Appended to a Daily Telegraph story about a different Shakespeare-related topic is this news from the world of anti-Stratfordian eccentricity:
John Casson supports the thesis first mooted in 2005 that an Elizabethan diplomat named Sir Henry Neville was the real author of William Shakespeare's plays.
Dr Casson, in his book Enter Pursued by a Bear, identifies ‘Shakespeare’s’ first published poem as the ‘Phaeton sonnet’, his first comedy as ‘Mucedorus’ and ‘Locrine and Arden of Faversham’ [sic] as the first of the tragedies. All of these were created ten years before the Henry IV plays.
“After 400 years we can now see ‘Shakespeare’s’ early artistic development. What we thought were the first plays by ‘Shakespeare’ appeared anonymously in the early 1590s. It is inconceivable however that his first plays were the massive trilogy of Henry VI. Writers develop over time from simpler beginnings. I have discovered some of those earlier writings,” he said.
The findings have been welcomed by leading actor Sir Derek Jacobi. Sir Derek said: “I consider it to be a work of first class research and scholarship, full of fascinating indicators all pointing away from the orthodox belief.”
Young Google, my research assistant, quickly turned up the publisher’s Web site, where they know that Locrine and Arden of Feversham are two different plays. (“Feversham” and “Faversham” are variants, the former being the earlier.) Here is the blurb for the forthcoming book:
Following Brenda James’s discovery of the true identity of the writer of Shakespeare’s works, Henry Neville, John Casson has applied this to apocryphal works with startling results. He has thus discovered:
Neville’s first nom-de-plume (before he used the name ‘Shakespeare’)
Shakespeare-Neville’s first published poem: the Phaeton sonnet
Shakespeare-Neville’s first comedy: Mucedorus
Shakespeare-Neville’s first tragedies: Locrine and Arden of Faversham
Shakespeare-Neville’s first Falstaff: ten years before the Henry IV plays.
Dr. Casson also explores Thomas of Woodstock and A Yorkshire Tragedy, revealing the connections between them and Henry Neville’s life and letters. He reclaims the lost play Cardenio in the surviving text of Double Falshood, showing that this is a genuine work by Shakespeare-Neville and John Fletcher.
After 400 years we can now see Shakespeare-Neville’s artistic development before his early known works.
John Casson, PhD, is an independent researcher, psychotherapist and playwright.
There’s no need to reprise what I think about the Neville-Shakespeare theory (but those who wish to can read The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu, The “Tower Notebook” and Filching from the Baconians, which examine it in more detail than most people can endure). As for the plays that Dr. Casson assigns to “Shakespeare-Neville”, they are familiar parts of the “Shakespeare Apocrypha”, various dramas attributed to the Bard by the editors of the Second, Third or Fourth Folio, usually on the strength of initials on the title page of an Elizabethan era print run. Shakespeare could have had a hand in some of them, but there’s no way to know.
One sure thing, however, is that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors and Henry VI are quite adequate as “simpler beginnings” for the Shakespearean corpus.
Sir Derek Jacobi’s endorsement of the book is interesting. He has hitherto been a stalwart supporter of the claims of the 17th Earl of Oxenford, and Oxenfordians have no truck with the Nevillian heresy. In the words of Oxfordian News,
[At] the April 20-23[, 2006] 10th Annual Shakespeare Authorship StudiesConference . . . Lynne Kositsky politely demolished Rubinstein’s credibility. [William Rubinstein is the Neville theory’s co-originator.] Anyone who has followed the authorship question as a topic in intellectual history is aware that for many decades (at least since 1984, if not 1920), there has been no serious alternative to the Oxford case.
I trust that the Oxenford hierarchs will be prompt to herd the erring Sir Derek back into the onr true theory’s corral.
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