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Bob Grumman's last essay on the Shakespeare Authorship Question: A Review of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare
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Sabrina Feldman
May 1, 2015, 11:48:02 PM5/1/15
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I am still in shock over Bob Grumman’s too early death on April 2. I feel a hole in my heart every time I think about him. I keep wanting to email Bob about various topics, Shakespeare authorship-related and otherwise, and can’t wrap my mind around the fact that I’ll never receive one of his irreverent, thought-provoking, kind-hearted emails again. A message to Bob in the heavens: even though we never met, I miss you so much. I never told you how much I love and admire you, and your commitment to living the life of the mind. You spent every day trying to understand and explain those corners of the world that intrigued you. I keep reading your blog, poeticks.com, as a poor substitute for having you alive again. Even though we disagreed on so many topics, from Shakespeare to politics, you are one of the most admirable and free-thinking men I’ve ever known. I plan to dedicate my next book to you, and your picture will have a place on my fireplace mantle all my life. I can’t even think about you without weeping.
For readers here at HLAS:
On March 17, just a couple of weeks before he died, Bob Grumman sent me the near-final draft of his planned Amazon review of my first book The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, on which he had been working for some half a year. Unfortunately he died on April 2 before he was able to complete the last few paragraphs, post his review on Amazon, or post it here at HLAS. I hesitated for the last month before posting this review myself, partly because I did not want to seem to be promoting my book, and partly because I have been so sad about Bob’s death that even writing this has made me cry for the last hour. However, I know Bob would have wanted me to post this on his behalf. It represents his last lengthy essay on the Shakespeare authorship question, and he hoped to make it public.
On March 4, Bob sent me the following email comments on his review. (I had just bought four of his poetry books, which is what Bob was referring to as my ‘patronage.’)
“About my review of your book, it's something I really want to do for many reasons and would do without your patronage of my poetry, as I like to think of it. It is also an expression of friendship because you and your book deserve the kind of serious attention I hope I'm giving it. But I also want to show the SAQ crowd what a review of a SAQ book should be. I also feel Sackville deserves a chapter in my own SAQ book, and the review will provide much of that. It's also satisfying to be able to focus on one major SAQ question without being sidetracked by wacko counter-arguments and non-arguments as is the case at HLAS. So don't feel your bribing me to write the review, or influence it.
all best, Bob"
Bob Grumman’s Review of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare
Last revised: March 17, 2015
Sabrina Feldman’s The Apocryphal William Shakespeare is easily the best book about the SAQ (Shakespeare Authorship Question) that takes a position against the actual author of Shakespeare’s works that I’ve read, and I’ve read more than a few. Of these, perhaps John Michell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare? is the best (although Michell believed a group of people wrote Shakespeare’s works, ignoring the preposterousness of a conspiracy involving such a multitude that nonetheless left behind no direct evidence of its existence whatever), Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare the most clottedly stupid of the semi-sane ones (i.e., those not giving their candidate the works of more than one or two other authors besides Shakespeare’s or making him a prince instead of a mere earl) but the most influential, and Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography the most ingeniously idiotic, and considered the most scholarly by anti-Stratfordians, which is the most popular name given to those seeking to downgrade Shakespeare.
I give Sabrina’s book 5 stars for its description and commentary on the Shakespeare apocrypha—or those plays published during Shakespeare’s lifetime with his name or initials on their title-pages that almost no certified Shakespeare scholars credit him with; 5 stars for making readers aware of a hitherto obscure but important figure in English literature, Thomas Sackville; and 2 stars for the view that Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did not write the plays all the direct documentary evidence says he did, and her arguments for that position: 12 Stars altogether. Dividing that by 3, I get a tally of 4 as my rating for The Apocryphal William Shakespeare as a whole.
A confession: Sabrina is an Internet buddy of mine and the only one so far who has reviewed my own SAQ book, Shakespeare and the Rigidniks—and she gave it a 4! So I had to be gentlemanly and give her book the same score. (If we wuznt buddies, I’d still have given her at least a 3, though.)
From her book’s back cover, we learn that Sabrina was born and raised in Riverside CA. She attended college and grad school at Cal Berkeley, getting a Ph. D. in experimental physics, and now manages the Planetary Science Instrument Development Office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When I emailed her to find out how she happened to get interested in the SAQ, I learned she’d always read a lot, including all of Jane Austen's works and most of Kafka's by age 12 (when I, a somewhat different breed of gifted child than she, was starting to read the Hardy Boys books).
A BBC production of Hamlet with Derek Jacobi as the melancholy Dane made a Shakespeare devotee of her four years later. Thereafter she regularly attended Shakespeare performances in the San Francisco area. Eventually, while working toward her bachelor’s in physics at Cal Berkeley, she took a Shakespeare class taught by Stephen Booth, world-class Shakespeare scholar, and got the only A+ in the class! In short, she was no ignoramus about Shakespeare.
Her downfall occurred when she encountered the April 1999, Harper's Magazine group of ten essays collectively entitled "The Ghost of Shakespeare." It consisted of articles by the five best Oxfordians, as those giving the Earl of Oxford credit for Shakespeare’s works are called, that Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham could round up. Opposing them were five Shakespeare scholars on Shakespeare’s side of the question. Of these, Marjorie Garber was satisfied to do little more than warble in favor of the SAQ’s being ultimately unanswerable, and Harold Bloom pretty much ignored it to gab about his own ideas of Shakespeare (who “invented human nature as we know it,” according to him).
The other three argued creditably for Shakespeare, but none of them was what I’d call a Shakespeare-Affirmer of the first rank—like David Kathman, who took on the Harpers’ Oxfordians with a letter-to-the-editor (which you can read at http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/harpers.html) as soon as the issue it was in came out. In it he pointed out the many factual errors and distortions of the Oxfordians, and otherwise succinctly demonstrated the truth of Shakespeare-Affirmer Gail Kern Paster’s remark in her Harper’s piece that it makes no more sense for Shakespeare scholars to pay any attention to the theories of Oxfordians than for paleontologists to bother arguing with anti-Darwinians. Kathmans’ piece too effectively shot down the Oxfordians for Lapham. Rejecting it, he instead published what Kathman has described as “a group of short and superficial responses (to the Oxfordians) which failed to address the main issues.”
Not then knowing much about the SAQ, Sabrina was taken in by the discussion, although eventually later learning enough to realize many of its flaws, including the conclusion of its five anti-Shakespeareans (as those against Shakespeare are generally called) as to who The True Author was. Since then, she has come to know probably as much about the SAQ, and Shakespeare and his times as I do. The Apocryphal William Shakespeare is the initial result of her research.
Two Plays about a Shrew and their Importance for Sabrina Feldman’s SAQ
One of Sabrina’s three main theses is that a single author was responsible (or mainly responsible) for all the plays on her list of apocryphal Shakespeare plays—“ApocryWill,” as I will now call him. The first play she believes he wrote all or most of was The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which was published anonymously in 1598, but probably written in the late 1580s. While some orthodox scholars posit that this play was an apprentice work of Shakespeare’s, most reject it as that because it is so filled with nonsense and buffoonery. Moreover, its author showed little of the interest in philosophical questions, history or the psychology of its characters that the author of the FF plays did. Ergo, Sabrina contends that a love, indeed a talent for, nonsense and buffoonery significantly different from the True Author’s sort of comedy, and a lack of higher interests, is one of the defining characteristics of ApocryWill’s writing style. I agree that this is a strong piece of evidence that someone other than the True Author wrote The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth and many others, perhaps all, of the apocryphal plays on Sabrina’s list.
My counter-thesis is that some author other than Sabrina’s ApocryWill or her True Author wrote these passages whom I’ll denote as “Dr. FunnyWill.” His real name, if I’m right, will probably never be known, and perhaps was never recorded. I suspect an actor of comic roles. Richard Tarlton would have been an excellent choice had he not died in 1588. Still he may have written one or two of the apocryphal plays and another actor of comic roles taken over for him who was strongly influenced by him. I bring up my guesses more to show that a plausible theory of authorship different from Sabrina’s is possible than anything else. My final view is that we lack sufficient data to have any good idea of when, where or by whom the apocryphal plays were written.
To get back to Sabrina’s idea of ApocryWill’s writing style, from The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth she finds him to have had “a zesty vocabulary, found jokes about food to be highly amusing, and enjoyed writing scenes of roguery, clowning, and wenching.” Certainly, he had a much different, more slangy, vocabulary than the True Author, and forced it into his plays less smoothly than the True Author usually did, although the latter sometimes seemed to me to go out of his way to get his much different play-of-words into his plays (tediously more often than not, in my opinion). And I would agree that ApocryWill’s was more interested in scenes of low comedy than the True Author (although the latter wrote his share of them), although I still have read very few of the plays on Sabrina’s list (but hope to read them all after reading what Sabrina has to say about them).
