by Ros Barber
MR DISORDER
On 14 December 1595, Petit complains that ‘Christmas is the cause of ‘much vain expense’ for ‘des tragedies et jeux de M. Le Desordre’: tragedies and plays by Mr Disorder’.
IN DISGRACE WITH FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES
‘letters for two friends in London’ Ide du Vault wrote two letters dated 24 January 1595, one to Jean Castol, minister of the French Church in London and friend of Anthony Bacon, the other to a Madame Vilegre. Le Doux was to be the carrier. Someone copied both letters on to a single sheet of paper and sent these copies to Bacon.
THE EARL OF ESSEX
‘cousin of the Queen’ The maternal great-grandmother of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was Mary Stafford, née Boleyn, elder sister of the Queen’s mother, Anne.
‘a memo’ Essex issued Le Doux with a passport on 10 February 1596 and another a month later (Wraight, 1996, pp. 55–6). A document headed ‘Memoires Instructives’ (LPL MS 656 f.186) details what the Earl of Essex expects from his new agent on the continent. He is particularly keen for intelligence from Italy. Intimate first-hand knowledge of certain Italian cities has long been one of the arguments against the man traditionally attributed with the authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems. The author’s detailed knowledge of a fresco in the northern Italian town of Bassano, as revealed by passages in Othello, has led one scholar to propose recently that he must have visited Italy (Prior). Twenty years’ research on this subject has just been published in The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels (Roe).
‘a seal’ In the Manuscripts section of the British Library, Peter Farey found a seal, identified by the Library as sixteenth century, bearing the name Louis Le Doux. It depicts a man in Elizabethan dress, in all respects normal except his face is covered by a blank mask.
MERRY WIVES
‘some scraps of me’ In The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act III, scene i) the verse that Sir Hugh Evans sings to cheer himself up is from Marlowe’s ‘A Passionate Shepherd to His Love’: ‘Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry,’ he says, and on a second attempt, mixes Marlowe’s poem with words based on Psalm 137, ‘By the rivers of Babylon’, which Farey points out is ‘perhaps the best known song of exile ever written.’ Sir Hugh also mangles ‘fragrant’ to ‘vagram’, perhaps as close to ‘vagrant’ as the author dares. Further details in Chapter 5 of A Deception At Deptford (Farey, 2000).
IN THE THEATRE OF GOD’S JUDGMENTS
The Theatre of God’s Judgments was a bestselling tract by Thomas Beard, detailing the punishments God metes out to heretics, atheists and blasphemers. First published in 1597, it was reprinted several times over the next fifty years.
A KIT MAY LOOK AT A KING
‘Burghley is dead’ William Cecil died on the 4 August 1598.
‘working for the French’ A letter dated 28 October 1598 reveals a man named Le Doux is working for Lord Buzenval, French ambassador at The Hague, carrying messages and money between him and the King, Henri IV, in Paris. Le Doux continued travelling between the two for the next eleven months, spending marked periods with the King (Gamble).
‘France signed peace with Spain’ In a diplomatic move, the Protestant Henri IV had converted to Catholicism in 1593, saying, ‘Paris is well worth a mass’. On 2 May 1598, to the dismay of the English, he signed a peace treaty with Spain. The money he was sending to Lord Buzenval, however, appears to have been in support of Dutch resistance against Spanish occupation.
Navarre The King had formerly been the King of Navarre, and Anthony Bacon had formed a strong friendship with him during his twelve years in France (1580–92). The inexplicably detailed references to the court of Navarre contained in Love’s Labours Lost include the pointed caricature (as Don Armado) of a man both Anthony Bacon and Henri IV knew well, Antonio Perez. Le Doux mentions both Perez and Edmund Walsingham (Thomas Walsingham’s brother) in a letter to Bacon dated 20 April 1596. Two and a half years later, a man named Le Doux is in direct contact with the former King of Navarre (Gamble).
Wittenburg The real-life Faustus attended this university, as did Shakespeare’s Hamlet. ‘he is announced’ The Earl of Southampton had arrived at the Paris embassy in April 1598 and remained there until November, bar a short return to England in August to marry Elizabeth Vernon, a cousin of the Earl of Essex whom he had impregnated. Le Doux delivered a letter to the French king in late October 1598.
‘She’s in the Fleet’ Queen Elizabeth, always outraged when one of her maids of honour got married without her permission (and especially when they got pregnant) had imprisoned her.
A ROSE
‘some sixteen years ago’ The anonymous author of Ulysses upon Ajax (1596) speaks of ‘witty Tom Watson’s jests, I heard them in Paris 14 years ago’, putting Watson there in 1582.
‘It’s said you died blaspheming’ This myth began with Beard (1597).
