Though readable and more mannerly than other writings on the
subject by the editors Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Beyond
Doubt is a work of polemic. The ad
hominems invariably employed by those without substance to their arguments are
now encoded in their altered terms: anti-Stratfordians, they decree, are now to
be called anti-Shakespearians, and the Shakespeare Authorship Question will
henceforth be known as the Shakespeare Authorship Conspiracy Theory. This book rehashes the methods employed by James
Shapiro in Contested Will (2010): analyse the psychology (or pathology) of
early doubters, offer "evidence" that no-one disputes and claim it
supports Shakespeare-of-Stratford's authorship, ignore scholarship from the
last fifty years, and avoid Price's research.
Non-Stratfordians conversant with the evidence and arguments supporting
Shakespeare scepticism will have no problem dismantling Shakespeare Beyond
Doubt.
Unlike Shapiro's Contested Will, however, the book does make
space for Marlowe as a major candidate: an indication, perhaps, of Marlovian
progress in the last three years.
Chapter 3, "The Case For Marlowe," was written by Charles
Nicholl, whose well-researched book The Reckoning (1992, 2002) is required
reading for anyone wishing to consider the complex events surrounding Marlowe's
apparent death in May 1593. It is a
shame that Nicholl's contribution to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt does not
demonstrate the same quality of scholarship as The Reckoning. His chapter contains numerous factual errors
(A.D.Wraight's full name, for example), as well as evidence of some significant
misunderstandings of the Marlovian case.
He states, for example, that Marlowe's "measurable
quota of intellectual sophistication is stressed by Marlovians on the debatable
assumption that the writing of great literature requires a university
degree." This is a
misrepresentation. It's not the
university degree that we stress, but the opportunities Marlowe's life
apparently provided both then and later for him to mix with the intellectual
elite of the country – its statesmen, scientists, explorers, mathematicians,
thinkers, and writers – and to be given access to magnificent libraries such as
those of the "wizard" Earl of Northumberland to whom he claimed to be
well known. And that was all, of course,
before he would have started off on the travels envisaged in the Marlovian
theory.
In discussing the first exploration of this theory, Wilbur
Gleason Zeigler's It Was Marlowe, Nicholl focuses on Zeigler's interest in the
faulty account of John Aubrey, who claimed that Ben Jonson "killed Mr
Marlow the poet on Bunhill, coming from the Green Curtain
play-house." Nicholl claims
"This is an early paradigm of authorship controversialism, where invented
evidence plays a determining role in what is presented as a genuine historical
argument." A "determining
role"? Zeigler quoted Aubrey as just one example of the conflicting
accounts of Marlowe's death that were to be found at the time, and considers
the possibility that at least the date was correct. Although the novel does in
fact end at the Curtain in 1598, with both Marlowe and Jonson present (watching
Hamlet), nothing is suggested in any way about what happens after that.
Considering the support for the Marlovian claim provided by
the (authorship-neutral) scientist Dr Thomas Corwin Mendenhall in 1901, Nicholl
criticises Mendenhall's method on the basis of "the fluidity of spelling
in [the early modern] period and the extent to which printed copy has been prey
to the vicissitudes of transmission."
This criticism might be levelled at all stylometric studies, including
those that orthodox scholars claim to support their position. But in any case, it isn't a problem. Although Mendenhall didn't tell us which
texts he made use of, it is fairly clear from the method employed that they
would have been printed editions with modernized spelling.
Further, Nicholl states, "It has also been shown that
word-length distributions vary according to genre; an analysis of the works of
Sir Philip Sidney by C. B. Williams (1975) gives very different readings for
his prose and his poetry." Williams's analysis used only 1,552 of Sidney's
verse (i.e. poems) and 1,553 words of his prose. Yet such minimal data from one author is used
to deduce a conclusion applicable to all English renaissance writers! Nicholl claims Williams's conclusions would
"affect a comparison of Shakespeare's plays with those of Marlowe, which
feature much less prose." Yet in
our comparison of Marlowe's later works (9,452 words) with Shakespeare
excluding the comedies (66,402), the former has about 86% verse (blank verse,
not poems) and the latter about 81%.
Hardly enough of a difference to cause concern, even if Williams had
been right.
