by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembrook, died in 1621.
She did not die un-mourned. She was survived by her two sons William and Philip who are remembered today by literary scholars because the plays of William Shakespeare, as they appear in the First Folio, are dedicated to them. Their mother was well-known in literary circles at the time. Indeed, she was nothing less than the grande dame of English letters.
She was the beloved sister of the great poet Sir Philip Sidney. When he died (heroically) of wounds received fighting in Spain, she stepped into his role as arbiter of style and excellence in English poetry. She encouraged the use of blank (unrhymed) iambic pentameter, which she apparently considered the verse form best suited to the English language. She used her considerable wealth to encourage and support poets, and she held what we would now call “salons” at her Wilton estate. Her salons were attended by the most prominent intellectuals and writers in the country.
In 1621 everyone who was anyone knew Mary Sidney Herbert.
The Wilton estate sat beside one of the many rivers in England known as the Avon. A portrait of Mary Sidney Herbert shows her wearing a lace collar with swans woven into the lace. There is a poem by Ben Jonson in the front matter of the First Folio containing the lines, “Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were / To see thee in our waters yet appear.” Could he have been addressing Mary Sidney Herbert rather than (as is usually assumed) a glovemaker’s son from Stratford, the so-called “Bard of Avon”?
Jonson knew the glovemaker’s son. He even wrote a remembrance of him, presumably when he died (in 1616). But the sentiment expressed in that eulogy suggests that Jonson did not have a high opinion of his friend’s literary talent. He says, “I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, Would he had blotted a thousand.” Jonson seems to be telling us that his friend rarely wrote—“(whatsoever he penn’d),”—and when he did, he never bothered to polish and revise. Moreover, Jonson’s poem in the First Folio suggests that it is memorializing someone who has died recently, rather than seven years before.
I do not want to go so far as to claim that Mary Sidney Herbert was Shakespeare, although that idea has been seriously floated by others. (See, for example, Sweet Swan of Avon, by Robin P. Williams, 2006.) It is known that she did write at least some closet dramas, not intended for performance; but there are also persuasive reasons for thinking that she did not write all the plays of Shakespeare—at least not all by herself. Many of the plays are about war: the feelings of soldiers preparing for battle and the camaraderie among encamped soldiers. A woman of her time would not have had much opportunity to learn about such things.
I will, however, go so far as to claim that without Mary Sidney Herbert there would have been no William Shakespeare. She made William Shakespeare possible.
The evidence that a glovemaker’s son from Stratford did not write the plays of William Shakespeare has been manifest for some time. The glovemaker’s son had only a middle-class education. We have no record of his attending any institution of higher learning, or that he ever traveled abroad. Or that he even owned a book. The author of the plays, by contrast, had a knowledge of Danish geography, as well as its terms and customs. He was so familiar with Italy that he must have spent considerable time there. He also had a thorough knowledge of law; classical literature and languages; courtly manners and pastimes; philosophy; history; the French, Spanish, and Italian languages; music; painting; natural history; mathematics; astronomy; fishing; medicine; navigation and seamanship; theatrical techniques and practices; and the secret languages used by freemasons, the Elizabethan secret service, and undergraduates of Cambridge University. Finally, he had a massive vocabulary surpassing that of any other known writer, then or now.
In the 19th century it was widely believed that the only person with sufficient genius and education to be the author of the plays was Sir Francis Bacon. This view was held by such luminaries as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Ralph Waldo Emmerson. I believe they were wrong. Bacon was certainly a genius, but he was also a Puritan and had a low opinion of the theater. In his book on logic, Novum Organum, he is harshly critical of what he calls “idols of the theater.” These are fallacies of reasoning, ruinous to science, that arise from considering what might be true in “fictional worlds,” such as would be created for a play. I doubt that a person with those opinions would have spent much time writing plays.
But there were other noteable geniuses in England at that time. Some of them can even be linked to one or another of the plays:
There is William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. Love’s Labours Lost, first performed in 1593, is evidently based on events that took place at the court of Navarre, which Stanley visited in the 1580s. The play also satirizes Russian culture. William Stanley visited Moscow after leaving Navarre. The schoolmaster in the play seems to be a caricature of Stanley’s own tutor. And William Stanley is known to have written plays. In 1599 A Jesuit spy who was keeping an eye on Stanley reported that he spent all his time “penning comedies for the common players.”
There is Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. In 1596 he studied at Padua, where he had Danish classmates named Rosenkrantz and Gyldenstjerne. He traveled to Denmark in 1603, the same year in which the first quarto edition of Hamlet was published.
There is Fulke Greville, childhood friend of Sir Philip Sidney. He wrote at least some plays, including a version of Anthony and Cleopatra, which is presumed lost. What if his Anthony and Cleopatra is the very play we have under the name William Shakespeare? I believe he can also be linked to the other Roman history plays, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.
There is Samuel Daniel, who was neither a nobleman nor glovemaker’s son. He was a member of the “yeoman” class: loyal servants to the nobility. Daniel was a noted scholar on the history of the Wars of the Roses, which is probably why he was hired to serve as tutor to Mary Sidney Herbert’s two sons. He also served as her “Master of Revels,” the person responsible for organizing plays and other entertainment for the household. He not only wrote poetry (with the encouragement of Mary Sidney Herbert) but was the first poet in England to hold the title of Poet Laureate. He is the likeliest candidate to be the author of the so-called Henriad plays: the English history plays.
