Two Wills, Two Brows

It all kicked off in The Times on Monday, with a piece entitled "Lowbrow clue that poet was Shakespeare's secret son".  Not entirely a surprise: Dominic Kennedy, Investigations Editor, had already been in touch with me, and rather charmingly said, "I really enjoyed this book [Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant] and congratulate you on your research."

And then, the story went everywhere.  And, predictably, the backlash started straightaway.

Out of a book of some 95,000 words, Dominic Kennedy had zeroed in on two key issues.  One is Shakespeare's Sonnet 126, "O Thou my lovely Boy", which I suggest might have been written to the infant William Davenant, Shakespeare's "godson" and, in all probability, his actual son.

The other is the matter of the drooping eyebrow.  Both Sir William Davenant and William Shakespeare appear to have had left eyebrows which drooped.  As this condition, known as ptosis, can be inherited, I had included the information in Shakespeare's Bastard, albeit in all of about three sentences.

If I was a little taken aback that the eyebrow comparisons should have attracted so much attention, I have been even more surprised that a largely unknown portrait, said to be of Davenant as a young man, should have been given so much exposure.  The portrait (above, photographed by Keith Barnes) hangs in the Fellows' Common Room at Davenant's old Oxford college, Lincoln, and was all but forgotten.  The only accepted image of Davenant was the engraving by William Faithorne, based on a lost portrait, which adorned the title page of Davenant's Works, published in 1673:

Frankly, I prefer the Lincoln College portrait, even if the provenance is uncertain.  But it's worth returning to the Faithorne engraving because, as it focuses on the left side of Davenant's face, the misshapen left eyebrow is more clearly visible than it is in the portrait:

Okay, so let's go back to Shakespeare.  The subject of Shakespeare's left eye had much preoccupied me while writing Who Killed William Shakespeare? (The History Press, 2013).  One thing that is clear from such portraits as the Chandos (National Portrait Gallery) and the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio is that there was something wrong with the outside corner of Shakespeare's left eye socket:

(* An x-ray of the Chandos portrait, reproduced at the bottom of this piece, illustrates the peculiarity of the left eye, the shading indicating some sort of abnormality in the left eyebrow.)

Close inspection of those images, and comparison with the Beoley skull - which will soon hit the world's media, by way of a Channel 4 documentary - suggested that the extreme corner of Shakespeare's left eye socket was damaged, probably very shortly before his death.  However, that does not necessarily explain the oddity of Shakespeare's left eye as it appears in many portraits.

In several portraits thought to be of Shakespeare, the artists appear to have struggled with the left eye, making it look lower than the right eye, as if the shape of the eyebrow demanded an adjustment to the placing of the left eye - as below, in the Grafton, Janssen, and Coblitz portraits:

If these portraits appear to "drop" the left eye, in order to accommodate the deformed left eyebrow, the Soest portrait takes a different approach, squashing the left eye somewhat:

Two portraits which arguably do a better job of representing the swollen "droop" or overhang of Shakespeare's left eyebrow are the Cobbe and the Wadlow:

The fold of the overhanging left eyebrow is surely unmistakable in these images, the first trumpeted by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust as Shakespeare, the second identified by yours truly as a portrait of Shakespeare in my paper for Goldsmiths, The Faces of Shakespeare.

The question of what was going on with Shakespeare's left eyebrow was first raised for me by a research student in biological anthropology.  Perusing the images I had of the Beoley skull and assorted Shakespeare busts and portraits, including the Darmstadt death mask, the student noticed something:

... if you look at both temples on the skull, you may notice that the left temple is more "bumpy" than the right.  This happens in areas where the bone needs to hold on to the soft tissue more than it normally would.  If there was scar tissue in that area, that would explain why the temple bone is "bumpy" on the left and not the right.  The scar tissue need not be on the skin, it could be in the muscle or facia (the stuff that holds the muscle on to the bone ...)  Scar tissue often makes a depressed area in the skin so that would explain the depression behind the left eye in the portraiture.  There are also a few ways this can occur developmentally with essentially the same results.

"And interestingly," she added, "the Davenant Bust has fatty deposits (we all have them) across all of his right eyebrow, only half of his left (near facial midline).  If this is true, it would fit.  Fatty tissue often doesn't grow in regions where there is scar tissue."

Evidently, seen through the eyes of a biological anthropologist, the "bumpy" texture of the bone above the left eye of the Beoley skull (above, from a photo by Richard Peach, 2009) corresponds with the imbalance of the fatty tissue of the eyebrows, visible on the Davenant Bust of Shakespeare (Garrick Club).  A significant amount of the fatty tissue above Shakespeare's left eye was, apparently, missing, causing the bone to become "bumpy" as it sought to hold on to the skin.

The clue seemed to be the presence of a scar, clearly visible in a photo of the Beoley skull taken in about 1939, and also on the portraiture (the Wadlow replicates this scar exactly):

So, it appeared at first that a scar above Shakespeare's left eyebrow might have displaced the fatty tissue, causing the bone to become "bumpy" and the eyebrow to "droop" (it might have been this scar that the poet Ted Hughes had in mind when he wrote in a letter to Nicholas Hagger, "But what do you think of the deep scar on Shake's left temple (in the Chandos, & on the [death] mask)." - I'm grateful to Deivis Garcia of Jersey City for pointing that out to me).  Obviously, this scar had been a long-term feature of Shakespeare's appearance, because the bone of the skull had adapted to the lack of fatty tissue, and was therefore unrelated to the manner of his death.

