The success of The Truth Will Out filled the Nevillian camp with confidence. A dozen books followed, all of them further detailing the compelling case for Neville authorship. Brenda James launched an online Neville–Shakespeare journal for scholarly papers and updates on Nevillian research. One after another, the Nevillians found books, letters and manuscripts that buttressed their case and showed Neville’s hand in the creation of the greatest works of literature.
The Sir Thomas More manuscript, with additions evidently not by Shakespeare but by Neville, was a key discovery. Other treasures from Neville’s library at Billingbear reveal his facility with living and dead Continental languages: a 1518 volume of Ovid that contains Ars Amatoria and a commentary in Latin; a volume of Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Roman history (1546, in Greek, annotated by Neville in his youth); Giovanni Tommaso Minadoi’s Historia della Guerra Fra Turchi et Persiani (1594, in Italian); Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana Enamorada (1574, in Spanish); and a copy of Ptolemiæi Astronomi (1538, annotated by Neville in Latin and Greek).
Highlights from Neville’s collection of English books and manuscripts reveal a sound literary sensibility and strong literary connections. A handwritten copy of the banned ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’. A copy of Thomas Mille’s Catalogue of Honor, printed by Jaggard, 1610 (Neville’s copy appears to be a proof version with pre-publication corrections). A rare manuscript of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, 1561 (Hoby married Neville’s aunt). Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke, 1542. And another key Shakespearean source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587, edited by John Hammond, Thomas Randolph and Sir Henry Killigrew (Neville’s father-in-law).
Nevillians such as Mark Bradbeer, John Casson and Bill Rubinstein shared the priceless, exultant experience of handling the books that were used to write Shakespeare’s poems and plays. The authenticity of that experience, though, depends on the case for Nevillian authorship. The Truth Will Out announced that the case was made; that the Authorship Question had been answered in favour of Neville. The announcement was premature.
Aristocratic. Born out of wedlock. Overweight all his life. The Henry Neville who emerges from James and Rubinstein’s book is an English archetype: the fat bastard. A key plank of the Nevillian case is that Sir Henry’s life aligns closely with the contents of Shakespeare’s plays and the sequence in which they were written: ‘The known facts of Neville’s life consistently match the accepted chronology of Shakespeare’s works in a way which is so precise, and so helpful in illuminating why the works of “Shakespeare” were written, that they simply cannot be coincidental.’ In more than one important respect, that claim is false.
After four centuries of scholarship and speculation, the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays is still unsettled. There are good reasons for this. Each play went through multiple performed versions, and often multiple printed versions. Pinning a play to a specific moment in time is difficult, if not impossible. Shakespeare’s liberal use of literary sources further complicates things. Some of his sources were prior plays whose performance histories blended into those of the Shakespearean versions. To date the plays, editors and scholars look for references to trials, rebellions, invasions, shipwrecks, tempests. Such references are only partly helpful: many are cryptic, supporting diverse readings.
From contemporary documents it is possible to assemble a record of when the plays were performed, but that record, too, is imprecise. Dutch and Swiss tourists are among the audience members who penned some of the best evidence about what was performed when. The brief information they left behind—play titles, venues, impressions—is helpful but inconclusive. Different playwrights used the same titles for different plays, for example, so it is hard to tell if a note about ‘Hamlet’ is referring to a Shakespearean performance or not.
The publication record of Shakespeare’s plays is also sketchy. To squeeze the best performance value from the playtexts, owners typically delayed publication by a matter of years. Nineteen of the thirty-six First Folio plays did not appear in print at all during Shakespeare’s lifetime. (Othello first appeared in print in 1622, six years after the Bard’s death.) When quarto editions did appear, not all of them were registered with the Stationers’ Company. Some were produced in small numbers and may have circulated privately. There are intriguing hints that lost quarto editions—books that have not survived to the present day—pre-date the earliest known copies. None of these facts helps us to lock down the chronology.
