During Shakespeare’s lifetime, editions of his poems and plays found their way into the libraries of his fellow Elizabethans and Jacobeans. We know this because the book buyers recorded their purchases, and wrote notes in the books themselves. In 1593 Richard Stonley made the earliest known acquisition of a Shakespearean book. The printer-publisher Richard Field had registered Venus and Adonis with the Stationers’ Company on 18 April; less than two months later, Stonley recorded his purchase of ‘Venus and Adhonay per Shakspere’. For Stonley, who accumulated a library of more than four hundred books, things would soon take a turn for the worse. A Teller of the Exchequer, he was convicted of stealing more than £12,000. Stonley went to prison and his library was dispersed to pay his creditors.
At the high point of Shakespeare’s writing career, Scipio Squyer was a student. He went on to work for a judge before becoming Deputy Chamberlain of the Exchequer. In the course of his London career he assembled a creditable library of well-cared-for books and manuscripts. On the title pages he wrote his name and the date of acquisition. He also wrote, in 1632, an inventory of his library. Extending to almost seven hundred titles, the list included Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Pericles, Romeo and Juliet and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, an early alternative title for III Henry VI. The Squyer copy of Pericles, now in the Elizabethan Club at Yale University, is annotated on the title page, ‘Scipio Squyer. 5. Maij 1609’, and includes early textual corrections.
Gabriel Harvey had an even richer library. In his copy of Thomas Speght’s 1598 Chaucer (now in the British Library), Harvey added a useful note: ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort.’ The note is as mysterious as it is useful: Harvey made the note in 1600 or thereabouts, but the earliest known Hamlet edition was not published until 1603. Did Harvey take his information from the stage, or from an as yet unknown edition, perhaps unregistered?
Discovering a lost first-edition Hamlet quarto would be almost as exciting as discovering a Hamlet manuscript. It is quite plausible that whole editions of Shakespeare plays and poems have been lost. Some of the surviving editions do so only in very few copies, in some cases as few as one copy.
Venus and Adonis is an example. Frances Wolfreston was the most important early female collector of Shakespeare. Her library of nearly a thousand books included at least ten Shakespeare quartos and the only surviving copy of the first edition of Venus and Adonis, now in the Bodleian. Despite the efforts of collectors like Wolfreston and Squyer and Harvey, the average Elizabethan and Jacobean reader regarded plays as ephemeral entertainments and low literature, just as readers in the 1950s thought of ‘pulp’ magazines as fodder to be read and thrown away. Whole editions, printed cheaply and in modest quantities, could simply have been trashed.
It is also possible that unknown early editions will be discovered in the future. Things do turn up. In 2015 Dutch authorities found a chest that contained 2600 unsent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters. In 2005 a copy of Mandrop Torst’s exceptionally rare 1701 voyage account—a twenty-four-page pamphlet found bound with other pamphlets in a composite volume—was sold in Melbourne for $768,900. Early plays are among the books being unearthed. In 1904 the only surviving copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus was found—wrapped in a pair of lottery tickets—among items inherited by a Swedish postal clerk. A lost play by Ben Jonson, The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse (1609), was rediscovered as late as 1997.
Hamlet is not the only Shakespeare play that may have existed in an early edition that is now lost. Also in that category are pre-1600 editions of Othello, pre-1598 editions of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and all editions of Love’s Labour’s Won. Hints point to the existence of at least one unknown early Othello. In 1600, Edward Pudsey recorded in his commonplace book passages from his favourite texts. They included eight plays by Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Richard II, Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing. Here, Othello is the odd one out because the earliest known quarto edition dates from 1622, well after the date of the commonplace book. Pudsey seems to have owned all seven of the other plays in early quarto editions; perhaps he also owned an early Othello, now lost. Or, better still, hiding somewhere.
Shakespeare and his work were also mentioned in plays, poetry and prose written by his contemporaries. An example is the reference in Returne from Parnassus (1606), ‘acted by the Students in St John’s College in Cambridge’—racy Shakespeare enjoyed cultish popularity among the students. Francis Freeling owned this play, and John Fry studied it, focusing on the now famous line, ‘Why heres our fellow Shakespeare put them all doune, I and Ben Johnson too’. Early poetical references to Shakespeare include the 1603 poem in which John Davies of Hereford expressed admiration for Shakespeare and Burbage.
Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece was first published in 1594. Later in the same year, a popular book of poetry appeared. Purportedly by Henry Willobie, Willobie his Avisa includes the line, ‘And Shake-speare paints poor Lucrece rape’. The book also includes a reference to ‘W. S.’, who was once infatuated with lovely Avisa, but then changed his mind.
In 1598 Richard Barnfield lauded The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis:
And Shakespeare thou, whose honey-flowing Vein (Pleasing the World), thy Praises doth obtain.
Whose Venus, and whose Lucrece (sweet, and chaste) Thy Name in Fame’s immortal Book have placed.
In the same year, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury appeared. Produced by a clergyman named Francis Meres, the book is a collection of quotations, sayings and anecdotes with as much originality as the hodgepodge Barrington volumes. One section, though, is of much interest. Meres listed the greatest classical writers, then matched them to Englishmen of comparable talent. He put Shakespeare with the authors ‘best for Tragedie’ and ‘best for Comedie’. He then expanded on Shakespeare’s achievements, providing priceless information about the Bard’s work and how it was regarded:
As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his ‘Venus and Adonis’, his ‘Lucrece’, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, etc.
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his ‘Gentlemen of Verona’, his ‘Errors’, his ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, his ‘Love’s Labour’s Wonne’, his ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and his ‘Merchant of Venice’; for Tragedy, his ‘Richard the 2’, ‘Richard the 3’, ‘Henry the 4’, ‘King John’, ‘Titus Andronicus’ and his ‘Romeo and Juliet’…
This passage confirmed Love’s Labour’s Won was not just an alternative title for Love’s Labour’s Lost. Further evidence on the Love’s Labour’s Won mystery would also be found. A fragment of a bookseller’s list of items sold in 1603 included ‘marchant of vennis’, ‘taming of a shrew’, ‘loves labor lost’ and ‘loves labor won’, suggesting that the latter play was indeed printed.
Meres’s text also confirmed that Shakespeare was known at a relatively early date as both a poet and a dramatist. The fascinating statement that Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ were circulated ‘among his private friends’ is of immense value, as is the attribution of plays such as Titus Andronicus to Shakespeare.
England’s Parnassus (1600) included ninety-five Shakespeare quotations, along with 386 by Spenser and 225 by Drayton. Apart from quoting and praising his writing, Shakespeare’s contemporaries left behind hints about how he worked. Francis Beaumont knew something of Shakespeare as a playwright; he had co-authored plays with John Fletcher, who in turn had collaborated with Shakespeare on plays such as Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio. Beaumont wrote to Ben Jonson a manuscript verse-letter that praised Shakespeare for creating admirable lines ‘by the dim light of Nature’, without ‘Learning’. Shakespeare’s ‘natural wit’ was remarked upon by many people in the seventeenth century. According to Gerard Langbaine, ‘His Natural Genius to Poetry was so excellent, that like those Diamonds, which are found in Cornwall, Nature had little or no occasion for the Assistance of Art to polish it’. Similar remarks would appear in the First Folio’s preliminary matter and in later reflections on Shakespeare’s creative achievements.
Another recurring theme was darker: Shakespeare’s use of other writers’ work. In 1610, John Davies called him ‘our English Terence’. Comparing Shakespeare to a classical author sounds like praise, but the comparison had a sharp edge. An impoverished Roman writer, Terence was rumoured to have published under his own name lines he did not write. Davies wrote of Shakespeare:
Some say good Will (which I, in sport, do sing)
Hadst thou not plaid some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou had’st bin a companion for a King;
And, beene a King among the meaner sort.
Some others raile; but raile as they thinke fit,
Thou hast no rayling, but, a raigning Wit:
And honesty thou sow’st, which they do reape
So, to increase their Stocke which they do keepe.
These and other lines are ambiguous, but they have been read as an accusation that Shakespeare used, improperly, the work of others. Furthering that theme, Thomas Freeman’s 1614 To Master W. Shakespeare again linked Shakespeare to the ‘borrower’ Terence:
Besides, in plays thy wit winds like Meander,
When needy new composers borrow more
Than Terence doth from Plautus or Menander.
These battle lines had already been laid down much earlier, in the works of Robert Greene.
Accused of being constitutionally unreliable, Greene is a puzzle for modern researchers. His claims about his university education, Continental travels, love affairs, offspring and record of authorship are hotly contested and at least partially fabricated. So, too, the circumstances of his death, which, at the age of thirty-two, was hastened by wine and pickled herring. In his last days, so the story goes, he looked back over what he saw as a failed career, and concluded that others were to blame for his failure. He had been robbed of his authorial legacy, and the worst robber was a ruthless young upstart in the theatre world.
