Re: Sulch *OXtraBEEForeness* meat *soVEAL* behind
art
>>_____________________________________
>>My note: There was more than one Promus,
>>an antiquarian, Alan Keene, found 200 Bacon
>>commonplace books in an estate sale. Those,
>>like so many other Bacon finds, have disappeared.
bookb...@yahoo.com wrote:
> I couldn't find a source on Alan Keen and 200
> Francis Bacon commonplace books, only Sir
> Edmund Bacon's report to Royal Society about them.
> But I did discover info about Alan Keen's "the case for
> Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562-1615) as the real Bard of Avon", at
> http://stromata.typepad.com/stromata_blog/2006/01/the_nevilleshak.html.
> The commentator in blog format [HLAS's own Tom *VEAL*]
> does a hatchet job on The Truth Will Out in his review.
-----------------------------------------------
*VEAL* , n. [L. vitellus.] The flesh of a CALF killed for the table.
..............................................
. Love's Labour's Lost > Act V, scene II
.
LONGAVILLE: You have *a double tongue within your MASK* ,
. And would afford my speechless vizard half.
KATHARINE: *VEAL* , quoth the Dutchman. Is not *VEAL* a CALF?
LONGAVILLE: A CALF, fair lady!
KATHARINE: No, a fair lord CALF.
LONGAVILLE: Let's part the word.
KATHARINE: No, I'll not be your half
. Take all, and wean it; *it may prove an OX* .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
<<His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some
of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's
trade, but when he kill'd a CALFe he would doe it in a high style,
and make a speech.>> - JOHN *AUBREY* , 1669-96, _Brief Lives_
-------------------------------------------------------------------
. _Ulysses_ by Joyce
.
<<Break the news to her gently, *AUBREY* ! I shall die!
With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops
and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels,
chased by Ades of *MAGDALEN* with the *TAILOR's* shears.
A scared CALF's face gilded with *MARMALADE*
I don't want to be debagged! Don't you play the *giddy OX* with me!
Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle.
A DEAF gardener, *APRONed, MASKed* with Matthew Arnold's face,>>
------------------------------------------------------------------
_______ "[OAR]MAR. MAGDALENE"
_______ "[ORA]NGE MARMALADE"
-----------------------------------------------------------------
<<[Alice] took down a *JAR* from one of the shelves as she passed;
.
. it was labelled '[ORA]NGE MARMALADE',
.
but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like
to drop the *JAR* for fear of killing somebody, so managed
to put it into one of the *cupBOARds* as she fell past it.>>
-----------------------------------------------------
<<Even by the stern and direful GOD OF WAR,
Whose sinewy neck in battle nE'ER did bow,
Who conquers where he *COMES in EVERy JAR* >> - V&A
---------------------------------------------------------
. [COMES = Latin for EARL]
.
<<Edwardus COMES Oxon Et quidam Ed{ward}us Baynam de Ciuitate
pdca *TAYLOR* fuer insimul in quodam loco voco le Backe yarde
infra doum Mansonal Willi Cecyll Milit apud St Clement Danes>>
.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/DOCS/brinck.html
.
_____ *ANAGRAMMED EARL O*
_____ *ORANGE MARMALADE*
-----------------------------------------------------------
___ "The Pig-Tale" _Sylvie and Bruno Concluded_
.
"Once there were a Pig, and a Accordion,
. and two *JARs of [ORA]NGE MARMALADE* --
.
"The dramatis personae," murmured the Professor. "Well, what then?"
.
"So, when the Pig played on the Accordion," Bruno went on,
"one of the *JARs of [ORA]NGE MARMALADE* didn't like the tune,
and the other *JAR of [ORA]NGE MARMALADE* did like the tune-
-I know I shall get confused among those
*JARs of [ORA]NGE MARMALADE* , Sylvie!" he whispered anxiously.
------------------------------------------------
. King Henry VIII > Act I, scene III
.
LOVELL: Faith, my lord,
. I hear of none, but the new proclamation
. That's clapp'd upon the court-gate.
Chamberlain: What is't for?
LOVELL: The reformation of our travell'd gallants,
. That fill the court with quarrels, talk, & *TAILORS*.
......................................................
____ *TAILLEURS* : *TAILORS* (French, Dutch)
____ {anagram}
____ *ALL IS TRUE*
......................................................
<<While practicing fencing with Edward Baynam, a *TAILOR*,
. in the backyard of Cecil's house in the Strand, the
. 17-year-old Oxford killed an unarmed UNDERCOOK named
. THOMAS BRINCKNELL with a thrust to the *THIGH* >>
--------------------------------------------------------------
*FEEBLE*: I WILL do my good WILL, sir; you can have no more.
.
FALSTAFF: Well said, good woman's *TAILOR*! well said,
. courageous *FEEBLE*! thou wilt be as valiant as the
. wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse. Prick the
woman's *TAILOR*: well, Master Shallow; DEEP, Master Shallow.
...................................................
. t{O}.th[E].on[L]ie.[B]eg[E]tt[E]r.o[F].
.
. [F]er[E]tt[E]ge[B]ei[L]on[E]ht{O}t
.
. [F]ee[B]le{O}
. r___ a
. a__ c
. n__ o
. c__ n
- i "the Ondt": [F]RANCIS [B]acon
. s "the GraceHOPEr": [E.O.]xford
.........................................................
. FW 414: fable one, *FEEBLE* too.
. Let us *HERE* consider the *caSUS* ,
. my dear little *COUSIS*
. of the Ondt and the GraceHOPEr.
.
FW 507.6: clapping his hands in a *FEEBLE* sort of way
. and systematically mixing with the public
.
FW 419.(*F3*): My in risible *UNIVERSE* youdly haud find
. Sulch *OXtraBEEForeness* meat *soVEAL* behind.
. Your feats end enormous, your VOLUMES immense,
(May the Graces I HOPEd for sing your ONDTship song sense!),
. Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!
. But, Holy SALTMARTIN, why can't you beat time?
---------------------------------------------------------
"Sulch *OXtraBEEForeness* meat *soVEAL* behind"
.......................................
Posted by Tom *VEAL* on Tuesday, January , 2006
in Books, Shakespeare Controversies
http://stromata.typepad.com/stromata_blog/2006/01/the_nevilleshak.html
The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu
<<Reviewing the newest tome in the Shakespeare authorship
“controversy”, The Truth Will Out by Brenda James and William D.
Rubinstein, is harder than I expected. This “case” for Sir Henry
Neville (c. 1562–1615) as the real Bard of Avon is such a mass of
howlers, begged questions and non sequiturs that one is at a loss to
decide what a critique should bring to the fore and what should be
omitted for want of space. What should I do, for instance, about this
bizarre effusion on page 261?
Athena, bride [sic] of Apollo (the sun god), held a great shining
spear, from which the light was reflected in such a way that three
sections of sunlight were said to emanate from it. She is also
known as the Tenth Muse [sic], whose qualities encompass those
of all the others [sic]. Her name in Greek actually means
‘spear shaker’ [sic! sic! sic!].
That isn’t central to much of anything,
but how can one pass it by in silence?
The book comes near to raising its own “authorship question”: Can a
discourse this ill-argued and uninformed be from the pens of two
academic historians, one of whom has respectable historical works on
his résumé? It’s true that Professor Rubinstein’s expertise doesn’t
lie in the pre-modern era, but moving to a different terrain ought not
to have deprived him of all of his capacity to read and reason. The
theory that The Truth Will Out was written by a precocious but too
cocky teenager and then passed off as the product of more mature minds
is highly attractive. Perhaps the True Author is someone like Prince
Harry, whose royal position forbids his association with a thesis
that would undermine the national faith in William Shakespeare of
Stratford.
