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.

Dem Bones

I now have a copy of The Last Days of Richard III by my History Press stable-mate, John Ashdown-Hill.  This was the book which led archaeologists to the car park in Leicester where Richard's remains were buried.  I'm looking forward to reading it, when I take a break from my research into Sir William Davenant.

Today, I came across this: A Bone to Pick with the Bard - Richard III was NOT a Hunchback.  It's a piece in the Independent which indicates that Richard "Crookback" did not have a crookback after all!

William Shakespeare appears to get the blame for the fact that we all thought he did.

Well, that's not entirely fair.  Shakespeare was a poet-playwright, not a historian.  And he had to make do with the information that was available to him.

The Tudor kings and queens were always slightly aware that their claim to the English throne was rather shaky.  Henry VII became king when he defeated Richard III in battle.  So, in typical Tudor style, they made up a pack of lies about Richard.  And because many historians are lazy and credulous, we all believed the lies.

The question, then, is this: did Shakespeare really believe the Tudor propaganda?  Or was he actually up to something much more subtle and clever when he portrayed Richard III with a hunchback and a club foot?

After all, Richard III wasn't the only king he seemingly maligned.  Historically speaking, Macbeth was one of the most successful and popular kings in medieval Scotland.  Macbeth's predecessor, King Duncan, was useless; Macbeth defeated him in battle and then ruled for 17 years, during which time he made a pilgrimage to Rome (only a king who knew that his country was safe would disappear overseas for two years).  So, once again, Shakespeare drew a portrait of a king that was wildly inaccurate.

Unless ...

Unless we accept that Shakespeare wasn't really writing about Macbeth but about a different Scottish king.  The one who, at that moment in time, occupied the English throne.  James I.

In Shakespeare's tragedy, written in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Macbeth is a brave and steadfast lord who turns to the dark side - ambitious and greedy, he commits murders and goes paranoid.

There are very good reasons - some of them outlined in my book, Who Killed William Shakespeare? - to suspect that Shakespeare thought of James I in just these terms.  He was a promising monarch who broke his promises, choosing to become a veritable "Son of" [Gaelic - mac] Elizabeth, hence "Mac-beth".  King James had dropped heavy hints that England's Catholics would be allowed a degree of tolerance.  He then fell into the traps laid for him by his egregious secretary, Sir Robert Cecil (photo above), and colluded in the government fiction that was the Gunpowder Plot.  The treacherous slaying of King Duncan in the play was really Shakespeare's horrified reaction to the barbarous execution of Father Henry Garnet, SJ, the real target of the Cecil-masterminded "powder treason".

Which brings us back to Richard III.  So King Richard didn't have a hunchback after all.  But Sir Robert Cecil did.  A rhyme of the time described him thus:

Backed like a lute case
Bellied like a drum -
Like Jackanapes on horseback
Sits little Robin Thumb.

He was also known as the "Toad", and Robertus Diabolus - Robert the Devil.

The Cecil family claimed that Sir Robert (the second son of Elizabeth's chief minister, Lord Burghley) had been dropped on his head at birth.  He was certainly stunted and deformed, with a "crookback" and a splayed foot.  Queen Elizabeth called him her "elf", and so in Shakespeare's Richard III he became the "elvish, abortive, rooting hog", the evil "toad" who plots against and kills anybody who threatens to frustrate his ambitions.

It is, in all fairness, extremely simpleminded to imagine that Shakespeare was writing specifically about King Richard.  In reality, he was turning the Tudor propaganda into a weapon against the Court of Elizabeth I.  It was not Richard who was hunchbacked and splay-footed - it was her dangerous "elf", that inveterate and industrious plotter, Robert Cecil.

King James inherited the English throne on Elizabeth's death in 1603.  He also inherited the loathsome Robert Cecil, whom he repeatedly promoted.  And just as Shakespeare had transformed Robert Cecil, for his sins, into the diabolical Richard III, so he turned James I into the tyrannical butcher, Macbeth.

