You make a good point abut the shades of religious non-conformism. I was not stating the results of any informed research on my own part, but only the results of a significant body of revisionist scholarship which has tried to reconcile the biographical problems of the orthodox account of authorship by postulating the author’s recusancy. I accept your correction that “possible closet Catholic” would be a more justified summary. As you indicate, there’s quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that members of the family were Catholic, and Will apparently invested in the Blackfriars gatehouse, which was reportedly a hiding place for recusants. I don’t really have any horse in this race, but as you acknowledge the circumstantial evidence for the family’s Catholicism is pretty strong, even though you are correct to emphasize that there is no direct evidence for Will’s recusancy. To me the most interesting aspect of this question is how prominent the discussion has become within Stratfordian circles as a kind of surrogate authorship question. http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xCatholic.html

Best Wishes and thanks for contributing your informed perspective to the site.

Roger

BTW, I really feel I must take exception to the following sentence in one of your previous posts: “In my own view a substantial preponderance of the evidence does support the contention that your putative owner was a recusant, which would make his ownership of a Geneva bible something of an anomaly.”

To date I have personally seen no evidence that Will Shaxpere was a recusant. In the case of his father and daughter I could probably accept that label – but even then with some qualifications (see below) – however, in the case of Will himself the term would appear to be inappropriately applied. If you had said that Will was possibly a “closet Catholic” (my terminology) I might accept such a label, even though we have no evidence of his being that either. However, in this latter case, our current lack of any evidence of his true Roman Catholic religious affiliations would be a direct consequence of Will having been a “closet Catholic” – which would have involved his going through all the outward motions of being a conformant Anglican (such as attending church services at least once a month and partaking of Anglican communion when he did so) while all the time privately (even secretly) practicing his Roman Catholic faith with family, friends and neighbors, any one of which might possibly have more correctly deserved the label of recusant.

Somewhere between overt “Papist recusancy” (note: there were lots of other ideological reasons for openly rejecting the mandated orthodoxy of the Anglican Church so not ALL recusants were Papists, although they probably accounted for much of the recusancy that was reported to the authorities, and “Popish recusancy” was considered by far the most dangerous form of such overt religious rebellion because it also implied potential treason, treachery or traitorship on the part of the recusant since the main reason that King Philip II of Spain had launched the Armada attack in 1588 was to restore the country back to the orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism) and “closet Catholicism” (as I just defined it above) lies “Church Papistry” …

Up until the nearly successful attempted regicide of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, regularly attending church (but skipping communion) was probably frowned upon by the more pious Anglicans, yet it would have still been conduct sufficient to keep one off of the “potential recusancy” lists compiled by the churchwardens in the 1590s based on observed attendance (or more accurately, observed lack of attendance) at church. After the recent shock of the attempted blowing up of both Parliament and the King, the screws were very much tightened across the realm WRT spotting potential traitors whose only aim was to overthrow the Protestant rule of the Stuart monarchy. So after the failed plot of 1605 the churchwardens were now required to report on their monthly compiled lists not only the regular non-attendees at church for that past month, but also the regular non-recipients of communion amongst those that did attend.

In the early 1590s, Will’s father fell foul of the churchwarden’s scrutiny by his regular non-attendance at church, marking him out as a “suspected recusant”; while in 1606 Will’s daughter Susanna fell foul of the churchwarden’s increased scrutiny by her regular non-participation in communion, marking her out as a “suspected Church Papist”. Managing to have your name appear on the churchwardens’ monthly compiled lists (based on either of these criteria) did NOT mean that you were automatically considered guilty of either offence; it only meant that you were worthy of further investigation should someone in authority be so motivated. In fact, there could be quite valid excuses for both regular non-attendance at church (e.g., prolonged illness) and regular non-receipt of communion (presumably not being in a suitable state of grace each time one attended church).