The problem came when I was analysing the Davenant portraits.  The Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford - who, along with the Fellows, was kind enough to give me permission to reproduce the portrait in Shakespeare's Bastard - was unconvinced that the portrait at Lincoln was of Davenant.  Comparing the portrait with the Faithorne engraving (the latter post-dating the syphilis which ravaged Davenant's nose), I became fairly convinced that the chin, lips and cheekbones offered a pretty good match:

But what to make of that slightly odd fold over the left eye in the Faithorne engraving?  Although the left eye is less visible in the Lincoln College portrait, the left eyebrow does seem to descend at a rather steep angle, apparently matching the swollen or drooping left eyebrow seen in the engraving.

If Shakespeare's eyebrow was made to droop by a wound, the scar from which caused the fatty deposits of the eyebrow to slip, then that feature could not have been inherited.  Whereas, if the drooping left eyebrow was caused by something else - one of the other ways that the loss or displacement of the fatty tissue could occur developmentally - then perhaps it was an inherited feature.

Such a drooping of the eyebrow as can be seen in the Davenant and Shakespeare portraiture is known as "ptosis".  It can be an autosomal dominant inheritance, meaning that a single copy of the relevant gene is enough to cause the defect.  Even if the mother had no such mutation, the fact that the father had it would mean that it was passed on to the child.

Hence my remark, in Shakespeare's Bastard, concerning the line in Ben Jonson's 1623 poem to Shakespeare in the First Folio: "Looke how the fathers face / Lives in his issue ..."  When Ben Jonson wrote those words, William Davenant was already settled in London and working for the sister-in-law of Ben Jonson's patron. 

Might not Davenant's drooping left eyebrow have produced in Ben Jonson a shock of recognition, that the father's face had lived on in his issue - given that Ben would have been familiar with the unusual shape of Shakespeare's left eyebrow caused, it would seem, by congenital ptosis?

(* X-ray of the Chandos portrait:)

Shakespeare and the Ear of Corn

Well, it was pretty big news.  The face of Shakespeare discovered on the cover of The Herball, published in 1597 by John Gerard.  Certainly set the Twitterati a-flutter.

Do I think it's Shakespeare?  Truth be told, it's a bit difficult for me to apply my acid tests for determining whether a portrait is of Shakespeare or not.  The "dent" at the top of the forehead isn't visible, being hidden behind a laurel wreath and what looks like a curly fringe, and the left side of the face is so densely shaded that it's hard to tell if there's any drooping (ptosis) of the left eyebrow (a condition which Shakespeare appears to have passed on to his son).

That said, I think Mark Griffiths' arguments about the image are fascinating and fairly compelling.  And there may be a good reason to suspect that the image is indeed that of Shakespeare - not least of all on the basis of what he is holding.

The "Fourth Man", as Griffiths calls him, is a full-figure portrait of a rather handsome chap wearing some sort of Roman costume.  In his right hand, he holds (raised) a fritillary, which Griffiths convincingly relates to the "purple flower ... chequered with white" in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593).  In his left hand, the Fourth Man holds (lowered) an ear of sweetcorn.  Griffiths suggests that the appearance of this plant was inspired by the lines:

Oh let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf.

from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (published in 1594).  But that connection seems a little tenuous to me.

Griffiths does point out that the ear of corn which the Fourth Man (Shakespeare) is holding was an American crop.  The botanist John Gerard, who wrote The Herball, and with whom Shakespeare might have collaborated (hence the inclusion of his image on the frontispiece), had apparently grown and harvested maize.  This could only have happened, of course, after a few samples of maize had been brought back to Britain from America.  And this is why I think the image might indeed be of William Shakespeare.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I suggested that the 21-year old Shakespeare actually went on an expedition to Virginia in 1585.  This would have been shortly after his twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born, and so we are into the period known as his "Lost Years".  Shakespeare needn't have travelled as a mariner; Sir Richard Grenville, who commanded the expedition, liked to have music played loud and raucously when he was dining.  Shakespeare might have joined the expedition, then, as a musician.

The flagship, lent by Queen Elizabeth to Sir Walter Raleigh for the Virginia expedition, was the Tiger.  Years later, the Tiger crops up in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  The experiences of the colonists appear to have informed The Tempest, while the sea storm which very nearly wrecked the Tiger on the Virginia coast recurs in such works as Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale.

There are other hints that Shakespeare might have been on that expedition.  Ben Jonson couldn't help satirising Shakespeare's acquisition of a coat of arms, joking in Every Man Out of his Humour (1598) that the "essential Clown" should have chosen for his motto, "Not without mustard" (Shakespeare's actual motto was Non Sanz Droict - "Not without right").  The "Not without mustard" line was in fact borrowed from the satirist Thomas Nashe, who wrote of a young tearaway caught up in a sea storm and threatened with shipwreck, begging the Lord to save him and promising never to eat haberdine (dried salted cod) ever again.  When the crisis had passed, the "mad Ruffian" added, "Not without mustard, good lord, not without mustard."

I've since discovered another piece of evidence.  In Shakespeare Rediscovered (1938) Clara Longworth, Comtesse de Chambrun, referred to a letter, dated 20 December 1585, which was sent to Queen Elizabeth I.  The letter was signed, "Your Majesty's loyal and devoted true servant, W. H."

