Commentary
You can read Daryl Pinksen's commentary regularly on " The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection" blog. Scroll down to read the following articles.
May 16, 2010
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April 7, 2010
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January 17, 2010
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August 17, 2009
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August 2, 2009
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June 11, 2009
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May 10, 2009
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April 18, 2009
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February 28, 2009
Daryl Pinksen
December 28, 2008
Daryl Pinksen
December 1, 2008
Daryl Pinksen
November 28, 2008
Daryl Pinksen
November 3, 2008
Daryl Pinksen
by Daryl Pinksen
Scholars have long expressed frustration that Shakespeare left behind so few personal traces. There is plenty of evidence of a business life, but nothing concerning literary matters. Compounding their frustration, Shakespeares plays seem to suggest a desire to remain deliberately impersonal, to keep himself and his real opinions concealed.
Why did this particular author, the one we most want to know, choose to hide his face? The quest for an answer reminds us that Shakespeare, as an historical literary phenomenon, requires an explanation.
The exploration of Shakespeares Catholic roots has provided Michael Wood, the filmmaker behind the four-part documentary In Search of Shakespeare, with an opportunity to suggest an answer that Shakespeare lived his life as a hidden Catholic, and the fear of drawing the attention of Protestant authorities to his forbidden beliefs necessitated a low literary profile.
The case for Shakespeares father Johns Catholicism is solid. Evidence from his life and more from his will leaves little doubt that he kept his loyalty to the old faith in spite of the states attempts to stamp it out. Shakespeares youth then was spent in a home that paid lip-service to the upstart Anglican religion. The textual evidence for the authors Catholicism is less sure, but more passionately argued. Scholars have constructed opposing views with equally strong ammunition from the same texts. This is part of the frustration. The collected Shakespeare plays, though finite in number, create a near infinite space within which we interact with his creation.
The authors intimate knowledge of religious matters, including the history and practice of the Catholic Church, hints to Wood and others that the author was a devout Catholic. But we must take into consideration that the author was a Renaissance polymath of the highest degree. Those who forget this fact waste time speculating, for example, that demonstrated expertise in legal matters means the author worked in a law office or that he was Francis Bacon. Likewise, an easy familiarity with courtly matters, and a broad acquaintance with continental Europe and its politics, tells others the author was the Earl of Oxford. A handful of knowing references to leathercraft leads scholars like Jonathan Bate to imagine the poets youth spent as the son of a glover.1
After outlining Shakespeares familys Catholic roots and some contemporary accounts of Catholics persecuted by the state, Wood, in his companion book Shakespeare (2003), reveals why Shakespeares supposed Catholic faith is so important:
Such hints might tend to suggest that the absence of personal revelation in his works, which has so exercised his modern readers, and fuelled the fantasies of the conspiracy theorists, is no accident but a deliberate act of self-concealment on his part. This would make complete sense in someone of his background, whose family religion was defined by the law as treason, and whose father was pursued by the governments bounty hunters and thought police.2[my italics]
But could the authors private Catholic beliefs have really produced a life-long fear resulting in deliberate literary self-concealment? As often when discussing Shakespeare in his world, we can look for a comparison to Shakespeares contemporary Ben Jonson. A player for the Admirals Men, Jonson made his playwrighting debut as a contributor to the 1597 Isle of Dogs, a seditious play which landed him in jail. A year later, Jonson was back in jail for killing a fellow player, Gabriel Spencer, in an illegal duel. Jonson escaped hanging for his crime because of a legal loophole, the ancient right of clergy, which allowed those fluent in Latin to get a second chance. Instead, Jonson forfeited all his possessions.
