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.

The Dangerous Friendships of Princes

A few weeks back, I posted a short series of blogs examining the so-called Cobbe portrait and subjecting it to much the same detailed analysis as I carried out on the Beoley skull, the Darmstadt death mask and the familiar portraits of William Shakespeare in my runaway bestseller, Who Killed William Shakespeare?

Today, I had an email from a friend who just happens to have visited Hatchlands Park in Surrey recently, where the Cobbe portrait is on show along with a portrait of Shakespeare's noble patron, the third Earl of Southampton.  My friend remarked that he couldn't help noticing the strange bump or blister on the nose side of the left eye socket in the Cobbe portrait (which is said to be of Shakespeare).  Having read my book, he found this particular detail in the portrait "fascinating".

So I was reminded of the work that remains to be done on the Cobbe portrait.  Various features compare rather chillingly with the damage to the skull at Beoley Church, those features also showing up on the death mask, the Chandos Portrait, the Droeshout engraving and the Davenant Bust.  These correspondences would appear to indicate that the Cobbe portrait does indeed show an image of Shakespeare - one which was made posthumously, using the death mask as a model.

The image is that of a youngish man - not the middle-aged, semi-retired poet of the second decade of the 17th century, when the portrait is thought to have been painted.  This means that, though the portrait was almost certainly posthumous (witness the fatal head injuries), it presented Will Shakespeare as he had been quite a few years earlier.  Perhaps when, aged about 30, he had been friends with the Earl of Southampton.

The inscription at the top of the portrait reads Principum amicitas! - the 'Friendship of princes!'  The words come from one of the Odes of the Roman poet, Horace (Book 2, Ode 1: "To Pollio, Writing his History of the Civil Wars").  The opening verses of that Ode translate thus:

You're handling the Civil Wars, since Metellus
was Consul, the causes, mistakes, and methods,
Fortune's game, and the dangerous friendships
of princes, and the unatoned-for

bloodstains on various weapons:
a task that's filled with dangerous pitfalls,
so that you are walking over embers
that smoulder under treacherous ashes.

Now, if you've read Who Killed William Shakespeare? you'll know how relevant this verse is to Will Shakespeare.  He wrote about the "Civil Wars" and disturbances which had troubled the land ever since Henry VIII decided to tear England away from Rome.  In other words, he exposed the cruelty, the violence and the sickening oppression of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I in their efforts to destroy English Catholicism.  And for that, Shakespeare paid with his life.

Don't let the Muse of dark actions be long absent
from the theatre, continued Horace, writing to his friend Asinius Pollio, a Roman poet, playwright,literary critic and historian: soon, when you've finished covering
public events, reveal your great gifts
again in Athenian tragedy,
you famous defendant of troubled clients ...

Let us assume, then, that the Cobbe portrait really does show us an image of Shakespeare, backdated (as it were) to the time when his patron was the Earl of Southampton.  The inscription chosen for the posthumous portrait refers to a Roman poet and playwright, a "famous defendant of troubled clients", who was playing with fire by writing a history of his violent times and thereby "walking over embers that smoulder under treacherous ashes."

These words came from the Roman poet Horace, who gets more mentions in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? than any other classical poet.  The reason for this is that Shakespeare seems to have been considered - by his contemporaries - as something of a modern Horace; a writer who was inclined to quote Horace a great deal and (like Horace) a genius who was mocked and satirised by a slavish underdog (if you've read my book, you'll know who I'm talking about).

The Principum amicitas! inscription therefore lends weight to the possibility that the Cobbe portrait shows us Shakespeare, since Will Shakespeare was seen as being like Horace, as well as being a "Roman" (i.e. Catholic) poet and playwright, like the recipient of Horace's Ode.

The inscription also carries a very dark hint.  The Ode refers to the "heavy" or "dangerous friendships of princes" (grauisque principum amicitas), which has a particularly poignant significance in the context of Shakespeare's death.  The silencing of William Shakespeare, that "famous defendant of troubled clients", was - I have argued - ordered by King James I, who had no wish to see the eloquent playwright championing the cause of the king's former favourite, Robert Carr, who was about to be tried for murder.

