The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu

Reviewing the newest tome in the Shakespeare authorship “controversy”, The Truth Will Out by Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, is harder than I expected. This “case” for Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) as the real Bard of Avon is such a mass of howlers, begged questions and non sequiturs that one is at a loss to decide what a critique should bring to the fore and what should be omitted for want of space. What should I do, for instance, about this bizarre effusion on page 261?

Athena, bride [sic] of Apollo (the sun god), held a great shining spear, from which the light was reflected in such a way that three sections of sunlight were said to emanate from it. She is also known as the Tenth Muse [sic], whose qualities encompass those of all the others [sic]. Her name in Greek actually means ‘spear shaker’ [sic! sic! sic!].

That isn’t central to much of anything, but how can one pass it by in silence?

The book comes near to raising its own “authorship question”: Can a discourse this ill-argued and uninformed be from the pens of two academic historians, one of whom has respectable historical works on his résumé? It’s true that Professor Rubinstein’s expertise doesn’t lie in the pre-modern era, but moving to a different terrain ought not to have deprived him of all of his capacity to read and reason. The theory that The Truth Will Out was written by a precocious but too cocky teenager and then passed off as the product of more mature minds is highly attractive. Perhaps the True Author is someone like Prince Harry, whose royal position forbids his association with a thesis that would undermine the national faith in William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Whatever the merits of that speculation, I’m going to try developing a full review by taking advantage of the blog format to examine various facets of the book in semi-random order. The first is a matter far more crucial than the etymology of “Athena”. James & Rubinstein (hereafter “J&R”) assert that Henry Neville is superior to all other Shakespearean pretenders, because there exists “concrete documentation” linking him to the works.

They proffer, in fact, three documents: a manuscript, dated 1602, summarizing “Personal Services Appertaining to the Throne and Kings of This Realm”, marginal notes in a copy of the 1550 edition of Edward Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, and a page of scribbles known as the “Northumberland Manuscript”, which has long been a playground for Bacon-is-Shakespeare promoters. Today’s topic is the second item, which, if one believes J&R, represents Henry Neville’s personal notes on one of the major sources for Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

In 1940 an antiquarian book dealer acquired this volume in a library sale and became interested in the marginalia. He and a colleague wrote a book about it: Alan Keen & Roger Lubbock, The Annotator: The Pursuit of an Elizabethan Reader of Halle's Chronicle Involving some Surmises About the Early Life of William Shakespeare (London: 1954; available on-line, though not free of charge, in the invaluable Questia book collection). This study is noteworthy as the first, I believe, to advance the now fashionable speculation that Shakespeare spent part of his adolescence in a Catholic household in Lancashire. The grounds for that conclusion and for the underpinning proposition that the marginal notes are Shakespeare’s own are highly tenuous and won’t be examined here. So far as I can tell, hardly anyone, even among the Lancastrian theorists, takes them seriously.

J&R claim that Keen and Lubbock were partly right: The annotator wrote Shakespeare, but he was their candidate, not the Stratford man. How they go about “demonstrating” this hypothesis provides useful insight into their methods and credibility.

The handwritten notes need to be connected in two directions: to the plays attributed to Shakespeare on one side and to Henry Neville on the other. J&R make no attempt to show the former. All that they say is that the copy of Halle “was annotated, and the annotations bore such a close relationship to the concerns of Shakespeare’s history plays that Keen reasoned Shakespeare might have been the annotator.” [p. 232] This is a form of appeal to authority not uncommon in anti-Stratfordian writings: An isolated someone has adumbrated a conclusion that the writer likes, so he adopts it as incontrovertible fact without further discussion. In this instance, the resemblances that Keen put forward, in language and subject matter, between the history plays and the Halle annotations have won few, if any, adherents. J&R offer no justification for their acceptance of an extreme minority view.

More attention is given to trying to establish that the notes were Neville’s own. J&R begin with Keen’s opinion, based rather precariously on the fact that a label attached to the Halle volume is printed in the same typeface as one found in a different book, that both belonged in the 18th Century to a Robert Worsley. More than one man bore that name at the right time. Among them was a descendant of Henry Neville. The case that he was the Halle-owning Worsley was, J&R assure us, “convincingly made” in an anonymous article in the October 1993 issue of the Edward de Vere Newsletter.

By following the link, the reader can readily ascertain that the article presents no reasons for its identification of the owner of the book with any particular Robert Worsley. It simply picks the possibility most convenient for its own notion, viz., that the 17th Earl of Oxenford was the annotator. Nothing rules out Keen’s own guess: a Yorkshire Robert Worsley who was a collateral descendant of the 16th Century owner of the book. He does not appear to have been related to the Nevilles.

J&R also assert, “The handwriting of the marginalia is almost certainly Neville’s” [p. 89]. They offer no supporting argumentation. Their certainty, it turns out, rests on “Neville’s love of continuously varying his writing styles, and of using scribes” [p. 233]. In other words, handwriting evidence can’t prove that the notes are not Neville’s; therefore, he must have written them.

We need not, however, leave the question without a conclusion: The annotations themselves provide clear and convincing evidence that Henry Neville did not write them. The annotator on occasion drops hints of his private opinions, which are far removed from Neville’s.

Yet more emphatically, A. [the annotator] had a strong Roman Catholic, even clerical, bias. Halle often let himself go with eloquence and enthusiasm on the baseness, dishonesty, avarice, power, and general undesirability of priests, cardinals, and Popes, and A. did not let these passages pass unnoticed. Halle wrote: ‘The most ambicious desire and avaricious appetite of certayne persones callyng themselves spiritual fathers, but indeede carnall covetous and gredy glottons aspiring for honor and not for vertue to the proud see of Rome’, and A. would not stand for that: ‘The Author (if he dyd write it) wrote it in the afternoone.’ When Halle told of the first rebellion against Henry IV, expressing himself at length and bitterly against monastical persons better fed than taught, and imagining their vituperations against any prince who might justly reclaim some part of their possessions, A. commented: ‘here he begynneth to rayle.’ ‘Allways lying,’ he said of another tirade of Halle's against ‘proud priors’. . . .

