[Chapter Nineteen: 1487—Leonardo in the East]

Chapter Twenty: 1593—Marlowe, Samuel Daniel, and Wilton House

The well-wishing adventurer, in setting forth,
wishes all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet,
to the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W.H.
—Dedication to "Shakespeare's" Sonnets, written by Thomas Thorpe in 1609
and expressing the wishes of the author,
modernized and grammatically decontorted

The Comet of 1593

Though what is sometimes referred to as the "authorship question" has many interesting aspects and is certainly worthy of detailed investigation, the current chapter is not initially aimed at the question of who exactly wrote the works commonly attributed to William Shakspere (pronounced Shacks-pear or Shags-pear) of Stratford that, until the First Folio of 1623, appeared in print only sporadically under the name Shakespeare or Shake-speare, the form of the supposed author's name as it is found on the title pages of some of the early quarto editions, as well as in other quarto editions of plays currently not attributed to this same Shakespeare. Since the name of the supposed author of the plays has been spelled in various ways in attempts to either clarify or cloud the distinction between the broker from Stratford and the playwright; in the following paragraphs we will consistently refer to the Stratford man, the investor in the Globe Theater and occasional actor, as Shakspere. Until it becomes clear exactly who was the author or authors of the plays, we will refer to him or her or they as "Shakespeare," in quotation marks.

Before answering the question, who was "Shakespeare"? we will deal with a parallel question, that is, who was the cometary avatar for the year 1593, and what was his relationship to the author or authors of the plays? Once we shift the discussion to this closely related problem, the authorship question takes on a new dimension not currently under discussion among the so-called Stratfordians, Oxfordians, Baconians, or any of the other disputants engaged in attributing the Canon to one or another individual or group of individuals. It was Godfrey Higgins, the squire and magistrate of Skellow Grange near Doncaster, who pointed out that the avatars, whose appearances were associated with certain chronological cycles, would sometimes be born in the appointed years, and sometimes die in those years. Though we have seen that neither of these was a strict necessity, it is only fair to ask which of the candidates for the author of "Shakespeare's" plays is most closely associated with the cometary year of 1593. In the case of Christopher Marlowe alone, we find that he purportedly died in that very year, conveniently "murdered" by those in the employ of Sir Thomas Walsingham, the literary patron of Marlowe and first cousin, once removed, of his former employer, Francis Walsingham, before the Star Chamber could work its diabolical will upon him.

A Short Timeline of Events Related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question

Beyond the year of his purported death, Marlowe's life demonstrates another parallel with other members of the avataric succession. That is, he was swept up in the same theological madness that always threatened and often took the lives of some of the most important unconventional minds of the Christian Era. This opposition to the established religious order is often a key element in the biographies of our cometary avatars. Again, it is Marlowe who was the target of the British authorities, who charged him with atheism at a time when it was a capital offense to even suggest that the state religion of Britain, under the control of the queen and thus making atheism equivalent to treason, was based on something other than absolute fact.

 Daryl Pinksen, in Marlowe's Ghost, has trouble understanding why the Star Chamber continued to gather evidence against Marlowe even after his supposed death. He thinks they suspected that Marlowe was still alive. More likely, as we have already seen, the English version of the Roman Inquisition was planning on digging up Marlowe and placing him on trial—as they did with John Wycliffe for the high crime of translating the bible into the vernacular—presumably for his immortal soul, since his body was already in a state of advanced decay. One suspects that if Marlowe's place of burial were known, the ghouls of the Star Chamber would have had no qualms about repeating this demented practice. Fortunately for Marlowe, 1593 was a plague year, exacerbated, perhaps, by the effects of the Comet. No one in his right mind would have gone rummaging through the diseased remains of the dead in their common grave.

Enter the Freemasons

[Shakespeare] is a brontosaur:
nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris.
—Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead?

