Shakespeare s Ghost William Shakespeare
CHRONOLOGY [W]e will both our judgments join In censure of his seeming Hamlet (3.2.85 86) 1564 April 25: William Shakespeare christened in Stratford 1582 John Whitgift, Bishop of Worchester, waives the marriage banns for Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway 1585 Shakespeare s twins christened 1585-94 Shakespeare s Lost Years 1593 June 1-10: Spy Robert Poley, on official business for the queen, disappears for ten days, possibly assisting Marlowe to flee June 12: Venus and Adonis appears under Shakespeare s name?1593-98 Marlowe in exile in Italy writing comedies 1594 The Rape of Lucrece published under Shakespeare s name Dr. Lopez, Elizabeth s Jewish physician, executed as a spy The Comedy of Errors performed at Grays Inn in London First mention of Shakespeare as a member of the Lord Chamberlain s Men 1595-97 Several Shakespearean plays published anonymously, including Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Richard III 1598 Love s Labor s Lost, first play published under Shakespeare s name George Carey succeeds as patron to the Lord Chamberlain s Men 1599 Marlowe s works are revived and he possibly returns from Italy Archbishop Whitgift orders Marlowe s books burned The Globe Theatre opens and As You Like It debuts with a tribute to Marlowe and his death in Deptford 1600 Several plays registered under Shakespeare s name 1601 Richard II and the Globe actors implicated in the Essex Rebellion Shakespeare s troupe temporarily banished from court 1603 Queen Elizabeth dies and is succeeded by James I Lord Chamberlain s Men become the King s Men First Quarto of Hamlet published 1604 Archbishop Whitgift dies Second Quarto of Hamlet published 1609 May 20: Sonnets registered on anniversary of Marlowe s arrest 1616 Shakespeare dies and leaves second best bed to his wife 1623 First Folio published 114
WILL SHAKESPEARE ABSENTS HIMSELF FROM FELICITY AWHILE TO TELL MARLOWE S STORY O God, Horatio, what a wounded name Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me? If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. Hamlet (5.2.340 345) The Shakespeare Compact So likewise we will through the world be rung, And with my name shall thine be always sung. Ovid s Elegies (translated by Marlowe) (1.3.25 26) he Shakespeare authorship controversy features not one, but two major specters. Besides the enigma surrounding Marlowe s meeting in Deptford and the question whether he was made a ghost or survived as a ghostwriter, Shakespeare s origin and development are s h rouded in mystery. Shakespeare sightings before 1593 are almost as rare as Marlowe sightings after that date. Aside from notices of family christenings, a marriage record, and scattered property and legal transactions, there is no documentary evidence about William of Stratford s literary career, including his education, early 115
116 Hamlet acting or writing experience, and arrival in the capital. A half-dozen plays later attributed to him in the First Folio were performed on the London stage before he is mentioned in connection with a theater company. The story that he got his start on the stage by holding the reins of a horse for a playgoer is probably as apocryphal as the tale that he left Stratford after poaching a nobleman s deer. Like a stream of electrons in a vacuum tube or the contrails of a supersonic plane, Shakespeare s physical existence between 1585 and 1594 (like Marlowe s after 1593) can be inferred but not seen. Whatever Will s antecedents, in The Shakespeare Company 1594 1642, Andrew Gurr presents an elegant solution to some of the vexing questions surrounding the realignment of the English theater during the year after Marlowe s death and the sudden appearance of the first works under Shakespeare s name. Gurr, an authority on the Elizabethan stage, suggests that Henry Carey, the lord chamberlain (also known as Lord Hunsdon), and his son-in-law Charles Howard, the lord admiral and patron of the Admiral s Men, concluded a deal to divide the London theater between their respective companies. As Gurr explains: A single company had been established eleven years before as the Queen s Men, but it had lost its hegemony. Setting up two companies was a sounder policy than having just one, since it gave better insurance against any future loss of the capacity to entertain royalty. London s two leading actors, Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, were each allocated a company of fellow-players and a playhouse belonging to someone in their family, and each company was given a set of already famous plays. One secured Marlowe s, the other Shakespeare s. 1 The Admiral s Men would continue to play in the Rose theater south of the city, using works written by Marlowe prior to his reported slaying as its chief repertoire, while the newly formed Lord Chamberlain s Men would perform at the Theatre north of the city, featuring the works posterity has attributed to Shakespeare. The recent deaths of Lord Strange and the Earl of Sussex added to the urgency of consolidation. Hunsdon s new troupe was formed in May 1594 from remnants of Lord Strange s Men, Lord Pembroke s Men, and other companies. Overall, the London theater had fallen on hard times after the plague had closed the stage for most of the previous year and a half. Except for brief spells, such as the debut of Kit s The Massacre at Paris in January 1593 and occasional tours in the provinces, most players were out of work between June 1592 and April 1594. The friendly rivalry between the two companies continued over the next decade, as the Chamberlain s Men moved into their new playhouse, the Globe, south of the city, in 1598, creating what Gurr calls the only effective democracy of its time in totalitarian England. 2 In counterpoint, the