A. betrayed his own allegiance most clearly in, ‘Note that when he speakethe of the Pope he sheweth himself of the englisshe schisme a favorer’ (when Halle writes of ‘the Romishe bishop’). Once, he even let his Catholic loyalty stand before his patriotism: ‘a stowt bisshop of fraunce so in defiaunce of a prince to speke.' [Keen & Lubbock, op. cit., pp. 12–13]

Those sentiments are inconceivable from the hand of Henry Neville, who, as J&R themselves are well aware, was a firm Protestant and a promoter of anti-Catholic legislation. Like many of his co-religionists of that time, he imbued his faith with a touch of paranoia: While ambassador to France, he worried that his Scottish opposite number might be a Papist sympathizer, and J&R offer as one of his motives for complicity in the Earl of Essex’s abortive coup d’etat a genuine fear that Queen Elizabeth might will her crown to the Catholic Infanta of Spain. That doesn’t sound like a man who, in the privacy of his study, sniffed at “the English schism” and lambasted criticism of monks.

This part of J&R’s “concrete documentation” is, one must conclude, composed of sand without mortar. The others, as we shall see presently, are no more solid.

Part 2: The “Tower Notebook”
Part 3: Filching from the Baconians

Comments

[John Beebe]

Regarding the "bizarre effusion" mentioned in the first paragraph of Thomas Veal's blog of 10 January 2006, there is a mystery tradition around Athena that can perhaps make more sense of it. It is sketched out in the following passage from Peter Dawkins' Arcadia (The Life and Times of Francis Bacon, 1579-1585):

"Pallas Athena is Goddess of Intelligence and Enlightenment, by means of whom Wisdom is born and made manifest in the world. According to ancient mythology, Apollo, God of Wisdom, is her spouse, and Esclepius, the great Healer-Teacher (a Hermes or Christ figure), is their son. Mount Parnassus, the Mount of Inspiration and Enlightenment, is their mutual home.

"Athena is the Goddess of Fame, Patroness and Leader of the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, Goddess of peace and all learning, and hence the Protectress of the heroes-the brave, valorous and righteous-who seek the 'fame' of enlightenment. As the great Goddess of Intelligence, she is the upholder of justice and virtue. She is the Goddess of Poetry, in the sense of Poetry embracing all other things, and is known as the Tenth Muse, Leader of the other Nine."

To be sure, such an amplification of the Goddess and her name goes well beyond what most mythographers today would agree is safe to assert. Nevertheless, it is not entirely without foundation in what we do know about the goddess. Shaking of her spear is mentioned in the Homeric Hymns; the name Pallas can be translated as "shaking" (though "throbbing" or "pulsating" is more usual); and Athena (a name of uncertain derivation) could be related to a Greek word meaning "sharp."
"Shaking something sharp" is therefore is not beyond the pale as an understading of what may have been conveyed to the Greeks by the name "Pallas Athena." (See Ann Shearer's Athene, p. 43 for "throbbing" and "pulsating" and Timothy Gantz's Early Greek Myth, where on p. 84 he also refers to the primary use of Athena's emblematic aegis as "something to be held in the hands and shaken, usually to produce fear.")

Apart from Athena, the 'tenth muse' is actually a phrase to be found in Shakespeare's Sonnet 38, which is one of those that Helen Vendler, in her book, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, sees as addressed to a close male friend of the poet. Here he does so with what Vendler experiences as "an unnerving literalization of allegory," by identifying his friend as his Muse. (As Vendler explains, the Muse in poetic tradition is usually regarded as an inner divine, rather than as an outer human source of inspiration, and usually is female.) The effect is echoed when the Sonnets are published with a provocative dedication to “Mr. W. H." as their "onlie begetter", a phrase that has provoked readers of it to centuries of speculation. The last lines of Sonnet 38, however, bring the final source of any inspiration back to something in Shakespeare's own soul. When at the end of the sonnet he speaks of "my slight Muse," I think the poet is referring to the poetical energy that his friend has bestirred in him. He clearly hopes to please his friend with what he has produced, though, for he says to him, "If my slight Muse do please these curious days, / The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise."

The pain the poet speaks of goes beyond, I think, the usual pain of writing and to some historical circumstance, indicated also by the phrase, "these curious days." We do not know what that circumstance was, of course, but after perusing The Truth Will Out (which does not discuss Sonnet 38 but sees it as one of a series addressed by Neville to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley--the dedication's "Mr. W. H."--while the two men were imprisoned for their complicity in the Essex rebellion), it is not hard to imagine the poem being shared in the Tower as the two men were trying to while away the "curious days" of their imprisonment (days when they had to be wondering if they would be executed) as pleasantly as possible.

[Zeba Clarke]

I've just finished reading The Truth Will Out, and found it aggravating in the extreme - the snide digs at "Stratfordians" and "orthodox scholars", the skewed analyses of the works, the haphazard style and the entirely inconclusive and unsubstantiated evidence on display were all suggestive of an entirely flawed premise. I knew when I reached the point that Neville's wife might have been the Dark Lady of the sonnets, because being Cornish, she probably had dark hair the final insult to my intelligence.

This is not a balanced or scholarly book, but a poorly-argued rant. I can't work out how it got to publication as it has more holes in it than a piece of emmenthal.