In her last published book, A. D. Wraight makes reference to her forthcoming Legend of Hiram: Shakespeare & the Freemasons, in which she intends to demonstrate the connection between Marlowe and the Masons. Dolly Wraight died before she could finish this work, and those in possession of the manuscript claim that it contains no new information. One finds this difficult to fathom in that the title of the book suggests a direction not previously explored in any of Wraight's previous works. One can see by the following genealogical chart that Marlowe's employers in the secret service, first Francis Walsingham and then Baron Burghley, were closely related to two of the candidates for author of the plays and sonnets, and to other important literary figures of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as well as William Herbert, grandmaster of the Freemasons.

Partial Genealogy of the Cecils, de Veres, Sidneys, and Herberts

It is Peter Bull, however, who notices the similarity between the death of Marlowe, according to the report of the queen's coroner at the hands of Ingram Frizer, an employee of Thomas Walsingham, at the house of Eleanor Bull in Deptford, and that of Hiram Abiff, supposedly King Solomon's architect and the founder of Freemasonry. Bull lists a series of similarities between the two events that include attacks on them by "three ruffians" and their point of assault "above the right eye." The relationship between Abiff and Solomon was fairly complex and hints at the true identity of the architect. The story of how Solomon engineered the death of his half-brother Adonijah is well known. Less well known is the charge that Solomon had Hiram Abiff, who is also known among the Freemasons as Adoniram, murdered. The name Adoniram is not a great linguistic distance from Adonijah, where the Hebrew theophoric "Jah" is replaced by the equally theophoric "Ram". Add to this the tradition that Hiram the architect was the father of King Hiram of Tyre and we have a fairly complex series of royal relationships described in the genealogical table in Chapter Seven, all revolving around the enigmatic Balkis Bath-Sheba.

From 1618 until 1630, William Herbert was grandmaster of the Freemasons. If the current author is correct, it was to William Herbert that the Sonnets were dedicated under the initials W.H. We must assume that before 1618 William was involved at a slightly lower rank. Though, if Thomas Thorpe, the printer of the Sonnets, were also a Freemason, it might suggest an explanation of why William Herbert was addressed as "Mr. W.H.," rather than by his position among the nobility, in that the relationship of the two gentlemen within the Masonic organization would have trumped their exoteric social status. More likely, however, the author was in the habit of referring to William Herbert as "Mr. William," having been employed in the household of his mother.

Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, and the Wilton Circle

Composite Image of Shakspere (from the Droeshout Engraving)
and Samuel Daniel (from the 1609 Edition of The Civil Wars)

The sweetest swan of Avon to the fair
And cruel Delia passionately sings;
Other men's weaknesses and follies are
Honour and wit in him; each accent brings
A sprig, to crown him poet, and contrive
A monument, in his own work, to live.
—George Daniel of Beswick, A Vindication of Poesy, 1647

David Kathman writes,

But there are some writers who exhibit more similarities to Shakespeare than usual, either because they influenced Shakespeare or were influenced by him. Samuel Daniel has been recognized for the last 200 years as one of the most pervasive influences on Shakespeare's writing, particularly in the Sonnets but extending throughout the canon. Shakespeare repeatedly appropriated Daniel's vocabulary, images, themes (compare Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-18 with sonnets 33-40 of Daniel's Delia), and even unusual grammatical constructions (such as the pattern "so [verb or adjective] as [adverbial modifier]," which is uncommon outside Shakespeare and Daniel). The parallels between Daniel and Shakespeare are much more extensive than those Sobran notes between Oxford and Shakespeare, and extend far deeper than superficial verbal parallels.

Peter Farey writes,

As far as I can discover, nobody has ever challenged this actual statement [that "only the (pro)creative author may be called a 'begetter' "],...

G. Blakemore Evans does take issue with Donald Foster's solution (that the "W.H." is a misprint), and makes much of that one exception (from Samuel Daniel's Delia), even though Foster made it quite clear that the normal usage is being consciously reversed by claiming that the inspirer rather than Daniel himself was the real author.

In both of these instances, Samuel Daniel appears exhibiting similarities to the language of the plays or to that of the Sonnets and their dedication. Is this some bizarre coincidence? These are not the only "coincidences."

