David played the secret chord. That’s what we’re going to look for in the Bard.

The secret chord.

He took David for his example.  

“Set your whole delight” in God’s wisdom, urged his uncle Arthur Golding in dedicating his 1571 translation of the psalms to him.

“Occupy yourself day and night, to lay it up in your heart….to make your songs of it, to remember it night and day, to count it sweeter than honey, to take it as an heritage, and to make it the joy of your heart.”

So let’s not have any more guff about what a nasty piece of work he was. He was no worse than Lear, Hamlet, Poor Tom, or even….David.

His tongue was the pen of a ready writer….

I hope so, but you never know.  Here’s what it looks like:

Ecclus. 28.3-5, from the de Vere Bible: “He wil showe no mercie to a man wch is like himself: and will he aske forgiveness of his own sinnes?” Kindness the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This is of course the most obvious Old Testament precedent for the much more familiar part of the Lord’s prayer, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matt. 6.14 or Luke 11.3-4)– and when one adds references to the thought as it appears in these New Testament passages, the idea’s prominence emerges from the shadowlands of Shakespeare’s bewildering conceptual and linguistic superfluity to become a characteristic of the bard’s thinking.

Such overt references to particular Bible verses, moreover, belong to a much larger pattern in the Shakespearean works devoted to considering the problem of Mercy, an idea noted in the margins of the Bible.

It was an idea he wanted to transmit.

For example, when he puts the concept in the mouth of Henry condemning the conspirators at Cambridge, he seems to have in mind a kind of double irony:

The mercy that was quick in us but late,

By your own counsel is suppress’d and kill’d.

You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy.

Henry’s reference to mercy being “by your own counsel…suppress’d and killed” refers to the fact that the conspirators, now begging for their lives,  had only a few lines earlier urged harsh punishment  for a man accused only of criticizing his rule.

As it turns out, the execution of the conspirators is only a kind of practice for greater glories to come. The man who began his career as king by exiling Falstaff will end up at Agincourt killing the prisoners — a violation of the rules of war every bit as ethically problematic as the French killing the “poys.”    Like Portia herself, he’s not really the one to give lectures about mercy.

The bard is twisting and turning this problem every which way — pointing to the concept that, in the case of mercy, handsome is as handsome does. There seems to be a warning about trusting people who talk too much about how merciful they are.

But then we turn to the usage of 2 Henry VI, where the Bible reference is put in the mouth of Lord Say, about to be executed with his aristocratic comrades, it has a different resonance. Say has all the words to provoke our sympathy.  He first appeals to the mob as his “countrymen,” and then offers a paraphrase of the marked passage from Ecclesiasticus:

Ah countrymen, if when you make your prayers

God should be so obdurate as yourselves,

How would it fare with your departed souls?

The citation is ultimately ironic, since Jack Cade (yes, the same Jack Cade who says “first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”) can’t hear Say’s point about the cycle of retribution.  Ecclesiasticus is futile; the heads go up on grisly pikes.

There’s another significant wrinkle to the story. I did not understand this when I wrote the Notes and Queries article, but now I do: the quoted extracts from 2 H. VI 4.7  are merely fragments of a larger conversation that is inflected in multiple ways by the Bible verses in question.

The question of the (no doubt) both literal and metaphoric weakness of Say’s flesh forms a dominant current from the start when Say volunteers: “These cheeks are pale with watching for your good.”  Naturally things go downhill from there, until a few lines later we have the exchange:

But.Why dost thou quiver, man?

Say. The palsy, not the fear, provokes me.

Cade. Nay, he nods at us; as who should say, “I’ll be even

With you”: I’ll see if his head will stand steadier on a

pole or no. Take him away and behead him.

The line “as who should say, ‘I’ll be even with you,’” occurring, as it does, less than twenty lines away in the same scene from the more overt reminiscences of the verse — and ending with Cade’s brutal “take him away” — suggests that Ecclus. 28.2-5 has helped to shape not just a particular line, but a whole philosophic discourse in the scene. Cade, in fact,  is enacting a parody of the marked Bible verses.

But then look what our author will do with this in Tempest.

Here those  Ecclesiasticus verses seem to have defined his concept of the troubled relationship between matter and spirit, between the fleshly magus Prospero and the airy Ariel —  the imagination personified.  Like de Vere himself –yes, in fact,  he described himself so — Prospero is  a former “Duke of Milan” and devotee of the arts. He’s too much of a humanist to compete in the new Machiavellian world of his brother Antonio.  Brute force was now to rule, and the idea that a man’s word was his pledge, was becoming an antiquated fardel preserved in wrappers of cultural mystification.

