelong enthusiasm for the Shakespeare authorship question. He is editor of Humani, the journal of the Humanist Association of Northern Ireland. His previous works have included: Ulster’s Third Way: The Humanist Alternative Beyond Orange and Green; and Humanist Handbook. Brian McClinton The Shakespeare Conspiracies: untangling a 400-year web of myth and deceit Aubane Historical Society ISBN 978-1-903497-36-4 2007 © Brian McClinton Aubane Historical Society Aubane Millstreet Co. Cork Orders: [email protected] 2 Contents Preface 7 Part One: Evidence 1. The Fact of Mystery 12 The Missing Manuscripts; The Missing Books; William the Silent; The Unknown William; Shakespeare's Name; The Diary's Missing Name; The Strange Case of Troilus And Cressida; The First Folio; The Droeshout Hoax; The Concealed Poets; Anonymity, Allonymity And Pseudonymity; Contemned Poetry; Chapels of Satan; Was 'Shakespeare' A Cover Name?; Conclusion 2. Treacherous Doubts 39 Groats-Worth of Wit; The Return from Parnassus; Ratseyes Ghost; Willobie his Avisa; Phaethon; Labeo; Mutius and Canaidos; Terence; Poet Ape; The Great Assizes; Wits Recreation; Edward Ravenscroft; Essay Against Too Much Reading; The Life and Adventures of Common Sense; James Wilmot; The Learned Pig; The Romance of Yachting; Floodgates of Doubt; Delia Bacon; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Walt Whitman; Mark Twain and George Greenwood; Henry James 3. The Literary Colossus 65 The Highly Cultured Mind; The Wordspinner; The Cambridge Student; The Legal Expert; The Poet of Human Nature; The Aristocrat; The Great Educator; The Nature of the Genius 4. The Invisible Man 89 The Family Background; Unwillingly to School?; The 'Lost' Years; The Actor; The Corn Dealer; William's Will; Envious Death; The Stratford Monument; The Missing Southampton Link; The Womaniser; William 'Falstaff' 5. The Good Pens and the Master-Workman 120 Christopher Marlowe; Earl of Derby; Earl of Oxford; Other Claimants; The Master Workman; The Sonnets; The Use of Good Pens 6. The Waters of Parnassus 156 Cultural Background; The Hermit; Gesta Grayorum; Twickenham's Merry Tales; Essex and After; The Dark Period; Fancy Free; Last Years; Life Summary 7. A Dream of Learning 178 Hymn to the Muses; Feigned History; Philosophy Personified; The Tenth Muse; The Great Renewal; Idols of the Theatre; The Ladder of the Intellect 3 8. House Secrets 196 Matthew's Most Prodigious Wit; Davies' 'Sugared Muse'; Hall's Labeo and Marston's Mutius; Jonson's Plays; Drummond's Notes; The First Folio Again; De Shakespeare Nostrati 9. Exhibits in the Case 217 The Northumberland Manuscript; The Promus 10. Lights of Truth 236 Anagrams and Ciphers; Emblems Part Two: Identity 11. A Noble Heart 249 Mind of Mystery; Creeping Snake or Soaring Angel?; Scientist or Artist?; Philosopher or Poet?; The Advancement of Learning 12. Nature’s Mirror 267 Dogmatism and Scepticism; Art and Nature; Appearance and Reality; Deduction and Induction 13. Love and Romance 283 Of Love; Comedies; Histories; Tragedies 14. Heaven and Earth 298 Bacon's Christianity; Shakespeare and Religion; The Catholic Question; Tolerance; War and Peace 15. Humanist and Poet 317 Renaissance Humanism; Classicism; Secularisation of Education; Individualism and Freedom of Thought; Scepticism and Reason; Humanist Philosopher; Humanist Poet 16. Power and Authority 343 Actor or Spectator?; Pragmatist or Moralist?; Monarchist or Republican?; Order, Rebellion and Poverty; Beyond Politics? 17. A Way of Words 368 One Style or Many?; A Way of Words; The Vision Thing; Words and Things; Truth in a Trope 18. Hamlet’s Jest 394 Date of Composition; Sources of the Play; The Spying Game; The Burghley Parody; Scientific Allusions; Legal Expertise; Hamlet The Man; What's In A Name? 19. Prospero’s Myth 418 A Mythical Maze; The Wreck of the Sea Venture; The Wisdom of the Ancients; Divine Words in Frail Vessels; Uses of the Mask; Prospero's Prayer 4 20. Plot and Counter-Plot 438 Downgrading the Shakespeare Intellect; The Play's The Thing?; Bad Faith; Objections to Bacon; The Case for Bacon Appendix A: Bacon’s Verse Translation of Psalm 104 454 Appendix B: Shakespeare’s Humanism 455 Appendix C: Just William: Greenblatt's Will in the World 461 Appendix D: The Bard Stripped Bare: Ackroyd's Biography 463 Appendix E: Much Ado About Nothing: Germaine Greer on Mrs. Shakespeare 465 Appendix F: Timeline: Shakespeare and Bacon 467 Bibliography 469 Index 505 Illustrations The Droeshout 'Portrait' of Shakespeare page 35 Ben Jonson page 36 Robert Greene page 36 Thomas Nashe page 37 Michael Drayton page 37 A Quartet of Doubters (James Wilmot, Mark Twain, George Greenwood, Enoch Powell) William's 'Signatures' page 