Is This William Shakespeare?

Apologies, first of all, for my absence from the blog for a little while.  Things have been busy on a number of fronts.

My very good friend Steve Wadlow has created an excellent website around the painting in his family's possession.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been working with Steve for over two-and-a-half years now, examining this remarkable portrait.

It is, as far as I'm concerned, a particularly good, near-contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare.  For more information, please visit Steve's Is This William Shakespeare? website.

One of the pages of the website - entitled "TECHNICAL" - shows some images created by Lumiere Technologie in Paris.  Of those, one clearly shows the "touching up" which had been done, at a later date, to cover up the visible damage to the left eye socket.

Another image, which is presented in the same animated graphic, shows a clear line running down the left cheek of the portrait from the outside of the left eye.

These lines are a feature of Shakespeare portraiture.  If you can find an image of the Shakespeare portrait which now hangs in the old schoolroom at King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford-upon-Avon (where Shakespeare is presumed to have gone to school), you'll see a very similar line to that made visible on the Wadlow portrait by the technological wizardry of Lumiere.

One day, when the ultra-conservative mafia is no longer in a position to dictate what is known, and what is not allowed to be known, about Shakespeare, the Wadlow portrait will be recognised for what it is - the face of Shakespeare.

And maybe - just maybe - that time isn't so far away.

Do check out Steve's website.  It really is very good indeed.

That's Oxfordshire

Here, as promised - the link to the YouTube clip of my piece for That's Oxfordshire, with thanks to Alex Iszatt.

More to follow ...

Then They Fight You

A lovely morning in Oxford, on Tuesday.  I was there to be filmed by Alex Iszatt for a That's Oxfordshire piece on Oxford's community Freeview channel.

Alex interviewed me in the courtyard between what used to be the Davenants' Taverne on Cornmarket and the Cross Inn next door (seen here in an old photo).  I spoke about Sir William Davenant, and why I'd written my book about him.  No one, I pointed out, had ever taken the trouble to ask whether or not the rumours surrounding Davenant's paternity - was he the product of a liaison between William Shakespeare and Jane, the comely mistress of the Taverne? - might be true, so I had done so.

We then went for a walk around Oxford, Alex filming me as we wandered past Christ Church and back up to Lincoln College, where Davenant studied as a young man, before he moved to London.

The piece goes out this Friday and will then be put up on YouTube.  I'll do my best to remember to post the link.

I got back home to hear that there will be some sort of review or mention of my book, Shakespeare's Bastard, in the Oxford Times this week.  So - today, Oxford; tomorrow, the world!

Still, there had to be a backlash, didn't there?  And it came this morning, in the form of a piece in the Spectator.

I'm not all that familiar with the Spectator, but apparently the magazine has a regular column referred to as "The Heckler".  It would seem to be a slightly schizophrenic column.  Only last May, Lloyd Evans, writing as "The Heckler", decreed that "Shakespeare's duds should be struck from the canon".  Lloyd Evans professed to "love Shakespeare.  But when he pulls on his wellies and hikes into the forest I yearn for the exit."  Consequently, Evans felt, "Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, even Midsummer Night's Dream deserve to sink".

Evidently, by writing about the Woodland he came from, the old Forest of Arden with which he so identified, being half-Arden himself, Shakespeare let himself down.

Well, this week's "Heckler" column comes to us courtesy of Kate Maltby, who frets that "the Shakespeare anniversary has stripped the Bard of his beauty".  I give you her opening paragraph:

"The feeding frenzy over the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death has reached its peak.  Recently we've had Shakespeare's complete works performed through the puppetry of kitchenware.  On books pages, you can read about everything from Edward Wilson-Lee's Shakespeare in Swahililand (surprisingly beguiling) to Simon Andrew Stirling's Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant (he wasn't)."

Now, grateful as I am for the name check, I can only assume that Kate Maltby, or someone she knows, was actually present at the conception of Sir William Davenant and therefore capable of signing an affidavit stating that John and Jane Davenant were exclusively concerned in the act.  Failing that, only a DNA test could say for certain whether or not Sir William was a little closer to Shakespeare than a mere "godson", as Oxford remembered him.

Ah, but I forget.  The fact that no one had previously looked into the possibility that Davenant was (as he apparently claimed to be) Shakespeare's son is ipso facto proof that "he wasn't".  The very avoidance of an investigation is evidence of there being no need for an investigation.  We shouldn't consider the possibility because nobody else has.

Perhaps, if Kate Maltby had read my book, she'd have noticed that I tackle this argument in my opening pages.  For years, it was widely rumoured - and seemingly accepted - that Sir William Davenant was Shakespeare's illegitimate son.  A close examination of his life and career certainly suggests that Davenant modelled himself on his celebrated godfather, and almost certainly believed - or liked to believe - that he was the bastard son of Shakespeare.

And didn't Shakespeare use the word "godson" just once in all of his known works - in King Lear, a play obsessed with bastards, illegitimacy, adultery and female sexuality, which was written at about the same time as William Davenant was born?

Why bother with any of this, though, when all one has to do is ignore it?  Just because one pesky author dared to ask "Might Davenant have been Shakespeare's son?" and set out to explore the possibility, doesn't mean we have to take a look at his results.  Those who have never asked themselves the question or looked into the possibility have been saying for years that Davenant wasn't Shakespeare's son (the absence of any evidence to support this statement being irrelevant, apparently) and, hey, why break with tradition?

Kate Maltby's full piece can be read here.  I found it slightly odd, in that it seemed to be saying that we can only preserve the "beauty" of Shakespeare if we try not to think of him as a real person.  In fact, let's forget that he ever existed and just concentrate on the plays (presumably, if Lloyd Evans has anything to do with it, not those Shakespeare plays which involve trees).

The upshot being that even to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death is an act of cultural desecration, almost as bad as wondering if our second-ever poet laureate was telling the truth about his relationship to his godfather.

Of course, what Kate Maltby is really calling for is a kind of censorship.  It's an old trick: if we ignore Shakespeare and just concentrate on the words he left behind, we can construe those words in pretty much any way we choose.  We can tell other people what we want them to believe about Shakespeare (who didn't really exist, other than as a sort of disembodied quill).  We can continue to cover up what was going on in England when he was writing his masterpieces.

