Multiple authors of "Shakespearean" works?

For the birthday anniversary of the Stratford man, a Guardian columnist detailed one variation on the authorship controversy - that the corpus is the work of several authors.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust – the guardian of Shakespeare's global image – will publish a book of some 20 academic essays that sets out to prove definitively that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt marks a radical development in the Shakespeare Authorship Question, for it is the first time that the "establishment" has felt the need to acknowledge its existence and importance.

In the past, they have dismissed this question as only of interest to fantasists.. This is the first time that the subject is being taken seriously as "an intriguing cultural phenomenon". Why are they so worried?..

One reason is the publication in paperback of Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography by American scholar, Diana Price, in which she analyses every piece of evidence in existence concerning Shakespeare and concludes that the case for Shakespeare writing all of the works attributed to him is quite weak. As with my own research, Price does not argue for an alternative author but rather shows how the case for Shakespeare is built on mis-readings, mythologising and, often wilful deception...

A number of plays that appeared in the first collected works (the First Folio, printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death) have been shown to be works of more than one writer. I would argue that many more than this are collaborations and that some of the plays in that collection were not written by Shakespeare. For example, one record attributes Romeo and Juliet to Samuel Daniel, a contemporary of Shakespeare; Hamlet was being performed on stage 10 years before Shakespeare is supposed to have written it. These are just two of many such examples...

I receive hate mail on a regular basis and have been advised to "drop it now" if I wish to get published ever again. Yet I do not argue for an alternative author and do not suggest that any other individual wrote the plays and poems. I simply do not believe that Shakespeare wrote all of the plays and poems attributed to him and evidence seems to suggest I am right.

More details (and many comments) at The Guardian.

Snap-dragon on Christmas Eve

Snap-dragon (also known as Flap-dragon) was a parlour game popular from about the 16th to 19th centuries. It was played during the winter, particularly on Christmas Eve. Brandy was heated and placed in a wide shallow bowl; raisins were placed in the brandy which was then set alight. Typically, lights were extinguished or dimmed to increase the eerie effect of the blue flames playing across the liquor. The aim of the game was to pluck the raisins out of the burning brandy and eat them, at the risk of being burnt...

Other treats could also be used. Of these, almonds were the most common alternative or addition, but currants, candied fruit, figs, grapes, and plums also featured... The low bowl was typically placed in the middle of a table to prevent damage from the inevitable splashes of burning brandy. In one variation a Christmas pudding is placed in the centre of the bowl with raisins around it...

The first printed references to snap-dragons or flap-dragons are in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (1594): "Thou art easier swallowed than a flapdragon."

By the mid-19th century Snap-dragon was firmly entrenched as a Christmas parlour game, and it is in this sense that it is referenced in 1836, in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and in 1861, in Anthony Trollope's novel Orley Farm.  Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) describes "A snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy."

Agatha Christie's book Hallowe'en Party describes a children's party )during which a child's murder causes Hercule Poirot to be brought in to solve the case) at which Snap-dragon is played at the end of the evening...

Michael Faraday, in his essay The Chemical History of a Candle (1860), suggested that the raisins in Snap-dragon act like miniature wicks. The concept is similar to that of burning brandy on top of Christmas puddings – the brandy is burning, but is not burning at a high enough temperature to consume the raisins.  Nevertheless, children often burnt their hands or mouths playing this game, which may have led to the practice mostly dying out in the early 20th century.

I think the game should be restarted at Christmas, even at the risk of burning hands.  (Reposted from 2010)

"Wherefore art thou Romeo?"

Retailers in the U.K. are being criticized for placing on sale the t-shirt above. 

Anybody who buys it will not only look really, really silly, but will be trying to make people think they know about Shakespeare. Because it’s cool. Shakespeare is cool without having to put it on a tshirt. And if you didn’t see the error, you don’t deserve to use his words to make a fashion statement.

The man from Avon actually spelled his name in a variety of ways on legal documents through this life.  There are six surviving signatures by him, as follows:

Willm Shakp
William Shaksper
Wm Shakspe
William Shakspere
Willm Shakspere
By me William Shakspeare

As noted at Wikipedia this is not as ominous as it appears:

Most of these are abbreviated versions of the name, using breviographic conventions of the time. This was common practice. For example Edmund Spenser sometimes wrote his name out in full (spelling his first name Edmund or Edmond), but often used the abbreviated forms "Ed: speser" or "Edm: speser". 