W. H. is, of course, one of the great Shakespearean mysteries: the Sonnets were published in 1609 with a dedication to "the only begetter" of the sonnets, "Mr W. H."  In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I argued (after Phillips and Keatman) that "W. H." were the initials of William Hall, and that "Will Hall" was the codename used by Shakespeare whenever he did the State some service.

(Back to Thomas Nashe - who threw "brave Hall" into a pantomime he wrote for the amusement of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1592, at the same time as "Will Hall" was being paid for services rendered to the archbishop's priest-hunter, Anthony Munday, and Shakespeare was collaborating with Munday on The Book of Sir Thomas More.)

The letter sent to Queen Elizabeth by "W. H." in December 1585 therefore pushes the existence of this mysterious figure back to the beginning of Shakespeare's "Lost Years" period.  The letter writer described himself as a "man of judgment and action neither decrepit in body or in mind and whose present necessities crave to be provided for".  He complained that he had been blackballed or blacklisted by men of superior rank.  This all fits in with Shakespeare's biography, for the Shakespeares had been persecuted in Stratford by the more obsessive Puritans in the area - the Lucys and the Grevilles - not least of all because of their Catholic connections.  In marrying Anne Hathaway, whose family seem to have been Puritan, Shakespeare was making something of an effort to appear "honest" (in the Puritan sense of the word).  But he would still have been under suspicion and, indeed, the letter to Queen Elizabeth does mention certain "Papists" who were good patriots all the same.

The key element in the letter concerns the advice "W. H." presumed to give to her majesty regarding the planting of colonies in Virginia.  The Tiger had returned to London, after depositing the first hapless settlers in Virginia, just two months before the "W. H." letter was written.  And Shakespeare ("W. Hall"), as I have suggested, went on that expedition.  So he would have had some idea of what he was talking about when he wrote to Elizabeth I about colonising Virginia.

Which brings us back to the sweetcorn held by the Shakespeare figure on the cover of Gerard's Herball (1597).  Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis had been a huge success, so it would make sense that the totemic flower from that poem - the fritillary - was pictured in his right hand.  The not-entirely-realistic Roman costume would have established Shakespeare's stage credentials (as well as, perhaps, his Roman Catholic connections).  The ear of maize, however, needn't relate to Shakespeare's theatrical career or his poetry at all.  Its presence in the image might simply have recalled the fact that Shakespeare was one of the very first Englishmen to set foot in Virginia.  He had sailed there on the Tiger in 1585.

The sweetcorn is held downwards, as if to suggest the act of planting.  The planting of colonists in Virginia had been the whole point of the 1585 expedition, and the author of the "W. H." letter to Queen Elizabeth in 1585 also discussed the matter of planting colonies in Virginia.

In that respect, the ear of corn held by the Fourth Man on the cover of The Herball might be one of the best clues as to the Fourth Man's identity.  He was William Shakespeare, alias Will Hall, the man who went to Virginia in 1585 and, we can assume, brought some maize back with him.

The Shakespeare Deniers

I was recently sent an electronic document - quite a large one, in fact.  The author had deconstructed the entire sequence of Shakespeare's Sonnets (in reverse order!) with the determined intention of proving that they were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (pictured).

Oxford is not the sole candidate for the enviable role of the "real" William Shakespeare, but he is certainly the front runner.  The point, though, is why should we even consider the possibility that a man who died in 1604 - twelve years before the death of Shakespeare - was the true author of the plays and poems we attribute to Shakespeare?

Let me first of all state that I have some sympathy with the conspiracy theorists who propose that Oxford (or one of fifty-or-so other candidates) actually did all the hard work, for which William Shakespeare took the credit.

I have some sympathy because the standard biography of Shakespeare is so woefully inadequate.  There does seem to be a disconnect between the picture of William Shakespeare presented by so many of his biographers and the genius behind the Complete Works.

However, it's one thing to suspect that the Shakespeare of countless biographies might not have been up to the task of creating some of the world's finest works of literature.  It's another thing altogether to leap to the conclusion that somebody else must have written them.  Such a wild leap in the dark overlooks a far more obvious, and more realistic, interpretation - that the standard biography of Shakespeare is grossly misleading.

Or, in other words, Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare.  But the Shakespeare we're told about wasn't who Shakespeare really was.

The history of Shakespeare denial is long and far from honourable.  We can trace it back to Rev. James Wilmot, who left London and moved to Barton-on-the-Heath, near Stratford, in the late 18th century.  He began to have concerns about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, wondering (in 1785) how the humbly-born Shakespeare of Stratford could have mingled so freely with the great and the good.  Clearly, it was impossible - and so somebody else must have been the real Shakespeare.

English society had changed a great deal between Shakespeare's and Wilmot's day.  The aristocracy had distanced itself from the peasantry, and to Rev. Wilmot the very idea that a middle-class lad could become friends with lords and ladies was unthinkable.

But let's consider this: Ben Jonson was more humbly-born than Shakespeare.  He went to Westminster School, but did not finish his education.  He became a bricklayer instead (although he hated it, and it haunted him for the rest of his days).  He attended neither of the universities.  And yet, Jonson freely mixed with the aristocracy, had various aristocratic patrons, lodged with a cousin of the king and became Britain's first (unofficial) Poet Laureate.