Ariel uses Ecclesiasticus 28 to offer Prospero a lecture on his own humanity:

Ariel. …your charm so strongly works them,

That if you now beheld them, your affections

Would become tender.

Prospero. Does thou think so, spirit?

Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human.

Prosper. And mine shall.

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling

Of their afflictions, and shall not myself

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,

Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art?

(5.1.16-23; emphasis mine)

Prospero may have been an old man, but he sure was  a quick study. ‘)

The influence of Ecclesiasticus 28 on these verses became known to scholars via my 2009 Notes and Queries article.

John Keats (1795-1821), poet and Shakespeare scholar.

“Shakespeare lived a life of allegory. His works are comments on it.”

These words by John Keats, perhaps the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, distill the essence of authentic Shakespearean biography — as distinct from the seemingly never-ending parade of sham biographies inflicted year after year on an unsuspecting public.

In 21^st century literary circles it is no longer fashionable to speak of essences. But this book does have an essence – even, especially, a quintessence – that fifth part of what is essential, the constituting DNA of life, from which everything that is worth saying owes its genesis and germination.

In 16th century alchemy and neo-Platonism — the philosophy of Shakespeare’s own age —  the  quintessence of a substance could be separated from impurities by chemical means through distillation to reveal the concealed but “divine signatures impressed on earthly things by the Creator for their proper use” (Debus 4).

Shakespeare lived a life of allegory.

His works – down to the tiniest particles of meaning, the letters that make up words, like sequences of amino acids on the double helix of life –  are comments on it. Macbeth felt that life was a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but Macbeth is not Shakespeare; in Shakespeare every dust mote signifies, every exclamation echoes to the reverberate hills.  He signed his works.

The only unanswered question is: are we human enough to hear?

There is an old tradition, going back even before Keats, that Shakespeare was a magician.

He was. But like Prospero in the concluding scene of his Tempest, he was a magician caged within the confines of his own magic, shipwrecked and alone, unable to remove the spell of his own devising, but left to solicit forgiveness and redemption from comprehending readers.

Divided within himself, he transformed his own alienation into the wellspring of his art. On the one hand, he followed the admonition to self-sacrifice so explicitly inscribed in Matthew 6.1-4, underlined in his Geneva Bible: “when you give your alms, do not blow your trumpet in the marketplace.”  But, he was also, in the prophetic words of Walt Whitman,  a “wolfish Earl”  one of those with a “towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance.” Could he follow Christ’s path?

Figure One: Matt 6.1-3, underlined in red in the de Vere Geneva STC 2106: "When you give your alms, don't blow your trumpet."

We will probably never know when he marked those verses in his Geneva Bible; that he did so is beyond dispute, just as it is beyond dispute that his contemporaries regarded those verses as the spiritual justification for completion of great works in secret, read them as Christ’s injunction to anonymity (See Stritmatter, 2001, 23-30, 217).

If you are an average literate reader of the 21^st century you are now experiencing doubt.

Chances are, you have been told that it is ridiculous to think that Shakespeare was anyone but Shakespeare. You thought that Bill Bryson, Stephen Greenblatt, and James Shapiro had laid all this nonsense to rest. You may even have heard Birthplace Trust Fund promoter Stanley Wells declare that “Shakespeare of Stratford wins the debate.”

You do not, yet, count yourself among the “unsatisfied,” do not feel compelled to share Henry James’ conviction that Shakespeare is “the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”

Stay with me for a moment longer.

Try an experiment. Imagine, if you can (even against your “better judgment” if you must)  that what the Oxfordians have said is true.  Imagine that “Shakespeare,” aka Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604),  following the admonition of Matt. 6.1-4 (among other reasons), hid himself and allowed his works to appear under the “noted weed” (Sonnet 76) of a pseudonym and a literary “front.”

What kind of psychology does that dilemma produce? If you were that man, how would you feel, what would you do?

That’s right.

Something there is, says Robert Frost, that does not love a wall.

And something there is in “Shakespeare” that does not want to be concealed, a part that wants, nay yearns to be known, a small still voice inside that protests with every fiber of his literary being against the “loss of his good name”:

And this desire, to be known by the reader, is the secret spring of the Shakespearean vernacular, the language and mythos Shakespeare created for himself, about himself.

We may commence consideration of this claim by considering a recent article by independent British Columbia scholar  Nina Green, which appeared in the 2010 issue of Brief Chronicles.

Green begins from a puzzle left us by Shakespeare. Noticing that the bard  at least three times, in three different plays (Titus Andronicus, 4; I Henry IV, 2; Merry Wives, 4) alludes to the same page and passage in Lily’s Latin Grammar, perhaps the most generally known book (except the Bible) in early modern England, Green wonders, why?

