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Sir Lewes Lewkenor, the Master of the Ceremonies - the man everyone has been looking for!
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WILLIAM corbett
Jul 1, 2014, 9:54:07 PM7/1/14
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For four hundred years the world has believed that the actor William Shakespeare was the greatest writer that has ever lived.
The world was wrong.
William Corbett's new book uncovers the secret authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare and the Catholic message encoded within their pages.
"When I came across the phrase 'the stings and terrors of a guilty conscience' in an anonymous treatise from 1595 I couldn't help noticing the echo of Hamlet's famous 'to be or not to be' speech with the line 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. Not something you come across everyday, but when I discovered that the man who wrote it is cited again and again by different scholars as a major source for the plays, an examination of his life was called for, which revealed him in a sequence of unique places, places only the author could have been."
The man who wrote that striking line was Lewes Lewkenor, a renegade soldier who had spent a decade fighting for the Catholic Philip II of Spain. But Lewkenor was welcomed back to court by Burghley and soon began working as Elizabeth I's translator and receiver of foreign ambassadors. King James I created the position of Master of the Ceremonies for Lewkenor, placing him front-row at the recorded debut performances of many of the plays in the company of the very people they were written to please. We will examine how his contemporaries sniped at a clandestine writer who hid behind an actor, unraveling the sly allusions they made to a man they called 'Luck-Less' and 'Labeo' who hides like a cuttle-fish 'in the black cloud of his thick vomiture'.
The Master of the Ceremonies covertly led the propaganda war at the heart of the Counter Reformation, speaking directly to his Catholic audience by inserting coded messages in the plays which he published using William Shakespeare as his amanuensis, his mask.
Lewes Lewkenor urged that his name should be kept from his work, unknown for four hundred years. Finally we have found the author that the world and the works deserve. This is a remarkable tale of deceit and intrigue at the highest level.
Lewes Lewkenor was born in Sussex, the son of a local M.P. and scion of a noble lineage, his father enjoyed the patronage of the Queen's favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Lewes attended Cambridge alongside Anthony and Francis Bacon, and struck up a friendship with a man who would become one of England's greatest poets, Edmund Spenser. In 1579 he graduated with an M.A. and followed his uncle and cousin to the Middle Temple, but he found his devout Catholicism incompatible with life in England. Wishing to travel and see the wars and fashions of other countries, Lewes joined the growing number of dissident exiles fighting in the Low Countries under Philip II of Spain. This exodus was fashionable in the early 1580's, as gentlemen of good houses followed their conscience in the matter of religion, seeking restitution to the Roman faith.
Lewes Lewkenor served under several captains, Spanish, Italian and English, and married Beatrice, the daughter of a Brabant merchant. He also served in the Spanish forces under Camillo del Monte, (a captain of the horse, who Lewes tells us, went on to serve the Venetian republic in the very role assigned to Othello). Having lost an arm in the fighting Lewkenor sought a dispensation from the Queen for his return and he was welcomed back by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in exchange for information - essentially, he had been spying for Cecil throughout his exile and service under the Spanish King. On his return from Europe Lewes was well received at court by the Queen and found patronage from one of her closest friends, Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick, who he praises for her willingness to do him good at court. Anne was a great literary patron, having many books dedicated to her in her lifetime, and Lewkenor acknowledges her in his dedication to The Resolved Gentleman claiming that much of it was the Countess' own work.
Lewkenor published three translations between 1594 and 1600, and we can glean some facts of his life from his introductions and the dedicatory poems that adorn them. The poets are effusive in their praise for Lewkenor's style, one urging him to 'give us thy lesnests, not they store' hinting that there is more behind. At first glance we have little to go on, his anonymous treatise stretches to some ninety pages, covering the period 1580-95, and we would expect to gain little understanding of him from his translations of others work, in fact, what we discover is a canon of work which provides a unique insight into the plays.