Of course, Shakespeare was so good at what he did that we all made the mistake of taking his words at face value.  But then, historians have been so inclined to swallow Protestant propaganda whole that nobody seems to have questioned Shakespeare's portrayals.  Perish the thought that our greatest wordsmith might have exposed the brutal corruption at the heart of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I! 

No, no, no - far better to assume that Shakespeare really was describing the historical Richard and Macbeth than to acknowledge who the real targets of his quill might have been.  Because that would require us to admit that dreadful people did dreadful things, ostensibly to turn England into a Protestant country, but really to make themselves incredibly rich.  And we really don't want to admit that, do we?

How Conspiracies Work

Buoyed by the news that Who Killed William Shakespeare? has sold out its first print-run within two months of publication, I've been wondering what Shakespeare would think if he came back today.

At first glance, you'd imagine he'd be pretty chuffed.  Nearly 400 years on from his death in 1616, he is still far and away the leading figure in his chosen field.  No one comes near him.  Shakespeare is, without doubt, the most famous poet-playwright ever to have walked the planet.

He might find the internet exciting.  He would surely be impressed that the journey from Stratford to London can be done in two hours, as opposed to the two days it took on horseback.

But, to be honest, I think he would be appalled - and certainly very uncomfortable.  After all, it's one thing to be celebrated as the world's greatest dramatist and poet.  It's another thing altogether to be completely misremembered.

The Shakespeare industry is as busy as it ever was.  New books about Shakespeare appear all the time.  And most of them spout unadulterated rubbish about him.

There seem to be, essentially, two sides to the argument.  On the one hand, Will Shakespeare was a humble Warwickshire lad of extraordinary gifts - and, more than anything, humble and self-effacing; he went to London, made his fortune, wowed the Queen and then the King, and then he thought, "Ah well, I've had a good run, time to go home", and he sort of vanished.

The alternative argument goes something like this: That semi-transparent and quite frankly boring individual, better known for grain-dealing in Stratford, could never have been the universal genius who penned those marvellous comedies, histories and tragedies.  So somebody else must have done all the hard work.  William Shakespeare was just a frontman, a cardboard cut-out, undeservedly remembered as the greatest writer in the English language.

Both arguments are fundamentally flawed and - to put it bluntly - stupidly simplistic.  The latter arises from the former.  For as long as the academics, the Shakespeare experts and the tourism industry insist on selling us a see-through Shakespeare, a man who kept himself to himself and wrote entirely from his own imagination, steering well clear of the controversies of his day, there will always be those who cry "Foul!" and demand to know who the real William Shakespeare was.

And, if they happen to be of the all-aristocrats-are-excellent-and-infinitely-better-than-the-rest-of-us school (which dominates so much comment these days), they will insist that Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat - like the Earl of Oxford (who died while Shakespeare was still busily writing plays) or, more crazily, Queen Elizabeth I (ditto).

These are two extreme positions: Shakespeare was just an ordinary bloke, and Shakespeare must have been someone of high social standing.  They are the curse of Shakespeare studies.  Neither standpoint does any credit to William Shakespeare himself.

In a sense, what we are looking at is two sides of a conspiracy theory.  The first - and, apparently, the more innocuous - side claims that Shakespeare was just a patriotic middle-class Englishman; the second argues (quite rightly) that such a Shakespeare is a sham.  But, ultimately, both sides are wrong.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the circumstances of Will's life and death.  It's been described as a conspiracy theory.  Which it isn't.  The real conspiracy theory continually pours out of Stratford and the cloisters of academe, fiercely countered by the fanatics who want to believe that somebody else altogether was the true genius.

Let us take a moment to consider the similarities between Shakespeare's lifetime and that of Arthur - the first historical Arthur on record, that is; not the silly and mythical King Arthur.

First of all, even though these two individuals lived a thousand years apart, their periods were subject to very similar strains.  In Arthur's day, a foreign religion (Christianity) was taking root at the same time as Germanic settlers were forcibly conquering much of southern Britain, beginning with the eastern side of the country.  In Shakespeare's day, a sort-of foreign religion (Protestantism) had entered the country from Germany, working its way across the land from the eastern counties.  One of the results of the spread of Protestantism was enormous social change.  The old gentry was almost entirely ruined, as Protestant parvenus stole fortunes and scrambled for precedence.