A digression: a great problem for orthodox scholars called on to refute their work by anti-Stratfordians is the extreme work they’d have to carry out to do so effectively. For instance, a comparison of the frequency and style of the scenes of low comedy in the apocryphal plays versus such scenes in the First Folio plays would take a book to do a good job of. Would it be worth doing? I think it would, but only for a Shakespeare Studies academic whose whole vocation concerns Shakespeare and his literary era. Indeed, part of his job has probably already been done—surely some books he’d know of but I don’t, not being a Shakespeare Studies academic, have been written about Shakespeare’s scenes of low comedy that he could cite.
But I fear not enough writing about the apocryphal plays is available. Nor about playwrights’ general use of scenes of low comedy, which would be relevant. So he’d have to read a number of plays and think about them. I wish someone would. I wish some of those going for doctorates in Shakespeare Studies would be assigned the topic. A major problem has always been Shakespeare professors’ silly fear of certifying anti-Stratfordianism. But the subject would be more the literary times than the SAQ. Moreover, books by the orthodox against anti-Stratfordian claims would surely (1) increase knowledge of use to all sides, (2) help nudge academics out of ruts, (3) help the general reader interested in Shakespeare become better informed, not only about Shakespeare, but about the flaws in the reasoning of his opponents, (4) popularize Shakespeare and his era by covering interesting portions and people of his times that few are familiar with, and (5) increase their analytical skills.
After establishing her idea of ApocryWill as an author in a chapter on The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (the book’s second chapter), and a brief chapter on the plays of Marlowe, the playwright she will spend quite a few words demonstrating how much ApocryWill stole from him, Sabrina turns to a play published anonymously in 1594 called The Taming of a Shrew. This play is so similar to the play we know as The Taming of the Shrew that was first published in the First Folio of 1623 that scholars seem agreed that one was a version of the other, or vice versa—or each was a different version of an Ur-Shrew. Close inter-relationship, in any case.
Sabrina considers A Shrew an adaptation by ApocryWill of The Shrew. Her reasoning is that it seems to be in the style of her conception of the author of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. Sabrina also follows Steven Roy Miller, editor of a 1998 edition of A Shrew, who thought it “far more logical” to take A Shrew as a version of The Shrew because A Shrew seems to shred elements of a plot sequence based on an earlier literary source that the two plays share. This makes sense.
But Miller also argues that A Shrew is a simplification of The Shrew, which has, for instance, three plots, and he believes a simplification would most likely follow a complicated play. It does make sense that The Shrew might well have been simplified for the rubes who would be its audience when the company of actors was on tour. But Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is the reverse of a simplification of the Roman play it is based on.
I think if one studies the question, both sides will make sense, as above. I do think A Shrew came second. That’s because I think it was a thrown together by a few actors who had been in a recent performance of The Shrew, trying to make good material out of what they remembered of the play, and either making up other stuff where their memories failed them—or, in their opinion, to improve what they remembered, or from other plays they’d been in, prominently including Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which was not published until 1604, so had to be the reconstruction of someone who acted in it, or maybe the company owned the rights to Dr. Faustus.
There’s too much to say about the Henry V trilogy to go into here, except to say I think the young Shakespeare blitzed through his six Henry plays and King John while in his middle and late twenties, very possibly with co-authors on the Henry VI trilogy according to recent commentators on the plays, and never revised the ones on Henry VI or King John (at least not fully, although he may have touched them up before later productions; I simply feel they never inspired him, but the idea of adding Falstaff to the Henry V plays energized him to improve the rest of those plays.
Ditto The Shrew: first a crude version of what he made later into a better but still not great play, with a company (Pembroke’s Men, 1592-94, whom records show went on tour with it) make the play work for their set of players, and for the kind of audiences they were bringing it to—and then, the company breaking up, sold it like a bad quarto, which it effectively was.
One possibility I like is that the acting company performing A Shrew added the Christopher Sly scenes to it to provide a role for an extra comic actor of theirs.
There are too many good scenarios out (see the Wikipedia entry of The Taming of the Shrew) for me to say more about mine than that it seems to me not worthless, but—more important—indicates how no particular scenario will be obviously best.
Henry IV Part Two has what Sabrina, and some scholars on my side, believe to be some sort of authorial challenge to Peele and Marlowe expressed in the dialogue given to Pistol. He gets into a fierce argument with Doll Tearsheet that rages into lines that seem a parody or imitation of Peele then definitely repeats locutions of Marlowe’s including his famous “pampered Jades of Asia” and about how little distance the two conquered kings Tamburlaine had drawing his chariot could go. Sabrina interprets the lines to be a comparison of Peele’s and Marlowe’s playwriting with Pistol’s bombast, which Sabrina takes to represent Shakespeare’s playwriting.
Maybe, but it seems to me just a very funny use of popular passages from popular plays to bring Pistol’s character as a pugnacious braggart to the height of a Tamburlaine, and his battle with Dame Tearsheet up to the level of the battle of Alcazar the passage taken from Peele is in. No doubt Shakespeare is here making fun of the grandiose language of Peele and Marlowe, too—but challenging them?
Henry IV Part Two was published in 1600 and considered to have been written in the late nineties by most scholars, albeit not Sabrina. Sabrina feels Shakespeare would not have challenged Peele, who died in 1596 or Marlowe, killed in 1593, but I can see him making fun of plays, perhaps even being more able emotionally to do since their authors were dead.
I also find it unlikely that if the Henry IV plays were performed by 1593, Meres would have ignored them in his 1598 book.
As is the case with so many explanations of scenes from plays that Sabrina uses as evidence in her book for her theory, they seem somewhat plausible but no better than counter-explanations I can give for them that seem to me equal. Result: a draw on such skirmishes—leaving where the real battle occurs, the field of hard evidence, all to the standard theory, which depends on items like a picture in a book, and a monument in a church clearly objectively telling us the standard theory is valid (on the whole) rather than subjectively hinting that it is not.
Sabrina’s take on Henry IV Part Two could even be right in claiming the play was written before 1593, so might have more decorously made fun or “challenged” Marlowe and Peele, for we don’t know when the First Folio draft of the play was written.
Another part of Sabrina’s case for Will Shakespeare of Stratford as ApocryWill, a substantial part, is her interpretation of various writings that anti-Stratfordians for generations have used against the Stratford man. They are all satirical of someone in the theatre scene, sometimes scathingly so. My impression is that the anti-Stratfordians tend to take all the insults of that could by any stretch of the imagination be applied to the Stratford man to apply to him. Sabrina uses many of them. Her central one is Robert Greene’s attack in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit on the “upstart crow” who supposed himself “the onely Shake-scene in a countrey” and is thought by most literary historians to have been the Stratford man. After introducing the Groatsworth, Sabrina falls back a year or so in Greene’s life before he wrote it, to his Farewell to Folly, in which, Sabrina argues, Greene accuses the author of Fair Em as not just a bad writer but a plagiarist and sometime ghost writer for others. Her evidence that Greene is writing about the author of Fair Em is that Greene accuses the man of stealing plots from ballads, and Fair Em is based on a ballad.
I would want to know more: for instance, how many plays of the time were based on ballads, before believing that Greene was writing about any particular author. She goes on, quite effectively, to show the many ways whoever Greene was writing about resembles her idea of ApocryWill—but mentions no other playwrights he might plausibly have been, like Kyd, but mostly like probably more than one we no longer have any record of.
Sabrina uses the anonymous Arden of Favorsham not as another example of ApocryWill’s playwriting but as a satire on him. The play has two comically inept murderers, Shakebag and Black Will, Sabrina believes satirical of ApocryWill—although forthrightly admitting that they portrayed historical characters with those names. It was written in 1591—possibly by a young Ben Jonson.
Interestingly, Shakebag occasionally breaks out of his usual homely prose into blank verse like: “Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,/ And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth,/ And with the black fold of her cloudy robe/ Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,” which seems quite Shakespearean to me. Or, if not Shakespearean, in a climb to somewhere near that. Marlowe? My guess would be Shakespeare the play-doctor. The blank verse heightening possible an incongruous change of style for a total thug intended for laughs? I haven’t read the play (one thing The Apocryphal William Shakespeare definitely does is make one read such plays—for enjoyment); I’m speaking from my own past as a (never-produced) playwright when I did such things.
Sabrina brings up another anonymous play, Selimus (ca. 1591) for a clown in it she supposes a satire on ApocryWill (anti-Stratfordians tend to consider almost every vulgar comic figure in a play or poem to be a satire on poor ApocryWill). She finds Marlowe’s “intense style” in some of its passages, but gives Greene the clown’s speeches, which are reminiscent of those of Sparrow, a character in Guy, Earl of Warwick, (whom Sabrina considers “almost certainly a caricature” of ApocryWill because, among other things, “Sparrow” is pronounced “spear-O,” he ditched the mother of his child back in his hometown of Stratford, and is a conceited lack-latin poet).
Guy, however, was not published until 1661—with “B.J.” on its title-page). It seems interestingly possible that Sparrow was a satire on ApocryWill—or my Will, by those jealous of his superior talent who exaggerated what they took to be his flaws, like poorer Latin than theirs.