Ned Blount Edward Blount published Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander (1598) with a dedication to the recently knighted Sir Thomas Walsingham, describing Marlowe as ‘the man, that hath been dear unto us’. The other 1598 edition, published by Paul Linley, in which George Chapman had completed the poem and broken it into sestiads, also carried the dedication from Blount to Walsingham, in this version signed only with the initials ‘E.B. Thorpe’ addresses Blount as Marlowe’s friend in a letter accompanying Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s First Book (1600). Blount was also publisher of the First Folio (1623).
George Chapman completed Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and published it in 1598 with a dedication to Thomas Walsingham’s wife Audrey, contributing more lines than Marlowe had written and altering the structure.
CHAPMAN’S CURSE
‘fresh from communing with the spirit world’
‘Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?’ Sonnet 86
It was chiefly these lines that caused a number of scholars, starting with William Minto in 1874, to identify George Chapman as the Rival Poet. Chapman claimed to have been visited by the spirit of Homer while writing his translation of The Iliad, published the same year. The chief reason this identification was not ratified was that no connection could be found between George Chapman and William Shakespeare.
CONCERNING THE ENGLISH
‘I’m falling sick’ On 24 September 1599 Essex set sail from Ireland against the Queen’s express command; his decision to do so would have been taken days earlier. On 25 September 1599, Buzenval writes to King Henri IV, ‘I will shortly send you Le Doux who has been here three days, unwell.’
‘Cecil’ Lord Treasurer Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, now a privy councillor.
ORSINO’S CASTLE, BRACCIANO
Orsino Duke Orsino’s seat was a castle at Bracciano, in a mountainous region north of Rome. Inspired by Leslie Hotson’s work on Twelfth Night, A. D. Wraight speculated that Marlowe may have spent some time there around 1600 (Wraight, 1993, pp. 369–423).
‘Oh, you will like it’ As You Like It, where all the central characters are living in exile, contains a discussion of Hero and Leander, of the ‘feigning’ nature of poets, and an allusion to Marlowe’s death (paraphrasing a line from his Jew of Malta) that reveals inside knowledge. (That the dispute resulting in Marlowe’s apparent death was supposed to have been over ‘the reckoning’ (the bill) was not in the public domain until 1925. All early commentaries from Beard onwards gave different and conflicting causes. )
‘a stupid William’ The exchange in Act V, scene i between William, Touchstone and Audrey – characters not present in the source story – is a curious one. The self-confessed unlearned William is recognised by scholars to be a parody of the Stratford-born William Shakespeare, but if it is a self-parody, Touchstone’s reaction to him is inexplicably vicious. Touchstone, whose name symbolises a reference point against which other things can be evaluated, tells Audrey that William ‘lays claim’ to her and tells William ‘that drink, being pour’d o
ut of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your writers do consent that ipse is he: now, you are not ipse, for I am he’. (Ipse = ‘he himself’.) Touchstone is determined to marry Audrey (whom Wraight suggests stands for the Audience) and threatens to kill William ‘a hundred and fifty ways’ if he doesn’t ‘abandon’ his claim to her. As You Like It was registered in 1600, but its publication was stayed until 1623.
GHOST
‘Kyd’s fishwife tale’ See note on the Ur-Hamlet in ‘Necessity’.
‘the speech from Dido, Queen of Carthage’ The speech recounting Priam’s slaughter of which Hamlet makes so much in front of the Players (and on which Polonius comments, ‘This is too long’) is in imitation of an even longer speech by Aeneas on the same subject in Marlowe’s earliest play.
IN PRAISE OF THE RED HERRING
‘red herring’ Thomas Nashe’s final prose work, Lenten Stuff (1599), is also known as The praise of the red herring.
‘no one’s seen Thom Nashe’s corpse, or grave’ Nashe disappeared around 1601. Two epitaphs appeared that year, but we have no idea when or where he died, or in what circumstance. He was thirty-three.
T.T. & W.H.
‘Bedlam is reserved for any maniac who makes that claim’ Thanks are due to Peter Farey for this excellent suggestion on how the secret of Marlowe’s faked death could be enforced by the State. There is a long history of Shakespeare sceptics being accused of (or even committed for) insanity, and that this might have begun in the late sixteenth century seems entirely possible, given the level of State suppression at the time. Committal to Bedlam in the early 1600s was a threat not to be considered lightly.
TWELFTH NIGHT
Leslie Hotson suggested Twelfth Night was written to celebrate the visit of Duke Orsino to London in early 1601. A. D. Wraight developed a Marlovian version of this theory, speculating that the author might have been present, perhaps disguised as a Moor.
‘As Thorpe said’ In the letter that fronts Marlowe’s translation of Lucan, published in 1600, Thorpe addresses Marlowe’s publisher thus: ‘Blount: I purpose to be blunt with you, and out of my dullness to encounter you with a Dedication in the memory of that pure elemental wit, Chr[istopher] Marlow; whose ghost or Genius is to be seen walk[ing] the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets. Me thinks you should presently look wild now, and grow humorously frantic upon the taste of it.’