Shakespeare s Ghost 117 Admiral s Men left the decaying Rose and moved to the newly built Fortune to the north. The two impresarios, James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, ran their respective theaters with a sympathetic but deft hand. Burbage s son Richard, the star of the Lord Chamberlain s Men, performed many of the leading Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet, which appear to have been composed with him in mind. At the Rose and later the Fortune, Edward Alleyn, the consummate tragedian of his time and Henslowe s son-in-law, continued to pack the house with revivals of Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Although Gurr doesn t mention it, before the Lord Chamberlain s Men moved into the Theatre in the winter of 1594 95, Henslowe produced Titus Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, and Hamlet, suggesting he already had access to the early versions of the Shakespearean plays and the Ur-Hamlet of Kyd and/or Marlowe. Up and coming Ben Jonson, who would succeed as the dominant playwright in the following decade, started to write for both companies. Following Elizabeth s death in 1603, the Lord Chamberlain s Men (which probably first staged Shakespeare s Hamlet) became the King s Men under James I s patronage, while the Admiral s became Prince Henry s Men, under the crown prince. Overall, the new arrangement provided London with the most sublime theatrical experience since ancient Athens. Yet financial security and economic stability may not have been the only motives for the consolidation. The two patrons, the Lord Admiral and Lord Hunsdon, were supporting actors, if not direct participants, in Marlowe s rescue. This web of correspondences suggests that the two patrons (with the approval and encouragement of the Cecils) deliberately entered into the new arrangement in order to provide a secure venue for Kit s new works. In all likelihood, buttressed by marriage alliances among three sets of families, Carey and Howard enthusiastically entered into the new arrangement not only for the material advantages it conferred but also out of shared inner convictions. Similarly, in the interest of secrecy, Marlowe himself appears to have willingly surrendered all credit for his subsequent works to William of Stratford. As privy councilors, both Carey and Howard had a history of sympathizing with religious reform and moderating the excesses of the archbishop and the churchmen. Many of Marlowe s early plays were performed for the admiral s company, and he may have served as an intelligencer for the naval commander during the Armada campaign. Howard had served as lord chamberlain in 1583 1585 and evidently arranged for his cousin, Edmund Tilney, to serve as Master of the Revels and oversee performances at court and on the London stage. Hunsdon succeeded Howard in this post and both men naturally would have resented John Whitgift s heavy-handed move to seize control over the registration and censorship of plays. Huns-
118 Hamlet don s son, Sir George Carey, was the knight marshall with authority over the verge the sovereign zone around the queen s person that played a pivotal role in Marlowe s murder investigation. Both Hunsdon and the admiral had been accused of atheism in the dossier prepared against Marlowe and knew how trumped up charges could assume a life of their own. In addition to the orthodox theologians on the right, they had to navigate around the Puritans and city commissioners on the left who would close down the theater altogether. The Lord Mayor was appeased by a ban on players using city inns, Gurr observes, explaining the compromise arrived at. Now plays could be confined to the two counties north and south of the city where Howard controlled the local magistrates. 3 Again in 1600, when the London theaters were closed following a crackdown by the archbishop on seditious and lewd material, the Privy Council allowed only the Lord Chamberlain s Men and the Lord Admiral s Men to perform, reaffirming the arrangement struck six years earlier. Anthony Marlowe, Kit s kinsman, may have also played a role in the arrangement. The influential manager of the Muscovy Company signed an appeal to the Privy Council supporting construction of the new Fortune theatre, where the Lord Admiral s Men, Kit s old company, intended to move. It is possible that the elder Marlowe contributed some support to his junior relation, possibly even financing or defraying his expenses in selfimposed exile. Because of his ties to Deptford, Anthony Marlowe and the Lord Admiral would have been especially close. In Shakespeare s Ghost, we will examine the broad contours of how these arrangements played out. Printer Richard Field and patron Southampton were particularly instrumental in launching the new relationship. Overall, I hesitate to call the entire phenomenon the Shakespeare conspiracy or plot because these terms have a pejorative connotation. The Shakespeare caper, sting, or op are too frivolous, and the Shakespeare matrix or shaxpeare Files smacks of the occult. From beginning to end, the authorship question resembles nothing so much as a dramatic partnership and a comic one at that. I have decided to refer to it as the Shakespeare Compact, which is meet, or appropriate, as the gravediggers in Hamlet would say. The performative elements involved include a faked death, mistaken and switched identities, baseless slanders, supernatural effects, and the union of high and low patrons and poet, university wit and talented country boy, nobles and groundlings which echo the Shakespearean comedies themselves. The mutual bonds between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Hunsdon and Howard, Henslowe and Burbage, and their supporting cast constitute a marriage of true minds that brought happiness and blessings to a gilded but deeply flawed age and to a grateful posterity.