There is one aspect of Maltby's piece I agree with: I've long argued that what the major Shakespeare organisations are flogging is a brand.  Not Shakespeare per se, but an unhistorical idea of what they want Shakespeare to have been.  And in recent months we have seen the extraordinary lengths to which organisations will go to protect and preserve their rather false image of Shakespeare.  It's a cash cow, no doubt, and the tourists seem to love it.  But it's not Shakespeare.

However, Kate Maltby's solution is even more alarming (though not quite as alarming as "The Heckler's" previous call to expunge Shakespeare's more arboreal works).  It's also regressive.  For years, scholars tried to argue that Shakespeare's writings were no guide whatsoever to what he might have thought or believed.  As arguments go, that one is utter nonsense.  Dramatists write in character, but they draw their inspiration from the world around them, and everything that happens in their work is coloured by their outlook, their perspective.

So, once again, it's back to the Dark Ages.  The scientific investigation of Shakespeare's skull was smothered, and now we're told - on no authority whatsoever - that Davenant "wasn't" Shakespeare's bastard.

Long live the Shakespeare who never was!

Or, better still, let's do what nobody seems prepared to tolerate, these days: ask questions, do some research, and little by little feel our way towards an understanding of the man who wrote those glorious works.  There's little if any reward in this, but it's better than claiming to admire the "beauty" of the Bard while trying not to know anything about him.

Shakespeare's Tomb

Well, the wait is nearly over.  Channel 4 TV started showing a trailer, this evening, for the forthcoming documentary, Shakespeare's Tomb.  You can view the trailer here.

So a tense few days lie ahead.  What do we know?  Well, judging by the trailer, the team from Arrow Media and the University of Staffordshire spent quite a bit of time in the vault beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley, and then working with Caroline Wilkinson (University of Dundee) on some sort of analysis of the laser scan that was made of the skull when the team were in the vault.

(Incidentally, the documentary producer tried to convince me that they really weren't devoting much time or attention to the Beoley skull, and I was asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement to stop me mentioning that Caroline Wilkinson was involved in the programme.)

Elsewhere, the Telegraph recently revealed that Shakespeare's grave is to be subjected to a high-tech laser scan - apparently, a follow-up to the scan performed last year, the results of which will be revealed in the Channel 4 documentary (one instantly wonders what the "initial" scan failed to reveal).  So something's afoot.

Anyway, the Shakespeare's Tomb documentary will be aired in the UK this Saturday - 26 March 2016 - at 8.00pm.  Regular readers of this blog will recognise the skull in the vault at Beoley, and will probably have some idea of the background to the documentary.  More background to the story is currently being researched - and some interesting things have already been found. 

But for those who don't know much about the background, and why the only researcher ever to have studied the skull and published his findings was excluded from the Channel 4 documentary, allow me to include this link to an interview I did with Julia Robb in Texas, which lifts the lid on some rather shifty behaviour.

Watch this space ...

(PS: just in case link to the trailer does not work, here's another one.)

Historical Honey is Back!

Those wonderful honeys have relaunched their Historical Honey website. 

First up, a piece by yours truly, flagging up a rather interesting development concerning a certain disarticulated human skull, an archaeologist from the University of Staffordshire, and a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary.

Read all about it here.

Research or Resistance? My History Press Blog Piece

Well, it's been an interesting couple of weeks, with a lot more excitement to come.

For now, allow me to post a link to a piece I wrote for the History Press blog, entitled: "Why is Shakespeare's real life (and his death) so undebatable?"

It kind of looks at some of my experiences while researching various aspects of Shakespeare's life (and death) and wonders why so many historians haven't done that research.

Happy reading!

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:)

2016: Year of the Skull and the Bastard

Belated New Year greetings!

You know, I've a feeling that it's going to be quite a year.  Come April, we'll be hearing a lot about Shakespeare, it being the 400th anniversary of his death.

Before then, my latest book - Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant - will be published by The History Press.  And we can also look forward to a documentary, to be broadcast on Channel 4 here in the UK, which will show the very skull, hidden in a crypt under St Leonard's Church, Beoley, which might well be Shakespeare's (long time followers of this blog will know something about this skull already, as will anyone who's read Who Killed William Shakespeare?).  So there's a lot to look forward to in just the first four months of this year.

In anticipation of which, I take great pleasure in linking the reader to a fascinating and colourful infographic on the subject of "Shakespeare in Pop Culture".  This was sent to me, a little while ago now, by Roslyn Willson, and it is with great thanks to Roslyn that I include the link here.

Enjoy!

Shakespeare's Skull - Setting the Record Straight

The news broke on Sunday evening.  Could Shakespeare's skull have been found? Why Church ruling means we may never know ran the headline in The Telegraph.  Since then, the story has gone around the globe.

It came as a surprise, partly because those of us involved in the story have been keeping pretty quiet about how it's all going (hence the lack of blogging in recent months) and partly because it is, in fact, old news.

I was informed - by a TV producer - back in March that the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester had turned down our application for a faculty to remove the rogue skull in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley for forensic analysis.  That judgement came after a consistory court hearing, paid for by the TV production company and held as a sort of appeal against the Chancellor's previous ruling, made some six months before, that we had no real grounds to justify the exhumation of the skull.

I'll come back to the Chancellor and his rulings in a minute.  The first question, I guess, is: why did the news suddenly break this weekend, when the decision to deny us the faculty was made months ago?

I can only suggest that it's because a TV documentary is about to go into production, with the story of the Beoley skull playing a part in that forthcoming documentary.  And, I suspect, somebody is out to scupper that documentary, and its findings, before the camera even starts rolling.

Some background: I first picked up a hint that Shakespeare's skull might not be in Stratford ten years ago.  After a while, I tracked down the story - and I've been working on it, one way or another, ever since.