On the basis that he considers Mendenhall's stylometry
flawed, Nicholl then dismisses the extensions of that work by Daryl Pinksen and
Peter Farey, which (contrary to Nicholl's assessment) took full account of
these caveats, and used statistical and technological methods unknown to
Mendenhall. Recognising that authors may
vary over time and between genres, Farey demonstrated that the pattern for
Marlowe's later plays correlates (at r = .9998, where r = 1 is perfect
correlation) more closely with Shakespeare's histories, tragedies and
"Roman" plays than Shakespeare's own comedies do with them (.9986),
or than Marlowe's earlier plays do with his later ones (.9943).
When assessing the evidence surrounding Marlowe's apparent
death in 1593 – a death that would clearly preclude Marlowe's writing the
Shakespeare canon – Nicholl falls victim to either a profound logical
inconsistency or a personal blindspot.
"The desire of anti-Stratfordians," he says, "is always
to create alternative narratives, with or without the backing of evidence, and
despite this extensive scene-of-crime documentation Marlovians continue to
claim that Marlowe's death was faked." But Charles Nicholl himself (in both editions of his book, The
Reckoning) rejects the "extensive scene-of-crime documentation" as being
based on lies, and in Mike Rubbo's documentary Much Ado About Something
accepts the possibility, if not the probability, of there having been a faked
death. The
proper approach for an historian would therefore have been to show why the lies
told by those present wouldn't have extended as far as the identity of the
body, rather than simply appealing to the authority of other biographers, and
making offensive (and false) remarks about his opponents' motives and
reasoning.
Nicholl says Marlovians have "sought to prove"
that the Deptford killing was not within the verge (a twelve mile radius around
the queen) and that "the involvement of the Royal Coroner in the case was
a suspicious intervention rather than a routine requirement." Follow up
the references he gives for this allegation, however, and one will find they
say exactly the opposite. Despite the
Queen actually being at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey (rather than at Greenwich,
where Nicholl places her), Deptford was still within the verge, and it was
certainly a requirement for him to have been involved. However, the law required the inquest to be
presided over jointly with a coroner from the county, in this case Kent, and
according to the report of the inquest it wasn't. This information, discovered by Marlovians,
was gratefully picked up by Park Honan in his biography of Marlowe, but for
some reason Charles Nicholl blatantly misrepresents it.
Having dealt at some length with the version of Marlovian
theory espoused by Calvin Hoffman's [The Murder Of] The Man Who Was Shakespeare
(1955), Nicholl claims that "There have been various further explorations
and refinements of his theory, but no great changes or new directions." This
is simply untrue, and as an attempt to dismiss nearly sixty years of more
recent research, disingenuous. Other
than agreeing with the theory that Marlowe's death was faked and that he
survived to write much of what is attributed to Shakespeare, modern Marlovian arguments
contain very little of Hoffman's material.
There are numerous other errors of both fact and reasoning
in Nicholl's chapter, and also some evidence notable by its absence. When writing that, "in The Merry Wives
of Windsor, Hugh Evans soothes his 'melancholies' by crooning a couple of
stanzas from Marlowe's famous lyric, 'Come Live With Me'," Nicholl fails
to mention that Evans mixes Marlowe's song up with one based upon Psalm 137
("By the rivers of Babylon") which, as everyone would have known, is
a lament for being in exile. Presumably, he has no explanation for why the
author would do such a thing.
As with all convinced Stratfordians, where there is no good
explanation for a piece of evidence, Charles Nicholl either ignores the
evidence completely, or insults those who raise questions about it, insisting
that questioning the received view is simply not legitimate. He calls Marlovians "disingenuous"
(definition: lacking in candour or frankness, insincere, morally fraudulent)
for asking how and why Touchstone, making a clear reference to Marlowe's death
in As You Like It, could have knowledge of the word "reckoning"
(given in the inquest document as the reason for the knife-fight) when it was
apparently not in the public domain until 1925.
Thus it is clear that despite the generally improved tone of
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, the defenders of the orthodoxy continue to hold the
line that authorship questioners are morally or logically deficient, and the
question itself invalid. Charles Nicholl
demonstrates a clear distaste for "the interrogative syntax much favoured
in authorship literature." We, on
the other hand, insist that questioning is a legitimate human activity, central
to all research in both the humanities and the sciences. And though it is possible that the
Shakespeare authorship question will never be settled, we refer Charles Nicholl
and the contributors and editors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt to this quote from
French philosopher and humanist Joseph Joubert:
"It is better to debate a question without settling it,
than to settle a question without debating it."
© Ros Barber and Peter Farey, May 2013