Greene captured these reflections in a deathbed pamphlet: Groats-worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance, Describing the Follie of Youth, the Falsehoode of Makeshift Flatterers, the Miserie of the Negligent, and Mischiefs of Deceiuing Courtezans. The book is divided into four parts. The first is a fictionalised tale of Greene’s alter-ego ‘Roberto’, a promising young scholar who, after being cheated by a prostitute, fell into disgrace. Then he met a rich-looking stranger—a successful actor who could also write plays. The stranger needed a writing assistant for his theatre company. Roberto signed on, but dissolution and depravity followed. The book then changes gear and voice. The non-fictional second part of Groats-worth is a repentance and a list of life lessons and precepts. The third part is also factual: a letter to three of Greene’s fellow scholar-dramatists (probably Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and George Peele) in which he warns them about a dangerous man preying on dramatists.
Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. O, that I might entreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your past inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them all will never prove a kind nurse: yet whilst you may, seek you better Masters; for it is pity men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasure of such rude grooms.
There is a lot going on in this passage. The target, evidently William Shakespeare, employed actors and also dabbled in acting and writing. Greene accuses him of usury, plagiarism and bad dealing. The ‘crow’ reference is one of the several charges of literary theft: in classical fables the crow is a thieving bird, stealing the finer plumes of others. ‘Johannes Factotum’ is the man-of-all-trades; the sense here is that Shakespeare is not a real playwright, nor much of an actor, but an over-confident dabbler who believes he can out-write and out-act the true men of the stage.
The line, ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide’, was adapted from York’s outburst, in III Henry VI, against his captor, Queen Margaret: ‘O, tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!’ Greene’s pun accomplishes a few things. Most importantly, it reinforces the symbolism of cruelty and double-dealing, and links the passage to Shakespeare’s writing, or possibly to writing he filched from someone else. Though III Henry VI first appeared in print in the First Folio under that title, earlier versions of it and of II Henry VI circulated and were performed in Greene’s lifetime. Sidney Lee claimed in his Life of William Shakespeare that Shakespeare had not originally written the three parts of Henry VI, but had revised and expanded them.
Greene’s Groats-worth concludes with a fable about an Ant and a Grasshopper. The accusations against Shakespeare are repeated, with the bad Bard now appearing as the heartless Ant, a miserly profiteer whose ‘thrift is theft’. Greene’s image of Shakespeare aligns well with much of the documentary evidence. Shakespeare owned shares in theatres, and would therefore have been involved in the business side of the theatre world, including the employment of actors. The Clayton loan and other financial and legal documents confirm Shakespeare lent money for profit. Collectively, his business interests were lucrative, enabling him to buy not only New Place but also other real estate in Stratford and in London. In 1611 and 1614 he took legal steps to protect the returns from his property investments.
Greene left behind a poignant document: a dying man’s bitter reflections on a benighted life. The confessional deathbed memoir has been a literary device for more than four centuries. In this convention, the author speaks with unusual candour and authority; he has no earthly thing to lose by plain speaking. The Groats-worth pamphlet’s fatal veracity is stressed in the preface, ‘To the Gentleman Readers’, and on the title page: ‘Written before his death and published at his dyeing request’. In practical terms, though, the deathbed author is at a disadvantage. Deathbeds are not good places to write. Imminent mortality makes seeing a book through the press difficult. A severely ill Greene supposedly wrote this and other longish pamphlets in the last weeks of his life. It is likely that Greene did no such thing. (Another problem: the time of a future death from illness is hard to predict. How embarrassing to publish a deathbed pamphlet and then linger on or, worse still, recover.)
Apart from being a literary device, the deathbed reflection is also a convenient cloak. As soon as the pamphlet appeared, Greene’s contemporaries saw through it: other writers had used Greene’s death as an opportunity to denounce Shakespeare in print. Greene was the ideal front. He had earned a reputation as a perspicacious observer and a snipey exposer of bad conduct. Behind their Greene cloak, the true authors could say what was on their minds.
Groats-worth’s denunciation of Shakespeare caused a stir. The three living men implicated in the book’s production—Thomas Nashe, William Wright and Henry Chettle—took great pains to disown it. Nashe, an author and an addressee of Greene’s open letter, angrily denied having written the pamphlet. Wright, the publisher who registered it, claimed he did so ‘upon the peril of Henry Chettle’, who was therefore responsible. Chettle, a printer, author, typesetter and book-trade all-rounder, issued a florid and panicked apology, in which he admitted to having edited Greene’s work but desperately denied having done more than that.