* The Estate of English Fugitives Under the King of Spain was written as a private letter sometime in 1588-89 and was later expanded and printed in 1595. It takes the same form as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, detailing the evil deeds and ultimate downfall of the protagonists. But these protagonists happen to be the real-life people that scholars have long associated with characters in Shakespeare's plays: John Williams, the Welsh soldier, who is the basis for Fluellen in Henry V; Captain John Smith, who likes to get 'wel-tipled' and whose legs had swollen to 'the thicknesse of a mans middle' and who, like the his stage counter-part, Sir John Fastolf, was from Norfolk, and had deserted the soldiers he had mustered to fight in the Low Countries without pay, a matter which came to the attention of Lord Burghley and the Queen; 'Black' Jack Norris, whose reflection we find in 'Black' Jack Cade of Henry VI. Lewkenor talks at length about Sir William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, whose ancestor appears in Henry VI, part III. Roland York, often cited as the basis for Shakespeare's Iago, is mentioned in familiar terms. There are a number of people with strangely familiar names like Hamyel or Scurlocke, Don John and Don Pedro from Much Ado About Nothing, Captain Jaques Francesco - the Jaques of As You Like It, and Doctor Roderigo Lopez, who is considered to be the model for Shylock. In 1594 Lewkenor writes to Burghley from Egham, near Windsor Castle, asking him to return the manuscript, as the Queen wishes to see it.
* The Resolved Gentleman, printed in 1594. A prose version of Olivier de Marche's blank verse epic. Lewkenor's loss of his left arm gave him cause to ponder his choice to desert his Queen and country to follow his religion; indeed it may have converted him to the Protestant cause. This allegorical journey of a knight would have appealed to Lewkenor as the knight faces his twin demons of Accident and Debility.
* The Commonwealth of Venice' by Contarini in 1599. Cited as the source for The Merchant of Venice and Othello. We find him living in Bishopsgate by the Fortune Theatre.
* The Spanish Mandeville or The Garden of Curious Flowers, initially published without his permission, as the printer begs Lewkenor in the introduction to forgive him for retrieving it out of his waste papers, where it was the author's wish that it be 'consigned to the flames'. Lewkenor urged that 'howsoever it be disposed of' his name should be kept from it. The Spanish Mandeville represents a compendium of the oddities and unusual words found in many of the plays, most notably A Midsummer Nights Dream. Dedicatory poems from his Cambridge classmates Edmund Spenser and Sir John Harington praise him as a poet of the highest degree, although no poetry in his name has survived.
Lewkenor's use of such specific language, years before it appeared in the plays, and his choice of subjects, can be explained away. We may suggest that Shakespeare had read his manuscripts and absorbed his style, his education, and even his life. We can conjecture (a dangerous business when we have few facts) and place William Shakespeare in the Low Countries between 1585-89, reading Lewkenor's treatise in 1595 and recognizing the same characters he had been inspired to write about in Henry VI and would later elaborate in Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor (written in 1596 for George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, at his investiture into the Order of the Garter).
Lewkenor would have encountered the actors at court; he was a member of the inner circle, a well-educated and literate gentleman who rose rapidly. He was chosen for diplomatic service and attended on ambassadors who visited the English court, and this is where his connections to the plays begins to flourish, as in 1599 he escorted the ambassador for the Spanish Netherlands, Vereiken, to the Lord Chamberlain's play Sir John Oldcastle, a play written to undo the unfavourable character painted in Henry VI of the previous Lord Chamberlain's ancestor.
The following year he is working as Spanish translator to the embassy from Barbary, the very visit that is considered to be the inspiration for Othello, and he introduces the Moor, Massouad, to the Queen, who is seated in great state, and we may be surprised to learn that he escorted the Duke of Orsino to the debut of Twelfth Night, which opens with the character of the Duke himself, who speaks the famous lines, 'If music be the food of love, play on!'
Lewkenor's close working relationship with Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I and James I, the Herbert brothers, Fulke Greville, Francis Bacon, and many others, place him at the centre of court life from the 1590's until his death in 1627.
When James I ascended the throne in 1603, Lewkenor rode to Newark to greet him and was duly knighted. King James was entertained with a dozen plays by Shakespeare, issuing the actors with a Royal charter within days of taking the throne, but his surprise choice for the newly created post of Master of the Ceremonies was Sir Lewes Lewkenor, a position that was conferred on him for life in 1605. James I's choice of Lewkenor to handle the delicate diplomatic position that he brought to the fore during his reign suggests that Lewkenor's C.V. provided some special skill not easily found; indeed, the position of Master of Ceremonies is credited as the start of the Diplomatic Corps and the plays of Shakespeare expertly deliver diplomacy and propaganda via the theatre.
His wife, Beatrice, died of smallpox and Lewes remarried to the widow of his cousin and fellow lawyer, Sir Richard Argall, described as 'the widow of one Argal' she too died of smallpox soon after. This explains the obscure use of the word 'argal' in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. His third marriage was to Mary Blount, with whom he had more children. Lewkenor attended Count Gondomar, the only known foreign subscriber to First Folio, when the actors of The Fortune feasted them, and he returned to Catholicism under the hand of Gondomar's Confessor, Fuente.
Lewes Lewkenor's published writings provide a tangible connection to the most obscure elements of Shakespeare's plays, from the unexplained use of 'Argall' instead of 'ergo' in Hamlet, and the use of 'borachio' (a Spanish insult) as a character name, to the corrupted Castilian and Italian mottoes that are used by his soldiers. His personal involvement with so many of the characters from the plays is astonishing, and his time at Cambridge forms the sub-text of Loves Labours Lost, the only play in the whole canon to be the authors own invention. It is here that we come across Holofernes riddle, the answer to which is LL. Another clue falls out if we turn to Ovid's telling of the tale of Pyramis and Thisbe, we will find that Arthur Golding had made a mistake in his famous translation, confusing the names of the various narrators, for after the tragic tale the line that follows should read, 'There was a pause, and then Leucanoe began to speak'.
The life and works of Lewes Lewkenor connect in a myriad of ways with the plays of William Shakespeare; what their relationship may have been, and how their writings coincide will always be a matter for debate, but the similarities in their writing style, their plots, their characters and their subjects are so numerous, that they confirm beyond doubt that Sir Lewes Lewkenor, Master of the Ceremonies, was, in reality, the man who wrote the works attributed to the actor William Shakespeare.
After a pause of four hundred years, Lewkenor begins to speak.
'But me thinks I hear it ubrayed unto me, that it is now rather a time to do than to write: I confess it to be so for him that is well set on work: and yet he that writeth well is never the farther off from doing well: so that for my part I hold it no disgrace to write so long as my pen uttereth no dishonesty. My education hath been in the wars: This I only do to beguile time; wishing that whosoever shall herein censure me amiss, would be as ready as myself, both in mind and body, when either commandment of my prince, or occasion of my country shall injoin me to other courses.'
Lewes Lewkenor
The world was wrong.
William Corbett's new book uncovers the secret authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare and the Catholic message encoded within their pages.
"When I came across the phrase 'the stings and terrors of a guilty conscience' in an anonymous treatise from 1595 I couldn't help noticing the echo of Hamlet's famous 'to be or not to be' speech with the line 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. Not something you come across everyday, but when I discovered that the man who wrote it is cited again and again by different scholars as a major source for the plays, an examination of his life was called for, which revealed him in a sequence of unique places, places only the author could have been."
The man who wrote that striking line was Lewes Lewkenor, a renegade soldier who had spent a decade fighting for the Catholic Philip II of Spain. But Lewkenor was welcomed back to court by Burghley and soon began working as Elizabeth I's translator and receiver of foreign ambassadors. King James I created the position of Master of the Ceremonies for Lewkenor, placing him front-row at the recorded debut performances of many of the plays in the company of the very people they were written to please. We will examine how his contemporaries sniped at a clandestine writer who hid behind an actor, unraveling the sly allusions they made to a man they called 'Luck-Less' and 'Labeo' who hides like a cuttle-fish 'in the black cloud of his thick vomiture'.
The Master of the Ceremonies covertly led the propaganda war at the heart of the Counter Reformation, speaking directly to his Catholic audience by inserting coded messages in the plays which he published using William Shakespeare as his amanuensis, his mask.
Lewes Lewkenor urged that his name should be kept from his work, unknown for four hundred years. Finally we have found the author that the world and the works deserve. This is a remarkable tale of deceit and intrigue at the highest level.
Lewes Lewkenor was born in Sussex, the son of a local M.P. and scion of a noble lineage, his father enjoyed the patronage of the Queen's favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Lewes attended Cambridge alongside Anthony and Francis Bacon, and struck up a friendship with a man who would become one of England's greatest poets, Edmund Spenser. In 1579 he graduated with an M.A. and followed his uncle and cousin to the Middle Temple, but he found his devout Catholicism incompatible with life in England. Wishing to travel and see the wars and fashions of other countries, Lewes joined the growing number of dissident exiles fighting in the Low Countries under Philip II of Spain. This exodus was fashionable in the early 1580's, as gentlemen of good houses followed their conscience in the matter of religion, seeking restitution to the Roman faith.
