Random Reading (2): A Distaff Shakespeare?

A perk of blogging is that one receives – frequently if one is Glenn Reynolds, every blue moon or two if one is me – unsolicited copies of newly published books. Thus Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? appeared in my mailbox some months ago. I had the good intention of repaying the author by reviewing it, but time slipped by and, though the book was read, the review remained unwritten. Then, a few days ago, I ran across a Usenet post commending the author’s thesis. That stirred my sense of responsibility, so here are my thoughts.

Robin P. Williams, a writer of computer how-to books and soi disant “Independent Scholar”, is not quite the first person to put forward Mary Herbert (née Sidney), Countess of Pembroke, as the “real” William Shakespeare. That distinction belongs, I believe, to Gilbert Slater, whose Seven Shakespeares (1931) included Lady Pembroke among the committee that assembled the Bard’s oeuvre. In Sweet Swan of Avon, she gets solo billing. Miss Williams hypothesizes that she kept her authorship secret partly because she was a woman, partly to avoid jeopardizing her sons’ prospects of advancement at the court of King James (a far-sighted move – the elder boy was about ten years old, and James was a decade away from ascending the throne, when the first Shakespearean play appeared).

Lady Pembroke (1561–1621) (or, as her latter day admirers anachronistically call her, Mary Sidney) is a notable figure in literary history, though until recently her fame derived more from her roles as a patroness of other writers and the keeper of the legacy of her brother Sir Philip Sidney than from her own work. Married to a prodigiously wealthy earl, she subsidized Samuel Daniel, Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Nashe, among others, becoming the first Englishwoman outside the ranks of royalty to attract a large number of literary dedications. John Aubrey called her “the greatest patroness of learning and wit of any lady of her time”. More significantly, after her brother’s premature death she put his Arcadia into its final form and oversaw the publication of his collected works.

Lately the feminist claque has taken her up, insisting that her own literary output – a verse paraphrase of the Psalms, several translations, among them a French closet drama, and a minute body of original poetry – pushed against the boundaries set by patriarchy, or some such thing. Perhaps she was indeed a more significant writer than previous generations of critics thought. (C. S. Lewis, to take one example, discusses her revisions to Arcadia but has only a single passing mention of her other work.) Suppose that we pretend for a moment that there is a genuine mystery about the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare; is Mary Sidney Herbert a plausible candidate for the role?

Robin Williams, whose account of Lady Pembroke’s accomplishments can reasonably be described as worshipful, seems so thrilled by the idea of a great female author that she neglects to notice that greatness comes in many forms. Keats and Dickens were both great, but neither could have written like the other. Similarly, the Countess of Pembroke, on the available evidence, could not, or would not, have written like Shakespeare.

We have two strong clues to the Countess’s taste in drama. First, her idolized brother included a chapter of theatrical criticism in his Defence of Poesie. Second, she evidently liked the French dramatist Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, for she published a translation in 1592 under the title Antonius, at just about the same time that the earliest Shakespearean tragedy, Titus Andronicus, first trod the boards.

While Philip Sidney defended the theater against its detractors, he had a low opinion of the English plays of his own day. Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc was singled out as the best of the lot, yet –

notwithstanding as it is full of stately speeches, and well sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca’s style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain[s] the very end of Poesie, yet in truth, it is very defectious in the circumstances, which grieves me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary Companions of all corporal actions. For where the Stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it, should be both by Aristotle’s precept, and common reason, but one day; there [are] both many days and places, inartificially imagined. [The Defense of Poesie, §48 (spelling modernized)]

Other plays, he complains, are even worse, “where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Africa of the other, and so many other under Kingdoms, that the Player when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is”, or “two young Princes fall in love, after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy: he is lost, grows [into] a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this is in two hours space” [id.].

Garnier’s work, by contrast, observes the unities and decorum that The Defence of Poesie recommends. Garnier “limits himself to a very few characters, dispenses almost entirely with physical action, is not enamoured of horror, expresses his theme mainly through monologue and chorus, [and] represents his history (as Jean de la Taille advised in 1572) ‘en vn mesme iour, en vn mesme temps, et en vn mesme lieu’ [that is, observes the Aristotelian unities of time and place]” [F. P. Wilson & G. K. Hunter, The English Drama 1485–1585 (1968), pp. 142–3]. He thus was the kind of tragedian that Philip Sidney approved. That Sidney’s sister translated him occasions no surprise. There could hardly be a greater gulf, though, than that between Antonius and the contemporaneous Titus Andronicus.

Antonius opens with the hero’s 148 line soliloquy, followed by a chorus. After that, the characters declaim at length, only now and then interrupted by dialogue. Little time passes, and the scene never changes. All of the key events take place off stage and are recounted to the audience.

