REBIRTH of THE AUTHOR

“There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone.”

Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ‘Everything and Nothing’, plays with the idea that William Shakespeare had the power to assume any identity he chose because he had no identity of his own. Borges’ story is based on the surprising fact that almost nothing is known about one of our civilization’s greatest writers – and that what is known about his life reveals nothing in the least bit interesting or suggestive of genius or literary ability of any kind. William Shakspere (sic) of Stratford-upon-Avon was a mediocrity – a run-of-the-mill businessman, broker and money-lender, a petty, litigious burgher who got a little rich. This paradox gives rise to Borges’ conceit: nothing less dramatic can be imagined than the life of the great dramatist.

Indeed, William Shakespeare is the Invisible Man of his time. His name on a title page or a dedication; a sole, ambiguous attribution by a contemporary; six signatures all spelled different ways. He owned no books, wrote and received no letters. He was never paid for what he wrote; never arrested either, unlike a number of his contemporaries; never questioned or tortured, even after the use of his work in support of the Essex rebellion.

How can you torture someone who doesn’t exist?

The plays, of course, did not write themselves – but nor were they composed by Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, who by all indications was barely literate. His parents were illiterate, and, crucially, his children too. The universal assumption is that William received a grammar school education, but it is only an assumption since the enrollment records have not survived. William Shakespeare, the writer, had a world class education, as can easily be deduced from what he wrote.

The name Shakspere is most likely an anglicisation of the Norman Jacques-Pierre, and the wild variety of surviving spellings are creative attempts to transcribe it phonetically, with the soft J consistently approximated by Sh, but the consonant cluster and the final vowel causing a degree of confusion — thus Shakspere, Shaxper, Shagspur and so on. It’s important to note that the A is always short, as in Jack, in all but one of the many versions of the Stratford man’s name that appear in documents.

Shakespeare the poet, by contrast, was always spelt with the middle E, making the A long and giving us the verb to shake. The name was often printed with a hyphen — SHAKE-SPEARE — which is a standard way of indicating a pseudonym, as in the anticlerical pamphleteer Martin Mar-Prelate, actually a group of Puritan satirists attacking the Anglican Church. The pseudonym ‘Shakespeare’, then, was deliberately chosen for its classical connotations: it derives from a soubriquet for the goddess Minerva or the Pallas Athena, the ‘spear-shaker’. The two names are not the same, in spelling, pronunciation or provenance. But they are close enough for confusion, or misdirection. Somehow it came about that William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon was used as a kind of allonym — that is, when a person uses the name of another real person as cover for their identity. Not, you understand, the identity of someone called William Shakespeare: it wouldn’t make sense to use an name almost identical to the real name. More of a homnym than an allonym. No, this would have to be someone who already used ‘William Shakespeare’ as a pseudonym.

A double layer of secrecy, then.

Must be something worth covering up.

Theatre, the great art form of the English literary Renaissance, adds another layer of anonymity to that already offered by print, and it’s no wonder, actually, that the greatest writer to emerge from that milieu is known to us by a pseudonym. He lived in a dangerous age for writers, the age of the Cecils, Archbishop Whitgift and the English Inquisition; the age of Elizabeth, Queen of Eyes and Ears. One of the most famous paintings of the Virgin Queen depicts her wearing a gown with brocade images of human eyes and ears sewn into it. The message is clear: I see everything. I hear everything. The Great Hall in her lavish palace on the banks of the Thames — Hampton Court, Elizabeth’s Versailles — is adorned with ‘eavesdroppers’: three-dimensional wooden figures, leaning over a balcony up under the roof, so that they are visible from below. They overhear nothing, of course; their function is not to see but to be seen; a reminder that there are eyes and ears everywhere.

We should not be surprised that the writer chose to disguise his identity: fiction, after all, is multiplicity, the prismatic refraction of personality. Many artists do this, for many reasons. The Author — any author — simultaneously reveals himself in his works and conceals himself behind them. In the case of the great George Orwell, it was to protect his family from his work and his work from his family. This use of a name-change to delineate different ‘worlds’ might be the common element in all uses of pseudonyms. The use of a pseudonym can also be an opportunity to create a brand. ‘Will Shake-speare’ was a nom-de-plume but also, like Martin Mar-Prelate, a nom-de-guerre, chosen for its defiant connotations — the brandishing of a spear before battle.