According to a tradition passed down by Shakespeare's godson - and probably his natural son - Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare had once received a friendly letter, written in the king's own hand.  And so the inscription on the portrait serves as a reminder that the friendships of princes could be destructive.  King James was in fact a weak and paranoid king, while Shakespeare was an outspoken critic of his murderous regime.  He wrote about the "civil wars" of the English Reformation - the causes, the mistakes, the methods, the unatoned-for bloodstains on various weapons ... it's all in his writings.  He also referred repeatedly to "Fortune" as a sort of perverse monarch, the capricious and vengeful spirit of the times.  He knew "Fortune's game" and, ultimately, he lost.

We might think of the Cobbe portrait as a sort of dreadful memento mori.  Perhaps it was a gift to the Earl of Southampton (commissioned by person or persons unknown) which, in itself, sought to explain the sudden death of the Earl's former poet-protege.

For if Southampton ever thought back to his youthful days, when he had William Shakespeare as his pet poet and playmate, and wondered why Will had been so suddenly silenced, the portrait would explain it all.

Shakespeare had been walking on hot coals, writing true histories which it was not safe to write.  And so he was, in the words of Ben Jonson, "stopped", before he could plead for any more "troubled clients".

M- M- M- My Verona!

Okay, so now we're going to try to be very clever by linking the previous post ("Shakespeare's Dark Lady") to a forthcoming post (about Shakespeare and the Cobbe Portrait) by way of something that's in the news.

There's a new Romeo and Juliet movie heading our way (see poster, credit: Relativity Media).  Apparently, it's less like Baz Luhrmann's hyperkinetic William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (which came out 17 years ago, can you believe?) and rather more like Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version.

That said, the script has lately come under fire.  Julian Fellowes, who adapted the original for the screen this time around, has been accused of "dumbing down" the language of Shakespeare so that modern audiences can understand it.

Now, I'm not all that surprised that there's a bit of a backlash here.  It's been due for a while, not least of all because (for all its international success) Downton Abbey is an impossibly rose-tinted and soapy work of historical revisionism, in which the upper classes are generally marvellous and the First World War lasted all of two weeks.  At least Gosford Park had Robert Altman at the helm, and so some much needed scepticism and cynicism was brought to the country house dreamworld which Fellowes seems to inhabit.  And it might reasonably be asked, if your intention is to translate Shakespeare's much beloved tale of adolescent longing into today's teenage idiom, whether Julian Fellowes was really the right man for the job.

But in a sense, all that is missing the point.  It's not that Shakespeare's language is impossible to follow (Baz Luhrmann stuck to it, and his flashy adaptation was a huge hit wiv da yout').  The problem isn't the words Shakespeare used.  It's what he was really on about.

The tagline for the latest R & J adaptation is "The Most Dangerous Love Story Ever Told" - which rather puts Antony and Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, Tristan and Isolde, Francesca da Rimini and Abelard and Heloise in their place!  But what is it that makes Romeo and Juliet the "Most Dangerous Love Story Ever Told"?  After all, the reason why those two households, "both alike in dignity", are at war with each other is never explained.

It didn't have to be.  The audience in Shakespeare's day would have known exactly why the Montagus and the Capulets hate each other so much.

Now, a lot of our previous post ("Shakespeare's Dark Lady") referred to events which took place in the year 1594.  Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, turned 21 in October of that year.  He was instantly stung with a huge fine.  His father had died in suspicious circumstances when Southampton was a boy, and he had been brought up under the dubious guardianship of Lord Burghley, the Queen's chief minister.  Burghley was a self-serving Protestant who tried to marry his aristocratic ward to his own granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere.  Southampton refused, and was hit with a massive fine for doing so when he came of age.

Southampton himself came from a Catholic family.  His father had died in the Tower of London shortly after the Jesuit, Father Edmund Campion, was arrested.  His mother, Mary Browne, was the granddaughter of the defiantly Catholic Viscount Montagu (and so Southampton was, by way of descent, a Montagu, like the fictional Romeo).  Swithin Wells, the first tutor employed by the Southamptons, was hanged for attending a Mass in 1591.  The Jesuit Father Robert Southwell (a distant cousin of William Shakespeare's) acted as a "spiritual adviser" to the young Earl of Southampton before he was captured in 1592.

