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Thomas Sackville, Shakespeare attribution problems
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book...@yahoo.com
Dec 2, 2012, 9:48:25 PM12/2/12
to
A look through Internet search results on Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl
of Dorset, 1536-1608, shows a few negative as well as positive lines
of argument regarding claim for him as the Bard.
I will attempt to organize a few approaches to organizing my negative
notes in terms of main categories of literary criticism, fully
expecting a drive-by reprisal or two, especially since I'm venturing
into an unfamiliar neighborhood with only Sabrina Feldman's challenge
as an invitation and my innocence as a light(:>].
As I recently attempted to outline, I know of several categories of
approach to critical theory, and now will use two or three to organize
my Internet results. I can do a biographical essay, which Ms Feldman
indicated will not disprove Sackville's creditability. I can do a
pragmatic essay, seeking to assail Sackville on the basis of his
audience intentions and interrelations. And I can do a mimetic
critique, examining Sackville's use of sources and influences.
Thus I shall begin, slowly, with the above picking up of her gauntlet
thrown down, and commence with negative proofs associated with
Sackville's biography--in another post.
of Dorset, 1536-1608, shows a few negative as well as positive lines
of argument regarding claim for him as the Bard.
I will attempt to organize a few approaches to organizing my negative
notes in terms of main categories of literary criticism, fully
expecting a drive-by reprisal or two, especially since I'm venturing
into an unfamiliar neighborhood with only Sabrina Feldman's challenge
as an invitation and my innocence as a light(:>].
As I recently attempted to outline, I know of several categories of
approach to critical theory, and now will use two or three to organize
my Internet results. I can do a biographical essay, which Ms Feldman
indicated will not disprove Sackville's creditability. I can do a
pragmatic essay, seeking to assail Sackville on the basis of his
audience intentions and interrelations. And I can do a mimetic
critique, examining Sackville's use of sources and influences.
Thus I shall begin, slowly, with the above picking up of her gauntlet
thrown down, and commence with negative proofs associated with
Sackville's biography--in another post.
Sabrina Feldman
Dec 3, 2012, 3:08:00 AM12/3/12
to
Bookburn, I look forward to this challenge, and hope to learn from it. Thanks for starting this thread. --Sabrina Feldman
book...@yahoo.com
Dec 3, 2012, 3:36:37 AM12/3/12
to
On Mon, 3 Dec 2012 00:08:00 -0800 (PST), Sabrina Feldman
<sabrinama...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Bookburn, I look forward to this challenge, and hope to learn from it. Thanks for starting this thread. --Sabrina Feldman
BTW, I depend on my Internet meta-search program, Copernic, for
<sabrinama...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Bookburn, I look forward to this challenge, and hope to learn from it. Thanks for starting this thread. --Sabrina Feldman
gathering results according to selected categories of individual
search programs, which saves me from Google and other search programs
with advanced permutations. If you don't have such a meta-search
program, you might try using Copernic's FREE version, found at
http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/home/download.html
(I used Copernic freeware for years, and now like to recommend it when
I can.) Copernic makes the Agent news and e-mail reader I use, too;
has a spelling checker in it and archive files, folders, and desks. It
can configure your composition window for word-wrap and line spacing,
if you like.
Sabrina Feldman
Dec 3, 2012, 3:49:59 AM12/3/12
to
Hi Bookburn, thanks for recommending Copernic -- I haven't used this meta-search engine before, but it sounds quite useful and I look forward to trying the freeware link you provided. --S.F.
book...@yahoo.com
Dec 4, 2012, 6:31:16 PM12/4/12
to
Sackville attribution problems--his biography
Up front it should be mentioned that Diana Price has a book,
Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography : New Evidence of an Authorship
Problem (2003), and responded to criticism of it with "The Mythical
Myth of the Stigma of Print". This may be an elephant in the room
that's hard to ignore when approaching Sackville's biography as an
attribution problem.
My comment is that Sackville was enormously successful with his early
poem, Induction, and play, Gorboduc, which was performed with critical
praise in the Inner Temple before Elizabeth, 1561; so why should he
hide his elephant from the public later in life, given that it
accomplish his literary purposes? More can be added about this in
assessing Sackville's propaganda agenda later.
In terms of family traditions Sackville was supported by, it seems
other family members were not only highly literate, but literary. I
note one study, by Karen Raber, "Murderous Mothers", that suggests a
family-state parallel in Gorboduc that views the Shakespeare canon in
this way, too. The site at http://www.factbites.com/topics/Gorboduc
has a good summary of these sources.
Did the London theatre scene attract the Sackville's in any way? The
article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury_Court_Theatre
notes the following.
(quote)
Salisbury Court Theatre was a theatre in 17th-century London. . . . .
Salibury Court was acquired by Richard Sackville in 1564; when Thomas
Sackville was created Earl of Dorset in 1604, the building was renamed
Dorset House. (His descendant, Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset,
was Queen Henrietta Maria's Lord Chamberlain in the 1630s, and was a
prime mover in theatre and drama in London in that era, including the
force behind the founding of the Salisbury Court Theatre.)
(unquote)
Clearly, the direction the Sackville's take with theatre is in the
Blackfriar Theatre sort, not the London public theatre where
Shakespeare thrived.
Then there is the question of how compatible is the existence of many
examples of low-brow Shakespeare apocrypha with Sacville's purposes.
He would have noticed, as others have, that the comic "intermedii,"
used between the acts of Gorboduc, were favored more by spectators
than the drama (http://www.factbites.com/topics/Gorboduc ). Do we
really find in Sacville's biography the sources for language and
characterizations that we find in Stratman's sometimes rough
treatment?
Without making too much of Sackville's bent toward serious uses of
play writing, as opposed to commercial success with popularity, it
seems to me that after completing his literary agenda at an early age,
his output was null, certainly not inclined toward what became the
popular theatre.
Not only biographical evidence or absence of evidence suggests that
Sackville was not the sort to consort with playwrights and players,
but I have two more approaches to use: the mimetic and the pragmatic,
which I can probably contrive to dove-tail enough to at least show
areas of attribution problems.
I realize the above does not find any positive biographic proof for
Sackville's attribution. bookburn
book...@yahoo.com
Dec 4, 2012, 6:46:15 PM12/4/12
to
>
>Then there is the question of how compatible is the existence of many
>examples of low-brow Shakespeare apocrypha with Sacville's purposes.
>He would have noticed, as others have, that the comic "intermedii,"
>used between the acts of Gorboduc, were favored more by spectators
>than the drama (http://www.factbites.com/topics/Gorboduc ). Do we
>really find in Sacville's biography the sources for language and
>characterizations that we find in Stratman's [colorful] treatment?