Despite this uncertainty, James and Rubinstein pretend the chronology is final and fixed. They then proceed to align a version of it with the details of Neville’s biography. More than once, the purported alignment is delightfully wacky.
A passage in Macbeth (act 1, scene 6) refers to weather and birds:
Duncan: This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Banquo: This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet does approve.
The sweet mild air, so the co-authors argue, is a real but unexpected feature of Scotland; to know about it, the writer must have travelled there. Neville certainly did so. James and Rubinstein think, moreover, that the reference to a martlet is telling: ‘It is…typical of a Neville to notice birds—his father even made a specific point of mentioning his falcon in his will, while over the centuries Neville’s descendants kept birds which they had stuffed because they could not bear to part with them when they died.’ This last sentence about Nevillian bird noticers and stuffers breaks every rule of evidence. Another arresting example: Neville was lame, had gout and knew people who had the plague; Measure for Measure refers to sciatica of the hip and other unnamed diseases; ergo Neville must have written it. This style of anti-logic is emblematic of the book as a whole.
James and Rubinstein are at their weakest when they attempt literary readings of the plays. Their main takeaway from The Merchant of Venice is that ‘business and friendship can be mixed together successfully’. To that idiosyncratic interpretation they append a quaint coda: ‘This was a typically Nevillian stance in real life too.’ Later, they mount a similar argument about Neville and Horace. They quote the 1974 Encyclopaedia Britannica on how ‘Horace’s fame rests chiefly upon the likable person revealed in his works…As time went on he became convinced that the good poet must first be a good man and useful to the community as educator and civiliser.’ At the end of the quotation, the coauthors state: ‘It is startling that everything written above applies so exactly to Neville.’ Astrologers and fortune-tellers invented this technique. Horace provides a horoscope that fits Neville exactly: he is a good person, but under-appreciated.
Often, the purported alignment between Neville and the plays is absent altogether. In Neville’s lifetime, the Puritans became more and more powerful. An austere offshoot of the Church of England, they despised the theatre, seeing ‘the daily and disorderly exercise of a number of players and playing houses’ as both a cause and a symptom of moral degradation. London’s Lord Mayor agreed, writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1592:
[The city’s youth are] greatly corrupted and their manners infected with many evil and ungodly qualities, by reason of the wanton and profane devices represented on the stages… To which places also do usually resort great numbers of light and lewd disposed persons, as harlots, cutpurses, cozeners, pilferers and suchlike, and there, under the colour of resort to those places to hear the plays, devise divers evil and ungodly matches, confederacies and conspiracies.
Like many people connected with the theatre, Shakespeare opposed Puritanism with his pen and in his bones. In Measure for Measure he attacked the excesses of Puritanical extremism. Sir Henry Neville, in contrast, was called ‘a great puritan’ by a contemporary detractor, and sided with the Puritans whenever it was politically to his benefit.
Other apparent contradictions are equally stark. Neville was still grieving when, three months after the death of his father, the long Shakespearean love-poem Venus and Adonis was registered with the Stationers’ Company. Conservative in spirit, Shakespeare’s plays convey a patriotic respect for royal institutions and authority; yet Neville was implicated in the Essex Rebellion.
Awkwardly for James and Rubinstein, The Merry Wives of Windsor was registered while Neville was imprisoned in the Tower. The co-authors describe Neville’s internment as a harrowing experience in which he was ‘depressed and conceivably suicidal’; and yet elsewhere they characterise it as a period of ‘leisure time’ in which he was disposed to write comedic plays and romantic verse. Such clashes are no obstacle for James and Rubinstein. They power on, turning contradiction into confirmation. The imprisoned Neville indulged in a kind of gallows humour: ‘Conceivably, Neville wished to escape his misery with ribald, subversive, slapstick comedy, although facing the prospect of being hanged, drawn and quartered.’