Meanwhile ‘Shakespeare’ remains a mystery. Everything and nothing. Everyone and no one. Except that no one didn’t write these plays. I.e., Someone did.

∆

The brutal religious and political repression of Elizabeth’s reign, in response to infiltration and subversion by Rome, created a world of espionage and counter-espionage, rat-lines and priest-holes, a whole underground milieu. The wilderness of mirrors which is the intelligence world dates its inception, in England at least, from Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and is part of the lurid backdrop of his daughter’s reign. Interestingly, the first co-ordinator of Elizabeth‘s intelligence and counter-intelligence service was the occultist Sir John Dee, widely credited at the time for summoning up the storm which sank the Spanish Armada. He was succeeded by Sir Francis Walsingham, before it fell into the hands of First Minister Robert Cecil after Walsingham’s death.

Through secret societies, the Classical-Pagan influence bypassed the dead hand of Church and State, flowering just when the country was struggling to find a national identity after a century of disintegration, and playing a crucial role in the English Literary Renaissance.

The Tudor centralisation necessitated the taming of the English aristocracy as a power to rival the Crown — and as the last bastion of resistance to the Reformation Protestant ascendancy which had already subsumed the Church and the monasteries. Elizabeth’s reign, dazzling as her Court was, ultimately empowered an imperium of drabness from which the culture has only sporadically shown signs of recovery ever since.

In the last decade of the sixteenth century, the Reformation turned its baleful eye on the London stage, which had struggled into existence from the late 1560s onwards and now, in the nineties, faced extinction. At that moment the writer known as ‘Shake-spear’ (sic) announces himself under that war-like pseudonym in direct opposition to the Queen’s Machiavellian First Minister, the scoliotic hunchback Robert Cecil. Cecil wanted to destroy the theatre and was now making murderous forays into its ranks, deploying both the naked power of the Star Chamber and its legion of torturers, as well as the hidden hand of agents and cut-outs using methods of dagger and poison. In 1594, Cecil was winning. By 1598, he had lost, his order to ‘pluck down’ the theatres ignored, and his power limited by a powerful cultural resistance.

Cecil, whose family had enriched itself enormously from the Reformation of the monasteries, had every reason to fear the London stage. Apart from the seditious tendencies inherent in any artistic milieu, and its unmanageable possibilities as a venue for free thought, through veiled, metaphorical speech — ultimately unpatrollable — the theatre was an anomalous survival of the aristocratic taste for display, colour and costume, spectacle, poetry and music, disguise and identity-play. Cecil’s war on the theatre, which by 1594 had martyred three high-profile victims — writers Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, and the theatrical patron Lord Strange — now faced a formidable opponent; this new voice emerged, roused and armed to the teeth with hatred and wit – a hatred not just political, but cultural, spiritual and deeply personal.

The voice was like nothing heard before. Polished and rough, sophisticated and raw, it could hold the ear of courtier, law student, Member of Parliament and commoner alike, uniting London in bristling contempt against the manipulator as it turned him into the morally and physically repulsive Richard III – the spider king. As well as the spear shaken in his face, Cecil could feel the daggers, expertly placed, sliding between his ribs. 

quote dogs bark at me in the street / if I cannot play the lover

The voice, we now know — and Cecil must have known it, too — was coming from somewhere close to him.

It was ragged with the fury of a dying breed,/Someone he couldn’t touch? no doubt one of the ‘wolfish earls’ as Walt Whitman tagged them, the ‘handsome long-legged courtiers with whom Elizabeth surrounded herself’ – courtiers among whom Cecil had grown up, despised and mocked behind his back, however courteously they treated him to his face. Now that he had succeeded his father as First Adviser to the Queen, now that he controlled Walsingham’s spies and assassins, the Privy Council and the Star Chamber, he would work to destroy them all; but already he was feeling the backlash, the lash of a vicious tongue whose root he could not tear out to stop it humiliating him night after night in the playhouses, over and over again in sold out Quartos. For now he could do nothing, because to take action would be to admit that he was King Richard, the most evil king (in Tudor mythology) under whom the land had ever suffered.