>Then there is the question of how compatible is the existence of many
>examples of low-brow Shakespeare apocrypha with Sacville's purposes.
>He would have noticed, as others have, that the comic "intermedii,"
>used between the acts of Gorboduc, were favored more by spectators
>than the drama (http://www.factbites.com/topics/Gorboduc ). Do we
>really find in Sacville's biography the sources for language and
>
>Without making too much of Sackville's bent toward serious uses of
>play writing, as opposed to commercial success with popularity, it
>seems to me that after completing his literary agenda at an early age,
>his output was null, certainly not inclined toward what became the
>popular theatre.
>
> Not only biographical evidence or absence of evidence suggests that
>Sackville was not the sort to consort with playwrights and players,
>but I have two more approaches to use: the mimetic and the pragmatic,
>which I can probably contrive to dove-tail enough to at least show
>areas of attribution problems.
>
>I realize the above does not find any [negative] biographic proof for
>Without making too much of Sackville's bent toward serious uses of
>play writing, as opposed to commercial success with popularity, it
>seems to me that after completing his literary agenda at an early age,
>his output was null, certainly not inclined toward what became the
>popular theatre.
>
> Not only biographical evidence or absence of evidence suggests that
>Sackville was not the sort to consort with playwrights and players,
>but I have two more approaches to use: the mimetic and the pragmatic,
>which I can probably contrive to dove-tail enough to at least show
>areas of attribution problems.
>
>Sackville's attribution. bookburn
>
Sabrina Feldman
Dec 4, 2012, 9:07:48 PM12/4/12
to
Great questions, Bookburn, I've given these topics a great deal of thought and look forward to answering to the best of my ability. One interesting aspect of the case for Sackville is that Sackville has received so little attention from literary historians that records pointing to his lifelong interest in poetry, and connections between his known writings (and personal biography) and the Shakespeare canon, have been overlooked. I'm tied up with work tonight, but will answer in detail as soon as I can. --Sabrina
Sabrina Feldman
Dec 8, 2012, 1:10:04 AM12/8/12
to
Hi Bookburn, let me begin by responding to your first comment/question. You ask whether any surviving historical evidence suggests that Thomas Sackville felt himself subject to an an aristocratic 'stigma of print':
"Up front it should be mentioned that Diana Price has a book, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography : New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (2003), and responded to criticism of it with "The Mythical Myth of the Stigma of Print". This may be an elephant in the room that's hard to ignore when approaching Sackville's biography as an attribution problem.
My comment is that Sackville was enormously successful with his early poem, Induction, and play, Gorboduc, which was performed with critical praise in the Inner Temple before Elizabeth, 1561; so why should he hide his elephant from the public later in life, given that it accomplish his literary purposes? More can be added about this in assessing Sackville's propaganda agenda later." -- Bookburn
As you note, Diana Price established that Elizabethan aristocrats were generally subject to a “Stigma of Print.” Although many members of the court enjoyed writing poems and plays, they preferred to circulate their poetic works in manuscript among their private friends. Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocrats rarely published original poetry, as to do so was apparently viewed as embarrassing, even déclassé. These aristocrats did occasionally allow their minor works such as commendatory poems, commendatory epistles, and contributions to anthologies into print, but avoided publishing their major works. A handful of noblemen including Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Sir Philip Sidney did write influential poetry, but their bodies of work were published posthumously. They too circulated their poetry in manuscript while alive.
The "Stigma of Print" seems not to have applied (or at least, not with full force) to works of translation, or to religious, didactic, educational, and political works. These kinds of writings were evidently not viewed as morally suspect or frivolous, and did not carry the implication that the authors sought personal gain or public acclaim from their writings.
The "Stigma of Print" held strongest when it came to play publishing. Not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean aristocrat is known to have voluntarily published a play under his own name throughout the period, even though playwriting was a popular activity among Queen Elizabeth’s artistically inclined courtiers.
The aristocratic "Stigma of Print" even applies to Gorboduc, the first blank verse play in the English language and the first English play inspired by the classical Greek and Roman drama, co-authored by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton in 1561. Sackville and Norton clearly did not intend to publish their work when it was first published in the plague year of 1565. Instead, one of their acquaintances, a young man who “lacked a little money and much discretion,” printed Gorboduc surreptitiously while Sackville was “out of England, and T. Norton far out of London, and neither of them made privy.”
(Note that Sackville was knighted and made the Baron of Buckhurst in 1567. When he co-authored Gorboduc in 1561, wrote a commendatory sonnet for a friend's work of translation in 1561 and allowed two of his narrative poems to appear in a didactic 1563 anthology of historical poems assembled by two other friends, he had no official title other than that of a gentleman. This 1561 commendatory poem, along with Sackville's two poems in the 1563 anthology "Mirror for Magistrates," are the only three poetic works that he appears to have allowed to be printed under his name.)
Five years later, in 1570, Sackville and Norton seem to have authorized a second edition of Gorboduc including a preface by the printer John Day explaining the circumstances of the original publication. According to Day, the 1565 edition was “exceedingly corrupted,” as if the pirate who printed it “enticed into his house a fair maid and done her villainy, and after all to bescratched her face, torn her apparel, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of doors dishonested.” His claim that the 1565 edition of Gorboduc was so corrupted it needed to be republished is ridiculous, since the 1565 text is nearly identical to the 1570 text. It has a few minor misprints, such as “terrour” for “errour,” and a repeated line or two.
At least one reason, if not the main reason, for the 1570 reprinting of Gorboduc seems to have been the authors’ wish to place on record that they weren’t responsible for the original publication. As Day explains, Sackville and Norton “were very much displeased that she [Gorboduc] so ran abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do.” She was “somewhat less ashamed of the dishonesty done to her because it was by fraud and force.” If readers “still reproached (her) with her former mishap…the poor gentlewoman will surely play Lucrece’s part, and herself die for shame.” (Incidentally, this appears to be the first English allusion to the Roman story of Lucrece’s rape, later popularized in Shakespeare’s 1594 poem The Rape of Lucrece.)
As will be familiar history to regular HLAS readers, after England's first public amphitheater was built in 1576, the public theaters became increasingly popular and came under vehement attack from Puritans and public scolds who worried about the playhouses’ effect on the public morals. In 1577 the minister John Northbrooke wrote of stage plays in his A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes as being “wicked,” “detestable,” “evil,” “unprofitable,” “abominable,” and “blasphemous.” He abhorred “those filthy and unhonest gestures and moving of interlude players, what other thing do they teach than wanton pleasure and stirring of fleshly lust, unlawful appetites and desires, with their bawdy and filthy sayings and counterfeit doings.”
