PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
  Sunday, 02 August 2009
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On this series of posts I want to review some of the evidence that's been put forth as being sufficient to claim that William Shakspere of Stratford wrote the Shake-Speare plays and poetry, some even claiming it as proof. I expect to show that not one piece of this evidence can be considered as strong evidence and certainly that none of it can overcome the barrier of the alternate theory of authorship. Then at some point I'll start posting material regarding the idea of Bacon's hiding his authorship. I probably won't discuss each and every piece of evidence but at least the main tenets.

To start, here is how one alternate author (not a Baconian) described the identity issue: "The reason the identity of Shakespeare is shrouded in mystery may very well be that it was planned that way. We should label this plan a deliberate, premeditated strategem rather than a deliberate hoax, for while the author is in part playing a joke on his audience, the secret of authorship was planned for any number of good and sufficient motives. For such a deliberate, deep-laid deception to have been successful for a period of close to four hundred years would argue that only a few individuals were entrusted with the secret".
Shake-Speare: The Mystery by George Elliott Sweet, 1956.

Returning to Nigel Cockburn's 1998 book The Bacon-Shakespeare Question, he has this to say about evidence criteria:

"There are also about a score of references in Shakspere's lifetime to Shakespeare or William Shakespeare, and without the "Mr.", in praise of his work. These individually throw no light on whether the makers of the references believed Shake-Speare to be (William) Shakspere or merely a pen name for someone else. It is likely that many or most of them believed him (Shake-Speare the author) to be Shakspere (of Stratford). But if a literary work is published under the name of a real person, or under a name close enough to be taken for that of a real person, one assumes him to be its author unless one has reason to know otherwise. Though Stratfordians are lothe to concede this, a reference to Shakespeare is worthless individually as evidence of Shakspere's authorship unless it satisfies three conditions.

First, it must identify Shakspere with Shake-Speare in one way or another. Secondly, its maker must have been likely to know if Shakspere was not Shake-Speare. Thirdly, he must have been likely to reveal that fact in the reference under consideration.

This third condition must be added because someone likely to know the truth might still identify Shakspere with Shake-Speare because he wished to protect the secret. In my view not one of the references satisfies all three conditions. And the same applies to the few further references to Shakespeare by name in the years following Shakspere's death.
14 years ago
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#2899
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (2)

Dr. Spurgeon states (1) " With Shakespeare, nature images are the most frequent: with Bacon, nature definitely takes second place." This statement cannot, of course, be supported because, as we have pointed out, Dr. Spurgeon has not counted Bacon's nature images; her analysis has ignored the work in which she might reasonably have expected to find most of them; but let us see how far comparison of a few will take us.

In the first place (1) Bacon thinks of Nature as a Book of God both in his Interpretation of Nature and Parasceve IX . The same image is to be found in As You Like It, Act II, scene 1, and in Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, scene 2. Again, both for Bacon and Shakespeare, the Mind is a Mirror held up to Nature. Dr. Spurgeon is familiar, of course, with Hamlet, Act II, scene 2, but, although she has not analysed The Interpretation of Nature, she should have noted in the Advancement of Learning that "the mind of a wise man is a glass wherein images of all kinds in nature are represented". Again, both Bacon and Shakespeare insisted upon our liability to account to Nature: one in Cogitationes de Natura Rerum and the other in Sonnet 126; both saw Custom as an "ape of Nature"; one in the Advancement of Learning and the other in Winter's Tale, Act V, 2; to both the laws of Nature furnished models for government; Bacon in the Union of England and Scotland, Shakespeare in Richard 111, Act III, 4. Bacon was greatly attracted by analogies between Nature, animate and inanimate, and human society; he found one such analogy in the harmony of music, another in a bee-hive and a third in a garden. Shakespeare, too, used all three. Again both Bacon and Shakespeare compare the benefits of Nature with a loan; Bacon in Valerius Terminus and Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, and Sonnet 4.

Examples might be multiplied indefinitely: not only did the same images occur in Bacon and Shakespeare again and again, but it is impossible to justify the statement that with the former they definitely take second place.

(2) "When thinking of mental activity," Dr. Spurgeon states, "some picture of light seems nearly always to come before Bacon. Shakespeare shows no sign or this great interest in light nor of Bacon's association of light with intellect." Well, for Shakespeare "there is no darkness but ignorance" (Twelfth Night) and, if ever there were a fine association of light with intellect, surely it is to be found in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

BEROWNE: Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain
Which, with pain purchas’d, doth inherit pain,
As painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed,
By fixing it upon a fairer eye;
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,
And give him light that it was blinded by.
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,

(If only more Shakespeare lovers were open to the ‘light of truth’. Sigh)

The image of light as a window is not as well known. It is common to both Bacon and Shakespeare and is to be found in De Augmentis, VII, and I in All's Well, Act II, 3 and Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, 2 (“Studies my lady? Mistress, look on me; Behold the window of my heart, mine eye,”). The light of reason is referred to in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II, 4, (“And that hath dazzled my reason's light”); and the light of truth in Love's Labour's Lost, (see above); these examples would appear to indicate that Shakespeare as well as Bacon associated light (lumen iccum) with the operation of the intellect and its results. But does not Dr. Spurgeon completely falsify her own statement when she writes that Shakespeare shows no signs of Bacon's great interest in light? On page 213 of her book she writes that in Romeo and Juliet the dominating image is light; in the first scene of l Henry Vl she writes that we are at once struck by the effect produced upon us by the contrast of a blaze of dazzling light (p. 225) against a background of black and mourning. The conception of the King as the Sun is fairly constant with Shakespeare (page 235) and is not this a "light" image? Dr. Spurgeon traces it in Richard II , both parts of Henry IV, Henry V and Henry Vlll. Surely Shakespeare shows some signs of Bacon's great interest in light, Dr. Spurgeon herself being the judge. We have counted forty references to light in the Shakespeare plays, besides those I referred to by Dr. Spurgeon.
14 years ago
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#2900
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (3)

(3) Dr. Spurgeon continues: "Shakespeare visualizes human beings as plants and trees choked with weeds or well pruned and trained. Bacon pictures them in terms of light." If Bacon does, he compares Man, just as Shakespeare does, to a tree in the essay Of Death. "Man having derived his being from the earth, first lives the life of a tree, drawing his nourishment as a plant and made ripe for death: he tends downwards and is sowed again in his mother, the earth, where he persisteth not, but expects a quickening." Again Bacon writes "compare men to the Indian fig tree which being ripened to his full height is said to decline his branches down to the earth.”

It is worthwhile to consider this glorious essay, so entirely Shakespearean in thought and expression. Dr. Spurgeon will have noted that like the Indian fig tree "Nature as it grows again towards earth is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy" (Titus Andronicus, Act II, 2) and, just as Bacon writes "Man is made ripe for death," so Shakespeare tells us "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe. And then from hour to hour we rot and rot"(As You Like It, Act II, 7) and "Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all” (King Lear, Act V, 2). Once more, just as Shakespeare compares our bodies with gardens planted with herbs or weeds (Othello, Act I, 3) Bacon tells us "A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds." Neither does the identity of visualization, as Dr. Spurgeon calls it, end there. Just as Bacon said that "Man is sowed again in his mother, the earth," Shakespeare makes Charles, the wrestler, ask "Where is this gallant so desirous to lie with his mother earth?" (As You Like It, Act I, 2) The entire eighth paragraph of the essay Of Death, with its seven different images, all appear in one or other of the Shakespeare plays.
14 years ago
·
#2901
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images– cont. (4)

(4) Then, Dr. Spurgeon states that “Bacon's mind is steeped in Biblical story and phrase in a way in which there is no evidence in Shakespeare, whose comparisons and references are few and familiar”. In stating that Shakespeare's comparisons and references to the Bible are few and familiar, Dr. Spurgeon has not only dispensed with the light of all the authorities, but her own light as well. We should hardly have thought it possible that even a cursory reader of the Bible and of the Shakespearean plays could have failed to have been struck by Shakespeare's exceptional knowledge and the use of the Old and New Testaments. We know that Dr. Spurgeon has analysed Shakespeare and would not dare to suggest that she has neglected the Bible as she has neglected so much of Bacon's works, but what are we to think in view of the following facts?

