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Brenda James    Page 1    02/12/2008

Why the Shakespeare Authorship Question really matters 

DOES IT REALLY MATTER WHO WROTE THE WORKS ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE?

Any artistic creation is the result of the combination of inspiration and perspiration on behalf of its creator or creators.  It goes without saying that if we learn something about the time in which the artist lived,  then we shall be better able to understand the sociological aspects of the works.  Similarly, if we understand something about the artist himself, then we shall better understand the psychological aspects of the works.  Indeed, it is often difficult to separate psychological from sociological cause and effect, so by closing our eyes to the artistic creator, his life, his aspirations, his learning, and his personal struggle, we lose quite a lot of the meaning and impact of his or her works, especially when those works were created in an epoch which was so different from our own.  Additionally, any insight into the psychology of the Shakespeare works is bound to be beneficial for anyone involved in the production of the plays.

HOW DOES KNOWING ABOUT A VIABLE AUTHOR FOR THE SHAKESPEARE WORKS BECOME A PRACTICAL AID IN UNDERSTANDING THEM?

In order to understand artistic works from such a distant time as the 16^th and 17^th centuries, we have to somehow access, get a feel for, the society of the times in which they were created.  Each age carries with it its own common sense.  We do not often stop to analyse the common sense of our own times; we learn it and become accustomed to it from childhood.  It then becomes part of the ideology we automatically carry with us, mostly in our subconscious.  Carrying with us our common sense and ideology tends to work in the same way as we carry the grammar of our own language.  We don’t have to stop and think how to recognise it or how to use it.  But the problem is that everyday philosophy, politics, and scientific understanding have changed so drastically since the 16^th century that we cannot automatically latch on to the common sense embodied in works of Shakespeare’s time.  One way in which we can attempt to understand the times is to read history books.  But there are two main problems with many history textbooks, especially when our main aim is to access the literature of the past.

The first problem is that some historical investigators have not succeeded in shaking off their present-day ideologies.  It is all too easy to view the past with modern eyes, and sometimes to blur the dividing line between fact and opinion.  Even seasoned historical writers can fall into this trap.  Readers can therefore tend to lose sight of the fact that their books are secondary sources, even though they are sometimes labelled as authoratative.  To make matters worse, successive historians usually like to refer to works by their own contemporary or previous historians, so that any original errors of fact or opinion can become compounded through the ages.  

Of course, to break away from these problems we can all go back to primary sources, if we have the time.  We can visit Record Offices up and down the country, the National Archives at Kew, or the Institute of Historical Research in London, where we can find excellent calendars of events for certain years, records of the proceedings of Parliament, and both personal and governmental correspondence from the times we are researching.  All this brings history truly alive for us and, I would argue, gives us a much more accurate feeling for the times than reading the disembodied history contained in some historical text books.  We may pick up history in a hapahazard way if we go back to primary sources before reading textbooks.  But, after all, that is how we pick up the common sense of our own times.  And it works, doesn’t it?  The human brain has a facility for making patterns out of haphazard facts and incidents, whereas it sometimes resists patterns which are presented to us without enough facts and examples to back them up.  ‘More matter with less art’ is what we need as a first step to understanding our ancestors. 

Anyway, there are quick ways of accessing primary sources nowadays.  There are some books which specifically deal with collections of Elizabethan primary sources, and there’s the excellent Dictionary of National Biography, which is now provided online for anyone who has a library card.  I think it’s therefore best to home in on the lives of some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and follow up the paths of their individual biographies before actually returning to history textbooks.  The DNB is a good place to begin, and each potted biography has notes at the end directing us to primary as well as secondary sources.

PROBLEMS WITH SECONDARY SOURCES: THE 'GREAT MAN' THEORY

But even if one does focus on primary research there is a second problem standing in our way.  This problem is the GREAT MAN THEORY of history.  Historians have tended to concentrate on certain generally-perceived movers and shakers.  Successive historians have therefore focused in again and again on the same old names which are well known and about whom a lot of research has already been done.  As we all know, however, in real life there are often men and women whose work has been great, yet who have gone unrecognised.  There are several reasons for this, of course, each individual having his own story of bad luck, lack of financial backing, missed opportunities, skeletons in cupboards, or simply a deep desire to avoid the limelight.  But when it comes to the Shakespeare authorship question the problem in the past has been that most researchers who set out specifically to find alternative authors have looked only among the ‘great’ men already widely researched by historians.  Such seekers have, for the most part, neither sought out nor stumbled upon direct clues which might set them on the right path.  This makes their surmising little better than trying to choose the winner of the Grand National by looking at a list of horses in a newspaper, closing one’s eyes, and picking out a name with a pin.

THE SECRET WRITER

This is a strange way of going about things, particularly when it comes to the Shakespeare authorship, because in Sonnet 71 the writer using the Shakespeare pseudonym says to his addressee 

“O, if, I say, you look upon this verse/ When I perhaps compounded am with clay,/Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,” which immediately suggests that the writer did not wish his real name widely broadcast.

