[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Make it POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
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In 1857, Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded in which she expounded on her theory put forth in an essay in Putnam Magazine a year earlier: that William Shakespeare was the front man for a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen style collaboration that counted Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon (no relation) among their number, and that the works attributed to him were in fact theirs. Why did these men, all public, all admired, and all published, decided to slip behind the arras and prop up a Stratford boy?
Delia thinks they hid subversive code in there; code filled with revolutionary philosophy and anti-tyrannical broadsides. Consider a couple of factors: Around the time she published her theory, academics were having a field day speculating about biblical authors and whether Homer was a composite or not; questions of authorship were in the air. She was friends with Samuel Morse. Throw into the mix that Delia was batty and ended her life in an asylum, and you have a recipe for a pre-internet internet conspiracy.
She was brilliant in addition to batty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fan. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wasn’t a believer in her Shakespeare conspiracy, per Wikipedia, “retrospectively remarked that America had only two ‘producers’ during the 1850s, ‘Our wild Whitman, with real inspiration but checked by [a] titanic abdomen; and Delia Bacon, with genius, but mad and clinging like a tortoise to English soil.’” Whitman himself called her, “the sweetest, eloquentist, grandest woman.” Harriet Beecher Stowe thought well of her.
Despite counting himself among the unconvinced, Emerson helped get that first essay on the subject printed. Here’s a bit from it.
“How can we undertake to account for the literary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth of the modern ages still lies at our own door, unquestioned? This vast, magical, unexplained phenomenon which our own times have proceed under our own eyes, appears to be, indeed, the only thing which our modern rationalism is not to be permitted to meddle with. For, here the critics themselves still veil their faces, filling the air with mystic utterances which seem to say, that to this shrine at least, for the footstep of the common reason and the common sense, there is yet no admittance.”
There’s a bit of Candace Owens in there: “I’m just asking questions. I’m just asking questions.”
“For too long critics,” write Warren Hope and Kim Holston in The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Claimants to Authorship, and Their Champions and Detractors, “have depicted [her] as a tragicomic figure, blindly pursuing a fantastic mission in obscurity and isolation, only to end in silence and madness…” Or maybe not long enough, write I. There are plenty of arguments claiming an author other than Shakespeare wrote the body of work we attribute to the man—all of that’s bosh, in my opinion—worth wrestling with, but Bacon’s deserves to be viewed as most other literary cipher hunts. I can’t help thinking of poor Muriel Spark convinced Eliot peppered his poetry with secret communiques or Brendan McKay poking the code breakers by using their methods to find warnings about the JFK, MLK, and Rabin assassinations in Moby Dick. There’s always something for those who want there to be something.
In claiming that critics considered her a “tragicomic figure” for “too long,” Hope and Holston want you to dismiss that critics closer to her time considered Bacon tragicomic over an extended period. Sudden reversals make academic careers, but going against the grain has the grain to contend with and, though they range beyond, on the singular claim of Bacon, Hope and Holsten v Emerson doesn’t sound promising for Hope and Holsten.
I don’t think many gave credence to cipherous cabal imaginings, but those imaginings established a foothold.
Jump forward sixty years to John Thomas Looney. Looney sifted through Bacon’s suspicions and pulled, from among her list of supposed conspirators, the name Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. De Vere, rather than William Shakespeare was the author of the plays and poetry we attribute to the latter, claims Looney, and then lays out a well considered biographical case.
Academics—and I suppose layabout web surfers as well—convinced that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare go by the charming collective name “Anti-Stratfordians,” possibly introducing a regional rivalry between themselves and what I hope are called “The Greater Avon Metroplex Bard’s Boys,” that resolves in choreographed finger snapping. Those among the Anti-Stratfordians convinced that the mind behind the work is de Vere are known as Oxfordians. To build the Oxfordian (not Broguian) claim, Looney shows that the Earl traveled to and was familiar with Italy, was familiar with courtly manners, goings on at Windsor, Latin and Greek, all as he proposed the true author must be. It is assumed that no one, especially a butcher’s son, could write so convincingly of such things without first hand knowledge.
Looney’s great at spotting coincidences and casting doubt. He’s an agile story teller and knows—I’m giving a Christian interpretation—intuitively the conspiracy weaver’s tricks of peppering fact with suspicion, hope with possibility, and gnosticism with vanity. It’s a great read. But in the end, all he’s done is throw down a hailstorm of questions and possibilities. We’re to make surety from what isn’t disallowed.
As to why de Vere needed to ghostwrite another’s career, Looney writes, “Generally, poets and poetry were scornfully regarded in the Elizabethan period, and young nobles would not risk losing caste by publishing under their own name.” I don’t know what to say to that. Sir Walter Ralegh wrote poetry and was well regarded for it. Spenser was adored. I could go on. Elizabeth herself was known to write verse. Few published, but publishing a collection of poetic miscellany was relatively new; Songs and Sonnets, also known as Tottel’s Miscellany after the publisher Richard Tottel, was England’s first published collection of poetry and it was still a novelty, released in 1557. It’s more the case to say that there were few early adapters.