Whatever the merits of that speculation, I’m going to try developing a
full review by taking advantage of the blog format to examine various
facets of the book in semi-random order. The first is a matter far
more crucial than the etymology of “Athena”. James & Rubinstein
(hereafter “J&R”) assert that Henry Neville is superior to all
other Shakespearean pretenders, because there exists “concrete
documentation” linking him to the works.
They proffer, in fact, three documents: a manuscript, dated 1602,
summarizing “Personal Services Appertaining to the Throne and Kings of
This Realm”, marginal notes in a copy of the 1550 edition of Edward
Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster
and York, and a page of scribbles known as the “Northumberland
Manuscript”, which has long been a playground for Bacon-is-Shakespeare
promoters. Today’s topic is the second item, which, if one believes
J&R, represents Henry Neville’s personal notes on one of the major
sources for Shakespeare’s historical dramas.
In 1940 an antiquarian book dealer acquired this volume in a library
sale and became interested in the marginalia. He and a colleague wrote
a book about it: Alan Keen & Roger Lubbock, The Annotator: The Pursuit
of an Elizabethan Reader of Halle's Chronicle Involving some Surmises
About the Early Life of William Shakespeare (London: 1954; available
on-line, though not free of charge, in the invaluable Questia book
collection). This study is noteworthy as the first, I believe, to
advance the now fashionable speculation that Shakespeare spent part of
his adolescence in a Catholic household in Lancashire. The grounds for
that conclusion and for the underpinning proposition that the marginal
notes are Shakespeare’s own are highly tenuous and won’t be examined
here. So far as I can tell, hardly anyone, even among the Lancastrian
theorists, takes them seriously.
J&R claim that Keen and Lubbock were partly right: The annotator
wrote Shakespeare, but he was their candidate, not the Stratford
man. How they go about “demonstrating” this hypothesis provides
useful insight into their methods and credibility.
The handwritten notes need to be connected in two directions: to the
plays attributed to Shakespeare on one side and to Henry Neville on
the other. J&R make no attempt to show the former. All that they say
is that the copy of Halle “was annotated, and the annotations bore
such a close relationship to the concerns of Shakespeare’s history
plays that Keen reasoned Shakespeare might have been the
annotator.” [p. 232] This is a form of appeal to authority not
uncommon in anti-Stratfordian writings: An isolated someone has
adumbrated a conclusion that the writer likes, so he adopts it as
incontrovertible fact without further discussion. In this instance,
the resemblances that Keen put forward, in language and subject
matter, between the history plays and the Halle annotations have
won few, if any, adherents. J&R offer no justification
for their acceptance of an extreme minority view.
More attention is given to trying to establish that the notes were
Neville’s own. J&R begin with Keen’s opinion, based rather
precariously on the fact that a label attached to the Halle volume is
printed in the same typeface as one found in a different book, that
both belonged in the 18th Century to a Robert Worsley. More than one
man bore that name at the right time. Among them was a descendant of
Henry Neville. The case that he was the Halle-owning Worsley was,
J&R assure us, “convincingly made” in an anonymous article in the
October 1993 issue of the Edward de Vere Newsletter.
By following the link, the reader can readily ascertain that the
article presents no reasons for its identification of the owner of the
book with any particular Robert Worsley. It simply picks the
possibility most convenient for its own notion, viz., that the 17th
Earl of Oxenford was the annotator. Nothing rules out Keen’s own
guess: a Yorkshire Robert Worsley who was a collateral descendant of
the 16th Century owner of the book. He does not appear to have been
related to the Nevilles.
J&R also assert, “The handwriting of the marginalia is almost
certainly Neville’s” [p. 89]. They offer no supporting argumentation.
Their certainty, it turns out, rests on “Neville’s love of
continuously varying his writing styles, and of using scribes” [p.
233]. In other words, handwriting evidence can’t prove that the notes
are not Neville’s; therefore, he must have written them.
We need not, however, leave the question without a conclusion: The
annotations themselves provide clear and convincing evidence that
Henry Neville did not write them. The annotator on occasion drops
hints of his private opinions, which are far removed from Neville’s.