When Southampton did eventually marry, it was to Elizabeth Vernon in 1598, when Elizabeth was already pregnant.  It is not known when their affair began, but because Elizabeth Vernon was one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Queen Elizabeth I threw a fit when she found out about the marriage and sent both bride and groom to prison.

It is possible that Southampton was already enamoured of Elizabeth Vernon at the time of his 21st birthday in 1594.  Shakespeare would have spotted the problem immediately: Southampton was a Catholic - a Montagu, no less - whereas Elizabeth Vernon was first cousin to the Protestant Earl of Essex and almost certainly a Protestant herself.  She was, then, a "Capulet" - a "little chapel" person who wore a little knitted cap in church.

The world of Romeo and Juliet was dangerous because of the religious division which was tearing England in two.  It was, essentially, a case of Sunni versus Shia, or Presbyterian vs Episcopalian.  The two households - the Catholic Montagus and the Protestant Capulets - were at each other's throats over their religious differences which, in 1594, when Romeo and Juliet was written, probably as a 21st birthday present for Southampton, were reaching new heights of violent severity.

Romeo is at first in love with Rosalind.  There are several Rosalinds in Shakespeare's plays.  The name was pronounced "Rose-aligned" (think of the rosary).  But when Romeo sneaks into a party at the Capulets' place and sees the lovely Juliet, he falls for a woman from the opposite side of the religious divide (which was also, of course, a political divide, the Protestants furiously persecuting the Catholics because that was how they became rich and powerful).  Their love is doomed, not because they are young and reckless, but because they are caught up in a hideous sectarian conflict.

Put the play back into its context and the language presents fewer difficulties.  "O Rome, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" doesn't mean "Where are you, Romeo?"  It means "Why are you 'Rome-o'?"  Why are you a Roman Catholic, and therefore forbidden to a Protestant girl like me?

"What's in a name?  That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet."  Why these labels - "Catholic" and "Protestant"?  A "Roseley" (see previous post) would be just as gorgeous, whether he were a Catholic or a Protestant.  In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, a young gentleman protests that he is about to be executed "for a name", the name in that instance almost certainly being "Jesuit".

Shakespeare knew that marriages which crossed the sectarian divide were not necessarily happy ones, having himself been dragooned into marrying a woman from a Puritan family.  It could all end in tears - as it does in the play.

So is it too much to ask that, instead of cheapening or "dumbing down" Shakespeare's language in order to make it easier to understand, we might simply try to understand what Shakespeare was actually saying?  A Catholic might fall in love with a Protestant, and there is no reason at all why their love should not blossom ...

... except that, under Queen Elizabeth I and her ministers (like the egregious Lord Burghley), there was no place for such idealistic and romantic notions.  You were either Protestant, or you were dead.

And so the lovers die, because there is no place for true love under such an embittered, repressive and fanatical regime.

Somehow, though, I can't help feeling that the Julian Felloweses of this world would rather meddle with Shakespeare's text than shine a light on the period in which it was written.  Because if you think Downton Abbey is a fair and accurate reflection of Edwardian England, you're pretty much bound to believe in the "Golden Age" of Elizabeth I.  The very "Golden Age" in which young lovers were likely to die if they fell in love with the wrong people.

Shakespeare's Dark Lady

Thomas Nashe was an undersized playwright and satirist.  Born in November 1567, he was three-and-a-half years younger than William Shakespeare.  One of his main claims to fame is that he collaborated in 1597 with one Benjamin Jonson on a play entitled, The Isle of Dogs.  This satirical play was considered so "seditious" that it led to an order from the Privy Council, insisting that all of London's playhouses should be shut down.  And knocked down.

Some three years earlier, he dedicated his rather strange novel, The Unfortunate Traveller, to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (pictured).

That was in 1594.  Somebody else was dedicating literary works to Southampton at that same time: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare had dedicated his two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece to Southampton in 1593 and 1594, respectively.  There are good grounds for thinking that a number of Shakespeare's Sonnets were written to and/or for the attractive and wealthy young earl, possibly as early as 1592.

