Critical Survey, an established peer-reviewed academic journal edited by Professor Graham Holderness at Hertfordshire University, has accepted for publication a 13,000-word study of Frances Meres’ Palladis Tamia (1598) and its role in the authorship debate. The new article, “Francis Meres Revisited: Wit, Design, and Authorship in Palladis Tamia,” will appear in the Fall 2023 (35.3) issue of Critical Survey.

The first and only work of the 1590s that discusses “Shakespeare” as a writer of literary drama, Palladis Tamia, has long been heralded as an essential document in the orthodox account of the genesis of the Shakespeare plays.

1598 title page of Palladis Tamia (“The Steward or Accountant of [the speareshaker] Pallas Athena.” Image courtesy Compendium of Renaissance Drama.

 According to Roland Lewis in his massive two-volume study, The Shakespeare Documents (1969), Palladis Tamia contains “the most elaborate statement about Shakespeare in all contemporary Elizabethan literature,” and to Ian Wilson in his 1993 Shakespeare: The Evidence, the book “breaks new ground in the contemporary recognition of [Shakespeare’s] contribution to literature,” including a passage “that has been of  greater value to generations of literary scholars than [Meres] could have realized.”  

The forthcoming article enlarges upon the insights of the late K.C. Ligon and the late Robert Detobel in their 2009 Brief Chronicles article “Francis Meres and the Earl of Oxford,” confirming that Meres knew full well the long term value and significance of his book for the Shakespeare biographer or Shakespeare scholar. In his book Meres explicitly identifies the ”real” Shakespeare as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. To make this identification Meres employs “centuries of doctrine and practice of esoteric communication and commonplace book construction” as well as his own explicit statements of method and consistent practices in the book.

The article will be the second published in Critical Survey to openly endorse an Oxfordian solution to the longstanding enigmas of Shakespeare studies. The first, “A Kingdom for a Mirth’: Shakespeare’s ‘Fatal Cleopatra’ and the Worm’s Turn,” by Roger Stritmatter and Shelly Maycock, appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Critical Survey.

Critical Survey was founded by Bryan Loughrey, whom editor Holderness describes in a recent memorial as a “mover and shaker” who “rattled cages, fluttered dove-cotes and set cats among pigeons. . . a true radical” who “questioned everything, right down to the roots of his own assumptions.”