Northbrooke’s treatise spawned a series of sermons, letters, and tracts in opposition to the theatres. The plays were accused of being lewd and profane; the audiences were said to be full of vagrants, criminals, and whores; and the actors were painted as immoral and irresponsible. Scolding moralists continued to deplore the effects of the theatre on society until 1640, when they succeeded in closing down all the theatres in England for a generation.
***
Bookburn, there is substantial other evidence that Thomas Sackville deliberately avoided printing his poetic/dramatic works, presumably due to the aristocratic “Stigma of Print" documented by Diana Price. When these long-ignored, previously overlooked, and newly discovered historical documents are assembled, it becomes clear that Sackville wrote many works in various genres over a span of decades that were never published under his name during his lifetime, including the following:
* “Sweetly sauc’d sonnets,” mentioned by Sackville’s friend Jasper Heywood in his 1560 translation of Seneca’s Thyestes;
* A sequence of stories from English history dating back to the time of William the Conqueror, which Thomas Sackville intended to relate himself according to the 1563 Mirror for Magistrates anthology;
* Sacvyle’s Olde Age, composed around 1574, first discovered in the 1980s and first published in 1989;
* Many works about “Mighty Love” and the “sweet complaints of woeful lovers wronged,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
* “Lusty ditties,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
* Devotional works in honor of God, assuming Sackville followed through on his intention in Sacyvle’s Olde Age. (It is not impossible that Sackville contributed biblical translations to the King James Bible project, since he served as the Chancellor of Oxford University which housed an anonymous translation team throughout much of the translation effort);
* Sackville's Italian translations of Samuel Daniel’s romantic poetry, commended by Giordano Bruno in a letter composed between 1583 and 1585;
* Sackville's Italian translation of John Lyly’s comic novel Euphues, again commended by Bruno;
* Unknown poetic works by Sackville which inspired the writer Henry Lok to praise Sackville’s poetic craft in a sonnet affixed to his 1597 Ecclesiasticus: “But when I call to mind, your pen so blest, / With flowing liquor of the Muses’ spring; / I fear your dainty ear can ill digest / The harsh-tun'd notes, which on my pipe I sing."
* “Public” and “private” poems, which “so divinely crowned” Sackville’s name, mentioned by Thomas Campion in his 1602 Observations in the Art of English Poesie (dedicated to Sackville).
The fact that Thomas Sackville, the premiere poet of the early Elizabethan age, generated such a large and diverse body of work which he never published under his name at least raises the possibility that he might have considered presenting his works under another man’s name.
Significantly, after Sackville died he was honored as a secret/hidden poet. The early English poets followed the ancient custom of honoring the death of a poet by writing verse tributes. Sometimes these tributes were made public; other times they remained private. After Thomas Sackville’s death in 1608, he received only one public tribute as far as is known. The poet Joshua Sylvester dedicated a section of his 1608 translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s "The Divine Weeks" to Sackville, along with a Latin anagram and an English poem. The anagram reads:
Sacvilus Comes Dorsetius
Vas lucis Esto décor Musis
Sacris Musis Celo Devotus
This translates as:
Sackville My friend, the Earl of Dorset
Vessel of Light Beautify the muses
Secretly devoted to the sacred muses
(I conceal out of love for the sacred muses)
In his attached English poem honoring Sackville, Sylvester declares that his friend has “lov’d so long the sacred sisters,” and “(sad sweetly most) thyself hast sung (under a feigned ghost) the tragic falls of our ambitious throng.” Considered as a group, Sylvester’s anagram and poem strongly imply that Sackville had been writing under an assumed name – “under a feigned ghost.” Modern literary historians would probably agree that it was Shakespeare, more than any other English poet of 1608, who had “sad sweetly most” sung the “tragic falls” of the ambitious throng.
"Up front it should be mentioned that Diana Price has a book, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography : New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (2003), and responded to criticism of it with "The Mythical Myth of the Stigma of Print". This may be an elephant in the room that's hard to ignore when approaching Sackville's biography as an attribution problem.
As you note, Diana Price established that Elizabethan aristocrats were generally subject to a “Stigma of Print.” Although many members of the court enjoyed writing poems and plays, they preferred to circulate their poetic works in manuscript among their private friends. Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocrats rarely published original poetry, as to do so was apparently viewed as embarrassing, even déclassé. These aristocrats did occasionally allow their minor works such as commendatory poems, commendatory epistles, and contributions to anthologies into print, but avoided publishing their major works. A handful of noblemen including Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Sir Philip Sidney did write influential poetry, but their bodies of work were published posthumously. They too circulated their poetry in manuscript while alive.
The "Stigma of Print" seems not to have applied (or at least, not with full force) to works of translation, or to religious, didactic, educational, and political works. These kinds of writings were evidently not viewed as morally suspect or frivolous, and did not carry the implication that the authors sought personal gain or public acclaim from their writings.
The "Stigma of Print" held strongest when it came to play publishing. Not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean aristocrat is known to have voluntarily published a play under his own name throughout the period, even though playwriting was a popular activity among Queen Elizabeth’s artistically inclined courtiers.
The aristocratic "Stigma of Print" even applies to Gorboduc, the first blank verse play in the English language and the first English play inspired by the classical Greek and Roman drama, co-authored by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton in 1561. Sackville and Norton clearly did not intend to publish their work when it was first published in the plague year of 1565. Instead, one of their acquaintances, a young man who “lacked a little money and much discretion,” printed Gorboduc surreptitiously while Sackville was “out of England, and T. Norton far out of London, and neither of them made privy.”
(Note that Sackville was knighted and made the Baron of Buckhurst in 1567. When he co-authored Gorboduc in 1561, wrote a commendatory sonnet for a friend's work of translation in 1561 and allowed two of his narrative poems to appear in a didactic 1563 anthology of historical poems assembled by two other friends, he had no official title other than that of a gentleman. This 1561 commendatory poem, along with Sackville's two poems in the 1563 anthology "Mirror for Magistrates," are the only three poetic works that he appears to have allowed to be printed under his name.)
Five years later, in 1570, Sackville and Norton seem to have authorized a second edition of Gorboduc including a preface by the printer John Day explaining the circumstances of the original publication. According to Day, the 1565 edition was “exceedingly corrupted,” as if the pirate who printed it “enticed into his house a fair maid and done her villainy, and after all to bescratched her face, torn her apparel, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of doors dishonested.” His claim that the 1565 edition of Gorboduc was so corrupted it needed to be republished is ridiculous, since the 1565 text is nearly identical to the 1570 text. It has a few minor misprints, such as “terrour” for “errour,” and a repeated line or two.