Shakespeare s Ghost 119 1 A Mechanical Solution 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. In the characteristic curves of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself. Dr. Thomas Mendenhall, A Mechanical Solution for a Literary Problem n the absence of definitive evidence such as signed manuscripts of the poems and plays, a secret diary, or other historical documents the case for or against any candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare s works remained open. Historians and literary critics analyzed the circumstantial evidence and arrived at opposite conclusions. A more objective standard of determining the provenance of disputed writings, stylometric studies, emerged early in the twentieth century with the scientific analysis of literary works that eliminated as much as possible personal evaluations and judgments. The story of Shakespeare s Literary Fingerprint begins during Reconstruction, following the U.S. Civil War. Dr. Robert Mendenhall, a physics professor at Ohio State University and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, devised a mechanical method to determine the author of a disputed work. By counting the number of letters in each of the words of an author s literary corpus whether prose or poetry, a letter or a novel and plotting the total number of words of twoletters, three-letters, four-letters, etc., on a graph, a unique individual ratiocurve appears. No two people exhibit exactly the same proportion; thus given a sufficient number of words ideally 100,000 or more the real identify of a disputed or anonymous document could be ascertained with near certainty. Mendenhall reported his discovery in an article in Science on May 11, 1887. The chief merit of the method consisted in the fact that its application required no exercise of judgement, he explained.... Characteristics might be revealed which the author could make no attempt
120 Hamlet to conceal, being himself unaware of their existence... The conclusions reached through its use would be independent of personal bias, the work of one person in the study of an author being at once comparable with the work of any other. 4 During the hotly contested presidential election of Rutherford B. Hayes and James G. Blaine, he became intrigued with unsigned editorials in the New York Herald. The articles contained a small total number of words, making the margin of error quite high, but even so, Mendenhall discovered that the ratio-curves matched those of Blaine s niece, a widely read author. As the new century began, a prominent Baconian approached Mendenhall, asking him to apply his method to the Shakespeare authorship controversy. A theory originally introduced in the mid-1800s held that Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher, essayist, and lord chancellor under James I, was the real author of the sonnets and plays. But the Bacon hypothesis soon became mired in the quest for secret codes, hidden ciphers, and other occult evidence. As can be seen in the books today on a code hidden in the Bible, virtually anything could be read into the literary entrails of the Folio, whose obscure orthography, misplaced fonts, and other irregularities appeared to have been composed by the clowns in Dr. Faustus or the gravediggers in Hamlet. In this maddening jumble of text and type, Baconians saw Kabbalistic revelations of Sir Francis s hidden hand communicating in code with his brother Anthony, the spymaster. Accepting the challenge, Mendenhall hired a team of young women to count the words in the First Folio, Bacon s Advancement of Learning and other writings, and as a control, over a million words from the writings of other Elizabethan poets, including Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. To the disappointment of his patron, but not surprisingly to anyone who has read Bacon s turgid prose, Mendenhall found that Bacon s ratiocurve was light years apart from the author of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and the other masterpieces. However, the tedious undertaking did not go for nought. 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, Mendenhall reported in December, 1901. In the characteristic curves of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself. 5 Today s computer technology makes stylometric studies such as these faster, more reliable, and more sophisticated. A recent computerized study replicated and corroborated Mendenhall s original study. English researcher Peter Farey found a correlation of up to 99.98 percent between Marlowe s plays and those attributed to Shakespeare. 6 A recent stylometric study of function words such as but, and and the found a distinct difference
Shakespeare s Ghost 121 between the Marlovian and Shakespearean canons. 7 However, taking probable date of composition into account, Farey found that Marlowe s and Shakespeare s curves progressed with age and meshed exactly. He also looked at the percentage of run-on lines and feminine endings (in which an extra syllable is added to the regular iambic line of ten syllables) and found a perfectly smooth curve can be seen to pass through the two groups of plays. In a further development, Louis Ule, a statistician and editor of a Marlowe concordance, found that Marlowe and Shakespeare s vocabulary were virtually indistinguishable. The rate that each canon added new words (known as hapax-legomena) to new plays differed by only 1 percent. 8 Ule also found that the expected vocabularies among different genres (such as dramatic works, amorous poems, and moral poems) is much the same for Marlowe as it is for Shakespeare. 9 Several other stylometric studies have also shown a strong correlation between individual plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare. For example, Kit s The Jew of Malta contains an average of 11.74 props (e.g., swords, crowns, scepters, coins, etc.) per thousand lines, compared to an average of 11.48 for the Shakespearean tragedies as a whole, while other Elizabethan works range from 4.2 to 22. 10 In writing this book, I was struck by the similarity between the use of biblical imagery in Hamlet and in Marlowe s earlier plays. Turning to two standard reference works, I compared the use of biblical references, allusions, and echoes in the writings of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The books were Christopher Marlowe s Use of the Bible, edited by R. M. Cornelius, a p rofessor of English at Bryan College, and Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays, edited by Naseeb Shaheen, who has published many articles on Shakespeare in scholarly journals. These compendiums show that both Marlowe and Shakespeare relied primarily on the Geneva Bible (the scripture favored by the Puritans), followed by the Bishop s Bible, and that each made infrequent references to one of several other English bibles that were circulating at the time. A statistical comparison of the references reveals a striking similarity between the overall use of the scriptures. Both the Marlovian and the Shakespearean works refer to the Gospel of Matthew more than to any other book in the Bible. The Book of Psalms is the second most popular book referred to in each canon. In fact, as the accompanying table shows, eight of the top ten books are the same. Revelation and the Gospel of John are referred to more in Marlowe than in Shakespeare. One explanation for this would be that, after the Baines Note accusing him of blaspheming the apostle John, Marlowe consciously or unconsciously shied away from referring to John s work, including Revelation, which was traditionally assigned to him. Instead, the Shakespeare works rely more often on Mark and Proverbs.