In other words, both in Arthur's day (late-6th century) and Shakespeare's day (late-16th century), a dangerous and disruptive movement was spreading across the country from the east and seeking to destroy and/or seize everything in its path.  The old religion (paganism, first; Catholicism, later) was under concerted and violent attack.  If you adhered to the old form faith and the social order which had obtained before the 'tempest' blew up, you were more or less doomed.

Both Arthur and Shakespeare stood for what could be called the 'true' Britain.  Arthur was no Christian, but there were Christians in his circle.  Shakespeare tried to pose as a Protestant, only to return to the faith of his forefathers when he saw just how vicious and corrupt the regime of Elizabeth I really was.  Neither of them was a fundamentalist, in any meaningful way; rather, they saw that what Britain needed was an end to the religious strife that covered a multitude of sins.  As Shakespeare had John of Gaunt say in Richard II:

"That England that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself."

I believe - and have offered evidence to support my belief - that both Arthur and Shakespeare were treacherously betrayed.  Murdered, to all intents and purposes.  Why?  Because both of them, in their different times, stood in the way of the triumph of Britain's enemies - the greedy, the self-serving, the corrupt, the dishonest, the over-zealous, the cruel and the depraved.

Now, here's where we enter the realms of conspiracy.  And the simple fact is that no conspiracy can succeed if (as is commonly supposed) it comprises just a handful of shady individuals.  Any conspiracy of that kind is likely to fail, or at least to be quickly exposed.

If it had been that simple - if, that is, the premature deaths of both Arthur and Shakespeare, had been brought about by just one or two fanatics - then we would have known the truth for some time.  But I would argue that such a scenario is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy.

The real conspiracy requires many, many more people to engage in the cover-up.  It needs generations of commentators to collude in the crime.

In the case of Arthur, the treachery stemmed from the early Church - and, one could say, a particular religious establishment set up by one prominent churchman.  In the case of Shakespeare, the treachery stemmed partly from professional rivalry and partly from the paranoia that was loose at the court of King James.

Now, consider this: could future generations, wedded as they were to the cause of Christianity, acknowledge the role played by the early Church in the assassination of Arthur and the destruction of Britain?  Were there own beliefs not essentially the same as the beliefs which led to Arthur's death and the betrayal of Britain to her enemies?

And consider this of Shakespeare: the very people whose devious and bloody-minded behaviour was exposed in his plays ended up running the country.  Protestantism, which provided so many of these ogres with the excuse they needed to rob and slaughter their fellow countrymen, became the official religion of the land.  Future generations of scholars set out to prove that this was an inevitable and desirable process: it's what made Britain great.  And so, if Shakespeare had opposed this very kind of extremism, and his vocal opposition had led to his death, then it was absolutely necessary that the biography of William Shakespeare should be rewritten and the circumstances of his death ignored and forgotten.

The original conspiracies - the murders of Arthur and Shakespeare - required only a few determined and unscrupulous individuals to succeed.  Initially.  After that, though, huge numbers of likeminded people had to play along, to connive in the original crime, to become complicit in the cover-up (for reasons of faith and/or political expediency).  They became accessories after the fact.

It continues to this day.  There are still scholars who spout absolute gibberish about Arthur.  They steadfastly refuse to explore his northern roots.  They get unreasonably angry at the very suggestion that the first Arthur on record might have been the original Arthur.  Why?  Because they are colluding in the conspiracy that led to Arthur's death.  They are studying Arthur purely from the point-of-view of his enemies.  They are happy to continue the cover-up, because their mindsets and belief systems would have led them to participate in the original crime.

