A CHANGE OF ADDRESS
Sir John Harington
of Exton, Rutland, was first cousin to Sir Philip Sidney (the soldier poet, first husband of Sir Francis Walsingham’s daughter), Sir Robert (governor of Flushing) and their sister Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, to whose sons Shakespeare’s
First Folio
Shakespeare was dedicated in 1623. His daughter Lucy married at fourteen to become Countess of Bedford.
Burley on the Hill
Le Doux arrived at Burley in October 1595 and remained there until 25 January 1596 when he left with Sir John Harington.
HOW
RICHARD II
FOLLOWED
RICHARD III
Posthumous
is the unusual given name of the hero of
Cymbeline
, a man of low birth but high personal merit, who is banished from the kingdom for exceeding his station.
It was also the name of the first cousin who connected Anthony Bacon to the Haringtons.
NOTHING LIKE THE SUN
Jaques Petit
Anthony Bacon’s Gascon servant Petit was to arrive at Burley on 10 December 1595. The woman known as Ide du Vault, appointed as governess to Harington’s small daughter, had preceded him.
Ide du Vault/Madame Vallereine
The woman depicted here as the
Sonnets
’ Dark Lady was indeed known by both names. She signs her name ‘du Vault’ on her letters, but they are endorsed as being from ‘Madame Vallereine’. In one of his letters, Jaques Petit refers to her as Ide du Vault, and in another plays on both names by calling her Miss-worth-nothing (Mzel Vaultrein). (Wraight, 1996).
‘ruined nun’
Petit says du Vault is a defrocked nun. He refers to her as ‘
la nonain
’ but also calls her a whore.
WILL HALL
Unconfirmed evidence of an agent named ‘Will Hall’ is reported but not referenced in
The Shakespeare Conspiracy
(Phillips and Keatman). Hall’s first appearance in the records is allegedly recorded in Canterbury in 1592 in connection with writer and intelligencer Anthony Munday. A payment to ‘Hall and Wayte’ for carrying messages to the Low Countries was supposedly made on 19 March 1596. (It is a William Wayte who takes out a surety of the peace against one William Shakespeare in November of the same year.) In October 1601 ‘Willm Halle’ returns with intelligence from Denmark. The
Sonnets
’ dedication famously begins, ‘TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE ENSUING SONNETS MR W.H. ALL HAPPINESSE’ and Donald Foster has demonstrated that ‘begetter’ at this time was, with one deliberate exception that plays on the convention, always a reference to the author. Foster’s solution is that ‘W.H.’ is a typo for ‘W.SH.’ (Foster). A solution suggested by Peter Farey is that the author is at this point going by the name of Will Hall (Farey, 2000).
MY TRUE LOVE SENT TO ME
‘Pembroke’s Men to come from London with a play’
The Earl of Pembroke’s Men played
Titus Andronicus
at Burley on the Hill during the Christmas Le Doux was there.
Reporting on the Christmas festivities in January 1596, Petit notes that ‘the tragedy of Titus Andronicus’ was played, adding ‘but the performance was better than the subject matter.’
HAL
Ganymede
in Greek myth was abducted by Zeus to be cup-bearer to the gods, and his sexual plaything.
THE AUTHORS OF SHAKESPEARE
‘A lawyer playwright’
A reference to John Marston who, with Joseph Hall in various publications from 1597 to 1598, discussed an author they nicknamed Labeo, whom Marston implies is the author of
Venus and Adonis
. He identifies Labeo with a heraldic motto used exclusively by Francis and Anthony Bacon, ‘Mediocra Firma’. H. N. Gibson, who argued against a range of authorship candidates in his book
The Shakespeare Claimants
, calls this ‘the one piece of evidence in the whole Baconian case that demands serious consideration’ (Gibson, p. 63). All copies of the books in which Marston and Hall discussed ‘Labeo’ were subsequently ordered to be burnt by Archbishop Whitgift and the Bishop of London (1599).
‘Picks up a play from Bacon’
On 25 January 1595 – incidentally the day that Le Doux left Burley – Francis Bacon wrote to his brother Anthony from Twickenham Lodge: ‘I have here an idle pen or two, specially one that was cozened, thinking to have gotten some money this term; I pray send me somewhat else for them to write out besides your Irish collection which is almost done’ (Cockburn, p. 147). Cockburn says, ‘Bacon evidently had several young men at the Lodge doing copying work for him’ (p. 148). That Francis Bacon (or his scribes) had possession of several Shakespeare works, including
Richard II
and
Richard III
, is supported by The Northumberland Manuscript (pp. 164–83). On this mixed inventory of works from 1595 to 1597, the name ‘William Shakespeare’ is scribbled repeatedly as if for practice. No play was published under the name ‘William Shakespeare’ until
Richard II
and
Richard III
in 1598. The
First Folio
comments of Heminges and Condell regarding blotless manuscripts make it clear that they only received fair copies of the plays, and that this was unusual.
MR DISORDER
On 14 December 1595, Petit complains that ‘Christmas is the cause of ‘much vain expense’ for ‘des tragedies et jeux de M. Le Desordre’: tragedies and plays by Mr Disorder’.
IN DISGRACE WITH FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES
‘letters for two friends in London’
Ide du Vault wrote two letters dated 24 January 1595, one to Jean Castol, minister of the French Church in London and friend of Anthony Bacon, the other to a Madame Vilegre. Le Doux was to be the carrier. Someone copied both letters on to a single sheet of paper and sent these copies to Bacon.
THE EARL OF ESSEX
‘cousin of the Queen’
The maternal great-grandmother of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was Mary Stafford, née Boleyn, elder sister of the Queen’s mother, Anne.
‘a memo’
Essex issued Le Doux with a passport on 10 February 1596 and another a month later (Wraight, 1996, pp. 55–6). A document headed ‘Memoires Instructives’ (LPL MS 656 f.186) details what the Earl of Essex expects from his new agent on the continent. He is particularly keen for intelligence from Italy. Intimate first-hand knowledge of certain Italian cities has long been one of the arguments against the man traditionally attributed with the authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems. The author’s detailed knowledge of a fresco in the northern Italian town of Bassano, as revealed by passages in
Othello
, has led one scholar to propose recently that he
must
have visited Italy (Prior). Twenty years’ research on this subject has just been published in
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels
(Roe).
‘a seal’
In the Manuscripts section of the British Library, Peter Farey found a seal, identified by the Library as sixteenth century, bearing the name Louis Le Doux. It depicts a man in Elizabethan dress, in all respects normal except his face is covered by a blank mask.
MERRY WIVES
‘some scraps of me’
In
The Merry Wives of Windsor
(Act III, scene i) the verse that Sir Hugh Evans sings to cheer himself up is from Marlowe’s ‘A Passionate Shepherd to His
Love’: ‘Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry,’ he says, and on a second attempt, mixes Marlowe’s poem with words based on Psalm 137, ‘By the rivers of Babylon’, which Farey points out is ‘perhaps the best known song of exile ever written.’ Sir Hugh also mangles ‘fragrant’ to ‘vagram’, perhaps as close to ‘vagrant’ as the author dares. Further details in Chapter 5 of
A Deception At Deptford
(Farey, 2000).
IN THE THEATRE OF GOD’S JUDGMENTS
The Theatre of God’s Judgments
was a bestselling tract by Thomas Beard, detailing the punishments God metes out to heretics, atheists and blasphemers. First published in 1597, it was reprinted several times over the next fifty years
.
A KIT MAY LOOK AT A KING
‘Burghley is dead’
William Cecil died on the 4 August 1598.
‘working for the French’
A letter dated 28 October 1598 reveals a man named Le Doux is working for Lord Buzenval, French ambassador at The Hague, carrying messages and money between him and the King, Henri IV, in Paris. Le Doux continued travelling between the two for the next eleven months, spending marked periods with the King (Gamble).
‘France signed peace with Spain’
In a diplomatic move, the Protestant Henri IV had converted to Catholicism in 1593, saying, ‘Paris is well worth a mass’. On 2 May 1598, to the dismay of the English, he signed a peace treaty with Spain. The money he was sending to Lord Buzenval, however, appears to have been in support of Dutch resistance against Spanish occupation.
Navarre
The King had formerly been the King of Navarre, and Anthony Bacon had formed a strong friendship with him during his twelve years in France (1580–92). The inexplicably detailed references to the court of Navarre contained in
Love’s Labours Lost
include the pointed caricature (as Don Armado) of a man both Anthony Bacon and Henri IV knew well, Antonio Perez. Le Doux mentions both Perez and Edmund Walsingham (Thomas Walsingham’s brother) in a letter to Bacon dated 20 April 1596. Two and a half years later, a man named Le Doux is in direct contact with the former King of Navarre (Gamble).