At least one reason, if not the main reason, for the 1570 reprinting of Gorboduc seems to have been the authors’ wish to place on record that they weren’t responsible for the original publication. As Day explains, Sackville and Norton “were very much displeased that she [Gorboduc] so ran abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do.” She was “somewhat less ashamed of the dishonesty done to her because it was by fraud and force.” If readers “still reproached (her) with her former mishap…the poor gentlewoman will surely play Lucrece’s part, and herself die for shame.” (Incidentally, this appears to be the first English allusion to the Roman story of Lucrece’s rape, later popularized in Shakespeare’s 1594 poem The Rape of Lucrece.)
As will be familiar history to regular HLAS readers, after England's first public amphitheater was built in 1576, the public theaters became increasingly popular and came under vehement attack from Puritans and public scolds who worried about the playhouses’ effect on the public morals. In 1577 the minister John Northbrooke wrote of stage plays in his A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes as being “wicked,” “detestable,” “evil,” “unprofitable,” “abominable,” and “blasphemous.” He abhorred “those filthy and unhonest gestures and moving of interlude players, what other thing do they teach than wanton pleasure and stirring of fleshly lust, unlawful appetites and desires, with their bawdy and filthy sayings and counterfeit doings.”
Northbrooke’s treatise spawned a series of sermons, letters, and tracts in opposition to the theatres. The plays were accused of being lewd and profane; the audiences were said to be full of vagrants, criminals, and whores; and the actors were painted as immoral and irresponsible. Scolding moralists continued to deplore the effects of the theatre on society until 1640, when they succeeded in closing down all the theatres in England for a generation.
***
Bookburn, there is substantial other evidence that Thomas Sackville deliberately avoided printing his poetic/dramatic works, presumably due to the aristocratic “Stigma of Print" documented by Diana Price. When these long-ignored, previously overlooked, and newly discovered historical documents are assembled, it becomes clear that Sackville wrote many works in various genres over a span of decades that were never published under his name during his lifetime, including the following:
* “Sweetly sauc’d sonnets,” mentioned by Sackville’s friend Jasper Heywood in his 1560 translation of Seneca’s Thyestes;
* A sequence of stories from English history dating back to the time of William the Conqueror, which Thomas Sackville intended to relate himself according to the 1563 Mirror for Magistrates anthology;
* Sacvyle’s Olde Age, composed around 1574, first discovered in the 1980s and first published in 1989;
* Many works about “Mighty Love” and the “sweet complaints of woeful lovers wronged,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
* “Lusty ditties,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
* Devotional works in honor of God, assuming Sackville followed through on his intention in Sacyvle’s Olde Age. (It is not impossible that Sackville contributed biblical translations to the King James Bible project, since he served as the Chancellor of Oxford University which housed an anonymous translation team throughout much of the translation effort);
* Sackville's Italian translations of Samuel Daniel’s romantic poetry, commended by Giordano Bruno in a letter composed between 1583 and 1585;
* Sackville's Italian translation of John Lyly’s comic novel Euphues, again commended by Bruno;
* Unknown poetic works by Sackville which inspired the writer Henry Lok to praise Sackville’s poetic craft in a sonnet affixed to his 1597 Ecclesiasticus: “But when I call to mind, your pen so blest, / With flowing liquor of the Muses’ spring; / I fear your dainty ear can ill digest / The harsh-tun'd notes, which on my pipe I sing."
* “Public” and “private” poems, which “so divinely crowned” Sackville’s name, mentioned by Thomas Campion in his 1602 Observations in the Art of English Poesie (dedicated to Sackville).
The fact that Thomas Sackville, the premiere poet of the early Elizabethan age, generated such a large and diverse body of work which he never published under his name at least raises the possibility that he might have considered presenting his works under another man’s name.
Significantly, after Sackville died he was honored as a secret/hidden poet. The early English poets followed the ancient custom of honoring the death of a poet by writing verse tributes. Sometimes these tributes were made public; other times they remained private. After Thomas Sackville’s death in 1608, he received only one public tribute as far as is known. The poet Joshua Sylvester dedicated a section of his 1608 translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s "The Divine Weeks" to Sackville, along with a Latin anagram and an English poem. The anagram reads:
Sacvilus Comes Dorsetius
Vas lucis Esto décor Musis
Sacris Musis Celo Devotus
This translates as:
Sackville My friend, the Earl of Dorset
Vessel of Light Beautify the muses
Secretly devoted to the sacred muses
(I conceal out of love for the sacred muses)
In his attached English poem honoring Sackville, Sylvester declares that his friend has “lov’d so long the sacred sisters,” and “(sad sweetly most) thyself hast sung (under a feigned ghost) the tragic falls of our ambitious throng.” Considered as a group, Sylvester’s anagram and poem strongly imply that Sackville had been writing under an assumed name – “under a feigned ghost.” Modern literary historians would probably agree that it was Shakespeare, more than any other English poet of 1608, who had “sad sweetly most” sung the “tragic falls” of the ambitious throng.
Robin G.
Dec 8, 2012, 2:08:56 AM12/8/12
to
On Dec 7, 10:10 pm, Sabrina Feldman <sabrinamariefeld...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> As you note, Diana Price established that Elizabethan aristocrats were generally subject to a “Stigma of Print.”
Pardon me, Ms Feldman, but Diana Price did not establish anything. Her
understanding of the period is shallow. Throughout her book, she is
leave things out of quotes from scholars. When one goes to the book
or article she quotes, it is clear she distorts or does not understand
what the author has written. In short, the full passage does not
support her claims. As someone trained to do literary and historical
research, I find her methods substandard. She could never pass a
course in research methodology.
I suggest you read the following. http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/stigma.html
The article is Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical "Stigma of Print" by
Steve W. May.
wrote:
> As you note, Diana Price established that Elizabethan aristocrats were generally subject to a “Stigma of Print.”
understanding of the period is shallow. Throughout her book, she is
leave things out of quotes from scholars. When one goes to the book
or article she quotes, it is clear she distorts or does not understand
what the author has written. In short, the full passage does not
support her claims. As someone trained to do literary and historical
research, I find her methods substandard. She could never pass a
course in research methodology.
I suggest you read the following. http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/stigma.html
The article is Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical "Stigma of Print" by
Steve W. May.
Sabrina Feldman
Dec 8, 2012, 5:53:06 PM12/8/12
to
Hi Robin, thanks for the link -- I've read both Steve May's article and Diana Price's rejoinder at http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com/Resources/Stigma.asp. I found Price's rejoinder to be more persuasive, but as she notes, even May himself agrees that the early aristocratic poets felt themselves subject to an aristocratic "stigma of verse." Sackville belonged to this earlier, more private generation of aristocratic poets, and clearly (a) didn't wish for Gorboduc to be published under his name, and (b) wrote a lot of poetry that was never published under his name. Those were my main points.
book...@yahoo.com
Dec 8, 2012, 6:17:39 PM12/8/12
to
Thanks for your rejoinders. I can make a couple comments, without
really denying that biography issues deny Sackville's case.
>On Fri, 7 Dec 2012 22:10:04 -0800 (PST), Sabrina Feldman <sabrinama...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi Bookburn, let me begin by responding to your first comment/question. You ask whether any surviving historical evidence suggests that Thomas Sackville felt himself subject to an an aristocratic 'stigma of print':
>
>"Up front it should be mentioned that Diana Price has a book, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography : New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (2003), and responded to criticism of it with "The Mythical Myth of the Stigma of Print". This may be an elephant in the room that's hard to ignore when approaching Sackville's biography as an attribution problem.
>
>My comment is that Sackville was enormously successful with his early poem, Induction, and play, Gorboduc, which was performed with critical praise in the Inner Temple before Elizabeth, 1561; so why should he hide his elephant from the public later in life, given that it accomplish his literary purposes? More can be added about this in assessing Sackville's propaganda agenda later." -- Bookburn
>
>As you note, Diana Price established that Elizabethan aristocrats were generally subject to a “Stigma of Print.” Although many members of the court enjoyed writing poems and plays, they preferred to circulate their poetic works in manuscript among their private friends. Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocrats rarely published original poetry, as to do so was apparently viewed as embarrassing, even déclassé. These aristocrats did occasionally allow their minor works such as commendatory poems, commendatory epistles, and contributions to anthologies into print, but avoided publishing their major works. A handful of noblemen including Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Sir Philip Sidney did write influential poetry, but their bodies of work were published posthumously. They too circulated their poetry in manuscript while alive.
But I notice that other aristocrats sponsored poets and playwrights
and even had a hand in directing popular theatres in London, plus seem
to have had the time to write some. Sackville seems to have been too
busy with government business to write the two plays a year
Shakespeare averaged.
>The "Stigma of Print" seems not to have applied (or at least, not with full force) to works of translation, or to religious, didactic, educational, and political works. These kinds of writings were evidently not viewed as morally suspect or frivolous, and did not carry the implication that the authors sought personal gain or public acclaim from their writings.
>
>The "Stigma of Print" held strongest when it came to play publishing. Not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean aristocrat is known to have voluntarily published a play under his own name throughout the period, even though playwriting was a popular activity among Queen Elizabeth’s artistically inclined courtiers.
>
>The aristocratic "Stigma of Print" even applies to Gorboduc, the first blank verse play in the English language and the first English play inspired by the classical Greek and Roman drama, co-authored by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton in 1561. Sackville and Norton clearly did not intend to publish their work when it was first published in the plague year of 1565. Instead, one of their acquaintances, a young man who “lacked a little money and much discretion,” printed Gorboduc surreptitiously while Sackville was “out of England, and T. Norton far out of London, and neither of them made privy.”
>
>(Note that Sackville was knighted and made the Baron of Buckhurst in 1567. When he co-authored Gorboduc in 1561, wrote a commendatory sonnet for a friend's work of translation in 1561 and allowed two of his narrative poems to appear in a didactic 1563 anthology of historical poems assembled by two other friends, he had no official title other than that of a gentleman. This 1561 commendatory poem, along with Sackville's two poems in the 1563 anthology "Mirror for Magistrates," are the only three poetic works that he appears to have allowed to be printed under his name.)
>
>Five years later, in 1570, Sackville and Norton seem to have authorized a second edition of Gorboduc including a preface by the printer John Day explaining the circumstances of the original publication. According to Day, the 1565 edition was “exceedingly corrupted,” as if the pirate who printed it “enticed into his house a fair maid and done her villainy, and after all to bescratched her face, torn her apparel, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of doors dishonested.” His claim that the 1565 edition of Gorboduc was so corrupted it needed to be republished is ridiculous, since the 1565 text is nearly identical to the 1570 text. It has a few minor misprints, such as “terrour” for “errour,” and a repeated line or two.
>
>At least one reason, if not the main reason, for the 1570 reprinting of Gorboduc seems to have been the authors’ wish to place on record that they weren’t responsible for the original publication. As Day explains, Sackville and Norton “were very much displeased that she [Gorboduc] so ran abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do.” She was “somewhat less ashamed of the dishonesty done to her because it was by fraud and force.” If readers “still reproached (her) with her former mishap…the poor gentlewoman will surely play Lucrece’s part, and herself die for shame.” (Incidentally, this appears to be the first English allusion to the Roman story of Lucrece’s rape, later popularized in Shakespeare’s 1594 poem The Rape of Lucrece.)
>
>As will be familiar history to regular HLAS readers, after England's first public amphitheater was built in 1576, the public theaters became increasingly popular and came under vehement attack from Puritans and public scolds who worried about the playhouses’ effect on the public morals. In 1577 the minister John Northbrooke wrote of stage plays in his A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes as being “wicked,” “detestable,” “evil,” “unprofitable,” “abominable,” and “blasphemous.” He abhorred “those filthy and unhonest gestures and moving of interlude players, what other thing do they teach than wanton pleasure and stirring of fleshly lust, unlawful appetites and desires, with their bawdy and filthy sayings and counterfeit doings.”
>
>Northbrooke’s treatise spawned a series of sermons, letters, and tracts in opposition to the theatres. The plays were accused of being lewd and profane; the audiences were said to be full of vagrants, criminals, and whores; and the actors were painted as immoral and irresponsible. Scolding moralists continued to deplore the effects of the theatre on society until 1640, when they succeeded in closing down all the theatres in England for a generation.
>
>***
>
>Bookburn, there is substantial other evidence that Thomas Sackville deliberately avoided printing his poetic/dramatic works, presumably due to the aristocratic “Stigma of Print" documented by Diana Price. When these long-ignored, previously overlooked, and newly discovered historical documents are assembled, it becomes clear that Sackville wrote many works in various genres over a span of decades that were never published under his name during his lifetime, including the following:
>
>* “Sweetly sauc’d sonnets,” mentioned by Sackville’s friend Jasper Heywood in his 1560 translation of Seneca’s Thyestes;
>
>* A sequence of stories from English history dating back to the time of William the Conqueror, which Thomas Sackville intended to relate himself according to the 1563 Mirror for Magistrates anthology;
>
>* Sacvyle’s Olde Age, composed around 1574, first discovered in the 1980s and first published in 1989;
>
>* Many works about “Mighty Love” and the “sweet complaints of woeful lovers wronged,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
>
>* “Lusty ditties,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
>
>* Devotional works in honor of God, assuming Sackville followed through on his intention in Sacyvle’s Olde Age. (It is not impossible that Sackville contributed biblical translations to the King James Bible project, since he served as the Chancellor of Oxford University which housed an anonymous translation team throughout much of the translation effort);
>
>* Sackville's Italian translations of Samuel Daniel’s romantic poetry, commended by Giordano Bruno in a letter composed between 1583 and 1585;
>
>* Sackville's Italian translation of John Lyly’s comic novel Euphues, again commended by Bruno;
>
>* Unknown poetic works by Sackville which inspired the writer Henry Lok to praise Sackville’s poetic craft in a sonnet affixed to his 1597 Ecclesiasticus: “But when I call to mind, your pen so blest, / With flowing liquor of the Muses’ spring; / I fear your dainty ear can ill digest / The harsh-tun'd notes, which on my pipe I sing."