Besides references to Cain twenty-five times, to Jephthah seven times, to Samson nine times, to David six times, to Job twenty-five times, in two plays, 2 Henry Vl and Henry VIII, the number of allusions to the Psalms runs into double figures, all of which may be familiar but are certainly not few. Shakespeare definitely makes identifiable quotations from, or allusions to, at least forty-two books of the Bible, eighteen each from the Old and New Testaments and six from the Apocrypha. Shakespeare's biblical images and references are not to be analysed only by reference to those in which proper names are actually mentioned. He often used an incident recorded in the Bible without mentioning proper names at all. Examples furnished by Mr. Richmond Noble (Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge, p.21) are the allusions in King John to the sun standing still-- Joshua is not mentioned. In Twelfth Night and Cymbeline those who cared to do so could identify the allusion to setting the feet on the necks of five kings. Again, without mentioning her name, the story of Jael and Sisera is referred to in The Tempest. Five times reference is made to the reply by the Shunamite woman to Elisha's enquiry as to her dead child's health and Richard II contrasts the reception by Christ of the children with his attitude to the rich young man who sought the Way of Salvation.

Secondly, we would refer Dr. Spurgeon to the following authorities, all unimpeachably orthodox in regard to the authorship controversy, that Shakespeare's knowledge of the Bible was altogether exceptional and, as the late Mr. E. E. Fripp wrote, "Probably Francis Bacon alone among contemporary laymen knew his Bible as well. Not the most subtle allusion in Shakespeare to Scripture would be lost on Bacon.” (Shakespeare, Man and Artist, Vol. I, p. 102).

Dr. Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrews; Dr, Thomas Carter; Dr. Christian Ginsburg, one of the most learned Biblical scholars of the 19th century and one of the Revisers of the Old Testament; Canon Todd, among the greatest Biblical authorities in the Irish Church, and Mr. Anders, in Shakespeare's Books mentioned the Bible as one of the books of which Shakespeare had especial knowledge.

It is not, of course, necessary to the purposes of our argument to demonstrate that Shakespeare's knowledge of the Bible was exceptional; we have, as we think we have done, only to show the utter absurdity of Dr. Spurgeon's statement that Shakespeare's comparisons and references to the Bible are few and familiar. If she still pleads they are familiar, let us remind her of "the base Judean” Othello, Act V, 2; St. Philip's daughters, I Henry Vl, 2; Shylock's reference to "the stock of Barabbas," and Antony's to "the horned herd". Doubtless these are familiar enough to her, but to how many except to those whose knowledge of the Bible and Shakespeare is as profound as her own are they familiar today? And to whom among laymen, except Francis Bacon (to him upon her own admission) would they have been familiar in Shakespeare's time?
14 years ago
·
#2902
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (5)

(5) Dr. Spurgeon wrote that "Astronomical images reveal very definite differences between Bacon and Shakespeare, yet both hold by the old Ptolomaic system." This statement is also entirely unsupported except by one example - Shakespeare never mentions the primum mobile. Against this we will record three very striking identities between Bacon and Shakespeare’s astronomical images.

First, to both the stars are fires; Shakespeare "The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks; They are all fire." (Julius Caesar, Act III, 1); BaconThe stars are true fires:. (Descriptio Globi Intellectualis).

Second, both Bacon and Shakespeare think of the stars as like the frets in the roofs of houses; a very unusual comparison and we think a highly individual one.

Shakespeare: “This majestical roof, the sky, fretted with golden fire,: (Hamlet)

Bacon: "For if that great Workmaster had been of a human disposition, he would have cast the stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and orders, like the frets in the roofs of houses." (Advancement of Learning).

Third, and a singular conception, is of God arranging the stars as a show and this is common to both Bacon and Shakespeare and seems to have been derived from Cicero's; De Natura Deorum. This identity is very remarkable.

Shakespeare: "This huge stage presenteth nought but shows whereon the stars in secret influence comment." (Sonnet 15).

Bacon: "Velleius, the Epicurean, needed not to have asked why God should have adorned the heavens with stars, as if he had been an AEdilis, one that should have set forth some magnificent shows or plays." (Advancement of Learning).

Deep in the consciousness of Bacon and Shakespeare lay the idea which so frequently finds expression in the works of both, that of the world as a theatre; this image is indeed a dominant one and is identical with both writers even in minor details; to enumerate these would lead us, however, too far from Dr. Spurgeon whom we will pursue on this ground only so far as to remind her that not only did Bacon and Shakespeare adhere to the old, Ptolomaic system to the end after the entire scientific world had rejected it, but they were also agreed in rejecting the Copernican theory long after the entire scientific world had accepted it. We except, of course, the opinions of the churchmen and those astronomers writing under the influence of the church.

The astronomical images, as far as these are lunar, instead of revealing very definite differences, as Dr. Spurgeon states, reveal the most startling similarity in the work of Bacon and Shakespeare. For both writers the Moon is cold and fruitless; both record her influence operating upon the earth in exactly the same way (a) By, the drawing forth of heat, (b) By the inducing of putrefaction, (c) By the increase of moisture and (d) By the exciting of the motions of spirits as in lunacies. These are set out by Bacon in Sylva Sylvarum; the first two by Shakespeare in exactly the same order in Timon of Athens, Act IV, 3; the third in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, 2, and Act III, 1; and Richard III, Act II, 2, and the fourth in Othello, Act V, 2.
14 years ago
·
#2903
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (6)

(6) We think Dr. Spurgeon's next dictum is again entirely unsupported by evidence of any kind. It is that "the nature images, are of a very different character. Bacon's interest is in the practical processes of farming; Shakespeare's of gardening". Dr. Spurgeon is aware that Bacon wrote an essay Of Gardens and she has analysed its images, metaphors, similes we care not what she calls them comparing them carefully with those of Shakespeare. She or her assistants have, we presume, read this essay; if she or they under her direction had done so desiring impartially to reach a true conclusion whether these two minds as she thinks them Bacon's and Shakespeare's were twain or one, she and they would have realized, must have realized, and then honestly recorded Bacon's intense love of gardening which he describes in the second sentence of his essay as the purest of human pleasures. But no, Dr. Spurgeon prefers to write that Bacon's interest was in the practical processes of farming. Must we not conclude that prejudice, the desire to make a case, to bolster up a conclusion with which somehow or another at whatever cost of truth and candour her premises must be fashioned to justify, induce her to do so?

We write plainly about this not because we have any particular quarrel with Dr. Spurgeon, but because her controversial methods are typical of modern orthodox scholarship, which, it seems, will sacrifice every ethic of criticism and even intellectual honesty of purpose upon the Stratford shrine.

In the essay just referred to, twenty-one of the thirty-five flowers mentioned in the Shakespearean plays are enumerated. Of the rest, all but three are noted or studied by Bacon; the exceptions are the columbine, pansy and long purples. All these flowers were but a few of those well known in the time of Bacon and Shakespeare; in all the former's gardening notes there are only five which are not mentioned by Shakespeare, while of Ben Jonson's list of flowers only half are ever alluded to by Bacon.

Again, Bacon was the first writer to distinguish flowers by the season of their blossom. Shakespeare follows this order exactly - he says daffodils come with March, Bacon said that “for March, there come violets, especially the single blue, which are the earliest; the yellow daffodil”. Shakespeare writes "spongy April betrims the banks with peonies and lilies" and with May comes the Rose. Bacon studied gardening in every detail with loving care. As an old man he wrote to Lord Cranfield that he proposed to visit him at Chiswick and gather violets in his garden. In the New Atlantis he writes of grafting and inoculating as well of wild trees as fruit trees which Shakespeare makes Polixenes explain that "we marry a gentle scion to the wildest stock and make conceive a bark of baser kind by bud of nobler race". The trial of seeds by skilful gardeners, the curious idea that the earth was especially prepared for the cornflower, the images of our bodies as gardens and our England as a sea-walled garden are all common to Bacon and Shakespeare. We will add one extraordinary parallel. In Troilus and Cressida, Act 1, 3, Shakespeare writes:

“Checks and Disasters
Grow in the veins of actions highest rear'd;
As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap
Infect the sound pine and divert his grain
Tortive and errant from his course of growth”.

Bacon studied the effect of sap upon a tree’s growth, too, and wrote:

"The cause whereof is, for that sap ascendeth unequally, and doth, as it were, tire and stop by the way. And it seemeth, they have some closeness and hardness in their stalk which hindereth the sap from going up, until it hath gathered into a knot and so is more urged to put forth".

And so we find that Shakespeare writes the knots are caused by the conflux of the meeting sap; Bacon writes that where it is arrested the sap gathered into a knot and both think the knots produce the new branches. Yet Dr. Spurgeon writes that in Bacon and Shakespeare we have two highly individual and entirely different minds. So, if Bacon's interest is in farming processes. Be it so. And so was Shakespeare’s.