[In Groats-worth] a letter written to divers play-makers is offensively by one or two of them taken, and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceits a living author. [At] the perusing of Greene’s book, [I] struck out what then in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ, or had it been true, yet to publish it was intolerable…To be brief, I writ it over, and as near as I could, followed the copy; only in that letter I put something out, but in the whole book not a word in, for I protest it was all Greene’s, not mine nor Master Nashe’s, as some unjustly have affirmed.
The apology is as cryptic as the offending passages. ‘Because on the dead they cannot be avenged’ seems to confirm Greene was used as a front for others. Chettle names none of the aggrieved parties. They were probably Marlowe, Nashe and Peele, the notional addressees of the Groats-worth letter. But Shakespeare, the subject of Greene’s original accusations, may too have been aggrieved, and his reaction may account for a share of Chettle’s apparent contrition.
The Greene–Chettle imbroglio is of immense value for what it says about Shakespeare’s gossipy, backstabbing milieu. Powerful people, ‘divers of worship’, were somehow involved in the affair. At least one wounded party had friends in high places. Chettle’s apology again indicates that Shakespeare, like Marlowe (a secret service agent who died a violent death) was not a man to annoy.
The Bard is thought to have had the last laugh on Groats-worth when, in Twelfth Night, he depicted Robert Greene as the roly-poly, Falstaff-like character, Sir Toby Belch. The feud with Chettle, though, continued. Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, for example, Chettle criticised Shakespeare, as ‘Melicert’, for not writing a tribute.
Since finishing James and Rubinstein’s book, I had worried about my next meeting with John O’Donnell. The meeting, though, was just as friendly and enlightening as all the others had been. John was unperturbed by my reaction to The Truth Will Out, which he knew was not the best advertisement for Nevillism. We talked through some of the holes in James and Rubinstein’s case, then discussed some of the weaker thinkers on the orthodox side. We shared a joke about the flimsy scholarship and weighty pomposity of the celebrated Shakespearean A. L. Rowse. John gave me another book, Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (2001). This, he said, would end my neutrality and bring me over, once and for all, to the unorthodox side. I delved into it that very night.
According to Price’s published résumé, she has lectured at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Tennessee Law School, California State University and the University of North Carolina. Her style and methods differ strikingly from those of The Truth Will Out.
Devoting much of her book to the Greene–Chettle controversy, Price argues that Greene’s hidden authors spoke of Shakespeare mostly as a theatre investor, playbroker and businessman; not in any sense as an actor or playwright. John O’Donnell had made a similar point at our meeting. Shakespeare, John said, was an actor merely in the way that the owner of a circus might erect the tent, drive the truck and occasionally appear before the audience as a clown.
Shakespeare’s missing library is central to Price’s argument. How could he have been a writer, Price asked, if all his surviving documents were non-literary? This, she concluded, was not only ‘bizarre’, but ‘statistically impossible’. To formalise her conclusion, Price set out ten criteria and used them to score Shakespeare and twenty-four of his literary and para-literary contemporaries. She explained her approach in Darwinian terms: ‘Just as birds can be distinguished from turtles by characteristics peculiar to the species, so writers can be distinguished from doctors, actors or financiers, by the types of personal records left behind.’
Five of the ten criteria are about Shakespeare’s library and those of his peers. Price gave Ben Jonson a winning score of ten out of ten. Edmund Spenser scored a creditable seven, Robert Greene a middling six, Thomas Kyd a sorry four, and William ‘Shakspere’ a devastating zero. No one else scored worse than four on Price’s ten-point scale.
Price provided other evidence and arguments that reinforced Shakespeare’s nugatory performance. She argued that the Shakespeare hyphen revealed the name as pseudonymous. She argued that the plays must have been written much earlier than is typically thought, and too early for Shakspere of Stratford. With these and complementary arguments, Price answered the first of the two heretical questions: Did Shakespeare write the poems and plays? No, he did not; he was a barely literate bumpkin; a money-hungry playbroker, of mediocre intellect; merely a user of others’ material; an ambitious commercial man, not respected by his literary associates, and not a literary man himself at all. Shakespeare’s authorial library was empty.