Here is where the Jonson comparison becomes relevant. While in prison, Jonson actually converted to Catholicism and remained openly Catholic for twelve years.3 And even though he stopped practicing his faith in 1610, it is widely believed that he returned to Catholicism later in life.4
This is curious. Shakespeare, we are asked to believe, was so fearful of his hidden Catholic beliefs being outted that it led to a life-long deliberate act of self-concealment. Jonson, by contrast, while trying to build a reputation, chose to become an open Catholic. What impact did Jonsons conversion have on his career? It did not slow him down for an instant. Upon release from prison in 1598 he effected a comeback with Every Man Out of His Humour, a hit for Shakespeares Lord Chamberlains Men. His career continued on an upward trajectory culminating in 1616 when King James I named Jonson the first de-facto poet laureate by granting him an annual pension of 100 marks.5
Scholars are quick to point to Ben Jonson when needing an example of another playwright who began as a player, or one who had not gone to the university. They should also remember Jonson when considering the theory that Shakespeares remarkable literary self-concealment was the outcome of hidden Catholic beliefs. Ben Jonson, minor actor, ex-con son of a bricklayer, was not impeded in his writing career by his open Catholic beliefs. Can we really be expected to believe that the author of the Shakespeare plays was paralyzed with fear into a literary life lived under cover because of hidden Catholic beliefs?
In light of Jonsons experience, it appears that Wood may be exaggerating the danger of Catholicism in 1590s England. Simply being Catholic was not an act of treason. It was only when those Catholics declared their Protestant monarch illegitimate that treason was charged against them.
Perhaps Shakespeare was just more cautious than Jonson? We know Shakespeare was not the shy and retiring type; witness his pursuit of a coat of arms, padded with spurious embellishments, and his huge Stratford home. And living in London as an actor/shareholder with a theater company that performed at court could not be considered low-profile.
If Shakespeare did hold private Catholic beliefs, he would not have needed to live his literary life in fear. He did not need to avoid recording personal remembrances letters, dedications, encomia, prefaces; all he needed to do was avoid making anti-establishment statements in them.
Still, the fact remains that the author of the Shakespeare plays, whoever he was, did employ a policy of literary self-concealment. The answer to why he chose to do so lies elsewhere.
Daryl Pinksen
Daryl Pinksen, a regular contributor to MSC, is the author of Marlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, a recent recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award's Bronze Medal for Best Regional Non-fiction, Canada (East). Click here to reach Daryl Pinksen's website.
1Bate, Jonathan. 2002. "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth and the Death of a Dramatist." In Shakespeares Face. Stephanie Nolen. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf. p.122.
2Wood, Michael. 2003. Shakespeare. New York: Perseus Books Group. p.27.
3Harp, Richard, and Stewart, Stanley, eds. 2000. The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. xiv.
4Van Den Berg, Sara. 2000. "True Relation: the Life and Career of Ben Jonson." In The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.10.
5Marcus, Leah. 2000. "Jonson and the Court." In The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.36.
DARYL PINKSEN 2009
SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 2009
by Daryl Pinksen
InShakespeares Face(2002), a book about the Sanders Shakespeare portrait, Jonathan Bate addresses the relatively modern phenomenon of doubting Shakespeares authorship in a chapter titled, Scenes from the Birth of a Myth and the Death of a Dramatist. He outlines a compelling case with plenty of evidence that the Stratford man, William Shakespeare, was the London actor and theater company shareholder Shakespeare: his name appears on the title pages of printed editions of the plays, contemporaries mention him as the author of those same plays, the First Folio unequivocably assigns authorship to Shakespeare of Stratford, and Ben Jonson and others reinforce the claims on the title page. These are all strong points in Shakespeares favour. But in his zeal, in one instance at least, Bate has reached too far.
Bate reports he is convinced only a poet born and bred in Stratford could have written The Rape of Lucrece," a 1594 poem attributed to Shakespeare and dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. Bate proceeds to roll out what he suggests is incontrovertible evidence to that effect. It has to do with a specific metaphor the poet uses of the turbulent movement of water through the arch of a stone bridge. The poet describes powerful eddies which send the water doubling back on itself, re-entering the arch it has just passed through.