Bacon writes of The Pacification of the Church, "And what are mingled but as the chaff and the corn which need but a fan to sift and sever them." Shakespeare's is the same image, "the broad and powerful fan Puffing at all, winnows the light away: And what hath mass or matter by itself Lies rich in virtue and unmingled " (Troilus and Cressida, Act I, 3).

But Bacon writes "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread ". And this is a farming image and therefore his interests are in the practical interests of farming and not like Shakespeare's in gardening. But, alas! Shakespeare thinks of wealth as "common muck", too (Coriolanus, Act II, 2), so that by parity of Dr. Spurgeon's reasoning Shakespeare's interests must be in farming as well, and what becomes of her images and her beautifully coloured chart showing the result of a classification which is an entirely arbitrary one, based as far as we can see upon no principle of selection whatever? We will not compare them to that "mass of wealth that was in the owner little better than a stack or heap of . . . spread over Your Majesty's Kingdom to useful purposes" (Bacon's Letter to James I re Sutton's Estate, 1611). "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread" is a remark, according to Dr. Spurgeon, peculiarly characteristic of Bacon. It really is no such thing. Bacon appropriated it from Mr. Bettenham, a reader of Gray's Inn, and exactly the same comparison is made by Jonson, Webster and Dekker. Money is described as muck by Nashe, Peele, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton and Rowley, Heywood and Massinger. The "remark" is therefore not peculiarly characteristic of Bacon or of Shakespeare. But here is something which is--another word for "muck" is "compost”. Writes Bacon: "We have also great variety of composts . . . for the making of the earth fruitful" (New Atlantis); but composts also make weeds grow, so Shakespeare has it "do not spread the compost on the weeds to make them ranker". (Hamlet, Act III, 4).

[Note: see earlier posts on this which go into these topics in greater detail.]
14 years ago
·
#2904
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (7)

(7) We will consider Dr. Spurgeon's comparisons of Bacon's and Shakespeare's sea images together. She tells us (a) they differ in that Shakespeare's are general, Bacon's concrete and particular; (b) Shakespeare's most constant images are those 1) of a tide rushing through a breach, 2) a ship being dashed on the rocks and 3) the infinite size, depth and capacity of the Ocean. These three, Dr. Spurgeon says, she never finds in Bacon. We cannot think she can have looked: we know that she has not looked far. She adds that Shakespeare's is the landsman's view of the sea; Bacon's that of a man in a ship or boat and Shakespeare, she says, never once uses the word "ballast". She will find, if she looks again, that he does, in the Comedy of Errors, Act III, 2. “…who sent whole armadoes of caracks to be ballast at her nose”.

An example of Bacon's "general" sea images is furnished by Apothegm, "A sea of multitude". In this image Bacon refers to the large army with which Charles VIII invaded Italy, against which it would be perfectly correct to say, if such were the fact, the Italians, like Hamlet, thought of "taking arms". A very curious identity of metaphor or image is to be found in The Advancement of Learning, Book II, and Timon of Athens, Act IV, 2. Both Bacon and Shakespeare write of a "Sea of air". Other Baconian images are "Vast seas of time"; "a sea of quicksilver"; "a sea of baser metal", while Shakespeare has seas of joys, cares, tears, glory, blood and tears.

If Dr. Spurgeon will compare the orders given by the Boatswain in The Tempest, Act I, 1, with Bacon's History of the Winds, she will find that the latter writes, when a ship is on a sea shore, and, to avoid disaster, must put to sea again, she can lie within six points of the wind, provided she set her courses. Those were the exact orders given by the Boatswain in the play "lest we run ourselves aground”.

Both Bacon's and Shakespeare's view was "that of a man in a ship or boat". Shakespeare refers (Henry VIII, I, 2) to a curious piece of sea lore:

“As ravenous fishes do a vessel follow
That is new trimm'd, but benefit no further
Than vainly longing.”

How many landsmen knew or know what was meant by "trimming" a ship? Shakespeare's knowledge of seafaring, like Bacon's, was technical, but he thought, of course, in terms of the ships of his time. In Richard III, I, 4, we have "the giddy footing of the hatches". Hatches were then movable planks laid on the ship's beams, taking the place of the modern upper deck: they afforded a very insecure foothold indeed. In Pericles, Act III, 1, a sailor cries "Slack the bolins", and besides this Shake-speare used a great number of clearly nautical expressions, for example,"clapp'd under hatches", "fetch about" and anchor "coming home"; "bear up and board 'em", "the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail" and "to hull here". No landsman ever wrote like that: Shakespeare had been to sea.

So much then, for Shakespeare as a landsman. Now we will look at three sea images Dr. Spurgeon finds in Shakespeare, but never in Bacon. She will find "the great deluge of danger" in Bacon’s The Felicities of Queen Elizabeth; she will find "peremptory tides and currents which, if not taken in due time, are seldom recovered", in his Advancement of Learning, II, as well as in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV, 3; she will moreover discover that Bacon and Shakespeare use the word "tide" in exactly the same metaphorical sense - the tide of opportunity, the tide of affairs, the tide of business, the tide of error, the tide of blood. Again the size, depth and capacity of the ocean is, pace Dr. Spurgeon, as common an image with Bacon as she writes it is with Shakespeare; she will find in Bacon’s Experimental History, the “Ocean of Philosophy” and in the Great Instauration the "Ocean of History". In their attempt to express great quantity and extent, both Bacon and Shakespeare refer to the ocean as a symbol; we have already referred to their identical sea-images. They cannot be said to be in one case "general" and in the other "concrete"; they do not differ in quality at all.
14 years ago
·
#2905
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (8)

(8) On page 24, Dr. Spurgeon writes "Mr. Wilson Knight has shown recently how constant is the "tempest" idea and symbolism in Shakespeare's thought, and, on page 25, "I never once find this analogy in Bacon". She will find it (by Bacon) in several places; she will find (Works Vll, p. 158), "Solon compared the people unto the sea and orators and counsellors to the winds, for that the sea would be calm and quiet, if winds did not trouble it"; she will find it in the Advancement of Learning, II, xxii, 6, "For as the ancient politiques in popular estates were wont to I compare the people to the sea, and the orators to the winds: because as the sea would of itself be calm and quiet, if the winds did not move and trouble it; so the people would be peaceable and tractable, if seditious orators did not set them in working and agitation; so it may be fitly said, that the mind in the nature thereof would be temperate and stayed, if the affections, as winds, did not put them in tumult and perturbation," and in Works, VI, I p 589, "Shepherds of people had need know the calendars of tempests in state . . . as there are certain hollow blasts of wind and secret swellings of the seas before a tempest, so there are in states" (Essay XV); "as by proof, we see the waters swell before a boisterous storm " (Richard 3, Act 2, 3), and in (Bacon's Essay - Of Seditions and Troubles) "when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shakened or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure) men had need to pray for fair weather," (just as doubtless she has found the "windy orator” in King John, Act V, 1, where we have the "tempest" idea and the "fair weather which men have need to pray for" to calm the storm as well as the cause of the tempest which was religion (stubborn usage of the Pope).

Pandulph: "It was my breath that blew this tempest up,
Upon your stubborn usage of the Pope;
But since you are a gentle convertite,
My tongue shall hush again this storm of war
And make fair weather in your blust'ring land."

In place of Bacon's "hollow blasts of wind . . . before a tempest" we have in Shakespeare, "The Southern wind . . . by his hollow whistling in the leaves foretells the tempest and a blustering day" (I H4, V, 1, 5), and in each case it was "the affections, as winds," that put men's minds "in tumult and perturbation," and caused the blustering. Here, then, is the very analogy which Dr. Spurgeon says "I never once find in Bacon”.
14 years ago
·
#2906
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (9)

(9) On page 28, Dr. Spurgeon writes "Bacon . . . definitely asserts that he strongly approves of war," while "Shakespeare hates war . . . associates it with loud and hideous noises" (pp. 28 - 29). Here again Dr. Spurgeon is very misleading. Bacon, too, associates war with noise (Life, I, p. 384); tells us "war is too outwardly glorious to be inwardly grateful" (lb., p. 383); that "the humour of war is raving" (15., p. 381); that "wars with their noise affright us" (Works, V, p. 272). Bacon disliked war as Shakespeare did; but what kind of war? Surely civil war, and here again Bacon and Shakespeare entirely agree. They both approve, too, of an energetic foreign policy calculated to distract people from internal politics; to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". It is well known that Bacon was averse to civil war, religious or political, and he tells us the Greeks were full of divisions among themselves. Of these divisions Shakespeare, too, must have been aware, for he makes Ulysses say "Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength”.