In addition to both of these independently written records of reported instances of non-attendance at church (for John) and non-participation in communion (for Susanna), in the latter’s case we do have further information. She subsequently failed to turn up in the vicar’s court despite receiving a summons to do so by the apparitor. However, the word “dismissa” was later added to her entry in the act book which would seem to indicate that when she did finally appear before her judges her case was duly dismissed by them. The obvious assumption to make from this is that she had subsequently been witnessed willingly receiving the Eucharist in Anglican communion, something a Papist recusant would never do. Of course, that is merely an assumption. She may just have equally bribed the judges to grant her clemency! There is, unfortunately, no similar surviving record of what was subsequently determined in John’s case – see next post. Consequently, for us four centuries later to label either John as being a “recusant” or Susanna as being a “Church Papist” might be stretching the terminology somewhat; but at least there may be some justification for doing so in both their particular cases.

However, in the case of our beloved Willy, as far as I know there is no such evidence of Will’s name having ever appeared on a list of regular non-attendees at church (in the same manner that we have for his father John in 1592) nor on a list of church attendees that regularly did not receive communion (in the same manner that we have for his daughter Susanna in 1606). So IMO to label Will as being a “recusant” is even more of a misuse of appropriate terminology than it is in either his father’s or his daughter’s case.

Best regards,

an Upstart Crow

Thanks so much for the lucid exposition of what’s wrong with the argument that “Oxford cannot possibly have written the Shake-speare canon because he died in 1604, a number of years before the last plays were penned.”

It truly is a pity that so many otherwise intelligent persons fall for this “totally fallacious” argument!

Best Wishes,

R.

I just read your recent exchange of posts with Roger. Apropos your comment, “I think there is still a problem with the early death of de Vere,” I would just like to add that the following observations to Roger’s response …

Nobody knows for certain when William Shakspere, the player from Stratford, actually wrote any of his plays. If anyone tells you differently then he’s lying. Any dating of the plays by Stratfordian academics (which is the vast majority of all Shakespearean academics) is pure conjecture on their part, as Roger has stated. In most cases, it is well-informed conjecture, but it is speculative conjecture – NOT a priori knowledge – nevertheless. Naturally, if one believes that the lad from Stratford is the author of the Shake-speare canon, all that conjecture is designed to fit neatly around the few limiting hard facts that we know about Will’s life; such as the surmised date of his arrival in London (approximately 1589 give or take a couple of years) and the date of his death in Stratford (23 April 1616).

Thus the penning of Will Shakspere’s “known” canon of plays (which number approximately 40 in total; of which two are forever lost; at least a further 7 are believed to be late cooperative efforts with other playwrights; while about an additional dozen plays, which “experts” have detected the Bard’s hand in down the years, are currently considered to be Apocrypha) are generally attributed to the period 1590-1611 at the rate of about two plays per year (but perhaps as many as three or four per year when the Bard was at the peak of his creativity and popularity in the late 1590s). Note that there is no academic consensus on exactly WHICH plays Will wrote, let alone on WHEN he wrote them! Consequently, there is NO definitive Stratfordian dating for ALL of the plays, there being different schools of thought amongst Stratfordians for many of the plays re the extent of Will’s contribution (if any) to their creation, as well as disagreement over when he made that contribution (either by himself or in cooperation with others).

So the over-simplistic dismissal by Stratfordians of the Oxfordian theory of authorship that can best be summarized as, “Oxford cannot possibly have written the Shake-speare canon because he died in 1604, a number of years before the last plays were penned,” is obviously a totally fallacious one. Because it takes non-consensual surmised dates of composition that were originally speculated based on the lifespan of Will Shakspere and then proceeds to misapply these contingent dates (as if they were a priori facts) to the lifespan of Edward de Vere in order create the seeming impossibility of the latter’s authorship. Only a four year old would be fooled by such obvious casuistry!