Bate suggests to the reader that theonlyplace where an Elizabethan poet could have observed this phenomenon was in Stratford-upon-Avon. He bases this argument on an observation made by Robert Nye in his 1998 novelThe Late Mr. Shakespeare. During his research Nye travelled to Stratford and noticed something extraordinary when he paused on the centuries-old Clopton Bridge to watch the floodwaters pass underneath. Bate explains:
Sometimes it takes a creative eye to identify the fingerprint [of Shakespeares background]. Thus the novelist Robert Nye inThe Late Mr. Shakespeare, a biographical faction of 1998, draws attention to a particularly watery detail:
If you stand on the eighteenth arch of Clopton Bridge (the one nearest the point where the road goes to London), and if you watch the River Avon below when it is in flood, you will see a curious thing that Shakespeare saw.
The force of the current under the adjoining arches, coupled with the curve there is at that strait in the riverbank, produces a very queer and swirling eddy.
What happens is that the bounding water is forced back through the arch in an exactly contrary direction.
I have seen sticks and straws, which I have just watched swirling downstream through the arch, brought back again as swiftly against the flood.
The boy Will saw this too. Heres how he describes it:
As through an arch the violent roaring tide
Outruns the eye that doth behold his haste,
Yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride
Back to the strait that forcd him on so fast,
In rage sent out, recalld in rage, being past:
Even so his sighs, his sorrows, make a saw,
To push grief on and back the same grief draw.
Thats fromThe Rape of Lucrece, lines 1667-73. How many times must he have watched it, perhaps with tears in his bright eyes?(1)
Bate then implies that Nyes comparison is "proof" that only a Stratford-bred poet could have witnessed the phenomenon described in The Rape of Lucrece. Bate concludes with this challenge:
Next time you meet members of the anti-Will brigade, ask them on how many occasions their candidate stood on the eighteenth arch of Clopton Bridge in Stratford-upon-Avon and watched the eddying movement of the water.(2)
I wondered if there were places other than Clopton Bridge where a young Elizabethan poet might have seen the eddying phenomenon described in The Rape of Lucrece." A second glance at the passage reveals a key descriptor the poet speaks of a "tide" which is responsible for the eddy effect. Granted, tide could have referred to a flood of the Stratford river at the time tide was more generally applied to any strong current but perhaps the poet meant it in its more specific sense.
Among rivers, the Thames in London is remarkable for being affected by dramatic tides up to five meters high creating strong currents upstream and down. Today a system of dams and modern bridges has mostly tamed the violent effects of the tides, so Mr. Nye could not have seen the same Thames that 16th century Londoners saw. If he had, he would have walked across the most famous landmark of Elizabethan London, Old London Bridge, with its tightly spaced stone arches.
I wondered what effect the untamed tidal currents had as they passed under Old London Bridge. A quick internet search led me to Thamesfestival.org, which provided the following description:
Work began on the first stone London Bridge in 1176 under the direction of Peter of Colechurch. The bridge opened in 1199 and survived for over six hundred years. It was a wonder of the medieval world and an icon for the city. Almost three hundred metres long, it had nineteen arches of widths varying from five to ten metres. Its piers sat on boat-shaped platforms (called starlings) that were exposed at low tide. As such, the whole bridge structure acted as a kind of dam, blocking 85% of the rivers width.The rush of water through narrow gaps between the starlings created a waterfall effect with treacherous eddies and currents.Passing between these by wherry, known as shooting the bridge was extremely dangerous and there was a popular saying: wise men walk over London Bridge and only fools pass under it."(3)[my emphasis]
The writer of Lucrece was familiar with a place where strong tides flowed through arches and produced powerful eddy currents. Unlike the Avon river under Clopton Bridge, which would have created eddies only when the river was in flood, the poet could have seen this same phenomenon at Old London Bridge on any given day, the result of actual tides.
Finally, if the only readers able to recognize the poets eddy description in Lucrece were those raised within walking distance of Clopton Bridge in Stratford, it would lose much of its power. But if the poet knew that the phenomenom was familiar to every citizen of London, it would have made it an especially effective metaphor, one tailor-made for a London audience for whom the poem was written.