Figure Two: "Of the Noune" from Lily's Latin Grammar: content from this exact page is alluded to three times in Shakespeare.

Was the bard trying to tell us something, using Lily as his trusted confidante?

If so, was there some method to his madness?  Had he some precedent or guide?

What might we find, on that thrice-marked page of Lily’s grammar, that he  wanted us to know?

Perhaps – Green does not say this herself but it seems to me a reasonable speculation – the bard was following a clue from his favorite source, the book to which, above all others save the Bible, he turned over and over  for wisdom and literary sustenance: Ovid.

Perhaps the bard was imitating a  motif which Leonard Barkan –former Bliss Snyder Professor of English and Art History at Northwestern University and now Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton — identifies as the connecting link between Shakespeare and Ovid,

the first signal that Shakespeare knew his Ovid at first hand, and that he read The Metamorphoses with a deliberate and original purpose.

This “first signal” and  connecting link, says Barkan, is the myth of Philomela,[i] the natural “point of entry to the powerful relation between [the] two geniuses,” Ovid and Shakespeare.

Figure Thee: The rape of Philomela by Tereus. Engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid's Metamorphoses Book VI, 519-562. Fol. 80 r, image 6.

In that Ovidian myth, the rapist Tereus cuts out his victim’s  tongue  to prevent her from naming him; the inventive Philomela, tongueless,  instead weaves a tapestry to identify and accuse him.

In so doing she supplies a model for the literary figure, well known to modern literary critics but first named by Ovid, in another passage[ii] of his Metamorphoses, of intertextuality. Intertextuality is the study of the conversations which literary texts have with one another — for example the way Shakespeare makes deliberate use of such Bible passages as Ezekiel 16.49 in order to supply a context and commentary for Hamlet or Joyce’s Ulysses retells The Odyssey.

In his comparative analysis of Titus Andronicus and the Philomela motif, Barkan notes that both stories involve “escalating efforts to stifle communication” and he argues that  ”The [Philomela] story attracts Shakespeare because it is centrally concerned with communication.”[iii]

Concluding that this Ovidian motif forms the deepest and most potent strata of Shakespeare’s involvement with Ovid, Barkan leads us directly to the center of our shared question:

Titus takes us back to the darkest side of Ovid’s poem…[but]….it is not lessons in perversity that Ovid offers Shakespeare – there are many other classical sources for that – but a series of paradigms for the act of communication. Many of the great figures of Ovid’s poem define themselves by their struggle to invent new languages….Narcissus, [like Philomela], must discover a language of paradox that suits his situation….Shakespeare appears to be still struggling [in Lucrece and Cymbeline] with the problems of Philomela, the juxtaposition of mutilation and communication.[iv]

“Inventing new languages?”

Appropriating “a series of paradigms for the act of communication” in order to “struggle with….the juxtaposition of mutilation and communication”?

Surely this is not the Shakespeare you studied in 9th grade.

We may wonder:  just as Shakespeare’s characters are forced by circumstance to follow Ovid’s exemplars to “define themselves by their struggle to invent new languages” and “discover a language of paradox that suits their situations,” is Shakespeare himself  following the same Ovidian template? Could such a communicative strategy be the concealed key to otherwise obscure passages or subterranean connections to third party texts like Lily’s Grammar?

Let us see.

Here is the first passage, from I Henry IV, alluding to Lily’s discussion of nouns:

Figure Four shows a detail of the passage from which the line “homo is a common name to all men” is drawn:

Figure Four (After Green, 2010): Close up from Lily's discussion of nouns, showing phrase "Eduardus is my propre name."

In Merry Wives of Windsor in Act 4, scene 1 the bard also draws  from the same page while Sir Hugh Evans tutors “William” during his Latin lesson. Evans introduces the lesson by asking, “How many numbers is in nouns?”  The answer is found in Lily’s discussion of nouns:  ”in nouns be two numbers,” immediately following the above excerpt.

Neophytes may have some difficulty appreciating how funny this is, but it is, in fact, hilarious: William is getting his Latin lesson from the page  in Lily, used to  illustrate the definition of a “noune substantive,” which announces the name of the real author.  In renaissance philosophy, a substantive is distinguished from an accident —  it describes  a real thing, while an accident is merely a quality of a thing and has no independent existence. Reading Lily and Merry Wives together, we might say that the message is that William is an unlettered accident — an adjective — of Edward.

The jest may even remind some of Thomas Nashe’s remark to Gabriel Harvey to watch out for de Vere: “he may be a little man, but he hath one of the best wits in England.”

