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Part III (w/ Poll)
Authorship aside, certain mysteries in Shakespeare’s work must be acknowledged (and enjoyed, if we love mystery!)
[T]he truest poetry is the most feigning.
--As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 3 (Touchstone)
Ambiguity was in fashion.
“The whole process of writing a sonnet sequence precisely involved drawing a translucent curtain...over the scene so that only shadowy figures are visible to the public….The challenge of the game was to sound as intimate, self-revealing, and emotionally vulnerable as possible, without actually disclosing anything compromising to anyone outside the innermost circle.”
--Stephen Greenblatt, Will In the World, pp. 233 f.
For instance, what was this about? There is no accepted answer.
Shakespeare, SONNET 107
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
Now for tonight’s three candidates:
4. Aemilia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645)
Aemilia Bassano Lanier, by fashionable miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard. (Her first name is alternately spelled Emilia, her surname Lanyer.) Wikipedia.
Primary sponsor: John Hudson in Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier (2014)
Other notable exponents: Steve Weitzenkorn, who expressed this view in the form of a novel, Shakespeare’s Conspirator: The Woman, the Writer, the Clues (2015)
Brief bio: Aemilia Bassano was the daughter of an Italian musician attached to the English royal court. His family came originally from Venice and possibly of Jewish descent. Their station in society might be described as high-ranking professional class or minor gentry. It has been suggested that they continued adhering to the Jewish faith in secret, though this was illegal in England at the time.
Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon (1526-1596). By Steven van Herwick, c. 1561-63. Private collection, on loan to the Globe Theater. If dates given are correct, Aemilia Lanier may have become his mistress when she was 18, he 61. According to Simon Forman, Carey supported her generously.
Her father died when she was only seven. She received a thorough musical and humanist education, however, spending time in the households of powerful women, Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent; Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland; and Margaret’s daughter, Lady Anne Clifford.
At about 18, shortly after her mother’s death, Aemilia Bassano became mistress of the much older Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, a cousin of the Queen who held several important positions in Queen Elizabeth’s government.
In 1592, pregnant, Aemilia was married off to a cousin, Alfonso Lanier, another court musician. She bore a son named Henry.
Henry Carey in 1594 became sponsor of the acting company in which Shakespeare was a shareholder. He died, however, in 1596.
Aemila Lanier’s marriage was unhappy and her husband a spendthrift, we learn from the surviving casebooks of Simon Forman, an astrologer-physician she consulted several times. She suffered several miscarriages; a daughter died in infancy.
Aemilia Lanier has been regularly cited among the potential candidates for Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady of the Sonnets.”
More importantly, she is credited as the first woman to publish a whole volume of original English poetry under her own name, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which appeared in 1611. A proto-feminist cast has been noted in her poetry. Some consider her published work a veiled satire on Christianity.
First original volume of original English poetry published by a woman, “Written by Mistris Aemilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer, Servants to the Kings [James I] Majestie. “
She was clearly familiar with not only the classics of literature but with contemporary poetry and theater. She corresponded with Mary Sidney Herbert (see yesterday’s installment).
After the death of her husband, Aemilia Bassano Lanier apparently returned to aristocratic household employment and supported herself for a time by operating a school. She continued to have financial difficulties and was twice was arrested for non-payment of rent.
Despite all these difficulties, she survived to age 76.
Primary argument: This theory would account for what are seen as rather subversive female perspectives throughout the plays; their display of musical expertise and knowledge of law (in which she was trained); and the apparent familiarity with Italy, where her family sometimes visited, and the Italian language. An extraordinary discovery is a reflection of the Jewish Tractate Nedarim in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Several unusual personal names appear in the plays, some of them more than once, that reflect Aemilia Bassano’s own name and others in her family (for instance, the character of Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice — a play in which a woman acts as a lawyer while disguised as a man, and which in one famous speech, eloquently humanizes the Jewish people).
Perhaps a later portrait of Aemilia Bassano Lanier by the same artist. The possible identity of the portrait www.independent.co.uk/... has been supported by analysis of the embroidery on her bodice, according to needleprint.blogspot.com/… The design incorporates silkworms and mulberry trees from the Bassano coat of arms with the stag emblem of the Earl of Essex, who employed Aemilia’s husband Alphonso Lanier at one time.
Additional arguments: A woman author of plays would have an extremely compelling need for a cover identity, as female self-expression and involvement with the low-class world of theater would have exposed her to gross reflections on her chastity. If she were a Jewish woman, cover would be still more important. (Queen Elizabeth’s Jewish-descended physician was found guilty of trying to poison the monarch and executed in 1594. An extraordinarily eventful period, the early 1590s.)
Surprise: Coincidentally, Elizabeth Winkler in this month's Atlantic magazine has a piece examining the theory that Aemilia Bassano Lanier “wrote Shakespeare.” It’s good reading.
Fun fact: The southern American poet, Sidney Lanier, who believed he was descended from this Lanier family, after the Civil War went on to teach Shakespeare at Johns Hopkins University. I do not know that any connection has been proved, but Aemilia Lanier’s son by Henry Carey lived to marry and have children of his own.
Primary counterargument: The history plays don’t seem to fit the profile. And in any case, such a masquerade would be extremely dangerous and difficult to pull off.
Additional counterargument: A woman wrote Sonnet 151? (And similar.)
Counter-counter-argument: As with Mary Sidney Herbert, we may suppose that some of the Sonnets were by someone else.
Aemilia Bassano Lanier poetry sample
From the Dedication of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Each blessed Lady that in Virtue spends
Your precious time to beautify your soul;
Come wait on her whom winged Fame attends
And in her hand the Book where she enrolls
Those high deserts that Majesty commends:
Let this fair Queen not unattended be,
When in my Glass she deigns her self to see...
Let all your robes be purple, scarlet, white,
Those perfect colors purest Virtue wore,
Come decked with Lilies that did so delight
To be preferred in Beauty, far before
Wise Solomon in all his glory dight:
Whose royal robes did no such pleasure yield,
As did the beauteous Lily of the field.
Adorn your temples with faire Daphne’s crown,
The never changing Laurel, always green;
Let constant hope all worldly pleasures drown,
In wise Minerva's paths be always seen;
Or with bright Cynthia, though fair Venus frown:
With Hyssop cross the posts of every door,
Where Sin would riot, making Virtue poor...
Thus may you fly from dull and sensual earth,
Whereof at first your bodies formed were,
That new regenerate in a second birth,
Your blessed souls may live without all fear,
Being immortal, subject to no death:
But in the eye of heaven so highly placed
That others by your virtues may be graced.
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(For the full text of the dedication, and more, see my earlier diary on Aemilia Bassano Lanier.)
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5. Roger Manners, 5thEarl of Rutland (1576-1612)
Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. (According to Wikidata. No further information.)
Primary sponsor: German critic Karl Bleibtreu (1859-1928) in Der Wahre Shakespeare (1907).
Primary argument: I’m not sure of the logic that made Manners stand out as a candidate, my German not being up to the task, but Manners’s life showed several points of contact with other contacts of Shakespeare and references in the plays.
For those who want to see for themselves, the full text of Bleibtreu's book may be read here.
“[P]romoted naturalism in German literature. He was noted for his aggressive and dogmatic style of criticism, linked to a nationalistic and sometimes antisemitic agenda.” en.m.wikipedia.org/...
Brief bio: “Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland...was the eldest surviving son of John Manners, 4th Earl of Rutland, and his wife, Elizabeth nee Charleton….He travelled across Europe, took part in military campaigns led by the Earl of Essex and was a participant of Essex's rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I [in which Shakespeare’s acting company just avoided prosecution for treason]. He was favoured by James I, and honoured by his contemporaries as a man of great intelligence and talent. He enjoyed the friendship of some of the most prominent writers and artists...Evidence indicates that Manners was a patron of the architect Inigo Jones and probably introduced Jones to the Court of James I and Anne of Denmark, where Jones had his impact as...a designer of Court masques." (Wikipedia)
Like another candidate, Edward De Vere (see yesterday’s installment), Roger Manners in his youth found himself the ward of Queen Elizabeth’s counselor, William Cecil.
The Shakespeare Roundtable reports: “While studying at the University of Padua, his fellow students were two Danes by the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern….[H]e joined Essex and Raleigh on an expedition to the Azores where they encountered a terrible storm that nearly wrecked the enterprise. Perhaps this adventure was a source for The Tempest.”
Manners married the daughter of the poet Sir Philip Sidney (brother of another of yesterday’s candidates, Mary Sidney Herbert) and in 1603, served as ambassador to the Court of Denmark at Elsinor, site of Hamlet.
Primary counterargument: Manners seems young to be Shakespeare. He would have been only 17 when Venus and Adonis was published.
Surprise: In researching Bleibtrau, I happened to discover that Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. (Emoticon: dismay.) George Orwell responded in Shakepeare's defense.
Roger Manners poetry sample — none found
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6. Mr. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Christopher Marlowe, age 21? Portrait found in a dumpster during renovations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. Restored. Motto: QUOD ME NUTRIT ME DESTRUIT (“That which nourishes me destroys me.”) The date fits.
Primary sponsor: Calvin Hoffman (1906-1986), New York theater critic and press agent, in The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (1955). Hoffman was not the first to suggest Marlowe, but earned the most publicity for the hypothesis. He left a bequest to Marlowe’s school, The King’s School in Canterbury, which funds the annual Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman prize, recognizing a distinguished publication on Marlowe.
Other exponents: The International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society. Thanks to vigorous lobbying, a question mark appears after Marlowe’s death date on his memorial window in Westminster Abbey.
Brief bio: Born in the same year as William Shakespeare of Stratford, Christopher Marlowe was the oldest child of a Canterbury shoemaker of modest means. Through a series of scholarships, he made his way to Cambridge University, where he received the M.A. (This also entitled him to use the prefix “Mr.”) Around this time Marlowe as well was engaged in some unspecified service for Her Majesty’s Government; it is usually assumed that this involved spying.
A 1620 edition of Doctor Faustus
He burst onto the London stage with a blockbuster hit, Tamburlaine the Great, in about 1587. Tamburlaine II, Doctor Faustus and three others followed.
In less than seven years, the young playwright was dead.
Records of Marlowe’s life are scanty, but he had a talent for trouble, seemingly. He was once arrested as an accessory in a fatal duel, was summonsed for assaulting a tailor, and found himself under scrutiny by Her Majesty’s Privy Council for alleged heresy shortly before losing his life in a knife fight, supposedly over a tavern tab (“the reckoning"), age 29.
“Marlow’s mighty line” (in the words of Ben Jonson) pioneered the blank verse in iambic pentameter that would dominate the London stage and influence our poetry long afterwards. An ambitious narrative poem, Hero and Leander, was left unfinished. One lyric and a few Latin translations are the only other surviving works.
Marlowe, as an aside, may have been the first “out” gay writer in the English language, at least the first we know of with that very public reputation.
Primary argument: Whoever “wrote Shakespeare” simply must have had a substantial formal education and prior experience. Marlowe had that. “Shakespeare” followed up so smoothly on Marlowe’s innovative use of blank verse in iambic pentameter that a continuity could be suspected.
Leading counterargument: Marlowe died on May 30, 1593, well before most of Shakespeare’s plays were produced; the coroner’s report is extant.
Further counterargument: The styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare are only superficially similar. For example, Marlowe employed nature as an emblem or painted backdrop; Shakespeare made it live.
Counter-counter argument: Marlowe’s death was faked to escape potential capital punishment for heresy; his style continued evolving as he composed the rest of the “Shakespeare” plays from somewhere in exile.
Surprise: Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2016 concluded, based on sophisticated textual analysis of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays that more than one playwright contributed to them. The most likely collaborator: Marlowe. Marlowe’s most probable contributions include the Jack Cade (revolutionary) scenes. Oxford University Press has now credited Marlowe with co-authorship of the three plays. (It would also make this theory, in the Snopes lexicon, a “Mixture” of true and false.)
Fun facts: In 2013, Ros Barber won the Desmond Elliott Prize For New Fiction with a novel in verse, based on the premise that Marlowe survived to “write Shakespeare.”
Christopher Marlowe poetry sample
Tamburlaine the Great, Act II, Scene 2
MYCETES: Come, my Meander, let us to this gear.
I tell you true, my heart is swoln with wrath
On this same thievish villain Tamburlaine,
And of that false Cosroe, my traitorous brother….
...by heavens I swear,
Aurora shall not peep out of her doors,
But I will have Cosroe by the head,
And kill proud Tamburlaine with point of sword….
Enter a SPY.
SPY: An hundred horsemen of my company,
Scouting abroad upon these champion plains,
Have view'd the army of the Scythians;
Which make report it far exceeds the king's.
MEANDER: Suppose they be in number infinite,
Yet being void of martial discipline,
All running headlong, greedy after spoils,
And more regarding gain than victory,
Like to the cruel brothers of the earth,
Sprung of the teeth of dragons venomous,
Their careless swords shall lance their fellows' throats,
And make us triumph in their overthrow.
MYCETES: Was there such brethren, sweet Meander, say,
That sprung of teeth of dragons venomous?
MEANDER: So poets say, my lord.
MYCETES: And 'tis a pretty toy to be a poet.
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More Marlowe in other DK diaries:
The Passionate Shepherd To His Love
Doctor Faustus
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“When a man’s verses cannot be understood,
nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child Understanding,
it strikes a man more dead
than a great reckoning in a little room.”
--As You Like It, Act III, Scene 3 (Touchstone, again)
Any doubts about the reference?
Touch-stone, Shake-speare? Touchstone courts the rustic hoyden, Audrey. F.O.C. Darley (1886), at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, www.brandywine.org/...
The final three candidates, and a poll — tomorrow — same time — same place.
Hope to see you?
Continue to Part III (w/poll)