Daryl Pinksen
1Bate, Jonathan, Scenes from the Birth of a Myth and the Death of a Dramatist, p. 103-125. Nolen, Stephanie with Jonathan Bate, Tarnya Cooper, Marjorie Garber, Andrew Gurr, Alexander Leggatt, Robert Tittler, and Stanley Wells. 2002.Shakespeares Face. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf. p.122-23.
2Bate, 2002, p.123.
3Seen atThamesfestival.org page 6, accessed April 10, 2009.
Daryl Pinksen, a regular contributor to MSC, is the author ofMarlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare.Click hereto reach Daryl Pinksen's website.by Daryl Pinksen
In 1887, physicist T.C. Mendenhall decided to study the word-length frequencies of writers the frequency at which writers tended to use words of varying lengths in a quest to find a mathematical way of proving or disproving authorship. To accomplish this he counted the numbers of one-letter, two-letter, three-letter words, etc., in a text, calculated the percentages of each word length used (the frequency), and displayed the results on a graph. He discovered that writers word-length frequency curves remained consistent, and more importantly, that each writers characteristic word-length frequency curve differed from those of other writers.1
In 1901, a wealthy Bostonian named Augustus Hemingway, having heard of Mendenhalls work, commissioned him to carry out a comparative study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe. Hemingway believed Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, and he was convinced that Mendenhall had found a way to prove it.
Using Hemingways money, Mendenhall hired two women to count the words of various lengths in each of the works. They had to manually count millions of words. Unfortunately for Hemingway, the overall word-length frequencies of Bacon and Shakespeare were very different (although, to be fair, Mendenhall compared Bacons prose with Shakespeares blank verse, two genres since shown to differ markedly in word-length frequency).
Mendenhall discovered that Shakespeare used significantly more four-letter words than three-letter words. Every other English writer Mendenhall studied, including Shakespeares playwright contemporaries, used more three-letter words than any other length. After a while, Mendenhall and his assistants could recognize unidentified blocks of Shakespeare from the four-letter-word spike alone. But when his assistants began to count the words in the Marlowe plays, Mendenhall realized that the Shakespeare curve was not unique after all. To his surprise, the Marlowe and Shakespeare curves were nearly identical. Here is Mendenhalls reaction to the discovery:
It was in the counting and plotting of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, however, that something akin to a sensation was produced among those actually engaged in the work. Here was a man to whom it has always been acknowledged, Shakespeare was deeply indebted; one of whom able critics have declared that he might have written the plays of Shakespeare. Even this did not lessen the interest with which it was discovered that in the characteristic curve of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare about as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself, as is shown in Fig.92
(In Fig. 9, word length is shown on the horizontal axis, and frequency, in number of words out of a thousand, on the vertical axis. For example, Mendenhall found that Marlowe and Shakespeare both used 2-letter words about 175 times out of a 1000, or 17.5% of the time).
Mendenhalls study made no impact on Shakespearean scholarship, but it did energize a small number of proponents of the Marlowe theory and persuaded others that perhaps the Marlowe theory was worth further investigation.
The study sat idle for decades untilPeter Fareydecided to extend Mendenhalls work.3Farey chose a group of authors and, using electronic texts and word-counting software, performed a comparison of two large chunks of text by each writer, calculating how closely each writer agreed with him or herself. All of the writers agreed with themselves quite closely.4
Next, Farey moved on to a comparison of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Mendenhall had not noticed that authors' word-length frequency usage could change over time and genre, but Farey had discovered that the word-length frequency curves for Marlowe's earlier works differed from his later ones, and that Shakespeare's comedies differed from his non-comedies. The differences were subtle but significant. Accordingly, Farey chose to compare Marlowe's later plays with Shakespeare's histories and tragedies (since none of the Marlowe works are comedies) to eliminate the effects of time and genre. In his Marlowe-Shakespeare comparison, Farey found the agreement was statistically closer than any other writer had been with himself.5
The match between the two curves is astonishing. Fareys method is easily reproducible, and it is accompanied by rigourous statistical analysis. As such it merits serious attention from mainstream scholarship. Like Mendenhall before him, Fareys work has not penetrated the mainstream to any large extent. The standard scholarly explanation of the origins of Shakespeares style, that he began his career by imitating Marlowe, is invoked to explain why the word counts of the two respective writers are so similar. But even allowing for this, it would still require a strong coincidence for Shakespeare to obtain this degree of match with Marlowe, especially since it would have to have happened unconsciously.