122 Hamlet Table 3. Frequency of Biblical Allusions and Echoes in the Marlovian and Shakespearean Works Rank Marlowe Shakespeare Hamlet 1. Matthew Matthew Psalms 2. Psalms Psalms Genesis 3. Revelation Luke Job 4. John Genesis Matthew 5. Luke Job Proverbs 6. Isaiah Revelation I Corinthians 7. Job Mark Isaiah 8. Romans Romans Revelation 9. Genesis Isaiah Luke 10. Hebrews Proverbs Ecclesiasticus The total number of references is also comparable. Dividing Marlowe s 1037 primary biblical references or echoes into eleven groups, including seven plays, three narrative poems, and short works (all grouped together), Professor Cornelius s count averages out to 94.3 references per work. The list of 3483 biblical references in Shakespeare, divided among the thirty-nine plays indexed (including those in the First Folio, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Sir Thomas More) averages 91.7 references per play a difference of 3 percent. Of course, this comparison is very approximate, since the two editors may have selected references based on different literary criteria and their own subjective reading of the works. In annotating Hamlet for this edition, I identified more biblical references (see Annotations), bringing the total allusions and echoes in the play to 135. According to this reckoning, Hamlet alludes to forty of the eightytwo books in the Elizabethan era Bible, including, the Apocrypha, or just under one half. The Psalms and Genesis with twelve references or echoes each are tied for first, followed by Job with eleven and Matthew and Proverbs with ten each. Seven of the top ten books, including Isaiah, Luke, and Revelation, are the same as those in the above table. New additions include 1 Corinthians, Ecclesiasticus, and Proverbs, which is number ten on the overall Shakespearean list, but not in the top ranks of the early Marlovian works. Again, the overall pattern remains consistent. In comparison to Marlowe and Shakespeare, other Elizabethan playwrights used the Bible much less frequently. Thomas Kyd s The Spanish Tragedy, a primary dramatic source for Hamlet, has only seven references,
Shakespeare s Ghost 123 while Marton s Antonio s Revenge, a revenge tragedy that may also have made use of the lost Ur-Hamlet (attributed to Kyd and/or Marlowe), has only eight biblical correspondences, according to the experts. If this significantly lower frequency of biblical references holds up in the writings of other playwrights, we can tentatively conclude that the Marlovian and Shakespearean works refer to the Bible about ten times more often than those of other contemporary dramatists. Finally, there is a significant overlap among the references in Marlowe and Shakespeare. For example, about 20 percent of the passages in the Bible referred to in Dido (eight out of thirty-seven) are also alluded to in Shakespeare s plays. In the first part of Tamburlaine, the percentage rises to nearly 40 percent (fifty-four out of 137 references), including fourteen out of seventeen references to the exact same passages in Matthew and ten of seventeen in Revelation. 11 As we might expect, a profound knowledge of holy writ fits the profile of Marlowe, who prepared for the ministry at Cambridge, studied Latin and Greek, and received his M.A. in theology. There is nothing in Shakespeare s life to suggest that he had comparable learning or religious sophistication. Actually there is a significant difference in the use of scripture in the two canons. In an introductory essay, Professor Cornelius marvels at Marlowe s scrupulous use of the Bible in his works. The treatment of judgment, which appears in all of his plays, is quite detailed and balanced, for Marlowe refers to both pains and punishments, rewards and righteous justice. In general, he is Biblically orthodox in presenting God as sovereign with respect to the machinations of men. 12 In contrast to Marlowe, Shakespeare, he asserts, is much more provocative, frequently using biblical humor and levity to make a point and even verging on flippancy! As examples, he cites The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which Launce compares himself to Christ; The Comedy of Errors, in which even Noah s flood could not clean the face of Nell, the greasy kitchen maid; and Much Ado About Nothing in which women are claimed to be superior since men are made from dust. None of these instances has a counterpart in Marlowe, he observes. 13 How can we explain this discrepancy? Like a sketch artist who composes a drawing of a missing child or adult that attempts to approximate how the person has aged, we need only focus Marlowe s literary light through the prism of the events in Deptford to see how it manifests differently in the guise of Shakespeare. After May 30, 1593, Marlowe wrote from the comparative freedom and safety of exile rather than under the direct gaze of the London censor, which could account for the emergence of this satirical strain, especially in the Italian comedies. This tendency reaches its zenith in Hamlet s puns on the Lord s Supper and the graveyard scenes.