Many of the Shakespeare plays were written in the 1590s and 1600s. When Neville was supposedly busy as a clandestine playwright, he had a lot of other things on the go. We know this because Neville’s biography is well documented and firmly established. From the mid-1590s he was lord of an estate; he was playing a prominent national role; and he was beginning to figure, too, in international affairs.
Neville’s duties as a member of parliament in various parts of England have already been noted. In addition to those duties, he was active as a Justice of the Peace, and performed other official and civic functions. He was often preoccupied with managing the affairs of a large household in which he had eleven children. More than once he was forced to move that household, such as when plague made Billingbear dangerous. All the while, Neville managed extensive business interests including a foundry that manufactured artillery. He held shares in the London Virginia Company, which became for him ‘a central obsession’.
In France, Neville was a busy if incompetent ambassador. Clumsily he went in disguise to the funeral of the King of Spain, and was later blamed for the failure of the treaty with England’s principal rival. Confronted with this failure, James and Rubinstein put on a brave face, describing the ambassadorship as ‘partially successful’; a diplomatic curate’s egg. Neville’s humpty-dumpty diplomacy failed to earn him any favour at court.
James and Rubinstein claim Neville wrote As You Like It, Twelfth Night and possibly Much Ado About Nothing during his failed ambassadorship. Noticing an obvious problem here, the co-authors make a concession: ‘Even for the greatest author in history, writing two or three plays as an Ambassador is asking quite a lot.’ Such biographical misalignments are graver than the ones that made people doubt Shakespeare’s authorship.
Apart from these specific infelicities, the attempt to align Shakespeare’s works with Neville’s life suffers from a fundamental problem. Reading the plays and poems biographically is an error, a Romantic fallacy. Why? Because the contents of the plays and poems were dictated by fashion and context as well as by the author’s personality and experiences; because Shakespeare borrowed plots, style and language from earlier authors who, if the biographical approach is to be taken seriously, would have left behind traces of their own biographies; because parts of the plays were produced by co-authors and editors who also brought along their own biographies; because all of the plays’ authors were engaged in writing fiction, at a time when writers of fiction did not think to write autobiographically; and because, even if a given piece of fiction were partly inspired by and reflective of its author’s biography, the biographical and non-biographical threads are impossible to disentangle.
This critique applies to every attempt to match the works to any historical person, whether it be Henry Neville, Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon or ‘William Shakspere’ of Stratford. Pretty well any conception of Shakespeare’s biography can be supported by his works. Sheepskins, for example, are mentioned in Hamlet; surely a hint of the wool and hides in which John Shakespeare dealt during William Shakespeare’s youth? Other traces point to close familiarity with more exalted occupations and spheres, such as the royal court and the law courts. (Unlike many heretics, James and Rubinstein argue that Shakespeare did not train as a lawyer. Neville, needless to say, was not a lawyer.) Reading biography into such traces is untenable. How can we ever be sure that a word or phrase is ‘biographical’ or not? What number of ‘biographical’ words and phrases is enough to establish a strong connection? These questions can never be answered in a useful way.
Authorial arguments that depend on biographical matching suffer from other logical problems as well. Two things can happen at the same time without one having caused the other. The first meeting of the International Rosicrucians may have coincided with the beginning of Shakespeare’s London career, and the second may have coincided with his death, but this doesn’t make his career a Rosicrucian plot. Then there is the problem of subjectivity. When heretics detect an ‘aristocratic attitude’ in Shakespeare’s plays, they are really just perceiving a twenty-first-century, upper-middle-class idea of what an Elizabethan aristocratic attitude might have been like.
Much of the Nevillian enterprise involves searching the plays for references to Neville and his relatives. Such references, though, do not support a conclusion about authorship; they do not even withstand a common-sense critique. What number of references is a lot? The Nevilles were a famous family. Plays that speak of kings and lords and diplomats will inevitably bring Nevilles into the picture. How can we be sure that the references are not inadvertent? Every reference can support multiple hypotheses, all of them equally impossible to prove. A playwright who filled his plays with Nevilles may have done so because he admired them, or because he thought his audience admired them. An infinite variety of such stories can be told. The upshot is this: we cannot claim that a person wrote a play just because it refers to or resembles that person’s life, especially if the person was famous and from a famous family.