Thomas Nashe made an intriguing remark in his written (and published) dedication to Shakespeare's patron:

"A dear lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of poets themselves."

What?  Thomas Nashe was saying - out loud, and in public - that the Earl of Southampton (who turned 21 in October 1594) was a lover and cherisher, not just of poets, but of their lovers too.

Also in 1594, a rather scurrilous poem was published which detailed a somewhat seedy three-way relationship or love-triangle.  A young man, identified in the poem as "Henrico Willebego" or "H.W." falls in love with a "modest maid" who just happens to be married.  H.W.'s "familiar frend" is an "old player", identified simply as "W.S."  This "old player" has just recovered from his own infatuation with the maid, and he eggs his "frend Harry" on, promising the youth that "in tyme she may be wonne".

The poem was Willobie his Avisa.  The poet wilfully admitted that he had given his heroine, the "chaste and constant wife" the "feigned name" of Avisa.  In other words, the author of the poem was having some fun with the story of the alleged seduction by "H.W." of an (unidentified) married woman, encouraged by his familiar friend, the old player "W.S.", who was also in love with the maid.

This at the same time as Thomas Nashe was remarking that Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and patron to the player William Shakespeare, was a "dear lover and cherisher" of poets and their lovers.

One thing that is made clear in Willobie his Avisa is that the "modest maid" was based at - lived and probably worked in - an inn known as the George.  Internal evidence in the poem led me to determine (after extensive research) that the inn was the George Inn at the village of Banwell in Somerset.  The attempted seduction of the maid by "H.W." took place in or around the month of April in the year 1593.

Will Shakespeare was just about to publish Venus and Adonis, the first of the long poems he dedicated to "H.W.", the Earl of Southampton.

There was another woman who worked in an inn or tavern and who was romantically linked with Shakespeare.  She was Jane Davenant, mistess of The Taverne in Oxford.  Jane and her husband - John, whom she had married in about 1593 - left London and moved to Oxford to take up the lease on the Taverne in about 1600.  Thereafter, Shakespeare is reputed to have visited the Taverne whenever he passed through Oxford on his journeys beween Stratford and London.

Before her marriage, she was known as Jane Sheppard.  When I searched the Banwell area to find if there were any Sheppards there in Shakespeare's day, I discovered that the Sheppards had been a prominent family in Banwell and the surrounding villages.  Like Will Shakespeare, though, they had been drawn towards London.  Jane was actually baptised at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 1 November 1568.  Three of her brothers worked for the royal household, two of them as glovers and perfumiers.

The plague was rampant in London between 1592 and 1594, and it would only have been prudent for Jane Sheppard (who became Jane Davenant in about 1593) to leave London for the healthier climes of the countryside, and the famously beneficent "Christall well" which gave Banwell its name.

Of course, it is quite possible that Will Shakespeare might have enjoyed a fling with Jane Sheppard before she left London, so that when he and his patron visited Banwell (Sir Walter Raleigh had his eye on a property there) Will possibly still had feelings for the vivacious young woman but was willing to encourage his attractive young patron because that is what one did!  And there can be no doubt about it - Shakespeare, in his Sonnets, gave plenty of hints that his "Fair Youth" had betrayed him with his own lover:

"No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done,
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud ..."

The name Wriothesley seems to have been pronounced "Roseley".  "Roseleys" had their thorns, and "silver fountains" had their mud.  Jane Sheppard was living beside Banwell's "Christall well" at the time.

I believe that Will Shakespeare had an affair with Jane Sheppard in 1592.  He met up with her again in Banwell, this time with his youthful patron, Henry Wriothesley, the following April.  Jane was possibly now married to John Davenant, vinter of London, and so Shakespeare refused to touch her.  But that didn't stop the beautiful 3rd Earl of Southampton from having a go.

There were few secrets in those days.  By the following year, the love-triangle had become common knowledge, not least of all because Willobie his Avisa was published, dropping the heaviest of hints about it and managing to enjoy the scandal hugely whilst assuming a prurient attitude towards it all.