124 Hamlet The lighter theological vein accords with the general thematic change from the Marlovian plays, which dramatize the effects of evil, to the works attributed to Shakespeare, which focus on the restorative powers of the good. After Deptford, Kit appears to have transformed his inner demons and furies into angels and benevolent elves and fairies. He continued to invoke the spirits of darkness, especially Hecate, the queen of Night, but he let her inner radiance shine. Like his namesake Merlin and his hero Ovid, author of Metamorphoses, Kit mastered the art of transmutation, magically changing night into day, tragedy into comedy, and revenge into an immortal meditation on the human condition. In brief, scanning Marlowe s and Shakespeare s literary and theological DNA proves a close, if not an exact, match. A variety of scientific, linguistic, and religious comparisons shows beyond a reasonable doubt that their collected works were composed largely by the same hand. 2 The Muse s Springs Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses springs. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (motto from Ovid s Amores) The First Heir of My Invention Marlowe is the greatest discoverer, the most daring pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before Marlowe there was no genuine blank verse and genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the path made straight for Shakespeare. Algernon Charles Swinburne s if on cue, following Christopher Marlowe s death and sudden exit from the Elizabethan stage, Will Shakespeare made his literary entrance with publication of Venus and Adonis. Composed in the same style and tone as Hero and Leander, the lyrical narrative was registered anonymously with the Stationers Company on April 18, 1593, about the time the first anti-alien libels were
Shakespeare s Ghost 125 posted in London. Ironically, the poem was approved by Archbishop John Whitgift, who oversaw publication of all printed material and whose name appears on the registry. Anonymous authorship was not uncommon in an era when theater troupes or printers owned the rights to a play. In William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Stanley Schoenbaum mentions the appearance of a printed copy of Venus and Adonis with Shakespeare s name as early as June 12. 14 There is no author listed on the title page, and the dedication page with Shakespeare s name appears to have been inserted into the volume after publication. This suggests that he volunteered or was chosen to take the credit for the poem in the two weeks after Marlowe s death in Deptford. Dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, Venus and Adonis was offered as the first heir of my invention. Why was this young nobleman the dedicatee? A grandson of a former lord chancellor under Henry VIII, Southampton became a ward of William Cecil, or Lord Burghley, at age eight following the death of his father. In London, he lived with Burghley and his family in Cecil House in the Strand and was brought up like a son. Although the boy was a Catholic, when he was twelve, Burghley enrolled him at St. John s College at Cambridge, a Puritan stronghold, where he received his master s degree in June 1589, just two years after Marlowe did. Hence their stay at the university overlapped by about five years. In 1588, through Burghley s influence, Wriothesley was admitted to Gray s Inn, one of the inns of court or law schools. The following year he was introduced to the queen and soon acquired a reputation as a generous patron of literature and the arts. In the early 1590s, he accompanied Essex to France and in later years participated in military expeditions to the Azores, Cadiz, and Ireland. Southampton s wealth, rising influence at court, and intellectual and cultural interests made him the perfect patron. In addition to Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece another narrative poem attributed to Shakespeare that came out in 1594 is dedicated to Southampton. In 1605, the earl sponsored a performance of Love s Labor s Lost in his home at which Queen Ann, the wife of James I, attended. Some critics believe that the sonnets addressed to the Fair Young Man allude to an intensely personal relationship between Shakespeare and his patron and that the mysterious Mr. W. H., to whom the Sonnets are dedicated, is Henry Wriothesley, with his initials reversed. However, there is no direct evidence linking the wealthy aristocrat and the Stratford actor. According to Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse, Leander, the tragic hero in Hero and Leander, is modeled on Southampton, and the earl patronized Marlowe as well as Shakespeare. But again there is no evidence for such a tie or an intimate connection.
126 Hamlet Another possibility, advanced by poet Ted Hughes, is that Burghley commissioned Venus and Adonis as part of his campaign for Southampton to marry his granddaughter, Elizabeth Vere. When Wriothesley rejected the proposed match, he explains, Cecil arranged for John Clapham, one of his secretaries, to compose an allegorical poem, Narcissus, derived from the classical tale, about a young man who abandons Venus, the goddess of love, for self-love, falls into a pool and drowns, and is turned into a flower. Shakespeare s poem, while the same campaign was still in full swing, could well be seen as a continuation of Clapham s brief, almost as if it had been commissioned for the purpose, Hughes suggests. It has been pointed out that one possible explanation for the fact that this daringly erotic poem was approved and licensed by one of the most morally severe theological censors of the age, Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was that Burghley somehow authorized it. 15 Of course, as England s leading poet and a government agent already reporting to Cecil, Kit would have been a far more likely candidate to be tapped for the assignment than the unknown William of Stratford. A clue to the possible relationship between Shakespeare and Southampton comes from Dr. John Ward, a London physician, who moved to Stratford in the 1660s, became vicar of the local church, and lived there for nineteen years. Curious about Shakespeare s life, Ward reported that Shakespeare supplied ye stage with 2 plays every year, and for yt had an allowance so large, yt hee spent att the Rate of a 1,000 a year as I have heard. 16 According to Ward s diary, he met with Shakespeare s surviving relatives, friends, and neighbors who knew him before he died in 1616, including Thomas Hart, his nephew, and a Mrs. Queeny, who is apparently Judith Shakespeare, the actor s daughter, who married Thomas Quiney and died in her late seventies. In his diary, Dr. Ward writes: I have heart yt Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented ye plays all his younger times, but in his elder days lived at Stratford. 17 This description suggests that he was natively intelligent but had little formal training ( any art at all ) and that he worked in the London theater in early manhood (though apparently not as a writer) and retired in late middle age to his boyhood home. Traveling troupes of players came to Stratford periodically, and young Will may have come under the spell of the theater at that point. In any event, it would have been unprecedented for any poet to receive a thousand, much less a hundred, pounds for a manuscript. The typical payment for a play was several pounds at most, and a printed edition that was successful and broke even on sales of 500 copies would typically make a profit of 1 a year. Once for a special performance, the Globe theatre received 40 shillings to make
