Our topic is Shake-speare’s Bible. The one he owned. Really. No joke.

To learn what that means, please visit the “about” page.

It’s not.

The first appearance of the name "William Shakespeare" in print, attached to dedicatory epistle to Venus and Adonis (1593). It is neither italicized nor hyphenated.

We also saw that Shapiro builds on this misconception to create an elaborate theory that the name is hyphenated in a significant number of later publications only to avoid the typographical problem which could result from placing a -k- next to an long italic -s- such that the two letters would collide and “break,” creating a messy delay in the print shop.

The theory is not originally Shapiro’s own, but that’s a subject for another post.

Shapiro, who admits to prefer studying Shakespeare in performance rather than in the study, and seems to have a rather dim understanding of what goes on in an early modern print shop,  has apparently never heard of the typesetter’s device known as a “spacer” – a thin metal blank, existing in five different widths. Such blanks were regularly used by early modern compositors  to avoid the problem of colliding letters; they allowed compositors to introduce white space as needed to regulate the distribution of printed letters without needing to use any hyphens.

However, there’s a lot more to said about Shapiro’s gaffe.

Let’s resume our discussion with this quote, in which Shapiro advanced this already defunct claim about the hyphen:

dedicatory letters addressed to the Earl of Southampton and signed ‘William Shake-speare’ are included in italics in the front-matter of both. (”Advance Reviewers Copy,” 226)

Of course this statement  is misleading for more than one reason: the letters aren’t actually “signed” with Shakespeare’s name – the name is printed on the page. Nor, as we have seen, is the name spelled  “Shake-speare,” as Professor Shapiro assures us it is.

But there is another problem posed by an ambiguity in Shapiro’s wording, which remains to be investigated. Is he actually claiming that the name is italicized, or just the “letter” (technically known, in the parlance of early modern scholarship, as a “dedicatory epistle”)?

Beats me.

But it does make a difference.

As even a fourth grader can see, the name is not (unlike the preceding dedicatory epistle) italicized, so if Shapiro meant to say that it was, he may be on the verge of setting a Guinness book of world record for the number of erroneous statements about one tiny piece of early modern typography.

On the other hand, to give Shapiro the benefit of the doubt (temporarily, of course!), if the name were italicized but not hyphenated, then his  theory would have failed before it started, so perhaps its a good thing that he was wrong about the facts.

Its always been my own motto to never let a fact get in the way of a good theory, and I guess that Professor Shapiro and I are brothers under the skin in that regard.

And while one hates to cast undocumented aspersions, it does occur that perhaps this dilemma could explain an ambiguity in Shapiro’s narrative; for while he seems certain that the name is hyphenated, he seems to be a little less certain whether or not it’s italicized.

In a strict grammatical construction, he’s not saying that it is. But I venture to suggest that most readers without a copy of the Venus and Adonis dedication page in front of them, would conclude that Shapiro  means to also claim that the name is italicized, especially since he builds on this assumption in the analysis which follows.

Certainly, if Shapiro knew that the name was not italicized, he didn’t go out of his way to  make that clear.

In any case, it’s Shapiro’s lucky day in the scholarship sweepstakes: his factual error ends up supporting his theory: anyone can see that the name is not italicized, and if anyone  is in a mood to make excuses for Professor Shapiro,  he could reason as follows: “unlike the dedicatory epistle, the name is clearly printed in Roman and not Italic type. That explains why it’s not hyphenated.”

Right?

Wrong. The Lord giveth and he taketh away.

In yesterday’s post we already saw the example from the 1623 folio of the hyphenated name printed in Roman type, but there are many others as well.

Let’s take a look at the actual earliest appearance of the hyphenated name, “Shake-speare.”

It’s from a dedicatory poem to a mysterious and pseudonymous 1594 publication, Willowbie His Avisa.

Avisa has a long and intriguing publication history, but since it has little to do with our present quest, and the history would no doubt put professor Shapiro to sleep, let’s focus on the essentials, shall we?

Its not surprising that the interests Shapiro represents would want to distract attention away from Avisa by inventing a cock and bull story about the name “Shake-speare” being italicized and hyphenated in the 1593 edition of Venus and Adonis.

While the name as it appears in that context seems to reassuringly connect the author with the flesh-and-blood Henry Wriostheley, stabilizing our preconceptions about the author and his milieu, the appearance in Avisa seems more inclined to induce vertigo than complacency in the average Stratfordian college professor.

Verses from the 1594 Willobie His Avisa, showing the first ever instance of the name "Shake-speare" hyphenated. Note the Roman type.

Not only is the name hyphenated here,  for the first time, but it appears in a pseudonymous publication. Moreover, the close reader will notice that the logic of the passage associates “Shake-speare,” by parallelism, with a fictional character in his own poem – the rapist Tarquin, who steals the jewel of Lucrece’s female honor while her husband, Collatine, is off sporting about in Italy (I refer to RL, 106-112).

Have we just run smack dab into our first good clue that Elizabethans could read, god forbid, allegorically?

Could this association between Tarquin and “Shake-speare” have meant something?

Hold that thought – we’ll fish in that stream another day. For now, let’s just note this in passing: for Stratfordians, this is not a propitious moment. No wonder they’d prefer to just sing the chorus to Shapiro’s convenient fiction about the origins of the hyphen.

There is another, more subtle problem here.

In Avisa the hyphenated name is not, as Shapiro’s theory requires us to predict, italicized. It is also spelled with the –e- after the k.

This is more bad news for Shapiro’s credibility.

From the very first appearance of the hyphenated name in the historical record, it would seem that the scenario Professor Shapiro assures us would have caused any Elizabethan typographer to chuckle at those foolish modern Oxfordians, is starting to look like the inflationary gab of a gifted storyteller with an ax to grind, not a scholarly analysis from a distinguished academician dispassionately examining the evidence.

As John Thomas Looney wrote in reply to O.J. Campbell’s 1948 review of “Shakespeare” Identified, “This is the kind of argumentation one associates with political maneuvering rather than a serious quest for the truth on great issues and it makes one suspect that he is not very easy in his own mind about the case.”

But, wait a minute. Surely there are some examples of Elizabethan typography which actually do support Professor Shapiro’s argument. Aren’t there?

After all, I can hear you saying, Stritmatter, you teach at Coppin State University in Urban Baltimore. James Shapiro is an important man and a distinguished scholar; he hails from the heart of the Ivy League, hobnobs over tea and biscuits at the Folger library, and gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to write books like Contested Will. You’re a blogger who doesn’t get paid anything and teaches on North Avenue in Baltimore! Who are you to question his scholarship?

