The third in a series which explores the evidence which Ben Jonson provides for the identity and biography of Shakespeare to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio.
In the first installment I introduced Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson who, as Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Wells says, “is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare.” In the second I summarized the documentary evidence for Shakespeare as writer, actor, and theater investor as well as what is known about the man from Stratford conventionally identified as the author
In this post I share my personal journey from respectable Marketing professor to obsessive investigator of early modern English literature. I hope you enjoy and welcome comments and especially factual corrections as I am intending to publish this work in a forthcoming book
This material can also be found on my Substack:
open.substack.com/...
Twelve Days of Shakespeare:
- Ben Jonson and the Arte of Shakespeare
- The
Four Five Shakespeares
- Heart of Darkness: My journey into the madness of Shakespeare Authorship
- Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love
- The Upstart Crow
- Jonson, the Herberts and the Folio
- To the Memory of My Beloved
- Bauds, Whores and William Basse
- Wits to Read: Francis Meres and Shakespeare’s Small Latin
- Praise to Give
- Shakespeare’s Shadow
- Women are but Men’s Shadows
Heart of Darkness: My journey into the madness of Shakespeare Authorship
I’m Dave Richardson. While I am a career academic, I am neither a historian nor an English Lit professor. I have a PhD in Marketing Science, my academic expertise is in statistics and game theory which I use to study how consumers’ choices reflect the information available to them. As part of my research I have spent decades studying theories of knowledge and behavior and how they evolved over time. I have found that people dislike asking hard questions about their world, and once they find acceptable answers they tend to leave well enough alone, sometimes for many centuries. As a result really interesting new ideas about how to interpret information do not emerge uniformly across recorded history but appear in bursts of a few decades, even a few years and then subside again into settled wisdom. For my work these critical moments occurred in Ancient Greece in the time of Plato, in the late Renaissance in the groundwork for the enlightenment and in the early twentieth century when modern statistics and choice theory became regularized into the foundations of economics. Each time these questions are asked new answers open new possibilities for learning at the cost of leaving alternative ways of thinking in the past. As an academic I am interested in how people respond to complex problems when they have little information with which to understand them. In seeking what was lost in modern economic theory I became an expert on the history of Epistemology (the branch of Philosophy that considers the nature of knowledge) and of Scientific Method (itself a branch of Epistemology).
The Elizabethan Renaissance was a pivotal period when such patterns were established for how men engaged their world that continue to shape our behavior and understanding. At the center of this world of ideas was Elizabeth’s leading scholar, mathematician, book collector and sometime mystic Dr. John Dee. Understanding Dee’s complex view of his world on the cusp of industrial and scientific transformation became something of an obsession. Soon my expertise extended to NeoPlatonic Philosophy and its neer-do-well offspring alchemy and their relation to the religious schisms of the sixteenth century.
My Life as Lord Chamberlain
In 2018 my interest in the Elizabethan Renaissance led me to audition for the Bristol Renaissance Faire which recreates the Queen’s progress to Bristol England during the summer of 1574. I had hoped to portray Dee, so I could share my knowledge of Renaissance science and philosophy.
Instead I was assigned the role of Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, and, as future Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s patron, although he would not gain that office until more than a decade after the year we portray.
The dashing Lord Hunsdon, Henry Carey, and me.
Wikipedia told me Hunsdon was an unpolished, rough-spoken soldier who drank a lot and had 14 legitimate children and more by mistresses scattered about England.
My research revealed a circumspect but powerful and effective politician who with his son-in-law sponsored the two most important acting companies of the age. Carey was likely the bastard son of Henry VIII by his mistress Mary Boleyn. Unfortunately he suffered from extraordinarily poor timing throughout his life. When Henry was born in 1525 the king had already acknowledged one bastard son as Henry Fitzroy and on his sixth birthday made him Duke of Richmond and Somerset, establishing the boy as a potential heir if he failed to sire a legitimate son. By the time Henry Carey was born the prospect of a son by Katherine of Aragon was fading and the King began to entertain the idea of another Queen. His eye fell upon Anne Boleyn, sister to the mistress who had already born him two children (Henry had an older sister Catherine). As Henry’s strategy to obtain a divorce was to claim that his marriage to Katherine was incestuous by virtue of her previous marriage to his brother Arthur, it would have been impolitic to admit to fathering children with the sister of the woman he intended to marry. Henry Carey would not be made a Duke on his sixth birthday.