Lewes Lewkenor served under several captains, Spanish, Italian and English, and married Beatrice, the daughter of a Brabant merchant. He also served in the Spanish forces under Camillo del Monte, (a captain of the horse, who Lewes tells us, went on to serve the Venetian republic in the very role assigned to Othello). Having lost an arm in the fighting Lewkenor sought a dispensation from the Queen for his return and he was welcomed back by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in exchange for information - essentially, he had been spying for Cecil throughout his exile and service under the Spanish King. On his return from Europe Lewes was well received at court by the Queen and found patronage from one of her closest friends, Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick, who he praises for her willingness to do him good at court. Anne was a great literary patron, having many books dedicated to her in her lifetime, and Lewkenor acknowledges her in his dedication to The Resolved Gentleman claiming that much of it was the Countess' own work.
Lewkenor published three translations between 1594 and 1600, and we can glean some facts of his life from his introductions and the dedicatory poems that adorn them. The poets are effusive in their praise for Lewkenor's style, one urging him to 'give us thy lesnests, not they store' hinting that there is more behind. At first glance we have little to go on, his anonymous treatise stretches to some ninety pages, covering the period 1580-95, and we would expect to gain little understanding of him from his translations of others work, in fact, what we discover is a canon of work which provides a unique insight into the plays.
* The Estate of English Fugitives Under the King of Spain was written as a private letter sometime in 1588-89 and was later expanded and printed in 1595. It takes the same form as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, detailing the evil deeds and ultimate downfall of the protagonists. But these protagonists happen to be the real-life people that scholars have long associated with characters in Shakespeare's plays: John Williams, the Welsh soldier, who is the basis for Fluellen in Henry V; Captain John Smith, who likes to get 'wel-tipled' and whose legs had swollen to 'the thicknesse of a mans middle' and who, like the his stage counter-part, Sir John Fastolf, was from Norfolk, and had deserted the soldiers he had mustered to fight in the Low Countries without pay, a matter which came to the attention of Lord Burghley and the Queen; 'Black' Jack Norris, whose reflection we find in 'Black' Jack Cade of Henry VI. Lewkenor talks at length about Sir William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, whose ancestor appears in Henry VI, part III. Roland York, often cited as the basis for Shakespeare's Iago, is mentioned in familiar terms. There are a number of people with strangely familiar names like Hamyel or Scurlocke, Don John and Don Pedro from Much Ado About Nothing, Captain Jaques Francesco - the Jaques of As You Like It, and Doctor Roderigo Lopez, who is considered to be the model for Shylock. In 1594 Lewkenor writes to Burghley from Egham, near Windsor Castle, asking him to return the manuscript, as the Queen wishes to see it.
* The Resolved Gentleman, printed in 1594. A prose version of Olivier de Marche's blank verse epic. Lewkenor's loss of his left arm gave him cause to ponder his choice to desert his Queen and country to follow his religion; indeed it may have converted him to the Protestant cause. This allegorical journey of a knight would have appealed to Lewkenor as the knight faces his twin demons of Accident and Debility.
* The Commonwealth of Venice' by Contarini in 1599. Cited as the source for The Merchant of Venice and Othello. We find him living in Bishopsgate by the Fortune Theatre.
* The Spanish Mandeville or The Garden of Curious Flowers, initially published without his permission, as the printer begs Lewkenor in the introduction to forgive him for retrieving it out of his waste papers, where it was the author's wish that it be 'consigned to the flames'. Lewkenor urged that 'howsoever it be disposed of' his name should be kept from it. The Spanish Mandeville represents a compendium of the oddities and unusual words found in many of the plays, most notably A Midsummer Nights Dream. Dedicatory poems from his Cambridge classmates Edmund Spenser and Sir John Harington praise him as a poet of the highest degree, although no poetry in his name has survived.
Lewkenor's use of such specific language, years before it appeared in the plays, and his choice of subjects, can be explained away. We may suggest that Shakespeare had read his manuscripts and absorbed his style, his education, and even his life. We can conjecture (a dangerous business when we have few facts) and place William Shakespeare in the Low Countries between 1585-89, reading Lewkenor's treatise in 1595 and recognizing the same characters he had been inspired to write about in Henry VI and would later elaborate in Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor (written in 1596 for George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, at his investiture into the Order of the Garter).
Lewkenor would have encountered the actors at court; he was a member of the inner circle, a well-educated and literate gentleman who rose rapidly. He was chosen for diplomatic service and attended on ambassadors who visited the English court, and this is where his connections to the plays begins to flourish, as in 1599 he escorted the ambassador for the Spanish Netherlands, Vereiken, to the Lord Chamberlain's play Sir John Oldcastle, a play written to undo the unfavourable character painted in Henry VI of the previous Lord Chamberlain's ancestor.
