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.

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:)

Breaking my Silence

Hi, folks!

Julia Robb is a Texas-based writer.  I've known her - online - for a while now, and have reviewed a couple of her books, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

She's passionate about Shakespeare and has been very interested in developments since Who Killed William Shakespeare? was published in 2013.

Now she's interviewed me for her website/blog about Shakespeare, the Beoley skull, and the forthcoming Channel 4 documentary which will feature the skull.  It's a pretty free and frank, no-holds-barred interview, and you can read it here:

Skull-Duggery - Julia Robb interview with Simon Stirling

So I'm no longer biting my tongue, and the truth is out there.

Meanwhile, my very first copy of Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant is on its way to me from The History Press.

All in all, it's going to be an interesting time ...

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 - Latest

Working through the proofs of my Davenant book, "Shakespeare's Bastard", due out in February, and coming to the sections which deal with St Leonard's Church, Beoley, the Sheldon Chapel, and the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare" ...

It's been an interesting week, as far as "Shakespeare's Skull" goes.  The crypt in which it resides was opened up, this Tuesday, and the skull scanned by archaeologists from the University of Staffordshire.  All this was filmed for a Channel 4 documentary, due to be aired in April.

I didn't get to see the crypt, pictured above in a photo from circa 1939, so I didn't get to see the skull either.  But here I am, going through the passages on Beoley and the skull in Shakespeare's Bastard, and I turn to an endnote I made about Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian who wrote about Sir William Davenant.

Anthony Wood's close friend and benefactor was "The Great Sheldon", Ralph (1623-84), whose grandfather (also called Ralph) built the Sheldon Chapel alongside the chancel of Beoley church.  It was in the elder Ralph Sheldon's funerary urn, deposited in a small ossuary adjoining the vault underneath the Sheldon Chapel, that the Reverend C.J. Langston apparently found the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare" in about 1884.

Wood attended the burial of his patron, "The Great Sheldon", which took place "in a vault situate & being under the Chappell of our Lady joining to St Leonards Church of Beoly".  Presumably, then, Anthony Wood saw the crypt, under the Sheldon Chapel, in which Ralph Sheldon was laid to rest.  Maybe he also saw Shakespeare's skull in there.

Although the Sheldon Chapel itself was built by the elder Ralph Sheldon in 1580, there is little to indicate when the crypt underneath it was constructed.  The assumption tends to be that the chapel came first, and at a later date - before 1684, the year in which "The Great Sheldon" was buried in it - the crypt was constructed underneath the chapel.  But is that necessarily the case?

The elder Ralph Sheldon appears to have built the Sheldon Chapel (or Chapel of Our Lady, as Anthony Wood seems to have thought of it) strictly for the use of his own family.  It was invisible from the road but accessible from the Sheldons' manor house nearby.  The Sheldons were Catholic, and no doubt wanted a chapel to worship in (the black marble altar table in the Sheldon Chapel was reputedly blessed by Pope Gregory XIII).  However, the law required everyone to attend a Church of England place of worship.  Cunningly, Ralph Sheldon created a chapel which would allow his Catholic family to appear to be attending an Anglican church, as the law required, without actually setting foot in an Anglican church.  They attended, rather, their own Catholic chapel, alongside the Anglican chancel.  Clever, eh?

But what if a priest had been celebrating Mass in the Sheldon Chapel?  What if the family had been in attendance?  Where would they hide in the event of a government raid?

The obvious answer would be - under the chapel.  Access to the crypt is by removing a couple of steps which lead up to the Sheldon Chapel (the chapel, like the adjacent chancel, being a fair deal higher than the body of the church).  Today, concrete steps lead up to the chapel, and these had to be removed to allow Arrow Media to film the skull inside the crypt this week.  Previously, the steps would have been stone or, more probably, wood.

Examples exist of priest-holes which were accessed via "false" steps in staircases.  A step or two would be removed, or swung on a hinge, to open up the secret entrance to the hiding place.  Steps would also have to have been installed to connect the main body of the church to the Sheldon Chapel, and so it would be reasonable to expect that these stairs could have been designed to "open up", allowing access to the secret vault underneath the chapel to those who knew about it.

So, if the G-Men suddenly appeared, surrounding the church and its Catholic chapel, any priest or celebrant in the Catholic chapel could quickly disappear into the vault beneath the chapel, and the pursuivants would find the chapel empty.

The vault is large enough to hold a number of people, possibly for quite some length of time.  It would need to have been somewhat more capacious than the average priest-hole if it might have to accommodate several celebrants, plus a priest, all at once.  Only later did the readymade crypt become a handy burial vault for the family that built it.

A gap in the wall of the crypt opens into the little ossuary adjoining it - the "bone-house" in which the skull which looks suspiciously like it might be Shakespeare's was "found".  This can be thought of as an additional hiding place - a cramped "priest-hole" of last resort, in which a small priest could hide if the entrance to the vault was discovered.  It could also have been a repository for all that Catholic paraphernalia (rosaries, vestments, prayer books, candles, etc.) which could not be safely hidden anywhere else.  Everything needed for an illicit Catholic Mass in the Sheldon Chapel would be stored directly underneath it, and if it all went wrong, the priest - and some of his flock - could hide in the vault till the priest-hunters had gone.

I suspect, then, that the crypt and the ossuary were constructed at the same time as the chapel above, but not as a burial vault.  They were hiding places.

Shakespeare's head, collected after his sudden death - probably by his first love, Anne Whately, whose relatives were supported by the Sheldons of Beoley, and whose family name appears in various parts of the church, including on a churchwardens' chest in the Sheldon Chapel - would have been taken to Beoley church because there was a safe hiding place under the Sheldon Chapel.  It would have joined those priestly items necessary to hold a Mass in the chapel above.

There could have been no safer or more sacred a place for such an extraordinary relic as the head of the Catholic martyr, William Shakespeare.

Heads Up: Shakespeare's Bastard

Just came across this on the Foyle's website.

Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant by Yours Truly is now available for pre-order.  And it'll be published on my birthday!

That makes me strangely happy.