Under the revivifying influence of the bard’s literary magic, Lily’s book is filled with a new signifying presence, speaking what cannot be said in propria persona.

It is the first grammar lesson for a post-Stratfordian epistemology, a strand from the double helix: Eduardus is my propre name.

–Hamlet

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

–A.A. Milne

I began with a desire, common enough in my profession, to speak with the dead. Much to my surprise, and much against my will, they spoke back. To my dismay, I might add, they spoke heresy.

Put yourself in my position.

Who was I to deny their claims on the living? It is said that he who increases knowledge, increases sorrow. Should I chose knowledge, and with it, sorrow? Was it an honest ghost, or a goblin damned?

I was not the first to wonder, and I would not be the last.

Before me on one of the ornate oak research tables in the Shakespeare Folger library Reader’s Room was an old book. Cracked open, both covers nestled gently in the foam book supports used to cushion rare books, protecting the worn maroon velvet binding, adorned with silver medallions – a four-hundred-year-old Bible. It beckoned and signified, inviting me forward.

I leafed through centuries in a few blinks: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers – I knew I was passing by so much,  in search of something.  I didn’t know what, but I would  know it, I told myself, when I saw it. Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel….

“It is the glory of God to hide a thing,” says Nabokov rephrasing Proverbs 25.2, “and the glory of man is to find it.”

I paused. Ezekiel 16.

There it was – just the kind of clue many literary historians would die for. Or, I imagined wryly, they would do anything they could, up to and including symbolic assassination, to prevent its disclosure by anyone other than themselves.

A bell sounded somewhere in the back of my mind. There was no question. An early reader of the volume had noticed the prophet’s apocalyptic warning. With a quill pen he deposited a bold orange stripe, underlining the verse number – 49 – bright as a day-glow thin-wedge orange sharpie, lighting up a 21^st century student exam paper (Figure One).

Ezekiel 16.49 from de Vere Geneva Bible (STC 2106). Reproduced with the kind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Behold, this was the  iniquity of thy sister, Sodom. Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters

I would soon find many more like it, but this was the first hint. I could not decide whether to break out into song and dance or cower in terror.

I stared. I stalled.  I equivocated in my own mind. I must be imagining this, like Macbeth tormented by his imaginary dagger.

Apparently undeterred by my reticence, Ezekiel thundered back.

Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.

It was hard to believe, but I could not deny the evidence of my own senses.

I glanced up from my study to survey the reading room of Washington DC’s Folger Shakespeare Library. Was it safe? A dozen scholars of all ages, earnest and educated men and women, devoted to the study of Shakespeare and his age, unobtrusively pursued their research projects in quiet isolation at nearby study tables, all within earshot of Ezekiel. No one seemed to notice. To my colleagues nothing had happened. To me, it was the day the world changed.

It was January, 1991, and I had been studying the Shakespearean question for little more than two years. A neophyte in every conceivable sense, I was unprepared for the burden of my own discovery. I had indeed been fumbling for a method for more than two days, possessed by an idea but wholly incapable, or so it seemed, of conceiving a strategy to confirm or disprove it.

So it was only natural that my first hint released a shock wave that is still reverberating twenty years later. As I have said, my first impulse – like that of so many others – was disbelief. What I saw was impossible.  My second impulse, therefore, was to run.

Now let me explain why. Beside the Edward de Vere Geneva Bible – for that was the Bible in which had I discovered this marked verse – lay the source of my anxious perplexity. It was a copy of Naseeb Shaheen’s Biblical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1987) that I had just retrieved from the stacks to study, and was starting to understand.

It was this book that would supply the first startling clue on a quest that would lead me on a bewildering paper chase through the annals of English literary history and eventually bring me face to face with a Shakespearean status quo,  divided against itself and even more unwilling to accept the significance of my findings than I would be.

The first of four books that Shaheen, then a University of Tennessee professor, was to eventually write, culminating in his 1999 opus Biblical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays,  the book tabulates (more or less comprehensively) approximately 800 Bible allusions in the Shakespearean tragedies, from Hamlet to Othello.

In the process, it also considers a more specialized and ambitious question: Like Richmond Noble (1935) before him, Shaheen seeks to document which translation of the Bible Shakespeare read or heard. We could say much more about the these versions — and especially of the translation of the Geneva — for it is an interesting story in its own right and one that supplies some fascinating context for the main thread of my narrative.

But since this is an abbreviated web publication, let us take only a temporary detour.