Michael Prescott writes,

The satirical play Return [from] Parnassus [performed at St. John's College between 1599 and 1601, most likely in December of 1600] has a character quote lines from Romeo and Juliet as his own, prompting another character to quip, "Romeo and Juliet: o monstrous theft! I think he will run through a whole book of Samuel Daniel’s."

The conventional explanation of this line is that Daniel was being accused of borrowing from "Shakespeare." If the current author is correct, the author of the Parnassus plays clearly knew who "Shakespeare" really was, and we begin to suspect why no-one noticed when the grain dealer and part owner of the Globe Theater died in 1616. It must have been an open secret that he had written neither the plays nor the sonnets.

Romeo and Juliet is not the only work whose "Shakespearean" authorship was called into question by the author of Return from Parnassus, sometimes called "Part 1." Steven Steinberg (2013) makes the following point about Venus and Adonis in his attempt to identify the 17th earl of Oxford with the author using the pen name William Shake-speare:

No doubt some were envious of the success and quality of Venus and Adonis. No one was laughing at it. So, if the poem is not the joke, where else can the joke be but with the poet? How so? The only obvious satirical implication is that the fool Gullio has been gulled into worshipping the wrong person or a person who doesn't exist. An alternative to that conclusion would have to pass the test of audience comprehension. There is no such alternative.... The unavoidable implication of viewing the joke as a joke is that Shakspere's authorship was a sham and that the sham was an open secret.

This is not the only place where "Shakespeare" appears alongside a reference to Samuel Daniel. The following appears in a printed marginal note in Polimanteia of 1595 "beside praise of Samuel Daniel in the text," as quoted by Penny McCarthy in her Pseudonymous Shakespeare:

All praise worthy. Lucretia sweet Shakespeare. Eloquent Gaveston, Wanton Adonis. Watson's heir. So well graced Anthonie deserves immortal praise from the hand of that divine lady who like Corinna contending with Pindarus was often victorious. [modernized spelling and punctuation]

"That divine lady" is, of course, Mary Sidney, who translated Garnier's Antonie. "Shakespeare" was the author of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and Antony and Cleopatra. But why is this note next to a passage on Samuel Daniel who wrote The Tragedy of Cleopatra and A Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius and not elsewhere? Again, an open secret—despite scholarly attempts to muddy the waters, William Covell knew in 1595, as the author of Return from Parnassus knew in 1600 and George Daniel knew in 1647, that Daniel was "Shakespeare."

Along the same lines, Steven Steinberg (2013) reproduces a quotation from Henry Peacham's The Perfect Gentleman of 1622. Steinberg points out that Peacham's "list of writers who had made Elizabeth's reign a Golden Age of Literature" contains the names of various authors but not that of "Shakespeare." He suggests that this resulted from the author's knowledge that Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford, was the author of "Shakespeare's" works and, therefore, listing the name of the man from Stratford would have been redundant. But Steinberg's logic applies to all of the names on the list, de Vere, Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser, and, of course, Samuel Daniel.

Of these, de Vere died in 1604, hence the obsession of the Oxfordians to show that the plays were written early; Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1608; Henry Lord Paget, quite a minor figure, in 1569; Sidney in 1586; Dyer in 1607; and Spenser in 1599. Only Daniel makes any sense from a chronological point of view, having lived until 1619, though clearly there are many authors from this period not mentioned by Peacham (see the table below), so Steinberg's logic is flawed, though one would certainly expect someone as important as "Shakespeare" to be listed as a luminary of Elizabeth's reign if, indeed, he wasn't identical with one of the gentlemen listed.

Similarity of content and style also bears upon the question. In her attempt to show that Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, wrote the plays of "Shakespeare," among many works by many authors, Robin P. Williams (2006) lists the following from the pen of Daniel as sources of the plays:

Delia (1592)
The Complaint of Rosamond (1592)
The First Four Books of the Civil Wars (1595)
Musophilus (1599)
The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1599)
Letter from Octavia (1599)

The Complaint of Rosemond is echoed in The Rape of Lucrece, Love's Labour's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. The First Four Books of the Civil Wars foreshadow Henry IV. The specific details of these and other parallels may be found in Henry R. D. Anders' Shakespeare's Books (Berlin 1904) beginning on page 85, available at Google Books. These include the supposed lifting almost untouched of "Romeo's words over the apparently dead Juliet" from "Henry's lament over the dead Rosamond," as noted by Rees (1964). The details of the derivation of Lucrece from The Complaint may be found in Henry Lee's introduction to the 1905 facsimile edition of Lucrece, beginning on page 18, also available at Google Books. On numerous occasions, critics have noticed the similarities between Daniel and "Shakespeare," but rather than draw the obvious conclusion, they have accused "Shakespeare" of borrowing from Daniel. More reasonably, the borrowing is illusory, the use of similar language and motives occurring within the production of a single author, sometimes writing in a more scholarly and literary vein under his own name, and sometimes writing in a more popular style for the public stage under a pseudonym.

Peter Ackroyd, in his Shakespeare: The Biography of 2006, sees borrowing in the other direction:

If Shakespeare borrowed from Daniel, then in turn the poet borrowed from the dramatist; some effects from Antony and Cleopatra become part of Daniel's verse drama on the same theme. So there was in a sense, a meeting of minds. Samuel Daniel is an image of what Shakespeare might have been—a writer of obscure country origins who, by dint of learning and skill, fashioned a career for himself as poet and retainer.

Specifically, Seronsy (1967), in his chapter on Daniel's production of "Senecan Closet Drama," suggests the influence of "Shakespeare's" Antony and Cleopatra on the 1607 revision of Daniel's Cleopatra. However, "Shakespeare's" work was not registered until 1608. The reader will appreciate the absurdity of this kind of parsing of influences, as if the two authors belonged to some kind of mutual admiration society, membership in which allowed them to continually use the work of the other. As long as Daniel and "Shakespeare" are seen as two different authors, the opportunities for scholars to analyse these supposed borrowings remain almost limitless.

 Peter Ackroyd also sees connections between "Shakespeare" and Mary Sidney:

There is another intriguing connection between The Rape of Lucrece and a noble family. It has been suggested that the poem was conceived and written under the auspices—or at least under the influence—of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.... She had ... created an informal network of literary patronage, and under her direction three neo-classical tragedies were written or translated from the French.... Each of these tragedies concentrated upon the sufferings of noble heroines, among them Cleopatra and Cornelia, and in deference to Mary Herbert takes an almost "feminist" reading of women betrayed by a hostile male world. The Rape of Lucrece is very much part of this tradition. It is not otherwise clear why Shakespeare would have chosen such an apparently unpromising subject. Samuel Daniel wrote a poem, The Complaint of Rosamond, and dedicated it to the Countess of Pembroke; this poem also expresses the sorrows of a suffering woman....

Talk about "close but no cigar."

Many of the works used by "Shakespeare" beyond those written by Daniel under his own name would have been available in the library of the Countess of Pembroke. Williams (2006) lists 219 works believed by scholars to have been used by "Shakespeare." And, of course, the knowledge and advice of the members of the Wilton Circle or those associated in other ways with Mary Sidney would have been close at hand to someone serving as tutor to Mary's children and living at Wilton House. This would tend to explain the indications seen by some that "Shakespeare" was a group effort, Mary Sidney serving, in that scenario, perhaps as a general editor. Among the works believed to have been used by "Shakespeare," many of which were foreign or classical in origin, 24 were written by Mary Sidney or her associates listed in the following table, including six by Samuel Daniel.

Persons Associated with Mary Sidney and Wilton House

While it has been suggested that the reference at the head of this section was lifted from Ben Jonson in his dedication to the First Folio, at the very least it shows that the "Avon" mentioned is the one associated with Mary Sidney (the Salisbury Avon) and not the Stratford Avon, either (through poetic license) the rivers Nadder and Wylye that feed the Avon and flow through the grounds of what was called Wilton Park in 1900, or the actual Avon that flowed past "Mary's seat at Ivychurch," the former Ivychurch priory east of Salisbury, as noted by Margaret P. Hannay in Philip's Phoenix. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia is supposed to have been written at Ivychurch.

Furthermore, "Delia's home [was] near the Avon," according to sonnet 48 of the 1892 edition of Delia, as noted by Joan Rees (1964). The passage reads:

   No no my verse respects nor Thames nor theaters,
Nor seeks it to be known unto the great:
But Avon rich in fame, though poor in waters,
Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat.
   Avon shall be my Thames, and she my song;
   I'll sound her name the river all along.

Again, this is clearly not a reference to Stratford. It should also be pointed out that the Thames flows past Oxford University, a fact that will become important shortly. Thus, by "my Thames," Daniel appears to mean his equivalent of Oxford University where he had studied for three years. He now was being instructed by Mary Sidney, and perhaps other members of the Wilton Circle.

Map of Wilton House and Environs

to be continued

The Author in Italy

Richard Roe (2011) presents solid evidence that whoever wrote the plays had on-the-ground knowledge of northern Italian locations. According to Fred Faulkes (2007), Daniel was in France and Italy during most of 1590 and 1591.

Geographical Settings of the Contemporary and Medieval Italian Plays

In Italy, Daniel met Sir Edward Dymoke, to whom he had dedicated his translation of The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius in 1585. Johanna Procter, quoted in Selene Scarsi's Translating Women in Early Modern England, calls Daniel "an excellent Italianist, with a wide knowledge of Italian literature." Unlike the Stratford Shakspere, one finds no problem in explaining the Salisbury one's knowledge of Italian geography. That Daniel was in Italy is not just speculation or surmise, According to June Schlueter (2012), during that time the Austrians were in the habit of keeping what are now called autograph books. It seems that Daniel's companion in crossing the Alps was Erhard Grünthaler, whose Stammbuch Daniel signed in 1591. Since Erhard and his brother crossed the Alps in 1590 and Daniel's signature is sandwiched between entries for Padua, it seems that he was there on June 30, 1591, and had already been in Italy the year before, though the entry locates it at "Augusta," perhaps a reference to the nearby Villa Augusta. Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona west of Padua, was already in publication by 1597, having been acted many times before. In the same year its authorship was being ascribed to Samuel Daniel in a performance of Return to Parnassus at St John's College.

One of the two possible routes available to Daniel would have taken him along the Via Claudia Augusta, an old Roman road that ran from Donauswörth south of Nuremburg all the way to Verona, the site of the partially historical events of 1302 dramatized in Romeo and Juliet, and on to the port town of Ostiglia on the Po from which they would have traveled by boat to Padua. If Daniel was indeed "Shakespeare," we can fill in his itinerary in Italy with the locations of his contemporary and Medieval Italian plays. Thus, besides Verona and Padua, he would have visited Milan, Mantua, Venice, "Belmont" (the Villa Foscari on the Brenta), Sabbioneta, Florence, and even Messina in Sicily far to the south, perhaps taking a short boat ride to Vulcano Island off the northern coast.

Map of Northern Italy ca 1591

As a student of British and Italian history, Daniel would have been familiar with the main characters in "Shakespeare's" historical plays, as well as others containing historical elements:

Historical Dates of the Events Described in Some of the Plays

The Author in Time

Comparing the life and works of Samuel Daniel with the first references to the works of "Shakespeare," we have the following:

Chronology of the Life and Credited Works of Samuel Daniel Aligned with the Earliest References to the Works of "Shakespeare"

Joan Rees (1964) presents two chronological clues from Delia, though she sees them as two versions of a single clue. In sonnet 26 of the 1592 edition, Daniel claims that he has served Delia for three years:

   My privilege of faith could not protect it,
That was with blood and three years witness signed:
In all which time she never could suspect it,
For well she saw my love, and how I pined.

