Arguing Further With Professor Rubinstein

William D. Rubinstein, co-author of The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, has offered a response (scroll down) to my most recent expression of skepticism about his efforts:

I would like to reply to some of the points made by Mr Veal in his posting about The Truth Will Out, both here and on his own website (Stomata [sic]). They are in error; readers will have to decide whether they are also a comedy.

It is of course possible that The Comedy of Errors was written before its first recorded performance on 28 December 1594, as Chambers suggests, but there is simply no evidence that it was performed before this and recent authorities do not accept that it was. For instance, Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells in their Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 2001) – a source hardly likely to be sympathetic to anti-Stratfordian views – state (p. 84) that “it is unlikely that the lawyers and students [of Gray’s Inn] would have hired actors to appear at a grand festive occasion with anything but a new, or at least current play…stylistic texts confirm a dating around 1594, with rare vocabulary placing it between The Taming of the Shrew [c1592] and Romeo and Juliet [c1594].” Two other points are relevant here. First, the Gray’s Inn performance was preceded by a series of masques which many scholars, including AL Rowse, believe were by Francis Bacon. Bacon was a close kinsman by marriage of Neville’s (Not a blood relative, as is sometimes stated) – when Neville's mother died, Neville's father remarried Bacon’s much older half-sister. Both were deeply learned university men and MPs. It is inconceivable that they did not know each other well, and presumably admire each other. Errors is about separated sets of twins. Draw your own conclusion. In contrast, what conceivable connection was there between Bacon and William Shakespeare? As well, Errors was not known to have been performed again until 1604. It was apparently not in the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire, which lends weight to the argument that it was written for a one-off ad hoc performance.

As to the date of the Greenwich performance, 28 December 1594 is what it says. Mr Veal would not dream of questioning it if some other date were specified, but would certainly accept it as valid primary evidence. He has done so here only because it is inconvenient to Stratfordian orthodoxy.

The most remarkable point about this rejoinder is that it all but ignores the major issue – whether, as Professor Rubinstein contends, Shakespeare and his fellows were demonstrably elsewhere when The Comedy of Errors was performed at Gray’s Inn – in favor of a trivial one: whether that performance was the play’s premiere. Then, having decided to fight on that ground, Professor Rubinstein reads far too much into the authority that he cites. As any reader can see, Dobson and Wells do not assert that the December 28th performance was the first, only that the play was new or current. Their disagreement is with those who date it to the 1580’s. What they actually say, as opposed to what Professor Rubinstein reads into them, is consistent with my contention that a date before July 1593, when the French civil war to which a joke in the play alludes came to an end, is most likely.

(Note: One of Wells and Dobson’s arguments strikes me as ill-founded. Do we know what sort of plays London lawyers wanted to see in 1594? Many audiences, before and since, have preferred revivals of old favorites over new productions.)

Nor can one infer, on the basis of the fact that only two performances are known from Shakespeare’s lifetime, that the play “was written for a one-off ad hoc performance” or “was apparently not in the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire”. Elizabethan theatrical records are extremely scanty. The great majority of known performances come from the Revels Office accounts, which do not give the names of plays during the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign. Except for Philip Henslowe’s “diary”, which doesn’t deal with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and stops noting titles after 1597, our knowledge of what was playing in the public theaters is near to a blank. As I noted before, Professor Rubinstein seems to have a seriously mistaken notion of the quality and quantity of the extant performance evidence.

He next moves into strange territory. It is not true that “many scholars” believe that the masques preceding the Gray’s Inn performance of The Comedy of Errors were written by Francis Bacon. The most that one can say is that Bacon played some role in the Inn’s revelries over a period of many years. Documents show that he helped put on a dumb show there in 1588 and wrote speeches for an entertainment of unknown date (c. 1595). (Vide E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, III:211-14 (1923)). How much else he did in that line is guesswork. Whatever it was, I fail to see how his step-relationship to Henry Neville makes it more plausible that Neville wrote The Comedy of Errors. Does Professor Rubinstein picture Bacon as the Gray’s Inn gatekeeper, willing to admit only work written by his kindred? And what is the conclusion that we are encouraged to draw from “Errors is about separated sets of twins”? Is a half-uncle by marriage like a twin brother? Are we to suppose that the Antipholus twins are portraits of Neville and Bacon? (In his book, it appears, Professor Rubinstein sees Falstaff as Neville’s self-depiction, an idea that certainly is, er, original.) We are veering toward the same lee shore of the intellect as the Oxenfordians who think that their auctorial candidate identified himself with Hamlet.

After all that, how does Professor Rubinstein respond to my central argument? By ignoring it. The reason for doubting that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at Court on December 28, 1594, isn’t “because it is inconvenient to Stratfordian orthodoxy” but because the Revels accounts show two companies playing on the same day. Barring a unique double bill by the two leading London troupes, the date of one performance or the other must be wrong, and it takes no special pleading to assume that a clerk, making out the payment orders 2½ months after the fact, wrote “xxviii” where he meant “xxvii”.

In his own field of expertise, Professor Rubinstein wouldn’t tolerate the evasion of central issues, tendentious reading of authorities and odd divagations into hazy speculation that he adopts when discussing Shakespeare. His manner of argumentation is redolent of the classic crackpot, frequently encountered in anti-Stratfordian circles. It does nothing to dispel my expectations for his forthcoming volume.