Then, in Sonnet 81 the writer actually states that no one will know his name, because he says: “... I, once gone, to all the world must die.”  These are all so obviously the words of a man under some constraint not to divulge his identity.  And in other sonnets he expresses the same constraint again and again, sometimes openly and sometimes in allegorical terms.  This means that the author was not a man about whom a great deal had been written, nor a man who set out to seek the limelight for himself as a writer of groundbreaking literature.  He was clearly not expecting his name to be remembered.  The real Shakespeare was therefore unlikely to be a man whose name was already known as that of a writer with his real name placed on his works.  Indeed, sonnet 81 suggests that the true writer never wrote anything under his own name, otherwise his name would not disappear from general view after his death. 

Altogether, this means that in reading any of the milliard biographical fantasies on William Shakespeare of Stratford we are allowing our perception of the works to be at best confused and at worst erroneous.  Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her excellent book Ungentle Shakespeare, actually goes so far as to say that nothing in Shakespeare’s life throws any light on his works and that hardly any connections or reflections of his life and knowledge can be seen in his dramas.  In her very last chapter she therefore advises her readers to read no more biographies of Shakespeare, because nothing makes sense.  “Just read his works,” she says.  Yet she professes to remain a Stratfordian and steadfastly says she will have nothing to do with the authorship question.  In the light of so much stumbling around in the dark, this is indeed an understandable position, and one which I myself adhered to, until I so unexpectedly came upon the very substantial clues and research leading to Sir Henry Neville.

It is good that she advises us not to read the repeated Shakespeare fantasies, posing as biographies, that have blossomed since the Romanticism of the nineteenth century and are still in full bloom.  They are misleading, unsatisfying and - even worse - can leave the Shakespeare beginner with so many anomalies in his or her mind that he becomes frustrated and may even start to think she will never understand the works.  But it can still be helpful to continue looking in other directions for the author, because even that activity on its own aids our understanding of the plays.  The research itself will put us in touch with the real men and women of the times.  And to present the plays meaningfully - and to act them meaningfully we should have a viable vision of the messages, ideas, artistry and connections carried in those plays.  

But from the writer’s own statements in his Sonnets, we can also see that researchers who have been looking in the direction of men already named and known as writers, such as Bacon, Marlowe and the Earl of Oxford have focused on the wrong identities ab initio.  And even researchers who look further afield have still mainly limited their scope to the great men of history. Well-known aristocrats, for example, have set up their own memorials, so their names are not dead and forgotten, yet the man writing under the Shakespeare pseudonym says that his identity will most certainly die with him.  “My name be buried where my body is, and live no more to shame nor me nor you,” he says in Sonnet 72.  Altogether, the sonnets bear 18 references to names and naming, while a consciousness of shame is mentioned over 20 times.  This does indeed show rather a close concern with both subjects, neither of which concerns tie in with what little we know of Shakespeare’s life. 

Brenda James [Read part 2 - The path leading to  Henry Neville]

©Brenda James    Page 1    02/12/2008

The Shakespeare Authorship Question, part 2: First steps along The path leading to Sir Henry Neville

Throughout my time teaching Shakespeare, I found all the known authorship contenders interesting but unconvincing.  Admittedly, though, following their lives was much more helpful than following up the Shakespeare myth, because it brought me into contact with the true spirit of the times, rather than with the unviable Shakespeare of Stratford, about whom very little is truly known or documented.  But I decided mainly to study the works and the times, and keep the authorship question open, because none of the contenders truly connected with the issues, topics, style and imagery within the Shakespeare works.  It wasn’t worth following up the question itself too assiduously unless I found clearly defined clues in the works and/or in my own historical primary research. 

My prime aim was to understand the works, and I thought a good way of doing this would be to try and work out who the mysterious dedicatee of the Shakespeare sonnets might be.  He was named only as  W.H. but he was obviously a close friend of the writer of the sonnets, so by discovering his identity, I thought, I would be able to see precisely which circles the author moved in.  Even if I didn’t then discover the precise identity of the author himself, at least I would gain a greater insight into the works by knowing something about the author’s milieu.

I had been intrigued by the Sonnets since I first read them at the age of 14.  I found them complex, mysterious, and resistant to a truly holistic interpretation.  I loved them, both for the beauty of their language and for the secrets they hinted at but never explained.  

I read that many people had thought that the mysterious Dedication to those sonnets might well be some sort of code.  I had always been intrigued by codes and mysteries, so I decided that one day I’d break the Sonnet code.

Well, many years later - after trying to keep up with a couple of careers alongside bringing up two children - some adverse circumstances to do with my weakened immune system ironically gave me the time to follow up my teenage interest.  I studied linguistics on a post-graduate course, and also cryptology, and finally saw how to break the Sonnet Code.  It was in that Code that I found  Henry’s name.  But even though this was immensely exciting, I was still not satisfied that  Henry Neville was correctly named as the true author.  I had never heard of him before, so I was determined not to get carried away unless his encoded authorship could be backed up by primary research.  And my research had to consist of searching through primary documents, because so few historians had written much about him.  Despite my previous setting aside of the authorship question, therefore, and despite my previous quasi-Stratfordian sympathies, I realised it would be immensely neglectful and prejudiced of me not to investigate when such a totally unsought and unexpected clue presented itself to me through an absolutely viable and verifiable cryptological analysis.