Despite certain declarations to the contrary,[1] in those rare cases when a definitive preference can be ascertained, the English Bible to which Shakespeare makes most frequent recourse is the Geneva, a translation prepared during the 1550s in Geneva by William Whittingham and other English Protestant refugees of Mary Tudor’s counter-reformation regime. Indeed, although this pattern is established through relatively few examples – in all, around thirty[2] – and the evidence also proves his knowledge of the Bishop’s and other variant translations, Shakespeare’s preference for the Geneva has since 1905 been sufficiently unambiguous as to be beyond any reasonable dispute.[3]

Both Noble (1935) and Shaheen (1987, 1999) agree in identifying Ezekiel 16.49 as one of several key verses that establishes Shakespeare’s  preference for the Geneva Bible. Although the two passages share only a few words in common, they are so idiosyncratic, and particular to the Geneva translation, as to put the direct influence of this passage on Hamlet beyond doubt. Noble even calls it the “strongest of all proofs” (67) of Shakespeare’s direct knowledge of the Geneva translation.

At the height of his excited frenzy over whether or not to slay Claudius at prayer, Hamlet makes apparently conscious reference to the marked passage from Ezekiel. His dagger is poised for the kill:

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann’d:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven….
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
‘A took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
(3.3.85-87)

As in Ezekiel, the line “full[ness] of bread” signifies the corruption of the unreformed state of the soul with “crimes broad blown.” Hamlet’s father, a sinner of the old faith, has died without last rites of confession.

The connection is available only for the Geneva Bible. As Shaheen describes it, “only the Geneva reads ‘fulness of bread’ in Ezekiel 16.49. All other versions (Coverdale, Matthew, Turner, Great, Bishops’) have ‘fulness of meate” (1999 38).

The reader may now begin to appreciate my predicament. The original owner of this Bible – as, by every conceivable indication, he seemed to be – had a history, and not one likely to inspire courage in the faint hearted.  According to the late great Shakespearean biographer Sir Sidney Lee, the original owner was possessed of a “violent and perverse temperament” and had an “eccentric taste in dress.” [4]

Although guilty of a “reckless waste of substance, he also “evinced a genuine taste in music and wrote verses of much lyric beauty…and a sufficient number of his poems is extant to corroborate Webbe’s comment, that he was the best of the courtier poets of the early days of Queen Elizabeth, and that ‘in the rare devices of poetry he may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent amongst the rest.”  He was moreover, despite being a very bad boy, “reckon[ed] among the best for comedy in his day; but though he was a patron of players, no specimens of his dramatic productions survive” (280).

Indeed the anxiety of influence casts a long shadow; it is safe to say that few men have been hated for such a long time or with such thoroughly irrational passion as the original owner of the Bible that lay before me in the Folger reading room. Not long after my discovery, in fact, Berkeley Professor Alan Nelson would begin work on his biography, Monstrous Adversary – the thesis of which seems to be that de Vere was such a bad man that he couldn’t possibly be the author of Lear or Hamlet.

His comedies? Lost, apparently.

I had many questions, but one thing was clear. According to virtually all the authorities in the field of Renaissance literature, de Vere shouldn’t have marked Ezekiel 16.49 in his Geneva Bible.  It was a scandal that he had done so.

But, he did.

I needed a witness.

I summoned  Dr. Nati Krivatsky, the Folger Library’s Head of Reference – who, up until that point in time had been a bit chary of the heretic in the temple. The two books, side by side on the table, told the story; I had only to point, but I think I added: “I just wanted to show you this.”

Dr. Krivatsky looked. She read.  She pondered. Her eyes grew round with the same surprised disbelief that had ambushed me only moments before, driving me out of the reading room into the cold January air. She saw what I saw. She took a deep breath, of the kind that signifies the thoughtful reception of what Gregory Bateson calls “news of a difference.”

“Maybe,” she started, “maybe you should write a book about this.”

From one point of view, the Shakespeare authorship question is a debate — and a mystery — about a pronoun.

Who is the “I” who speaks to us with such direct, seemingly modern confidence, dispensing the instructions of Sonnet 71?  Who is this man who  warns us against “rehearsing” his “poor name,”  lest we be “mocked” by the “wise world” after his demise?

Is it the same “I” who, in Sonnet 110, has  gone “here and there” and made himself  “a motley to the view”?  Is it the “I”  who, in Sonnet 37, has been “made lame by fortune’s dearest spite”?  Is he the “I”  who, in Sonnet 76, writes “still all one, ever the same/And keep[s] invention in a noted weed,/That every word doth almost tell” his “name” (italics supplied)?