Shall we agree to ignore invidious comparison, for a few more  moments anyway, long enough to follow the trail of our logic to its embarrassing denouement? Or would you prefer to avert your eyes and stop reading, for fear that your hero will turn out to have clay feet and be suffering from an identity crisis?

There are by my count (which may be incomplete) 6 independent occurrences of the hyphenated name on the title pages of early Shakespearean texts. These are Richard II Q2 (1598), Richard III Q2 (1598), Hamlet Q1 (1601), SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609), King Lear Q1 (1608), and Romeo and Juliet Q3 (possibly Q4, date uncertain, see Chambers I: 340).*

Of these, all but Hamlet continue the hyphenation in at least one successive edition.

There are, additionally, eight other texts, printed between 1594 and 1623, in which the name is hyphenated. Aside from the Sonnets, the largest number of examples occurs in the 1623 folio, in which poems by Leonard Digges (3x) and I.M. (2x) consistently hyphenate the name.

Now, the inquiring mind wants to know: how many of these examples conform to the requirements set forth by Shapiro’s analysis, that the hyphen is justified when the name is set in italics and spelled Shakspeare – without the medial –e-?

The answer is: None.

At least three of the examples (Richard II Q2, “I.M.”, Sh. Folio 1623, and John Webster, 1612), are italicized. However, each of them also spells the name Shake-speare, with the medial –e-, obviating the logic of Professor Shapiro’s argument.

More typical is this example from the first quarto of Hamlet – where there is obviously no more danger of breaking any type by removing the hyphen than there would be in removing it from such conspicuous examples of early modern pseudonyms as Lucres-Avis (Avisa, 1594, A4v), Martin Mar-prelate, Tom Tell-truth, or Cuthbert Curry-knave.

Hamlet Q1, showing the hyphenated name with Roman type.

Lear Q1 prints “Shak-speare,” with the hyphen and without the medial -e-, but in Roman type face. This is corrected in Lear Q2 within less than a year to “Shake-speare,” suggesting that, contrary to Shapiro’s initial assumption, the normative literary spelling of the name was Shakespeare, or Shake-speare, not Shakspeare.

Lear Q1 (1608) showing spelling "Shak-speare" in Roman type.

For anyone who believes that theories should be rooted in verifiable facts, Shapiro’s goes downhill fast from here.

Enter, stage left, John Bodenham’s (1600) Bel-vedére, the first collection of popular Elizabethan lyrics to include many selections from Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It spells the name, in italics, Shakspeare – without the medial –e- and without any hyphenation!

Five ways from Sunday, Shapiro’s theory is apparently not worth the paper used to print it:

1) It departs from a manifest error (there is no hyphenated form of the name in Venus and Adonis Q1);

2) It follows this error by insinuating another false claim (that the name is not only hyphenated but italicized in Venus and Adonis);

3) It depends on the undemonstrated (and apparently false) proposition that “Shakspeare” was the normative print spelling of the name;

4) It ignores or suppresses numerous instances of positive evidence (e.g. the title pages of Hamlet Q1, Lear Q1, and SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS) which disprove it;

5) It ignores or suppresses instances of negative evidence (e.g. Bel-vedére) which, independently, also disprove it.

If we return once more to Shapiro’s narrative with these examples in mind, it is easy to wonder just what he must have been thinking when he invented the story about the hyphenated name in Venus and Adonis.

Does he believe his own story? Apparently so. His explanation for a typographical dilemma, the existence of which is predicated on a single false example, and which every known actual example contradicts, is that

The easiest solution was inserting a letter ‘e’, a hyphen or both; as we’ll soon see, compositors settled on different strategies. And as the title pages of the 1608 quarto of Lear and the 1609 Sonnets indicate, it’s a habit that carried over when setting roman font as well. (”Readers Advance Edition,” 226)

But if there never was  any typographical rationale for the first uses of the hyphen, one cannot very well explain later uses as instances of habit established through precedent.

And the sole example which might conform, barely, to Shapiro’s model is not, as he has so glibly led his readers to believe, the first, but actually the last, or nearly the last, in the series (”I.M.” in the 1623 folio). Even in the best of all possible Stratfordian worlds, it cannot therefore logically have had any impact whatsoever on the typographical practices  informing the prior examples.

Finally, anyone who pauses long enough to test alternative theories must realize that it makes no sense at all to suggest that the compositors of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS would have included an unnecessary hyphen in the name in 32 running half-titles of that book merely out of loyalty to the precedent established in, say Hamlet Q1, a book which they probably had never seen.

The very suggestion reveals Shapiro’s alienation from the gritty circumstances of early modern book producers, who favored economy and thrift over adherence to irrelevant precedent, and  would, one thinks, have more readily laughed at  Shapiro’s ignorance of their trade than at the informed suspicions of the Oxfordians.

No. Whatever reason the publishers and compositors of the Sonnets and other texts had for hyphenating the name Shake-speare, it is safe to conclude that it is not the one offered, with such sweeping and grandiloquent authority but so little credibility, by Professor Shapiro.

Now, this has been a rather long and detailed digression on early modern typographical conventions; if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You’re living proof that the internet may not after all kill off literate culture, and that maybe the life of common sense can survive the current Stratfordian press releases.

Before I sign off, however, prudence obliges me to offer a specific disclaimer of what I have not said in this blog post.

I am very far from claiming that the existence of the hyphenated variants in the printed versions of the name Shakespeare between 1594 and 1623 obliges the modern scholar to conclude that anyone thought that the name was a pseudonym.

Naturally it would be convenient for Professor Shapiro if I were to make such a claim, and his cup overfloweth with examples of  unprincipled use of the straw man argument of imputing such beliefs (and much worse) to people who never held them (a depressingly recurrent tactic in the authorship debate of which Shapiro is only the most recent and enthusiastic practitioner).

The fact is, I don’t really know why these typographical irregularities occur.

Shapiro is the Professor from Columbia with all the answers.  I’m just a blogger from Baltimore, who barely got through graduate school without having his Department shut down by Professor Shapiro’s colleagues.

But, knowing that I don’t know, I cannot help but wonder if, just possibly, the “holy hyphen” (as Richard Kennedy, in a lovely piece of self-deprecating Oxfordian irony, has dubbed it) signifies exactly what Shapiro goes to such extravagant and self-defeating lengths to deny it does. As the aphorism goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there sure is a lot of smoke being blown in the eyes of the jury over one little hyphen.

In any case, it seems safe to offer at least one probative conclusion: if anyone had no prior basis for questioning the reasoning  employed by the Shakespearean elite to sustain the cliché that “Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” then this little parable of the “notorious hyphen” provides a damn good illustration of why everyone should revisit his or her assumptions about authorship.