Shakespeare s Ghost 127 up for the anticipated loss at the gate. By comparison, the annual budget for the entire Elizabethan secret service was only about 2000, and after expenses the archbishop of Canterbury earned 1500 a year. While Shakespearean biographers today tend to ignore Ward s diary, Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare s first biographer, also reported that Southampton bestowed 1000 on the young actor early in his career. 18 Whether given to Shakespeare once at the launch of his career or annually, the enormous figure suggests a business agreement to run a theater company rather than write individual plays. 19 The earliest plays attributed to Shakespeare are believed to have been composed and performed between 1587 and 1591. The last Shakespearean plays are dated to about 1611. The First Folio contains thirty-six plays, and there are several more such as Edward III that literary experts now generally assign to his hand. The interval between these two dates, some eighteen to twenty years, corresponds with the production of about forty plays, or two a year. Some skeptics speculate that the fantastic payment to Shakespeare was a bribe, or even blackmail, not to reveal his part in the masquerade. More likely, it was used by the novice actor or stage manager to became a shareholder in a theater company. It is unnecessary to impugn Shakespeare s character or attach primarily financial motives to the arrangement. Compounding the mystery, Shakespeare s formative years are a complete blank. The first documented account of his presence in London is in late 1594. The meager facts suggest that William of Stratford was employed immediately after the events in Deptford to serve as a theatrical stand in and literary alias for Marlowe and prior to this time had no major involvement in the world of arts and letters. Burghley, who had served as Henry Wriothesley s guardian and de facto father since early adolescence, evidently made the arrangements. He watched over both Southampton and Marlowe at Cambridge, where he was chancellor, and it is reasonable to conclude that they knew each other from their university days. There is simply no information about when Shakespeare first came to the capital or became involved in the stage. Shakespeare s dark years a virtual cipher between 1585 and 1594 allow for many potential relationships to have developed among the principals. The most plausible is contact between Marlowe and Shakespeare at the Rose or some other theatrical venue where the careers of the two young men born within two months of each other may have intersected in the late 1580s or early 1590s. In his hometown, Will is last mentioned in connection with the birth of twins, Judith and Hamnet, to him and his wife, Anne Hathaway, in 1585. Nine years later, in 1594, he is listed with Will Kempe and Richard Burbage as members of the Lord Chamberlain s Men in London who received payment for a performance at
128 Hamlet court. In the interim, Will may have served Lord Strange s Men or the Earl of Pembroke s Men as a prop man, stage manger, or member of the cast. The stipend he received in 1594 does not specify his services, but Kempe and Burbage were both actors. The case for Shakespeare as a budding poet and dramatist at this early period rests largely on a pun. In Greene s Groatsworth of Wit, Robert Greene warned dramatists not to trust actors because of their mendacity and lack of learning. In his splenetic narrative, he singled out an upstart Crow... that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and... is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country. 20 On the basis of the pun on Shake-scene and the parody of a passage in 3 Henry VI, O tiger s heart wrapp d in a woman s hide! (1.4.137), scholars have concluded that this is the earliest known literary reference to Shakespeare. Published in 1592, it appears to place William of Stratford as solidly employed within the London theater and to document the formative stage of his acting and writing career. As the chief source for The Winter s Tale and a minor source for Troilus and Cressida, Greene evidently knew young Shakespeare and, it has been suggested, even collaborated with him on Titus Andronicus, 1 and 2 Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and other early works. Yet, in Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn, A. D. Wraight shows convincingly that Greene referred not to Shakespeare but to Alleyn. Starring in the title role of Marlowe s Tamburlaine, Alleyn had risen to prominence as an actor and was known to shake a stage, a common term for great actors of that time. As the manager of the Lord Admiral s Men as well as a tragedian, he employed Greene as a writer, but they had a falling out. 21 The tiger s heart line is actually from The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of Yorke, the early version of 3 Henry VI, a play that some scholars independently assign to Marlowe. I would also point out that two years earlier in Never Too Late, Greene had taunted Alleyn and Marlowe in similar language: Why Roscius [Alleyn], art thou proud with Esop s Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler [Marlowe, the shoemaker s son] hath taught thee to say Ave Caesar, disdain not thy tutor. Ave Caesar is a famous phrase from Edward III, a play now widely attributed to Shakespeare! Hence, the main linchpin of the case for young Shakespeare as an author and dramatist is very shaky indeed. It is possible that Shakespeare shared Marlowe s idealism, passion, and even free-thinking spirit and entered into a partnership with him for larger social, religious, or political ends. Thomas Cartwright and Job Throkmorton, the great Puritan opponents of Archbishop Whitgift, hailed from Warwickshire and visited Stratford. Young Will could have been inspired by