My contribution to the debate was to look at the word counts of individual Shakespeare plays. Did they all look more or less alike? Using a counting method shared with me by Peter Farey, I counted the words of twenty-one Shakespeare plays, randomly chosen across the whole canon. I plotted all twenty-one curves, along with the overall average, on a single graph. 
What is immediately striking is the amount of variation between individual plays. What this variation tells us is that the average curve for Shakespearecouldhave assumed many different shapes. There was no underlying principle forcing it to average out in this manner.6
The graph emphasizes how remarkable Mendenhall and Fareys results actually are. The possibility that two writers, both showing variability in individual plays, could arrive at the same average curve by chance, is exceedingly small. Mendenhall and Fareys studies provide compelling evidence for a Marlowe authorship of the Shakespeare plays.
1 Mendenhall, T. C. 1887. The Characteristic Curves of Composition.ScienceVol 9: 23749.
2 Mendenhall, T. C. 1901. A Mechanical Solution of a Literary Problem.The Popular Science MonthlyVol LX: 97105.
3 Peter Fareys Marlowe Page http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/chap8.htm#note1
4 Peter Fareys Marlowe Page http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/appx3a.htm
5 Peter Fareys Marlowe Page http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/appx4a.htm
6 Pinksen, Daryl. 2008.Marlowes Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare.Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. (p. 55) DARYL PINKSEN 2009
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2008 a question for Daryl Pinksen, author of Marlowe's Ghost
Carlo: Daryl, in your extensive research that went into writingMarlowe's Ghost,certainly you formulated some opinions regarding Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. What do you make of the theory that de Vere authored the works we attribute to Shakespeare, clearly the most popular of the alternate authorship theories?
Daryl: You're right,Carlo, Edward de Vere is by far the most popular of the alternative Shakespeare candidates, but he wasn't the first. In the 19th century Francis Bacon was the go-to-guy, but that movement seems to have exhausted itself due to its heavy reliance on cryptography, an approach that's been largely discredited. The mantle then settled on the Oxford movement, which gained prominence in the first half of the 20th century and still holds sway. The Marlowe movement, latecomers to the party, didn't get off the ground until Calvin Hoffman's 1955The Murder of the Man Who was "Shakespeare", so we had some catching up to do. As you would expect, I believe that Marlowe will eventually replace Oxford as the focal point of Shakespeare skepticism. Here's why.
The Oxford claim is based on his education, extensive travel, access to (and participation in) court intrigue; all weaknesses in the Stratford case. Add to this the fact that he was spoken of as a poet and playwright in contemporary documents, who, like many other aristocrats, kept some of his work hidden from the braying masses. He was also credited with having a countenance that "shakes speares," a military metaphor stretching back to Greek hoplite warfare. To their credit, the Oxford case relies much less on cryptography than the Bacon claim. Instead, books about Oxford's claim to Shakespeare's works point to a vast number of similarities between Oxford's biography and events in the Shakespeare plays and sonnets.
But the problem with mining the Shakespeare canon for biographical linkages to Oxford, or any other candidate for that matter, is the extraordinary breadth of the author's creation. The complete works of Shakespeare comprise an entire world of experience. Stephen Greenblatt and Michael Wood have written exhaustively about the biographical connections in the works to the Stratford man; the many instances of Warwickshire words, family and place names, the references to gloves, leather goods and epaulettes, references to grain and harvesting, loans and debt, the actor's life, the agony of separation from family, the death of Hamnet, the complex relationship with Anne, etc. It all sounds incontrovertible. But read Brenda James's book on Sir Henry Neville, or any of the various books promoting de Vere, and you are presented with equally compelling cases employing the same general argument.