Indeed one is irresistibly reminded of the acerbic comment of former Folger Library Educational Director Richmond Crinkley, summarizing the history of similar errors documented in Charlton Ogburn’s Mysterious William Shakespeare – a book which James Shapiro can hardly bring himself to mention: ” if the intellectual standards of Shakespeare scholarship quoted in such embarrassing abundance by Ogburn are representative, then it is not just authorship about which which we have to be worried.”

Ironically, these words were published in the Folger Library’s own Shakespeare Quarterly in 1985. A quarter century later, they seem to be forgotten by an industry which seems only to remember those parts of its own history – and its own subject – which flatter  its narcissism.

Any reasonable person, after all,  must wonder why Professor Shapiro would enlist the weighty authorities cited in the “acknowledgments” section of his book, and get paid the huge sums of money he’s banked, and be invited to narrate his own BBC documentary to back up his printed fallacies with the imprimatur of the mass media, on the back of theory which  is so manifestly erroneous, both factually and logically.

If someone really did pay Shapiro a million bucks for this book, then I hope they have a really big truck. They’re going to need it to carry away all the bullshit they paid for.

*I’d like to acknowledge the assistance of Robert Detobel in assembling these data.

The answer is, “no” – at least if one may draw any conclusion from the depressingly conformist hallelujah chorus which has issued from so many mass media internet reviewers in response to James Shapiro’s Contested Will.

This is not to deny that there have been some excellent parries of the pretzel logic, factual lapses, and subtly malicious innuendo of Professor Shapiro’s book. One skeptical review, William Niederkorn’s Brooklyn Rail analysis, even received notice as the National Book Circle Critics April 7 Review of the Day.

Among other merits of his review which might lead one to conclude that investigative journalism is not quite dead, Niederkorn points out that Shapiro’s most widely self-touted “discovery” is largely if not wholly derivative of the research of two anti-Stratfordian scholars, Daniel Wright and John Rollett,  whom he does not mention in the body of his work. In fact only Wright’s contribution  is acknowledged at all by Shapiro,  and that only in an obscure “bibliographical essay” disconnected from the body of his narrative.

Shapiro’s attempt to pass the discovery off as his own should be a red flag for  any reader capable of processing factual information from a perspective of even modest skepticism. “As we all know,” contemporary academicians are often tempted to seek the limelight for themselves by appropriating the labor of others who may be less powerful or well-connected – or even, remarkably, as in this case, as a prelude to slamming them in absentia as retrograde mental defectives.

Heward Wilkinson, in one of the more sophisticated Oxfordian responses to Shapiro, sees that “Shapiro’s neglect of contextual reading is astonishing,” and laments “the degree to which Shapiro’s own position, and those he repudiates, as formulated by him, simply mirror one another, take in one anothers’ washing, and readily reverse, flip over, and mutate into one another.”

Wilkinson does an excellent job of doing what a good psychoanalyst does: seeing the world from the point of view of his patient’s subjectivity, and pointing out some of the internal contradictions and limitations, concluding that Shapiro (more than once, actually) “completely violates his own criterion [of interpretation], without noticing he does.”

To Warren Hope , PhD, the author of a book which actually does what Shapiro claims to be doing, by offering an objective scholarly history of the authorship question,  the hero of Shapiro’s narrative is the anonymous fourth grader who motivated Shapiro to write his book by saying, “My brother told me that Shakespeare really didn’t write Romeo and Juliet. Is that true?”

As Hope notes, the fourth grader “cited his source, quoted him fully and accurately, and then asked the most relevant question he could think of.”

Would that Shapiro’s reviewers could live up to these modest standards.

Instead, such critically-aware reviews as Niederkorn’s, Wilkinson’s, or Hope’s have been few and far between, written on the margins of the mainstream discourse. And perhaps  the most striking characteristic of many others is how effortlessly they manage combine star-struck gullibility about Shapiro’s accomplishments with savagely uninformed attacks on authorship skeptics.

Clearly the race is on to see which reviewer in which periodical can outdo the other in falling all over himself to sing Shapiro’s praises and heap contempt on anyone who would dare to question whether Shapiro’s book is really all its cracked up to be.

A few examples will suffice to illustrate the tone of the present operation:

Peter Conrad, writing in The Guardian, assures us that he has it on the best authority that the Oxfordians are a gabble of “cranks” and a “reprehensible reactionary lot,” unable to adapt themselves to the post-modern reality, in which “Literary theory delights in…the ‘death of the author,’ because the writer’s annihilation licenses the critic’s self display.” Hmm…

The Irish Times gushes that “Contested Will brings in the forensic skills of the academic researcher—Shapiro has visited archives all over the US and British Isles.” Gosh.

Not to be outdone, The Independent’s Boyd Tonkin admires “the absolutely high speed express of modern research,” which is modernizing the romantic view of Shakespeare as a “lofty demigod” by transforming him into a “shrewd creative industry entrepreneur” – that is to, say, someone not unlike Shapiro himself, who surely has the shrewdness of a canny entrepreneur,  easily able to swim past the big fish in the shark tank without blinking, and even reportedly received a million dollar advance for his book!

Talk about licensing the critic’s “self display….”

Over the next few weeks and months, doubtless there will be many more such screeds. And just as doubtless, I’ll have a lot to say about Shapiro’s book – which certainly contains enough striking instances of error of one kind or another to keep scholarship employed for some time mopping up the mess he’s made of things.

As I remarked in this interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, in a comment which did not make the cut into print, from the point of view of the intellectual historian, Shapiro has just made the biggest blunder of his long and successful career.

Contested Will is a work of tragi-comic overreaching, the result of a “perfect storm” of opportunism,  cheering from the Shakespeare industry (especially its real-estate theme-park wing headquartered in Stratford-upon-Avon), and a growing fear among Shakespearean scholars that they may have been dupes in a cosmic joke which is about to take an abrupt turn for the worse.

History beckoned for Shapiro to write a truly significant book on the Shakespearean question – a book that might have helped lead his colleagues out of the mess they’re in as a result of nearly two hundred years of failing to honestly confront the limitations of their own knowledge, or to admit the real and significant discrepancies in their narratives which have contributed to widespread public distrust of their scholarly bona fides.

Now, more than ever, the Shakespearean industry needs leadership of this kind.

Instead, Shapiro elected to take the easy way out.  The result is a book which deprives readers of the opportunity to experience critical thinking, promotes Shapiro’s own career at the expense of a failure to  grapple honestly with the real perplexities of the case he purports to examine, and apparently has fooled an awful lot of gullible reviewers into thinking that the mythology from Stratford has any future.