In this period we see also the formation of a second underground in the Classical-Pagan secret societies. Many of the leading figures in the Court and the culture at this time had connections with such ‘freethinking’ groups. Raleigh’s School of Night was one such society – Marlowe was associated with this group – and Cecil hated Raleigh like no-one else, marking him as his greatest quarry, to be pursued by stealth over the course of decades. Cecil’s long and patient hunt finally captured and destroyed its prey in 1618.

The spider knew how to wait.

In retrospect we can see that a figure of much more lasting influence was accruing power in both open and invisible ways, as the multi-talented Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam), climbed the slippery pole whilst simultaneously working in secret to achieve far-reaching aims.

Gray’s Inn/Temple, the bar etc.

Bacon’s proto-Rosicrucian Order of the Knights of the Helmet assembled a scriptorium which included at some points several dozen scribes and writers. The key figures among them were also initiates of the Order, including, it appears, the great Ben Jonson. The Order was dedicated to the God Apollo, the Archer, and the Goddess Athena (the ‘Spear-Shaker’) and its mark was the Double-A (one light, one dark) motif, which functions as an identifying signature to those in the know, in the many publications which the Order produced and promoted: including both Shake-speare’s Sonnets (1609) and the First Folio (1623).

The Queen knew, of course, and so did many courtiers, poets, and playwrights. Insiders knew, and more than a few cryptically acknowledged it to posterity and to each other in their works. In one well-known allusion the poet appears as ‘Adon [Adonis] deafly [silently] masking through’ (Thomas Edwardes, Narcissus L’envoy, 1595). Most spectacularly, the frontispiece of a book of emblems and devices, Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612), features a woodcut image which reflects the contemporary awareness of a concealed poet writing for the stage. A hand holding a pen emerges from behind a theatre curtain, and writes (upside down from our perspective to signify a code) the Latin words MENTE VIDEBORI (By the mind I shall be seen). The Shakespeare persona is also celebrated in Peacham’s title; Britain’s Minerva, since Minerva is the spear-shaker. So that hand is Shakespeare’s. By the mind I shall be seen.

His identity has been known now for over a hundred years – since J Thomas Looney exposed it in his definitive work of literary-historical detection, Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (1920). This ground-breaking investigation established the identity of the author beyond reasonable doubt, and provided a framework for a century of extremely productive research by talented, highly qualified literary historians ever since. But a century later, thanks to the self-interest of academia and the stubborn resistance of commercial interests, Shakespeare’s identity is still not widely known – and this despite the fact that the author is so explosively relevant to our own times.

While de Vere donned his mask out of necessity and circumstance, identity-play was evidently in his blood. How many of the plays feature disguises and assumed identities? From Romeo masked at the Capulet ball, to Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’, from Portia’s impersonation of a young doctor of law, to Ariel’s terrifying harpy, the delight in disguise is everywhere: cross-dressing and bed-tricks, plays-within-plays and players playing players, and this reflects not just the theatre milieu — the theme of disguise resonates deep within English traditional culture. In the countryside, ‘pagan’ holiday traditions had largely been suppressed by the asphyxiating forces of the Reformation. Hamlet laments: For O, the hobby-horse is forgot. Stephanie Hopkins-Hughes, at PoliticWorm, explains: “The hobby-horse was a feature in the old mummer’s processions. A man dressed in a horse costume, his identity hidden, would dash at the crowd, singling out individuals whom he thought deserved a public reprimand, while the crowd roared in a combined shout of approval and alarm.”

If these mumming and disguising traditions were anathema to the Reformation, so was theatre, to the nth degree. From the 1590s on, de Vere was fighting a culture war. As ‘one of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays themselves’, in Walt Whitman’s razor-sharp intuition about Shakespeare must really be, he emerged from the old feudal world – but what he bequeathed to modernity survived the eventual closing of the theatres in 1648 and the puritan dictatorship; what he fought for was theatre itself, that bright mirror of multiplicity, music and magic, poetry, play and display. In the author’s obsession with persona and disguise, the satirical hobby-horse lives on.