Charles Jones was born in Alcester, Warwickshire, in 1837, the son of an attorney.  He grew up in Alcester, and the neighbouring parish of Wixford, and studied theology in Birmingham before taking holy orders.  By the 1870s, he was Rector of the small parish of Sevington, close to Ashford in Kent.

It was while he was in Sevington that, in 1879, he did two interesting things.  First, according to The Times of 26 September 1879, he changed his name, adopting his mother's maiden name of Langston.  Secondly, he published a story in the Argosy magazine, that October, under the nom de plume of "A Warwickshire Man".

Langston's extraordinary tale was entitled, "How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen".  It described how a local doctor had been inspired by a conversation around the dinner table at Ragley Hall to steal Shakespeare's skull from the grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.  This was apparently because Horace Walpole, the antiquarian, had offered George Selwyn MP 300 guineas if the latter could acquire the skull of Will Shakespeare for him during David Garrick's farcical Shakespeare "Jubilee" in 1769.  According to Langston, Dr Frank Chambers recruited three local ne'er-do-wells and stole the skull, but could not agree terms with Horace Walpole.  Chambers arranged for the skull to be returned to its grave, although the story ended with some doubt in the air as to whether this had actually happened.

Langston's story did not come out of nowhere.  There was something of an international debate raging at the time, initiated in part by Hermann Schaaffhausen, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn, who in 1875 published a piece calling for Shakespeare's skull to be exhumed.  Others were equally keen to examine the skull of the Bard, principally to know what he looked like and to compare the skull with the supposed death mask of Shakespeare, which is now in the library at Darmstadt Castle.  Langston's story appears to have been a deliberate attempt to attract attention to the possibility that Shakespeare's skull was not in the grave at Holy Trinity Church after all.

Rev. C.J. Langston had to wait a few years before someone took the bait.  Then, in 1883, the Shakespeare scholar Clement Mansfield Ingleby published his own proposal to disinter Shakespeare's Bones.  In a footnote, Ingleby praised How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen by "A Warwickshire Man" for its amazing "vraisemblance" - its likelihood, or believability.  All bar the concluding part of the story which, Ingleby felt, wasn't up to scratch.

C.M. Ingleby was rewarded with a letter from Rev. C.J. Langston, sent from the Vicarage at Beoley, Worcestershire, and dated 2 January 1884.  In this letter - a copy of which I have received from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. - Langston identified himself as the "compiler" of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen (thereby undermining the claims that "A Warwickshire Man" has never been identified) and added, "Further revelations are in progress which will probably set at rest this much agitated question."  That question being, should Shakespeare's skull be exhumed from his Stratford grave?

Langston was as good as his word.  Later that year - 1884 - he published an engaging booklet, price one shilling, which he entitled, "How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found".  The first part was merely a reprint of the story he had published in the Argosy, five years earlier.  The second part described how the narrator had finally tracked "THE VERITABLE SKULL OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE" down to a private family vault beneath a chapel in an "outlandish parish".  That chapel was the Sheldon Chapel, built in about 1580 by Ralph Sheldon on the side of St Leonard's Church, Beoley - the very church of which Langston was now the Vicar.

Langston's story is without doubt intriguing.  There were two important aspects, in particular, which struck me when I first read it.  They chimed with my own research into Shakespeare.  And so I resolved to dig a little deeper.

After several weeks spent combing through census records and the like, I had discovered that most of the individuals named in Langston's remarkably detailed accounts had been real people and were in the area during the period in which Langston's story was set.  These included some extremely obscure local personages - like the grave-robbers recruited by Dr Frank Chambers - and an ancestor of Langston's, Lieutenant Joseph Langston of the Royal Marines, who appears to have been a close friend of Frank Chambers's.  The places were real, and the people were real ... so could the story have been true?

Well, no.  I doubted it very much - and Langston himself was cagey about how much of his story was fact and how much was fiction.  All the same, a Church of England clergyman had, over the space of five years, published two halves of a minutely detailed and meticulously researched account of how Shakespeare's skull had been tracked down to the funerary urn which once held the viscera of Ralph Sheldon.  Ralph Sheldon, a wealthy Catholic, died three years before Shakespeare and was related to him by marriage, via the Sheldon-Throckmorton-Arden nexus of Catholic families in the Midlands.

It was only after I had started putting together the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means (The History Press, 2013) that I discovered, to my surprise, that there is a spare skull in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley.  Better still, that skull had been photographed by Richard Peach for The Village, a local magazine, in September 2009.  Peach had been put onto the story by Morris Jephcott, a villager who now lies buried in Beoley churchyard.  Like others in the village, Jephcott believed the story of the skull to be substantially true.

When I first saw Richard Peach's excellent photos, my eye was drawn to two parts of the skull.  My research had already suggested that there should be some sort of damage or discoloration to Shakespeare's right forehead, just above the eye.  And then there is the evidence of the Droeshout and Chandos portraits of Shakespeare, which both show a distinct swelling on the outside edge of the left eyebrow.

Startlingly, there was an area of actual damage and discoloration clearly visible on the right side of the skull, above the right eye, and on the outside edge of the left eyebrow, where the bone is broken, jagged burrs poke out in the exact same spot where, in the Droeshout and Chandos images, there is clear evidence of a noticeable swelling or injury.

Over the next nine months, while I wrote Who Killed William Shakespeare?, I went back to the photos of the skull time and time again, comparing them with the death mask and portraits of Shakespeare.  I met Richard Peach and studied the photos he had taken of the skull in as much detail as I could.  Little by little, I spotted more distinguishing features and anomalies, linking the skull to the Shakespeare images, which I graphically illustrated in my book:

Such as the thin scar across the bridge of the nose on the death mask, which seems to correspond to a couple of small, triangular puncture wounds on the inside of the left eye socket.  It would appear that a sharp pointed weapon - a poniard - was driven into the eye socket here, forcing the left eyeball forward (hence the "wall-eye" look in the Shakespeare portraits);

Or the distinctive depression, high up on the forehead, very near the top of the frontal bone, which looks a bit like a crater on the skull and is clearly visible in the Shakespeare portraiture (including the so-called Davenant Bust of Shakespeare, which belongs to the Garrick Club, and the half-length effigy of Shakespeare in his funerary monument in Holy Trinity, Stratford, not to mention the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio, which replicates the depression very faithfully);

Or the strange jagged lines running down and across the cheeks of the death mask and the Chandos portrait (National Portrait Gallery), amongst others, which appear to show the damage to the cheekbones and maxilla (upper jaw) instantly visible on the skull;

And so on.  In March 2014, I was invited to give a paper on these matters, which I entitled, "The Faces of Shakespeare", at Goldsmiths, University of London.  That paper was later published in the university's GLITS online journal.