One thought, my Will could have had only what Latin he remembered for his early plays, then got books in Latin he could refer to in order to get what Latin he wrote right. In other words, he had more than enough Latin to read it, use it correctly if he could check his memory, which was poor at rote learning, good at osmotic learning. It seems hard for me to believe that even ApocryWill would not have stayed in school long enough to get a good grasp of Latin. Related thought: how much would he have temporarily lost of it if he didn’t use it for six of seven years until he saw the use of it in plays?
Sabrina discusses many plays a chapter at a time that have some sort of title-page attribution to Shakespeare or W.S., or a reason for attributing the play to him that makes sense, such as a later FF play being about the same subject.
The Arte of English Prose attributed to George Puttenham (1589) alludes to “ . . . gentlemen of her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest . . .” Evidence for Puttenham, a servant of the Queen at the time, as an important “concealed writer. TAWS says yes, but I wonder: how does the author of The Arte know about the work of “concealed authors?” Sackville had a play and two poems published in his name. Another problem is the number of such writers mentioned: too many, it seems to me, to pick out one as the particular one who used Shakespeare as a front (as was either the explicit case, or the effectual case—i.e., either Sackville or someone acting for him got Shakespeare to agree to act as Sackville’s front, or the latter came accidentally or illicitly to become just such a front whether desired or not).
She uses Greene’s writing of “Theological poets” who hired writers to act as front men for works the wanted to publish without anyone’s knowing it because “for their calling and gravity being loathe to have any profane pamphlets pass under their hand” to indicate how it was taken for granted that some men of high social rank might want his authorship concealed, the way she believes Sackville did.
Important note from TAWS: when Gorboduc was published with Sackville’s and Norton’s names on it, a second edition was printed with its printer’s disclosure that the previous edition had been unauthorized. The two authors wanted it known that they were quite upset to have become known as a play’s authors. I wonder. The second edition was five years after the first. If they were really upset, why did they take so long to complain? Why, too, is there no evidence, even anecdotal, of their having been mocked or otherwise embarrassed by anyone for having written it? I think it possible they may have been sufficiently proud of their accomplishment to have wanted to make sure it entered world culture while having it both ways by pretending to be too manly to have been responsible for mere literature. In any case, the second edition of Gorboduc is enough to keep Sackville a possible concealed . . . playwright. Not a concealed poet, because he later allowed two poems of his to be published.
Call that an oversight, and all is okay, though. He could easily have thereafter kept his poems away from printers, circulating them among many friends—as Shakespeare’s. Hmmm, make that “getting Shakespeare to circulate them among . . . his friends?” But he had no literary friends. A better guess is that Sackville simply gave them to a single very trusted friend who circulated them—Ah, the one they were written to according to many scholars and Sabrina (and I, although not certain, because of Sabrina’s excellent argument that Shakespeare says in one of his sonnets that the addressee of the sonnets is the only one he made everlasting by naming him, and Southampton is the only one he ever named).
The preceding paragraph illustrates once again the many problems any scenario regarding the writing of Shakespeare’s works by someone other than Shakespeare entails compared with the simplicity of the scenario required if Shakespeare himself wrote them . . . or dictated them, as the near-total illiterate his appalling handwriting makes it certain he was. Amusingly, though, for most anti-Stratfordians, much of the appeal of the demotion of Shakespeare is due to the wonderful secret conspiracy it requires. Of course, the main virtue of it for those believing in it is its ability to explain everything. We have no manuscripts because the author didn’t want any evidence to survive that connected him to the Shakespearean Oeuvre, etc.
Feldman makes the usually anti-Stratfordian claim for “the stigma of print.” I find it hard to accept that someone capable of Shakespeare’s works would have been bothered by idiots who would scorn such accomplishments, but geniuses can be idiots. In any case, it seems a pretty weak reason not just for concealing a True Author’s identity but for going to the incredible lengths the one’s concealing the identity of the True Shakespeare went to, which went on, it would seem, for generations, collections of the plays coming out in the false name 25 or 30 years after the True Author died (if he were one of the most prominent ones so far named).
That someone calling himself “Ignoto” penned a commendatory poem in Spenser’s The Faery Queene (1590) is another plank in the bridge to Sackville under construction in TAWS: there its similarity of its theme (good writing needs no advertisement) to a speech of Rosalind’s in As You Like It is presented as evidence that both speech and poem was the work of Sackville. The stanza form of the four-stanza poem is a further link between “Ignoto” and the True Author, for it is the same one used in Venus and Adonis. Unfortunately, “Ignoto” was commonly used for a number of writers simply to mean “anonymous” during this time, so fails strongly to pin down anyone as the author of the commendatory poem.
On the other hand, Sabrina goes on to quote a commendatory sonnet of Spenser’s to Sackville which may be interpreted to ask Sackville to continue maintaining the value of Spenser’s verse against “backbitings vain,” which “Ignoto” could be said to have done in his poem to Spenser.
I think “Ignoto” may well have been Spenser but am waiting for a stylometric study I can believe in pins that down—or relevant objective evidence turns up.
Now that we have an idea of how Sabrina took care of her first challenge, demonstrating the plausibility of ApocryWill’s having written all or part of the plays on her list, we come to her second challenge, demonstrating the plausibility of Thomas Sackville’s having written all or most of each of the FF plays. She begins with the evidence, quite strong, of Sackville’s having been capable of literary greatness. “To know Thomas Sackville—to know his two poems and one play—is to know where Elizabethan tragedy came from and where it was going,” a quotation from Normand Berlin’s Thomas Sackville (1974).
Sackville, (1536 – 1608), she tells us, “ . . . was one of the leading statesmen of the time and (her italics) the greatest poet of his generation.” He rose high enough in Elizabeth’s favor to become Lord Treasurer in 1599, having 32 years earlier having been made a baron. He was retained as Lord Treasure by King James after Elizabeth died, and was elevated to an earldom. Meanwhile, he and Thomas Norton had written Gorboduc (1561), the first English drama in blank verse, and universally considered what Berlin called it. I’ve read it and consider it as good or better than Titus Andronicus, which William Shakespeare is said by most Shakespeare scholars to have written 20 or so years later, although Titus is quite a bit more adventurous in language (in my view).
He also wrote two narrative poems, Induction and The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham that appeared in the famous 1663 poetry anthology, Mirror for Magistrates, which many critics feel establish him as the poet of his generation Sabrina claims he was. We also have a poem called Sacvyl’s Old Age which was long lost but found by chance in the 1980s. Sackville wrote it as he approached the age of . . . 40. (This is interesting so far as the SAQ is concerned because of how unlikely it would have been for Shakespeare’s actually to have written the sonnets attributed to him because in two or three of them their author describes himself as an old man although would have been no older than 40 when they were written. A similar point of interest is the spelling of Sackville’s name; anti-Stratfordians [other than Sabrina] also make a big deal of the different ways Shakespeare’s name is spelled in the records.
Friendship of Florio and Sackville as evidence of Sackville as playwright. (Phaeton as Sackville with a commendatory sonnet in Florio’s Second Fruits?ⁿ) But why no mention of his comedies by Meres? And why did Meres list both Sackville and Shakespeare in a single list of excellent contemporary English tragedians? Was he one of those in the know or just ignorant? A probably with all anti-Stratfordian conspiracy-scenarios is how often about some person of the times that question comes up.
Sabrina quotes none of Sackville’s works—when writing the book under review, she was saving her full case for Sackville for her soon-to-be published sequel to it. However, in The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, she quotes a number of documents from the time alluding to concealed poets, her case for Sackville being premised on his having been such a poet.
The weakest portion of Sabrina’s books seems to me the portion devoted to demonstrating that Shakespeare was not the True Author. Of course, she has already produced a good case for his having actually authored a bunch of second-rate plays. If so, it is as unlikely he also authored the very much better FF plays as it is that he could have written any of the apocryphal plays had he been the actual author of the FF plays. But she has no direct evidence for him as ApocryWill aside from title-page attributions, only a few of which gave his whole name.
The title-page evidence for his authorship of the FF plays is much stronger. Unlike the apocryphal plays, other title-page attributions supported them as his. Also unlike the apocryphal plays, other writers mentioned them as his. Most important, Heminges and Condell, who personally knew him, claimed only the FF plays as his. They spoke of “diuerse stoln, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of iniurious imposters that expos’d them: even those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect in their limbes; and all the rest I absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued them.”
The Troublesome Reign of King John is possibly another play of ApocryWill’s. Its title-page attributes it to “W. Sh.,” and, according to Sabrina, William Shakespeare never disputed his authorship of it. So far as we know, as I must add, Sabrina overlooking, as almost all anti-Stratfordians do, that absence of evidence does not necessarily mean evidence of absence. According to The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, the True Author’s “King John, a different but closely related play, was printed for the first time in the 1623 First Folio under Troublesome Reign’s publishing license. Despite this direct contemporary evidence that William Shakespeare wrote Troublesome Reign, modern scholars do not assign it to him.”