Titus Andronicus starts with rivals for the imperial throne, accompanied by rowdy retinues, bursting into the Capitol and exchanging angry repartee. The setting moves about the city of Rome and its environs. Enough time passes for the begetting and birth of a child, and the summoning and arrival of an army from distant Gothia. The audience sees murder, amputation, the preliminaries of rape and much else that Garnier would have kept discreetly out of sight. As the description of a recent production avers, the spectacle is “Not for the faint-hearted”.

In other respects, too, Lady Pembroke’s known tastes and habits rub incongruously against Shakespeare’s works. She was a staunch Protestant whose faith comes across plainly in her writings. The plays give scarcely any clues to the author’s religious stance.

The Countess’s imagery, in the words of her 20th Century editor, “allude[s] to life at court, to the experiences of an aristocratic wife, and to motherhood” [Mary Patterson Hannay, “Mary Herbert”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)]. Miss Williams cherry picks a few items (gardens, cooking, lawn bowling, antipathy toward war) from Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), with a view to demonstrating the author’s “feminine” proclivities, but she doesn’t examine whether imagery characteristic of Lady Pembroke’s attested writings is prominent in Shakespeare. So far as I can tell, it isn’t.

While Shakespeare’s plays are as guarded about contemporary politics as about religion, some of the early works hint at admiration for the Earl of Essex. The heroic Talbot, “terror of the French” in Henry VI, is believed to be modeled on him, and an overt, laudatory allusion to his Irish expedition makes it possible to date Henry V to 1599. Maybe Lady Pembroke admired the dashing young earl, too, but she can scarcely have been overt about it, for her husband was his personal and political enemy.

It should be noted, too, that the Pembrokes spent most of their time at a considerable distance from the center of the theatrical world. From 1586 Lord Pembroke was president of the Council of Wales and perforce resided for long stretches at Ludlow. When his wife was not there too, she kept her salon at Wilton, their estate near Salisbury. From neither location could she readily furnish the explanations, corrections and revisions that every other playwright in history has found necessary during the course of a production.

The Pembrokes’ enthusiasm for theater in the flesh, as contrasted with theater on paper, seems not to have been unlimited. Miss Williams makes much of Lord Pembroke’s patronage of an acting company. She omits to mention that, when the company lost heavily on a disastrous road tour in 1593 (a famous incident in Elizabethan theatrical history), the Pembrokes, one of the richest couples in England, did nothing to bail out “their” players, who were forced to disband.

The case for Lady Pembroke as Shakespeare would have to be very powerful to overcome these anomalies. Far from that, the case that Sweet Swan puts forward is impressionistic and superficial. During her widowhood, Lady Pembroke formed a close friendship with a doctor; doctors appear in the plays. Voila! The Pembroke sons were undisciplined and headstrong; so are various Shakespearean sons. Voici! The countess was descended from or related to many figures who appear in the historical plays. She was the patroness of writers who serve as sources for Shakespearean plays. She is known to have read North’s translation of Plutarch and the Geneva Bible. And, as a coup de grâce to doubters, the plays are full of virtuous women and villainous men.

There is much more in this vein. It might make a stronger impression if it were not so familiar: Every anti-Stratfordian theorist lays out much the same “evidence” for whichever noble personage he favors. One can always find, in the abundance of the plays, poems and sonnets, incidents that somewhat resemble events in any given biography. All English blue bloods had ties of kinship to everyone who had been important in the island’s history. They all patronized writers or had other visible links with Shakespearean sources. As clues to authorship, these characteristics are of no use at all.

What is useful is what contemporaries said, and they never suggested that anyone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon created the works that have come down under his name. Like all anti-Stratfordians, Miss Williams must deny that the evidence is conclusive, but Sweet Swan has nothing new to offer on this score. For the most part, it closely follows Diana Price: Shakespeare of Stratford lacks the proper “personal literary paper trails” and therefore could not have been a writer. The fundamental defect of this line of argument is that it refuses to examine the evidence that exists, complaining instead that more ought to be there. One would, of course, like to know as much about Shakespeare as we do about Tennessee Williams, or even Ben Jonson, but the gaps in the record don’t justify ignoring what survives. The affirmative evidence demonstrates beyond rational cavil that contemporaries unanimously believed that the creator of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Lear was a man named William Shakespeare who acted in the company that produced almost all of the plays and hailed from Statford-upon-Avon. (Vide Tom Reedy & Dave Kathman, “How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts”.)