The first thing I did was to look at the DNB.  I discovered that at least three men living at the time of Shakespeare bore the name of Henry Neville.  However, the Code had given me a stated attribute concerning this particular man, as well as his name.  It said HE ONLIE BE OF THE SEIN, HENRY, POET, NEWELL.  (The letter W was formed by putting two VVs together in the printing of 1609 - the year the Sonnets were published - so the name could be either NEWELL or NEV VELL. )  There were no Henry Newells listed as being around during Shakespeare’s time, (although I was later to discover that  Henry Neville had indeed been recorded as Henry NEWELL on his baptismal record.)  Even before I discovered this, however, it seemed clear that the name was indeed N E V V E L L - NEVELL.  And I soon found something which made me catch my breath, because what I read in the DNB matched up perfectly with what the Code had told me.  I found a  Henry Neville who had almost identical birth and death dates to those of Shakespeare, and who had once been our Ambassador in France.  Hence the HE ONLIE BE OF THE SEIN epithet.  Amongst the three Henry Nevilles listed, he was the only one who had a tangible connection with France and hence with the River Seine.   Looking back at the Code, I then also saw ‘PARIS TRAETEE IT IS BY POET, and I had now read that Henry Neville had been ordered from his post in Paris to help formulate and negotiate the Treaty of Boulogne with the Spaniards.

This was all remarkable enough, but I was not going to give up further research so early in my quest.  I looked at the Sonnets again and found Sonnet 121 in which Neville seemed to be encoding his name: 

 ’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,

When not to be receives reproach of being,

And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed

Not by our feeling but by others’ seeing.

For why should others’ false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,

Which in their will count bad what I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own;

I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;

By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown,

Unless this general evil they maintain:

All men are bad and in their badness reign.

[The letters forming NEVIL in its various spellings are emboldened, above. Remarkably too, this sonnet implies many secrets from Sir Henry's life, as explained in a whole chapter I devote to it in Sir Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code] 

This was backed up by yet another sonnet which, after reading Neville’s biography, seemed to be encoding his name and attributes, just as was the Dedication itself:

Sonnet 111

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Pity me then, and wish I were renewed,

Whilst like a willing patient I will drink

Potions of eisel ‘gainst my strong infection;

No bitterness that I will bitter think,

Nor double penance to correct correction.

Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye

Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

A very viable message in this sonnet reads MY NAME IS SUBDUED: HENRE NEWILL.] 

And in Sonnet 76, the writer says that ‘Every word doth almost tell my name’ and, when we look at it, we find clusters spelling the various forms of Nevil everywhere.  (Neville was indeed spelt differently on several documents of the time, because there was no standardisation of spelling.)  But I must stress that I would not have noticed these encodings, had I not so unexpectedly discovered Neville’s name in the Dedication Code.

More documentary research was to follow.  I began by going to look up Neville’s personal letters in the Berkshire Record Office, and I remember saying to my husband on the way there that I was not even yet convinced I was absolutely on the right track.

 “What would convince you?”, he asked.

“Well, I might take it as a bit of a sign if I were to discover that Henry Neville was lame” I replied, “Because the writer tells us at least three times in the sonnets that he is lame and limps.”

You may imagine my surprise, then, when one of the first letters I read commisserated with  Henry for his ‘poor leg’.  This was from his sister in law, and she said she hoped that visiting the bath had brought some relief to it, because poor old Henry suffered from gout.  Now, a medical friend of mine tells me that this might have been the general term for rheumatism at the time, because he has noticed that  Henry is concealing his hand in his portrait, but what is shown of it looks like rheumatic swelling.  But the fact remains that both his sister in law and his friends in Parliament remarked on  Henry’s limp.

Next I read his diplomatic letters, and the Shakespearean devices he used in them were amazing.  But most of all, his letters, and general research, brought me into contact with his life story, and his circle of friends, family, learning and interests - and all of these matched up in a truly uncanny way with the Shakespeare works, chronologically speaking, and in every other conceivable respect.  Yet Neville had many viable reasons for wishing to remain a secret writer.  We are fortunate, however, in that he left just enough clues for us to discover his secret during succeeding centuries, as times grew more liberal, less harsh in prejudices, judgements and punishments. 

Neville's name appearing unexpectedly in the Dedication Code, and his identification as the author of Shakespeare's works then being supported by continuing primary research are highly unlikely to be the work of mere chance or coincidence.  No other contender matches the psychological and sociological profiling of the Shakespeare works so exactly as Sir Henry, which could hardly happen - especially with such an unknown, previously-unassociated name - unless Neville is indeed the true author.

Brenda James

 MORE ABOUT SIR HENRY NEVILLE, TOGETHER WITH NEW EVIDENCE OF HIS IDENTIFICATION AS SHAKESPEARE, CAN BE FOUND IN Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code