We'll come back to the Stratford man's name some other time.  To finish with the t-shirt, we note that it is now sold in a "cropped" version:

The pricing has not been reduced by a third, however.

The reason I posted the shirt was because it gives me an excuse for a rant that is familiar to many (?most) English majors.  Students and amateur theatrical groups almost invariably butcher the line by declaiming "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore ART thou, Romeo?"  They interpret "wherefore" as an archaic version of "where," and confusedly assume that Juliet is unable to locate Romeo standing below her balcony.

For the Elizabethans, "wherefore" meant "why," as in this Biblical verse: "Even all nations shall say Wherefore hath the LORD done thus?"  The proper emphasis on the Shakespearean verse is therefore "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou ROMEO?" as she wonders why he had to be a Montague.


Enough.  Most of you know this already.  But it bugs me when I hear it done incorrectly.

The shady side of the Stratford man

The 1596 writ charging Shakespeare with making death threats, discovered in Britain's National Archives by the Canadian scholar Leslie Hotson in 1931. The second of the four entries is the one relating to the playwright.

Excerpts from an interesting article about the Stratford man from an article in The Smithsonian:

There is not the least shred of evidence that anybody, in the early years of the Shakespeare cult, bothered to travel to Warwickshire to interview those in Stratford who had known the playwright, even though Shakespeare’s daughter Judith did not die until 1662 and his granddaughter was still alive in 1670. The information that we do have lacks credibility, and some of it appears to be untrue...

But this only makes it all the more remarkable that scholars of Shakespeare have chosen to pretty much ignore one of the very few new documents to emerge from the National Archives over the last century. It is an obscure legal paper, unearthed from a set of ancient sheets of vellum known as “sureties of the peace”, and it not only names Shakespeare but lists a number of his close associates. The document portrays the “gentle Shakespeare” that we met in high school English class as a dangerous thug; indeed, it has been plausibly suggested that it proves he was heavily involved in organized crime...

"Be it known," the Latin text begins,

that William Wayte craves sureties [guarantees] of the peace against William Shakspere, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death, and so forth. Writ of attachment issued by the sheriff of Surrey, returnable on the eighteenth of St Martin [November 29, 1596].

The scholar who unearthed the document—an indefatigable Canadian by the name of Leslie Hotson, best remembered today as the man who first stumbled across the records of the inquest into the highly mysterious murder of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe—uncovered a squalid tale of gangland rivalries in the theatrical underworld of Queen Elizabeth’s day...

Shakespeare was obliged to begin his career on a lowly rung, working for disreputable theater people—which, at that time, was generally regarded as akin to working in a brothel... Most biographers suggest his first employer was Philip Henslowe, who became wealthy as much from his work as a brothel landlord as he did as a theatrical impresario. Nor was the playwright’s next boss, Langley, much of a step up. Langley, as Hotson’s minutely careful research shows, had made much of his fortune by crooked means, and was the subject of a lengthy charge sheet that included allegations of violence and extortion... Langley’s most dangerous opponent was William Wayte, the man who accused Shakespeare of threatening him...

Biographers who have made mention of the writ’s discovery since Hotson made it in 1931 have tended to dismiss it. Shakespeare must simply have got caught up in some quarrel as a friend of Langley’s, they suggest–on very little evidence, but with the certainty that the author of Hamlet could never have been some sort of criminal... This seems almost willful distortion of the evidence, which seems fairly unambiguously to show that the playwright—who is named first in the writ–was directly involved in the dispute....

There is plenty of evidence elsewhere that Shakespeare was somewhat less than a sensitive poet and entirely honest citizen. Legal records show that him dodging from rented room to rented room while defaulting on a few shillings’ worth of tax payments in 1596, 1598 and 1599... That Will Shakespeare was somehow involved in the low-life rackets of Southwark seems, from Hotson’s evidence, reasonably certain... It is tempting to speculate, however, whether the profits that paid for such an opulent residence came from Will’s writing–or from a sideline as strong-arm man to an extortionist.

More at the Smithsonian, where the relevant sources are listed.  And this sentence: "There is not the least shred of evidence that anybody, in the early years of the Shakespeare cult, bothered to travel to Warwickshire to interview those in Stratford who had known the playwright" is worth discussing in detaiil in a blogpost separately at some future time.