The implication is that Daniel was continuously employed by Mary Sidney for three years sometime before the first pirated edition of Delia appeared in 1591. Despite Rees, who thinks that Daniel did not enter the employ of Mary Sidney until 1592, this period can be determined rather precisely. Daniel left Oxford in 1584, which year Edward Dymoke became his patron. In 1585 he published his translation of Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'Imprese of 1555 dedicated to Dymoke and late that year he left for France, where he remained until September of 1586. In 1590 and 1591, Daniel was in Italy, at least part of the time with Edward Dymoke. He returned to England late in 1591 and by the next year he was again in the employ of Dymoke before again entering the service of Mary Sidney. The three years when Daniel was in the employ of the countess must therefore have been sometime between September of 1586 and March of 1590. This is a rather narrow window, suggesting that the vast majority, if not all, of Daniel's service—at that time—occurred during the years from 1587 until 1589. This is the period during which Samuel Jonson claimed that Titus Andronicus was written. In 1589, we have the earliest known mention of Hamlet, after Mary Sidney, and presumably Samuel Daniel, had moved to London.

By the edition of 1601, in which they are found in sonnet 28, the years of service have increased to five, the following version being from the final memorial edition of 1623 in which they are found in sonnet 31:

   No privilege of faith could it protect,
Faith being with blood, and five years witness sign'd,
Wherein no show gave cause of least suspect,
For well thou saw'st my love and how I pin'd.

This suggests two possible explanations. Either Daniel had only worked for Mary Sidney an additional two years before 1601, or the line was modified after five years of service, perhaps in 1594, and never changed thereafter. In fact, the wording remained "five years" for the rest of Delia's publishing history. According to Joan Rees (1964), Daniel lost the patronage of Mary Sidney sometime between the registrations of Cleopatra on the 19th of October, 1593, and the "first instalment" of The Civil Wars on the 11th of October, 1594. This fits perfectly with the notion that Daniel left the service of Mary Sidney in 1594, after a total of five years of service. 

As for the suggestion in the dedication to "Shakespeare's" Sonnets, published in 1609 and quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the author was off adventuring at the time of publication, thus explaining certain defects in the publication, it should be noted that two of "Shakespeare's" Sicilian plays appear to have been written between 1610 and 1611. The argument for those dates may be found in the work of Henry Paine Stokes at Cambridge in 1878. They suggest that the author was in Sicily just prior to that time and that he visited Vulcano Island during his stay there. We can therefore place Daniel tentatively in Sicily in 1609 and perhaps into 1610.

to be continued

The Spear Shaker

The name "Shakespeare" had no prominence
while he lived because the Elizabethans knew
what the troglodytes wish you never to find out;
"Shakespeare" or "to shake a spear" meant nom de plume.
The name "Shakespeare" was attached to any play
when the author wished to remain anonymous.
—Keir Cutler in his performance, Is Shakespeare Dead? [12:20]
based in part on Mark Twain's book of the same name

Among the supporters of various candidates for author of "Shakespeare's" plays, it has been noted that the plays often appeared in print under the name William Shake-speare, with a hyphen, indicating to them that the name was a pseudonym—a pen name. Some have even gone so far as to make the connection with Athena, the "spear shaker" of Greek mythology. The story is that when the sun reflected off of the spear of her statue, it appeared to shake. Though Athena was the goddess of knowledge and learning among other things, as noted by some of these authors, among them Paul Hemenway Altrocchi, in To All the World Must Die, what has not been addressed is how this identification with Athena related to the biography of any particular author. However, one does not have to search very far to find evidence of the origin of this reference to Athena. It turns out that a book written by Anthony à Wood, the one that serves as the only solid evidence that Samuel Daniel's unnamed sister married John Florio, was called Athenæ Oxonienses, meaning "Oxfordian Athens," Athens suggesting a classical university town and cultural center. The book is a history of the authors and bishops who attended Oxford University and its title is important in that it directly connects Oxford to the ancient city of Athens and its local goddess, Athena. Thus, the hyphenated name "Shake-speare" points to someone who studied at Oxford. This is our first clue, but not our last.