Yet more emphatically, A. [the annotator] had a strong Roman
Catholic, even clerical, bias. Halle often let himself go with
eloquence and enthusiasm on the baseness, dishonesty, avarice, power,
and general undesirability of priests, cardinals, and Popes, and A.
did not let these passages pass unnoticed. Halle wrote: ‘The most
ambicious desire and avaricious appetite of certayne persones callyng
themselves spiritual fathers, but indeede carnall covetous and gredy
glottons aspiring for honor and not for vertue to the proud see of
Rome’, and A. would not stand for that: ‘The Author (if he dyd write
it) wrote it in the afternoone.’ When Halle told of the first
rebellion against Henry IV, expressing himself at length and bitterly
against monastical persons better fed than taught, and imagining their
vituperations against any prince who might justly reclaim some part
of their possessions, A. commented: ‘here he begynneth to rayle.’
‘Allways lying,’ he said of another tirade of Halle's against
‘proud priors’. . . .
A. betrayed his own allegiance most clearly in, ‘Note that when he
speakethe of the Pope he sheweth himself of the englisshe schisme a
favorer’ (when Halle writes of ‘the Romishe bishop’). Once, he even
let his Catholic loyalty stand before his patriotism: ‘a stowt bisshop
of fraunce so in defiaunce of a prince to speke.' [Keen & Lubbock, op.
cit., pp. 12–13]
Those sentiments are inconceivable from the hand of Henry Neville,
who, as J&R themselves are well aware, was a firm Protestant and
a promoter of anti-Catholic legislation. Like many of his co-
religionists of that time, he imbued his faith with a touch of
paranoia: While ambassador to France, he worried that his Scottish
opposite number might be a Papist sympathizer, and J&R offer as one of
his motives for complicity in the Earl of Essex’s abortive coup d’etat
a genuine fear that Queen Elizabeth might will her crown to the
Catholic Infanta of Spain. That doesn’t sound like a man who, in the
privacy of his study, sniffed at “the English schism” and lambasted
criticism of monks.
This part of J&R’s “concrete documentation” is, one must conclude,
composed of sand without mortar. The others, as we shall see
presently, are no more solid.>>
-----------------------------------------------
The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (2): The “Tower Notebook”
<<The “documentary evidence” that supposedly goes furthest to prove
Neville’s authorship is an anonymous 196-page manuscript bearing the
title, “Serieantiez of sundrie kindes, Namely, Personall Services
appertaining to the thronne and kings of this Realme as well in tymes
of warre as of peace and pastime, Especially at there Coronation,
Copyed and collected out of the Recordes in the tower Anno 1602”.
James & Rubinstein deal with only one page of this document,
describing posts of honor claimed by various personages at the
coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. This, they declare, “contains many
parallels with the coronation scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII,
although Henry VIII was not written or performed until 1613, more than
ten years later” [p. 44].
Act IV, Scene 1 of that play shows Anne and her attendants in
procession to the ceremony. The elaborate stage directions, captioned
“The Order of the Coronation”, draw heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicle
(1587), the source for much else in the play. The playwright
subtracted a little (omitting the Earl of Oxford in his office of
Great Lord Chamberlain, for instance) and altered a couple of names
(e. g., the Earl of Arundel for the Earl of Surrey) but neither added
nor rearranged anything. By and large, he simply copied. (For a
detailed comparison, vide W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s
Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared, pp. 484-5
(1896).)
The “Tower Notebook”, as J&R call it, has just two points of
overlap with “The Order of the Coronation” (all quotations from
J&R’s transcription on pp. 45-6 of their book;
bracketed inserts are theirs):
1. Notebook: “maior of London to serve the k[ing] in p[er]son
in the halle and his chamb[e]r with a cup gold, & that his fee
to cary awaye”
Henry VIII: “Maior of London, bearing the Mace.” (Cf. Holinshed:
“then after them went the maior of London with his mace”.)
2. Notebook: “Barons 5 ports claym to cary the canapie
on 4 Lances gylt sylver. 4 men at a lance.”