The following year he is working as Spanish translator to the embassy from Barbary, the very visit that is considered to be the inspiration for Othello, and he introduces the Moor, Massouad, to the Queen, who is seated in great state, and we may be surprised to learn that he escorted the Duke of Orsino to the debut of Twelfth Night, which opens with the character of the Duke himself, who speaks the famous lines, 'If music be the food of love, play on!'
Lewkenor's close working relationship with Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I and James I, the Herbert brothers, Fulke Greville, Francis Bacon, and many others, place him at the centre of court life from the 1590's until his death in 1627.
When James I ascended the throne in 1603, Lewkenor rode to Newark to greet him and was duly knighted. King James was entertained with a dozen plays by Shakespeare, issuing the actors with a Royal charter within days of taking the throne, but his surprise choice for the newly created post of Master of the Ceremonies was Sir Lewes Lewkenor, a position that was conferred on him for life in 1605. James I's choice of Lewkenor to handle the delicate diplomatic position that he brought to the fore during his reign suggests that Lewkenor's C.V. provided some special skill not easily found; indeed, the position of Master of Ceremonies is credited as the start of the Diplomatic Corps and the plays of Shakespeare expertly deliver diplomacy and propaganda via the theatre.
His wife, Beatrice, died of smallpox and Lewes remarried to the widow of his cousin and fellow lawyer, Sir Richard Argall, described as 'the widow of one Argal' she too died of smallpox soon after. This explains the obscure use of the word 'argal' in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. His third marriage was to Mary Blount, with whom he had more children. Lewkenor attended Count Gondomar, the only known foreign subscriber to First Folio, when the actors of The Fortune feasted them, and he returned to Catholicism under the hand of Gondomar's Confessor, Fuente.
Lewes Lewkenor's published writings provide a tangible connection to the most obscure elements of Shakespeare's plays, from the unexplained use of 'Argall' instead of 'ergo' in Hamlet, and the use of 'borachio' (a Spanish insult) as a character name, to the corrupted Castilian and Italian mottoes that are used by his soldiers. His personal involvement with so many of the characters from the plays is astonishing, and his time at Cambridge forms the sub-text of Loves Labours Lost, the only play in the whole canon to be the authors own invention. It is here that we come across Holofernes riddle, the answer to which is LL. Another clue falls out if we turn to Ovid's telling of the tale of Pyramis and Thisbe, we will find that Arthur Golding had made a mistake in his famous translation, confusing the names of the various narrators, for after the tragic tale the line that follows should read, 'There was a pause, and then Leucanoe began to speak'.
The life and works of Lewes Lewkenor connect in a myriad of ways with the plays of William Shakespeare; what their relationship may have been, and how their writings coincide will always be a matter for debate, but the similarities in their writing style, their plots, their characters and their subjects are so numerous, that they confirm beyond doubt that Sir Lewes Lewkenor, Master of the Ceremonies, was, in reality, the man who wrote the works attributed to the actor William Shakespeare.
After a pause of four hundred years, Lewkenor begins to speak.
'But me thinks I hear it ubrayed unto me, that it is now rather a time to do than to write: I confess it to be so for him that is well set on work: and yet he that writeth well is never the farther off from doing well: so that for my part I hold it no disgrace to write so long as my pen uttereth no dishonesty. My education hath been in the wars: This I only do to beguile time; wishing that whosoever shall herein censure me amiss, would be as ready as myself, both in mind and body, when either commandment of my prince, or occasion of my country shall injoin me to other courses.'
Lewes Lewkenor
WILLIAM corbett
Jul 1, 2014, 9:54:43 PM7/1/14
to
marco
Jul 2, 2014, 1:26:54 PM7/2/14
to
Jim F.
Jul 2, 2014, 9:32:59 PM7/2/14
to
On Wednesday, July 2, 2014 9:54:43 AM UTC+8, WILLIAM corbett wrote:
> http://leweslewkenor.com
Any candidate should fit to all 154 sonnets, that is a true test.
William Shakespeare cannot pass this test. You might like to
consider how Lewes Lewkenor can fit to every sonnet.
> http://leweslewkenor.com
Any candidate should fit to all 154 sonnets, that is a true test.
William Shakespeare cannot pass this test. You might like to
consider how Lewes Lewkenor can fit to every sonnet.
marco
Aug 22, 2014, 1:53:19 PM8/22/14
to
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