The Guardian can’t resist throwing in a snide attack on “Trump’s America” in the opening of a report on the discovery of a significant new piece of data from the life of Shakespeare, one confirming the poet’s worldly success and resulting rise to gentility.
Dr [Heather] Wolfe is a willowy, bright-eyed manuscript scholar, a paleographer specialising in Elizabethan England who in certain moods of candour might put you in mind of Portia or perhaps Cordelia. She’s also a Shakespeare detective who, last year, made the career-defining discovery that is going to transform our understanding of Shakespeare’s biography. In the simplest terms, Wolfe delivered the coup de grace to the wild-eyed army of conspiracy theorists, including Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi, who contest the authenticity, even the existence, of the playwright known to contemporaries as Master Will Shakespeare. …
Wolfe’s role as a curator at the Folger is to bring her expertise to bear on the tantalising mass of documents that survives from the late 16th century. And yet, despite a heap of legal, commercial and matrimonial evidence, Shakespeare the man continues to slip through scholars’ fingers. Four centuries after his death, apart from a handful of crabbed signatures, there is not one manuscript, letter or diary we can definitively attribute to the poet, sponsoring the pervasive air of mystery that surrounds his genius. Indeed, the most intimate surviving Shakespeare document remains that notorious will, in which he bequeathed his wife his “second best bedâ€.
Before Wolfe arrived on the scene, all that scholars could be certain about was that a man named Shaxpere, Shaxberd or Shakespear was born in Stratford in 1564, and that he was an actor whose name is printed in the collected edition of his work published in 1623. We also know that he married Anne Hathaway, and died in 1616, according to legend, on his birthday, St George’s Day. The so-called “Stratfordian†case for Shakespeare rested on these, and a few other facts, but basically, that was it. …
Wolfe’s appetite for manuscript corroboration has led her into many dusty corners of the Elizabethan archives. It was this research instinct that first led her to reopen the file on the coat of arms granted to Shakespeare’s father, the small-town glover, in 1596.
John Shakespeare, from Stratford-upon-Avon, was ambitious to rise in the world. He was certainly not the first Englishman keen to put his origins as a provincial tradesman behind him. Among his contemporaries in Stratford, he was a figure of fun for his social climbing. English class snobbery has a long pedigree. His son, who would continue the quest for official recognition after his father’s death, also attracted metropolitan disdain as “an upstart crow beautified with our feathersâ€. In 1601, after his father’s death, Shakespeare the upstart returned to the college of arms to renew the family application for a coat of arms. He had made a small fortune in the theatre, and was buying property in and around Stratford. Now he set out to consolidate his reputation as a “Gentlemanâ€. Under the rules that governed life at the court of Elizabeth I, only the Queen’s heralds could grant this wish.
A much-reproduced sketch for a coat of arms crystallised Shakespeare’s hopes for legitimacy in the antique jargon of heraldry: “On [Sic: should be “Or a Bend Sable”] a Bend Sables, a Speare of the first steeled argent. And for his Crest, a falcon, his winges displayed Argent, supporting a Speare Gould …†The needy applicant also attached a motto: Non Sanz Droit (“Not Without Rightâ€). All this, and much more, is buried in the archives of the college of arms in London. …
An adjunct to the court, the College of Heralds was not exempt from its own secret feuds. In 1602, the internecine rivalry between Sir William Dethick, the Garter King of Arms, and another herald, Ralph Brooke, burst into the open when Brooke released a list of 23 “mean persons†whose applications for crests (he claimed) had been wrongfully preferred by Dethick. When “Shakespeare the Player†found himself on this list, his campaign for social advancement seemed in jeopardy. A bitter row broke out at court between two factions. Shakespeare himself became an object of ridicule. Another rival, Ben Jonson, in his satire Every Man out of his Humour, poked fun at him as a rustic buffoon who pays £30 for a ridiculous coat of arms with the humiliating motto “Not Without Mustardâ€.
It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gunâ€. In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford†and “Shakespeare the Player†are the same man. In other words, “the man from Stratford†is indeed the playwright. Crucially, in the long-running “authorship†debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can take refuge.
Complete story.
Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.
Phil Taylor
I am so happy to have found this article. Thank you for posting it. It was great!
During the infancy of the internet, i found several blogs the proclaimed or denied that Shakespeare was not the author of his work.
What pleased me was that both sides posted the rebuttal of the other side, showing the unbiased ability of the internet to discuss a topic reasonably and present all sides. Freedom of speech is under attack today, but these post proved that it could happen in our technological age.
Phil Taylor
I am so happy to have found this article. Thank you for posting it. It was great!
During the infancy of the internet, i found several blogs the proclaimed or denied that Shakespeare was the author of his works.
What pleased me was that both sides posted the rebuttal of the other side, showing the unbiased ability of the internet to discuss a topic reasonably and present all sides. Freedom of speech is under attack today, but these posts proved that it can still happen in our technological age.
nightspore
Still doesn’t explain why the figure on the title page of the First Folio has 2 left shoulders. In short, the bien pensant mind will stop at nothing to protect its fond beliefs.
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