Going by Rev. Wilmot's logic, none of that was possible, and so Ben Jonson cannot have been Ben Jonson.  Somebody else must have written the plays, poems and court masques, for which Jonson took all the credit.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever made that suggestion about Ben Jonson.  We don't seem to mind the fact that he - an overweight, alcoholic bully - could have made the journey from obscurity to celebrity and enjoyed the patronage of lords and ladies.  So why do we assume that Shakespeare could not have done so?

In fact, Shakespeare's dealings with the aristocracy were fairly limited, in comparison with Jonson's.  The only patron we know of, where Shakespeare is concerned, was the teenage Earl of Southampton, who came from a Catholic family.  Shakespeare dedicated two long poems to him (in 1593 and 1594) and appears to have written a number of sonnets to the young earl.  But it was not a notably long association, and it does not seem to have survived Southampton's coming-of-age.

So the theory that Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare because he lacked the appropriate social standing is utter nonsense.  Poets had aristocratic patrons; they hung around noble households.  What seems surprising about Shakespeare is that he kept his contacts with the nobility to a minimum.

The real issue, when it comes to the various "Alternative Authorship" theories, is something else.  It starts from a desire to make Shakespeare - the best writer we've ever had - into something that he wasn't: an aristocrat.  Behind this lies a very strange assumption - that only those of noble birth are capable of marvellous things.  Realistically, we know that to be untrue.  But not everybody has reconciled themselves to democracy, and there are still plenty of people out there who harbour the delusions of an earlier age.  And, if you believe that blue blood is inherently better than any other kind, it will follow that you want to claim Shakespeare for the ruling elite.

So the denialists start out with a fundamental belief (the aristocracy are universally brilliant; everyone else is an idiot) which they then seek to prove.  We call this sort of thing "confirmation bias".  You start out with a theory and then bend the evidence to suit it.

Sir Derek Jacobi - one of the more consistent anti-Stratfordian voices - once claimed that there is absolutely no evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  Well, you can make that claim if you decide to exclude every bit of evidence that he did.  But you have to ignore the testimonies of Robert Greene (1592), Richard Field (1593/4), Francis Meres (1598), William Jaggard (1599), the students at Cambridge University (1601) and a host of others, including John Fletcher, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson.  Or, rather, you have to conjure up a conspiracy of epic proportions, so that the churchman Francis Meres could praise both Oxford and Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia without realising that they were (allegedly) one and the same, and Ben Jonson could collude in a ridiculous plot without giving the game away (this is probably the best argument against all the Alternative Authorship theories: Ben Jonson wouldn't not have been able to keep the secret).

Basically, everybody at the time knew that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  It wasn't until more than 150 years after Shakespeare's death that anybody began to imagine that he didn't.  And the basis for that imaginary claim was groundless - it grew out of the refusal to acknowledge the social realities of Shakespeare's time.

But here's the problem.  The Shakespeare denialists are very much like climate sceptics (or "contrarians", as they're sometimes called) or Creationists.  They've started out with a fixed idea based on a kind of blind faith, and nothing will shake their conviction.  No amount of evidence will force them to rethink.  They'll just adapt their theory, regardless of how far from reason and reality they have to travel to accommodate the inconvenient facts.

You can't argue with them, because they made up their minds before they started.  Everything becomes some strange kind of "proof" that they are right (and, consequently, anyone who points to the facts is engaged in the original conspiracy - the reasoning becomes decidedly circular).

It's all incredibly frustrating, because the denialists can lose the argument one hundred times but will still come back claiming that they've won.  Just as with climate sceptics, who get very creative with the facts, they won't give in.  Why should they, you might ask.  Well, for the simple reason that they're absolutely wrong!

There is no evidence - none at all, not a shred - that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays.  They were written by William Shakespeare, gent, of Stratford-upon-Avon (although others had a hand in a few of them).  There is no argument about this, and it is facile to pretend that there is.

But the big worry is that the obsessives who want to believe that Shakespeare simply wasn't posh enough to be Shakespeare will keep misleading the public.  If we're honest, there isn't a debate.  There are a few loud voices continually trying to shout down the experts.  There is, as it were, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

These people are trying to drag us back to a past which we ought to have got rid of.  No one in their right minds believes that only aristocrats can write well.  So let's be honest: nobody in their right minds believes that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare (including those plays which were written after Oxford's death).  It is a kind of madness to imagine that he did, and it's a madness we could all do without.

Please, devote your energies to researching who William Shakespeare really was, because that's where the Stratfordians have let us all down.  But don't take the lunatic view that Shakespeare was "illiterate".  That simply shows that you left your reason at the door when you blundered into the debate.

And stop trying to mislead people.  In my book, that's an unforgivable sin.  Whether it's climate change or who was William Shakespeare - there is no excuse for trying to force people into believing things that are not true.

Keep your madness to yourself, and stop trying to take Shakespeare from us.

Shakespeare "Not a Very Tall Man"

Between delivering your manuscript and seeing your book in print, there's a gap.  In the case of Who Killed William Shakespeare? that gap was about ten months.

It's a tricky period because, mentally, you're still writing your book.  Is there something you've missed, something you need to put in, something that could be better expressed? 

One of the little things I fussed about and mulled over endlessly, while waiting for the proofs of my book to arrive, was whether to address the issue of Shakespeare's height.  Not a common problem, perhaps; it doesn't seem to have bothered many of his biographers.  But it bothered me.  Because I had this sneaking feeling that Shakespeare was probably quite short.