∆

A strange and pernicious theory has arisen in the past half century which may (as a number of commentators have suggested) owe its provenance to the strange disjuncture between the works of William Shakespeare the author and the uninteresting biography of William Shakspere of Stratford. Roland Barthes and other fashionable intellectuals argued from the nineteen sixties onwards against the relevance of a writer’s biography to the work, and promoted the ideology that critics should regard authors as merely unconscious or passive conduits or mouthpieces for the culture and the language. If ‘it is the language that speaks’, according to the poet Mallarmé, then the author has no authority, is merely a receiver, and literature is reduced to sociology and linguistics. This postmodern attack on the individuality of the artist – usually referred to by Barthes’ formulation ‘The Death of the Author’ (La Mort de L’auteur) is an assault on the concept of the individual per se. Like the citizen under Communism, the artist is stripped of free will and authentic action. And even the artist has no individual agency, how can anyone else?

De Vere is the antidote to this travesty. His creativity is about as far from a passive conduit as you can imagine; he didn’t just create his individual masterpieces, he did more than anyone else to carve out the space, physical and cultural, in which they would be heard. The turbulent Earl was one of history’s great individualists, attracting much Puritanical opprobrium for his profligacy and bohemianism, his feuds and love-affairs. 

De Vere’s creative evolution is unique. In his late teens and early twenties he was Elizabeth’s favourite and a star performer at court, both in his own person and as the Puckish spirit behind brilliantly devised court entertainments. High-born and rebellious, driven, brilliant and reckless, his intimate relationship with the Queen allowed him to escape punishment for acts of defiance which would have had serious consequences for any other courtier. As becomes clear in extraordinarily personal court dramas such as Hamlet, he saw himself as having the special status of a court jester or ‘licens’d fool’ in Elizabeth’s court. But things went too far. Banished and re-instated, he finally exiled himself from the Court, and in twelve years of seclusion hammered out the final versions of his greatest works, turning them into literary as well as dramatic masterpieces – the great studies in human folly which became famous throughout the world.

The Stratford misdirection has always met with most opposition from writers, directors and other artists. Any real artist knows the labour of art; genius doesn’t just switch itself on and off like a light on a timer. Good writing is hard, long work, the work of an individual who is both equipped and impelled to write by his or her own history and psychology. Good writing is by definition individualistic and can come only from an individual, as an expression of identity. It is not a passive process. Genius is not magic.

∆

Much of the opposition to de Vere’s authorship seems to reflect unconsciously absorbed class prejudice: in other words, inverted snobbery. De Vere is automatically to be despised because of his birth: he is not the Shakespeare we want. We crave an idealized rags-to-riches figure, Mr Nobody from Nowhere, Dick Whittington with a talking cat. Instead what we get is Lord Byron with Faustian gifts and ‘lewd’ friends, the charismatic magnet for a bohemian milieu, in Venice or in London. Sentimentalists don’t want to hear about this reckless aristocrat who got himself imprisoned in the Tower and then banished from Court.

The final trigger was his affair with one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, resulting in the birth of a bastard son and a vendetta pursued against him by relatives of the lady. The feud spilled onto the streets of Blackfriars in lethal brawls and ambushes, leaving three men dead and de Vere badly wounded. Such was the implosion of the child star of Elizabeth’s court.

Stratford became the chaste birthplace of a miracle, a kind of new Bethlehem, but the Brythonic name ‘Avon’, meaning ‘waters’ or ‘watery place’, as Alexander Waugh has shown, was used poetically at the time to signify not Stratford but Hampton Court: the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, Ben Johnson knew, was the poet of Elizabeth’s Versailles.