By then, I already knew that a television documentary company was looking into all of this, with a great deal of willing help and co-operation from the Vicar and churchwardens of St Leonard's, Beoley.  Plans were drawn up to extricate the skull and subject it to a range of scientific examinations, including radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis.  The application was submitted to the Diocese, with the full support of the church, for a faculty to remove the skull for laboratory tests.

Sadly, although the advisers to the Chancellor (chief legal officer) of the Diocese were rather in favour of the project, Sir Charles Mynors - the Chancellor himself - was sceptical.  As such, he was only doing his job, and I believe he did so as assiduously as anyone could want.  It would have been natural and proper for him to have sought the opinions and advice of leading Shakespeare experts.  And I have no doubt whatsoever that they gravely misled him.

I know of no one who has looked into Langston's story, researched it, and followed it through to an analysis of the skull identified by Langston as Shakespeare's.  No one.  Until, that is, I undertook that research myself, publishing the results in Who Killed William Shakespeare? and The Faces of Shakespeare (plus, I might add, in my forthcoming biography of Sir William Davenant, due out next February).  No one has ever looked into this.  Nobody from Stratford, to the best of my knowledge, has ever shown the slightest interest in Langston and his story or been moved - by curiosity, if nothing else - to inspect the skull.  No one.

Rather, the line coming out of Stratford has been consistent.  The experts don't want to believe the story, so they rubbish it.  They pretend that it's "folklore" (which it isn't), that the skull was returned to Stratford (which it wasn't), and that Langston only published his story to raise money for the restoration of the church (which doesn't stand up to reasonable scrutiny).  Indeed, there are reasons for believing that Langston made little if any impact with or money from his publication, and certainly not enough to repair his church, if a rather forlorn and desperate letter he sent to James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips in 1887 is anything to go by (I have a copy of that letter too - again, Langston identifies himself as the author of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen, only now he is living in Bath and looking for someone who will actually pay him for an article he has written entitled, Shakespeare in his cups.)

The point needs to be made: the Shakespeare experts have gone to quite extraordinary lengths to bury the story of Shakespeare's skull, written by a local clergyman with local knowledge.  It doesn't fit in with their idea of Shakespeare, so it must be ignored, ridiculed, rejected out of hand.  They have refused to look into it and they certainly don't want anybody else to go delving.  The very subject is taboo.

And I'm pretty sure that when Sir Charles Mynors, in all good faith, approached them for their expert opinion, they just showered him with their prejudices.  Which is not, in fact, expert opinion.  Truth be told, they've never bothered to research or investigate the story at all.  Ever.

And now, shortly before filming starts on the TV documentary, a story mysteriously appears out of nowhere in The Telegraph, and then all across the world, rubbishing the very idea that the story of the skull is anything other than "Gothic Fiction".  Sir Charles Mynors had found no evidence to link Shakespeare to the skull.  Of course he hadn't.  Because the Shakespeare fraternity had absolutely no idea that such evidence exists, and if they did, they certainly weren't going to let Sir Charles know about it.

The last thing they want is for someone actually to study the skull, forensically, and compare the idiosyncrasies of the skull - all those dinks and dents and breakages - with the portraits of Shakespeare.  Still less to compare the skull's DNA with a sample taken from one of the descendants of Shakespeare's sister.  You'd think, if they were so sure of themselves, they'd say, "Why not?  Go ahead!  You'll be proven wrong."  But that's not what they've done.  Rather, they've tried to obstruct a legitimate investigation.

There is evidence linking Shakespeare to the skull, be it Langston's painstakingly researched (if somewhat fictionalised) accounts, the visible similarities between the skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, or the links between Shakespeare and the Sheldons, whose funerary vault his skull apparently shares.

Or how about this?  The story began, so Langston claimed, with Horace Walpole's offer to George Selwyn MP of 300 guineas in return for the skull.  Horace Walpole was in a better position than most to know that Shakespeare's skull was not in Stratford but underneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley.  Walpole's "intimate friend" and neighbour in Twickenham - he jokingly called her his "wife" - was Lady Browne, born Frances Sheldon, in Beoley.

There is also the matter of why Rev. Charles Jones chose to change his name to Charles Jones Langston just as his first instalment of the story was going to press.  Could it have had something to do with the fact that, shortly after Shakespeare died in 1616, his "cousin", Thomas Greene, promptly resigned his post as steward and town clerk of Stratford-upon-Avon?  The man elected to replace Greene as town clerk was one Anthony Langston.  On 18 August 1619, this same Anthony Langston witnessed a deed by which Shakespeare's old friend and colleague, Henry Condell, conveyed some property in Worcestershire to Edward Sheldon of Beoley.  Was Rev. C.J. Langston seeking to highlight his ancestral link to Anthony Langston, town clerk of Stratford and a man who had a connection with both the co-editor of the First Folio and the son of Ralph Sheldon, in whose funerary urn Shakespeare's skull was allegedly found?

The Chancellor's judgement that no evidence exists to justify the proper forensic examination of the Beoley skull was wrong.  Not his fault, though.  He was misinformed or misguided by those very experts he had turned to for advice.

The same experts who, I suspect, are now trying to undermine the TV documentary about these things by letting the world know that we have been debarred from running DNA tests on the skull and so the case might well never be proven.

One really needs to ask - what are they so afraid of?

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 Faces of Shakespeare

Morning, all!

I'll be on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire local radio this morning, talking about the story of Shakespeare's skull.  There have been developments in that arena, but I can't go public with them just yet.