The same goes for Shakespeare.  His story is repeatedly written up by his enemies - even though they claim to love and admire him - because they harbour the same set of beliefs, ultimately, as the men who killed him (the one who wielded the weapon, the one who commissioned the crime, and the faction which kept it quiet).  So the conspiracy continues, perpetuated by the very character-type that was involved from the start.  Naturally, these academics cannot tell the truth about Shakespeare.  They might not have been there at the actual assassination, but they can continue to assassinate him by lying about his life, his works, his beliefs and covering up the harsh reality.

That's how conspiracies work.  If it were just a hugger-mugger huddle of plotters, their crimes would soon be exposed.  But it isn't.  It's an ongoing propaganda war.  Those who would have applauded and approved of the crime continue to cover for the criminals.  They misrepresent Arthur and Shakespeare and attack anyone who points to the realities of the time.

So Shakespeare, I believe, would find his visit to today's world a truly depressing experience.  His enemies triumphed.  They continue to tell his story, and to tell it all wrong.

And here's where we should take note.  Conspiracies can only prosper in a society, in a world, where there is sufficient fanaticism for the crimes to be covered up.  We don't all have to wield the knife - only to lie to ourselves and each other about what really happened.  And we do so because our belief systems are so horribly skewed.  We will justify atrocities because our blind prejudices assure us that they were justifiable.

Have you been on Facebook lately?  Read the below-the-line comments beneath any online newspaper story?  Fanaticism is flourishing.

Somewhere out there is today's Arthur, today's Shakespeare.  They will be betrayed and put to death.  And future generations will be none the wiser.  Because there are enough maniacs out there who will happily spread lies in support of their extremist positions.  And that's all that is needed for conspiracies to succeed.

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.

Macbeth Died Today

He wasn't as bad as he's made out to be.

In fact, Macbethad son of Findlaech was one of Scotland's most successful kings.  He reigned for 17 years and was the first Scottish king to undertake a pilgrimage to Rome, 'scattering money like seed' on the way, which can only have meant that his kingdom was safe enough for him to absent himself from it for two years.

He did not murder his predecessor, King Duncan, in a treacherous bedroom incident.  Duncan was a useless king, defeated by Macbeth in open battle.

Seventeen years later, on 15 August 1057, Duncan's son Malcolm slew Macbeth in the battle of Lumphanan in Mar.  The 'Red King', as the Prophecy of Berchan described him, was buried on the Isle of Iona - or, as Shakespeare put it:

'Carried to Colmekill,
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones.'

The Prophecy of Berchan offers a wholly different view of Macbeth from the one we're used to:

The Red King will take the kingdom ... the ruddy-faced, yellow-haired, tall one, I shall be joyful in him.  Scotland will be brimful, in the west and in the east, during the reign of the furious Red One.

Which raises the question, why do we imagine him to have been a murderous tyrant?

Fiona Watson, in her 'True History' of Macbeth, suggests that it started with the Church.  For reasons to do with establishing the right of succession, the medieval Church chose to blacken Macbeth's name (it wouldn't be the first time, or the last, the Church rewrite history to suit its agenda).  But the blame should also lie at Shakespeare's door.

Although ... Shakespeare seldom, if ever, wrote history as History.  Take his famous portrayal of Richard III: it's hardly accurate, in strictly historical terms, but it served the purposes of Tudor propaganda, because in order to strengthen their rather dubious claim to the throne, the Tudors (Henry VII through Elizabeth I) found it expedient to misrepresent King Richard as a deformed monster.

If anything, though, Shakespeare's Richard 'Crookback' is more a portrait of Sir Robert Cecil, second son of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, Lord Treasurer, chief minister and most trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth I.  Robert Cecil matched Shakespeare's depiction of Richard III to a tee - he was stunted, dwarfish, hunchbacked and splay-footed:

Backed like a lute case,
Bellied like a drum,
Like jackanapes on horseback
Sits little Robin Thumb

in the words of a popular rhyme of the day.

Cecil also conformed to Shakespeare's presentation of Richard III's personality - feverishly industrious, devilishly devious, two-faced and dangerous, the younger Cecil fitted the description.  He was groomed by his father to take over as Elizabeth's most trusted secretary, and her successor became utterly dependent on him, much to the nation's distress.