‘And did they meet?’ Orthodox scholars assume Shakespeare was frequently at Court. However, there is no evidence to support the idea that Shakespeare performed at Court or met the Queen. Indeed, Diana Price has demonstrated he was in Stratford on several key occasions when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were performing at Court (Price, pp. 32–5). In payments for court performances, his name is only once recorded among those of other company shareholders.
AN EXECUTION
Following his bursting in on the Queen, unwigged and ungowned, when he returned unbidden from Ireland, the Earl of Essex was ordered to remain in his own house. He remained there from October 1599 to August 1600. Though his freedom was then granted, his basic source of income had been stopped and the Queen would not allow his presence at Court. The earl grew increasingly desperate, and on 8 February 1601, supported by a party of nobles and gentlemen, he marched from Essex House into the City in an attempt to force an audience with the Queen. He was opposed and forced back to his house, where he eventually surrendered. On 19 February 1601, he was tried for treason. On 25 February 1601, he became the last person to be beheaded in the Tower of London.
WILLLIAM PETER
Elsinore Hamlet was written some time between 1599 and 1602. Between the publication of the first and second quarto, Danish ‘flavour’ was added, according to John Michell (p. 221). As noted above, William Hall was supposedly paid for returning from Denmark with intelligence on 2 October 1601.
ELSINORE
‘brother-in-law of our most wanted James’ James VI of Scotland was married to Anne, sister of the Danish king. The Earl of Essex had been a strong supporter of James’s succession to the English throne. After Essex’s execution, there was concern that James would forcibly depose Queen Elizabeth with the help of his Danish brother-in-law’s army.
LIZ
‘The week the old Queen died’ Queen Elizabeth I died on 24 March 1603. We know nothing of the marriage of Will Peter’s sister Liz. But one of the curious anomalies in that privately printed poem A Funeral Elegy, which claims to be by one ‘W.S.’ but is now attributed to John Ford, is its statement that the coyly referenced ‘subject of this verse’ had been married for nine years when John Ford was well placed to know that the putative subject, William Peter of Whipton near Exeter, had only been married for three. Thus is drawn into a Marlovian framework the possibility daringly suggested by Richard Abrams; that even though A Funeral Elegy is not written by Shakespeare, it may be about him (Abrams).
IAGO
‘A friend will ask a friend’ On 28 March 1603 Francis Bacon wrote a letter to lawyer and writer John Davies – apparently the John Davies, later to be knighted, whose epigrams had been published alongside Marlowe’s translation of Amores. Davies was riding north to meet the new king, James, as he travelled from Scotland to London. Bacon closes with the phrase, ‘So desiring you to be good to all concealed poets’. Baconians assume this is a reference to Francis himself but there is no necessity for it to be self-referential, and nothing supports the idea that Francis Bacon possessed any capacity for writing verse (though his brother Anthony did). Bacon’s biographer Spedding said, ‘the allusion to “concealed poets” I cannot explain’ (Cockburn, pp. 14–15).
A NEVER WRITER TO AN EVER READER. NEWS.
The title is copied from an open letter attached to the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, published, like the Sonnets in the same year, by George Eld.
THE MERMAID CLUB
‘Shake-speare’ The frequent hyphenation of Shakespeare’s name is not, as is sometimes claimed, due to the requirements of kerning fonts (the need to separate the tails of a long k and a long s) since the name is often hyphenated in the absence of them and also left unhyphenated at times when they are present. Its frequent hyphenation in early texts is highly unusual when compared with the treatment of other names, and it has never been satisfactorily explained.
Thomas Greene No relation to Robert Greene. A writer and lawyer whom John Marston and his father sponsored to enter the Middle Temple in 1595. Greene was appointed steward of Stratford-on-Avon in August 1603, and is believed to have lived with the Shakespeare family at New Place from 1603 to 1611 (Newdigate). A published poet himself, whose works include a sonnet praising Michael Drayton, he shows no awareness of his host’s reputation as a writer, and though he keeps a diary, and the Sonnets were published during his stay at New Place, he makes no mention of it. Nor does he comment on William Shakespeare’s death in 1616 (though he mentions the deaths of others) (Jiminez). However, he appears to have taken that event as a cue to resign his clerkship, sell the Stratford house he had moved into in 1611, and go to live in Bristol (Fripp).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, R. (2002), ‘Meet the Peters’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 8.2, 6:1–39
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Barber, R. (2009), ‘Shakespeare Authorship Doubt in 1593’, Critical Survey, 21:2, 83–100
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Du Maurier, D. (2007), Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and Their Friends, London, Virago
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Freeman, A. (1973), ‘Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel’, English Literary Renaissance, 3, 44–52
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