Penny Mccarthy

… “ the question of R. L.'s identity has not been raised for decades, and certainly not solved.”
(p. xiii)

“I follow (the initials) R. L.'s identity as it transmogrifies into other authorial pseudonyms—A. W., Humphrey King and some others. There is one name that hovers doubtfully between pseudonym and true name: 'William Smith' straddles the literary and the real worlds. Other nicknames for R. L. are ones used by his contemporaries to refer to him. These covert references are mined in the poetry of George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Robert Armin, Ben Jonson, John Davies of Hereford and some others. Prose works of Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, William Covell, William Kemp and John Harrington are also found to be a fruitful source of covert reference, as are dedicatory poems, prose prefaces, epigraphs and marginalia. The investigation extends into works published in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Some of these were genuine seventeenth-century compositions; but others, it is argued, were written long before they were published, and are essentially sixteenth-century works.

“As the roll-call of names may suggest, the Sidney circle looms large in this enquiry. This is widely understood to comprise Philip Sidney and his sister Mary Sidney (later Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke), and the writers enjoying their patronage and that of their powerful uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Its contours will be somewhat redefined here; and not one, but two great poets will be added to it.

“R. L. was in this coterie. The secrecy of the shrouding of this fact was necessitated in part by the scandal of his low birth and cross-class liaisons, in part by the 'dangerous' politics. The poetry of the Earl of Leicester's protégés is saturated with covert anti-Elizabethan sentiment, as I shall show. Shared terms of reference and sleights of hand learned from each other meant that much was left opaque in the work of Sidneian writers, intended to be deciphered only by 'understanders' (initiates)--those in the inner circle. My aim is to put modern readers in the position of that inner circle, rather than that of benighted outsiders.

“For the purposes of this study, the subtext—that which is concealed under the bland surface of the text—is the important text. This does not involve ignoring what each work appears to be 'about'—what its matter is—but it does pay particular attention to what it is 'about'—what its designs on us are. Accordingly, I pay much attention to puns, for they are a prime means of masking an author's intent: it requires an act of attention on the reader's part to notice their presence.
(pp. xiv-xv)
...

“Sometimes there appears an author-name with no apparent extra-literary identity, so that the name might as well be a pseudonym.* 'Humphrey King' is one such, with numerous 'walk-on' parts, as author and as addressee. In his case as in the ones above, when a reader kept meeting the same nickname on different types of texts, he or she might well have suspected that the same real person was involved. The suspicion could have been right or wrong, of course: coincidence might have played a part. But we should keep open the possibility that writers might knowingly have played on the belief that in their readers' minds, signing off very diverse texts with a telling clue.” …
(p. xvi)

“The upshot of my investigation is the reinterpretation, to a small or large degree, of many texts by Shakespeare's contemporaries; a considerable ante-dating of the existence of contemporary allusion to the historical Shakespeare; and the advancement by many years of the dates of first reference to several of his works.

“Clearly, therefore, this study will argue for much earlier dates of composition for most of Shakespeare's known corpus. I shall insist on a strict application of the 'terminus ante quem', for two reasons. Abundant evidence exists for long intervals between composition and publication of works of all kinds in the sixteenth century. And mention is a haphazard phenomenon: there is one sole record of the existence of As You Like It (in the Stationers' Register of 1600) before its publication in the First Folio of 1623. These two probabilistic reasons are given firm backing by my findings of a wealth of oblique references to Shakespeare's person and his plays at dates earlier than the currently-accepted dates of composition.

“I re-order Shakespeare's plays chronologically, suggesting that internal evidence can be invoked to work out, from the likely state of his imagination, understanding, general knowledge and loyalties at different times of his life, a more plausible order of composition. I reject the whole notion of a late period of romance.

“I add to Shakespeare's corpus, identifying his lost juvenile occasional poems, lyrics, and elegies, his juvenile accounts of progresses and a poetic 'entertainment.' I further identify as his two sonnet sequences; a poetic romance; more mature poems of all kinds; dedicatory poems; a pamphlet; a prose translation; a pseudo-historical treatise.