That successor was, of course, King James VI of Scotland, who liked to trace his ancestry back to Macbeth's legendary companion, Banquo.

Shakespeare, however, recognised him as a true 'son' (Gaelic mac) of [Eliza]beth.  He was every bit as unprincipled and intolerant as Elizabeth had been, and after appealing to James's conscience in several pointed plays (Hamlet through to Othello), Shakespeare finally gave up on the Scottish monarch.

The last straw was the execution of Father Henry Garnet, superior of the Society of Jesus in England, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot.  Shakespeare took this as the inspiration for the opening scenes of his Tragedy of Macbeth, with the saintly Garnet taking the role of King Duncan and James himself characterised as the once-noble Macbeth ('Son of Beth'), whose lust for power turned him into a 'bloody tyrant', a 'butcher' with 'hangman's hands'.

So Shakespeare's portrait of Macbeth had little to do with the original - who died on this day 956 years ago - and much to do with the reigning king, James I of England and VI of Scotland.

Time, you might say, for Macbeth to be rehabilitated - like King Richard III, in fact, who wasn't that bad either.

And while we're at it, maybe we should acknowledge that Shakespeare's historical characters weren't necessarily based on the originals, but on the dangerous, treacherous, self-serving and deceitful men of power of his own day.

(Plenty more on this, folks, in Who Killed William Shakespeare - get hold of your copy now, before everyone jumps on the bandwagon!!)

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).

The High Priesthood

David Starkey has appeared in the Telegraph newspaper, slamming historical novelists who - he feels - have no "authority".

Odd ... doesn't an author automatically have authority?  Isn't that what being an author means?

Anyway, why should we be bothered about what David Starkey says?  He just seems to be a bit miffed because the BBC has produced a documentary about Anne Boleyn, to which Starkey has contributed.  But so have Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory.  They might be award-winning and extremely successful novelists specialising in Tudor history (which Starkey reckons is his preserve), but Starkey doesn't rate them.

Now, there are two ways we could look at this.  Starkey had the bad grace to dismiss the work of Mantel and Gregory as "chick lit", which it isn't. So the problem might well be that David Starkey just doesn't like women very much - especially gifted and intelligent women who take their historical research seriously and sell more books than he does.

But I think there's more to it than that.  It has to do with the "High Priesthood" of historical studies.  This is a (largely) self-appointed elite which likes to pretend that it has all the answers.  If you want to know about the Tudors, Starkey's your man.  Whatever you do, don't go talking to anybody else about them (least of all a woman).

So what, we might ask, is the worst that could happen if somebody was imprudent or wayward enough to consult someone other than David Starkey?  After all, Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory have immersed themselves in the period in question, living imaginatively in Tudor times and recreating that world in painstaking detail.  What could possibly be so WRONG about picking their wonderful brains?

The answer might well be that you would glean information and opinions which have not been authorised by Mr Starkey.

David Starkey insists (in the Telegraph) that high profile historical novelists "have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources" and he'd rather they "stayed off my patch as a historian."  Harsh words, you might feel, and utterly unwarranted.  Not least of all because Starkey's own view of history - and the Tudor period in particular - is so relentlessly reactionary.  He is the Conservative Party's idea of a historian - imperialistic, bombastic, borderline racist and sexist, a man who actually believes that Henry VIII was our best monarch (and not an obese, syphilitic monster with some pretty alarming personality defects).

Maybe this brings us a little closer to the heart of the matter.  If David Starkey is going to succeed in hoodwinking us all into buying into his extreme right-wing approach to British history, he has to stop us hearing from such novelists as Mantel and Gregory who give us a pretty crisp idea of what the key figures of the Tudor period might have been really like.  After all, it's easy to say that Henry VIII or his daughter, Elizabeth I, were marvellous monarchs.  But once a little bit of research is carried out, and you begin to suspect that the one was mad and the other was profoundly neurotic, his simplistic "Rule, Britannia!" view of the Tudors starts to look a little bit shaky. 