Sure, the Oxfordians have done their share of playing into Shapiro’s deceptions, but that is another story for another day.

For now, on the other hand,  let’s start  by conceding a point made by Shapiro-pumpers like Tonkin. Shapiro’s book indeed contains a number of startling revelations, the fruits of his industrious scouring of archives on that jet-pack-driven “high speed express of modern research” which so thrills Mr. Tonkin’s intellect.

These revelations are, indeed,  remarkable for what they illustrate about the “state of the debate” in Shakespearean authorship studies. Indeed, if anyone should require examples of why Shapiro insists, a little like Al Gore was doing just last summer about Global Warming, that “the debate is over,” and that the only thing left to be done is to dissect the brains of the non-conformists to determine what was wrong with them, then surely Shapiro’s original archival discoveries qualify.

Nor should we  lose sight of the fact that Shapiro’s high-tech whizz-bang discoveries were not only supported with generous grants from the Guggenhiem foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullmen Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, among others, but were cheered on  by a host of Shapiro’s luminary literary colleagues who are generously thanked in the acknowledgments section of the book.

With this critical context in mind, let us begin by considering what is perhaps the single most original and  impressive example of Shapiro’s discoveries (we’ll get to some others in subsequent blog entries).

Unknown to two hundred and five years of scholarship, Shapiro reveals to us for the first time in his book that the first printing of the name “Shakespeare,” attached to the dedication page of the first quarto of Venus and Adonis (1593) (discovered by Edmund Malone in 1805), contains the “notorious hyphen,” about which so much ink has been spilt.

As Shapiro intimates, this little hyphen is truly “notorious.”

It might even easily be blamed as the root of all authorship evils, a typographical glitch even more deleterious in its long term consequences than the naiveté of Edmund Malone about biography, Delia Bacon’s insane search for the real meaning of Shakespeare’s works, or Mark Twain’s plagiarizing (on which see, again, Mr. Niederkorn) of that liberal freak and animal lover, Sir George Greenwood.

Let’s allow Shapiro himself to resume the thread of our search for the origins of this pernicious piece of typographical mischief:

Early in his career Shakespeare showed great care in seeing into print his two great narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, bestsellers that went through many editions. While his name didn’t appear on the title pages of these volumes, dedicatory letters addressed to the Earl of Southampton and signed ‘William Shake-speare’ are included in italics in the front-matter of both. It’s the first time that the notorious hyphen appeared in the printed version of his name, a telling sign, for sceptics, of pseudonymous publication. (225 “advance reader’s edition”)

Now, I have a confession to make.

When I first read this – and I thank Robert Detobel for directing me to the passage in the first place and getting me started thinking about it – I thought I must have stumbled into an alternate universe. I’m thinking of the kind of world in which people are given PhDs for criticizing books they’ve never read, in which the Guggenheim foundation supports literary research which takes place in a bar on 5^th Avenue, and major publishers hire fact checkers who have never made it out of high school.

I even imagined that in this alternate universe, Ivy League professors were in the habit of sticking both their feet in their mouth at the same time, and then not only trying to get everyone to laugh about it, but actually succeeded in doing so, and were afterward praised for their wit.

What do you mean it doesn’t sound so “alternate”?

As the facsimile reproduced below shows, there is no hyphen in the name on the dedication page to Venus and Adonis.

Q1 (1593) title page of Venus and Adonis, showing unhyphenated and Roman type "William Shakespeare" after the epistle dedicatory.

One has to wonder how Professor Shapiro, in his twenty-five years teaching Shakespeare at Columbia, not to mention all that time he spent with Guggenheim grant money writing this book, can have failed to miss this elementary point.

But the reviewers are not worried.

James Williams from “PopMatters,” who teaches English Renaissance literature in Illinois, assures us that Shapiro’s work is “deeply informed,” and opines that “it would be difficult to imagine a better work of scholarship than this.”

Well, sorry, guy: with all due respect, I have no trouble at all imagining a better work of scholarship. I know it may be difficult, but how about “imagining” with me, even for a few seconds, a work of scholarship which does not initiate a fairly extensive discussion of a significant factual and interpretive problem with an unfortunate error of this kind?

Is that so unreasonable or impossible to imagine? Or am I the only one who thinks that just maybe this little literary faux pas might constitute a basis for reconsidering the merits of the rest of Shapiro’s o-so-brilliant work of scholarly detection?

Now, in case anyone of a skeptical bent of mind is reading this (“art thou there, truepenny?”), I hope you’ve already asked yourself the next obvious question: is there some other copy of the first edition of Venus and Adonis which contains the “holy hyphen”?

No.

There’s only one copy.

And no, the hyphen isn’t in the first edition (1594) of Rape of Lucrece, either.

So it is obvious that it required an indomitable exercise of the scholarly will to arrive at the brilliant conclusion that the hyphen was there, when opening any copy of any number of books housed in hundreds of libraries all over the world, or even dropping in on the digitized copy of the Folger Library’s own online archive – shows that it isn’t. Nor is it, to the best of my knowledge (which would appear to be shockingly far in advance of that of the learned Professor Shapiro), on any subsequent quartos of either poem, which for most part fastidiously reproduced, down to the last colon and comma, all the introductory matter of the first editions of both poems for the next several decades.

Now that we’ve settled that little problem, there is a deeper question which deserves to be answered: does this even matter?

After all, we all make mistakes. To err is human, isn’t it?

While it may seem shocking to some of Professor Shapiro’s more fervent acolytes, climbing fortune’s hill a little below him but still scrambling to reach the summit where the big checks are written, even college Professors at places like Columbia have from time to time been known to lose their car keys or write books about “notorious hyphens” which on closer inspection just don’t exist.

So, perhaps this is just, after all, just an innocent mistake – which, however embarrassing it may be to Professor Shapiro, his acolytes, and the fact checking department at Simon and Schuster (wake up!) – is really a red herring. Perhaps Stritmatter is mischievously diverting attention from the obviously superior merits of Professor Shapiro’s larger analysis by focusing on a trivial and inconsequential detail.

Well, let’s look at what Shapiro does with this error and see if this explanation is a sound one.

First we might need to clarify one niggling point. Does the name appear hyphenated on any early texts, or is this  something the anti-Stratfordians made up, maybe to embarrass the real scholars like Professor Shapiro?

Of course it does, and no they  didn’t. Instances include Hamlet Q1 (1603), Richard II Q2, Richard III Q2, the Sonnets, and a number of other texts dated 1594-1623 (If anyone cares, I’ll publish a complete census within the next few weeks as we examine this subject in greater forensic detail).