In 1998, John Dougill published a book entitled Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the 'English Athens'. In which he refers us to the work of William Camden, who died in 1623 in Chislehurst where Thomas Walsingham was buried, the same year as the publication of the First Folio and The Whole Works of Samuel Daniel. In Camden's words, originally published in Latin in 1586 in his Britannia and shortly thereafter translated into English,

Where the Cherwell flows along with the Isis, and meets it; and where their divided streams make several little sweet and pleasant islands, is seated on a rising vale the most famous University of Oxford, in Saxon Oxenford; our most noble Athens, the seat of our English Muses, the prop and pillar, nay the sun, the eye, the very soul of the nation: the most celebrated fountain of wisdom and learning, from whence Religion, Letters, and Good Manners, are plentifully diffused through the whole Kingdom. A delicate and most beautiful city, whether we respect the neatness of private buildings, or the stateliness of public structures, or the healthy and pleasant situation. For the plain on which it stands is walled in, as it were, with hills of wood, which keeping out on one side the pestilential south wind; and on the other the tempestuous west, admit only the purifying east, and the north which disperses all unwholesome vapour. From which delightful situation, authors tell us, it was heretofore called Bellositum. [emphasis added]

The Cherwell is to the east of Oxford, the Isis (or Thames) to the south and west. Clearly, the identification of Oxford University with ancient Athens was current in the late 16th century. Neither Mary Sidney, nor Christopher Marlowe, nor Francis Bacon, nor even the 17th earl of Oxford attended Oxford University. Samuel Daniel, on the other hand, studied at Oxford—though for only three years—as did William Stanley and, for a brief time, Sir Walter Raleigh. Both Mary Sidney's brothers and her sons attended Oxford. There is, thus, a deep Oxford connection to the productions of the Wilton Circle.

 to be continued

Shakespeare and Shakspere, Conspiracy or Coincidence?

It is a curious fact that all the writings
were put forth in the name of Shakespeare,
very often printed with a hyphen,
as I have given it above, Shake-speare;
while in every one of the five cases
where the man's signature has come down to us,
he spells his name Shakspere.
—Ignatius Donnelly, The Great Cryptogram, Book 1

Two names, one the nom de plume of a well known poet and author augmenting his income by writing for the less than respectable public stage, the other the almost exclusively theater-related spelling of the name of a small-time broker and part owner of the Globe Theater engaged, on occasion, in playing minor roles at said theater; these two gentlemen were both connected to the Globe, one as management and the other as playwright, and at some point around 1594 or 1595 their names were confounded, so that the broker was given credit for the works of the playwright and the playwright was robbed of his position as author of the greatest works ever written in the English language. This confusion may not have been accidental, the broker being less than a shining example of ethics and moral rectitude, having hoarded grain during a shortage and engaged in other questionable activities, and the poet not finding himself in a position to challenge the authorship claims of the broker for reasons of social standing and reputation.

It is the position of the current author that the similarity of the names Shake-speare and Shakspere was entirely coincidental and that they never referred to the same person. In this regard, it is his contention that they are not, as commonly claimed by the believers in the legend of Stratford upon Avon, simply variant spellings of the same name. They are different names and refer to different people with entirely different biographies and the identification of the plays of the one with the name of the other may very well have resulted from the greed of a social climber who adventitiously found himself in a position to take advantage of the similarity of his name to the pseudonym of the other.

Applying Occam's razor, the current author further asserts that the notion that William Shakspere was somehow engaged in a complex conspiracy to protect the identity of the playwright—thought by some to have been the fugitive Christopher Marlowe, in mortal fear for his life—is totally specious. In short, Shakspere was not in cahoots with the true author of the works of "Shake-speare," he was operating on his own and his motives were purely mercenary and self serving. Most likely, attempts to identify Shakspere with "Shake-speare" after the former's death resulted from ignorance and wishful thinking rather than intentional misdirection. Even so, knowledge of the name of the true author survived at least until 1647, as evidenced by the application of the expression "sweetest swan of Avon" to the historian, sonneteer, and playwright Samuel Daniel, even as the myth of the Stratfordian "Shakespeare" was taking root. In short, it is only by completely dissociating Shakspere from "Shake-speare" that one is able to make any sense at all of the various conundrums that arise in trying to connect the broker with the literary works.

[Chapter Twenty-One: 4375 BC—Orion in India]

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