Or worse - it starts to look plain WRONG.  We might begin to wonder whether the version of events which David Starkey was so eager to promote is a little (how shall we say this?) misleading.  It is an entirely one-sided view.  An extremely political view.  Not history, as such, so much as propaganda.

The past is of enormous importance.  If we don't understand the past, we cannot truly understand the present (and ourselves) and we can't really figure out what kind of trajectory we're on.  But whoever controls the present tends to control the past - and for the last thirty or forty years, the past (like the present) has been controlled by the ideological reactionaries, the neo-liberals, the right-wing fundamentalists.

What this means is that the David Starkey school of history has been given a prominence that it does not rightly deserve.  It suits the Michael Gove idea of history ("facts" ruthlessly pruned of context and regurgitated in order to produce a generation of flag-waving drones).  And it can only be sustained by the systematic exclusion of whole reams of facts, vast piles of historical evidence, which doesn't support such a biased, revisionist interpretation.

In other words, the Conservative school of history doesn't hold sources to be quite as sacrosanct as David Starkey pretends.  It is extremely selective in its use of sources.  Basically, only those sources which support its rightward-leaning stance are admitted.  Anything (nay, everything) else is ignored.

Which is why we mustn't be allowed to hear from people who aren't David Starkey - because they might not play by the rules of the reactionary and revisionist "history-as-we-want-it-to-be-not-as-it-actually-was" school of historiography.

All this is absolutely pertinent to my forthcoming publication.  Twenty-five years of research went into the writing of Who Killed William Shakespeare?  It wouldn't have taken that long - indeed, it wouldn't have needed to be written at all - if historians hadn't been so adept at hiding the evidence which doesn't suit their particular prejudices.  The image of William Shakespeare which has been sold repeatedly, over and over again, in a succession of identikit biographies, comes straight from the David Starkey school.  It is based on the most selective choice of sources. 

The greater part of the available historical information about William Shakespeare doesn't really make it into the "authorised" biography because it doesn't fit the approved portrait of Shakespeare as a talented (and thoroughly patriotic) Mr Nobody.  And so a cabal exercises supreme control over what we are allowed to know and to think about Shakespeare, because any deviation from the consensus threatens to blow the lid on what Shakespeare's life and times were really like.

David Starkey - with his sanitised, God-Save-the-Queen approach to the Tudors - comes from the same school of historical make-believe as the High Priests of Shakespeare Studies.  It is important to such people that their view is the only one available - even if it doesn't make sense!  Like the Church in the Middle Ages, it approves publications which bear no relation whatsoever to evidence-based reality while condemning anything and everything which doesn't square with its own narrow ideological view.

In that regard, David Starkey's pompous little gripe about historical novelists is entirely in keeping with a historiographical movement which has devoted huge amounts of time and energy to completely rewriting the past in order to make it fit into an idealised kind of reactionary nationalism.

Talking to other people - especially articulate and imaginative writers - about the subject can only upset the demagogues like Starkey and the Shakespeare clique.  Because you might just find yourself looking at their beloved subjects from a more sane and realistic point-of-view.

W.S.

British history is in vogue at the moment.

Madonna is releasing a film about Wallace Simpson ("W.E.") and, though I fear for the script, I imagine that the casting of Andrea Riseborough will prove to have been inspired.

Another forthcoming movie release is "Anonymous", which seeks to make out that the plays of William Shakespeare were really written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Okay, let's not worry about the fact that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604 - at least nine years before the end of Shakespeare's playwrighting career.  Even sillier theories have been put forward over the authorship question, with both Christopher Marlowe (died 1593) and Queen Elizabeth I (died 1603) being nominated as the "real" Shakespeares.  The simple reality is that there are no good reasons whatsoever to imagine that Shakespeare was not the author of his own plays - but that hasn't stopped the conspiracy theorists.