This is interesting. As Sabrina shows, scholars consider the early version too poorly written to have been by Shakespeare—even though, in my opinion, the FF version is almost as bad a play as the ones about Henry VI. It does have a few bright spots. I think WS wrote both, improving his apprentice version for later but not trying too hard. As Sabrina points out (and this kind of fairly detailed use of what scholars, real scholars, have said about a play is one of the many virtues of TAWS), the early play reaches Marlovian heights, as in the following speech of the French King about his army’s progress at one point: “Twice should not Titan hide him in the west,/ Too cool the fetlocks of his weary team,/ Till I had with an unresisted shock/ Controlled the manage of proud Angiers’s walls . . .”
Sabrina also quotes bombastic passages—one about a viper, for example—that strike me as the kind of thing the early Shakespeare was guilty of in Titus and other plays. She refers to scholars who have pointed out the many parallels in the early play to Marlowe or Peele, which make sense to me as what Shakespeare would probably have been doing early on. One of my theories about the early play is that it is a play by Peele and Marlowe which Shakespeare greatly re-wrote or collaborated with them on, then later improved to the still poor FF version, perhaps when still not quite what he suddenly seems to have become in the mid-nineties.
I think the use of an early play’s publishing license for a different play with the same name, if it happened, was only a way of avoiding a fee, not indicative that anyone necessarily thought both versions were written by the same man. In this case, I’m not sure who Sabrina thinks was the same man who wrote it, Sackville or ApocryWill. The question, from what I consider Sabrina’s point of view, is if the former, how could his early play be so bad, if the latter, how could his later play be so improved? If ApocryWill wrote the early version and Sackville the later version, then scholars have been right to assign two different authors to the two versions, which it seems to me Sabrina has contested.
Once again the need for a valid stylometric study would be helpful—but extremely difficult, it seems to me, since the early play could be a mix of sometimes tiny portions by many different authors and/or by one or more authors extremely influenced by one or more other authors or even plagiarizing one or more of them, as could the later play. I believe all the FF plays (and only those plays) seemed to Condell and Heminges to have been sufficiently by Shakespeare to be considered his, so assign the FF King John to him. I lean toward the early play’s being mainly by the FF author, too, but consider the question open.
Locrine (ca. 1591, published in 1595) is another play Sabrina thinks ApocryWill may have written, because it has “W.S.” on its title-page. Scholars advance Peele and Greene alone or a collaborators; Sabrina thinks the author’s initials unlikely if that were the case, since Greene’s name, at least, should have been a bigger draw than WS’s when published. Sabrina goes on to tell us that the title-page indicates that “‘W.S.’ himself oversaw the publication and ‘corrected’ errors. Given this case, the author can be assumed to have taken care that his initials were printed correctly.” Here I feel Sabrina, like so many authorship skeptics, assumes a single cause for something when several are plausible. For instance, my own best but not only guess is that the publisher got the play from Shakespeare or an actor who said Shakespeare had updated it, so had the text printed that appeared on the title-page, possibly knowing Shakespeare had not written the play but done a little work on it, so the publisher wouldn’t be cheating the public too much to imply it was his work, his name being quite a salable one due to the success of Venus and Adonis, and perhaps some word-of-mouth about his plays.
But some other WS could have written it, as some scholars believe. Or the publisher was ignorant and merely thought a play from Shakespeare’s company was by him, and knew it was updated because it was different from a version he saw. Or maybe Charles Tilney wrote a version of it, as evidence from George Buc, Master of the Revels, indicates. In that case, it is possible that several playwrights tinkered with it, and Shakespeare was responsible for the published version.
As is the case with so much theorizing about this era in literature, we simply have too little data to pin very much down. That’s why I drop down to default position on just about everything except what the available data makes, for me, certain beyond reasonable doubt: that WS was the sole, or chief author of all the plays in the FF, and the major poems attributed to him, and most of the other details are (1) of minor consequence, however interesting, and (2) up for grabs—with nothing contradicting my default position capable of being correct.
There’s a lot of stuff stolen from Spenser in Locrine, too. What to make of it? I simply don’t know. I doubt that a single playwright was stealing stuff and getting away with it to the extent that we have published copies of so many of his works (remember, most plays of the time are just names now, or nothing). I tend to guess unscrupulous playwrights, like Greene, may have made quick money by revising plays for a fee by filling them with stolen material. Or actors filled plays with gaps in them with lines they remembered from plays they had been in.
How would they likely have been caught? How many play-goers bought books of poetry, and of those who did, how many remembered much of what they’d read, or would recognize the works of many poets when used on stage?
I doubt a man thought to have the art of Virgil, the wisdom of Socrates and the common sense of Nestor, or whatever the monument said about Shakespeare , would have needed to steal whole passages from Spenser or Marlowe or anyone else. The bottom line, however, is—again—we simply can’t know what happened.
n Not only does The Apocryphal William Shakespeare introduce us to a host of interesting plays and poems to read but its conspiracy theory nicely incorporates a lot of interesting writers and others of the times besides Sackville such as Florio—particularly the ones using names like Phaeton—as we shall see.
2 Which many be many different kinds of “knowledge-bits” such as the visual appearance of a tree.
One reason Sabrina's book excites me is that it grapples with the whole Shakespearean literary scene. I want her to use her substantial analytical gifts and imagination to do an overview of the era from 1550 or so through 1630 or so. I might consider that, too. (A related problem with Shakespeare scholars is too great a focus on Willie or some True Author, rather than the fascinating scene of the times. Definitely my problem but one I'm too old to grow out of.)
Main gaps: how active as a play-doctor was Shakespeare? How common was the doctoring of plays? Did actors act as play-doctors very often? Datum: the many play-doctors Thomas More had. Also, how common were collaboratively-written plays?
Exactly how did plays get to publishers? How many plays were thought to have been mis-attributed to someone other than Shakespeare?
How many unknown playwrights were there? How many concealed poets? How many literary circles of friendship are we sure of? How many seem plausible?
How active were aristocratic playwrights? How many were known to write plays for private performance? How many such plays were published? How many college plays were published?
Datum: WS’s telling the registrar he thought a clergyman had written a certain play. Conclusion: lots of different people wrote plays, and they were hard to keep track of. Also, how would WS have known of the clergyman—that is, wouldn’t the clergyman have been certain to conceal his authorship?
For readers here at HLAS:
On March 17, just a couple of weeks before he died, Bob Grumman sent me the near-final draft of his planned Amazon review of my first book The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, on which he had been working for some half a year. Unfortunately he died on April 2 before he was able to complete the last few paragraphs, post his review on Amazon, or post it here at HLAS. I hesitated for the last month before posting this review myself, partly because I did not want to seem to be promoting my book, and partly because I have been so sad about Bob’s death that even writing this has made me cry for the last hour. However, I know Bob would have wanted me to post this on his behalf. It represents his last lengthy essay on the Shakespeare authorship question, and he hoped to make it public.
On March 4, Bob sent me the following email comments on his review. (I had just bought four of his poetry books, which is what Bob was referring to as my ‘patronage.’)
“About my review of your book, it's something I really want to do for many reasons and would do without your patronage of my poetry, as I like to think of it. It is also an expression of friendship because you and your book deserve the kind of serious attention I hope I'm giving it. But I also want to show the SAQ crowd what a review of a SAQ book should be. I also feel Sackville deserves a chapter in my own SAQ book, and the review will provide much of that. It's also satisfying to be able to focus on one major SAQ question without being sidetracked by wacko counter-arguments and non-arguments as is the case at HLAS. So don't feel your bribing me to write the review, or influence it.
all best, Bob"
Bob Grumman’s Review of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare
Last revised: March 17, 2015
Sabrina Feldman’s The Apocryphal William Shakespeare is easily the best book about the SAQ (Shakespeare Authorship Question) that takes a position against the actual author of Shakespeare’s works that I’ve read, and I’ve read more than a few. Of these, perhaps John Michell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare? is the best (although Michell believed a group of people wrote Shakespeare’s works, ignoring the preposterousness of a conspiracy involving such a multitude that nonetheless left behind no direct evidence of its existence whatever), Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare the most clottedly stupid of the semi-sane ones (i.e., those not giving their candidate the works of more than one or two other authors besides Shakespeare’s or making him a prince instead of a mere earl) but the most influential, and Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography the most ingeniously idiotic, and considered the most scholarly by anti-Stratfordians, which is the most popular name given to those seeking to downgrade Shakespeare.
I give Sabrina’s book 5 stars for its description and commentary on the Shakespeare apocrypha—or those plays published during Shakespeare’s lifetime with his name or initials on their title-pages that almost no certified Shakespeare scholars credit him with; 5 stars for making readers aware of a hitherto obscure but important figure in English literature, Thomas Sackville; and 2 stars for the view that Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did not write the plays all the direct documentary evidence says he did, and her arguments for that position: 12 Stars altogether. Dividing that by 3, I get a tally of 4 as my rating for The Apocryphal William Shakespeare as a whole.
