More on the “New” Shakespeare

One must, of course, reserve judgement until the book appears, but nothing that I see about The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare (discussed in a previous post) encourages me to believe that its thesis – that the real Bard was Sir Henry Neville, a minor courtier, anti-Catholic zealot and quondam ambassador to France – has been baked until done.

The blog of the Social Affairs Unit, which I had hitherto thought of as a sensible right-of-center British outfit, today carries co-author William Rubinstein’s puff piece for the volume. It offers an argument for doubting Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship that is ill-grounded in the evidence and exposes a root inconsistency in Professor Rubinstein’s hypothesis:

To give one example of where legitimate doubts must exist, on the night of 28th December 1594 A Comedy of Errors was given its premier [sic] at Gray’s Inn before an audience of lawyers, an occasion marked by a drunken saturnalia which became known at the time as “the night of errors”. At precisely the same time, however, William Shakespeare and his entire acting company were known to be elsewhere, specifically at Greenwich Palace, performing before the Court. There cannot be the slightest doubt of this, since payment was specifically recorded to William Shakespeare (who is named) for the performance, dated 28th December 1594. Stratfordians have attempted to get round this contradiction either by asserting that the entry was misdated (for which, of course, there is no evidence) or that the performance took place during the day, and then Shakespeare and his company went on to Gray’s Inn (presumably without rehearsing) to give the premier of Errors on the same night. But, as E. K. Chambers pointed out in 1907, all Court performances took place at night, starting at 10 p.m. and ending at 1 a.m. In other words, Shakespeare and his acting company were known to be elsewhere literally at the moment when one of his plays was being premiered. Such anomalies as this one, of which there are many, are consistently swept under the rug in orthodox biographies of Shakespeare.

What Professor Rubinstein omits – through lack of reading Chambers thoroughly, I presume, rather than disingenuousness – is that there is evidence that the December 28th date for the performance by Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was an error. The same Court records (set down 2½ months after the event) state that a different company, the Lord Admiral’s Men, was paid for performing on that same day. Since a double bill is highly unlikely, one company or the other was not at Court on the 28th. (E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV:164-65 (1923)) It’s not even a slight stretch to assume that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played for the Queen on the 27th, then for the lawyers the next day.

There is, incidentally, no reason to think that the Gray’s Inn performance was the premiere of A Comedy of Errors. It is simply the first surviving mention of the play, which was almost certainly written earlier. It contains a reference to the civil war over Henri IV’s succession to the French throne (France “making war against her hair”, III.ii.126) that would have lost its point after the conflict ended in July 1593. There are also a couple of verbal echoes in books published in 1592. (E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, I:310-11 (1930)) While the point isn’t central to Professor Rubinstein’s thesis, his casual assumption that first mention equals mention of premiere suggests less than an intimate acquaintance with the available materials on the Elizabethan theater.

What is most interesting, though, and the surest sign of muddled thinking, is his failure to see that his anti-Stratfordian “evidence” contradicts his own theory. According to the “media pack” promoting his book,

a simple pseudonym could not provide adequate protection from the curious, and to ensure absolute anonymity [emphasis added] he [Neville] went one step further and employed William Shakespeare to stand in as the author of his works.

But if neither the “stand-in” nor his troupe showed up for the premiere of one of the plays, wouldn’t it have been obvious even to bibulous English lawyers that the authorship façade was a fraud? As so often happens with anti-Stratfordian fantasies, the web tangles itself into knots. Sometimes the secret is tightly hidden, other times known to the whole world. Professor Rubinstein is far from unique in overlooking his own contradictions.

Update (10/10/05): Professor Rubinstein has responded to this post (scroll down), and I naturally have a sur-rebuttal.