Another mass of Nevillian work focuses on matching Shakespeare’s and Neville’s expressions and vocabulary. The language fallacy—whereby common use of words, grammar and phrases is taken incorrectly to mean common authorship—has already been discussed in connection to ‘Shakespeare’s dictionary’ and similar entrepreneurial ‘discoveries’. The fact that Neville and Shakespeare sometimes used the same language and turns of phrase does not make Neville the author of the plays.
Neville’s Virginia venture is central to the second pillar of James and Rubinstein’s case. The Nevillian movement started, so the story goes, when James ‘decrypted’ the Sonnets dedication. That was a recent example of how the hapless dedication has been sliced, diced, shuffled, quartered and abused in every way. It has been read at séances and through intoxicating hazes of absinthe, opium and laudanum. It has been read backwards, upside down, along the diagonals and around corners. Searchers have looked for telluric currents, anagrams, palindromes, acrostics, snakes and ladders.
Theories of the dedication abound. Many relate to the third line, ‘MR W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE’. Perhaps that was a typographical accident and ‘Mr W. H. All…’ was meant to read ‘Mr W. Hall’. No one knows, though, who Mr Hall might be. Perhaps ‘Mr W. H.’ was meant to be ‘Mr WSH’, for William Shakespeare. Maybe ‘W. H.’ is ‘Walsing-Ham’. Or perhaps he is Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, his initials erroneously or affectionately reversed. Perhaps the Mr is Willie Hughes, the beautiful boy-actor; William Hall, cousin of Anthony Munday; William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; Sir William Harvey, third husband of the Dowager Countess of Southampton; William Holme, a recently deceased associate of the sonnets’ publisher; William Hatcliffe, Prince of the Purpoole at the Gray’s Inn Revels; William Hathaway, a Shakespeare in-law; William Henry Ireland, the elder; or, an expedient solution, ‘William himself’.
James and Rubinstein claim Neville wrote and dedicated the sonnets to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, allegedly his prison lover and certainly his fellow member of the council of the London Virginia Company. Why ‘W. H.’ and not ‘H. W.’? Because, in the Tower, ‘stripped of their titles…they would have referred to each other as Mr H. N. and Mr H. W. Or, even more likely…Neville reversed his friend’s initials so that there was no confusion as to which Henry was meant.’ (With all those Henries in such a confined space there was bound to be confusion.) Southampton, so the argument goes, was the ‘onlie begetter’ because he inspired Neville to write the sonnets. The phrase ‘all happinesse’ echoed the dedication from The Rape of Lucrece, which wished Southampton ‘long life still lengthened with all happiness’. The timing of the Sonnets’ publication was significant: ‘It was, quite plainly, occasioned by the granting of a royal charter, three days after the official registration of the work, to the second London Virginia Company.’ That is why the dedication ends with ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth’.
There is much to dislike in this pillar. The H. W. / W. H. reversal, for example, really doesn’t sound very likely. The deepest problem with James and Rubinstein’s theory, though, is that the Sonnets dedication is not a secret code. It is not even relevant evidence. We know from centuries of book history that preliminary and endmatter in books is frequently put there by the publisher, not the author; often the material is there to help sell the book; often it is irrelevant to the body text. (In 1568, William Turner complained to Queen Elizabeth that a ‘crafty, covetous and Popish’ stationer had issued one of Turner’s books with the author’s preface replaced by the stationer’s.) In the case of the 1609 Sonnets, the dedication is signed by T. T., uncontroversially the book’s publisher Thomas Thorpe, which makes it clear that the dedication is not in the author’s voice. If the dedication is nevertheless read authorially, several parts make no sense, such as the references to ‘our ever-living poet’, which is a way to refer to someone who has died. The biggest furphy of Shakespeare studies—a field remarkably rich in furphies—the dedication is of no evidentiary value for any important questions, including the Authorship Question.
