May News Roundup
This is the monthly news roundup. You thought April was busy. The 'Q' buzz slides into May.
“Need proof who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? See The Merry Wives of Windsor”
That is the title of a review of the performance on stage in Stratford. The Guardian article (click here) begins with a challenge to Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi: “Do they seriously believe that a capricious aristo such as the Earl of Oxford or a legalistic scholar like Francis Bacon could have written The Merry Wives of Windsor?”
Such an interesting and myopic presumption: An aristocrat could not possibly write about upper-class life in a small town (as the writer Michael Billington insists), yet the man William Shakespeare from the village of Stratford could write almost exclusively about intimate details of the royal court.
Don’t forget that this particular small town has a CASTLE smack dab on the edge of the old section of town. Aristocrats were constantly coming and going, especially when someone was being installed as a Knight of the Garter, an event clearly parodied in this very play. Even aristocratic women were allowed a special balcony from which to view the ceremony.
Claiming an aristocratic writer could not possibly write about events and people in a small town implies that Thomas Harris could not write Silence of the Lambs unless he or a close relative was a cannibalistic psychopath.
“Whodunnit? The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s Will”
This article by Joseph Pearce shows up in several places, including The Imaginative Conservative and the Catholic World Report. It questions the recently reported new theory (presented as a fact, of course) that it was Joan Hart, Shakespeare’s sister, and not John Shakespeare, who signed the purported “Spiritual Testament” that somehow wiggles around to “prove” Shakespeare was a secret Catholic—even though the original document has never been seen.
In the March News Roundup, we provided a link to the Shakespeare Quarterly article which could only be read if one has a subscription to that journal. The two links above report on the article so you can read about it more fully. Joseph Pearce ends with: “The rest of us can at least find amusement and a reason to smile, and perhaps even an opportunity to laugh, at the way in which modern scholarship ends in such engendered farce. It’s the triumph of bathos.”
To keep in mind regarding the booklet:
From the Oxford Reference:1 A booklet containing a handwritten Catholic protestation of faith by John Shakespeare in fourteen articles discovered in the rafters of his house in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1757. John Jordan submitted a transcript of all of it except the first leaf (which by then was missing) for publication in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1784, but it was rejected. Edmond Malone studied the original and printed it in his Historical Account of the English Stage in his 1790 edition of Shakespeare’s works, along with a transcript of the missing first page which Jordan was somehow able to supply. By this time, Malone was beginning to lose faith in the document's authenticity.
The original booklet is now lost, and we depend for our knowledge of it on Malone’s printed transcript. For a long time Jordan was suspected of having forged the entire document, but about 1923 a Spanish version of the same basic statement, a “Last Will of the Soul, made in health for the Christian to secure himself from the temptations of the Devil at the hour of death” and drawn up by Carlo Borromeo, who died in 1585, was discovered in the British Museum. It is known that British Jesuit missionaries, including Edmund Campion, visited Borromeo in 1580 and disseminated thousands of copies of the document on their return to England.
In 1966 an early printed English translation was acquired by the Folger Library, which proves2 that the document as printed by Malone was genuine, except for the first page, as to which Malone's suspicions of Jordan are justified.
The loss of the original document leaves several questions unanswered, but it does seem that at some point in his life Shakespeare's father subscribed to the Catholic faith. [emphases added]
One question still unanswered is how either John Shakespeare, the father, or Joan Shakespeare, the sister, could have signed this hand-written document J. Shakespeare since both are known to have signed their names with marks.
Kamm again
If you are interested in yet another lengthy vitriolic diatribe against Doubters: https://quillette.com/2024/05/02/the-paranoid-style-in-shakespeare-denialism-winkler-edward-de-vere/
Europeans should note Winkler has another event at the American Library in Paris on June 12: https://journalistwinkler.com/events
An Audience with Will Shakespeare in a Pub
Professor Nother gives performance-talks about Shakespeare authorship in the pub—but he doesn’t believe the man from Stratford wrote those plays. On stage, that’s Will’s cue to defend his reputation. Come and meet the man himself! He’ll tell you all about his family, what it’s like on tour, and the glory days at the Globe. Ladies and gentlemen, raise your glasses!
Your Bard was written by Nicholas Collett in 2016 as part of the “Escape To Create” writers’ residency in Seaside, Florida. It was the winner of the first Holland Playwriting Award and directed by Gavin Robertson. The show has toured throughout the UK and has been performed in Kansas City; Seaside, Florida; and Edinburgh. It was selected to be part of the Arts Council of England’s first “Inn Crowd” scheme, administered by Creative Arts East and Applause—the show has been performed in pubs in Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, and East Sussex. Tour dates vary but in May it was in Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
The SAQ in the Remote Redwood Forests of Humboldt County
In a three-part series in the North Coast Journal of Politics, People & Art in rural Humboldt County in Northern California, population 136,000, writer Barry Evans educates readers on the Shakespeare Authorship Question: Part One begins here.