The idea that Will was not exactly a giant had grown, slowly, fed by the odd hint here and there.  It also came from the fact that the skull in the Sheldon family crypt at Beoley church (which as regular readers, or those blessed souls who have read Who Killed William Shakespeare? will know, was probably Shakespeare's skull) was described in the 19th century as "undersized".  More recently, a former churchwarden of Beoley, who has both seen and photographed the skull, told me that it was "small" - as if it were a woman's skull, or the skull of a child.

Of course, if you've read the book you'll know that parts of the skull are missing.  But it still seems to have struck observers as being small.  Rev. Charles Jones Langston, writing his account of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found in 1884, made the point twice.  And yet he was convinced that the skull was Shakespeare's.

I ummed and ahhed about mentioning Shakespeare's height in the book because I had picked up on a few hints, a few references, which could be interpreted as indicating that Will was a little on the short side.  In Sonnet 80, he compared himself unfavourably with Sir Walter Raleigh, who was about six feet tall; Raleigh, the "Rival Poet", was "of tall building and of goodly pride", and Will's "saucy barque" was "inferior far to his".

Other hints came in Ben Jonson's An Execration Upon Vulcan.  Jonson's library had just gone up in smoke, a mere month before the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.  Ben Jonson thought back to the burning of the Globe theatre, ten years earlier, and I suspect that just as he appears to have blamed Shakespeare for the fire at the Globe, so he saw Shakespeare's influence behind his own catastrophic fire (even though Shakespeare had been dead for more than seven years when Ben's study went up in flames).

The traditional story of the Globe fire holds that it was caused by the firing of two cannons.  Ben Jonson suggested otherwise:

Nay, sigh’d, ah Sister ’twas the Nun, Kate Arden
Kindled the Fire! But, then did one return,
No Fool would his own harvest spoil, or burn!
If that were so, thou rather would’st advance
The Place, that was thy Wives Inheritance.

In this strange passage, the "Nun", Kate Arden, magically transforms into a "Fool" who wouldn't - surely he wouldn't! - wreck his own nest egg.  The Arden surname points at Shakespeare.  The word "kate" or "cate" could be interpreted in two ways: either as a "picklock", a tool for breaking into a locked building, or as something "small" and "dainty".

I held back, however, on tentatively advancing my notion that Shakespeare might have been of modest stature.  But maybe I was right.

Two portraits of Shakespeare have recently been unveiled by Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel.  These portraits are reproduced above (images courtesy of Discovery News).  Neither is an original.  Rather, the one is a photo of a portrait that went missing during the Second World War, the other being an engraving published in 1824.

However, the engraving - or "Boaden" portrait - would appear to have been modelled on an original portrait, now lost.  Those facial features (wonky left eye, damaged or drooping left eyebrow, depressions high up in forehead) which I have come to see as authentically Shakespearean are present and correct.  It is based, then, on a genuine likeness of Shakespeare.

But here's the really exciting bit: the "Boaden" portrait is unique in showing Shakespeare's whole body.  And as Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel was moved to remark about the "Boaden" - "We can see he wasn't a very tall man."

So maybe I was right: maybe Shakespeare was small and dainty (a "cate"), and "undersized", as is the skull at Beoley.

(There's something else about the "Boaden" portrait - anyone who's read my recent article on the Historical Honey website will know that another, and I believe more interesting, portrait has an unusual detail in the form of a dragonfly-shaped knot or bow poking through the doublet; that detail is so unusual that a professional period costume expert admitted she'd never seen a bow poking through a doublet like that before.  Take a look at the detail from the "Boaden" portrait, above; there's another bow.)

Anyway, I think we can begin to think of Shakespeare as being rather delicately formed.  He "wasn't a very tall man", which only adds extra weight to the possibility that the skull at Beoley church is his.

Fire at the Globe

400 years ago today, the first Globe theatre was destroyed by fire.

But was it an accident?


The afternoon of Tuesday, 29 June 1613, was warm and sunny. Crowds crossed the River Thames to see William Shakespeare's latest play, All is True.  It was a lavish production: expensive costumes had been donated and real cannons were used.  These cannons were discharged at a key moment in the action - just as King Henry VIII was about to meet and fall in love with Anne Boleyn.

A courtier, Sir Henry Wotton, received a report on what happened.  Some "paper, or other stuff" from one of the cannons "did light on the thatch".  At first, it was thought "but an idle smoke".  The audience was too preoccupied with the pageantry on the stage to take much notice.  But the fire "kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds."

There were no casualties - apart from a man whose breeches caught fire; fortunately, he had a bottle of ale to hand with which he doused the flames.  The Globe Theatre, though, was ruined.  Its timbers had in fact been recycled from the earlier Theatre, built in 1576, and so nearly four decades of theatrical tradition had come to a fiery end.

Ten years later, another fire tore through the lodgings occupied by Ben Jonson.  Shakespeare's great literary rival responded to the destruction of his books and manuscripts with a mock-serious poem, which he entitled An Execration Upon Vulcan.

Addressing the lame Roman "Lord of Fire", Jonson recalled the earlier fire at the Globe - or what he chose to call Vulcan's "cruel Stratagem, / (Which, some are pleas'd to stile but thy mad Pranck), / Against the Globe'.  Jonson claimed to have seen "the Glory of the Bank" destroyed, but confided that other accounts of how the fire started had been gossiped about at the time:

Nay, sigh'd, ah Sister 'twas the Nun, Kate Arden
Kindled the Fire!  But, then one did return,
No Fool would his own harvest spoil, or burn!