Rodney Bolt's tongue-in-cheek biography of Christopher Marlowe, History Play, brilliantly illustrated the folly of relying solely on this approach. Bolt lists Canterbury references in the Shakespeare canon; names, words, family names, places, as evidence of Marlowe's authorship of the plays. He applies the loose rules of Shakespearean (and Oxfordian) biography instead to Marlowe and constructs an equally convincing case. But Bolt never lets his reader forget where he stands - he'splayingwith the Shakespeare canon. It's a devastating indictment of New Historicism-based biographical reaching.
The case for Shakespeare is weak, but the case for Oxford is even weaker. Oxford made no attempt to hide the fact that he wrote poetry and plays from his peers. Accounts make him seem quite proud, and yet the writing that has survived in his name (the work of a mature, educated man) is clearly that of an amateur. Yet Oxfordians would have us believe that at the same time he allowed middling poesy to circulate in his name, he deliberately withheld his name from benign works of pure genius. To what end? This is a dead in its tracks argument. There is no getting past it.
Marlowe, on the other hand, wrote plays and poetry in the years preceding the 1593 Deptford incident which are indistinguishable from the early Shakespeare works. This is the consensus of more than a century of mainstream scholarship. If William Shakespeare did act as a front for some writer who needed to hide, admittedly a big if, there really is only one credible candidate - Christopher Marlowe. DARYL PINKSEN 2008
MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2008
a question for Daryl Pinksen, author of Marlowe's Ghost
Carlo: Daryl, what do you say to those who argue that Marlowe's style differs from Shakespeare's? Thus, the argument goes, Marlowe could not have authored the plays we attribute to Shakespeare.
Daryl: Thanks, Carlo. They do have a point, the mature Shakespeare style does differ substantially from Marlowe's, but here's the rub: the early Shakespeare style also differs substantially from the mature Shakespeare style. As a result, comparing Marlowe's style to the mature Shakespeare tells us little. Here is what we need to ask: are the styles of late Marlowe plays and early Shakespeare plays similar enough to suggest that they could have been written by the same person?
Many people don't realize that until the 1960's, it was common for scholars to argue that Marlowe co-authored early Shakespeare plays. As far back as 1886, scholar A.W. Verity said, "Among the plays assigned to Shakespeare there are four of which it is practically certain that Marlowe was a part author; they are of course, Henry VI, parts I, II and III, and Titus Andronicus." To many scholars' ears, early Shakespeare simply sounded too much like Marlowe to ignore. Assigning early Shakespeare plays wholesale to Marlowe was unacceptable, so they compromised by speculating that the early plays had been co-written by the two men. But things have changed since then. In the last several decades, these claims have nearly vanished from the literature.
Nonetheless, a survey of scholarship on Shakespeare and Marlowe dating back over a century confirms that the styles of the two bodies of work are closely related. Take this 2002 quote from a giant of Shakespearean scholarship, Harold Bloom, who said, "Marlowe . . . was Shakespeare's starting point, curiously difficult for the young Shakespeare to exorcise completely," adding, "that means the strongest writer known to us served a seven-year apprenticeship to Christopher Marlowe." So why is it that we continue to hear how different their styles are? I have a theory. . .
In undergraduate English programs, students read Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth -- the mature Shakespeare masterpieces. If they are required to read a Marlowe play, it will likely be Dr. Faustus, the play most associated with Marlowe. Marlowe does not fare well in the comparison. The instructor will then guide students through a "compare and contrast" of the two playwrights' styles. Even the dullest student will easily see the differences between Shakespeare masterpieces and early Marlowe. For many students of English literature this will end their study of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and they will depart with the firm, albeit superficial, conviction that the styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare are markedly different, and dismiss anyone who suggests otherwise.
A more honest approach might lead to a very different conclusion. Dr. Faustus was written before 1588, when Marlowe was in his early 20's. Hamlet and Lear were written after 1600, when Marlowe would have been in his mid to late 30's. A fair comparison would examine plays written closer to the same time. If students were to begin their studies with an early Shakespeare play, like Richard II, and then read a late Marlowe play, like Edward II, plays separated by only a handful of years, they would find it hard to believe that they were written by different playwrights. Or imagine instead if students were to begin their Shakespeare studies by reading Hamlet (1600) followed immediately by Titus Andronicus (pre-1594). They might find it hard to reconcile the two plays as the product of a single author. Yet most accept that these two plays were written by the same person because we quite reasonably make allowances for writers to grow over a long career.