Evans muses: “Originally, Francis Bacon was considered the prime candidate. Later contenders include Christopher Marlowe; Henry Neville; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby; and several more. Or an amalgam of these, writing under a single pseudonym. However, the candidate most frequently cited is the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, someone with a motivation for writing under a pseudonym and with the right background: classical education (attended Cambridge), knowledge of the law (studied at Grays Inn law courts), worldly (traveled extensively in Italy and France), confidant of Queen Elizabeth (whose chief advisor was de Vere’s father-in-law, William Cecil Burghley). He was also a good writer, “the most excellent” of Elizabeth’s courtier poets. De Vere’s motivation for anonymity is obvious. Take the character of Hamlet’s Polonius, chief advisor in the Danish court, portrayed as a garrulous, bumbling old man—clearly, to most Shakespeare scholars, modeled on Burghley himself. In those days, to openly mock the crown or government was considered treason, punishable by maiming, imprisonment, or death. The main strike against de Vere is that he died in 1604, so that if he was Shakespeare, several plays had to have been published posthumously, edited, perhaps, by someone in the know—Mary Sidney?”
The county seat for Humboldt is aptly named Eureka. We applaud Mr. Evans and his editor for his work—perhaps some lightbulbs will turn on over some of his readers.
New York Times, Judi Dench
In an interview in the New York Times, Judi Dench is asked: Does the Shakespeare authorship debate interest you? Her response: “No. William Shakespeare from Stratford is good enough for me and I’ll settle for that.” Dame Judi has our utmost respect. The debate is not of interest to everyone, and engaging in it may open one up to vitriolic attack (see references to Kamm here and in last month’s news roundup). To the Gentle Readers of this newsletter though, it matters very much.
Monetary Theory and the SAQ—Who Knew?
In The Mandarin, an Australian free daily newspaper online, Professor Stuart Kells ponders parallels between modern monetary theory and the SAQ. He writes, in part:
“Larry Summers called MMT a new incarnation of voodoo economics. Paul Krugman has complained that MMT proponents are a moving target—like the players in Calvinball (from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) who whimsically change the rules mid-game. John H. Cochrane likened Stephanie Kelton’s logic, facts, and language to (brittle and circular) “pretzels.”
“Some of the criticism has been unfair, some of it ill-tempered. For Shakespeare scholars, this all looks very familiar.
“The field of Shakespeare studies is bifurcated into two groups: orthodox ‘Stratfordian’ scholars who accept that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems that were published under his name, and ‘heretics’ who believe one or more hidden authors were responsible for the Shakespeare oeuvre.
“Writing under the banner of the ‘Shakespearean Authorship Question,’ heretics have put forward a wide variety of ‘true author’ candidates.
“Looked at alongside the MMT debate, the disciplinary dynamics are strikingly similar, as is the psychology of the competing proponents. We see the same polarisation, the same adoption of entrenched positions, the same name-calling, and the same caricaturing and mischaracterization of each other’s positions.”
If you have faced the polarisation, entrenched positions, name-calling, caricaturing, and mischaracterization of the debate, apparently, you can find allies among economists.
Click here to read the full article.
Dennis McCarthy and Thomas North—Rogues Together
Dennis McCarthy, a self-described “rogue scholar,” will give a talk and book-signing for his new book, Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Source Plays, hosted by National Public Radio station WLIW in East Hampton, Long Island, on June 24. You can reserve a spot at eventbrite. Previously McCarthy has published In Shakespeare’s Shadow: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest to Reveal the True Source Behind the World’s Greatest Plays. The premise of the first book flirts with the authorship question in that McCarthy posits that North provided the source material for Shakespeare’s work. Tidily phrased as “What if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare . . . but someone else wrote him first?” He’s so close, but not yet a full-throated member of the Community of Doubters.
Call for Papers—Aemilia Lanyer Fans
A special edition of Explorations in Renaissance Culture (Fall 2025) will be dedicated to exploring the topics of body and embodiment in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Brice Peterson will edit. Article topics might include but are not limited to medicine and health, disease and sickness, healing and restoration, and sensation, senses, and sensuousness. For details on submitting proposals or queries, email brice_peterson@byu.edu no later than July 1, 2024.
Oxford Reference is a premier online reference product, spanning twenty-five different subject areas, bringing together two million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias. It has nothing to do with Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
Proves??? Does it really?
I'm disappointed that this newsletter uses the spelling "Shakespeare" throughout to refer to the man from Stratford, when the Stratford parish register shows that his family name name was consistently spelled "Shakspere," or close variants, and never "Shakespeare." (see A.J. Pointon's "The Man who was Never Shakespeare, and the first chapter of "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?" Shahan and Waugh, eds). Even Strats admitted this until around 2016, when they began erasing the name "Shakspere." This feeds the Stratfordian narrative that "of course Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare," which is part of their strategy for making us look like fools. It is strategic malpractice to play right into their hands this way.