Orthodox critics, naturally, are perplexed by these statements from the Sonnet author.  They do  not readily match the preferred biography. How had he made himself a “motley to the view”?  Where is the evidence for his being “lame” — literally or metaphorically?  Above all, why the reiterated emphasis on the mystery of his own name – a quality requiring concealment in Sonnet 71 but linguistically irrepressible in Sonnet 76?

In compensation, many Stratfordians make ready recourse to the idea that the Sonnets — the only surviving texts in which Shakespeare writes about himself in the first person — are constructed from the point of view of a literary persona. Just as the author has created Shylock, or Hamlet, or Olivia,  they suggest, he has constructed a persona — not to be identified with his own ego or experience — which has written the Sonnets from what is essentially an imaginary sense of context and set of relationships.

Proponents of this theory over the decades have included many distinguished scholars, among them Sir Sidney Lee, Samuel Schoenbaum, and James Shapiro, for whom “The effect of the Sonnets depends in part on the fiction of their confessional nature.”

The theory  is not only circular; it is suspiciously ad hoc, as if taken off the shelf of obsolete literary cliches and dusted off for an expedient book tour needed to distract the public from too much thinking.

We might just as well argue that the Sonnets are  the accidental consequence of a billion monkeys all pounding away on keyboards in alternate universes until one of them hit the jackpot. Anything will do as long as we can be saved from the fate of having to think that the words themselves — not to mention the lived experiences behind them, which give them context, meaning, and humanity — are real.

In fact there is no evidence to support the persona theory.  But it does  supply a convenient pretext to explain why the primary datum of the literary experience deposited in the Sonnets does not correspond in any credible way — and in fact contradicts in many evident ways — the secondary datum of the assumed biography.

This mystery of  “I, Shakespeare,” is mirrored by the problem of ascertaining the identity of the annotator of  the de Vere Geneva Bible. Who was he? Some identify him with Homer’s Outis – Nobody.  We shall take up this question in some detail as our investigation proceeds.  But for now we may offer one definitive observation: whoever the annotator was, he read the volume with an exacting attention to detail.

There is no better illustration of this fact than the handwritten annotation found in Romans  7.20 (Figure One).   Please read the verse carefully.

Figure One: Romans 7.20 in de Vere 1570 Geneva Bible. Image Courtesy the Folger Shakespeare Library.

As you can see, the annotator supplies the “I” missing from the printed text of  Romans 7.20 in the STC 1427 copy of the de Vere Geneva Bible. Thought it is now four hundred and forty-one years since its publication, this misprint in the 1570 Geneva New Testament has  not been recorded by Bible historians or bibliographers.  But our annotator not only saw it — he corrected it.

This little “I,” a tiny speck of ink on a timeworn page, is the stuff of intellectual revolution.

In the post-Looney, post-Ogburn world, it assumes a potent force and an imaginative life of its own.  No mere proofreader’s correction,  the act of writing here becomes what linguists call a performative: the word does what it says (like the oath “I do” in the wedding ceremony).

In supplying it, the annotator inscribes himself in the volume,  quite literally becoming the Pauline “I.”  If unwilled, he did not do it –  instead the sin that dwelled in him did it — whatever it might have been. A  more elegant and potent merger of author, message, and reader is difficult to imagine.

You may be wondering how this concerns Shakespeare.

I did not know it when I first began my study of the de Vere Bible, but “sin” is among the most common nouns in the Shakespearean canon. It occurs  with variation well over two hundred times.  Since  the Greek word for “sin” — hamartia — is the same word Aristotle uses in the Poetics — the most influential work of literary criticism ever written — to describe a hero’s “tragic flaw” this may come as small surprise to those with even a little Greek.

For the bard,  ”sin” is a  concept mediating between the religious and the literary. As such it becomes one of the great overarching themes of the Shakespearean oeuvre, especially in the  tragedies, and this theme is reflected in numerous Biblical allusions, from the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament, revealing the author’s close and sustained attention to theological principle and precept.

This is the point where Lt. Colombo stops, scratches his head, and looks dazed and confused: “Now sir, just one one more thing.  I’m sure this is an impertinent question, but, you see, I was wondering.” He takes the cigar butt out of his mouth and waves it absent-mindedly, as if trying to remember where he left his hat (which he is still wearing). “Of  all these many Shakespearean allusions to sin, I’m sure that none of them can  be traced back to Romans 7.20, right?”

Nope. The idea of Romans 7.20 — that sin is an agency foreign to the will –  is arguably the single most prominent of all Shakespearean ideas about sin.

Such commonplaces as the sins of Cain or Adam and Eve may be more readily apparent,  but the concept found in the corrected verse of the de Vere Bible  is ubiquitous, occurring as many as eleven times in the canon, including prominently in the Sonnets, and being among a handful of verses to which the bard alludes, definitely or probably, more than ten times.