"If that were so," Jonson continued, "thou rather would'st advance / The Place, that was thy Wives Inheritance."

It's always difficult to know how far Ben Jonson's tongue was in his cheek.  But subtlety was never his strong point.  A "Nun" - Kate Arden - might have "Kindled the Fire", even though in doing so he spoilt his own "harvest" and burnt his wife's "Inheritance".

Officially, there were no nuns in Protestant England.  Jonson was presumably referring to a Bankside whore, although he gave her the name of William Shakespeare's home region and his mother's family - and then promptly changed her sex!  Whoever Jonson was hinting at had a financial interest in the Globe ("thy Wives Inheritance") and was tarred with the brush of "Popery".

So could it be that the fire which destroyed the Globe 400 years ago was started deliberately, as Jonson seems to have been suggesting?  And, if so, why?

Perhaps it had something to do with the play that was being performed that afternoon.  Although All is True - or, as it is better known today, Henry VIII - was credited to William Shakespeare, much of the text had been rewritten by John Fletcher, the son of a former Bishop of London, who had the rare distinction of being "loved" by Ben Jonson.  Fletcher's revisions had turned Shakespeare's play about the beginnings of the English Reformation into a rather crude piece of Protestant propaganda.

It might be no coincidence that the theatre was burned down on the traditional feast day of St Peter, the very first "Bishop of Rome".  Nor that Ben Jonson should have been reminded of this "mad Pranck" when his own library was incinerated just a month before the First Folio of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, over which Jonson had tried to wield editorial control, appeared in print.

The fires of 1613, which destroyed Shakespeare's Globe, and 1623, which ravaged Jonson's study, provide glimpses into an age of sectarian strife.  The accepted account of the fire at the Globe pretends that there was no ideological warfare going on - a false pretence maintained, to this day, by Shakespeare scholars.  But Ben Jonson could not keep a secret.

It was no accident but a "cruel Stratagem" that razed the first Globe Theatre, four hundred years ago.

God's Little Joke

Pretty soon, I should have a new front cover design for Who Killed William Shakespeare? to show you.

All being well, it'll include something you've almost certainly never seen before - the actual skull of William Shakespeare.

In my analysis of that skull I describe something which certain physicians like to refer to as "God's little joke".  It's a part of the brain called the pterion, and you do not want to damage it.  Believe me, you don't.

But for now, I'm posting another example of God's exquisite, if rather mischievous, sense of humour.  The gravestone (above) is the last one you pass before you enter the church in which Shakespeare's skull has rested for many, many years.  In other words, this gravestone stands about as close to the church porch as you can get, almost as if it's guarding the entrance to the place where Shakespeare's skull is kept.

The gravestone commemorates one Ben Johnson.

Really, you couldn't make it up!

Have a great weekend, folks. 

The Somerset Scandal

How timely is this?  Barely have I sent in the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare to my editor at The History Press, than the BBC decides to show a programme which touches on a major historical scandal featured in the book!

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday, 9:00pm), BBC1 will screen an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?" with Celia Imrie.  The popular actor discovers in the course of the programme that one of her ancestors was Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset (pictured here).

The scandal which engulfed Frances Howard, her husband Robert Carr, and the entire Court of King James I, was to prove fatal to William Shakespeare.

And what a scandal it was!  According to the official version, it involved adultery, poison, witchcraft and murder.  But this is somewhat typical of history, in that it is the tabloid version of events which tends to be remembered.  The reality is that a vicious and bitter power struggle was raging at the heart of King James's court, and Lady Frances was just one of the victims of that struggle.

On the one side of the power struggle were Frances Howard's relations and her husband, the handsome Robert Carr, a former favourite of the King.  On the other side were the forces of Puritan oppression: the Earl of Pembroke, his younger brother, the Earl of Montgomery, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This latter group also included Sir Fulke Greville, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, and Shakespeare's great rival, Ben Jonson.

At this distance in time, it is difficult to know just how bad Frances Howard was.  She had been married, at the age of 14, to the 3rd Earl of Essex.  This was in fact a political arrangement designed to protect the despicable Robert Cecil, an ally of Frances's father, who was widely blamed for the death of Essex's father.

Frances Howard and her first husband lived apart for the first three years of their marriage and then soon found that they were utterly incompatible.  Frances then fell in love with Robert Carr, a young Scot who was also the King's lover.  Strenuous efforts were made to ensure that Frances's marriage to Essex was annulled, so that she could marry Carr.

Robert Carr had a close friend called Thomas Overbury.  The two were seemingly inseparable.  Carr was nobody's idea of an intellectual, and he relied on Overbury's superior brain power.  Overbury, in turn, relied on Carr's relationship with King James for his own advancement.

Overbury grew intensely jealous when it became clear that his companion and meal-ticket, Robert Carr, had fallen hopelessly in love with Frances Howard.  Because it looked like Overbury would create difficulties over the matter of Frances's marriage annulment, King James personally ordered that Overbury should be locked up in the Tower of London.  After five months of imprisonment, Thomas Overbury was dead.