Having established to her own satisfaction in Chapter One that the Stratfordian Shakespeare cannot be a literary figure of any sort, Miss Williams astonishes us in Chapter 18 by there declaring that he did in fact write Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. In an appendix, she acknowledges that there are no grounds for questioning his authorship of those poems and proceeds to denigrate them as “overwrought and melodramatic”. She thus spares herself having to explain why Lady Pembroke would have felt any need to use a pseudonym for these unexceptionable pieces or would have dedicated them subserviently to the juvenile, less socially elevated and Roman Catholic Earl of Southampton, while making nonsense of her belief that only someone who left behind a Pricean PLPT can be an author. The maneuver is similar to that of Thomas Looney, founder of the Oxenfordian school, who, unable to deny that The Tempest was written years after his candidate’s death, responded that it must be phony Shakespeare, and a bad play, too.

It has long been plain that there is a market, at least in academic circles, for feminist readings of Shakespeare. Miss Williams’ feminism is of a rather naive variety. To her mind, only a woman can portray a woman sympathetically. Since Shakespeare has many such portraits, he must have been female. Readers who find that logic convincing aren’t in the market for logic. May I suggest, however, that, if they need a distaff Bard, Emilia Bassano is a more amusing choice?

Note: Since the original post, I have corrected a typo in John Aubrey’s name. I’ve also been reminded that believers in the notion that Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare can’t and don’t make use of the line of argument that I ascribed to “every anti-Stratfordian theorist”, their candidate of course not being a “noble personage” with a well-documented biography and family tree.

Comments

[Tom Veal]

Mr. Faulkes is correct that the Countess of Pembroke did not patronize Thomas Nashe, whose bid for her largesse failed rather badly. The rest of his comments are, to put it mildly, highly speculative. I will probably have more to say later. For the moment, let me just note that, if "Venus and Adonis" was an attack on Nashe, it was the least successful in literary history, for no one, up to Mr. Faulkes himself, ever read it that way. The numerous Elizabethans who alluded to the poem took it for what it seems to be: the retelling of a classical myth.

[Fred Faulkes]

Great to see some discussion of the Mary Sidney case.

Just a few corrections and emendations for your further consideration.

1. Mary Sidney never patronized Thomas Nashe. Nashe's writings indicate there was enmity between them from the time that Nashe briefly wrote for Pembroke's Men (1591) until he was run out of town in 1597.

2. You somewhat skew the chronology. "Antonius" was translated in 1590 (year 3 of the countess's literary apprenticeship); Pembroke's Men was established in 1591; Shakespeare's rewriting of the Pembroke scripts is first noticed by Greene in 1592 (when she was in year 5); "Titus Andronicus" (which forensics suggest was largely written by George Peele) appears to belong to 1593.

3. The term "closet drama" is a misnomer, and as misnomers go, is a pretty hideous one. In their day, this kind of play was read out loud by a gathering of family and friends on an afternoon or evening. As every speech covers many pages, one copy sufficed for the whole group! All voices took turns practicing their oratorical skills. With regards to "Antonius" and Shakespeare, both follow Philip Sidney's prescription of climbing "to the height of Seneca's style". As well, "Antonius" comes back as half of Shakespeare's later "Antony and Cleopatra".

4.As you excoriate Mary Sidney's plausibility I take it you have not yet considered how this all begins with her ladyship's actors. As the patron she was very close to the action. Remember, too, that Mary had mostly finished editing and publishing her brother Philip Sidney's works by 1593. Shakespeare's first published work appears this year. This timing bolsters her case from a forensic point of view. As to the sudden "demise" of Pembroke's Men in 1593, don't take this too literally for it was straight into the palace for those actors, including William Shakespeare of Stratford.

5. The countess always had a London home and was at court throughout the year for such festivities as Ascension Day, the Christmas season, and so on.

5. In Shakespeare's additions to the early plays, one does notice that the female characters have all been completely redrawn. This is not true of the other characters.

6. As to "Venus and Adonis", it is curious that Gabriel Harvey reported it as the countess's work several weeks before it appeared in print in 1593 (see his "Pierces supererogation"). I find his gloss of Venus -- that it was written to put Thomas Nashe in his place -- convincing. "Venus and Adonis" is a poem about a young man who cannot perform when he meets a beautiful, aroused female (reflecting Nashe's leaving Pembroke's Men after the first play). I don't believe the young Earl of Southampton, to whom the poem was dedicated, would have been pleased with that message. As Southampton was Essex's protege, and as the queen found Essex himself wanting as a lover, I believe "Venus" reflects the enmity between Essex and the Pembrokes rather well.

Readers wishing to learn more of this early Pembroke history may read my findings at www.tiger-heart.com.

Fred Faulkes