Shakespeare’s affinity for this idea has been documented for well over a century, since Thomas Carter first drew attention to its importance in 1905, and confirmed  over the years by Richmond Noble (1935), Naseeb Shaheen (1987 etc.), Peter Milward (1984), Morris Westhoven  (1971), and Roy Battenhouse (Table One).

To the list of eight references to the verse recorded by these previous scholars, focused search has yielded two more, one to a very prominent and undeniable, Geneva-Bible only reference in the Sonnets (Stritmatter 1997).

According to Battenhouse, Angelo, the misguided Puritan in Measure for Measure, is a psychological type created from sustained meditation on the implications of the marked verse. He is  “a man self-divided by a law within his members” and  “at war with the law of the spirit” (174).

But who is the reader who supplied this correction to the de Vere copy of the 1570 Geneva Bible?

An entire industry of scholars, representing what Ron Rosenbaum has termed the “Shakespeare industrial complex”  and backed by such powerful insiders as Columbia Professor James Shapiro, would have us believe that the answer to this question is not only unknown but unknowable.

But whether this proposition is tenable or not, we can be sure of one thing: the passage corrected in the de Vere Geneva Bible left an indelible mark on Shakespeare’s imagination,  emerging over many years, as if by spontaneous recall, in many varied permutations throughout his work (Table One).

References to it appear in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, As You Like It, Alls Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night, and 2 Henry IV.

In my book you will be asked to consider a startling transformational proposition.

Action is often the custodian of memory. Shakespeare’s own intimate connection with the marked idea is not surprising in view of his documentary biography. As we can now see with our own eyes he himself supplied a defect to the printed copy of the verse, writing his “I” into the book of books.

He remembered what he had written.

****************************************************
Please revisit for the next installment when we consider Romans 7.20 in relation to Hamlet 4.2 and Sonnet 151.

Table One: Shakespeare allusions to, or echoes of, Romans. 7.20.

Waugaman’s article, “The Sternhold and  Whole Book of the Psalms is a Major Source for the Works of Shakespeare,” appears in the December 2009 issue of Notes and Queries.

Taking his cue from the marked psalms of the de Vere Geneva Bible, Waugaman set out to investigate two related questions.

First, how important were the Sternhold and Hopkins psalms, in a general sense, for shaping Shakespeare’s religious themes and imagery?  The received wisdom, as Waugaman explains in his article, was “not very.”

While scholars have recognized the generic importance of the psalms, the standard belief has been that while the Coverdale psalms and those found in the Book of Common Prayer were critical to Shakespeare, he was not that familiar with the Sternhold and Hopkins psalms that are found with the 1570 de Vere Geneva Bible.

Not so, found Waugaman. His Notes and Queries article documents a volley of previously undetected allusions to language that is not found in these alternative sources, but is unique to the Sternhold and Hopkins psalms.

“The Sternhold and Hopkins metrical translation of the Psalms is a crucial but neglected repository of salient source material for the works of Shakespeare….” concludes Waugaman.

“Richmond Noble maintained that Shakespeare quoted the Psalms more often than any other book in the Bible, and that ‘a large proportion of such quotations’ are from the Coverdale translation of the book of Common Prayer. Noble led other scholars to ignore WPB….[but I have found WPB to be a rich source of Shakespeare’s first 126 Sonnets…." (595).

Waugaman’s second, more specific question, was whether the de Vere Bible annotations could provide a heuristic “answer key” that would point him in the direction of passages in the plays that echoed the psalms marked in de Vere's Sternhold and Hopkins.

As originally reported in the de Vere Bible dissertation,  twenty-one psalms are marked in the de Vere Sternhold and Hopkins, mostly with  marginal drawings of a small hand with a pointing finger.  Sixteen  (12, 25, 30, 31, 51, 61, 65, 66, 67, 77, 103, 137, 139, 145, 146 and Lamentations) are marked in the body of the text, and five (8, 11, 15, 23 and 59) in the commentary by Athanasius.