Shakespeare's love for Jane Davenant was later rekindled, probably in 1604, when Jane and John Davenant were settled in Oxford.  In the summer of 1605, Jane Davenant fell pregnant.  She was delivered, in late February 1606, of a boy named William.  He was, by all accounts, Will Shakespeare's godson ... but there were rumours, which William - later, Sir William - Davenant did much to encourage and nothing to deny, that he was Shakespeare's natural son.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I give fuller accounts of Will's on-off relationship with Jane Davenant (nee Sheppard).  To me, their tortured love is one of history and literature's great untold stories.  I believe she fascinated him.  She was witty, captivating, and dangerous as only a woman can be.  Certainly, she must have been pretty impressive to have been beloved (twice?) of William Shakespeare and wooed by a wealthy and attractive young aristocrat.

It must have been a painful love.  When both parties were married (to rather boorish spouses) and when every poet-satirist in the land seems to have spread their secrets abroad like a tabloid journalist.

I confess, I have a fondness for Jane Davenant.  Her son, Sir William, is a largely-forgotten hero, a truly remarkable man.  But then, his mother was really quite something.  She was William Shakespeare's "Dark Lady", his Cleopatra.  And she drove him up the wall.

The Rival Poet

I've blogged recently about the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's peculiar determination to insist that the so-called Cobbe Portrait is of William Shakespeare when it seems so much more likely to have been Sir Walter Raleigh.

If it is Raleigh, then Stratford really is adding insult to injury.  Not only is the Trust's favourite portrait not of Shakespeare: it's of a man he considered a rival!

The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (published in 1609) present us with three shadowy, elusive persons - the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet.  The first of these was almost certainly Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare's youthful and attractive patron in the early 1590s.

The Dark Lady was most likely Jane Davenant, nee Sheppard, with whom both 'W.S.' and 'H.W.' appear to have had a fling at the time (Will would rekindle his affair with the vivacious Jane in about 1605: she gave birth to a son, baptised William, in February 1606).

Which leaves the Rival Poet.  He lurks in the background of Sonnets 78-86, and he certainly made Shakespeare feel uncomfortably jealous.

Sonnet 80 hints at his identity:

O How I faint when I of you do write,
Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,
And in the praise thereof spends all his might,
To make me tongue-tide speaking of your fame.
But since your worth (wide as the Ocean is)
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy barque (inferior far to his)
On your broad main doth wilfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride,
Or (being wracked) I am a worthless boat,
He of tall building, and of goodly pride.
     Then If he thrive and I be cast away,
     The worst was this, my love was my decay.

Sir Walter Raleigh had built his reputation on his naval prowess and eagerness to exploit the New World (in 1585, for example, he had organised an expedition to Virginia which resulted in a number of colonists being left - 'cast away' - at Roanoke; I argue in Who Killed William Shakespeare? that young Will himself might have taken part in that epoch-making expedition).  But his position at court had been secured by his willingness to flatter Queen Elizabeth I.  He wrote her fawning poems, in which she was his Cynthia and he was her Ocean (his name sounded like 'Water').

Raleigh fell from grace when he married one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth - 'Bess' - Throckmorton, who was in fact related to Shakespeare by marriage.  Few monarchs were as vain as Queen Elizabeth I, who expected her courtiers only to have eyes for her, and for marrying without her permission, Sir Walter and Bess Raleigh were both imprisoned.

Sir Walter settled on his Sherborne Estate in Dorset, where he set about rebuilding the lodge (making it four storeys high) and gathered around him a group of free-thinking poets and intellectuals - the infamous 'School of Night'.  These are hinted at in Shakespeare's 86th Sonnet:

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of (all too precious) you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished ...

The maritime imagery gives the game away - as do the references to the Rival Poet's pride (Raleigh was described by his contemporaries as 'damnable proud'), to his 'compeers by night', his 'tall building' and his pseudonym 'Ocean'.

The Rival Poet of the Sonnets was Sir Walter Raleigh.  And now, the custodians of Shakespeare's memory in Stratford-upon-Avon are trying to pass off a portrait of Shakespeare's rival poet as if it were the Bard himself!  He must be turning in his grave (the parts of him which are actually in his grave, that is).