On the second question—Who wrote the poems and plays?—Price refused to endorse any particular candidate, except to say that the author must be ‘a gentleman of rank’.
The idea that ‘William Shakespeare’ was the pen name of an Elizabethan aristocrat is ultimately less fanciful than ascribing to an alleged grammar school dropout the most exquisite dramatic literature in the English language.
Garrick had pumped Shakespeare up. Price did her best to deflate him.
Though Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography has been adopted as a core text of the Nevillian movement, Price’s arguments are kryptonite to the Nevillians’ Superman. Neville’s dates are almost identical to Shakespeare’s. If Shakespeare’s are too late, so are Neville’s. After Price, the best thing Neville had going for him turns into his Achilles’ heel.
At my next meeting with John I pointed this out, and we debated Price and her conclusions. John and I agreed her arguments were fascinating and her methods displayed admirable, even Malonite, rigour. She helped set out the unorthodox case, fair and square. And she painted a novel but realistic picture of Shakespeare, some of whose features were certainly convincing—his acumen, his ambition, his worldliness.
At the same time, though, both of us could find flaws in Price’s reasoning. Her scoring of Shakespeare against her criteria was subjective and indubitably harsh. (Price’s ten criteria also echo unhappily the bogus nine that J. Thomas Looney used to ‘prove’ Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s works.) Both of us could think of ways to rebut Price’s conclusions. She was wrong to claim that none of Shakespeare’s associates referred to him as a writer. She was wrong, too, about the age of the plays: most of them were too fresh, too imbued with topical references—Holofernes as Florio, the ‘dead shepherd’ as Marlowe, and Macbeth as a Gunpowder Plotter—to have languished in the theatrical refrigerator. (R. C. Churchill called Hamlet’s melancholy ‘a fashionable, fin de siècle mental disease’.)
The fraught latter years of Elizabeth’s reign were dangerous for playwrights. In 1593 alone, Thomas Kyd was tortured on the rack and Christopher Marlowe was murdered. Being the frontman for a secret aristocratic playwright would have been exceedingly perilous. If the writer offended the powers of the day, the frontman himself would be in danger, and could readily betray the true author. ‘William Shakespeare’ was not just a disembodied pseudonym; it was the name of a real person with diverse interests in London’s theatre world. As a cloak for a secret author, that name was unsuitable and unsafe.
To solve these problems, Price put forward a solution that took Shakespearean heresy in a bold new direction. The identity of the true author, she argued, must have been a collective conspiracy on an epic scale; an Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘open secret’ which, under a ‘code of silence’, Londoners maintained out of respect for the aristocrat and the aristocracy:
…which scenario is more plausible: A code of silence that prevented or obscured written references to an aristocratic writer, or an inexplicable conspiracy to eradicate all the personal literary paper trails for the commoner William Shakspere?
Though intellectually courageous and intriguing, this expedient is fatal to Price’s argument. The theatre in Shakespeare’s day was not respectable. An easy way for an aristocrat to lose favour at court would be to write plays secretly-openly as an absent-present author. Moreover, there are many routes through which an open secret could reach us today. Private letters from the period have survived, as have notes in private diaries and logbooks. In these documents, though, the secret was never recorded, never revealed. Many owners of anonymously and pseudonymously authored books wrote the true authors’ names on the books’ title pages. Where is the quarto with ‘William Shakespeare’ struck through and replaced by the true author’s name or initials or watchword? If such a quarto existed, Malone would have found it. Fry would have found it. Probably even Dibdin would have found it.
George Buc worked at the Revels Office licensing plays. Though he owned many books, including at least fifteen plays, we do not know if any were by Shakespeare. We do know, however, that Buc was familiar with the Bard and his work. Some time after 1599, Buc asked Shakespeare if he knew who wrote the play George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. Shakespeare could not recall the author’s name, but he remembered that the author was a minister and had acted in the play, in the role of the pinner. Buc recorded the information on the title page of his copy of George a Greene. Further inquiries followed. Edward Juby told Buc that the author was Robert Greene. Did Shakespeare know this and feign ignorance? Was he still cross about Groats-worth? Greene was notorious for his dissolute ways. Was the ‘minister’ answer a Shakespearean joke?
Another book with a contemporary annotation is now in the library of Balliol College. It is a copy of Rimas by the ‘Shakespeare of Spain’, Lope de Vega. Leonard Digges inscribed the book with a personal note; it refers to Shakespeare as an author. William Drummond owned the second edition of Romeo and Juliet (1599), and he wrote Shakespeare’s name on the title page. Late in the seventeenth century the Anglican clergyman Richard Davies made a private note about Shakespeare: ‘He died a papist’.