Dr. Spurgeon quotes Timon's words: "beastly mad-brain'd war"; but Timon is dealing with civil war, and so is Ulysses. If Shakespeare hated all kinds of wars, why does he rail at peace? He says it breeds cowards, is a very apoplexy, is a kind of lethargy which expressions are echoes of Bacon's statement that "men's minds are enervated and their manners corrupted by sluggish and inactive peace" (De Aug., VIII, III).
14 years ago
·
#2907
Dr. Spurgeon’s flawed research on Shakespeare and Bacon images – cont. (10)

(10) On page 29, she writes "On certain abstract subjects (such as the action of time) they (Bacon and Shakespeare) held diametrically opposite views'': and on page 29 she quotes from Lucrece.

"Time's glory is to command contending Kings
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light".

Dr. Spurgeon compared this passage with one from the Advancement of Learning, which has nothing whatever to do with time and truth; and to demonstrate once more how careless has been her comparison of the minds of Bacon and Shakespeare, on the preceding page of the same book she might have read Bacon's real view of time and truth, which is substantially the same as Shakespeare's "As time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth" (Advancement of Learning, I, 4), and on page 220 she could have read that "the inseparable propriety of time is ever more and more to disclose truth." (1b., II, xxiv).

With regard to the action of time, Bacon and Shakespeare both enjoin that its order must be observed, for "men frequently err and hasten to the end when they should have consulted the beginning"; both compare the value of time to a man in sickness or in sorrow; both see that men are as the Time is and finally for them both, as for us, Time is the wisest Judge, the supreme Arbitrator.

Let us for the last time now listen to Bacon-Shakespeare.

"Time is the wisest of all things and the author and inventor every day of new cases" (Bacon).
"It is an argument of weight as being the judgment of time" (Bacon).
"The counsels to which Time is not called, Time will not ratify" (Bacon).
"Time trieth troth" (Bacon).
"Time is the old Justice . . . and let Time try" (Shakespeare).
"O Time thou must untangle this" (Shakespeare).
"I entreat your honour to scan this matter no further. Leave it to Time" (Shakespeare), for "Time must friend or end" and "the time will bring it out".

We may perhaps return to Dr. Spurgeon's images of Shakespeare. We may perhaps try to show on some future occasion that her exhaustive analysis of these discloses not the Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon at all, but in part the real Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of Gray's Inn and St. Albans, that the Figure of Shakespeare which she writes "emerges", "although his senses, especially those of sight and hearing and taste were abnormally acute" was certainly not "a countryman through and through" nor "most interested in homely indoor occupations and routine." Dr. Spurgeon has attempted to fashion a Shakespeare to fit the Stratford shrine, but he cannot be made to shrink to this little measure. Despite her own efforts, she has found a Shakespeare "the most diversely minded, having an understanding of all varieties of human nature which has never been approached”.

In seeking Shakespeare she has discovered Bacon.
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End of Spurgeon.
14 years ago
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#2908
Another claim is that William Shakespeare was famous as a poet in his hometown of Stratford. For instance, there’s this evidence:

In 1630 an anonymous volume was published, entitled A Banquet of Jeasts or Change of Cheare. Jest no. 259 in this volume is as follows:

One travelling through Stratford upon Avon, a Towne most remarkeable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare, and walking in the Church to doe his devotion, espyed a thing there worthy observation, which was a tombestone laid more that three hundred years agoe, on which was ingraven an Epitaph to this purpose, I Thomas such a one, and Elizabeth my wife here under lye buried, and know Reader I. R. C. and I. Chrystoph. Q. are alive at this houre to witnesse it.

This jest implies that the writer had been in the Stratford church, and that he believed that the William Shakespeare born there was "famous"; indeed, not yet 15 years after Shakespeare's death, he was apparently the town's main claim to fame. True, the writer does not explicitly say that Shakespeare was famous as a poet, but it is difficult to see why a grain dealer would bring such fame to his home town.

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Of course, the non-critical thinker would never consider that the above scenario could be explained in another way. Someone who had a copy of the first folio with the name of William Shakespeare on it. He finds in the town of Stratford a monument that seems to show William Shakespeare as the great poet/playwright. And is oblivious to the possibility that someone else who wanted to hide his authorship behind the name and identity of William Shakespeare of Stratford was the true author. And he and/or his friends, or some who believed that William was the true author and who created the strangely worded monument, had it erected in the Stratford church. So if William really was famous as the poet/playwright Shakespeare then we might expect some evidence of this fact among the writings of some people we could expect to have known of him and his life and reputation.

I’m turning to an Oxfordian researcher now with some interesting contrary evidence.

Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 1
by Ramon L. Jiménez

It is well-known that the first references in print that seemed to connect William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to the playwright William Shakespeare appeared in the first collection of his plays—the First Folio, seven years after his death. On the other hand, we can identify at least ten people who personally knew the William Shakespeare of this Warwickshire town, or met his daughter, Susanna. At least six of them, and possibly all of them, were aware of plays and poems published under the name of one of the country’s leading playwrights, William Shakespeare. All ten left us published books, poems, letters, notebooks, or diaries, some of which referred directly to events or people in Stratford. Yet none of these nine men and one woman—it is fair to call them eyewitnesses—left any hint that they connected the playwright with the person of the same name in Stratford-upon-Avon.
14 years ago
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#2909
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 2
by Ramon L. Jiménez


William Camden

William Camden was the most eminent historian and antiquary of the Elizabethan age, and was deeply involved in the literary and intellectual world of his time. He knew Philip Sidney, was a valued friend of Michael Drayton, and is said to have been a teacher of Ben Jonson. His most famous work was Britannia, a history of England first published in Latin in 1586. It was translated, and frequently reprinted, and he revised it several times before his death in 1623. Another of Camden’s books was Remaines Concerning Britain, a series of essays on English history, English names and the English language that he published in 1605. Camden wrote poetry himself, and in the section on poetry, he referred to poets as “God’s own creatures.” He listed eleven English poets and playwrights who he thought would be admired by future generations—in other words, the best writers of his time (Remaines 287, 294). Among the eleven were six playwrights, including Jonson, Chapman, Drayton, Daniel, Marston, and William Shakespeare.

Two years later, in 1607, Camden published the sixth edition of his Britannia, which by then had doubled in size because of his extensive revisions and additions. He arranged the book by shire or county, with his description of each beginning in the pre-Roman period and extending to contemporary people and events. With Camden’s interests and previous work in mind, it is surprising to find that in this 1607 edition, and in his subsequent editions, in the section on Stratford-upon-Avon, he described this “small market-town” as owing “all its consequence to two natives of it. They are John de Stratford, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, later mayor of London, who built the Clopton bridge across the Avon” (Britannia 2, 445). In the same paragraph, Camden called attention to George Carew, Baron Clopton, who lived nearby and was active in the town’s affairs.

More details

There is no mention of the well-known poet and playwright, William Shakespeare, who had been born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose family still lived there, and who by this date had returned there to live in one of the grandest houses in town. Elsewhere in Britannia, Camden noted that the poet Philip Sidney had a home in Kent. We know he was familiar with literary and theatrical affairs because he was a friend of the poet and playwright Michael Drayton (Newdigate 95), and he noted in his diary the deaths of the actor Richard Burbage and the poet and playwright Samuel Daniel in 1619.i He made no such note on the death of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1616.

It might be suggested that Camden was unfamiliar with the Warwickshire area, and wasn’t aware that one of the leading playwrights of the day lived in Stratford-on-Avon. But could this be true? In 1597 Queen Elizabeth had appointed Camden to the post of Clarenceaux King of Arms, one of the two officials in the College of Arms who approved applications for coats of arms. Two years later, John Shakespeare, William’s father, applied to the College to have his existing coat of arms impaled, or joined, with the arms of his wife’s family, the Ardens of Wilmcote (Chambers 2:18-32). Some writers have asserted that William Shakespeare himself made this application for his father, but there is no evidence of that. What is likely is that William paid the substantial fee that accompanied the application.

The record shows that Camden and his colleague William Dethick approved the modification that John Shakespeare sought. However, in 1602 another official in the College brought a complaint against Camden and Dethick that they had granted coats of arms improperly to twenty-three men, one of whom was John Shakespeare. Camden and Dethick defended their actions, but there is no record of the outcome of the matter, and the Shakespeare coat of arms, minus the Arden impalement, later appeared on the monument in Holy Trinity Church. Because of this unusual complaint Camden had good reason to remember John Shakespeare’s application, and it is very probable that he had met both father and son. At the least, he knew who they were and where they lived.

William Camden had another occasion to come in contact with the Shakespeares. In the summer of 1600, when the famous Sir Thomas Lucy died, Camden bore Lucy’s coat of arms in the procession and conducted the funeral at Charlecote, only a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon (Malone 2:556). Thomas Lucy knew the Shakespeares also. When he was justice of the peace in Stratford-upon-Avon, John Shakespeare was brought up before him more than once. John may even have attended Lucy’s funeral, but it seems likely that William was too busy to go. During 1600, seven or eight of William Shakespeare’s plays were printed for the first time and, according to most orthodox scholars, in the summer of 1600 he was hurrying to finish up Hamlet.

So, even though William Camden revered poets, had several poet friends, and wrote poetry himself, even though he knew the Shakespeares, father and son, and even though he mentioned playwrights and poets in his books and in his diary, he never connected the Shakespeare he knew in Stratford-upon-Avon with the one on his list of the best English poets.


Camden, William: Remains Concerning Britain (1605); Ed. R.D. Dunn. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1984

Camden, William. Britannia (6th ed. 1607 ) Trans. by Richard Gough. London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1806. v. 2, 445.

i Camden’s Diary appeared in Camdeni Vitae, a life of Camden published in 1691 by Thomas Smith. The Diary is online at http://e3.uci.edu/~papyri/diary/, where the entries can be seen in the months of March and October under the year 1619.

Newdigate, B.H. Michael Drayton and his Circle. London: Basil Blackwell & Mott.
Corrected Edition, 1961.

Malone, Edmond: The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. Third Variorum
Edition. Vol 2. James Boswell, ed. London: R.C. & J. Rivington, 1821.
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Note: William Camden was a friend and associate of Francis Bacon.
14 years ago
·
#2910
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 3
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Michael Drayton

Another eyewitness is the poet and dramatist Michael Drayton, who was born and raised in Warwickshire, only about twenty-five miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. It is hard to imagine that Michael Drayton was unaware of Shakespeare. The two were almost exact contemporaries. They both wrote sonnets, and many critics have even found the influence of Shakespeare in Drayton’s poetry (Campbell 190-1). Also, they both wrote plays that appeared about the same time on the London stage in the late 1590s. In fact, in 1599 Drayton, along with Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathaway, wrote a play—Sir John Oldcastle—that was supposed to be a response to Shakespeare’s plays about Falstaff (Chambers 1:134).

In 1612 Drayton published the first part of Poly-Olbion, a poetical description of England, and a county-by-county history that included well-known men of every kind. In it were many references to Chaucer, to Spenser, and to other English poets. But in his section on Warwickshire, Drayton never mentioned Stratford-upon-Avon or Shakespeare, even though by 1612 Shakespeare was a well-known playwright. It seems that Drayton never connected the writer to the William Shakespeare he must have known in Stratford-upon-Avon.

How do we know he knew him? Many supporters of the Stratford theory think so. Samuel Schoenbaum wrote that it is “not implausible” that Drayton and Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson as well, had that “merry meeting” reported in the 1660s by John Ward, the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon (Schoenbaum 296). In fact, more than one scholar has found evidence that Michael Drayton was the “Rival Poet” of the sonnets. But we have better evidence than that.

Drayton’s life is well-documented. He had a connection to the wealthy Rainsford family, who lived at Clifford Chambers, a couple of miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. Drayton had been in love with Lady Rainsford from the time she was Ann Goodere, a girl in the household in which he was in service in the 1580s. She was the subject of his series of love sonnets, Ideas Mirrour, published in 1594. Although she rejected him and married Henry Rainsford in 1595, Drayton hung around their household and made himself a friend of the family. He apparently never stopped loving her, and from the early 1600s until his death in 1631 he made frequent visits to their home at Clifford Chambers, sometimes staying all summer.

The Shakespearean scholar Charlotte Stopes was certain that Shakespeare would have been “an honored guest” at the Rainsford home because of the family’s literary interests, but there is no record of such a visit (Stopes 1907, 206). But even if Shakespeare may never have visited the Rainsfords, Dr. John Hall, the man who married his daughter certainly did. Hall was the Rainsfords family doctor and once treated Drayton for a fever, probably at the Rainsford home. The doctor made a record of it in his case book, and even noted that Drayton was an excellent poet (Lane 40-1). His treatment for Drayton’s fever was a spoonful of “syrup of violets,” but he did recover.

Another reason that Drayton must have been aware of a playwright named Shakespeare was that in 1619 Sir John Oldcastle, the play Drayton had written with three others, was printed by William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier with Shakespeare’s name on the title page (Chambers 1:533-4). This is certainly something an author would notice.

It is very probable that if Drayton thought that Dr. Hall’s father-in-law was the famous playwright and poet, he would have written or told someone about him. But there is no mention of Shakespeare anywhere in his substantial correspondence. In all his writings—the collected edition is in five volumes—despite his mention of more than a dozen contemporary poets and playwrights, Drayton never referred to William Shakespeare at all until more than ten years after Shakespeare’s death. When he finally did, he wrote four lines about what a good comedian he was. It is unclear whether he was referring to him as a playwright, an actor, or in some other capacity.

Campbell, Oscar and E. G. Quinn, eds. The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare. New
York: MJF Books, 1966.

Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 v. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1930.

Stopes, Charlotte C.. Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries. Stratford-upon-
Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907.

Lane, Joan: John Hall and his Patients. Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust, 1996.
14 years ago
·
#2911
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 4
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Thomas Greene

Our third eyewitness connects Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon even more closely. In the 1603 edition of one of Drayton’s major poems, The Barons’ Wars, there appeared a commendatory sonnet—a Shakespearean sonnet—by one Thomas Greene.ii Also in 1603, the bookseller and printer William Leake published a poem by this same Thomas Greene titled A Poet’s Vision and a Princes Glorie. In seventeen pages of forgettable verse, Greene predicted a renaissance of poetry under the new King, James I. (For more than twenty years, beginning in 1596, William Leake was the holder of the publishing rights to Venus and Adonis [Chambers 1:544].)

Orthodox scholars agree that this Thomas Greene was none other than the London solicitor for the Stratford Corporation, and the Town Clerk of Stratford-upon-Avon for more than ten years (Dobson and Wells 173). He had such a close relationship with the Shakespeares that he named two of his children William and Anne. He and his wife and children lived in the Shakespeare household at New Place for many months during 1609 and 1610 (Schoenbaum 282). He was also the only Stratfordian contemporary of Shakespeare to mention him in his diary. This was in connection with the Welcombe land enclosure matter, where he referred to him as “my cosen Shakspeare” (Campbell 272).

Thomas Greene was also a friend of the dramatist John Marston, and they were both resident students at the Middle Temple during the mid-1590s. Yet nowhere in his diary or in his letters that have survived, does Thomas Greene—apparently the author of a Shakespearean sonnet himself—even hint that the Shakespeare he knew was a poet. What a shame that Greene made no comment in his diary about a book called SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS, with its strange dedication to “our ever-living poet,” that was published in London in 1609, about the time he was living in the Shakespeare household. Nor does he mention in his diary the death of the supposedly famous playwright in the spring of 1616. Mrs. Stopes wrote that “It has always been a matter of surprise to me that Thomas Greene, who mentioned the death of Mr. Barber, did not mention the death of Shakespeare.” For this she offered the astounding explanation—“Perhaps there was no need for him to make a memorandum of an event so important to the town and himself” (Stopes 1907, 89). Thomas Greene’s failure to make any note of his friend’s dramatic genius is especially unusual because he knew him so well, and he was a published poet himself.

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Note: This is the same Thomas Greene mentioned earlier in the posts on Marston and Hall. Since Greene and Marston were friends, Marston had an excellent source for assessing William Shakespeare of Stratford.
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ii The text of the sonnet appears in v. 2 of Michael Drayton: Complete Works, J. W. Hebel, K. Tillotson, and B.H. Newdigate, eds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961.

Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 v. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

Dobson, Michael and Stanley Wells. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: OUP, 2001.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life. New York: OUP, 1977.

Campbell, Oscar and E. G. Quinn, eds. The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare. New York: MJF Books, 1966.

Stopes, Charlotte C.. Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries. Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907.
14 years ago
·
#2912
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 5
by Ramon L. Jiménez


John Hall

Our fourth eyewitness is that same Dr. John Hall who came to Stratford-upon-Avon from Bedfordshire in the early 1600s, and married Susanna Shakespeare in 1607. During his more than thirty years of practice in Warwickshire, Dr. Hall was considered one of the best physicians in the county, and was called often to the homes of noblemen throughout the area. As a leading citizen of the town, he was elected a Burgess to the City Council three times before he finally accepted the office. On the death of his father-in-law in 1616, Dr. Hall, his wife Susanna, and their eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth moved into New Place with William Shakespeare’s widow Anne.

A few years after Dr. Hall’s death in 1635, it transpired that he had kept hundreds of anecdotal records about his patients and their ailments—records that have excited the curiosity of both literary and medical scholars. Two notebooks were recovered, and one containing about 170 cases was translated from the Latin and published by one of his fellow physicians. The other, possibly once in the possession of the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, has, unfortunately, disappeared. In the single surviving manuscript are descriptions of dozens of Dr. Hall’s patients and their illnesses, including his wife Susanna, and their daughter Elizabeth. Also mentioned are the Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon and various noblemen and their families, including Michael Drayton’s friends the Rainsfords, and of course Drayton himself. In his notes about one patient Thomas Holyoak, Dr. Hall mentioned that his father Francis Holyoak had compiled a Latin-English dictionary. John Trapp, a minister and the schoolmaster of the Stratford Grammar School, he described as being noted “for his remarkable piety and learning, second to none” (Joseph 47, 94).

But nowhere in the notebook that has survived is there any mention of Hall’s father-in-law William Shakespeare. This, of course, has vexed and puzzled scholars. Dr. Hall surely treated his wife’s father during the ten years they lived within minutes of each other. Why wouldn’t he record any treatment of William Shakespeare and mention his literary achievements as he had Michael Drayton’s and Francis Holyoake’s? The accepted explanation has always been that of the few cases in Dr. Hall’s notebook that he dated, none bears a date earlier than 1617, the year after Shakespeare’s death. For decades scholars have assumed that any mention of Shakespeare was probably in the lost notebook.

But recently this assumption proved false when a scholar found that at least four, and as many as eight, of the cases Hall recorded can be dated before Shakespeare died, even though the doctor didn’t supply the dates himself. Because Dr. Hall nearly always noted the age and residence of his patients, most of them have been identified and their birth dates found in other sources. The earliest case in the existing manuscript can be dated in 1611, others in 1613, 1614 and 1615, and another four in 1616, the very year of Shakespeare’s death (Lane 351)

It appears that Dr. Hall made his notes shortly after treating his patients, but didn’t prepare them for publication until near the end of his life. Hall was obviously aware and admiring of his patients’ status and achievements, especially their scholarly and literary achievements, as his comments about Drayton, Holyoake, and others reveal. By 1630 William Shakespeare was well-known as an outstanding, if mysterious, playwright. The Second Folio had been published in 1632, and there had been, of course, many of his plays issued in quarto, as well as several printed tributes. Thus, there is good reason to expect that Dr. John Hall would have noted his treatment of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon during the ten years he knew him—if he thought he were someone worthy of mention. It is indeed strange that in the early 1630s, as he was collecting the cases he wished to publish, he should neglect to include any record of his treating his supposedly famous father-in-law. Mrs. Stopes called it “the one great failure of his life” (Stopes 1901, 82).

Joseph, Harriet: Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law: John Hall, Man and Physician Hamden, CT:
Archon Books, 1964.

Lane, Joan: John Hall and his Patients. Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust, 1996.

Stopes, Charlotte C.. Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries. Stratford-upon-
Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907.
14 years ago
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#2913
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 6
by Ramon L. Jiménez

James Cooke

Our fifth eyewitness is Dr. James Cooke, a surgeon from Warwick who was responsible for the publication of John Hall’s casebook. Although he was about twenty years younger than Hall, Cooke was acquainted with him from the time they had both attended the Earl of Warwick and his family. In the 1640s a Parliamentary army was contending with the army of Charles I in a civil war that would end with Charles’ defeat, and eventual beheading in 1649. Both royalists and rebels occupied Stratford-upon-Avon on different occasions. In 1644 Dr. Cooke was attached to a Parliamentary army unit assigned to guard the famous Clopton Bridge over the Avon at Stratford-upon-Avon. At this date Dr. John Hall had been dead nine years and, according to Cooke, he and a friend decided to visit Hall’s widow Susanna “to see the books left by Mr. Hall” (Joseph 105).

When they arrived at New Place and met Susanna, Cooke asked if her husband had left any books or papers that he might see. When she brought them out, Cooke noticed two manuscript notebooks handwritten in a Latin script that he recognized as Dr. Hall’s. Susanna was confident that it wasn’t her husband’s handwriting, but when Dr. Cooke insisted, she agreed to sell him the manuscripts, and he carried them away with great satisfaction.

He eventually translated one of the notebooks, added some cases of his own, and published it in 1657 under a very long title that is commonly shortened to Select Observations on English Bodies. On the title page John Hall is described as a “Physician, living at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, where he was very famous” (Joseph 104). In his introduction to the book, Cooke described his visit with Susanna, during which neither of them referred to her supposedly famous father, nor to any books or manuscripts that might have belonged to him. In fact, from Dr. Cooke’s report of the meeting, neither Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna nor the doctor himself was aware of any literary activity by the William Shakespeare who had lived in the very house they were standing in.

As is well known, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon mentioned no books, papers, or manuscripts in his will. After certain specific bequests, he left the rest of his goods and “household stuffe” to his daughter and her husband, John Hall. In contrast, Dr. Hall referred in his will to “my study of books” and “my manuscripts,” and left them to his own son-in-law Thomas Nash (Lane 350).

Joseph, Harriet: Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law: John Hall, Man and Physician Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964.

Lane, Joan: John Hall and his Patients. Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust, 1996.
14 years ago
·
#2914
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 7
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Sir Fulke Greville

A sixth eyewitness is Sir Fulke Greville, later Lord Brooke, whose family had lived near Stratford for more than two hundred years, and who must have known the Shakespeare family. He was born in 1554 at Beauchamp Court, less than ten miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, in the vicinity of Snitterfield, the home of Richard Shakespeare, grandfather of William. He was related to the Ardens, the family of Shakespeare’s mother, and displayed the arms of the Arden family on his own coat-of-arms (Adams 451).

Fulke Greville was a man of importance in Warwickshire. In 1592 he, Sir Thomas Lucy, and five others were appointed to a Commission to report on those who refused to attend church. In September of that year, the Commission reported to the Privy Council that nine men in the parish of Stratford-upon-Avon had not attended church at least once a month. Among the nine was John Shakespeare, father of William (M. Eccles 33). Throughout his life Fulke Greville sought preferment at court, and eventually became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Treasurer of the Navy. On the death of his father in 1606, Fulke Greville was appointed to the office his father had held—Recorder of Warwick and Stratford-upon-Avon, and remained in it until his death in 1628. In this position he could hardly have been unaware of the Shakespeare family.

Fulke Greville was also a serious poet and dramatist. During the late 1570s he composed a cycle of 109 poems, forty-one of which were sonnets, and two decades later wrote three history plays. But he was one of those noblemen who disdained appearance in print, and in fact refused to allow any publication of his work while he was alive. The only work of his that appeared during his lifetime was an unauthorized printing of his play Mustapha in 1609. This was the same year that SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS was published—probably without the permission of its author, supposedly his neighbor down the road.

Greville preferred the company of poets and philosophers, and his closest friends were the poets Edward Dyer and Philip Sidney. Greville was also acquainted with John Florio, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson. Another poet and playwright William Davenant, who claimed to be a godson, or maybe a son, of William Shakespeare, entered Greville’s household as a page when he was eighteen (ODNB). Greville corresponded with the poet and playwright George Chapman (Crundell 137), who was mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, as was William Shakespeare, as one of the best English playwrights. Greville was a patron of Samuel Daniel, the poet and playwright from nearby Somerset who dedicated "Musophilus,” probably his finest poem, to him in 1599. Both Chapman and Daniel were about the same age and from the same class as William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Greville’s plays have never been performed, and he is best known today for his biography of Philip Sidney, in which he wrote about both himself and Sidney, and their twenty-year friendship. A number of letters both to and from Fulke Greville have survived. Yet nowhere in any of Fulke Greville’s reminiscences, or in the letters he wrote or received, is there any mention of the well-known poet and playwright, William Shakespeare, who supposedly lived a few miles away.iii Charlotte Stopes wrote: “It is always considered strange that such a man should not have mentioned Shakespeare” (1907, 171). Fulke Greville has been described as “one of the leaders of the movement for the introduction of Renaissance Culture into England” (Whitfield 366). Yet so far as we know, Greville never made any connection between the resident of the nearby town and the dramatist who bore the identical name and who, more than any other, used Renaissance literary sources for his plays—William Shakespeare.