In The Truth Will Out, Brenda James is cagey about the precise timing and circumstances of her ‘decipherment’ of the dedication and her consequent ‘discovery’ of Nevillian authorship. The Eureka moment probably occurred when she came across an old work, Charles Mills Gayley’s Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (1917). Gayley’s book is an implausible piece of wartime propaganda aimed at strengthening the trans-Atlantic anglophone alliance during the First World War.
In this period of conflict, the sternest that the world has known, when we have joined heart and hand with Great Britain, it may profit Americans to recall how essentially at one with Englishmen we have always been in everything that counts. That the speech, the poetry, of the race are ours and theirs in common, we know—they are Shakespeare. But that the institutions, the law and the liberty, the democracy administered by the fittest, are not only theirs and ours in common, but are derived from Shakespeare’s England, and are Shakespeare, too, we do not generally know or, if we have known, we do not always remember.
Gayley predicts much of the Nevillian case. He notices how Shakespeare’s and Neville’s circles overlapped; he scrutinises the mysterious Northumberland Manuscript; he notices that Shakespeare, like Neville, displayed an interest in the Virginian settlement; and he suggests that Shakespeare had inside knowledge of Sir Thomas Gates’ experiences as administrator of the settlement and the enterprise in which Neville owned shares. Indeed, Gayley is so assertive of a Shakespeare–Neville connection that, to the extent the Nevillians have come upon any kind of ‘discovery’, the discovery arguably belongs to Gayley.
The authors of The Truth Will Out downplay the importance of decipherment in the Nevillian case. They also distance themselves from the most enthusiastic cipher-hunters. At the same time, though, they allow that ‘some encryption might be legitimate’, and then embark on the clumsiest anagram hunt this author has ever seen. A poem by Leonard Digges appeared in the First Folio’s preliminary matter. Searching for secret messages in the poem’s last line, ‘But crown’d with Lawrell, live eternally’, James and Rubinstein detect, ‘But crown’d with all Law’t reely neville’. They repeat the same childish trick with the last line of Hugh Holland’s First Folio sonnet: ‘The life yet of his lines shall never out’, becomes, ‘The life yet of his lines has Nevell rout’. Claiming that Neville turned to writing sonnets after his ambitions at court were thwarted, James and Rubinstein hit rock bottom when they find ‘an echo of Neville’s bitterness in the lamenting Sonnet 111 (perhaps representing I, I, I)’.
Volumes of nonsense have been written on the subject of Shakespeare’s hetero, bi and multivalent sexuality. In their attempt to explain the apparent homosexuality of the sonnets, James and Rubinstein perpetrate a good example of the nonsense: ‘It is possible that, while confined [to the Tower], Neville had some kind of homosexual relationship with Southampton, although Neville, with eleven children, was obviously heterosexual under normal circumstances.’ The words ‘some kind of’ and ‘obviously’ are wonderfully quaint—and wonderfully ambiguous, especially as James and Rubinstein note elsewhere that Neville enjoyed conjugal visiting rights while in the Tower. With similar vagueness, James and Rubinstein also announce that Francis Bacon ‘was, apparently, a homosexual’. Like Edward de Vere and Henry Neville, Francis Bacon has therefore been accused of two clandestine Elizabethan activities: writing Shakespeare’s plays, and buggery.
In addition to modelling the biographical, chronological, cryptographic and language fallacies, James and Rubinstein offer documentary evidence in support of Neville authorship. They have especially high hopes for the Northumberland Manuscript, a big name for a small document. Even calling it a ‘manuscript’ is a stretch. The item in question is ‘a scrap of torn paper that seems to be part of the cover of a folder’. What the folder contained is a matter of debate. James and Rubinstein propose the folder was ‘used to hold or catalogue some sixteenth-century literary works’. The word ‘catalogue’ here makes the document seem more choreographed than it is. In reality the manuscript is a page filled from edge to edge with chaotic scribbling, like an exercise in writing practice or an Elizabethan doodle pad. Multiple scribes seem to have been doing the doodling, mostly in the secretary hand. The Nevillian argument relies on the inclusion of two names: Neville and Shakespeare. The manuscript, though, does not say ‘Henry Neville’; the identity of the Neville in question is unclear. Shakespeare’s name appears several times; the Nevillians suggest that the scribbler was ‘practising Shakespeare’s signature’. That is probably not true; even if it were, it would not help the argument. The Stratfordian case does not depend on evidence from signatures; and writing or even forging someone’s name is not the same as executing a colossal literary identity fraud.
Much of the writing, including Shakespeare’s name, is unclear. James and Rubinstein present a 1904 transcription of the Northumberland Manuscript into modern handwriting. The transcriber, Frank Burgoyne, seems to have done a large amount of subjective tidying up, and a small amount of converting text into what he hoped to find. The sequence, ‘By mr. ffrauncis Bacon / Essaies by the same author / William Shakespeare’, arguably involves a deliberate selection to support a deliberate inference. That part of the text could support a dozen other readings.
The ‘manuscript’ is problematic in other ways, too. Its chain of provenance is weak. To connect the document to Henry Neville, James and Rubinstein posit a complex scenario involving dukes, earls and a distant Neville relative. Henry may have owned the document, or he may not have. He may have written some of the scribbles, or he may not have. The manuscript’s date is also unclear and debatable. It could be from 1596, or it could belong to a much later date.
The contents of the Northumberland Manuscript are even more of a ‘word salad’ than the Alvearie leaf, and this time the salad is rotten. The Nevillians are not the only sect to take it up; it has also been used to advance the claims of Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Derby. If a hundred such documents were found, they would not strengthen the Nevillian case.
The fourth pillar is the so-called Tower Notebook. As an early seventeenth-century document, the Notebook is interesting, though quite routine and, for the Authorship Question, essentially irrelevant. But the authors of The Truth Will Out bend over backwards to link it to Shakespeare’s plays.
A single one of the Notebook’s two hundred pages describes positions of honour at Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533. James and Rubinstein characterise that page as something like an early draft of act 4, scene 1 of Henry VIII, which has Anne in procession to the coronation ceremony.
In the play, elaborate stage directions are given. They were lifted from Holinshed’s Chronicle, a well-known Shakespeare source that provided material for many other parts of Henry VIII. The Tower Notebook has only two details in common with the play: one relating to the role of the Mayor of London in the ceremony, the other to the carrying of a canopy. Several authors have pointed out that the Chronicle provides these details perfectly adequately, in a manner that aligns with the play much more closely than the Notebook does. As a ‘source’ for the play, therefore, the Notebook is redundant; another furphy, another effort by the co-authors to make nonsense sound like evidence.
The Notebook suffers doubly for its weak link to the plays and its weak link to Neville. Reprising the Northumberland formula, James and Rubinstein propose a doubtful provenance hypothesis that links the Notebook neither to Shakespeare nor to Neville (they concede the Notebook is not in Neville’s handwriting). The hypothesis requires leaps of logic and one eleven-year leap of chronology: according to James and Rubinstein, Henry VIII was not written or performed until 1613, eleven years after the date of the Notebook.
Another difficulty for James and Rubinstein is that Henry VIII was probably co-authored with John Fletcher. James and Rubinstein turn this problem into a virtue by pointing out, misleadingly, that Fletcher, with Francis Beaumont, dedicated a play to Neville. The suggestion is that Fletcher was somehow in on the whole thing—but that only makes the ‘conspiracy’ even less plausible.