Wittenburg
The real-life Faustus attended this university, as did Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
‘he is announced’
The Earl of Southampton had arrived at the Paris embassy in April
1598 and remained there until November, bar a short return to England in August to marry Elizabeth Vernon, a cousin of the Earl of Essex whom he had impregnated. Le Doux delivered a letter to the French king in late October 1598.
‘She’s in the Fleet’
Queen Elizabeth, always outraged when one of her maids of honour got married without her permission (and especially when they got pregnant) had imprisoned her.
A ROSE
‘some sixteen years ago’
The anonymous author of
Ulysses upon Ajax
(1596) speaks of ‘witty Tom Watson’s jests, I heard them in Paris 14 years ago’, putting Watson there in 1582.
‘It’s said you died blaspheming’
This myth began with Beard (1597).
Ned Blount
Edward Blount published Marlowe’s unfinished
Hero and Leander
(1598) with a dedication to the recently knighted Sir Thomas Walsingham, describing Marlowe as ‘the man, that hath been dear unto us’. The other 1598 edition, published by Paul Linley, in which George Chapman had completed the poem and broken it into sestiads, also carried the dedication from Blount to Walsingham, in this version signed only with the initials ‘E.B. Thorpe’ addresses Blount as Marlowe’s friend in a letter accompanying Marlowe’s translation of
Lucan’s First Book
(1600). Blount was also publisher of the
First Folio
(1623).
George Chapman
completed Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander
and published it in 1598 with a dedication to Thomas Walsingham’s wife Audrey, contributing more lines than Marlowe had written and altering the structure.
CHAPMAN’S CURSE
‘fresh from communing with the spirit world’
‘Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?’ Sonnet 86
It was chiefly these lines that caused a number of scholars, starting with William Minto in 1874, to identify George Chapman as the Rival Poet. Chapman claimed to have been visited by the spirit of Homer while writing his translation of
The Iliad
, published the same year. The chief reason this identification was not ratified was that no connection could be found between George Chapman and William Shakespeare.
CONCERNING THE ENGLISH
‘I’m falling sick’
On 24 September 1599 Essex set sail from Ireland against the Queen’s express command; his decision to do so would have been taken days earlier. On 25 September 1599, Buzenval writes to King Henri IV, ‘I will shortly send you Le Doux who has been here three days, unwell.’
‘Cecil’
Lord Treasurer Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, now a privy councillor.
ORSINO’S CASTLE, BRACCIANO
Orsino
Duke Orsino’s seat was a castle at Bracciano, in a mountainous region north of Rome. Inspired by Leslie Hotson’s work on
Twelfth Night
, A. D. Wraight speculated that Marlowe may have spent some time there around 1600 (Wraight, 1993, pp. 369–423).
‘Oh, you will like it’
As You Like It
, where all the central characters are living in exile, contains a discussion of
Hero and Leander
, of the ‘feigning’ nature of poets, and an allusion to Marlowe’s death (paraphrasing a line from his
Jew of Malta
) that reveals inside knowledge. (That the dispute resulting in Marlowe’s apparent death was supposed to have been over ‘the reckoning’ (the bill) was not in the public domain until 1925. All early commentaries from Beard onwards gave different and conflicting causes. )
‘a stupid William’
The exchange in Act V, scene i between William, Touchstone and Audrey – characters not present in the source story – is a curious one. The self-confessed unlearned William is recognised by scholars to be a parody of the Stratford-born William Shakespeare, but if it is a self-parody, Touchstone’s reaction to him is inexplicably vicious. Touchstone, whose name symbolises a reference point against which other things can be evaluated, tells Audrey that William ‘lays claim’ to her and tells William ‘that drink, being pour’d out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your writers do consent that
ipse
is he: now, you are not
ipse
, for I am he’. (
Ipse
= ‘he himself’.) Touchstone is determined to marry Audrey (whom Wraight suggests stands for the Audience) and threatens to kill William ‘a hundred and fifty ways’ if he doesn’t ‘abandon’ his claim to her.
As You Like It
was registered in 1600, but its publication was stayed until 1623.