Adams, Joseph Q. A Life of William Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923.

Eccles, Mark. Shakespeare in Warwickshire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1963.

Whitfield, Christopher: “Some of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in the Middle Temple—
III.” Notes & Queries
211 (1966) 363-69.

iii In Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation (1665), David Lloyd asserted that Greville wished to be “known to posterity” as “Shakespeare’s and Ben Johnson’s master.” But he cited no evidence to support the claim, and it is generally considered to be a fabrication. See Chambers 2.250.

Stopes, Charlotte C.. Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries. Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907.
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Note: The DNB says Fulke Greville had “a close personal intimacy with Francis Bacon” and “maintained friendly relations [with Bacon] to the last”. It was in a letter to Greville that Bacon wrote:

“ . . . For to be, as I told you, like a child following a bird, which when it is nearest flyeth and lighteth a little before, and then the child after it again, and so in infinitum, I am weary of it; as also of wearying my good friends”.

The use of the same image is noted by John Nichol, Bacon, Vol I. p 43 : It is interesting to find in Shake-speare's Coriolanus a near transcript of it : "I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he had caught it, he let it go again, and after it again; and over and over he comes, and up again," Act I, s.iii.

Bacon was also closely connected to the Antiquarian Society which included George Carew, Baron of Clopton near Stratford-up-Avon and also Earl of Totnes of the same Clopton near Stratford-upon-Avon. A letter from Greville to Francis Bacon in 1591 indicates Greville and Francis Bacon were close and old friends. Certainly that friendship was formed while young Francis Bacon was growing up in Burghley House, and included Philip Sidney.
14 years ago
·
#2915
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 8
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Edward Pudsey

Another eyewitness who must have known William Shakespeare of Stratford was an obscure theatergoer named Edward Pudsey who was perhaps only the second individual we know of to write out passages from a Shakespeare play. Very little is known about Edward Pudsey, except that he was born in Derbyshire in 1573 and died in 1613 at Tewkesbury, about 25 miles from Stratford (ODNB). There is a 1591 record of a Pudsey family living at Langley, about five miles from Stratford, and only three miles from Park Hall, the home of the Ardens, parents of Shakespeare’s mother Mary (Savage vi) .

In 1888 scholars were fortunate to discover a ninety-page manuscript that was inscribed “Edward Pudsey’s Book.” In it Pudsey had copied passages from several literary works in the fields of history, philosophy and current events—as well as from contemporary plays. The dates entered in the manuscript range from 1600 to 1612, the year before Pudsey died. Besides passages from Machiavelli, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and others, Pudsey carefully transcribed selections from twenty-two contemporary plays—four by Ben Jonson, three by Marston, seven by Dekker, Lyly, Nashe, Chapman, and Heywood. And eight by William Shakespeare.

The extracts from Hamlet and Othello are especially interesting because of their variations from the printed versions. The quotation from Hamlet is slightly different from the 1604 Quarto and the 1623 Folio. The quotation from Othello contains lines that do not appear in the Quarto, which was not published until 1622. After the Othello quotation, Pudsey wrote the letters “sh,” a reasonably clear indication that he knew that the play was by William Shakespeare. The English scholar who examined the manuscript asserted that the quotations from Othello and Hamlet were written in a section that she dated no later than 1600 (Rees 331). Thus, it is probable that Edward Pudsey had access to now-lost quartos of Othello and Hamlet, or had seen the plays and written down the dialogue in 1600 or earlier.

But nowhere in the hundreds of entries in Edward Pudsey’s Book is there any indication that he was aware that the playwright whose words he copied so carefully lived in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon.

Savage, Richard, ed. Shakespearean extracts from "Edward Pudsey’s booke” temp. Q.Elizabeth & K. James I. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1888.

Rees, J. “Shakespeare and ‘Edward Pudsey’s Booke’: 1600.” Notes & Queries 237 (1992) 330-1.
14 years ago
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#2916
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 9
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Queen Henrietta Maria

Our eighth eyewitness is Henrietta Maria, the fifteen-year-old daughter of King Henry IV of France and Marie de Médicis, who, by arrangement, became the wife and Queen of Charles I soon after his coronation as King of England in 1625. The new American colony of Maryland, founded in 1632, was given its name in honor of Henrietta Maria.

Both Charles and Queen Henrietta were theater buffs and enthusiastic patrons of the drama. King Charles even collaborated on a play with James Shirley in the 1630s, and was so fond of Shakespeare that he kept a copy of the Second Folio by his bedside. In this copy are found the alternative titles he assigned to several of the plays, such as “Pyramus and Thisbe” for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “Malvolio” for Twelfth Night (Birrell 45). To the Puritans, who executed Charles in 1649, his dissolute character was exemplified by his love of plays. One Puritan pamphlet asserted that he would have succeeded as king “had he studied scripture half so much as he did Ben Jonson or Shakespeare” (Campbell 107).

Queen Henrietta was also an amateur playwright, and even more enamored of the stage than her husband. She was the first English monarch to attend a performance in a public playhouse, and enjoyed performing the leading roles in her own masques at Court —behavior that shocked the English public (Campbell 312). According to Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, the word “actress” was first used in reference to her (187). In her 1632 masque Tempe Restored, professional women singers took the stage for the first time in England. Joining her on the stage on many occasions were several of her ladies-in-waiting, including Beatrice, the Countess of Oxford, wife of the 19th Earl, Sir Robert de Vere.

In 1642 Charles and his Parliament reached an impasse over taxes, and when he attempted to arrest five members, Parliament was moved to authorize an army, and a Civil War broke out. The Queen was in Holland at the time, but she quickly began rounding up support for the Royalist army. Early the next year she landed in Yorkshire with a large supply of ammunition she had solicited on the continent. From there she journeyed south to relieve her husband who was in the field with his army near Oxford. Traveling on horseback, the “Generalissima,” as she called herself, reached Warwickshire in early July 1643, and on the 11th arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon at the head of an army of three thousand foot, thirty companies of horse and dragoons, six pieces of artillery, and 150 wagons (Plowden 186).

The records of the Stratford Corporation document the visit of Queen Henrietta Maria and the substantial expense it incurred to provide a banquet for her (Fox 24). Although specific records of it are lacking, scholars accept a tradition that the Queen stayed two nights at New Place, then the home of William Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna, her daughter Elizabeth and son-in-law Thomas Nash (Lee 509; Schoenbaum 305).

Queen Henrietta was an exceptional letter-writer. Hundreds of her letters to her husband, her nephew Prince Rupert, and others have been collected and printed. But none of the letters she wrote before or after her visit to Stratford-upon-Avon contains any mention of her stay at New Place, or any indication that she had met the daughter and granddaughter of the famous playwright whom she emulated and whom her husband venerated.

What could be the explanation for this? By 1643 there had been several visitors to the Holy Trinity Church, where the statue of William Shakespeare had been installed more than twenty years earlier (Chambers 2:239, 242-3). But if Queen Henrietta walked over to the church to see the memorial to the famous playwright, she never wrote about it. One explanation might be that she knew that the Stratford Shakespeare was a myth. A decade earlier she had been closely associated with Beatrice, the Countess of Oxford, and her husband, Robert de Vere, the 19th Earl. She also knew Ben Jonson, the artificer of the First Folio, who was still writing masques for the Court in the 1630s. Any one of the three might have told her about the aristocrat who concealed his writings by adopting a commoner’s name as his pseudonym. Any one of them might have told her that she would find nothing about the playwright Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Further evidence suggests that plays and playwrights were not welcome in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is well known that during the thirty years between 1568 and 1597 numerous playing companies visited and performed there. But by the end of this period the Puritan officeholders in the town finally attained their objective of banning all performances of plays and interludes. In 1602 the Corporation of Stratford ordered that a fine of ten shillings be imposed on any official who gave permission for any type of play to be performed in any city building, or any inn or house in the borough. This in a year that five or six plays by Shakespeare, their alleged townsman, were being performed in London.iv

In 1612, just four years before their neighbor’s death, this fine was increased to ten pounds. In 1622, when work on the great First Folio was in progress, the Stratford Corporation paid the King’s Players the sum of six shillings not to play in the Town Hall (Fox 143-4). Surely by 1622, some thirty years after his name had first appeared in print, the people of Stratford would have been aware that one of England’s greatest poets and playwrights had been born, raised, and then retired in their own town. That is, if such a thing were actually true.