The "signature" of Judith Quiney, nee Shakespeare

Excerpts from her biography page in Wikipedia:

Judith Quiney (baptised 2 February 1585 – buried 9 February 1662), née Shakespeare, was the youngest daughter of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. She married Thomas Quiney, a vintner of Stratford-upon-Avon...

She was the younger sister of Susanna and the twin sister of Hamnet. Hamnet however, died at the age of eleven. Her baptism on 2 February 1585 was recorded by the vicar, Richard Barton of Coventry, in the parish register for Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon...

Judith Shakespeare was probably illiterate. In 1611 she was asked to witness a deed of sale for a house belonging to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Quiney, and to Elizabeth's son Adrian. Judith signed twice with a mark instead of her name... 

Note her "signature" is the pigtail-shaped mark at the left.  The surname was appended by a court scribe.

Anonymous (the movie)

A hat tip to Bub for alerting me to the upcoming (October 28) release of the movie "Anonymous." Those of you who are long-time readers of this blog may remember or have surmised that I am a proponent of the proposition that Edward de Vere was the true author of the works attributed to the "shakspere" guy in Stratford.

The movie is directed by Roland Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), who has said this re its development:

It's three characters. It's like Ben Jonson, who was a playwright then. William Shakespeare who was an actor. It's like the 17th Earl of Oxford who is the true author of all these plays. We see how, through these three people, it happens that all of these plays get credited to Shakespeare. I kind of found it as too much like Amadeus to me. It was about jealousy, about genius against end, so I proposed to make this a movie about political things, which is about succession. Succession, the monarchy, was absolute monarchy, and the most important political thing was who would be the next king. Then we incorporated that idea into that story line. It has all the elements of a Shakespeare play. It's about kings, queens, and princes. It's about illegitimate children, it's about incest, it's about all of these elements which Shakespeare plays have. And it's overall a tragedy. 

I suspect it will be a little "over the top," but perhaps it will introduce more of the general public to the doubts surrounding the Stratford man's authorship.

More about the Shakespeare authorship question some other time. Those who are interested in literature and history will be well rewarded by scanning this Wikipedia article on the Oxfordian theory, and then visiting the website of the Shakespeare-Oxford Society.

The Elizabethan ruff

One of my Christmas gifts this year was the book shown above, about the Shakespeare-Oxford connection. I'll review it later this winter, but by coincidence I encountered a nice post this week at A Polar Bear's Tale which featured five paintings of seventeenth-century ladies wearing similar collars, including this "Portrait of a Woman" (1628) by Michiel Jansz van Miereveldt:

Was there any practical purpose for such an elaborate collar?  Inquiring minds want to know.  First stop: Wikipedia -

The ruff which was worn by men, women and children, evolved from the small fabric ruffle at the drawstring neck of the shirt or chemise. They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer's doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.

The discovery of starch allowed ruffs to be made wider without losing their shape. Later ruffs were separate garments that could be washed, starched, and set into elaborate figure-of-eight folds by the use of heated cone-shaped goffering irons. Ruffs were often coloured during starching, vegetable dyes were used to give the ruff a yellow, pink or mauve tint. A pale blue colour could also be obtained via the use of smalt, though for an unknown reason Elizabeth I took against this colour and issued a Royal Prerogative "Her Majesty's pleasure is that no blue starch shall be used or worn by any of her Majesty's subjects."

At their most extreme, ruffs were a foot or more wide; these cartwheel ruffs... required a wire frame called a supportasse or underpropper to hold them at the fashionable angle...

I suppose in an era when washing-up was not very meticulous, the removable collar did protect other clothing from stains.  For "goffering irons" I had to retreat to the OED: to flute or crimp, from the French gaufrer "to stamp figures on cloth."  And "smalt" is also of French derivation (ultimately related to the smelting of ores), and refers to a deep blue glass colored by cobalt oxides.

For those interested, the starching process is explained in detail, with pix, at Elizabethan Costume.  Detailed instructions on how to actually make the ruff are explained here.

"The ruffs, or collars, framed the face and dictated the hairstyles of the age which were generally short for men and swept up look was required for women."

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the ablative plural of the medieval Latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost.  As it appears only once in Shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon in the Shakespeare canon. It is also the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels.

The earliest use listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1599, by Thomas Nashe: "Physitions deafen our eares with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heauenly Panachaea, their soueraign Guiacum." 

Here is the Shakespeare [Oxford] quotation:

"O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.
I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon."

- Costard, Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, Scene 1