(A word of warning: this blog is about ARThur and WILLiam)

The "Was Shakespeare Really Shakespeare" nonsense can be dated back to the late-eighteenth century.  In 1769, the actor-manager David Garrick staged his Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon.  The event was a wash-out (literally) and, besides, it missed the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth by five years.  The Londoners who attended decided that they didn't like the Stratfordians.  They considered them ignorant.

Only a few years earlier, a rather interesting piece of evidence had turned up.  Hidden under the rafters of the Shakespeare family home on Henley Street was a small, handwritten document.  It was a Jesuit 'Last Testament of the Soul'.  Thousands of these had been distributed around the Midlands by two Jesuit priests who had entered the country illegally.  The one found at Henley Street had been signed by Shakespeare's father, roundabout the time that Will Shakespeare was 16.

The discovery of John Shakespeare's illicit 'Last Testament' was dynamite.  Inevitably, perhaps, the document was conveniently lost by a Shakespeare scholar.  But the people of Stratford knew all about it.  So David Garrick and his metropolitan friends decided that the locals were ignorant.  The only people who really knew anything about Shakespeare were the Londoners.  And one thing they knew about him was that he was never, ever, ever a Catholic.

But take the Catholicism out of Shakespeare's writings and they stop making sense.  Or, put it another way, try reading them in the context of a vicious persecution of Catholics, including many of Shakespeare's friends, neighbours and relatives, and see what happens.  It took me twenty years to figure this out (because the academic elite really does not like discussing the possibility that Shakespeare was Catholic), with the result that for twenty years I couldn't enjoy Shakespeare.  I didn't know what he was on about.

Then, fortunately, I asked myself the question (long overdue, given the evidence): Could he have been a secret Catholic?  And the next Shakespeare play I saw became one of the most painful, distressing, cathartic experiences I had ever known.

All these foolish theories about somebody else writing the plays of Shakespeare stem from a blanket refusal in the academic community to admit who he really was.  Effectively, they have suppressed the evidence (for 'political' reasons, all to do with rather outdated, David Starkey-type notions of what England is).  And when the evidence is withheld, conspiracy theories abound.

The same can be said of Arthur.  For years, though I longed to discover who he was, I could only make out a vague, possibly non-existent culture hero.  He had been Welsh, but then the English made him English.  And there simply wasn't enough evidence to point to any historical figure as the original Arthur.  If he had existed, it looked like he would never be found.

But then I found him.  By accident.  I was researching his father, a king called Aedan.  And Aedan had a son called Artuir.  And a daughter called Muirgein.

I had never yet come across any early Arthurs who had sisters called Morgan.  Could Arthur have been Scottish, then?  Well, I decided it was worth taking a proper look.

That was eight years ago, and I've been looking ever since.  And you know what?  The evidence is overwhelming.

There is, however, a long-running argument in the Arthurian community.  While many of us had begun to suspect that Arthur was of Irish extraction and was based in the North, the backlash was constant.  NO!!  Arthur could not have been a Scot.  Or an Irishman.  Or northern.  No!  No, no, no!!

When you look at the arguments used against the theory, though, they are pathetic.  Superficially, the argument against the Scottish Arthur (who was actually more British than Scottish) is that he was too late: the generally accepted era of Arthur was some 50 to 100 years before his time.  But that 'generally accepted' age of Arthur is based entirely on flawed and faulty evidence - and not very much of it, at that.  So while there is a mound of evidence that the first Arthur on record, whose sister was called Morgan, who fought against the 'Saxons' and was buried on a sacred isle, it all has to be studiously ignored.  Why?  Because some people only want to believe in an Arthur who didn't exist, rather than spend a little while examining one who did.

As Will, as Art.  A self-appointed 'elite' determines what we are allowed to believe.  So, Shakespeare was NOT a Catholic (and we end up not really sure if he was really Shakespeare) and Arthur was NOT a prince of the North (so we end up doubting whether he existed at all).  See the link here?  Whenever racial, moral, religious and intellectual intolerance steps in, we lose our heroes.

Because some people only want us to believe in their heroes.  The approved English Protestant ones.  The ones who didn't exist.