Henry VIII: “A Canopy borne by foure of the Cinque-Ports; under
it, the Queene in her Robe; in her haire richly adorned with Pearle,
Crowned.” (Cf. Holinshed: “Then proceeded foorth the queene in a
circot and robe of purple velvet furred with ermine, in hir here,
coiffe, and circlet as she had saturdaie; and over hir was borne
the canopie by foure of the five ports”.)
That’s it. Fourteen persons or groups, not counting Anne herself,
make up the procession in Henry VIII. All are listed in Holinshed.
Only the two shown above appear in the Notebook, the rest of whose
material has no reflection in the play.
Is there any reason to believe, on the strength of these *FEEBLE*
parallels, that the author of Henry VIII made use of, much less
personally compiled, the document to which J&R attach such
significance? None is visible.
Nor is there much reason to credit J&R’s assertion that the manuscript
“is unquestionably from Sir Henry Neville” [p. 47]. Their proof rests
on a handful of weak or spurious arguments.
1. Neville was living in the Tower of London in 1602, the date on
the cover page, condemned for misprision of treason (for having failed
to disclose to the authorities his advance knowledge of the Earl of
Essex’s planned coup d’etat of February 1601). He could have broken
the monotony of his imprisonment by hiring a scribe to comb through
the Tower archives, and J&R fancifully elaborate on how he hoped to
win back Queen Elizabeth’s favor by writing a play featuring her
parents, for which the cited page in the Notebook furnished background
material. Why, though, should we think that more likely than the
straightforward hypothesis that a royal scrivener compiled the data to
assist in resolving the disputes about precedence and protocol that
were endemic to the Court?
2. The Notebook first came to light, J&R tell us, in 1954, when its
owner donated it to the Lincolnshire Record Office. That owner was a
collateral descendant of Henry Neville. Moreover, the document was
“bundled together with other works also annotated by Neville, and with
a letter on a subject about which he had been in correspondence” [p.
227]. The letter is never mentioned again, so we can’t judge whether
it bears on the question. (J&R’s uncharacteristically tentative
phrasing suggests that it doesn’t.) The works allegedly “annotated by
Neville” are two manuscript copies of the famous diatribe Leicester’s
Commonwealth (1584), which have marginal notes in an unknown hand. J&R
think that Neville wrote them but offer only the thinnest of support.
The principal points are (i) “the name ‘Neville’ is emboldened and/or
commented on every time it appears” and (ii) Neville was “together in
Scotland in 1583” with Charles Paget, a Roman Catholic exile who may
have had a hand in writing Commonwealth. The former means little
without information about comments and “emboldenings” elsewhere in the
text, which J&R do not supply. The latter is almost certainly wrong.
J&R present no evidence that Neville and Paget met in 1583, and Paget
probably wasn’t in Scotland at all that year. He normally resided in
Paris or Rouen. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, he visited England in 1583, apparently in
furtherance of an abortive Catholic conspiracy, but went no farther
north than Sussex. Other supposed indications of Neville’s
responsibility for the Leicester’s Commonwealth annotations are less
cogent than these. Even if they were his, of course, that would
scarcely prove that he also put together the Tower Notebook. From
the fact that two books were at one time part of the same library,
it does not follow that the same man wrote them!
3. J&R think it significant that “The role of the Cinque Port
Barons is stressed [sic – a bit of an exaggeration] both in the
Notebook and in the play of Henry VIII” [p. 220]. Neville, they inform
us, was himself a baron of the Cinque Ports [p. 47]. From that “fact”,
they spin out a tale about how he may have expected to be one of King
James’ canopy bearers and suggest that the opening lines of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 125 express his disappointment at being passed
over. Unfortunately for their argument, Henry Neville was not a baron
of the Cinque Ports. That honorific then belonged to the Members of
Parliament for the boroughs that comprised the Confederation of the
Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, Sandwich, Winchelsea,
Rye and Seaford). Neville never sat for any of those places, nor was
he a member of Parliament at all in 1602. Owing to his imprisonment,
he had not been able to stand in the election of 1601. Before then, he
had successively represented the borough of New Windsor, the county of
Sussex and the borough of Liskeard in Cornwall; none of them belongs
to the Cinque Ports. Where J&R got their odd notion, I can’t imagine,
but this error vitiates not just their discussion of the Tower
Notebook but also their repeated invocations of Sonnet 125’s
canopy-carrying line as some kind of pro-Neville evidence.