How does Shapiro explain this hyphenation of the name – even though it doesn’t exist where he says it does and it does exist in other places which he omits to mention?

Elizabethan compositors, trying to protect valuable type from breaking, would have smiled at the explanation [that the hyphen was a sign of pseudonymous publication]. They knew from experience that Shakespeare’s name was typesetter’s nightmare. When setting a ‘k’ followed by a long ‘s’ in italic font – with the name Shakspeare, for example – the two letters could easily collide and the font might snap. The easiest solution was inserting a letter ‘e’, a hyphen or both; as we’ll soon see, compositors settled on different strategies. And as the title pages of the 1608 quarto of Lear and the 1609 Sonnets indicate, it’s a habit that carried over when setting roman font as well. (”Advance Readers Edition,” 226)

To rephrase the essential point for the sake of clarity, Shapiro argues that the name Shakspeare (without the medial “e” after the k) was “a nightmare” for compositors; set in an italic font, the long italic s might easily collide with the k, producing big problems in the print-shop, with the result that “the font might snap.”

As even a reader uninitiated into the arcana of early modern printing can see by this example from the 1623 Shakespeare first folio, in the title of a poem by “I.M.,” Shapiro’s argument does have a veneer of plausibility:

Hyphenated and italicized name "Shake-speare," showing the long italic "s."

It’s an unfortunate sign of the lack of attention to detail and logic, not to mention the weak grasp of intellectual history, which lies behind many of the more effusive endorsements of Professor Shapiro’s genius that none of his reviewers can interrupt their hymns of praise long enough to ask,  whether the plausibility is any more than skin-deep, or whether Shapiro’s  theory of the origins of the “notorious hyphen” (like many similar sleights of hand in his book) is really just a species of condescending sophistry.

Heward Wilkinson, for one, seems convinced of Shapiro’s sincerity. But the more one grants Shapiro sincerity, the less plausible his knowledge of early modern typography becomes.

Notice, for example, that Shapiro’s theory as he frames it depends on two critical caveats: the name must not only be in italic, but must also be spelled without the -e- after the –k-. Otherwise the -e- itself takes care of the problem, without any need for the superfluous hyphen. Both conditions are clearly necessary according to Shapiro’s formula.

It seems apparent, even from the “I.M.” sample above,  that Shapiro’s formula is correct. Even in this instance, the hyphen is, by Shapiro’s own terms,  superfluous from the typographical point of view, since the name is spelled with the medial -e-.

Any doubt as the accuracy of Shapiro’s logic on this point can easily be assuaged with a little photo-shopping of the original image.

Modified version of "I.M." First Folio poem showing removal of hyphen.

Although it may not show too clearly in the above image, the k is not touching the s.

As long as the name is spelled with that medial -e-, even if it is in italics, there is no typographical necessity for the hyphen.

If the arrangement seemed too close for comfort, any 16th century compositor would have reached into his bin of “spacers” – thin blanks of lead designed for exactly such exigencies as this – to supply a little margin to offset the descender of the k from the long “s.” A hyphen was not required.

This conclusion is proved by a second example, from the same First Folio poem by “I.M.,” where the name appears in Roman type and there is obviously no danger of the typographical disaster which Shapiro fears.

Hyphenated name in Roman type from "I.M." poem in 1623 folio.

As we have seen, Shapiro is mistaken about the origin of the hyphen in Venus and Adonis.

These two examples alone make it pretty clear, also, that his global explanation for the hyphenation phenomenon is bogus.

The reason the hyphen appears in the first instance is shown by the second. The compositor was working from a manuscript in which the name was hyphenated.

Continued here.

Alas, I can’t easily seem to find the time for such an ambitious project.

Meanwhile, however, I’ve had some requests to see Howard live on the internet. Howard’s character does an inimitably charming and comical send-up  of Nazi pretensions. Moreover,  his comments are still relevant to those reactionary folk who in 2010 still seem to think that insinuating that  anti-Stratfordians are the moral and intellectual equivalent of  “holocaust deniers”  edifies their own preening sense of self worth. For this and other reasons, the film has become  a cult classic among the Oxfordians.

So, without further ado,  here’s Leslie Howard (who produced as well as starred in the film),  in persona “Horatio” Smith, on Shakespeare and Oxford (clip #1):

Some, you see, have marveled how its author, “Edward de Vere,” can still be writing musical video, four-hundred-and-six years after his decease.

When I wondered that out loud to myself on Utube, my comment was speedily deleted by the censors  (apparently not the brightest stars in the firmament), who may have taken it for a death threat against Sam Handley from An Emerald City, who seems to be the agent provocateur responsible for channeling this modern gem by the long-dead “no longer mourn for me when I am gone” Edward.

Update March 6, 2010: 14:59: On second thought, it has now positively been ascertained that all of the above, posted earlier today, is completely wrong. Your humble servitor unearthed the mysterious de Vere, who,  according to his own richly detailed and authoritative  MySpace biography, is very much alive today.

Indeed, the author was “Brought up under a mountain range in rural New Zealand.” His first musical production,  “a voice recording on cassette tape made with his brother for a time capsule and buried in the ground,”  was produced at the precocious and numerologically  propitious age of 7, and he is today many years later still involved in a number of musical projects, as well as being a founding member of An Emerald City.

Should anyone presume to doubt any of the above facts, I hasten to assure you that Mr. de Vere himself has posted documentary proof, in the form of a photograph in which he is pictured, with the brother in question, here. As anyone can see, the time capsule has just been buried; the two brothers memorialized the event on film, probably with a Kodak Instamatic,  anticipating the tune’s decryption by a later generation of musicologists.

His first album, from which “Mind Thoughts” is excerpted,  debuts in 2010, under  a new local label, “Banished from the Universe.” We sincerely apologize to Mr. de Vere for the confusion caused by the coincidence of names. It won’t happen again.

In other news, I am the gratified recipient (among several others)  of an essay from Professor Graham Holderness at Hertfordshire University clarifying his views on the authorship question. Still musing on a response, I will post Professor Holderness’ remarks in full once I’ve had a chance to more fully absorb their implications.  Meanwhile, his comments are already available kindness Micheal Prescott’s blog.

Stephanie Hughes of Politic Worm in that venue came back with a classic response, worthy of notice, which certainly captures my own first impressions of the erudite precision with which Holderness balances his quoted remarks last December with the need to save face among colleagues more overtly hostile to common reason:

It’s become clear to me over the passing years that the real problem we have with the English Departments is that they don’t care who wrote Shakespeare because what they really care about is the text and only the text. Had they cared they would not have succumbed to the inanities of the deconstruction fad of some decades ago, whereby it became dogma (for a time)  that the author and his or her intentions are of no importance.