HOWEVER ... Goldsmiths, University of London, have just published their GLITS e-journal for the past year, and my illustrated paper on The Faces of Shakespeare - Revealing Shakespeare's Life and Death through Portraits and Other Objects is the second item on the menu.

Here's the link to my paper in the Goldsmiths GLITS journal.

More to come later.

Gunpowder Treason - a 400 Year Old Lie

96 people died at the Hillsborough Stadium on 15 April 1989.  Even as the full scale of the disaster was becoming apparent, the authorities - police, politicians, the press - were concocting a story about it.  It was all caused by drunken football fans, they said.  Those same fans had picked the pockets of the dead and urinated on the paramedics who were trying to help.

We now know that that story was a pack of lies, although it took more than two decades for the truth to come out.  But what had happened was a political elite, composed of extremists, had cooked up and spun a false yarn designed to demonise a perceived enemy.  That enemy was, (a) football fans, who were seen as hooligans, and (b) the people of Liverpool, who remained obstinately opposed to the socio-economic insanity of Thatcherism.  The disaster provided an excuse for the State to denigrate those who seemed unable to fight back while, at the same time, covering up its own incompetence.

So what has that got to do with the Gunpowder Plot?

Well, we now know the truth about Hillsborough, 25 years ago, and few commentators would have the gall to repeat the lies told by the police and the government back then.  We do not, however, know the truth about the "powder treason", 409 years ago, because historians insist on repeating the lies.

The Radio Times reports that BBC2 has "just given the green light to Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot".  "It's a total retelling," says the writer, "which uses the interrogation of Fawkes's number three, Thomas Winter, who gave away the whole story."

Okay, before we go any further ...

Fawkes was not the ringleader.  That was Robert Catesby.  Guy Fawkes was essentially a hired hand.  Arguably, Thomas Wintour was Catesby's number three.  But did he give away the whole story?

"We restage the interrogation and get inside the plot, which was huge", continues the writer, Adam Kemp, breathlessly.  Restage the interrogation, hunh?  That'll be interesting.  I can only assume we will mention the fact that Thomas Wintour had been shot in the shoulder when he and his comrades were finally cornered by a local posse.  Whether he would have been capable of composing his ten-page confession in neat handwriting is open to doubt.  But the signature on the confession - a rather bold "Thomas Winter" - wasn't his own.  He spelled his name "Wintour".

Note that Adam Kemp referred to "Thomas Winter".  He's using the name used by the Jacobean government, not the individual whose name it actually was.  Which means that his "total retelling" will, in all probability, be exactly the same version of events as that which was cooked up at the time by government ministers.  It won't be a "total retelling" at all.  Just another re-tread.

He goes on: "They would have got everyone under one roof, the royal family and the entire governing elite and bishops.  There is truly nothing that can come close.  It really was big,"

Yes, it was.  It would have been enormous.  If it had happened.  And yet, truth be told, there never was even the slightest risk that the king and his lords would be blown to smithereens.  Not a chance in hell.

Let's start with the gunpowder.  It was sourced from the Tower of London, where the government (which had the monopoly on gunpowder) kept its supply under the supervision of Sir George Carew.  Carew, a government insider, had just become Baron Carew of Clopton.  He somehow managed to let Clopton House, his estate just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, to the gunpowder plotters.  Nobody seems to have thought that was odd.  But the government resolutely blocked an investigation into how the gunpowder had been removed from the Tower.

How much gunpowder was there?  Good question.  A credible source said one barrel.  Guy Fawkes confessed to secreting twenty barrels in the Parliament building.  Sir Robert Cecil, who knew more about the plot than anybody, wrote of there having been 34 barrels.  The figure eventually settled on was 36 barrels.

So nobody was quite sure how much gunpowder had been involved, and no explanation was ever given for its mysterious disappearance from the government's store.  A large quantity of gunpowder was returned to the Tower a couple of days after Fawkes's arrest and was registered as "decayed".  Its constituent elements had separated.  It would never have blown up anything, let alone the royal family and entire governing elite.  There wouldn't even have been a puff!

Reliable witnesses saw the real ringleaders - Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy - emerging from Sir Robert Cecil's house in the early hours of the morning, just days before the plot was discovered.  That's like the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings being spotted sneaking out of 10 Downing Street a few days before they detonated their rucksacks on crowded tubes and buses (except, of course, that the gunpowder plotters explosives were "decayed" and weren't going to blow up).  Thomas Percy himself was a government insider, in the king's service at the time.  His job was to make sure that the plot proceeded and to implicate his kinsman, the Earl of Northumberland, whom Sir Robert Cecil has sworn to destroy.

Catesby, on the other hand, spent much of the year leading up to the plot's discovery trying to trick Father Henry Garnet into condoning the plot.  The government repeatedly delayed the opening of Parliament so that Catesby would have more time to incriminate Garnet.  Catesby was aided in his attempts to entrap Garnet by William Parker, Lord Monteagle.  Monteagle was eventually credited with exposing the plot and rewarded handsomely - every mention of him in the plotters' confessions was redacted.  Both Catesby and Percy, who had engineered the plot, were killed, rather than taken alive, on the instructions of Sir Robert Cecil.

The simple fact is that the Gunpowder Plot never really was.  True, some of its members were ardent Catholics who joined what they believed would be a blow for freedom.  But the main players were government stooges (William Shakespeare - who was alarmingly close to the events - made this clear in his plays, Macbeth and Coriolanus).  In other words, the Gunpowder Plot was pretty much the same as every other plot of its time.  These supposed "plots" were "discovered" on a more-or-less annual basis, and they all followed the same pattern - a good example being the Babington Plot of 1586.  A Catholic patsy was lured into a fake conspiracy by government agents, who then "discovered" the plot which they themselves had manufactured.  There was massive publicity, and the Protestant extremists at the heart of the government got to enact the policies which they'd been hankering to put into place: the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots - a Catholic contender for the English throne - or the execution of Father Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits in England.

The constant repetition of the government's lies about the Gunpowder Plot is an offense to history.  It amounts to a 400-year propaganda campaign, and it speaks volumes that British historians would rather regurgitate the falsehoods about Catholic militancy than investigate the truth about Protestant duplicity.