A confession: Sabrina is an Internet buddy of mine and the only one so far who has reviewed my own SAQ book, Shakespeare and the Rigidniks—and she gave it a 4! So I had to be gentlemanly and give her book the same score. (If we wuznt buddies, I’d still have given her at least a 3, though.)
From her book’s back cover, we learn that Sabrina was born and raised in Riverside CA. She attended college and grad school at Cal Berkeley, getting a Ph. D. in experimental physics, and now manages the Planetary Science Instrument Development Office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When I emailed her to find out how she happened to get interested in the SAQ, I learned she’d always read a lot, including all of Jane Austen's works and most of Kafka's by age 12 (when I, a somewhat different breed of gifted child than she, was starting to read the Hardy Boys books).
A BBC production of Hamlet with Derek Jacobi as the melancholy Dane made a Shakespeare devotee of her four years later. Thereafter she regularly attended Shakespeare performances in the San Francisco area. Eventually, while working toward her bachelor’s in physics at Cal Berkeley, she took a Shakespeare class taught by Stephen Booth, world-class Shakespeare scholar, and got the only A+ in the class! In short, she was no ignoramus about Shakespeare.
Her downfall occurred when she encountered the April 1999, Harper's Magazine group of ten essays collectively entitled "The Ghost of Shakespeare." It consisted of articles by the five best Oxfordians, as those giving the Earl of Oxford credit for Shakespeare’s works are called, that Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham could round up. Opposing them were five Shakespeare scholars on Shakespeare’s side of the question. Of these, Marjorie Garber was satisfied to do little more than warble in favor of the SAQ’s being ultimately unanswerable, and Harold Bloom pretty much ignored it to gab about his own ideas of Shakespeare (who “invented human nature as we know it,” according to him).
The other three argued creditably for Shakespeare, but none of them was what I’d call a Shakespeare-Affirmer of the first rank—like David Kathman, who took on the Harpers’ Oxfordians with a letter-to-the-editor (which you can read at http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/harpers.html) as soon as the issue it was in came out. In it he pointed out the many factual errors and distortions of the Oxfordians, and otherwise succinctly demonstrated the truth of Shakespeare-Affirmer Gail Kern Paster’s remark in her Harper’s piece that it makes no more sense for Shakespeare scholars to pay any attention to the theories of Oxfordians than for paleontologists to bother arguing with anti-Darwinians. Kathmans’ piece too effectively shot down the Oxfordians for Lapham. Rejecting it, he instead published what Kathman has described as “a group of short and superficial responses (to the Oxfordians) which failed to address the main issues.”
Not then knowing much about the SAQ, Sabrina was taken in by the discussion, although eventually later learning enough to realize many of its flaws, including the conclusion of its five anti-Shakespeareans (as those against Shakespeare are generally called) as to who The True Author was. Since then, she has come to know probably as much about the SAQ, and Shakespeare and his times as I do. The Apocryphal William Shakespeare is the initial result of her research.
Two Plays about a Shrew and their Importance for Sabrina Feldman’s SAQ
One of Sabrina’s three main theses is that a single author was responsible (or mainly responsible) for all the plays on her list of apocryphal Shakespeare plays—“ApocryWill,” as I will now call him. The first play she believes he wrote all or most of was The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which was published anonymously in 1598, but probably written in the late 1580s. While some orthodox scholars posit that this play was an apprentice work of Shakespeare’s, most reject it as that because it is so filled with nonsense and buffoonery. Moreover, its author showed little of the interest in philosophical questions, history or the psychology of its characters that the author of the FF plays did. Ergo, Sabrina contends that a love, indeed a talent for, nonsense and buffoonery significantly different from the True Author’s sort of comedy, and a lack of higher interests, is one of the defining characteristics of ApocryWill’s writing style. I agree that this is a strong piece of evidence that someone other than the True Author wrote The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth and many others, perhaps all, of the apocryphal plays on Sabrina’s list.
My counter-thesis is that some author other than Sabrina’s ApocryWill or her True Author wrote these passages whom I’ll denote as “Dr. FunnyWill.” His real name, if I’m right, will probably never be known, and perhaps was never recorded. I suspect an actor of comic roles. Richard Tarlton would have been an excellent choice had he not died in 1588. Still he may have written one or two of the apocryphal plays and another actor of comic roles taken over for him who was strongly influenced by him. I bring up my guesses more to show that a plausible theory of authorship different from Sabrina’s is possible than anything else. My final view is that we lack sufficient data to have any good idea of when, where or by whom the apocryphal plays were written.
To get back to Sabrina’s idea of ApocryWill’s writing style, from The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth she finds him to have had “a zesty vocabulary, found jokes about food to be highly amusing, and enjoyed writing scenes of roguery, clowning, and wenching.” Certainly, he had a much different, more slangy, vocabulary than the True Author, and forced it into his plays less smoothly than the True Author usually did, although the latter sometimes seemed to me to go out of his way to get his much different play-of-words into his plays (tediously more often than not, in my opinion). And I would agree that ApocryWill’s was more interested in scenes of low comedy than the True Author (although the latter wrote his share of them), although I still have read very few of the plays on Sabrina’s list (but hope to read them all after reading what Sabrina has to say about them).
A digression: a great problem for orthodox scholars called on to refute their work by anti-Stratfordians is the extreme work they’d have to carry out to do so effectively. For instance, a comparison of the frequency and style of the scenes of low comedy in the apocryphal plays versus such scenes in the First Folio plays would take a book to do a good job of. Would it be worth doing? I think it would, but only for a Shakespeare Studies academic whose whole vocation concerns Shakespeare and his literary era. Indeed, part of his job has probably already been done—surely some books he’d know of but I don’t, not being a Shakespeare Studies academic, have been written about Shakespeare’s scenes of low comedy that he could cite.
But I fear not enough writing about the apocryphal plays is available. Nor about playwrights’ general use of scenes of low comedy, which would be relevant. So he’d have to read a number of plays and think about them. I wish someone would. I wish some of those going for doctorates in Shakespeare Studies would be assigned the topic. A major problem has always been Shakespeare professors’ silly fear of certifying anti-Stratfordianism. But the subject would be more the literary times than the SAQ. Moreover, books by the orthodox against anti-Stratfordian claims would surely (1) increase knowledge of use to all sides, (2) help nudge academics out of ruts, (3) help the general reader interested in Shakespeare become better informed, not only about Shakespeare, but about the flaws in the reasoning of his opponents, (4) popularize Shakespeare and his era by covering interesting portions and people of his times that few are familiar with, and (5) increase their analytical skills.
After establishing her idea of ApocryWill as an author in a chapter on The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (the book’s second chapter), and a brief chapter on the plays of Marlowe, the playwright she will spend quite a few words demonstrating how much ApocryWill stole from him, Sabrina turns to a play published anonymously in 1594 called The Taming of a Shrew. This play is so similar to the play we know as The Taming of the Shrew that was first published in the First Folio of 1623 that scholars seem agreed that one was a version of the other, or vice versa—or each was a different version of an Ur-Shrew. Close inter-relationship, in any case.
Sabrina considers A Shrew an adaptation by ApocryWill of The Shrew. Her reasoning is that it seems to be in the style of her conception of the author of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. Sabrina also follows Steven Roy Miller, editor of a 1998 edition of A Shrew, who thought it “far more logical” to take A Shrew as a version of The Shrew because A Shrew seems to shred elements of a plot sequence based on an earlier literary source that the two plays share. This makes sense.
But Miller also argues that A Shrew is a simplification of The Shrew, which has, for instance, three plots, and he believes a simplification would most likely follow a complicated play. It does make sense that The Shrew might well have been simplified for the rubes who would be its audience when the company of actors was on tour. But Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is the reverse of a simplification of the Roman play it is based on.
I think if one studies the question, both sides will make sense, as above. I do think A Shrew came second. That’s because I think it was a thrown together by a few actors who had been in a recent performance of The Shrew, trying to make good material out of what they remembered of the play, and either making up other stuff where their memories failed them—or, in their opinion, to improve what they remembered, or from other plays they’d been in, prominently including Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which was not published until 1604, so had to be the reconstruction of someone who acted in it, or maybe the company owned the rights to Dr. Faustus.
There’s too much to say about the Henry V trilogy to go into here, except to say I think the young Shakespeare blitzed through his six Henry plays and King John while in his middle and late twenties, very possibly with co-authors on the Henry VI trilogy according to recent commentators on the plays, and never revised the ones on Henry VI or King John (at least not fully, although he may have touched them up before later productions; I simply feel they never inspired him, but the idea of adding Falstaff to the Henry V plays energized him to improve the rest of those plays.