114 The Stratford Monuments page 115 The Southampton Connection page 116 A Quartet of Claimants (Christopher Marlowe, Earl of Derby, Sir Henry Neville; Earl of Oxford) page 117 Francis Bacon (Hilliard, Vanderbank portraits) page 118 The White Hart Mural page 119 The Northumberland Manuscript p232 Title Page of Minerva Britanna p233 Title Page of Bacon's De Augmentis p234 Detail of above: a jester? p234 Cryptomenytices Title Page p235 Detail of above: man with spear p235 Earl of Essex; Elizabeth 1; James 1 page 392 London, circa 1600 p393 The Swan Theatre, circa 1596 p393 5 To the memory of my mother Madge who taught me the true meaning of life 6 Preface My suspicions about the authorship of Shakespeare began in 1964 when I was studying The Tempest for A-Level Examination. Until then I had been fairly oblivious to any doubt on the subject, though I was uneasy about the incoherence between the Mind of the plays and the Life of the orthodox claimant. This sense of something not quite right about the miracle from Stratford suddenly became intensified by a close study of this play. As the teacher explained every classical reference, every topical allusion, every nuance of wordplay and every layer of meaning, the work began to assume the shape of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle devised by a grand designer whose mental universe was light years away from the mundane concerns of hoarding corn and malt. The author himself explicitly states that it is "as strange a maze as e'er men trod". That this colossus of literature, this man who was, in his own words, "for the liberal arts without a parallel", had supposedly no intellectual life outside such masterpieces become increasingly impossible to grasp. Surely he was so overbrimming with ideas and imagination that he would not have been content only with an indirect expression of them? Surely he would have said something worth recording or written something memorable—a letter, a poem to a wife, mistress or daughter, a prayer, marginalia in a book, a book list, an essay, a political statement, a religious credo or whatever— that would have been left to posterity? But no, there is instead a massive void outside the works. They stand alone, or apparently alone. Beyond their pages, the voice is silent as the grave. Robert Browning reportedly said about one of his poems: "God and I both knew what it meant once; now only God knows". And indeed many poets and dramatists are essentially intuitive artists who find it difficult to express themselves lucidly and coherently outside their works. But, I thought, this most philosophical and self-conscious of artists was decidedly not one of them. Reading the various critical interpretations of and multifarious meanings ascribed to The Tempest, I felt that this man of all men was quite capable of intending and even explaining all of them, such was the depth and range of his astounding intellect. Then in April of that year I was made more fully aware of the controversy. It was the 400th anniversary of the birth of the man whom I shall call William of Stratford, and an article appeared in the Observer newspaper under the headline: 'The anti-Shakespeare Movement hots up'. Here I discovered that there were other claimants to the mighty throne. 7 There was one in particular who seemed to possess all the necessary qualifications. Yet most of the media and the orthodox scholars treated the heretics with a certain sarcasm and disdain. This I considered unfair, because I was keen to know their arguments, and all I read were personal attacks on people labelled 'snobs', 'cranks' or 'fanatics' and on a movement allegedly rooted in Victorian or aristocratic values. But abuse is hardly a satisfactory way of disproving any viewpoint, however foolish it may seem. Nor is anyone a 'crank' or a 'lunatic' merely on the basis of one opinion, however mistaken. This kind of relentless media abuse would normally be sufficient to smother debate and investigation. However, I was fortunate enough as an undergraduate to attend Trinity College, Dublin, which has a copyright library entitled to every book published in the UK. So I had access to many old works written on the subject. For the majority of people, of course, an effort to find the truth is extremely difficult because the heretics' case has been effectively buried, at least in Britain. As far as most orthodox British scholars are concerned, it was all sewn up long ago: the heretics had their go for a few decades on either side of 1900 but can now be regarded with not a little amusement. Yet I am convinced that in this conclusion these orthodox scholars have made a monumental blunder.