The Truth Will Out uses tricks to enhance its veneer of authority. The long appendices have already been mentioned. Spurious exhibits are another technique: the bogus ‘family tree’ is a classic of its kind. Infused with truthy rhetoric—‘the truth from primary sources’, ‘the true background of the Tower of London prisoners’—the book in fact contains very little truth. In the face of uncertainty, the coauthors are ever ready to assert certainty. Neville ‘unquestionably’ wrote the sonnets in the Tower (this is very questionable). He ‘certainly authorised’ their publication (that is far from certain). The conspiracy covering up Shakespeare’s authorship ‘must have occurred’ (it very likely didn’t).
Paring back all the false confidence and wishful thinking leaves one bare fact. James and Rubinstein provide no evidence of any relationship, arrangement, undertaking or conspiracy between Henry Neville and William Shakespeare. For the claimed conspiracy to work, during Shakespeare’s lifetime there must have been a deep and binding understanding, and probably a commensurate financial relationship, between Neville and Shakespeare. Yet there is no evidence of any arrangement, deep or shallow, between the two men. Nor is there evidence of a connection between Neville and the plays and poems that bear Shakespeare’s name. Neville predeceased Shakespeare by nine months; what arrangements were in place to keep Shakespeare’s mouth shut after Neville exited?
For Neville, a hidden life as a dramatic author makes no sense. Why would a busy aristocrat—MP, courtier, entrepreneur, diplomat—spend such time and vigour on such an extensive yet secret œuvre? Ambitious and thwarted in politics and at court, he seems to have craved fame and favour. During the reign of James I, Neville had a strong incentive to disclose his authorship of plays that were sympathetic to the King, and upon which the King looked favourably. And yet, according to the Nevillian theory, he kept quiet, as did everyone else who was in on the conspiracy.
In laying out their theories and evidence, the co-authors evade the most important questions, the ones supposedly the subject of their book and their ‘discoveries’. ‘How Neville became Shakespeare’ is something about which ‘we can only surmise’. Why did Neville and his family wish to keep the real authorship a secret? That ‘remains a mystery’, the co-authors state, before floating a convoluted and unconvincing theory about a Hungarian humanist, Baltic trade routes, Shakespearean soliloquies and Lord Abergavenny. In their concluding chapter the co-authors ask why Neville’s secret authorship was not revealed by co-conspirators during his lifetime or after his death. Why did the First Folio editors, who knew both Shakespeare and Neville, decide to publish thirty-six plays under Shakespeare’s name after both men had died? This, the co-authors say, is just one of the ‘many mysteries’ we are left with, mysteries that will probably never ‘be completely resolved’.
The reader will remember that James and Rubinstein also claimed to have found ‘smoking-gun’ evidence of Nevillian authorship: the inclusion in Twelfth Night of William Knollys as Malvolio. Not surprisingly, this sub-argument is as flimsy as it is tortuous. Not a gun, no smoke. The paperback cover of The Truth Will Out attempts to align the faces of William Shakespeare and Henry Neville. The jarringly misaligned eyes and foreheads serve as metaphors for the misalignment of Neville and Shakespeare. Manifesto and mothership for the Nevillians, The Truth Will Out does them great harm.
There is insufficient room here to list every flaw in James and Rubinstein’s argument. But the main defects bear importantly on the question of whether Neville’s library was Shakespeare’s. The Truth Will Out exemplifies many species of impaired logic and method. It rests on four Swiss-cheese pillars. The goal of rigorous analysis is to avoid fixing on random and spurious correlations. Many unorthodox theorists are ‘noise traders’, finding meaningless patterns in the randomness. It is useful to call out their fallacious methods, to better equip us when looking at future arguments.
The Nevillian Authorship case made a strong start. To the extent that the case is founded on James and Rubinstein’s collaboration, however, we can be certain Neville’s library is not Shakespeare’s. Though no doubt genuinely felt and voraciously savoured, the Nevillians’ experience of handling Shakespeare’s books was not authentic.
When I finished The Truth Will Out, one thought was foremost in my mind. My next meeting with John O’Donnell would be awkward.