Ditto The Shrew: first a crude version of what he made later into a better but still not great play, with a company (Pembroke’s Men, 1592-94, whom records show went on tour with it) make the play work for their set of players, and for the kind of audiences they were bringing it to—and then, the company breaking up, sold it like a bad quarto, which it effectively was.
One possibility I like is that the acting company performing A Shrew added the Christopher Sly scenes to it to provide a role for an extra comic actor of theirs.
There are too many good scenarios out (see the Wikipedia entry of The Taming of the Shrew) for me to say more about mine than that it seems to me not worthless, but—more important—indicates how no particular scenario will be obviously best.
Henry IV Part Two has what Sabrina, and some scholars on my side, believe to be some sort of authorial challenge to Peele and Marlowe expressed in the dialogue given to Pistol. He gets into a fierce argument with Doll Tearsheet that rages into lines that seem a parody or imitation of Peele then definitely repeats locutions of Marlowe’s including his famous “pampered Jades of Asia” and about how little distance the two conquered kings Tamburlaine had drawing his chariot could go. Sabrina interprets the lines to be a comparison of Peele’s and Marlowe’s playwriting with Pistol’s bombast, which Sabrina takes to represent Shakespeare’s playwriting.
Maybe, but it seems to me just a very funny use of popular passages from popular plays to bring Pistol’s character as a pugnacious braggart to the height of a Tamburlaine, and his battle with Dame Tearsheet up to the level of the battle of Alcazar the passage taken from Peele is in. No doubt Shakespeare is here making fun of the grandiose language of Peele and Marlowe, too—but challenging them?
Henry IV Part Two was published in 1600 and considered to have been written in the late nineties by most scholars, albeit not Sabrina. Sabrina feels Shakespeare would not have challenged Peele, who died in 1596 or Marlowe, killed in 1593, but I can see him making fun of plays, perhaps even being more able emotionally to do since their authors were dead.
I also find it unlikely that if the Henry IV plays were performed by 1593, Meres would have ignored them in his 1598 book.
As is the case with so many explanations of scenes from plays that Sabrina uses as evidence in her book for her theory, they seem somewhat plausible but no better than counter-explanations I can give for them that seem to me equal. Result: a draw on such skirmishes—leaving where the real battle occurs, the field of hard evidence, all to the standard theory, which depends on items like a picture in a book, and a monument in a church clearly objectively telling us the standard theory is valid (on the whole) rather than subjectively hinting that it is not.
Sabrina’s take on Henry IV Part Two could even be right in claiming the play was written before 1593, so might have more decorously made fun or “challenged” Marlowe and Peele, for we don’t know when the First Folio draft of the play was written.
Another part of Sabrina’s case for Will Shakespeare of Stratford as ApocryWill, a substantial part, is her interpretation of various writings that anti-Stratfordians for generations have used against the Stratford man. They are all satirical of someone in the theatre scene, sometimes scathingly so. My impression is that the anti-Stratfordians tend to take all the insults of that could by any stretch of the imagination be applied to the Stratford man to apply to him. Sabrina uses many of them. Her central one is Robert Greene’s attack in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit on the “upstart crow” who supposed himself “the onely Shake-scene in a countrey” and is thought by most literary historians to have been the Stratford man. After introducing the Groatsworth, Sabrina falls back a year or so in Greene’s life before he wrote it, to his Farewell to Folly, in which, Sabrina argues, Greene accuses the author of Fair Em as not just a bad writer but a plagiarist and sometime ghost writer for others. Her evidence that Greene is writing about the author of Fair Em is that Greene accuses the man of stealing plots from ballads, and Fair Em is based on a ballad.
I would want to know more: for instance, how many plays of the time were based on ballads, before believing that Greene was writing about any particular author. She goes on, quite effectively, to show the many ways whoever Greene was writing about resembles her idea of ApocryWill—but mentions no other playwrights he might plausibly have been, like Kyd, but mostly like probably more than one we no longer have any record of.
Sabrina uses the anonymous Arden of Favorsham not as another example of ApocryWill’s playwriting but as a satire on him. The play has two comically inept murderers, Shakebag and Black Will, Sabrina believes satirical of ApocryWill—although forthrightly admitting that they portrayed historical characters with those names. It was written in 1591—possibly by a young Ben Jonson.
Interestingly, Shakebag occasionally breaks out of his usual homely prose into blank verse like: “Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,/ And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth,/ And with the black fold of her cloudy robe/ Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,” which seems quite Shakespearean to me. Or, if not Shakespearean, in a climb to somewhere near that. Marlowe? My guess would be Shakespeare the play-doctor. The blank verse heightening possible an incongruous change of style for a total thug intended for laughs? I haven’t read the play (one thing The Apocryphal William Shakespeare definitely does is make one read such plays—for enjoyment); I’m speaking from my own past as a (never-produced) playwright when I did such things.
Sabrina brings up another anonymous play, Selimus (ca. 1591) for a clown in it she supposes a satire on ApocryWill (anti-Stratfordians tend to consider almost every vulgar comic figure in a play or poem to be a satire on poor ApocryWill). She finds Marlowe’s “intense style” in some of its passages, but gives Greene the clown’s speeches, which are reminiscent of those of Sparrow, a character in Guy, Earl of Warwick, (whom Sabrina considers “almost certainly a caricature” of ApocryWill because, among other things, “Sparrow” is pronounced “spear-O,” he ditched the mother of his child back in his hometown of Stratford, and is a conceited lack-latin poet).
Guy, however, was not published until 1661—with “B.J.” on its title-page). It seems interestingly possible that Sparrow was a satire on ApocryWill—or my Will, by those jealous of his superior talent who exaggerated what they took to be his flaws, like poorer Latin than theirs.
One thought, my Will could have had only what Latin he remembered for his early plays, then got books in Latin he could refer to in order to get what Latin he wrote right. In other words, he had more than enough Latin to read it, use it correctly if he could check his memory, which was poor at rote learning, good at osmotic learning. It seems hard for me to believe that even ApocryWill would not have stayed in school long enough to get a good grasp of Latin. Related thought: how much would he have temporarily lost of it if he didn’t use it for six of seven years until he saw the use of it in plays?
Sabrina discusses many plays a chapter at a time that have some sort of title-page attribution to Shakespeare or W.S., or a reason for attributing the play to him that makes sense, such as a later FF play being about the same subject.
The Arte of English Prose attributed to George Puttenham (1589) alludes to “ . . . gentlemen of her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest . . .” Evidence for Puttenham, a servant of the Queen at the time, as an important “concealed writer. TAWS says yes, but I wonder: how does the author of The Arte know about the work of “concealed authors?” Sackville had a play and two poems published in his name. Another problem is the number of such writers mentioned: too many, it seems to me, to pick out one as the particular one who used Shakespeare as a front (as was either the explicit case, or the effectual case—i.e., either Sackville or someone acting for him got Shakespeare to agree to act as Sackville’s front, or the latter came accidentally or illicitly to become just such a front whether desired or not).
She uses Greene’s writing of “Theological poets” who hired writers to act as front men for works the wanted to publish without anyone’s knowing it because “for their calling and gravity being loathe to have any profane pamphlets pass under their hand” to indicate how it was taken for granted that some men of high social rank might want his authorship concealed, the way she believes Sackville did.
Important note from TAWS: when Gorboduc was published with Sackville’s and Norton’s names on it, a second edition was printed with its printer’s disclosure that the previous edition had been unauthorized. The two authors wanted it known that they were quite upset to have become known as a play’s authors. I wonder. The second edition was five years after the first. If they were really upset, why did they take so long to complain? Why, too, is there no evidence, even anecdotal, of their having been mocked or otherwise embarrassed by anyone for having written it? I think it possible they may have been sufficiently proud of their accomplishment to have wanted to make sure it entered world culture while having it both ways by pretending to be too manly to have been responsible for mere literature. In any case, the second edition of Gorboduc is enough to keep Sackville a possible concealed . . . playwright. Not a concealed poet, because he later allowed two poems of his to be published.
Call that an oversight, and all is okay, though. He could easily have thereafter kept his poems away from printers, circulating them among many friends—as Shakespeare’s. Hmmm, make that “getting Shakespeare to circulate them among . . . his friends?” But he had no literary friends. A better guess is that Sackville simply gave them to a single very trusted friend who circulated them—Ah, the one they were written to according to many scholars and Sabrina (and I, although not certain, because of Sabrina’s excellent argument that Shakespeare says in one of his sonnets that the addressee of the sonnets is the only one he made everlasting by naming him, and Southampton is the only one he ever named).
The preceding paragraph illustrates once again the many problems any scenario regarding the writing of Shakespeare’s works by someone other than Shakespeare entails compared with the simplicity of the scenario required if Shakespeare himself wrote them . . . or dictated them, as the near-total illiterate his appalling handwriting makes it certain he was. Amusingly, though, for most anti-Stratfordians, much of the appeal of the demotion of Shakespeare is due to the wonderful secret conspiracy it requires. Of course, the main virtue of it for those believing in it is its ability to explain everything. We have no manuscripts because the author didn’t want any evidence to survive that connected him to the Shakespearean Oeuvre, etc.