Furthermore, even if you accept the orthodox (i.e., Stratfordian) scholarship for the dating of the plays, according to one of the more conventional sources of the dating (viz. Alfred Harbage’s Pelican/Viking editions of Shakespeare) the likely composition dates given for each of the plays in the basic canon are ALL before 1604 except in the case of two plays – “Henry VIII” and “The Tempest”. The compositional date of “Macbeth” is also marginal, and these three plays are usually the ones that are most hotly contested WRT to the June 1604 cutoff caused by de Vere’s death. However, there are very strong arguments for all three of those plays having been written prior to 1604 (which would be too long for me to go into here).

Therefore, even using the compositional dates that were conjectured to best fit the known working lifespan of the lad from Warwick, the June 1604 cutoff caused by Oxford’s death is not, in the end, the great showstopper that the Stratfordian zealots always try to make it out to be. Of course, to do proper justice to the compositional dating of the plays with Oxford as their creator, the plays should actually be attributed to Edward de Vere’s known working lifespan using the same logic of date allocation that has been used to create the current various versions of the Stratfordian compositional timeline.

I hoped the foregoing goes some way to resolving your perceived problem with “the early death of de Vere” !!

an Upstart Crow

There’s only a problem with the “early” death of de Vere if you really think that the traditional chronology is worth beans, which I don’t. It’s been constructed this way (there are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of the plays fit the patter):

1) Subtract no more than two years off the earliest date of mention of a play to deduce its composition date;

2) Arrange the plays, as Chambers says he does, so as to provide a “fairly even flow of production” over the years of the presumed author’s career;

3) Take all the plays which are leftover, for which you can’t find definitive evidence of existence during the 1590’s, and place them during the period 1604-1611;

4) Claim that these late plays — which include not only Tempest, Lear, and Macbeth, but also Pericles and Cymbeline, are united by a common “style” and “genre.”

5) Rigidly enforce the preceding strictures so that anyone who questions their rationality is professionally marginalized and labeled a “fellow traveler” with the “Oxfordians,” who must have a hidden agenda.

It works very well.

Best Wishes,

Roger

Kind Regards

John

In my experience such things can easily be invented, and not necessarily in bad faith. People come to believe them because they want to — what begins as speculation becomes fact over generations. You don’t have to impute a lie to anyone (although there has certainly been plenty of that in other cases).

I would not doubt the good faith of your donor, but would be skeptical of the claim unless there is further evidence to substantiate it. I think the initials W.S. would have been very common — off the top of my head I think of “William Stanley” (more than one) and William Strachey. There must have been thousands. Of course the provenance gives you I suppose an element of circumstantial credibility, but its still not much. If, however, it is the Stratford Shakespeare’s it would be interesting in view of the longstanding question of his religious affiliation, which is currently dividing Shakespeare scholarship.

In my own view a substantial preponderance of the evidence does support the contention that your putative owner was a recusant, which would make his ownership of a Geneva bible something of an anomaly. When we turn, on the other hand, to the Shakespearean oeuvre the opposite is true: the works, while sympathetic in an aesthetic and spiritual sense to the great tradition of Catholicism, are firmly grounded in a Protestant nationalism which is fiercely orthodox and, imho, impossible to reconcile with a theory of Catholic authorship.

Glad to have you acknowledge the authorship question and I agree with you that this Bible, while certainly intriguing and worthy of comment, does not provide any relevant data for the question itself, unlike the de Vere Bible which was the subject of my dissertation and this site. If it did belong to the Stratford Shakespeare, it would, on the other hand, be the only surviving example of an undisputed book originally belonging to him. Contrast that with about 300 for Ben Jonson and you will start to see why Justice Stevens asks “where are Shakespeare’s books?” and regards this fact pattern as relevant to the authorship question. Google his “Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction” for more details.

Thanks for your interest in the site. Why don’t you read some other posts and let me know what you think?!

Best Wishes,

Roger

Regards

John

Thank you for your post. Other than the fact that this Bible was published within the lifetime of the bloke from Stratford and bears the initials “W.S.,” do you have any further tangible reason for linking this book to the Stratford man? Does it contain any annotations?

Best Wishes.