When we eliminate the variable of time, the styles of the Marlowe and Shakespeare plays are indistinguishable. Placed in chronological order, the plays suggest the continuous evolution of a single writer, the blacklisted accused heretic, Christopher Marlowe.
DARYL PINKSEN 2008
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2008
a question for Daryl Pinksen
Carlo: Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene's 1592 deathbed pamphlet entitled Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is largely famous for the appearance of one hyphenated word: "Shake-scene."
Stratfordians have long maintained that "Shake-scene" is the first mention of Shakespeare as a writer as early as 1591. Now I understand their desire to show that Shakespeare was already established in London circa 1591. They need to establish this, after all, since they maintain that Shakespeare wrote the very intricate (and dare I say very Marlovian) Henry VI, Part I--his first play--circa 1589. Pretty impressive work by a novice. Yet is this the best Stratfordians can do? No "other" mention of a theatrical Shakespeare exists at this time, and so all we have to go with is Robert Greene's "Shake-scene" amid a bitter rant about how theatre owners and actor-managers exploited him and other writers (Greene was debt-ridden, by the way).
Daryl: Thanks, Carlo. Sam Blumenfeld is quite right in pointing out just how crucial the "Shake-scene" reference is to the Shakespeare industry. Assuming it to be a reference to the Stratford man, it would verify that he was firmly established in the London theater world as of 1592. It would link him to a known Shakespeare play, Henry VI, and place him in contact with Lord Strange's Men at a time when Christopher Marlowe was writing for them. For Shakespeare biographers this is a goldmine, for it allows them to address what is arguably the most salient feature of the works of Shakespeare--the overwhelming debt the plays owe to Christopher Marlowe. By locating both Shakespeare and Marlowe in the company of Lord Strange's Men at the same time, biographers can imagine a close working relationship, perhaps even a personal one, between the two playwrights. Nearly all Shakespeare biographies devote ample speculation about this relationship, a relationship inferred entirely from the "Shake-scene" reference. Greene's reference is so important, so interwoven into the mythos of Shakespeare, that it has become indispensable. It simply cannot be abandoned, for if it were, it would be tantamount to erasing huge chunks of dozens of Shakespeare biographies.
The case for the "Shake-scene" referring to Shakespeare is strong; Greene's use of the prefix "Shake" and the fact that Greene alludes to a Shakespeare play, Henry VI, both carry weight. But an alternative explanation, that "Shake-scene" was actually aimed at the premiere actor of the age, Edward Alleyn, is even stronger. Greene tells us that the "Shake-scene" was a "player," i.e. an actor, and had a "tyger's hart," a line taken from Shakespeare's Henry VI. We know that Edward Alleyn spoke those very words on stage; he was the lead actor for Lord Strange's Men in 1592 when Henry VI was performed. And a "Shake-scene" does sound like an egocentric ham splitting the rafters with bombastic speech. But the most important piece of evidence pointing to Alleyn as the "Shake-scene" is that Greene had already documented his dislike for Alleyn two years earlier. In 1590, Robert Greene had written this passage:
Why Roscius, art thou proud with Aesop's crow, being pranct with the glory of other's feathers? Of thyself thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobbler hath taught thee to say Ave Caesar, disdain not thy tutor because thou Pratest in a King's Chamber. (Robert Greene, Francesco's Fortunes, 1590)
The similarities to Greene's 1592 "Shake-scene" reference are striking. "Roscius," the name of a famous Roman actor, is Edward Alleyn. Ben Jonson also referred to Alleyn as "Roscius" in a 1616 poem he wrote, titled "To Edward Alleyn." The "Cobbler" was a common nickname for Marlowe, and a reminder of his humble origins as the son of a cobbler. In 1590 Greene told Alleyn that he was merely an actor mouthing words that others, like Greene and Marlowe, had written for him. Alleyn was "proud with Aesop's crow, being pranct with the glory of other's feathers." Then, in 1592, Greene claims that someone he calls a "Shake-scene" is "an upstart crow beautified with our [playwrights'] feathers."