>
>* “Public” and “private” poems, which “so divinely crowned” Sackville’s name, mentioned by Thomas Campion in his 1602 Observations in the Art of English Poesie (dedicated to Sackville).
There remains the publication of numerous editions of VA and RL, which
no one associated with Sackville, including Wriothesley, and just the
kind of salacious poetry aimed at young men being stigmatized. Hard
to see Sackville's motivation in doing that.
>The fact that Thomas Sackville, the premiere poet of the early Elizabethan age, generated such a large and diverse body of work which he never published under his name at least raises the possibility that he might have considered presenting his works under another man’s name.
>
>Significantly, after Sackville died he was honored as a secret/hidden poet. The early English poets followed the ancient custom of honoring the death of a poet by writing verse tributes. Sometimes these tributes were made public; other times they remained private. After Thomas Sackville’s death in 1608, he received only one public tribute as far as is known. The poet Joshua Sylvester dedicated a section of his 1608 translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s "The Divine Weeks" to Sackville, along with a Latin anagram and an English poem. The anagram reads:
>
>Sacvilus Comes Dorsetius
>Vas lucis Esto décor Musis
>
>Sacris Musis Celo Devotus
>
>This translates as:
>
>Sackville My friend, the Earl of Dorset
>Vessel of Light Beautify the muses
>
>Secretly devoted to the sacred muses
>(I conceal out of love for the sacred muses)
>
>In his attached English poem honoring Sackville, Sylvester declares that his friend has “lov’d so long the sacred sisters,” and “(sad sweetly most) thyself hast sung (under a feigned ghost) the tragic falls of our ambitious throng.” Considered as a group, Sylvester’s anagram and poem strongly imply that Sackville had been writing under an assumed name – “under a feigned ghost.” Modern literary historians would probably agree that it was Shakespeare, more than any other English poet of 1608, who had “sad sweetly most” sung the “tragic falls” of the ambitious throng.
Thanks, again. bookburn
really denying that biography issues deny Sackville's case.
>On Fri, 7 Dec 2012 22:10:04 -0800 (PST), Sabrina Feldman <sabrinama...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi Bookburn, let me begin by responding to your first comment/question. You ask whether any surviving historical evidence suggests that Thomas Sackville felt himself subject to an an aristocratic 'stigma of print':
>
>"Up front it should be mentioned that Diana Price has a book, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography : New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (2003), and responded to criticism of it with "The Mythical Myth of the Stigma of Print". This may be an elephant in the room that's hard to ignore when approaching Sackville's biography as an attribution problem.
>
>My comment is that Sackville was enormously successful with his early poem, Induction, and play, Gorboduc, which was performed with critical praise in the Inner Temple before Elizabeth, 1561; so why should he hide his elephant from the public later in life, given that it accomplish his literary purposes? More can be added about this in assessing Sackville's propaganda agenda later." -- Bookburn
>
>As you note, Diana Price established that Elizabethan aristocrats were generally subject to a “Stigma of Print.” Although many members of the court enjoyed writing poems and plays, they preferred to circulate their poetic works in manuscript among their private friends. Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocrats rarely published original poetry, as to do so was apparently viewed as embarrassing, even déclassé. These aristocrats did occasionally allow their minor works such as commendatory poems, commendatory epistles, and contributions to anthologies into print, but avoided publishing their major works. A handful of noblemen including Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Sir Philip Sidney did write influential poetry, but their bodies of work were published posthumously. They too circulated their poetry in manuscript while alive.
and even had a hand in directing popular theatres in London, plus seem
to have had the time to write some. Sackville seems to have been too
busy with government business to write the two plays a year
Shakespeare averaged.
>The "Stigma of Print" seems not to have applied (or at least, not with full force) to works of translation, or to religious, didactic, educational, and political works. These kinds of writings were evidently not viewed as morally suspect or frivolous, and did not carry the implication that the authors sought personal gain or public acclaim from their writings.
>
>The "Stigma of Print" held strongest when it came to play publishing. Not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean aristocrat is known to have voluntarily published a play under his own name throughout the period, even though playwriting was a popular activity among Queen Elizabeth’s artistically inclined courtiers.
>
>The aristocratic "Stigma of Print" even applies to Gorboduc, the first blank verse play in the English language and the first English play inspired by the classical Greek and Roman drama, co-authored by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton in 1561. Sackville and Norton clearly did not intend to publish their work when it was first published in the plague year of 1565. Instead, one of their acquaintances, a young man who “lacked a little money and much discretion,” printed Gorboduc surreptitiously while Sackville was “out of England, and T. Norton far out of London, and neither of them made privy.”
>
>(Note that Sackville was knighted and made the Baron of Buckhurst in 1567. When he co-authored Gorboduc in 1561, wrote a commendatory sonnet for a friend's work of translation in 1561 and allowed two of his narrative poems to appear in a didactic 1563 anthology of historical poems assembled by two other friends, he had no official title other than that of a gentleman. This 1561 commendatory poem, along with Sackville's two poems in the 1563 anthology "Mirror for Magistrates," are the only three poetic works that he appears to have allowed to be printed under his name.)
>
>Five years later, in 1570, Sackville and Norton seem to have authorized a second edition of Gorboduc including a preface by the printer John Day explaining the circumstances of the original publication. According to Day, the 1565 edition was “exceedingly corrupted,” as if the pirate who printed it “enticed into his house a fair maid and done her villainy, and after all to bescratched her face, torn her apparel, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of doors dishonested.” His claim that the 1565 edition of Gorboduc was so corrupted it needed to be republished is ridiculous, since the 1565 text is nearly identical to the 1570 text. It has a few minor misprints, such as “terrour” for “errour,” and a repeated line or two.