Birrell, T. A.: English Monarchs and their Books: From Henry II to Charles II. London: British Library, 1986.

Campbell, Oscar and E. G. Quinn, eds. The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare. New York: MJF Books, 1966.

Plowden, Alison. Henrietta Marie: Charles I’s Indomitable Queen. Stroud, Gloucs: Sutton, 2001.

Lee, Sidney. A Life of William Shakespeare. 14th ed. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1968.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life. New York: OUP, 1977.

Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 v. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

Fox, Levi. The Borough Town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Stratford-upon-Avon, 1953.
14 years ago
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#2917
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 10
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Philip Henslowe

Our ninth eyewitness was a London businessman who decided to build a playhouse, and then became a successful theatrical entrepreneur. Philip Henslowe and his partner had operated the Rose Theater for about four years before he began, in 1592, making entries in an old notebook about his theater and the companies that played in it, primarily the Admiral’s Men (Foakes xv). The surviving 242-page manuscript, now called Henslowe’s Diary, is a goldmine of references to plays, playhouses, and playing companies in London, and mentions the name of just about everybody who was anybody in the Elizabethan theater in the 1590s.

Although Henslowe kept his Diary on and off for less than ten years, we can find in it, or in other Henslowe manuscripts, the names of 280 different plays, about 240 of which have entirely disappeared. The names of fully 170 of these plays would be totally unknown today, except for their mention in Henslowe’s Diary (Bentley 15). The Diary contains reports of performances at the Rose Theater by all the major playing companies of the time. There are also dozens of actors named, and no less than twenty-seven playwrights.

In his Diary Philip Henslowe kept records of the loans he made to playwrights, and of the amounts he paid them for manuscripts. Among the playwrights mentioned are the familiar names of Chapman, Dekker, Drayton, Jonson, Marston, and Webster. There are also some unfamiliar names, such as William Bird, Robert Daborne, and Wentworth Smith, the other “W.S.” But there is one familiar name that is missing. Nowhere in the list of dozens of actors and twenty-eight playwrights in Henslowe’s Diary do we find the name of William Shakespeare.

It might be objected that Henslowe also failed to mention several other familiar playwrights, such as Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. But there are good reasons for these omissions. Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ford didn’t begin writing plays until after the period of Henslowe’s Diary. Marlowe and Greene died within a year of the first entry in the Diary; Kyd died a year later, and Lyly and Peele wrote their last plays in 1593 and 1594.

Admittedly, Shakespeare is supposed to have been an actor, playwright, and sharer in the Chamberlain’s Men company, which played in the Globe Theater, the principal competitor of Henslowe’s Rose Theater. But the Globe and the Rose theaters were situated very near each other, and Henslowe had to walk past the Globe every day on his way to work (C. Eccles 69). His Diary contains many transactions with actors and playwrights associated with the Chamberlain’s Men, and his entries for June 1594 record that the Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men performed more than a dozen plays together at his Newington Butts theater about a mile away (Campbell 583). This is the period during which most scholars claim that William Shakespeare was acting with the Chamberlain’s Men.

If Shakespeare really were the busy actor and playwright we are told he was, then Henslowe would surely have known him, and mentioned him somewhere in his Diary. But although Henslowe mentioned several Shakespeare plays that were performed in his theater, he never mentioned the name of the man who wrote them, and had an attachment to a theater exactly one hundred yards away.

Foakes, R. A. ed. Henslowe's Diary. Cambridge: CUP, 2nd ed. 2002.

Bentley, Gerald E. The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time 1590-1642.
Princeton: PUP, 1986.

Eccles, Christine. The Rose Theatre. New York: Routledge/Theater Arts Books, 1990.

Campbell, Oscar and E. G. Quinn, eds. The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare. New
York: MJF Books, 1966.
14 years ago
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#2918
Shakespeare in Stratford and London: Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing - Part 11
by Ramon L. Jiménez


Edward Alleyn

Our last eyewitness is Edward Alleyn, the most distinguished actor on the Elizabethan stage. He was also a musician, a book and playbook collector, a philanthropist, and a playwright (Wraight 211-19). He was born about two years after William Shakespeare and came from the same class. His father was an innkeeper, and Alleyn was still in his teens when he began acting on the stage. He was most famous for his roles in Marlowe’s plays, but he also must have acted in several of the Shakespeare plays performed at the Rose, such as Titus Andronicus and Henry VI (Carson 68). In 1592 he married Philip Henslowe’s step-daughter and entered the theater business with his father-in-law.

Edward Alleyn also kept a diary that survives, along with many of his letters and papers. They reveal that he had a large circle of acquaintances throughout and beyond the theater world that included aristocrats, clergymen, and businessmen, as well as men in his own profession, such as John Heminges, one of the alleged editors of the First Folio. In his two-volume edition of Edward Allen’s Memoirs (1841), John Payne Collier printed several references that Alleyn made to Shakespeare and to his plays, but they have all been judged forgeries (Chambers 2:386-90). The alleged reference by Alleyn to Shakespeare that has puzzled scholars the most is one that Collier claimed he found on the back of a letter written to Alleyn in June 1609. There, Alleyn supposedly recorded a list of purchases under the heading “Howshowld stuff,”—at the end of which are the words “a book. Shaksper sonetts 5d.” Although this letter has been lost, the entry has been accepted as genuine by some scholars (Rollins (2:54 and Freeman 2:1142), but rejected as a forgery by others (Race 113 and Duncan-Jones 7). But forgery or genuine, it fails to suggest a connection with William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Thus, except for this one questionable reference, nowhere in Alleyn’s diary or letters does the name William Shakespeare appear. It is impossible to believe that Edward Alleyn, who was at the center of the Elizabethan stage community for more than thirty-five years, would not have met the alleged actor and leading playwright William Shakespeare, and made some allusion to him in his letters or diary.

Wraight, A.C. Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn. London: Adam Hart, 1993.

Carson, Neil. A Companion to Henslowe's Diary. Cambridge: CUP, 1988.

Rollins, Hyder H., ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets. Vol 2.
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944.

Freeman, Arthur & Janet Ing Freeman. John Payne Collier: scholarship and forgery in
The nineteenth century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Race, Sydney. “J.P. Collier and the Dulwich Papers.” Notes & Queries 195 (1950) 112-
14.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare. London:
Thomson Learning, 1998.
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Note: Nigel Cockburn writes: “Francis Bacon knew the great actor Edward Alleyn. In 1618 in a letter to the Duke of Buckingham (Spedding 13.324) Bacon discussed a license which Alleyn was seeking to build a “hospital”. Bacon commented: “I like well that Allen playeth the last act of his life so well” (But Bacon said he preferred that some of the money should go to founding two lectureships). On 13 September 1619 Alleyn opened Dulwich College which he was founding (I am not clear if this was the “hospital”). Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, was the principal guest. One supposes that some of Alleyn’s Theatre friends were present”.

Constance M. Pott found other Alleyn family members known by Francis and Anthony Bacon: First on the pages of Francis Bacon's letters appears Capt. Francis Alleyn, (The Alleyns spell their names variously even in the same letter. Alen, Allen, Allin, Aleyn, Alleyne) a frank, plain spoken soldier, employed by Anthony to intercede for the release of his servant, Lawson, who had been arrested after the charitable manners of the time, on suspicion of being a Romanist. Francis Alleyn seems to have been very useful to the Bacons as a Messenger or "Intelligencer."

William Alleyne got himself into political troubles. Bacon calls him "a base fellow and turbulent." John Alleyn was theatrical servant to the Lords Howard and Sheffield. He was elder brother to Edward Alleyn, the Player, and the ostensible founder of Dulwich College, in which Bacon was curiously interested. How Alleyn found the money to make that noble foundation is only one of the many points which remain "behind the Curtain of the Dark." Henslowe reports two more Alleyns, Charles, and Richard, and amongst Anthony Bacon's letters are at least six from Godfrey Alleyn. There is, therefore, no doubt that the Alleyn family were amongst Bacon's helpers or "servants."
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