This sounds like it could be a continuation of Greene's attack on Alleyn. There would seem to be enough evidence to, at the very least, call the "Shake-scene" reference into question. But to hear Shakespeare's biographers tell it, there is no question, for the Shakespeare conclusion is regarded as unimpeachable. Let us assume for a moment that the argument here is academic, how should we decide what to believe? My answer is that we must ask ourselves would Edward Alleyn have assumed that Greene was referring to him in the "Shake-scene" reference. Given the similarity to the 1590 insult, and the fact that Alleyn had spoken the "tyger's hart" line on stage, how could he have assumed that the insult was not aimed at him? If Alleyn assumed that he was the "Shake-scene" being insulted (again) by Greene, then we must assume that he was "Shake-scene" as well.
Here is why the debate is not academic: if we were to assume that "Shake-scene" was Edward Alleyn, then Shakespeare--the writer Shakespeare, would not exist before Marlowe's disappearance in 1593. Beyond that, it would link Christopher Marlowe to Edward Alleyn's performance of Henry VI, a play which scholars have long noted sounds like a deliberate emulation of Marlowe's style by Shakespeare. The line between the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare is already blurred; replace Shakespeare with Edward Alleyn as the "Shake-scene," and the line is effectively erased.
DARYL PINKSEN 2008
A question for Daryl Pinksen, author of Marlowe's Ghost
Carlo: Daryl, as I was reading your recent work, Marlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, I was struck by your description of Robert Poley, one of the three men who was with Marlowe the day of his alleged death. The other two were Nicholas Skeres and Ingram Frizer. Frizer was Thomas Walsingham's servant (ed. note: see 6/19 post on Walsinghams) and probably a low-level intelligence operative; Skeres, you suggest, might have been an operative in the Earl of Essex's intelligence network. And then there's Poley, someone with a very interesting intelligence background and a fairly experienced agent. Please elaborate.
Daryl: Thanks Carlo. The fact that Robert Poley was at the Deptford meeting is remarkable. It's commonplace to hear people refer to the 1593 Deptford incident as a "tavern brawl." Far from it. The four men who gathered there were, as Charles Nicholl called them, scoundrels, Marlowe included, and all four were involved in shady dealings, linked in some way to the Elizabethan underworld. But Poley's presence at the meeting makes it an exceptional event.
Marlowe, Skeres, and Frizer were lightweights, minor cogs in the Walsingham/Burghley-led intelligence machine (ed. note: see 6/23 post on Cecils). Robert Poley was in a different league entirely; in 1586 he had been instrumental in exposing the Babington Plot, which led to the execution of Queen Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. In The Reckoning, Nicholl's meticulous exploration of Marlowe's demise, he tells us that in the months leading up to Deptford, Poley was engaged in high-level diplomatic liaisons between The Hague, England, and Scotland. Here's where the story takes a turn - Nicholl's research reveals that for ten days following the Deptford meeting, Poley's whereabouts are inexplicably unknown. Where was he? Nicholl has no idea, but circumstances suggest that Poley may have been in Scotland, as Marlowe's escort. Years earlier, Poley had been recommended as an agent who knew "the best ways to pass into Scotland." And Marlowe, in his last conversation with Thomas Kyd (a playwright Marlowe had once shared a room with) said he was determined to go to Scotland, and mentioned that another of his literary friends, Matthew Roydon, had already gone. Marlowe urged Kyd to join them.
If Marlowe did survive the Deptford meeting, it may have been because Robert Poley was there to help Marlowe "pass into Scotland," a safe haven for freethinkers trying to escape the religious oppression then sweeping England. Thomas Kyd should have listened to Marlowe's advice; after his arrest he was imprisoned and tortured, and died within months of his release.
DARYL PINKSEN 2008