>
>At least one reason, if not the main reason, for the 1570 reprinting of Gorboduc seems to have been the authors’ wish to place on record that they weren’t responsible for the original publication. As Day explains, Sackville and Norton “were very much displeased that she [Gorboduc] so ran abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do.” She was “somewhat less ashamed of the dishonesty done to her because it was by fraud and force.” If readers “still reproached (her) with her former mishap…the poor gentlewoman will surely play Lucrece’s part, and herself die for shame.” (Incidentally, this appears to be the first English allusion to the Roman story of Lucrece’s rape, later popularized in Shakespeare’s 1594 poem The Rape of Lucrece.)
>
>As will be familiar history to regular HLAS readers, after England's first public amphitheater was built in 1576, the public theaters became increasingly popular and came under vehement attack from Puritans and public scolds who worried about the playhouses’ effect on the public morals. In 1577 the minister John Northbrooke wrote of stage plays in his A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes as being “wicked,” “detestable,” “evil,” “unprofitable,” “abominable,” and “blasphemous.” He abhorred “those filthy and unhonest gestures and moving of interlude players, what other thing do they teach than wanton pleasure and stirring of fleshly lust, unlawful appetites and desires, with their bawdy and filthy sayings and counterfeit doings.”
>
>Northbrooke’s treatise spawned a series of sermons, letters, and tracts in opposition to the theatres. The plays were accused of being lewd and profane; the audiences were said to be full of vagrants, criminals, and whores; and the actors were painted as immoral and irresponsible. Scolding moralists continued to deplore the effects of the theatre on society until 1640, when they succeeded in closing down all the theatres in England for a generation.
>
>***
>
>Bookburn, there is substantial other evidence that Thomas Sackville deliberately avoided printing his poetic/dramatic works, presumably due to the aristocratic “Stigma of Print" documented by Diana Price. When these long-ignored, previously overlooked, and newly discovered historical documents are assembled, it becomes clear that Sackville wrote many works in various genres over a span of decades that were never published under his name during his lifetime, including the following:
>
>* “Sweetly sauc’d sonnets,” mentioned by Sackville’s friend Jasper Heywood in his 1560 translation of Seneca’s Thyestes;
>
>* A sequence of stories from English history dating back to the time of William the Conqueror, which Thomas Sackville intended to relate himself according to the 1563 Mirror for Magistrates anthology;
>
>* Sacvyle’s Olde Age, composed around 1574, first discovered in the 1980s and first published in 1989;
>
>* Many works about “Mighty Love” and the “sweet complaints of woeful lovers wronged,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
>
>* “Lusty ditties,” mentioned in Sacvyle’s Olde Age;
>
>* Devotional works in honor of God, assuming Sackville followed through on his intention in Sacyvle’s Olde Age. (It is not impossible that Sackville contributed biblical translations to the King James Bible project, since he served as the Chancellor of Oxford University which housed an anonymous translation team throughout much of the translation effort);
>
>* Sackville's Italian translations of Samuel Daniel’s romantic poetry, commended by Giordano Bruno in a letter composed between 1583 and 1585;
>
>* Sackville's Italian translation of John Lyly’s comic novel Euphues, again commended by Bruno;
>
>* Unknown poetic works by Sackville which inspired the writer Henry Lok to praise Sackville’s poetic craft in a sonnet affixed to his 1597 Ecclesiasticus: “But when I call to mind, your pen so blest, / With flowing liquor of the Muses’ spring; / I fear your dainty ear can ill digest / The harsh-tun'd notes, which on my pipe I sing."
>
>* “Public” and “private” poems, which “so divinely crowned” Sackville’s name, mentioned by Thomas Campion in his 1602 Observations in the Art of English Poesie (dedicated to Sackville).
no one associated with Sackville, including Wriothesley, and just the
kind of salacious poetry aimed at young men being stigmatized. Hard
to see Sackville's motivation in doing that.
>The fact that Thomas Sackville, the premiere poet of the early Elizabethan age, generated such a large and diverse body of work which he never published under his name at least raises the possibility that he might have considered presenting his works under another man’s name.
>
>Significantly, after Sackville died he was honored as a secret/hidden poet. The early English poets followed the ancient custom of honoring the death of a poet by writing verse tributes. Sometimes these tributes were made public; other times they remained private. After Thomas Sackville’s death in 1608, he received only one public tribute as far as is known. The poet Joshua Sylvester dedicated a section of his 1608 translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s "The Divine Weeks" to Sackville, along with a Latin anagram and an English poem. The anagram reads:
>
>Sacvilus Comes Dorsetius
>Vas lucis Esto décor Musis
>
>Sacris Musis Celo Devotus
>
>This translates as:
>
>Sackville My friend, the Earl of Dorset
>Vessel of Light Beautify the muses
>
>Secretly devoted to the sacred muses
>(I conceal out of love for the sacred muses)
>
>In his attached English poem honoring Sackville, Sylvester declares that his friend has “lov’d so long the sacred sisters,” and “(sad sweetly most) thyself hast sung (under a feigned ghost) the tragic falls of our ambitious throng.” Considered as a group, Sylvester’s anagram and poem strongly imply that Sackville had been writing under an assumed name – “under a feigned ghost.” Modern literary historians would probably agree that it was Shakespeare, more than any other English poet of 1608, who had “sad sweetly most” sung the “tragic falls” of the ambitious throng.
Sabrina Feldman
Dec 9, 2012, 6:16:04 PM12/9/12
to
Hi Bookburn,
Sorry to be answering your questions so slowly, and one at a time -- it's a hectic month on all fronts. On to your next question, which concerns whether Thomas Sackville would have had had time to write the Shakespeare canon given his other responsibilities as a large estate holder, Privy Councilor after 1587, Chancellor of Oxford after 1592, and Lord Treasurer of England between 1599 and his death in 1608. Concerning this single issue (not the larger issue of whether he *did* write the Canon):
There is no question that Sackville was a busy man with many work responsibilities throughout the period while the Shakespeare Canon was being written. My theory that he was the main author of the Shakespeare Canon (coupled to my theory that William Shakespeare is the most plausible author of the Shakespeare Apocrypha and Bad Quartos, as argued in The Apocryphal William Shakespeare) rests on two underlying hypotheses/assumptions.
First, that Thomas Sackville wrote early versions of many of the Bard's canonical works during the first fifty decades of his life when he had abundant free time, including perhaps the 1562 play Julius Caesar, the 1562 play Romeus and Juliet, the play "The Jew" (performed at The Bull in 1579) which is thought to be the source for The Merchant of Venice, an early Comedy of Errors (the court play History of Error performed in 1577 and 1583), and so on. Because my theory postulates that about many of the canonical plays existed in some form by the mid-1580s, it only requires Sackville to compose about one new play a year, not two. It also means that his early life could have given him the >~10,000 hours of practice required for virtuousity in a given field according to many books on artistic genius.