The Gunpowder Plot is more than just an iconic incident-that-didn't-happen.  It led to the English Civil War; John Pym and John Milton were obsessed with it.  Like so many others in those paranoid times, they had swallowed the lies spouted by the likes of Sir Robert Cecil (for his own personal gain).  So successful were the propagandists in broadcasting the cooked-up story of the Gunpowder Plot, it fuelled the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the fanatics for decades.  Arguably, it continues to fuel our irrational fears of some nefarious, fanatical "enemy within" which is "out to get us" because it "hates our freedom".  That sort of nonsense has been doing the rounds since the Gunpowder Plot, and it's precisely why the plot was invented.  Fear is a useful tool of government.

Historians repeat the Gunpowder Plot lie for a simple reason.  Englishness has always been difficult to define.  It's easier to explain what being "English" means in terms of what it is not - Catholic, Jewish, Irish, Scottish, French, etc. - than in terms of what it is.  That is why the English lay claim to a "tolerance" and a sense of "fair play" which they so seldom exhibit.  If they were honest with themselves, they'd have to say that the simplest way to be "English" is to hate, fear and abuse anyone who isn't.  But that problem created its own national myth, embroidered by generations of Whig historians anxious to justify every atrocity and outrage of our past as a necessary part of our Manifest Destiny.  The State had to persecute Catholics because the Catholics wanted to blow up the State (even though they never did; never actually came close).  To be English is to be Protestant.  The Catholics were, ipso facto, the enemy - like those football supporters who died at Hillsborough.  They were "not on our side", so they could be slandered.

It really is time to put the lie of the Gunpowder Plot to bed.  And I doubt very much indeed that the BBC's Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot will even try to do that.  No.  Just going by the title alone, it seems most likely that it'll be yet another repetition of the old, old lie, designed to excuse the most vicious persecution of English citizens who happened to be Catholic. 

Such a slavish acceptance and repetition of past propaganda isn't history, though.  It's telling fairy tales for political purposes.

Apologia

I've been remiss.  Dreadfully so.

The only thing I can say in my defence is that I have been busy writing my biography of Sir William Davenant (Shakespeare's Son) and enjoying myself giving tours in Stratford-upon-Avon - some days, you might see me in doublet and breeches, leading a troupe of tourists or students from one Shakespearean site to another, whilst on Saturday evenings I guide intrepid visitors through the dark delights of Tudor World on Sheep Street, every Ghost Tour threatening to yield at least one supernatural experience.  So, yes, I've been busy.

Added to that, my paper on The Faces of Shakespeare is about to be published by Goldsmiths University; Moon Books will soon be publishing Naming the Goddess, to which I contributed a chapter, and my own The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion is currently passing through the Moon Books production process.  Oh, and I've also been quietly working on a project based on events in 1964-65 for a company set up by a very good friend of mine from my drama school days.

So I hope you'll forgive the radio silence.

Anyhoo - my great buddy and artistic collaborator on The Grail, Lloyd Canning, got a fantastic four-page spread in this month's Cotswold and Vale Magazine, including (as you can see) the cover shot.  Lloyd's amazing images really came out well in the magazine, and The Grail got a good mention (as well as my Who Killed William Shakespeare?), which means that we're all very chuffed.  A hearty CONGRATS to Lloyd for the well-earned and much-deserved publicity.

I'll try to post another update very soon.  I promise.

Crowd-funding - Can you help?

Rebecca Rideal runs the excellent History Vault website. 

On that site, she has published a five minute interview with yours truly, and my two posts about Shakespeare in love - The White Lady (about Anne, or Agnes, Whateley) and The Dark Lady, about Jane Davenant.  It really is an excellent historical website.

She also organises a monthly Historic Punch event in London's Soho.  So she takes her history very seriously.

Rebecca is looking for funding to cover the costs of her History PhD.  Now, I've something of an interest in this, because her thesis covers aspects of life in Restoration London, where I'm spending a lot of my time at the moment, working on my book about Sir William Davenant.

To raise the necessary finance, Rebecca has turned to crowd-funding, there being no viable alternative.  So I'm putting this post up in the hope that some benefactors out there will take the bait. 

It's a good cause - and Rebecca explains it all here.

If you can help at all, it will be very much appreciated.  Please click here for more information.

Thanks.

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?

Pure Honey

Just found out today that one of the most popular posts ever on the excellent Historical Honey website was this one - All is True: Fire at the Globe Theatre - which was the first post I wrote for them last year.

Pretty pleased with that!

Oxford Mania

Any psychologists out there care to help me?

I'm wondering whether there's already a name for it - Something-or-other Syndrome - or whether we might actually be in a position to identify a previously uncategorised condition and give it a name ourselves.

Let me explain.

My wife, the Adorable Kim, sent me a link yesterday to the Spectator blog.  She drew my attention, in particular, to the comments beneath the post.

First, the post itself, which was titled - with breath-taking insouciance - Shakespeare was a nom de plume - get over it.  The author claimed to have found the smoking gun, that one clinching piece of evidence that people knew, even as far back as 1595, that Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare.  He provides a photo (above) of a detail from a page of William Covell's Polimanteia where, in the margin, we see a note:

All praise worthy. Lucrecia. Sweet Shakspeare.

But no.  That's not relevant.  Because, to the side of that, in the main text, Covell writes about Samuel Daniel's Delia sonnets and his Cleopatra, remarking that -

"Oxford thou maist extoll thy courte-deare-verse happie Daniell"

Now, to the casual eye, this is a harmless enough piece.  Covell, a clergyman from Cambridge, notes that Samuel Daniel, who was educated at Oxford, could be admired and extolled by his old university.  Daniel was, in Covell's words, "court-dear-verse happy", which appears to suggest that his poetry pleased the royal court of Queen Elizabeth.  Meanwhile, in the margin, Covell adds "All praiseworthy" (probably in regard to Samuel Daniel) and then "Lucrecia Sweet Shakspeare", on the grounds that Daniel's Delia sonnets and his Cleopatra were published roundabout the same time as Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.