One thing is clear: Buc and other book owners left behind notes and inscriptions that did not disclose, or even hint obliquely at, a secret Shakespearean author. No one struck out the printed name on a quarto or otherwise blew the secret, even in their personal books in their private libraries.
Other parts of the documentary record also contradict the secret author theory. No evidence has been found of a person pulling Shakespeare’s strings. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, is often referred to as Shakespeare’s patron. Southampton’s papers, though, confirm he was not. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece include dedications to Southampton, but these, like the Sonnets dedication and the spurious and prospective Barrington prefaces, are part of the publisher’s clothing of the author’s text; they lend cachet and help make the books seem authorised and authoritative. Many contemporary dedications were built on clouds, with no underlying patronage relationship. Like the body texts, preliminary matter cannot be read naively for biographical content.
Price’s ‘open secret’ theory warrants a short Nevillian detour. James and Rubinstein have their own version of the theory, arguing that many of Neville’s associates must have known about his authorship of the plays. Francis Bacon supposedly knew, and Queen Elizabeth supposedly suspected. This argument stretches to breaking point at the time of the Essex Rebellion and Neville’s arrest and trial for treason. The co-authors’ argument degenerates into a hyper-fiction that makes the idea of a conspiracy of silence ridiculous: ‘A reasonable inference is that those who knew of his authorship, such as Francis Bacon (one of the government prosecutors) and Southampton did not wish to give away the secret, which would probably have meant a certain death sentence for Neville.’ This is a big ask: Southampton was in grave danger himself. Imprisoned and on the brink of execution, he had little love for Neville (notwithstanding the amorous picture painted by James and Rubinstein) and no reason to keep such a secret. In the case of Bacon, he was a prosecutor, loyal to the monarch. And yet these two men are supposed to have protected Neville–Shakespeare.
Perhaps the strangest part of the Nevillian case is the identification of Henry Neville as Falstaff. According to James and Rubinstein, Neville based the lovable, rotund, punning, bumbling Falstaff on himself. The co-authors make much of this link: ‘Falstaff,’ they claim, ‘was a deliberate and central component of [Neville’s] persona.’
The Shakespearean character Sir John Falstaff was originally named ‘Sir John Oldcastle’, after the eponymous nobleman and Protestant martyr who died in the fifteenth century. Until about 1598, the Oldcastle character appeared in performances of the Henry IV plays. Outraged by this disgraceful depiction, Oldcastle’s surviving relatives petitioned for the character’s name to be changed. Falstaff was the new name, but the changeover was imperfect. In the published version of I Henry IV, Prince Hal calls Falstaff ‘my old lad of the castle’ (act 1, scene 2). In the 1600 quarto edition of II Henry IV, one of Falstaff’s speech prefixes was left uncorrected as ‘Old’ instead of ‘Falst’.
James and Rubinstein claim Oldcastle is a pun on Neville’s name: ‘New-ville’ is the counterpoint of ‘Old-castle’. (Other hyphenators take this argument two steps further, interpreting ‘Fal-Staff’ as ‘Shake-Speare’.) If true, what was Neville thinking? Certainly Falstaff is lovable at times. Only someone with a very perverse sensibility, though, would build an autobiographical bridge to one of literature’s most grotesque characters, whom Victor Hugo called a swine-centaur, and who took his name from Sir John Fastolf, a man remembered by history as a greedy coward.
James and Rubinstein explain Neville’s rationale thus: ‘As Neville participated more and more in high political circles [and] he himself increasingly appeared destined for a prominent place in such circles, the mood of personal optimism and self-esteem allowed him to bring to the fore an almost diametrically opposed element in his complex character, that of a buffoon and comic.’ There is much perversity here. The Nevillians characterise Shakespeare as a real clown, and Neville as an aspiring one.
The Falstaff argument makes the Nevillian conspiracy even less tenable. A clandestine aristocratic author, embroiled in politics and eager to win favour at court, would have written for edification, not ridicule or disgrace.
Openness of the Shakespeare authorship secret is important to, and at the same time destructive of, Price’s unorthodox thesis. The most powerful counterargument, though, to her conclusions—and the most powerful evidence for Shakespearean authorship—is the subject of the next chapter. That evidence is Shakespeare’s library.