Canonical plays I accept as largely or entirely composed after 1590
1. All's Well That Ends Well
2. Antony and Cleopatra
3. As You Like It
4. Hamlet
5. Henry IV, Part I
6. Henry IV, Part II
7. Henry V
8. Julius Caesar
9. King Lear
10. Macbeth
11. Measure for Measure
12. A Midsummer Night's Dream
13. Much Ado about Nothing
14. Othello
15. Richard III
16. Romeo and Juliet
17. The Tempest
18. Troilus and Cressida
19. Twelfth Night
Canonical plays I suspect may have been largely composed by the mid-1580s, with later minor revisions by Sackville, or popular adaptations by William Shakespeare himself (not intended as definitive):
1. Comedy of Errors
2. Coriolanus?
3. Cymbeline
4. Henry VI, Part I
5. Henry VI, Part II
6. Henry VI, Part III
7. Henry VIII
8. King John
9. Love's Labour's Lost
10. The Merchant of Venice
11. The Merry Wives of Windsor?
12. Pericles
13. Richard II
14. The Taming of the Shrew
15. The Two Noble Kinsmen
16. Timon of Athens
17. Titus Andronicus
18. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
19. The Winter's Tale?
Second, I believe that Thomas Sackville was a born poet who would have continued to make time to write poetry regardless of his official duties. Many writers experience writing as a need rather than a choice, and I suspect Sackville was one of them. Even though he wrote in Sacvyle's Olde Age (circa 1574) about his intention to turn from secular poetry to religious poetry as he approached the age of forty, he also wrote movingly about his deep, lifelong love for poetry, and he clearly had returned to secular poetry by the early 1580s when he was translating Lyly's Euphues and Daniel's romantic poems into Italian.
I know from my own life that when a person wants very much to do something, they will find the time to do it even if it means sacrificing sleep, personal time, and so on. And I don't have anything like the array of personal secretaries, assistants, business managers, etc. that Sackville had available to help him. Even though I have a more than full-time job, with ordinary home responsibilities and two children (now 8 and 12) with busy schedules of their own, I still found time to write The Apocryphal William Shakespeare last year. I also did so privately, keeping strict lines between my amateur interest in the Shakespeare authorship question and my work life, so the two never spilled into each other (and still don't). Because of my own experience, it's not hard for me to imagine Sackville doing something similar, albeit on a much grander scale -- pursuing his personal passion for poetry / playwriting while keeping this pursuit separate and compartmentalized from his professional life as a statesman.
I'll turn to your next question about evidence for Sackville's interest in playwriting / the theatre in my next post.
All best,
--Sabrina
Sorry to be answering your questions so slowly, and one at a time -- it's a hectic month on all fronts. On to your next question, which concerns whether Thomas Sackville would have had had time to write the Shakespeare canon given his other responsibilities as a large estate holder, Privy Councilor after 1587, Chancellor of Oxford after 1592, and Lord Treasurer of England between 1599 and his death in 1608. Concerning this single issue (not the larger issue of whether he *did* write the Canon):
There is no question that Sackville was a busy man with many work responsibilities throughout the period while the Shakespeare Canon was being written. My theory that he was the main author of the Shakespeare Canon (coupled to my theory that William Shakespeare is the most plausible author of the Shakespeare Apocrypha and Bad Quartos, as argued in The Apocryphal William Shakespeare) rests on two underlying hypotheses/assumptions.
First, that Thomas Sackville wrote early versions of many of the Bard's canonical works during the first fifty decades of his life when he had abundant free time, including perhaps the 1562 play Julius Caesar, the 1562 play Romeus and Juliet, the play "The Jew" (performed at The Bull in 1579) which is thought to be the source for The Merchant of Venice, an early Comedy of Errors (the court play History of Error performed in 1577 and 1583), and so on. Because my theory postulates that about many of the canonical plays existed in some form by the mid-1580s, it only requires Sackville to compose about one new play a year, not two. It also means that his early life could have given him the >~10,000 hours of practice required for virtuousity in a given field according to many books on artistic genius.
Canonical plays I accept as largely or entirely composed after 1590
1. All's Well That Ends Well
2. Antony and Cleopatra
3. As You Like It
4. Hamlet
5. Henry IV, Part I
6. Henry IV, Part II
7. Henry V
8. Julius Caesar
9. King Lear
10. Macbeth
11. Measure for Measure
12. A Midsummer Night's Dream
13. Much Ado about Nothing
14. Othello
15. Richard III
16. Romeo and Juliet
17. The Tempest
18. Troilus and Cressida
19. Twelfth Night
Canonical plays I suspect may have been largely composed by the mid-1580s, with later minor revisions by Sackville, or popular adaptations by William Shakespeare himself (not intended as definitive):
1. Comedy of Errors
2. Coriolanus?
3. Cymbeline
4. Henry VI, Part I
5. Henry VI, Part II
6. Henry VI, Part III
7. Henry VIII
8. King John
9. Love's Labour's Lost
10. The Merchant of Venice
11. The Merry Wives of Windsor?
12. Pericles
13. Richard II
14. The Taming of the Shrew
15. The Two Noble Kinsmen
16. Timon of Athens
17. Titus Andronicus
18. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
19. The Winter's Tale?
Second, I believe that Thomas Sackville was a born poet who would have continued to make time to write poetry regardless of his official duties. Many writers experience writing as a need rather than a choice, and I suspect Sackville was one of them. Even though he wrote in Sacvyle's Olde Age (circa 1574) about his intention to turn from secular poetry to religious poetry as he approached the age of forty, he also wrote movingly about his deep, lifelong love for poetry, and he clearly had returned to secular poetry by the early 1580s when he was translating Lyly's Euphues and Daniel's romantic poems into Italian.
I know from my own life that when a person wants very much to do something, they will find the time to do it even if it means sacrificing sleep, personal time, and so on. And I don't have anything like the array of personal secretaries, assistants, business managers, etc. that Sackville had available to help him. Even though I have a more than full-time job, with ordinary home responsibilities and two children (now 8 and 12) with busy schedules of their own, I still found time to write The Apocryphal William Shakespeare last year. I also did so privately, keeping strict lines between my amateur interest in the Shakespeare authorship question and my work life, so the two never spilled into each other (and still don't). Because of my own experience, it's not hard for me to imagine Sackville doing something similar, albeit on a much grander scale -- pursuing his personal passion for poetry / playwriting while keeping this pursuit separate and compartmentalized from his professional life as a statesman.
I'll turn to your next question about evidence for Sackville's interest in playwriting / the theatre in my next post.
All best,
--Sabrina
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