Feldman makes the usually anti-Stratfordian claim for “the stigma of print.” I find it hard to accept that someone capable of Shakespeare’s works would have been bothered by idiots who would scorn such accomplishments, but geniuses can be idiots. In any case, it seems a pretty weak reason not just for concealing a True Author’s identity but for going to the incredible lengths the one’s concealing the identity of the True Shakespeare went to, which went on, it would seem, for generations, collections of the plays coming out in the false name 25 or 30 years after the True Author died (if he were one of the most prominent ones so far named).
That someone calling himself “Ignoto” penned a commendatory poem in Spenser’s The Faery Queene (1590) is another plank in the bridge to Sackville under construction in TAWS: there its similarity of its theme (good writing needs no advertisement) to a speech of Rosalind’s in As You Like It is presented as evidence that both speech and poem was the work of Sackville. The stanza form of the four-stanza poem is a further link between “Ignoto” and the True Author, for it is the same one used in Venus and Adonis. Unfortunately, “Ignoto” was commonly used for a number of writers simply to mean “anonymous” during this time, so fails strongly to pin down anyone as the author of the commendatory poem.
On the other hand, Sabrina goes on to quote a commendatory sonnet of Spenser’s to Sackville which may be interpreted to ask Sackville to continue maintaining the value of Spenser’s verse against “backbitings vain,” which “Ignoto” could be said to have done in his poem to Spenser.
I think “Ignoto” may well have been Spenser but am waiting for a stylometric study I can believe in pins that down—or relevant objective evidence turns up.
Now that we have an idea of how Sabrina took care of her first challenge, demonstrating the plausibility of ApocryWill’s having written all or part of the plays on her list, we come to her second challenge, demonstrating the plausibility of Thomas Sackville’s having written all or most of each of the FF plays. She begins with the evidence, quite strong, of Sackville’s having been capable of literary greatness. “To know Thomas Sackville—to know his two poems and one play—is to know where Elizabethan tragedy came from and where it was going,” a quotation from Normand Berlin’s Thomas Sackville (1974).
Sackville, (1536 – 1608), she tells us, “ . . . was one of the leading statesmen of the time and (her italics) the greatest poet of his generation.” He rose high enough in Elizabeth’s favor to become Lord Treasurer in 1599, having 32 years earlier having been made a baron. He was retained as Lord Treasure by King James after Elizabeth died, and was elevated to an earldom. Meanwhile, he and Thomas Norton had written Gorboduc (1561), the first English drama in blank verse, and universally considered what Berlin called it. I’ve read it and consider it as good or better than Titus Andronicus, which William Shakespeare is said by most Shakespeare scholars to have written 20 or so years later, although Titus is quite a bit more adventurous in language (in my view).
He also wrote two narrative poems, Induction and The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham that appeared in the famous 1663 poetry anthology, Mirror for Magistrates, which many critics feel establish him as the poet of his generation Sabrina claims he was. We also have a poem called Sacvyl’s Old Age which was long lost but found by chance in the 1980s. Sackville wrote it as he approached the age of . . . 40. (This is interesting so far as the SAQ is concerned because of how unlikely it would have been for Shakespeare’s actually to have written the sonnets attributed to him because in two or three of them their author describes himself as an old man although would have been no older than 40 when they were written. A similar point of interest is the spelling of Sackville’s name; anti-Stratfordians [other than Sabrina] also make a big deal of the different ways Shakespeare’s name is spelled in the records.
Friendship of Florio and Sackville as evidence of Sackville as playwright. (Phaeton as Sackville with a commendatory sonnet in Florio’s Second Fruits?ⁿ) But why no mention of his comedies by Meres? And why did Meres list both Sackville and Shakespeare in a single list of excellent contemporary English tragedians? Was he one of those in the know or just ignorant? A probably with all anti-Stratfordian conspiracy-scenarios is how often about some person of the times that question comes up.
Sabrina quotes none of Sackville’s works—when writing the book under review, she was saving her full case for Sackville for her soon-to-be published sequel to it. However, in The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, she quotes a number of documents from the time alluding to concealed poets, her case for Sackville being premised on his having been such a poet.
The weakest portion of Sabrina’s books seems to me the portion devoted to demonstrating that Shakespeare was not the True Author. Of course, she has already produced a good case for his having actually authored a bunch of second-rate plays. If so, it is as unlikely he also authored the very much better FF plays as it is that he could have written any of the apocryphal plays had he been the actual author of the FF plays. But she has no direct evidence for him as ApocryWill aside from title-page attributions, only a few of which gave his whole name.
The title-page evidence for his authorship of the FF plays is much stronger. Unlike the apocryphal plays, other title-page attributions supported them as his. Also unlike the apocryphal plays, other writers mentioned them as his. Most important, Heminges and Condell, who personally knew him, claimed only the FF plays as his. They spoke of “diuerse stoln, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of iniurious imposters that expos’d them: even those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect in their limbes; and all the rest I absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued them.”
The Troublesome Reign of King John is possibly another play of ApocryWill’s. Its title-page attributes it to “W. Sh.,” and, according to Sabrina, William Shakespeare never disputed his authorship of it. So far as we know, as I must add, Sabrina overlooking, as almost all anti-Stratfordians do, that absence of evidence does not necessarily mean evidence of absence. According to The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, the True Author’s “King John, a different but closely related play, was printed for the first time in the 1623 First Folio under Troublesome Reign’s publishing license. Despite this direct contemporary evidence that William Shakespeare wrote Troublesome Reign, modern scholars do not assign it to him.”
This is interesting. As Sabrina shows, scholars consider the early version too poorly written to have been by Shakespeare—even though, in my opinion, the FF version is almost as bad a play as the ones about Henry VI. It does have a few bright spots. I think WS wrote both, improving his apprentice version for later but not trying too hard. As Sabrina points out (and this kind of fairly detailed use of what scholars, real scholars, have said about a play is one of the many virtues of TAWS), the early play reaches Marlovian heights, as in the following speech of the French King about his army’s progress at one point: “Twice should not Titan hide him in the west,/ Too cool the fetlocks of his weary team,/ Till I had with an unresisted shock/ Controlled the manage of proud Angiers’s walls . . .”
Sabrina also quotes bombastic passages—one about a viper, for example—that strike me as the kind of thing the early Shakespeare was guilty of in Titus and other plays. She refers to scholars who have pointed out the many parallels in the early play to Marlowe or Peele, which make sense to me as what Shakespeare would probably have been doing early on. One of my theories about the early play is that it is a play by Peele and Marlowe which Shakespeare greatly re-wrote or collaborated with them on, then later improved to the still poor FF version, perhaps when still not quite what he suddenly seems to have become in the mid-nineties.
I think the use of an early play’s publishing license for a different play with the same name, if it happened, was only a way of avoiding a fee, not indicative that anyone necessarily thought both versions were written by the same man. In this case, I’m not sure who Sabrina thinks was the same man who wrote it, Sackville or ApocryWill. The question, from what I consider Sabrina’s point of view, is if the former, how could his early play be so bad, if the latter, how could his later play be so improved? If ApocryWill wrote the early version and Sackville the later version, then scholars have been right to assign two different authors to the two versions, which it seems to me Sabrina has contested.
Once again the need for a valid stylometric study would be helpful—but extremely difficult, it seems to me, since the early play could be a mix of sometimes tiny portions by many different authors and/or by one or more authors extremely influenced by one or more other authors or even plagiarizing one or more of them, as could the later play. I believe all the FF plays (and only those plays) seemed to Condell and Heminges to have been sufficiently by Shakespeare to be considered his, so assign the FF King John to him. I lean toward the early play’s being mainly by the FF author, too, but consider the question open.
Locrine (ca. 1591, published in 1595) is another play Sabrina thinks ApocryWill may have written, because it has “W.S.” on its title-page. Scholars advance Peele and Greene alone or a collaborators; Sabrina thinks the author’s initials unlikely if that were the case, since Greene’s name, at least, should have been a bigger draw than WS’s when published. Sabrina goes on to tell us that the title-page indicates that “‘W.S.’ himself oversaw the publication and ‘corrected’ errors. Given this case, the author can be assumed to have taken care that his initials were printed correctly.” Here I feel Sabrina, like so many authorship skeptics, assumes a single cause for something when several are plausible. For instance, my own best but not only guess is that the publisher got the play from Shakespeare or an actor who said Shakespeare had updated it, so had the text printed that appeared on the title-page, possibly knowing Shakespeare had not written the play but done a little work on it, so the publisher wouldn’t be cheating the public too much to imply it was his work, his name being quite a salable one due to the success of Venus and Adonis, and perhaps some word-of-mouth about his plays.
But some other WS could have written it, as some scholars believe. Or the publisher was ignorant and merely thought a play from Shakespeare’s company was by him, and knew it was updated because it was different from a version he saw. Or maybe Charles Tilney wrote a version of it, as evidence from George Buc, Master of the Revels, indicates. In that case, it is possible that several playwrights tinkered with it, and Shakespeare was responsible for the published version.