Shakespeare s Ghost 129 their impassioned sermons and speeches. Over the years, Shakespeare acquired a reputation as a tight spender and quarrelsome landlord and neighbor, but these need not detract from the possibility that he had his own youthful visionary bent. There is also a darker possibility for the genesis of their partnership. A Catholic will signed by his father, John Shakespeare, reportedly turned up hidden in the thatch roof of the family s cottage in Stratford in the eighteenth century. Knowledge of such clandestine religious practice by the anti- Catholic spymaster Walsingham in the 1580s or by the Cecils in the early 1590s, may have been used against Shakespeare. As a struggling young actor, Will could have been blackmailed into participating in the arrangement on condition that his recusant sympathies or those of his family not be exposed. His mother was also distantly related to Robert Southward, the Jesuit priest who was later martyred. Further, one of the cousins in his extended family, John Somerville, was arrested in 1583 as part of a Catholic plot to assassinate the queen. In the new book Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, several leading Shakespearean scholars explore the extensive network of Catholic connections among the Shakespeare clan, Stratford, and the Jesuit underground. It is hypothesized that Will s introduction to the stage came through the Catholic Stanleys, including Ferdinando, patron of Lord Strange s Men (for whom Marlowe wrote). 22 Though well known for mentoring young earls, princesses, and other future leaders of the realm, Burghley was also a shrewd judge of character at the low end of the social scale, and young Will may have come to his attention. In 1585, a London official wrote a letter to Cecil referring to Nicholas Skeres as one of the Masterless men and Cutpurses whose practice is to robbe Gentelmen s Chambers and Artificers Shoppes in & about London. 23 Instead of turning Skeres over to the magistrates and hangman, Burghley apparently referred him to spymaster Walsingham because of his singular talents. In addition to his apparent participation in the Babington Plot, Skeres was one of the three men present at Marlowe s death in Deptford. Perhaps because of stalwart performances by men such as Skeres, the lord treasurer readily agreed to employ the lowly actor from Stratford in an intelligence caper of another variety. Although stridently anti-catholic, Burghley protected Protestant dissenters, Separatists, and freethinkers like Marlowe whenever possible. Robert Browne, who matriculated from Corpus Christi College in Cambridge about a decade before Marlowe, is a case in point. A member of a prominent family that was related to the Cecils, Browne was arrested and jailed on numerous occasions for publicly criticizing the Church, but each time he was released through Burghley s influence. In the early seventeenth
130 Hamlet century, his followers, known as Brownists, set sail for America and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Robert Browne came to be known as the father of Congregationalism. There is no known connection between Browne and Marlowe, but their ties to Corpus Christi College and Burghley warrant further investigation. (One of Marlowe s Canterbury neighbors, Robert Cushman, hired the Pilgrim vessel the Mayflower.) Given the enormous personal risks that playwrights like Kyd and Marlowe faced from orthodox theologians, it is likely that Shakespeare, at least in the beginning, did not know the real identity of the author whose works he passed off as his own. Venus and Adonis s dedication to Southampton as the first heir of my invention punningly suggests that the volume is the first to come out under an invented name. In addition to external ties, Venus and Adonis also shows internal evidence that it was compiled by Marlowe. Like Hero and Leander, it is a charming fable about why human love is doomed to fail. In each case, the poem enlarges and reshapes its classical source to embody the author s own philosophy and insights. Though presumably written before Venus and Adonis, Marlowe s poem alludes to its sequel in the opening lines ( Where Venus in her naked glory strove / To please the careless and disdainful eyes / Of proud Adonis [12 14]) and, like Shakespeare s, occasionally abbreviates Adonis s name to Adon in later references. In both poems, the beautiful youth is referred to as rose-cheeked, an epithet not found in the classical myths. ( Rosecheek d Adonis hied him to the chase [3] in Shakespeare and Rosecheeked Adonis, kept a solemn feast [93] in Marlowe.) In comparing Adonis to Narcissus, Shakespeare describes how the self-absorbed young man died to kiss his shadow in the brook (162) while Marlowe s Leander leapt into the water for a kiss / Of his own shadow (74 75). In Ovid s account of the original Greek myth, Narcissus drowns trying to embrace his own reflection in a pool, but there is no mention of him kissing his shadow. Curiously, Leander s face is likened to that of a woman in both Marlowe s poem and Shakespeare s Sonnet 20. The passages describing the heroines liquid pearl tears are also parallel, 24 and both poems include a description of a powerful steed that, disdaining to be controlled, breaks its reins, stamps its hooves, and exchanges restraint for freedom. 25 The maritime scenery in the two poems also appears to have been arranged by the same set designer, with numerous references to the sea, waves, coral, breaks, and other coastal images. Of course, both myths are originally set in the Mediterranean, but Venus and Adonis s description of pursuing the deadly boar o er the downs (677) suggests the southeast English coastline, not Crete, the island sacred to Venus. This reference
Shakespeare s Ghost 131 would more likely come to Marlowe s mind, who drew upon childhood memories of the cliffs of Dover, where his grandparents lived, than that of Shakespeare, who grew up in inland Warwickshire. (The same later holds true in Hamlet, whose dreadful summit of the cliff / That beetles o er his base into the sea [1.4.76 77] is not found in Elsinore in Denmark, but in Kit s childhood haunts.) The predominant hue in each narrative poem is also the same. From the opening line of Venus and Adonis ( the sun with purple-color d face [1]) to the bed of flowers the lovers lie on ( blue-veined violets [125]) to the falling of the fruit ( the mellow plum [527]) that foreshadows their separation, the bloody injury that Adonis suffers, the purple tears, that his wound wept [1054]), and his final transmutation into an anemone ( A purple flow r sprung up [1168]), the Shakespearean poem clothes its starcrossed lovers in tragic indigo. In Marlowe s tale, the Morn... puts on her purple weeds (571 572), oblations of wine from grapes outrung (140) are made at Venus s temple, the heroine s resplendent attire has a lining of purple silk (10), and Hero adorns her lover with purple ribbon wound (590), a pun on Adonis s wound and a presentiment of Leander s fate. As the day bathes both sets of lovers with its life-giving rays, so the fall of darkness mirrors their parting and separation. When they resign their office, and their light,... / Who bids them still consort with ugly night (1039, 1041) Shakespeare sings, while Marlowe s lyric refrain muses, But he the day s bright-bearing car prepared / And ran before as harbinger of light, / And with his flaring beams mocked ugly Night (814 816). Finally, in each story, love s complaint is compared to decay in the natural world. Fair flowers that are not gather d in their prime / Rot, and consume themselves in little time (131 132), Shakespeare sighs, while Marlowe draws the same moral in a field of grain: The richest corn dies if it be not reaped; / Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept (327-328). The verses echo Marlowe s motto and Sonnet 73: Consum d with that which it was nourish d by. Compared to Shakespeare s later plays, which lift entire lines and themes from Marlowe, the theft of images and ideas in Venus and Adonis is relatively light. However, it has sufficiently vexed scholars so that they postulate that Shakespeare must have had access to a manuscript copy of Marlowe s work before writing his own. As A. L. Rowse states, The poems are full of echoes of each other, theme, arguments, phrases, whole passages. 26 Are these similarities harmless examples of literary poaching, coincidence, or prophecy? Occam s razor offers the simplest solution: the two poems were written by the same hand. As for Venus in the poem attributed to Shakespeare, the goddess may have been modeled, at least in part, on Mary Sidney, the Countess of
132 Hamlet Pembroke, one of the leading literary patrons of the Elizabethan era. Three years older than Kit and Will, she married the Earl of Pembroke when she was sixteen. Contemporary accounts suggest that the Pembrokes marriage, though it produced an heir, was largely one of convenience, with both the aging noble, previously married and more than thirty years older than his glamorous bride, and Mary pursuing their separate interests and dalliances. The countess, the sister of poet Sir Philip Sidney and an accomplished writer of blank verse in her own right, went on to complete her brother s unfinished work after his heroic death on the battlefield against the Spanish. Marlowe wrote a glowing tribute in Latin to Mary in the introduction of Amintae Gaudia, a posthumous book of poetry by his close friend, Thomas Watson, who died on September 26, 1592. Addressing the Most Illustrious Noble Lady, adorned with all gifts both of mind and body, Marlowe compares her to a goddess to whose immaculate embrace virtue, outraged by the assault of barbarism and ignorance, flieth for refuge. Could the haven possibly refer to her intervention on his behalf in Flushing, where he was detained by her brother, Robert, the governor, on charges of counterfeiting earlier in the year? Likening his own slender wealth to the seashore myrtle of Venus, he promises to invoke Mary s name as Mistress of the Muses in all of his own future works. Marlowe s Edward II and several anonymous plays attributed to him were performed by the Pembroke s Men, her husband s theatrical company. Mary s son, William Herbert, is the principal candidate for the mysterious Mr. W. H., to whom Shakespeare s Sonnets are dedicated. Edward Blount, the publisher of the First Folio, was Mary s trustee, and the first edition of Shakespeare s collected works is dedicated to William and his brother. This intricate web of connections with the countess and her family has led some critics to conclude that she and Marlowe may have been romantically attached. 27 Beside Mary Sidney and Southampton, Richard Field, the printer of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, may have been instrumental in Marlowe s literary return under Will s name. Field came from Stratford, as did Shakespeare, their two fathers were acquainted, and this connection is widely viewed by historians and critics as the missing link between Will s lost years and his move to London. Field served as an apprentice to Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot refugee printer. After the man died in 1587, Field married his widow and inherited the business, which included a monopoly on publishing Ovid s Metamorphoses, one of Marlowe s favorite books, in both English and Latin. He also published Holinshed, Plutarch, and many of the other sources that were used in the composition of the Marlovian and Shakespearean plays. Field also published a number of news pamphlets about religious strife in France that Kit used as background for The Massacre
Shakespeare s Ghost 133 at Paris. In the relatively small world of writers and publishers, Field and Marlowe were no doubt acquainted. Field may also have been a member of the School of Night and met Marlowe through Ralegh s circle. The title page of Venus and Adonis mentions that the book is Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Churchyard. In his testimony against Marlowe, Thomas Kyd implicated several other unnamed members of the informal academy, including some stationers in Paul s Churchyard. 28 In his statements extracted under torture, Kyd observed that they met under the sign of the White Greyhound. Since Field s books were sold at this alehouse, it is highly probable he was one of the stationers alluded to. He also published Sir Philip Sidney s works, tying him into Pembroke s circle, to which Kit was related through Lord Pembroke s acting company and Philip and Mary Sidney s other brother, Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing. Less well known is the connection between Field and Burghley. Field printed Burghley s The Copie of a Letter sent out of England to Don Bernardin Mendoza, Spain s ambassador in France, along with other material related to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The following year, Field wrote a dedicatory letter to Burghley in a book that he printed by George Puttenham entitled The Arte of English Poesie. It s possible that Field printed other documents for the Crown s chief councilor, but the Armada documents are the only ones catalogued in the British Museum. According to another Spanish emissary, Burghley secretly supplied poets with material for their plays. Evidently Feria [Spanish ambassador to England] was doing what he could to discredit Cecil with his mistress, explains Elizabethan historian Conyers Read. It was at this juncture that Feria protested against comedies in London which made mock of his royal master. He said that Cecil had supplied the authors of them with chief themes. 29 In William Cecil: The Power Behind Elizabeth, Alan Gordon Smith contends that Burghley orchestrated the publication of numerous encomiums of the new regime in its struggle to thwart Catholic conspiracies and establish a new patriotic English identity. Whole chapters might be filled concerning these official and semi-official publications: from Jewel s Apology to Foxe s Book of Martyrs. So important was this purely literary side of the revolution that, in the midst of his stupendous political labours, he would constantly take a personal hand in it himself. In addition to drafting his own works such as Declaration of the Queenes Proceedings since her Reign and Execution of Justice, Burghley had to rely, for the most part, on anonymous pens, for many of which he found regular employment. 30 Hence, as the center of the Crown s fiscal, diplomatic, and espionage web, the lord treas-