4. One of the persons mentioned in the Notebook is “Jon Lo[rd]
Latimer” (John Neville, Third Baron Latimer (1493–1543)), who served
as “sewer” (banquet supervisor) at the Boleyn coronation. That
reference sets J&R off on a flight of fancy: “[A] Neville . . . is
foregrounded here, making it even more likely that these annotations
were written by [Henry] Neville, and that he had originally chosen
this member of the Neville ‘clan’ to feature in this play” [p. 223].
They then must concoct a labyrinthine explanation of why Latimer does
not in fact appear. The only Neville on stage is Lord Abergavenny
(George Neville, third Baron Bergavenny (c.1469–1535)), a minor
character whom J&R confuse with Henry Neville’s grandfather, Sir
Edward Neville (c.1482–1538).
Like the marginalia discussed in Part 1, the Tower Notebook lacks any
discernible link to either Shakespeare’s works or Henry Neville.
What’s more, J&R’s incessant errors of reasoning and fact suggest that
they either lack competence in handling their material or are so
caught up in their thesis that they have lost the ability to check
their work for accuracy. One wonders again whether The Truth Will
Out can really be the work product of its nominal authors.>>
-----------------------------------------------
The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (3): Filching from the Baconians
<<The third of the documents in which James & Rubinstein claim to find
proof of Sir Henry Neville’s authorship of “Shakespeare” has long been
a staple of the Baconian strand of anti-Stratfordian argument. It
consists of the first page of a 90 page manuscript volume. E. K.
Chambers gives this description [II William Shakespeare:
A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), p. 196]:
The MS., reproduced as a whole in F. J. Burgoyne, Collotype Facsimile
and Type Transcript of an Elizabethan MS. at Alnwick Castle (1904),
is imperfect, but still contains some essays and speeches by
Francis Bacon, a letter by Sidney, and a copy of Leicester’s
Commonwealth. On f.1 is the beginning of a list of contents, and the
rest of the page has been covered by a second hand with scribbles,
which include (a) the name of ‘Mr ffrauncis Bacon’; (b) many
repetitions of the whole or part of the name ‘William Shakespeare’;
(c) the titles ‘Rychard the second’ and ‘Rychard the third’; (d) an
inexact quotation of [Shakespeare’s] [The Rape of] Lucrece, 1086–7;
(e) the word ‘honorificabilitudine’ (in Love’s Lab. Lost, v.i.44,
‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’); (f) the title ‘Asmund and Cornelia’;
(g) references to ‘Ile of Dogs frmnt’ and ‘Thomas Nashe & inferior
plaiers’; (h) the names ‘Dyrmonth’ and ‘Adam’. . . . The date cannot
be earlier than 1597, when Nashe’s Isle of Dogs was suppressed [this
play, produced in July 1597 and quickly banned, is now lost] and Rich.
II and Rich. III printed, and it is probably not earlier than 1598,
when Love’s Lab. Lost was printed. Bacon, here ‘Mr’, was knighted on
23 July 1603.
The conjunction of Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s names is seen by
Baconians as fraught with significance. J&R direct their attention
elsewhere: The name “Nevill” appears at the top of the left side of
the manuscript, and the Neville family motto, “Ne vile velis” (“desire
nothing base”), is among the scribbles. J&R take it for granted that
“Nevill” is their Neville rather than anyone else with that surname
and that he was the owner of the manuscript. That is far from a
necessary conclusion. The document was found in the archives of the
Earls of Northumberland and originated during the tenure of the ninth
Earl, Henry Percy (1564–1632, succeeded to the title in 1585). Percy,
a noted bibliophile, was the son of Katherine Neville, daughter of
John Neville, fourth Baron Latimer. That family connection is
adequate to account for the “Nevill” references; there’s no need
to drag in a distant cousin.