But maybe our eyes are too casual.  Because to the conspiracy nuts, that small snippet is PROOF that "Shakespeare" was really Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

See - beside the margin note (Sweet Shakspeare) we have the word "Oxford".  See?  And after Oxford we get the words "courte-deare-verse", which is OBVIOUSLY a clue, isn't it?  Can't you see it?  It says "Our De Vere"!

Or rather, it doesn't.

Now, if you click on the link to the Spectator blog, you'll see that this spectacularly irrelevant sample of conspiracy-fail is bigged up to the nth degree.  All us Stratfordians (i.e., those of us who pay attention to what people actually said about Shakespeare back in his day) are illiterate morons in the pay of dark forces determined to maintain a 400-year old fraud.

It gets worse when you look at the comments, and the unseemly slanging match of insult and aspersion.  My particular favourite - our whatever the opposite of "favourite" is - is this comment:

"Hopeless? Trying to fit a commoner - a petty thief from Stratford - into some supremely advantaged individual possessing rights of equality with a peer as published in quarto dedications. - The temerity of this commoner might be unique?
That he could influence English arts and culture and history by some kind of osmosis witht native fauna? - Are you for real?
First tell us the kind of excellence you seek in the defense of this Dumbness. Perhaps during those hard times you see Stratford men as a case for socioeconomic blindness? You see your literary comparatives defend - what? The poetry from the Stratford man's childhood?
Give us some merit to follow in at least a few of your arguments."

Setting aside the fact that the argument here is difficult to follow ("word salad", anyone?) let's be honest: the comment comes from someone who just hates William Shakespeare.  He was a "commoner" (ooh, steady on, old chap) and a "petty thief from Stratford" (evidence?  Oh yes, he supposedly poached a deer - see my book, where I deal with that).  So how could he possibly have possessed "rights of equality with a peer"? (that's an old argument, and shows a blind ignorance of what life was like in Shakespeare's day.  Ever heard of Ben Jonson?)

An astonishing outburst, which is a good 200-odd years out of date.  But then, something tells me that the individual who left this comment happens to believe that titled lords are the biz!  Please, bring back the aristocracy - they're the only people who can string a sentence together, and who deserve to be immortal and to "influence English arts and culture and history".  The rest of us are just trash living in our own middens.  Please, won't some grand Earl come along and show us the way, for we are mere scum?!

Nonsense.  Absolute nonsense.

There is no smoking gun.  There is NO evidence that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays,. and PLENTY of evidence that he did.  There is NO evidence that somebody else wrote them for him.  It is a silly story.

And yet, a certain kind of person clings to it with a kind of religious devotion ("Dear Lord [Oxford], give me the strength to serve you here in the midst of idolatry and evil ...").  That's what it's like.  A kind of religious mania ("Protect us, Lord Oxford; we who are persecuted for thy sake by the blind and the ignorant who have erected a commoner in thy place ...").

Look around, though, and you'll find many examples of such wayward extremism these days.  Climate Change Denial?  Check.  UKIP supporters?  Check.  People who don't like wind farms?  Check.  The Tea Party?  Check.  Etcetera, etcetera ...

They all use the same methods.  Weird claims, based on a fundamental refusal to read the evidence and a crazy belief in "smoking guns", coupled with outright abuse directed at anybody who challenges them.

Standards of debate are slipping.  Why?  Because these people never give in (it's a form of religious mania, remember).  You can beat them 100 times in a fair and open debate, and they'll just keep coming back with insults and wild, abusive, hysterical claims.  They are the only ones who know "The Truth", so be damned with you, and your evidence, and your facts.

So - any psychologists out there care to help me define this strange syndrome?  There seems to be something millenarian about it, as if the End of the World were nigh and we must all repent our sinful ways (admiring a commoner - you fools, you'll all burn in Hell!)  Can anyone in the know help me to put a name to this outrageous behaviour, this determination to shout down anyone with the facts at their disposal, this refusal to see things as they are?

What makes somebody leap to such an extreme?  What is their major malfunction?

And how do we stop them infecting the ether with their insanity?

Get in touch if you think you can help.

Shakespeare Week

Now you didn't think I'd forget Shakespeare's birthday, did you?

Not his 450th birthday, surely?

Of course not.

It's been a busy week.  And I've found myself biting my tongue quite a lot, as the media celebrates the Other Shakespeare - the Shakespeare who is really very little more than a Trademark.

It started for me with a fantastic afternoon at the Tree House Bookshop in Kenilworth, where I gave a talk about Who Killed William Shakespeare? and signed some books for the start of their Shakespeare Festival.  If you happen to be in the Kenilworth area, I can highly recommend a visit to the Tree House Bookshop - it's a lovely, relaxing place to browse second hand books, to lounge in their sofas, drinking tea or coffee.

Wednesday was, of course, Shakespeare's birthday.  And the "We Love Coventry and Warwickshire" website was kind enough to host a wee post of mine, entitled Two Years to Find Shakespeare.  Pretty self-explanatory, I'd hope.

I then had a piece published by my beloved Review Group on their wonderful blog, this one entitled - what else? - Happy Birthday, Shakespeare.

And now I'm looking forward to the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival, and my talk/book signing there this coming Tuesday on Who Killed Shakespeare?  Advance bookings appear to be pretty good, but if you are in or near Shakespeare's hometown on the afternoon of 29 April, come along - there's tea and cake!

So, you can't really accuse me of not celebrating Shakespeare's birthday.  But, as I hope my various talks and blogs have made it clear, we might not really be celebrating Shakespeare.  Not yet.  We're pretending we are, but we're still allowing the experts to keep us in the dark about him.

But that will change soon.  And I'll have a lot more to tell you about "Shakespeare's Son", Sir William Davenant, as my work on his biography progresses.

TTFN!

Paradigms Lost

It's the cruellest month, according to T.S. Eliot.  For me, though, it's a month of teaching, talking and signing.

The big one will be Stratford Literary Festival, where I'm appearing on Tuesday 29 April.  Naturally, I've been giving some thought to what I'll talk about on that occasion.