He was however brought to court at the age of two . When his nominal father William Carey died of sweating sickness in 1528, Henry became the ward of his Aunt Anne, who kept him nearby, a perfect little red haired copy of the King to remind him what marriage to a Boleyn girl could bring. When he was nine years old Carey learned to keep his secret. John Hale, a Catholic Vicar opposed to the king’s efforts to divorce, asked the young man about his father, and was imprudent enough to share the boy’s answer in a letter to the Privy Council. He was executed two week later.
“Moreover, Mr. Skydmore dyd show to me yongge Master Care, saying that he was our suffren Lord the Kynge’s son by our suffren Lady the Qwyen’s syster, whom the Qwyen’s grace might not suffer to be yn the Cowrte.” —John Hale, vicar of Isleworth to the Council, 20 April 15351 (executed 4 May 1535)
After Anne’s execution, Henry and his sister Catherine remained in the royal household at Hunsdon where they were raised with their ¾ sister Elizabeth. During the precarious years of Mary’s reign when Elizabeth was viewed as a potential threat to the Catholic monarch, Henry provided funds and sometimes a home to his sister. When Elizabeth became Queen she made Catherine Carey first lady of the bedchamber, the person closest to her at all times. Henry was created Baron Hunsdon for the childhood home they had shared, and later made keeper of Somerset House the sprawling castle on the Strand. He was also called on to lead the army every time Elizabeth was seriously threatened. He won the only real battle of the 1570 Northern Uprising despite being ambushed and vastly outnumbered. He commanded the land forces awaiting the arrival of the Spanish Armada.
In her 2008 dissertation, ‘No Other Faction but My Own’: Dynastic Politics and Elizabeth I’s Carey Cousins, Kristin Bundesen details how the Carey family wielded unrecognized power through their access to the Queen, and sheer numbers augmented by strategic marriages to extend their family network. In addition to Henry’s 17 known children his sister Catherine had another 17 of her own. Among these was Lettice Knollys who married successively Walter Devereux Earl of Essex and Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester. Her eldest son was Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex who dominated the politics of the 1590s on his way to a tragic end. By the time of Henry Carey’s death in 1596 the Careys controlled a majority of the House of Commons just among their own cousins and relations by marriage. Robert Dudley called them the ‘Tribe of Dan’ after the prolific biblical patriarch.
As a member of the Bristol court I was daily interacting with many of the personalities that would come to shape Shakespeare’s theatre. William Cecil and his daughter Anne, Walsingham and his daughter Frances, Leicester, the Sidneys, Lord Admiral Howard and of course the Queen were all friends I talked, interacted, even danced with.
I began to wonder how Shakespeare fit into all this. I had an independent interest in Shakespeare by virtue of my address, in 2012 I bought a house on Shakespeare Avenue in Chicago, without paying much attention to the name. My daughter was nine years old at the time and we thought that was an excellent age to begin to encounter the plays of Shakespeare. Chicago is an excellent theater city and offered multiple Shakespeare productions each month. We saw 22 that first year. My daughter participated in a workshop group that developed life skills for girls through studying Shakespeare, the Viola project, run by a group of young actresses with a passion for Shakespeare. Shakespeare began to be another of my Elizabethan friends, however unlike the others I did not have a face or a person to attach to the writer. I read the biographies from Wells, Bate, Schoenbaum, Duncan-Jones, but the pieces of Shakespeare didn’t add up to a character I could relate to. And I began to see all the surely, must haves and could haves and to wonder if maybe those traditional biographies were trying so hard but coming up short because they had the wrong man.
Dancing with Anne Cecil, behind us are Philip and Mary Sidney.