J&R’s ensuing discussion is too incoherent to summarize readily. It
offers no reasons to associate the manuscript with Henry Neville nor
any why, if it had been Neville’s, it would prove anything more than
his knowledge of Shakespeare’s existence. One specimen of their
argumentation (from p. 242) will serve to show its nature and quality:
But all of the above was written further down the manuscript than
that which logically announces its ownership – the name and rhyme
written at the top left-hand corner. Convention dictates that this
is where we should begin our reading. Neville’s signature is at
the very top left, thus announcing its origins, followed by
the rhyme incorporating his family motto (Ne vile velis):
. Nevill, Nevill, Ne vile velis
. Multis annis iam transactis
. Nulla fides est in pactis
. Mell in ore Verba lactis
. ffell in Corde ffraus in factis
Roughly translated, this means, ‘Nevill, Nevill, no vile intentions,/
Many years have I transacted,/ No faith in the agreement,/ Honey in
the mouth and milky words,/ Cunning in heart and false in practice’.
(Hardly the contented courtier, our Henry. Hardly the sentiments of
someone who has nothing to complain about, or nothing to hide!)
As a glance at the appended facsimile and transcript will show, the
“rhyme incorporating the family motto” is no such thing. “Neville” is
separated by about five lines vertically from the first occurrence of
“ne vile velis”. An equal distance separates a second “ne vile velis”
from the four lines of Latin. The quatrain is not original. It
appears, with slight variations, in texts going back to the 14th
Century [Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century (1939),
p. 346]. (For an example, vide Humphrey Milford, ed., The Poems of
John Audelay (1931), p. 94. Fr. Audelay was an Augustinian friar whose
floruit was c. 1417–1426.) It has no connection to the Neville family.
J&R’s translation is, incidently, “rough” to the point of
incompetence. A more accurate rendition would be, “Many years now
having gone by, there is no good faith in agreements: honey in the
mouth [and] words of milk [but] murder in the heart and deceit in
deeds.”
What, in any case, does this doggerel have to do with the authorship
of Shakespeare’s works? J&R’s attempt to find a link is *FEEBLE* .
On their next page, they note that a letter to Anthony Bacon
(dated April 2, 1597) contains these words:
Your gracious speeches be the words of a faithfull friende,
and not of a courtiour who hath Mel in ore et verba lactis,
sed fel in corde et fraus in factis.
From this they conclude, on the strength of “the overwhelming evidence
of the quotation from Neville’s own family-motto poem”, that Henry
Neville, as a “faithfull friende”, wrote speeches for Anthony Bacon to
deliver. That is certainly a strained reading – all the more so when
one discovers that the writers have engaged in a little “fraus in
factis” of their own. They have omitted part of the quoted sentence,
which actually reads:
Your gracious speeches concerninge the gettinge of a prebendshippe
for me be the words of a faithfull friende, and not of a courtiour who
hath Mel in ore et verba lactis, sed fel in corde et fraus in factis.
[quoted in Burgoyne, op. cit., p. xvii]
With the deletion restored, it is evident that the correspondent, a
clergyman named Rodolphe Bradley, is thanking Bacon for putting in a
good word with people who could help him gain ecclesiastical
preferment, a welcome contrast to the courtier who makes honeyed but
deceitful promises. As a trusted agent of the Earl of Essex, Bacon
was a useful contact for place seekers. On the other hand, he never,
so far as I can discover, delivered a public speech in his life.
As already noted, the Northumberland scribbles are a favorite
Baconian plaything, one that has never made much sense by even
the Baconians’ lax standards. James & Rubinstein,
having filched it, do no better job of demonstrating
that it has any pertinence to the authorship “debate”.>>
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Art Neuendorffer