It was not until two years later that rumours began to circulate concerning Overbury's miserable death.  These rumours were exploited by the Puritan faction which was seeking to oust the crypto-Catholic Howards from King James's government.  Four "lesser" people were tried and executed for the supposed murder of Thomas Overbury before Lady Frances and her husband themselves stood trial.

In my forthcoming book on Shakespeare, I explain how this trumped-up scandal impacted on the life of Will Shakespeare, guaranteeing that he was "stopped", and how his illegitimate son was able to exact some sort of revenge upon those who had conspired against Shakespeare.

For now, it might well be worth watching tomorrow night's "Who Do You Think You Are?" in order to get a glimpse of Lady Frances Howard, the dazzlingly beautiful young noblewoman whose scandalous story robbed us of our greatest ever poet-dramatist.  And to admire the fact that these people, so distant from us in time, live on, in our own age, in the form of their descendants.

He Should Be Stopped

How lucky am I, living so close to Stratford-upon-Avon?  It's a bus ride away - and a very pretty bus ride at that.

On Wednesday I hopped on the bus to go to the Shakespeare Centre on Henley Street, next to the Birthplace, to hear Ian Donaldson give a talk about his biography of Ben Jonson.

Donaldson's Life of Ben Jonson is the first proper biography of Will Shakespeare's greatest literary rival in some thirty years.  It's also an excellent biography: detailed, reasoned and readable.  And Ian Donaldson spoke very entertainingly about it.

Seeing as he was in Stratford, he concentrated on the various stories, legends, anecdotes and myths surrounding Jonson and Shakespeare.  There is, for example, a tradition that it was Shakespeare who gave Jonson his big break in the theatre.  Modern biographers don't care very much for these 'traditions', which is a shame because the people who originally passed them on might have been trying to tell us something.  We ignore them at our peril - if, that is, we're keen on knowing what was really going on.

Ian Donaldson also ran through some of the dramatic exchanges between the works of Shakespeare and Jonson.  Thus, in the original version of Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (which Shakespeare acted in), there is a jealous husband named Thorello.  This seems to have inspired the jealous husband in Shakespeare's Othello.  The crucial handkerchief of that play reappears in Jonson's Volpone (which seems to have been written as an answer to Shakespeare's Timon of Athens).  Donaldson also suggested that The Tempest was Shakespeare's response to Jonson's The Alchemist.  And so on.

One thing that modern critics turn a rather blind eye to is the long-running tradition of bitter and nasty rivalry between the two poet-playwrights.  Right through the 18th century it was widely accepted that Ben Jonson had attacked Shakespeare on every available occasion.  Today, though, the claim is made that they were good friends who indulged in a little gentle mockery from time to time but who admired each other enormously.  Ben's contributions to the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1623 are cited as proof of his great love and utmost regard for Shakespeare's work.

This is unreasonable.  It overlooks a basic fact: that Jonson seldom praised any other human being unless he was after something.  Other poets of the time seem to have been in little doubt that Jonson's comments on Shakespeare were false, inspired by envy.  But, once again, it seems that contemporary evidence is overlooked by modern commentators.  Poets of the period didn't trust Ben Jonson.  So why should we?

When Jonson was 'helping' the long-term colleagues of Will Shakespeare - Heminges and Condell - to put together the First Folio of 1623, they seem to have had a disagreement about Shakespeare's merits.  The players remarked that Shakespeare 'never blotted out a line' (and they said as much in their dedicatory preface to the First Folio).  Ben Jonson snapped back, 'would that he had blotted out a thousand.'

The players didn't like this.  But Jonson later explained himself.  Shakespeare, he wrote, 'was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility, that it sometime was necessary he should be stopped.'

Adding a classical touch, Jonson then quoted Augustus Caesar: Sufflaminandus erat ('the brakes had to be applied').

Quite how chilling these remarks really are can best be shown by comparing them with the conclusion to a long note made by a secret service agent in 1593.  The Baines Note, as it is known, listed a host of accusations about another playwright, Christopher Marlowe, who, it was said, was a blaspheming atheist who enjoyed tobacco and boys.  The incriminating memorandum ended: 'I think all men of Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member should be stopped.'

And it was.  Marlowe was murdered on 29 May 1593.  It is commonly believed that he died in a tavern brawl.  But it was hardly a brawl and it certainly wasn't a tavern.  It was the home of a respectable widow with connections at the highest level of the Elizabethan State.

Returning to Shakespeare's Othello, we find that when Desdemona is desperately trying to protest her innocence, she begs her husband to call Michael Cassio, who can explain the truth of the situation.  Othello's response is: 'No, his mouth is stopped.'  Othello mistakenly believes that Iago has killed Cassio.  Hence, 'his mouth is stopped' - like a wine bottle is stopped with a cork.

Jonson's remark that Shakespeare wrote so freely that 'sometime it was necessary he should be stopped' hasn't received much attention from critics.  Broadly, they presume that Will occasionally needed someone to intervene and calm him down, to bring a little discipline to his writing.  That's how much Jonson admired Shakespeare - he thought he wrote too much!

But, realistically, Jonson's remark has nothing innocent about it.  The contemporary meaning seems to have been pretty clear.  'His mouth is stopped' - Othello believes that Cassio is dead.  'The mouth of so dangerous a member should be stopped' - someone needs to make Marlowe shut up, permanently.  'Sometime it was necessary he should be stopped' - sooner or later, Shakespeare was bound to go too far; he had to be silenced.

And so Shakespeare was 'stopped' - just like Christopher Marlowe.

A Cover Up

Last week, all over Warwickshire, people covered up the name of Shakespeare.  On signs here and there, the name of William Shakespeare was masked by black tape.  This, apparently, was a form of protest against the new "Anonymous" film which rehashes the rather daft theory that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was actually responsible for writing Shakespeare's plays.  Although it could, of course, have been a clever marketing ploy to raise awareness of an indifferent movie.  These days, it's hard to tell.

But it got me thinking.  One of the problems with Will Shakespeare - and one of the reasons why conspiracy theories like the Oxfordian authorship nonsense are able to flourish - is that, now and then, his name did disappear.

Consider this: humble Will Shakespeare, a grammar school lad (probably) from a Warwickshire market town, made enough money to buy and renovate the second grandest house in his hometown.  He entertained kings and queens, earls and apprentices.  He left a body of creative work that is second to none.  Students at Oxford slept with his poems under their pillows.  He was quoted left, right and centre.  For more than twenty years he dominated the London stage.

He died rather suddenly on St George's Day in 1616 and was buried two days later in his local parish church.  Being a gentleman and the owner of what had once been church land, he was buried inside the church, immediately before the altar (which had also been buried, there having been a Reformation of the Church, let's not forget).

Naturally, most of England mourned the passing of her finest poet-dramatist.  You'd think so, wouldn't you?  Shakespeare is dead.  Somebody, you'd suppose, would have mentioned the fact.

No.  There are no surviving written references to the death of William Shakespeare.  None.  He died - and everyone was looking the other way.

It took more than seven years for anything acknowledging his death to appear in print.  This, of course, was the famous First Folio of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, for which we have two of Will's colleagues - John Heminges and Henry Condell - to thank.

William Basse, a minor poet from Oxfordshire, had written a sixteen-line poem in Will's honour.  It began by calling on some of England's most famous dead poets to make room for Shakespeare in the Poet's Corner section of Westminster Abbey:

Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make room
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.

Basse's poem was not included among those which prefaced the plays printed in the First Folio.  Ben Jonson, it would seem, had seen to that.  Jonson went so far as to sneer at Basse in his own prefatory poem:

My Shakespeare, rise.  I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.

One has to feel a little sorry for William Basse - not only was his poem omitted, but the bullish Ben Jonson openly mocked his sentiments.  Jonson in fact preferred to group Shakespeare with three less fortunate dead poets - John Lyly, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe - one of whom (Kyd) had never recovered from having been tortured by government agents, while another (Marlowe) had been murdered in strange circumstances.

It would seem that poor, neglected William Basse was one of the first in the kingdom to mention Will Shakespeare's demise on paper.  Still, years had passed since Shakespeare's death.  Had no one else made any written remarks about it?

There are two poems in the First Folio which seem slightly odd, in that they appear to have been inserted at a very late stage in the printing process.  Ben Jonson, we can assume, had vetoed the inclusion of Basse's short eulogy.  But Jonson's library had been destroyed by a fire just a month before the First Folio was published in December 1623, and so he might have been otherwise occupied.  At the last minute, two extra poems were smuggled into the publication by Shakespeare's theatrical friends.

One of these poems was written by Leonard Digges, whose step-father, Thomas Russell, was one of Will Shakespeare's close friends and neighbours in Stratford (Will named Russell as one of the two overseers of his will in 1616).  Digges's poem alluded to the fire which had damaged Ben Jonson's library, and a few years later he would supply another poem which sharply contrasted Jonson and Shakespeare.  The other poem was written by Digges's friend James Mabbe, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.  Mabbe's short poem in the First Folio opens with the intriguing words:

We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon
From the world's stage to the grave's tiring-room.

These two poems, written by men who knew each other well and had a personal connection (via Digges's step-father) to William Shakespeare, and which were added to the First Folio at the last minute, suggest that Ben Jonson had lost his editorial stranglehold on the project as a result of his devastating fire.  This had allowed Will Shakespeare's long-term friends Heminges and Condell to slip two adulatory poems into the publication which, the chances are, Jonson would have kept out of it.  Let's face it, with his own long prefatory poem and his dedication 'To the Reader' of the famous Droeshout engraving of Will Shakespeare at the front of the First Folio, the whole thing had the feel of a Ben Jonson Production.  But then, Digges and Mabbe got their poems in, thankfully.  Digges, it would seem, did not think much of Ben Jonson.  And Mabbe really did let the cat out of the bag.

We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon
From the world's stage to the grave's tiring-room.

Who 'wondered'?  Presumably, those who knew Will Shakespeare.  And why were they so stunned and surprised by Shakespeare's sudden exit from the world?

Will Shakespeare died in April 1616.  Then, everything went quiet.  Until the last months of 1623, when somebody let slip that certain people had 'wondered' about Shakespeare's sudden death.  Presumably, they had 'wondered' about it quietly, refraining from committing anything to paper, because no reference to Shakespeare's death survives.  He died, and nobody said anything about it, although they 'wondered'.

It's this sort of thing that makes the story of Shakespeare so intriguing.  Sadly, it also allows a few weirdos to claim that William Shakespeare was just a cardboard cut-out, a front man for a more illustrious author.

More likely, it was widely known that Shakespeare had died, suddenly, and had been buried, quickly, and that was that.  Best not to talk about it.

Even though they 'wondered'.