I had a hard time seeing Bacon or Oxford as Shakespeare (Oxford’s wife Anne and sister Mary did not create a flattering impression of the Earl who was off in Italy in 1574) and Bacon was too busy being a know it all, but when I encountered Robin William’s book Sweet Swan of Avon suggesting Mary Sidney it felt more plausible. The Sidney’s had just the right mix of political access and literary aspiration. I was intrigued but not convinced.
An Acceptable Authorship Question
Queen Elizabeth arrives at Kenilworth, August 1575
One of the resources we relied on to inform our efforts to accurately portray the Elizabethan court on progress was a curious book published in 1575 but quickly withdrawn. In August 1575 Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester hosted the biggest party of the Elizabethan age, a three week spectacular entertainment intended as a last ditch effort to convince Queen Elizabeth to marry him. It did not work, Elizabeth soon tired of the relentless wooing and fled the scene several days early with the poet George Gascoigne chasing after her spouting verses he had composed but not yet delivered.
We know a lot about the event because of a letter purportedly written by Robert Langham, a sort of sergeant at arms for the privy council, to a friend in London.
The letter portrays its author as a pompous fool while offering details of the Queen’s reactions that suggest the author is someone quite close to her. When it was printed just weeks after the event, Langham immediately protested to William Cecil that he was not the author and was being abused. William Patton, a writer and retainer of Leicester who help produce the event apologized and admitted authoring the letter but doubts about authorship persist.
The Entertainment at Kenilworth:note handwritten ascription to Robert Laneham (Folger)
The authorship of the Laneham letter is currently unsettled among academics. Some think Laneham is the author and is protesting that his letter was published, some that Patton wrote the work and still others that Patton was covering for the real author to spare political embarrassment. One explanation for the existence and rapid publication of the letter is that it fulfilled a need to report the outcome of Leicester’s gambit to the broader Dudley faction. The writer is in a position to closely observe and report the Queen’s reaction, but might not want to be blamed for betraying that trust. That Patton was involved seems certain. The letter uses Patton’s unusual orthography (spelling), notice all the oo’s and z’s. Only seven published documents survive that do, four are Patton’s.
The tone and character of the writing suggest a young writer of substantial talent with a satirist’s view of court pretensions. Philip Sidney (21) had recently returned from his European tour and was cup bearer for the Queen. He is briefly parodied as a gangly red headed bridegroom in a mock marriage that Elizabeth avoided. Mary (13) had just joined the court as a Maid of Honor (a term she invented) .The writer identifies himself as “el Principe Negro” and with the “warrant of the Black Prince” Ich Dien (I serve), traditionally associated with the heir to the throne. Philip was Dudley’s heir presumptive. He also speaks of long service to “the Lady Sidney”, the mother of Philip and Mary. Neither Laneham nor Patton is connected to the Sidneys, but her children might make that claim. Both would develop into celebrated writers. Could they have contributed to the letter? I thought perhaps with some research I could find out.
After reading various articles about the letter I came across a more interesting potential guide. In 1625, on the 50th anniversary of the entertainment, Prince Charles visited Kenilworth, which he had purchased from Dudley’s bastard son.
Ben Jonson’s Masque of Owles (courtesy Folger Library)
Travelling with the Prince was Ben Jonson, the greatest writer of the period after Shakespeare. Two years past editing the Shakespeare folio and somewhat past his prime, Jonson was still a royal favorite as a writer of Masques for the Court. As an entertainment for the visit Jonson wrote a piece he titled The Masque of Owles at Kenelworth, Presented by the Ghost of Captain Coxe mounted on his Hoby-horse. Although we do not think it was performed as a masque, it was probably read to the court for the occasion.
Capt. Cox had presented a traditional reenactment of a medieval battle at the 1575 Entertainment (twice since the first time the Queen was preoccupied with dancing). The description of his library is the primary attraction of the Langham Letter to bibliographers. As Jonson was very close to the Sidney family, his primary patrons throughout his career, I had hopes that he might disclose some bit of family history that might link them to the letter. The Masque makes many references to the Entertainment, and invites identification with both then current historical personages but offers no obvious clues to the authorship of the Letter. I had a new challenge, to learn to read Ben Jonson as he demanded in the first poem of his epigrams:
Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand,
To read it well: that is, to understand.