Holderness may have made an unfortunate (for him) slip of the tongue in seeming to endorse Oxford, but now he puts us straight. Nope,….. all he cares about is the canon itself. It would make no difference to him “if it was written by a tinker.” Are we to be surprised by this? Didn’t Fred Boas remind us some time ago that it took the English Departments of Cambridge and Oxford 200 years before they would even allow Shakespeare to be performed on campus, much less taught?

The Holderness essay is also  reviewed, somewhat more favorably,  by Linda Theil on the SOS blog (from whence the present writer first learned of Holderness’ December 2009 comments on authorship): “Holderness speaks gentlemanly at length on his acceptance of the Stratfordian hypothesis,” replies Theil, but “I’m not sure he understands what a breath of fresh air his humor and relative freedom from dogmatism bring to the authorship discourse.”

“Fresh air” is also the subject of “Mind Thoughts,” and the levity of the presentation reminds us of the importance of remaining grounded in a sense of history as well as proportionality to the present.

Hughes is right about the  prescience of Doc Boas’ scholarship: the popular academic belief that only “scholars” own the posthumous body of the bard (or comprehend its genesis)  is an illusion, one of those “big lies” which is always so necessary for any durable ideology.

The artists, by “every word,” claim him too; his spirit can no more be imprisoned in the ivory tower of the Stratfordian fiction than a soap bubble can be captured by a four-year-old.

I want first to say “thank you” to the visitors who have come, even if for a brief time, to visit my site. Quite a number of you have actually registered, which is lovely, and a few less shy than others have even offered some pingbacks, emails, or commentaries to let me know you’ve read. The weeks since I last wrote here in November  have been full ones.

In late December and January I worked intensively with Lynne Kositsky on material for our Tempest book, and we’ve launched a new website, Shakespeare’s Tempest, as an internet repository for the articles we’ve written and for updating news on the book project. More generally, we hope to keep tabs on at least the most important outlines in current Tempest scholarship, so that the site might eventually become a kind of “one stop shopping” venue for those who are looking for solid scholarship about that particular play.

Currently the book proposal, with sample chapters on the “Tempest as Shrovetide Revelry,” is at a major academic book publisher.

More recently, I’ve done a lot of work on Wikipedia, developing what was once one a minor fetish into a real hobby, with my own page, which you can access here if you happen to be curious about what Wiki projects I’m involved in.  One of the more contentious articles was the one I seeded on Brief Chronicles, which swiftly became a candidate for  deletion.

As of today, March 4 (going on March 5), however,  it would appear that the Wiki editors in favor of retaining the entry  outnumber (and have out-argued) those who wanted to delete it on the grounds of its alleged “non-notability.”  As Hamlet would say, “I devised a new commission, wrote it fair…..”

Speaking of Brief Chronicles, there is some big news, “big” at least for the Oxfordians, shortly to announce on that score. But I’ll update that news in a later post within the next week or so.

Work on the Hydrachos project has been somewhat delayed due to circumstances beyond my control, but happily involving the business success of Dr. Carole Chaski, whose work with identifying authorship using computer-assisted analysis of syntactic patterns  continues to grow in influence and attract new clients, both actual and potential,  including government agencies.

As you may imagine, the potential uses for this software, which supplies the closest thing to a linguistic “fingerprint” known to in contemporary  linguistic practice, are enormous. A half-dozen early modern authorship enigmas stand ready to fall, like dominoes in a row, once we can harness the Alias system to the required early modern research strategies.

But the first literary-historical application of the system will be to investigate the authorship of the Hydrachos manuscript, which I hope can still happen some time within the next month.

Meanwhile, researchers at Cedar Buffalo, under the supervision of Dr. Sargur Srihari, are submitting the document to a second round of forensic handwriting analysis to attempt to disprove findings of their first paper, which tentatively identified the Hydrachos author as a famous 19th century American novelist. Assuming the second round of tests is unable to invalidate the first, the results will be made publicly available on this site and elsewhere.

Stay tuned. It promises to be a fun ride.

–R.S.

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, whose 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).

This blog is the second entry in my “Unsung Heroes” Series: it is dedicated to William Plumer Fowler (1901-1993) — poet, lawyer, and Shakespearean heretic.

From its inception in 1920, the case for Oxford’s authorship of the Shakespearean canon has been supported by stylistic analysis of the poetry and prose surviving under de Vere’s own name.

In Shakespeare Identified, Looney describes how he was first drawn to de Vere as a possible disguised Shakespeare by noticing some distinctly “Shakespearean” characteristics in Oxford’s “If Women Could be Fair” lyric.   This was the starting point for Looney’s attempt to excavate de Vere’s forgotten reputation as one of the most celebrated lyric poets of the early Elizabethan period.  Later Looney draws attention to a number of surprising connections between de Vere’s surviving poetry and the imagery and diction of the Shakespearean plays.

Looney’s approach to the question of style was impressionistic and made no claim to being exhaustive.

Over the years other scholars continued to explore the possibility that style might provide further corroboration of Looney’s theory; Charles Wisner Barrel’s 1947 Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly article, “Proof that Shakespeare’s Though and Imagery Dominate Oxford’s Own Statement of Creative Principles,” was one landmark study that advanced the case by, for the first time, considering Oxford’s prose instead of  his poetry, as a baseline for stylistic comparison.  

The list of lexical concurrencies reproduced by Joseph Sobran (1996) seventy-five years later is far more complete and, in an empirical sense at least, more persuasive than Looney’s was in demonstrating the poetic and linguistic affinity of between de Vere and Shakespeare.

Starting in 1987  however, the  argument that de Vere’s style is consistent with Shakespeare’s was challenged by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza in a series of articles based on the work of a Claremont McKenna “Stylometric Clinic.” The Clinic, which released results over a period of years in articles co-authored by Elliott and Valenza, compared de Vere’s extant poetry with Shakespeare’s by means of an ostensibly “objective” series of computer tests ( a bibliography of these publications, along with some of the Oxfordian challenges to Elliott and Valenza, is forthcoming on the site).

By far the most persuasive stylistic arguments in favor of de Vere’s authorship, however, are found in William Plumer Fowler’s massive 1986 book, Shakespeare Identified in Oxford’s Letters.

Instead of focusing on Oxford’s poetry,  which consists of at most a couple of dozen juvenile poems, many of them song lyrics, Fowler focused on 37 of de Vere’s surviving letters, which span over forty years and together comprise a sample of over 12,000 words.  A poet and lawyer without formal training in linguistics, and working in the days before computers had radically simplified such an undertaking, Fowler devoted more than fifteen years to exhaustively analyzing the linguistic correspondences connecting “Shakespeare” to Oxford’s extant letters.