All being well, I'll be showing a lovely, large, blown-up poster of the "Wadlow" portrait, around which I based my paper given at Goldsmiths, University of London, last month (see left: we made Page 2 of the South London Press).  That, in itself, will probably be pretty controversial - introducing a "new" portrait of Shakespeare to the town.

But there'll be more to the talk than a discussion of the portrait.  I'm currently inclined to talk about the pendulum of history, and the way that a false view of history is often maintained for political reasons.

There are two major periods I'm tempted to analyse.  I opened my book Who Killed William Shakespeare? with an examination of the second half of the 18th century and the process by which Shakespeare was quite deliberately forgotten.  Of course, Shakespeare wasn't forgotten - we've all heard of him - but who he was, that was forgotten.

I'll talk about Shakespeare's mulberry, which was chopped down by an intolerant clergyman, who then went on to demolish New Place, Shakespeare's grand home in Stratford.  I'll talk about the discovery of the Jesuit Testament of the Soul, which had been signed by Shakespeare's father, John, and hidden among the rafters of the Shakespeare Birthplace (the testament vanished from the study of the Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone, probably because it's existence was somewhat embarrassing).  I'll also talk about David Garrick's farcical "Shakespeare Jubilee" and its impact on our understanding of Shakespeare - more than anything, the Jubilee established Shakespeare as the national poet, the "Immortal Bard", while simultaneously cutting him off from his roots - and raise the matter of the Rev. James Wilmot, a vicar who retired to a village near Stratford and first put forward the silly theory that somebody other than Shakespeare must have written the plays.

So - between 1755 and 1785, the real Shakespeare was forgotten, and a national myth erected in his place.  But there's another period I find interesting.

One hundred years on from the time in which the real Shakespeare was determinedly forgotten, attempts were being made to establish who he really was.  The death mask, found in Germany, which Professor Richard Owen, superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, concluded was the model for the Shakespeare funerary monument in Stratford, was exhibited in the town as Shakespeare's Death Mask on the 300th anniversary of his birth.  The discovery of the death mask had prompted numerous scholars to call for Shakespeare's grave to be opened, and his skull extracted so that it could be compared with the death mask.

At the height of this furore, Rev. Charles Jones Langston published his story of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found.  Found, that is, in the private family crypt beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley Church, 12 miles from Stratford.

The powers that be in Stratford currently refuse to discuss the death mask or the skull and pour scorn on the very idea that either might have anything to do with Shakespeare.

However, there is no evidence that anyone connected with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has taken the trouble to investigate the death mask (now in Darmstadt Castle) or the skull at Beoley.  To put it simply, they're not remotely interested in the death mask or the skull.  And they don't want anyone else to be interested in them either.

Rev. Charles Jones Langston published the first half of his extraordinary account of How Shakespeare's Skull Was Stolen in October 1879.  That same year, the Comedie Francaise came to London, bringing with them a play entitled Davenant.  The play was based on the long running rumour that Sir William Davenant was Will Shakespeare's natural son.

I find it odd, looking back, to see that some of the finest minds throughout Europe were so concerned with exploring possibilities - that the death mask was Shakespeare's, that the rogue skull in the crypt at Beoley was Shakespeare's, that Davenant was Shakespeare's son - and were willing and eager to put those possibilities to the test, scientifically-speaking.  I'm currently researching Sir William Davenant for a new biography (it'll be published by The History Press in 2016) and have just received a copy of a short book published in 1905; based on a dissertation he had written, John David Ellis Williams' book is entitled Sir William Davenant's Relation to Shakespeare: With an Analysis of the Chief Characters of Davenant's Plays.

At around the same time as Ellis wrote his dissertation, other experts were carefully studying and measuring the Darmstadt death mask and comparing their measurements - broadly successfully - with those of the Shakespeare effigy in his Stratford funerary monument.

There's such a huge sense of a missed opportunity.  The second half of the nineteenth century appeared to be edging close to several breakthroughs: the formal identification of the death mask, the (re-)discovery of Shakespeare's skull, the true nature of the Shakespeare-Davenant connection (as late as 1913, Arthur Acheson was confidently identifying Sir William Davenant's mother, Jane, as the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets).  All of these developments could and should have transformed the way we think about William Shakespeare.

But they didn't.  Something went wrong, and I suspect that something was the Great War.  England, desperate to preserve its sense of self, abandoned all the new research (a lot of which was German) and reverted to its comfy, cosy national myths.  In other words, the national myth of William Shakespeare - a humble, Protestant lad, beloved of that wonderful monarch, Elizabeth I - was reinstated.  All the advances of the previous decades were swept aside.  We went back to the reactionary view of Shakespeare as the national poet of a Protestant constitutional monarchy.  This was the Whig historian's notion of Shakespeare, and it was utterly unrelated to Shakespeare the man.

We've been stuck with that false idea of Shakespeare ever since.  The propagandist myth of Shakespeare, which was formulated in the late-18th century with the intent of removing any trace or taint of Catholicism in Shakespeare's background, has continued to be taught as if it was historically accurate - nay, as if it is the only known version of the Shakespeare story.  It is this Whiggish myth that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford propagates with ruthless determination.

As if those great minds of the late-19th century had never even considered the death mask, the skull, or the likelihood that Sir William Davenant was Shakespeare's son.  No; all that must be forgotten.  We were making progress, until the reactionaries took control.  And now generations of children, the world over, are subjected to an irrelevant and misleading account of Shakespeare's life.

It is time to resume the brilliant work done by so many scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the devastating tragedy of the First World War sent us all running back home to Mamma.

It is time to continue their efforts, to achieve the goals that they were making for, and to reveal the reality of Shakespeare and his world.

None of that will happen if the Shakespeare "experts" have their way.  But we owe it to Shakespeare, and to Stratford, and to every child who must encounter Shakespeare at school.  If we want to understand Shakespeare's words, we must understand his life.  And for that to happen, we must explode the asinine myth created in the late-18th century, and resurrected in the 20th century, and pick up where the genuine experts left off.

Now - how do we think a talk like that will go down in Stratford?