There is even another woman in the mix, Aemelia Bassano Lanier. She may be the “dark lady” of the sonnets. She was likely to have been a converted (or covert) Jewess, so she emerges as an interesting candidate to be the author of Merchant of Venice. This also links her to A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream which includes some references that only someone with a knowledge of Jewish culture would understand.
These days the most frequently mentioned alternative to the glovemaker’s son is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Like Hamlet he was once captured by pirates and later left naked on the shore of his home country. Like Timon, in Timon of Athens, he was profligate with his money and always in financial trouble. Like Mary Sidney Herbert, he was a patron of poets and playwrights. He even maintained a school for playwrights. That he wrote poetry and plays himself is a certainty. His friend, Gabriel Harvey, even once wrote a poem teasing de Vere to put down his pen for a while and do his duty as a soldier defending England. Two lines of the poem seem especially significant. “Minerva lies hidden in your right hand…Thine eyes flash fire and thy will shakes spears.” In my opinion, de Vere is the most likely author of the poem, “Venus and Adonis,” which chides “Adonis” for refusing the advances of “Venus.” At the time the scandalous and improper poem was written, the de Vere family were trying to arrange a marriage between de Vere’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and the handsome young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley. Wriothesley, however, was having none of it. Harvey’s poem may explain why the poem was published under the pseudonym, “William Shake-speare.”
But none of these candidates can be definitively linked to all the plays and poems. Even the Earl of Oxford, who seems to have the best case, is not a shoo-in. He was on bad terms with Sir Philip Sidney (they quarreled over a tennis match), so he kept his distance from the Wilton circle. He maintained his own troupe of actors and was never involved with the acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) who performed the plays of Shakespeare at the Globe Theater in London. Moreover, he died in 1604. Half a dozen plays attributed to “Shakespeare” were written after that time, and some appear to make references to historical events that took place after that time. If we include the lost play, Cardenio, on that list, the idea that Oxford wrote all the works of Shakespeare becomes unsupportable. Cardenio was based on the novel, Don Quixote, which was not even published in Spanish until 1605!
When my sister and I became interested in the authorship question twenty years ago, we considered all the candidates and eventually concluded that the works of Shakespeare could not have been written by any single person. We co-authored a paper arguing that point and presented it at a conference of Oxfordian scholars in Portland. We titled our paper, “Shakespeare on the Orient Express,” since Hercule Poirot, when confronted with a similar problem, came to a similar conclusion: they were all involved in one way or another. Our thesis has since gained some traction. It is now even taken as a foregone conclusion in some circles. That’s very gratifying, but it is not a complete answer.
We did not, at the time we presented our paper, have any very clear idea about who had written which plays, nor did we have a very good explanation for how all the plays came to be attributed to “William Shakespeare.” Claudia had one theory; I had another. But here is what we now suspect may have happened.
In December of 1604, shortly after the death of Edward de Vere, Philip Herbert, Mary Sidney Herbert’s youngest son, married Susan de Vere, Edward de Vere’s youngest daughter. This was at the urging of King James himself, who probably saw himself as a peacemaker and wanted to see an end to the feuding between these two prominent noble houses under his rule. It seems to have worked. The two families resolved their differences and merged their fortunes. And that, of course, explains how the literary works of Edward de Vere might have become merged with plays written by members of the Wilton circle. They all came to be the property of Mary Sidney Herbert.
Fifteen years later Mary Sidney Herbert died.
We can’t know this for certain, of course, but I can imagine her sons mournfully sorting through her effects, among which they would have discovered the many plays that had fallen into her possession over the years. On consideration they decided to create a memorial for their mother, and what could be more fitting than to publish the collection of plays. Some of the authors (fearing the displeasure of the King) may have wished to remain anonymous, or perhaps they had simply failed to put their name on their manuscripts. Perhaps Susan, looking over her husband’s shoulder and recognizing some of the plays as those written by her father, suggested that the plays be published under the pseudonym that her father had previously used. The actor from Stratford, who coincidentally had the same name, had died in 1616, so he was no longer around to cause trouble—even assuming the members of the Herbert family were aware of his existence!
Ben Jonson was one of the poets who received the patronage of William Herbert. It makes sense that William Herbert would have called on Jonson to edit the plays, write some introductory matter, and get the whole bundle to the printer. Jonson wrote some clever verses with double meanings, telling the reader to ignore the author’s name, and to “look away” from the frontispiece portrait of the author. He urged the reader to judge the plays only on their own merit, rather than by the identity of their author. Jonson was good at that sort of double-speak.
The preparation of the Folio must have taken some time. There was editing to be done, lead plates to cut, type to set, printing and binding, all of which would require time—much more time than it does now. Assuming the incentive for putting the First Folio together was to acknowledge the passing in 1621 of Mary Sidney Herbert, the grande dame of English letters, it is entirely reasonable that the book did not appear in London bookstores until two years after her death.
Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear.