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From the editor:
'Twas the night before December, and all through the house... |
 
Please forward this Bulletin to any and all. Free subscriptions, as ever, can be obtained here. Not quite free (but still competitively priced!) books and audiobooks can, we hasten to add, be obtained here. |
1) Letters
2) On Point: Lynne Kositsky and The Tempest
3) The Tour, The Gigs To Come
4) Masthead
Letters
If you have any feedback that you would like considered for the Bulletin, please drop us a line at feedback at shakespeare by another name dot com. (A human reading the previous sentence, of course, would appreciate knowing that shakespearebyanothername is actually one word. Spam email address harvesting programs aren't so clever.) Please also indicate in your email whether we may include your name and/or town, or whether you would like your correspondence to be printed anonymously. We reserve the right to edit for style, grammar, brevity, and clarity.
The Sweeper
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Thank you for your wonderful book. I was first told the de Vere story by my grandmother, Ethel Trussell, when I spent the summer with her in 1945. (I was aged 5). She claimed that the Trussells had some sort of an inn in England (which I later learned was Billesley) and that Will Shakespeare was “the boy who swept up the floors,” and that Edward de Vere was really the author of the works. I have corresponded over the years about this with a cousin in Salt Lake, and lo and behold, the other day she sent me a story from an Australian newspaper, claiming that [Sir Henry] Neville was indeed the author. I prefer your argument, though, and thanks again for such a wonderfully written story.
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Wow. Boldface added. Mr. Trussell has kindly agreed to look into this piece of family history and let us know what he finds. Will notify Bulletin readers as soon as we learn anything more.
On Wishing Well
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I am enjoying your book, and find the argument convincing. Earlier I had followed the common view that of course Shakspere wrote Shake-speare, and anyone who argued otherwise was a crank. I am not a Shakespeare expert but just happened to see your book at Border's. |
Whose Vile Phrase?
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In the September 23, 2005 Times Literary Supplement (p. 17), John W. Briggs cites Peter Bridgman and M.
C. Braddock to the point that Polonius' words “That's an ill phrase, a vile
phrase; 'beautified' is a vile phrase” (Hamlet 2.2.110) is a riposte to Robert Greene's attack on Will
of Stratford [“an upstart crow, beautified in our feathers...” from Greene's 1592 pamphlet Greene's Groatsworth of Wit]. |
According to the OED, one of the first attested usages of “beautify” is by Edward de Vere's father-in-law Lord Burghley in 1576: “Whome princely garter, with his azurd hue, dothe bewtyfye.” That Polonius is mocking Burghley's usage of the word makes a lot more intuitive sense—since Polonius is, on the whole, a caricature of precisely the same man.
On Point: Lynne Kositsky and The Tempest
“Edward de Vere couldn't have been Shakespeare because he died in 1604, before many of the plays were written.” This refrain, heard in one form or another by most readers of this Bulletin, is the perennial and the most substantive objection to the Oxfordian theory today.
Yet, all but one of the supposedly post-1604 plays can be rather quickly dealt with by looking more fully at the evidence. Macbeth and Henry VIII, for instance, are conventionally dated to c. 1605 and 1611. But the evidence for these dates of composition is flimsy at best. More likely, both plays were written during the Elizabethan era, i.e. before the 1603 death of Queen Elizabeth. See SBAN's Appendix C (“The 1604 Question”) for more.
But The Tempest has always been the toughest play to square with an author who stopped writing in 1604. Some nautical and new-world imagery and language in the play
arguably has strong parallels to a pamphlet about a 1609 shipwreck in the Bermudas written by a man named William Strachey. Here's an
essay by the online Stratfordian advocate David Kathman that argues for Strachey as a key source text of The Tempest. (Here, for the record, is an Oxfordian
response (PDF) to that essay, written by the Canadian researcher Nina Green.)
As it happens, though, after SBAN had been written, a tremendous piece of research came to prominence that decimates any lingering claims that The Tempest was inspired in any way by Strachey's pamphlet. The date of The Tempest, therefore, is no longer a problem for the Oxfordian theory. This
research—by the Canadian author and researcher Lynne Kositsky in collaboration with Prof. Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md.—represents one of the most important recent discoveries for the advancement of de Vere's claim to the “Shakespeare” laurels.
Not a few academics, curious about de Vere's story but wary of The Tempest's silver bullet, have been watching the “Shakespeare” debate from the wings. But after the dissemination of Kositsky and Stritmatter's work, removing the single most important objection to de Vere as “Shakespeare,” one suspects we may see more academics, like groundhogs in February, peeking out into
the new landscape to see if they're ready to come out.
SBAN Bulletin: Edward de Vere couldn't have written The Tempest because he died in 1604. How does your research respond to that claim?
Lynne Kositsky: It's a big response. First of all, the reason people give for [de Vere's] not writing The Tempest is that the author had to rely on the Bermuda pamphlets, basically by [William] Strachey. And the wreck in Bermuda didn't take place until 1609. The first pamphlets came out at the end of 1610. So 1611 is generally given as the date [for The Tempest]. And it couldn't have been written earlier because of the reliance on Strachey.
We've found two major things. One is that Strachey was a plagiarist, and he plagiarized nearly everything he did. The second is that the materials that Shakespeare has been said to have taken from Strachey actually exist in earlier documents. Almost every single thing is in Richard Eden's 1555 book The Decades of the New Worlde. On top of that, there are scores of other parallels between Shakespeare and Eden in The Tempest, which do not occur in Strachey. So it's much, much closer.
Are some of those new parallels in your short article on the web?
No, they're in the essays. In the table online, we were just dealing with the parallels between Shakespeare and Strachey. There are loads of others, but you'll find them in the second essay, which isn't available yet.
When and where will you be publishing this research?
We've written two essays, and we've submitted them to mainstream journals. If we've gone for two years, and no mainstream journal will accept it—and we have met with a lot of closed doors—then we will have to publish in an Oxfordian journal or newsletter.
Will you be presenting this material at any upcoming conferences?
Yes. At the Renaissance Society of America Conference [in March], we're going to be talking in an Erasmus seminar. And we'll be talking about Erasmus's influence on other travel writers, including Strachey. From there we'll be able to show that it was not Strachey's view of the storm that influenced Shakespeare.
We're also speaking [at the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference] in Portland in April. We'll probably at least do the Erasmus paper.
So has this research inspired your Muse?
I've started a novel about a young boy who is taken as Strachey's servant on the trip [to the New World]. Strachey may not be the source for Shakespeare, but he is the source for Kositsky.
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Lynne Kositsky is an award-winning Canadian poet and author who was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. She has Bachelors' degrees in psychology and education, a Master's degree in English, and various honours specialist teaching diplomas in English and drama. Her poetry has been awarded the prestigious E. J. Pratt Medal and Award and the Canadian Author and Bookman Award. She has published nine children's and young adults' novels, including the critically-acclaimed Oxfordian yarn A Question of Will. |
The “Shakespeare” By Another Name Book Tour lasted from September 7 through October 11 (with a few other events in New England before and after) and was
both great fun and, all in all, a tremendous success. Many have asked how the Tour went, and in answer to that question, I've attached below the blog entries for October 11 and 14 that offer a wrap-up of the fifteen book signings, classroom appearances and public lectures during that one intense month.
As for upcoming SBAN events, two are now logged on the website, and several more are in the planning stages. Please stay tuned.
Tour wrap-up from the Shakespeare By Another Name blog:
So much to say about one intense month of readings, interviews,
signings, talks, book sales, reviews, and countless conversations with readers from
coast to coast. Thank you to all who came to, who broadcast or wrote about, who
otherwise helped to publicize
these book events and make them happen.
Highlights 'n' curios (in no particular order): Doing a radio interview for
an alt.rock/pop music show that sandwiched a 10-minute discussion about
Edward de Vere and Elizabethan England between songs by the Dead Kennedys and Fountains of Wayne;
doing a couple signings in the wake of a famous author, who, via the good graces of
kindly employees at a bookstore down the line, was handed his own copy of SBAN;
flyering cafes, libraries, record stores, and bookstores in Seattle and Portland
like an underground rock'n'roll band publicizing a club gig; garnering the “Oxfordian of
the Year” award from the Ashland Authorship Conference (thank you, fellow
heretics!)—and serving as a contestant
on an up-and-coming new game show called “Oxfordian
Jeopardy.”
Good question...: “I just bought a copy of Scott McCrea's [anti-Oxfordian]
book The Case for
Shakespeare. What should I know before I read it?”;
“Sidney, Wyatt, and Surrey were all Tudor-era poets of high social station who
published works under their own name. How do you reconcile that?”
“What is the deal with Greenblatt's Will In The World anyway?”
“Could you
write another book, only this time arguing that Francis Bacon was the author?”
Audiobook of choice for the long car trips: The Egyptologist by Arthur
Phillips, narrated by Gianfranco Negroponte, Simon Prebble, Gerard Doyle, and
Bianca Mato.
Emblematic journal excerpt: “Sept. 10, 2:20 a.m. BOOK TOUR EVENT #1. BIG
SUCCESS. Could not ask for better. Did a radio interview in the morning. Very cool
station—but” [Entry ends abruptly. Fatigue won.]
Unsolicited endorsement time: Amy's Organics frozen foods plus a microwave.
What touring scribbler could ask for more?
And you seriously believe that?: “You see, education spoils
an author. Look at Sir Philip Sidney. He was an extremely learned man—but his
poetry was stilted and artificial. Now Shakespeare on the other hand...”;
“Ben Jonson wouldn't deceive us.”;
“The nice thing about the Shakespeare story we have is that he had working-class roots.”;
“Shakespeare was a magpie. He probably just heard about this de Vere fellow
and wrote about him in his plays.”
Finally, many thanks to SBAN Tour hosts, handlers, and helpers across the country:
Isabel Holden; Stephanie von Hirschberg; Adam Welsch; Joe Eskola;
George Anderson & Catherine Wengler; Louise Anderson; Jon Alberts & Sara Jackson;
Malcolm Hooper & Lara Whitley-Bender; Earl Showerman; Mary Daugherty; Randall Sherman;
and Rima, Malcolm, and Maya Greenhill.
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