Among Waugaman’s findings, as published in Notes and Queries:

• Sonnet 66 “echoes the sentiments, the imagery, and the language of Psalm 12” (596).
• Sonnet 21 “is structured as a response to psalm 8” (596).
• “…the author  of Psalm 8 is the Muse Shakespeare alludes to in Sonnet 21….The psalmist is an implicit prototype for the rival poet or poets of the sonnets” (597).
• “For my sin” is a phrase that occurs only in Sonnet 83. It occurs as well in Psalm 25:10—also its unique occurrence in that translation….It is thus one of the many instances where Shakespeare’s use of the language of the Psalms implicitly compares his words to the Fair Youth with the psalmist’s words to God…Shakespeare has been accused of a sin he does not agree he has committed…this identical phrase, ‘for my sin,’ would recall to an educated contemporary reader (including the Youth himself) the rest of psalm 25, which therefore constitutes a running subtext for Sonnet 83” (597)
• Psalm 103 has several interesting features that may have especially captured Shakespeare’s imagination….Vendler calls the diction of eight lines of Sonnet 124 ‘imitation biblical.’ It contains many allusions to Psalm 103” (598).
• In early modern England, Psalm 51 was regarded as  the chief ‘Penitential psalm.’…Lady Macbeth’s words are a transparent confession of her crime, so it is fitting that they should allude to the chief psalm of confession…A close reading of this scene against Psalm 51 shows several contrasts between her actions and words, and the psalm, thus highlighting her shortcomings…(600).
• “Psalm 77 is prominently echoed in lines 897-910 of Rape of Lucrece” (602).
• ‘Psalm 146 is also echoed in four significant words in this same stanza [of Lucrece]” (602).

• Psalm 139 captures much of the theme of Rape of Lucrece, including efforts to conceal sin in the darkness of night, and its eventual revelation and punishment…The allusion to Psalm 139, as well as other allusions to the Psalms throughout the poem, suggest ‘secret thoughts’ that scholars have previously overlooked” (602).

I hadn’t quite made the connection to the Portia quote, but the unconscious has a way of leading the willing, like mad Edgar leading his blind father, to the creative fusion that that brings those half-hidden truths to the surface.

Lunacy.

Candle.

De Vere.

A lunatic light broadcasts a soft glow over the landscape of the internet, a beacon in dark times….

Dover cliffs are fearsome steep. Look down at your peril.

You see, Portia’s quote has played a special role for me over the nearly a decade that I have had to reflect on the historical and literary meaning of the de Vere Bible.  It was my serendipitous discovery, sometime in 1992, that two generations of scholars had erroneously traced the origin of Portia’s evidently Biblical phraseology to Mtt. 5.16:

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good workes, and glorify your father which is in heaven.”

But, you see,  it wasn’t Mtt. 5.16 at all.

No, as I transmitted to Professor Naseeb Shaheen, who was then completing his book,  Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies (1993), it was Philippians 2.15:

The words "naughtie....worlde," coupled with the imagery of the shining candle, indubitably connects Portia's phrase to Philippians 2.15, as Professor Shaheen acknowledged.

Shaheen agreed with me.

Its time to stop keeping that a secret.

Please don’t be shy about suggesting changes or additions. A blog is a living entity — it requires readers and critics to breath, grow, and live.

Also now published is the “Critics” section, which includes a selection of quotations from my professional dossier.

To provide a sense of balance and give some indication of the controversial nature of the site’s content, I included David Kathman’s recent rip on me as someone with “pretensions” to scholarship, from the latest issue of The Oxfordian (2009).

Kathman’s quote represents a depressingly typical example of  the echo chamber effect of the Shakespearean establishment, which is remarkably effective at inducing conformity through the use of such ad hominem innuendo.

I will have more to say about the dubious politics by which this astounding statement came to be published in a journal which supposedly represents the views of Oxfordians, but for now I’ll just let readers ponder the Kathman quote, as it were, in situ — alongside  some opinions from others which serve to place Kathman’s pronouncement in a comparative context. For now, I also encourage readers to compare what Kathman says to the documented record of my curriculum vitae.

Added 12/7: Mark Anderson and Roger Stritmatter’s 1996 article on the state of the de Vere Bible research, reprinted from the Shakespeare Oxford Society newsletter, is now available.

Added 12/8: Take the Shakspeare’s Bible quiz!

Added 12/11/08: A reprint of my March 18, 2007  Washington Post article, “Is this the Bard We See Before Us?”

• The new publications page includes a growing list of links to Shakespeare’s Bible materials previously published in academic journals such as Oxford University Press’ Notes and Queries.
• The  Authorship FAQ page covers basic questions and answers on the authorship question.
• The Bible FAQ covers basic questions on the de Vere Bible.
  
• The dissertation page now includes all chapters of the dissertation.
• The curriculum vitae page provides a reasonably current CV of my professional qualifications and associations.

Further updates, are in the works, including:

• Dissertation appendices.
• A “Shakespeare’s Bible” FAQ.
• Some Sample Proofs for the sample proof category.
• A pinch or two of fun with flash.
• The Shakespeare’s Bible quiz.

Stay tuned!