The ad hoc hypothesis introduced to save Bethlehem is the condition of ‘genius’, which is conceived as something magical. Will Shakspere goes to London and immediately starts producing masterpieces, without the foundation of education, experimentation, or apprentice-work, leaving behind no juvenilia. Twenty years later his genius is suddenly switched back off, and he doesn’t lift a pen again, leaving his unfinished works to be completed by hacks. This is not realistic; it’s a fairytale. The reality is that de Vere’s masterpieces were achieved through a lifetime’s labour and were the result of both exuberant experimentation and painstaking revision. The ‘Shakespeare’ period of the 1590s and early 1600s, which have been traditionally seen as the explosion of Will Shakespeare’s youthful and implausible genius, turns out to have been the maturity of de Vere, who achieved his art through sweat, tears, and, yes, blood too.

It’s not just self-interest and inertia that keeps this patched up paradigm together, and it’s not just class resentment either. There is something deeper here as well, I believe. It’s not just the present-day war on masculinity or nationhood or whiteness that keeps de Vere behind his curtain. I’m talking about the abolition of the individual itself, as a concept, as a reality, as a moral centre – which Marshall McLuhan foresaw as the inevitable effect of the digital age.

The tribe is ruled by superstition. In our celebrity culture, we want to believe that education, discipline and mastery are not preconditions for original creative production. We want to believe in achievement without effort, in ‘genius’ without discipline. That these plays somehow wrote themselves.

De Vere is not the passive mouthpiece for an abstraction. His is the highly individual achievement of a highly individualistic man. He flirted with expulsion from the magic circle for years, and when disaster came, he responded with a fierce creativity and focus. If the banishment hadn’t happened, Fisher’s Folly wouldn’t have happened, and the poetic drama would never have become what it did.

Fisher’s Folly, de Vere’s mansion in the theater district, is the birthplace of Bohemia avant la lettre, and of a new literary style which arose from the contradictions inherent in de Vere’s personal history. The decade which begins with de Vere’s expulsion from court saw a marked change in the character of English poetry, and this change is connected with Lord Oxford’s immersion in London’s burgeoning theatre world. Looney writes:

We have already had to remark his restiveness under all kinds of restraints imposed by the artificiality of court life and his strong bent towards that Bohemian society within which were stirring energetic forces making for reality, mingled with much evil in life and literature.

Quoting from Dean Church’s Life of Spenser, Looney characterizes the ‘Drab Age’ of English poetry as marked by “feebleness, fantastic absurdity, affectation and bad taste … Who could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was at hand.”

De Vere’s class-apostasy, his banishment and self-exile, has everything to do with this change. Looney cites Philip Sydney’s ‘In Defense of Poesie’ “as representing the earlier, feebler period, and the ‘rude playhouses with their troops of actors, most of them profligate and disreputable’ as being the source of the later and more virile movement.”

The decade of the 80s constitutes “the period immediately following upon [de Vere’s] first poetic output, and it was during these years that he was in active and habitual association with these very troupes of play-actors […] What distinguishes Oxford’s work from contemporary verse is its strength, reality and true refinement. When Philip Sydney learned to ‘look into his heart and write’ he only showed that he had at last learnt a lesson that his rival had been teaching him.”

During the next ten years, 1590-1600, “there burst forth suddenly a new poetry, which with its reality, depth, sweetness and nobleness took the world captive. The poetical aspirations of the Englishmen of the time had found at last adequate interpreters, and their own national and unrivaled expression.”

Today de Vere is no academic footnote, but a challenge to the weaponized stereotyping of contemporary culture. Just as secret performances of Shakespeare’s plays were staged by dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Communist tyranny, so de Vere’s clandestine art can sustain us in our own times. The Borgesian paradox is void: Shakespeare was not nobody. He was a specific individual, unique and unrepeatable. Great art is not produced by impersonal cultural or historical forces, and certainly not by theory. De Vere’s identification is death to the ‘death of the author’ theory; in a word, the rebirth of The Author.

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NOTES & LINKS

Shakespeare Identified by J Thomas Looney (1920)

https://archive.org/stream/shakespeareident00looniala#page/160/mode/2up/search/dean+church

Thomas Edwards’ Narcissus L’envoy

http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/SM6.2.pdf

Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna

https://hankwhittemore.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/reason-no-18-is-henry-peachams-unidentified-writer-behind-the-curtain-by-the-mind-i-shall-be-seen

Mumming and disguising

Mumming and disguising