A graduate of Roxbury Latin School, Dartmouth College, and Harvard Law School, Fowler was a  life-long “student-scholar” of the works of the poet-dramatist. He served for 12 years as the president of The Shakespeare Club of Boston. By the time he finished his task in 1986, Fowler was legally blind and 85 years old.

Even Oxfordian scholars, let alone their critics, have yet to pay Fowler his due. His  book received almost no publicity, and was eclipsed in the public eye by the high tech but dubious conclusions of the Claremont Clinic, which made no effort to rebut Fowler’s work, and instead followed the (prudent) path of entirely ignoring it (and Oxford’s letters).

Fowler’s book may with justice be described as the most neglected and — ultimately– revelatory of all contributions to the canon of Oxfordian criticism.  The present writer has repeatedly challenged both Oxfordians and their critics (specifically, Terry Ross and David Kathman) to prove that the linguistic correspondences documented in Fowler’s 909 page book are “coincidental” expressions of a generic Elizabethan idiom. This could easily be accomplished by running some control samples on comparable bodies of Elizabethan prose correspondence, of which many are available.

Apparently, however, advocates of the orthodox view of authorship lack the confidence in their own beliefs to undertake this challenge.

Absent such disproof, the present writer is satisfied that the evidence assembled by Fowler goes very far to justify the author’s optimistic conclusion that the letters

effectively corroborate, through the consistency and distinctiveness of their correspondences to Shakespeare, Mr. Looney’s 1920 conclusion, in telling E.  Vere’s story ‘to the yet unknowing world,’ even as Horatio would have spoken…They are far more than just Oxford’s letters, they are Shakespeare’s letters.

(XXXV)

Recto side of 1846 "Hydrachos" Manuscript.

The Following Press release, dated Oct. 19, 2009, is reproduced from the original issued by the  Institute for Linguistic Evidence (ILE). Although it does not directly concern Shakespeare or early modern materials,  the release does report on my ongoing research program in the application of forensic methods to the study of historical and literary documents.

Results of the “Hydrachos” research program, which also involves collaboration with scholars from Buffalo State University’s CEDAR Forensic Handwriting division, should be available by the end of February.

(I-Newswire) October 19, 2009 – Georgetown DE – -Plans to use biometric linguistics to analyze a controversial and potentially important early American literary document were announced by  Institute for for Linguistic Evidence (ILE) founder Dr. Carole E. Chaski. In collaboration with Dr. Roger Stritmatter, a Coppin State University literary historian, Chaski will employ the patent pending ALIAS biometric Linguistic system to solve this 163-year-old literary “Whodunnit?”

This collaboration between the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and Dr. Stritmatter will be the first time that author identification methods developed for the forensic setting, having repeatedly met legal standards for admissible scientific evidence, will be applied to a literary puzzle. This particular document is perfect for this new collaboration because it is brief, just like the typical threat letter or suicide note or nasty letter to the SEC.

“This April 1846 satirical manuscript, The PHILADal GAZETTE – EXTR, includes seven pen and ink drawings accompanying a 437-word commentary on U.S. and World news of the 1840’s, as well as obscure references to contemporary circumstances known only to the writer and the intended recipient(s)” said Dr. Stritmatter. “The document’s leading image is a rider seated on a sea monster, racing several ships to deliver mail and news between Liverpool and America. Several prominent features of the manuscript, purchased from a New Jersey manuscript dealer, suggest that the author may be a well-known 19th century American novelist.”

High quality images of the manuscript with drawings and transcript are available, here.

A clue to the document’s possible genesis lies in an anonymous contribution to the June 19, 1847 issue of Yankee Doodle, a popular humor magazine.

“We are happy to announce on behalf of the Postmaster General,” writes the satire, “that a reward of One thousand Dollars will be paid to any person who will procure him a private interview with the Sea-serpent, of Nahant notoriety. Mr. Johnson is convinced that an economical arrangement can be made with the Serpent, for the transportation of the European Mails from Boston to Halifax.”

Did two anonymous satirists of the 1840’s both hit on the idea of a Sea Serpent carrying the international mail? Or is the author of the anonymous Yankee Doodle squib also the creator of the Hydrachos satire?

“This opportunity to use ALIAS biometric linguistic analysis on an important literary puzzle turns the table on the relationship between literary author identification and forensic author identification,” Dr. Carole E. Chaski, the Executive Director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence said.

“For the last fifteen years, literary scholars have been attempting to apply literary methods of author identification to forensic problems, and have not succeeded for two reasons.

“First, the basic techniques for literary author identification typically require far longer documents than the forensic setting usually allows; a novel is far longer than the typical threat letter, for instance.

“Second, literary author identification is grounded in close reading and other qualitative methods which do not meet the legal bar for admissible scientific evidence, such as repeatability, objectivity and error calculations.”

Dr. Stritmatter, an Associate Professor at Baltimore’s Coppin State, will use the ALIAS biometric linguistic system to further his investigation of the document. Dr. Stritmatter was awarded an ILE mini-grant during the 2009 funding cycle to pursue the research. Investigators will employ ALIAS to test several alternative authorship candidates to cross-validate results and establish the plausibility of the null hypothesis.

“I am excited by the opportunity to employ ALIAS to solve this problem,” said Stritmatter. “Given the small sample size, we need a method that can make fine linguistic discriminations to determine authorship even of short documents. By testing the document against a pool of possible suspects and mid-19th century controls, we will know how definitive any possible attribution might be.”

About The Institute for Linguistic Evidence

The Institute for Linguistic EvidenceEvidence was founded in 1998 by Dr. Carole E. Chaski as a non-profit, scientific research organization. The Institute, also called ILE, conducts pioneering research and development of methods for handling language as evidence and providing validated, tested and proven methods for answering forensically significant questions. ILE is the primary sponsor of the forensic linguistics professional organization, The Association for Linguistic Evidence (TALE).

ILE is the research and development wing of ALIAS Technology LLC. Based on litigation-independent ILE research and method validation, ALIAS provides forensic consulting services and the first on-demand biometric linguistic analysis solutions to law enforcement and investigators, security consultants and government agencies, commercial organizations, attorneys, the academic community and general public.
Media Contact

The London Times: Catholic Bard on the Brain.

As those who have followed the authorship question over a period of time may be aware, over the last decade a growing showdown has been shaping up within the orthodox Shakespeare community over the question of the bard’s religious affiliations.

A quick and dirty solution to the longterm problem of the “mystery” of Shakespeare’s biography is to postulate that he was a secret catholic.

The Catholic bard theory is like a cheap magic trick.