As is the case with so much theorizing about this era in literature, we simply have too little data to pin very much down. That’s why I drop down to default position on just about everything except what the available data makes, for me, certain beyond reasonable doubt: that WS was the sole, or chief author of all the plays in the FF, and the major poems attributed to him, and most of the other details are (1) of minor consequence, however interesting, and (2) up for grabs—with nothing contradicting my default position capable of being correct.
There’s a lot of stuff stolen from Spenser in Locrine, too. What to make of it? I simply don’t know. I doubt that a single playwright was stealing stuff and getting away with it to the extent that we have published copies of so many of his works (remember, most plays of the time are just names now, or nothing). I tend to guess unscrupulous playwrights, like Greene, may have made quick money by revising plays for a fee by filling them with stolen material. Or actors filled plays with gaps in them with lines they remembered from plays they had been in.
How would they likely have been caught? How many play-goers bought books of poetry, and of those who did, how many remembered much of what they’d read, or would recognize the works of many poets when used on stage?
I doubt a man thought to have the art of Virgil, the wisdom of Socrates and the common sense of Nestor, or whatever the monument said about Shakespeare , would have needed to steal whole passages from Spenser or Marlowe or anyone else. The bottom line, however, is—again—we simply can’t know what happened.
n Not only does The Apocryphal William Shakespeare introduce us to a host of interesting plays and poems to read but its conspiracy theory nicely incorporates a lot of interesting writers and others of the times besides Sackville such as Florio—particularly the ones using names like Phaeton—as we shall see.
2 Which many be many different kinds of “knowledge-bits” such as the visual appearance of a tree.
One reason Sabrina's book excites me is that it grapples with the whole Shakespearean literary scene. I want her to use her substantial analytical gifts and imagination to do an overview of the era from 1550 or so through 1630 or so. I might consider that, too. (A related problem with Shakespeare scholars is too great a focus on Willie or some True Author, rather than the fascinating scene of the times. Definitely my problem but one I'm too old to grow out of.)
Main gaps: how active as a play-doctor was Shakespeare? How common was the doctoring of plays? Did actors act as play-doctors very often? Datum: the many play-doctors Thomas More had. Also, how common were collaboratively-written plays?
Exactly how did plays get to publishers? How many plays were thought to have been mis-attributed to someone other than Shakespeare?
How many unknown playwrights were there? How many concealed poets? How many literary circles of friendship are we sure of? How many seem plausible?
How active were aristocratic playwrights? How many were known to write plays for private performance? How many such plays were published? How many college plays were published?
Datum: WS’s telling the registrar he thought a clergyman had written a certain play. Conclusion: lots of different people wrote plays, and they were hard to keep track of. Also, how would WS have known of the clergyman—that is, wouldn’t the clergyman have been certain to conceal his authorship?
BCD
May 3, 2015, 10:11:23 AM5/3/15
to
On 5/1/2015 8:48 PM, Sabrina Feldman wrote:
> I am still in shock over Bob Grumman’s too early death on April 2. I feel a hole in my heart every time I think about him. I keep wanting to email Bob about various topics, Shakespeare authorship-related and otherwise, and can’t wrap my mind around the fact that I’ll never receive one of his irreverent, thought-provoking, kind-hearted emails again. A message to Bob in the heavens: even though we never met, I miss you so much. I never told you how much I love and admire you, and your commitment to living the life of the mind. You spent every day trying to understand and explain those corners of the world that intrigued you. I keep reading your blog, poeticks.com, as a poor substitute for having you alive again. Even though we disagreed on so many topics, from Shakespeare to politics, you are one of the most admirable and free-thinking men I’ve ever known. I plan to dedicate my next book to you, and your picture will have a place on my fireplace mantle all my life. I can’t
even think about you without weeping.
>
> For readers here at HLAS:
>
> On March 17, just a couple of weeks before he died, Bob Grumman sent me the near-final draft of his planned Amazon review of my first book The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, on which he had been working for some half a year. Unfortunately he died on April 2 before he was able to complete the last few paragraphs, post his review on Amazon, or post it here at HLAS. I hesitated for the last month before posting this review myself, partly because I did not want to seem to be promoting my book, and partly because I have been so sad about Bob’s death that even writing this has made me cry for the last hour. However, I know Bob would have wanted me to post this on his behalf. It represents his last lengthy essay on the Shakespeare authorship question, and he hoped to make it public.
>
> On March 4, Bob sent me the following email comments on his review. (I had just bought four of his poetry books, which is what Bob was referring to as my ‘patronage.’)
>
> “About my review of your book, it's something I really want to do for many reasons and would do without your patronage of my poetry, as I like to think of it. It is also an expression of friendship because you and your book deserve the kind of serious attention I hope I'm giving it. But I also want to show the SAQ crowd what a review of a SAQ book should be. I also feel Sackville deserves a chapter in my own SAQ book, and the review will provide much of that. It's also satisfying to be able to focus on one major SAQ question without being sidetracked by wacko counter-arguments and non-arguments as is the case at HLAS. So don't feel your bribing me to write the review, or influence it.
>
> all best, Bob"
>
>
> Bob Grumman’s Review of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare
>
> Last revised: March 17, 2015
>
[...]
> I am still in shock over Bob Grumman’s too early death on April 2. I feel a hole in my heart every time I think about him. I keep wanting to email Bob about various topics, Shakespeare authorship-related and otherwise, and can’t wrap my mind around the fact that I’ll never receive one of his irreverent, thought-provoking, kind-hearted emails again. A message to Bob in the heavens: even though we never met, I miss you so much. I never told you how much I love and admire you, and your commitment to living the life of the mind. You spent every day trying to understand and explain those corners of the world that intrigued you. I keep reading your blog, poeticks.com, as a poor substitute for having you alive again. Even though we disagreed on so many topics, from Shakespeare to politics, you are one of the most admirable and free-thinking men I’ve ever known. I plan to dedicate my next book to you, and your picture will have a place on my fireplace mantle all my life. I can’t
even think about you without weeping.
>
> For readers here at HLAS:
>
> On March 17, just a couple of weeks before he died, Bob Grumman sent me the near-final draft of his planned Amazon review of my first book The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, on which he had been working for some half a year. Unfortunately he died on April 2 before he was able to complete the last few paragraphs, post his review on Amazon, or post it here at HLAS. I hesitated for the last month before posting this review myself, partly because I did not want to seem to be promoting my book, and partly because I have been so sad about Bob’s death that even writing this has made me cry for the last hour. However, I know Bob would have wanted me to post this on his behalf. It represents his last lengthy essay on the Shakespeare authorship question, and he hoped to make it public.
>
> On March 4, Bob sent me the following email comments on his review. (I had just bought four of his poetry books, which is what Bob was referring to as my ‘patronage.’)
>
> “About my review of your book, it's something I really want to do for many reasons and would do without your patronage of my poetry, as I like to think of it. It is also an expression of friendship because you and your book deserve the kind of serious attention I hope I'm giving it. But I also want to show the SAQ crowd what a review of a SAQ book should be. I also feel Sackville deserves a chapter in my own SAQ book, and the review will provide much of that. It's also satisfying to be able to focus on one major SAQ question without being sidetracked by wacko counter-arguments and non-arguments as is the case at HLAS. So don't feel your bribing me to write the review, or influence it.
>
> all best, Bob"
>
>
> Bob Grumman’s Review of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare
>
> Last revised: March 17, 2015
>
***Yes, Bob would have wanted you to post this--he didn't hesitate to
post things (thoughts, responses, etc.) of his at HLAS which were still
in the process of being completed, leaving the final touches for an
elusive later, as he well knew that you can't wait for every jot and
tittle to reach finality without risking never posting anything of it at
all, with the consequent loss of disseminating important thoughts which,
while perhaps incomplete, still comprise a contribution to progress or
at least understanding. It's foolish to submit to the starving tyranny
of "perfection" when the democracy of "nearly there" is so bountiful.
He couldn't do this considering the ethos of Amazon reviews, but it's
entirely appropriate for the workshop atmosphere of HLAS.
***Thanks for posting it!
Best Wishes,
--BCD
Sabrina Feldman
May 3, 2015, 11:06:12 AM5/3/15
to
Thank you so much for this comment, BCD -- this is indeed the spirit in which I posted Bob's incomplete but still very interesting "workshop" essay.
ArtNea...@germanymail.com
May 11, 2015, 12:42:51 PM5/11/15
to
On Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 8:06:12 AM UTC-7, Sabrina Feldman wrote:
> Thank you so much for this comment, BCD -- this is indeed the spirit in which I posted Bob's incomplete but still very interesting "workshop" essay.
?
> Thank you so much for this comment, BCD -- this is indeed the spirit in which I posted Bob's incomplete but still very interesting "workshop" essay.
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