Looney would have been on better ground to claim that courtiers and aristocrats of the time didn’t publish because they were landed and commerce was icky. A great many posthumous volumes by aristocratic authors came out, to no one’s shame; perfectly acceptable as no merchant’s greed infects the dead. But, as Looney admits later, de Vere did publish, or as Looney puts it, “effaced himself,” in 1576.
“As a poet, he deliberately effaced himself so far as publication was concerned from the age of twenty-six; notwithstanding that throughout his life and in the period immediately following his death his poetic eminence was recognised.”
So, what was Looney on about? Back to the question: Why did de Vere needed to ghost write another’s career?
All falls apart if de Vere’s poetry doesn’t carry a passing resemblance to what the un-pilled go around calling Shakespeare’s work. It sort of does. And this is where it gets funny. The work presented as de Vere’s poetry is reminiscent of the poetry presented as Will Shakespeare’s, but the work presented as de Vere’s poetry may not be de Vere’s poetry.
Apparently, authorship of de Vere’s work needed adjudication. In steps Dr. Alexander Balloch Grosart (and I’m shaking my head that we have the full name, Delia Salter Bacon, putting salt so near a cured meat, that she’s batty as segue to a guy named Looney, and that someone who, through no fault of his own, got scooped up and tossed into a literary conspiracy theory has a middle name that sounds like bollocks.) In 1972, Dr Grosart studied a number of works purported to be by the Earl of Oxford, though several were previously published and attributed to Sidney. The doctor sorted them into two piles: those verifiably de Vere’s and those probably de Vere’s. For this we have to take the good doctor’s word, as did Looney. So, the poetry one man says is and is probably de Vere’s looks enough like the poetry that he says isn’t Shakespeare’s to prove that de Vere was the true writer of Shakespeare’s body. Upon this rock he built his house.
I like the poetry Grosart is comfortable calling de Vere’s. There are some oddities. The man likes questions:
from Love Thy Choice
Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, my heart?
Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint?
Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart?
Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint?
Who first did paint with colours pale thy face?
Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest?
Above the rest in court who gave thee grace?
Who made thee strive in honour to be best?
In constant truth to bide so firm and sure,
To scorn the world regarding but thy friends?
And:
from Echo Verses
Oh heavens ! who was the first that bred in me this fever ? Vere (Ver.)
Who was the first that gave the wound whose fear I wear for ever ? Vere.
What tyrant, Cupid, to my harm usurps thy golden quiver ? Vere.
What sight first caught this heart and can from bondage it deliver ? Vere.Yet who doth most adore this sight, oh hollow caves tell true ? You.
What nymph deserves his liking best, yet doth in sorrow rue ? You.
What makes him not reward good will with some reward or ruth ? Youth.
What makes him show besides his birth, such pride and such untruth ? Youth.May I his favour match with love, if he my love will try? Ay.
May I requite his birth with faith ? Then faithful will I die ? Ay.
And, though someone referred to by Looney as Prof. May says this one, among a few others of the twenty-two Grosart verified poems, is wrongly attributed to de Vere:
Doth Sorrow Fret Thy Soul.
Doth sorrow fret thy soul? O direful sprite.
Doth pleasure feed thy heart? O blessed man.
Hast thou been happy once? O heavy plight.
Are thy mishaps forepast? O happy than (then)
Or hast thou bliss in eld? O bliss too late:
But hast thou bliss in youth? O sweet estate.
These are extreme examples, but he’s liberal with questions throughout his work. I don’t think it would be out of line to challenge the Oxfordian claim on the grounds that were de Vere the author of Hamlet, we’d see signs: “To be or not to be. That is but one of many questions.”
Again, the Oxfordian stuff makes for fun reading, but there’s little there there. Four hundred years from now, there may well be a movement dead set on establishing Tommy Lasorda as author of Bob Dylan’s songs, or that Elvis Costello is the real Guy Ritchie. I can’t prove either is or isn’t the case. I’m just asking questions.
It’s a shame that de Vere couldn’t be left alone and considered without the Shakespeare question. He’s very good when not badgering like a four year old. This last is from the verified pile. The man who would be a King’s Man:
Revenge of Wrong.
Edward de Vere (1550-1604)Fain would I sing, but fury makes me fret,
And Rage hath sworn to seek revenge of wrong;
My mazed mind in malice so is set,
As Death shall daunt my deadly dolours long;
Patience perforce is such a pinching pain,
As die I will, or suffer wrong again.I am no sot, to suffer such abuse
As doth bereave my heart of his delight;
Nor will I frame myself to such as use,
With calm consent, to suffer such despite;
No quiet sleep shall once possess mine eye
Till Wit have wrought his will on Injury.My heart shall fail, and hand shall lose his force,
But some device shall pay Despite his due;
And Fury shall consume my careful corse,
Or raze the ground whereon my sorrow grew.
Lo, thus in rage of ruthful mind refus’d,
I rest reveng’d on whom I am abus’d.
Earle of Oxenforde.