Voila! Suddenly the misfit between the biographical documents and the literary work is explained.  No need to question who wrote the stuff.  Like many English recusants who practiced the Old Faith, Shakespeare was forced to adopt a public persona at odds with his private faith. He lived life wearing a mask!

The only trouble with this theory is that, while purporting to resolve the biographical problem, it actually only makes it worse, as Peter Dickson argued in a 2004 University of Tennessee Law Review article.

That’s why an impressive roster of older Shakespearean scholars (among them Stanley Wells, Robert Bearman, James Shapiro, Johnathan Bate, and Katherine Duncan-Jones), who are not so easily seduced by the latest fad and know when they are being led into a trap, have steadfastly resisted falling for the Catholic bard theory.

But Richard Owen, in a London Times December 22 story, “Cryptic Signatures that ‘prove Shakespeare Was a Secret Catholic,’” appears as blithely unaware of the problem as he is irresponsible in promoting gossip as credible journalism.

While the biographical record of the Stratford Shakespeare does contain definite traces of Catholic sympathy,  including evidence that he was an investor in the Blackfriars Gatehouse, the Shakespearean works taken as a whole are unmistakably Protestant in their ethos. Adding additional “documentary” evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism,  even if it could pass the smell test for legitimacy — which the “evidence” of Owen’s article most certainly doesn’t — does not salvage the Stratford biography, as Dickson has cogently argued for over ten years now.

Having mentioned the “smell test,” let me disgress for just a moment. The caption to the Times Online graphic assures us with a straight face that the name “Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomiensis,”  which appears “in the visitors’ book at the Venerable English College in Rome” as a visitor in 1587, is “thought to be a pseudonym of William Shakespeare.”

Since William of Stratford’s whereabouts in 1587 are otherwise undocumented, this “Arthurus Stratfordus” must actually be the Bard!  If this doesn’t seem logical, you may not have studied enough theology in an English Department.  Obviously anyone associated with “Stratford” in 16th century Europe (most of which constitutes one or another of the “lost years” of the alleged author of Hamlet and 12th Night),  must be the  divine William, even if his name is actually Arthur and his surname is either Stratford or Wigomienses.

It’s a pseudonym, dummy!

As if this isn’t loopy enough, the same article also announces a second sacred relic from the lost land of Elizabeth I: in 1589 arrived  in Rome one “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis,” who, the London Times dispatch assures us without even cracking a smile, must also have been Shakespeare of Stratford. Surely this is nothing short of a miracle: two pseudonyms in as many years.

Questions:  Is it possible — however bizarre it might seem to the conspiracy theorists at the Times Online –  that “Arthurus Stratfordus” was actually just Arthur Stratford?  Or that Williamus Clerkue” was just William Clerke?   Has anyone tested this theory?   Is there any reason, beyond the fact that there are “lost years” in the traditional biography, and the two gents in question have names that soundly vaguely like they might have had something to do with Warwickshire, that this pair of pilgrims are identified with with the Bard?   Is “Arthurus Stratford” the same man known known in Lancashire, according to Michael Wood, as “William Shakshafte“?

How many pseudonyms hath Shakespeare, anyway?

The answer, apparently, is “as many as we need to distract the public from the ‘Wolfish Earl’ and ‘Diablo Incarnato,’ Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.”

One would think that Vatican scholars would already know what any internet dummy equipped with Google can now discover in five minutes:Wigomiensis is an early Latin variant for Wigorniensis, and refers to the diocese of Worcester. The name is Arthur Stratford of Worcester, as Robert Bearman pointed out in The Shakespeare Quarterly more than a year ago.

But then, the reasoning must go, if Shakespeare could change his name, he could also change his diocese, couldn’t he?

This is not to say that Shakespeare the writer was unsympathetic to the plight of such recusants as the martyred father Edmund Campion (1540-1581). Indeed, as Oxfordian scholar Richard Desper has pointed out in an article originally published in The Elizabethan Review and reprinted at The Shakespeare Fellowship, Campion’s fate is central to some of the more obscure passages of 12th Night.  Likewise, Poor Tom in Lear can easily be read as a Shakespeare’s comment on the circumstance of recusants, who were hunted down like animals by the Elizabethan security forces.

But being sympathetic to the situation of recusants is not the same as being one. As Peter Dickson says, read as a whole, it is impossible to reconcile the humanist and Protestant high church ethos of the Shakespearean ouevre with the philosophical outlook of an English recusant.

An example from Hamlet may clarify why this is so.

Hamlet’s father may have gone to his grave “unhouseled and unaneled” — which is to say, without Catholic last rites — but Hamlet himself was a student at Wittenberg,  the 16h century center of academic Protestantism, not to mention, through Georg Joachim Rheticus, a stronghold of Copernican astronomy. All this, as numerous scholars have pointed out, is relevant to the exegesis of the play as a reformation parable.

One may add to this that over a hundred years of careful analysis of Shakespeare’s Biblical influences — which are very significant — shows unmistakably that the Bible with which Shakespeare was most conversant was the Geneva translation, prepared during the 1550’s in Geneva by Calvinist refugees from Mary Tudor’s counter-reformation government and first published in Geneva in 1560.

The Genevan translation was so inflammatory from a Catholic perspective that even the Anglican establishment disapproved of it and quickly attempted to replace it with a more moderate Protestant translation (The Bishop’s, 1576).  To suppose that an Elizabethan recusant would depend primarily for his Biblical instruction on this translation of the Bible makes no sense at all.

Stephen Greenblatt assures us in a recent review of Johnathan Bate’s Soul of the Age that Shakespearean scholars are too timid. They don’t do enough “imagining,” says Greenblatt. Greenblatt, who has flirted with the recusant theory  in a number of his works, might well be gratified by all the bold “imagining” that the London Times seems to be regularly bringing to the task of bardography these days.Certainly it is hard to ask for a better example of how postmodern historiography seems to have abandoned all principle except finding the answers we already want.

But to “imagine” that Shakspeare was a recusant is like imagining an English Puritan who fortified his faith with daily reading of the Vulgate and distributed references to its language and points of doctrine throughout his theological tracts. Indeed, as Concordia University Professor Daniel Wright points out in The Anglican Shakespeare: Elizabethan Orthodoxy in the Great Histories (a book based on Wright’s Ball State University PhD dissertation), and as many historically informed Shakespearean scholars are aware, the Shakespearean history plays are suffused with the rhetoric and spirit of the reformation.

They are no more the work of a recusant that they are the work of William of Stratford, by any of his imagined pseudonyms.

All this, however, is apparently unknown to London Times writers  assigned to cover Shakespearean topics.