“The meaning of Shakespeare's known works is partially reinterpreted. I find a hidden agenda of anti-Tudor sentiment and promotion of would-be rulers of England, the Dudley/Sidneys, in the plays of Shakespeare, and of others who collaborated with him in a series of history plays to promote the Dudley cause. This antagonism to the monarch was deeper and longer-lasting than has been supposed. There is, conversely, a strongly autobiographical element in many of Shakespeare's plays, relayed by means of a persona he adopted for himself. His Sonnets and narrative poems are hardly touched on, for they require much more space than I could allow them in this study.

“An unfamiliar picture of our protagonist emerges: an almost motherless boy by reason of his transfer from his own family to the aristocratic milieu of the Dudleys (a Protestant milieu), he received an extraordinary if erratic education under the best scholars and poets of the day, writing masques and poetry—much of it non-dramatic—in that coterie. He promoted by his contemporaries, even by Robert Greene (who was not jealous of him), and especially by Nashe, who trusted his talent and urged him to publish. (My reading of Nashe's works differs considerably from that of previous criticism.) Our protagonist travelled to Italy when young. He 'enjoyed' an uneasy social status, was not quite a Cambridge undergraduate, and perhaps not quite a law student (or perhaps he was one). He taught in the country, enjoyed serially Sir Edward Denny's, Sir John Salusbury's and Sir John Harrington's protection. He turned his early compositions to good use in the citizens' theatre. He was more deeply involved in the Burbages' venture of the Globe than we previously imagined. His family situation was more complicated than has been supposed; and it inflects his plays from the earliest to the latest.”
(pp. xvii-xviii)

“There was an assassination attempt during the Kenilworth visit. The Spanish agent was there, and he mentions it twice in dispatches. Someone shot with a crossbow at the Queen while she was hunting. The agent not only reports this, but follows it up with the remark that he can get little information about the prisoner (the man arrested for the attempt) as no one dares say a word.(16) ”…
(p. 30) …

“The language is very Senecan, as Kenneth Muir has observed.(25) There are speeches of Lady Macbeth's corresponding closely to speeches of the Clytemnestra of Seneca's Agamemnon and of his Medea in the eponymous play. Macbeth himself echoes speeches of Seneca's Cassandra. To me, such imitation implies the authorship of a young dramatist still rather dependent on his models, before he finds his own vernacular voice.

“Though the rationale in terms of topical reference to James's reign usually given for the play's contents sounds plausible, a much earlier set of events maps into the plot equally well, if not better. Elizabeth I (Duncan) visits the seat of her chief subject Leicester (Macbeth), married to the wicked Lettice (Lady Macbeth) ; and is (almost) assassinated. Leicester then assassinates his companion Philip Sidney (Banquo) whose children are destined to rule, on the assumption that a marriage between Leicester and the Queen would have been a barren one, and power would have devolved to Philip, as Leicester's heir. Historically, Banquo was as much implicated in the rebellion against Duncan as Macbeth was. But Shakespeare wants to exonerate his hero Sidney from any taint of treason. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were childless, yet, notoriously, Lady Macbeth refers to babies to whom she has given suck. Robert Dudley and Lettice had no surviving children: but a young son Robert died aged four (years) in 1584, and Lettice had earlier had children.

“In October 1585, Philip, the Banquo figure, died while in his uncle's care in Zutphen in the Netherlands. The evidence that his contemporaries believed Philip had been killed by (his Uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of) Leicester is ubiquitous, and it is remarkable that it has escaped notice.

“Edmund Molyneux reports Sidney's desperate letter to his physician Weir written the night before he died: 'My dear Weir, come, please come, my life is in danger, I can say no more.' Weir was an authority on poisoning. Molyneux mentions that three Sidneys died within six months of each other in places where they could 'pretend no interest”—yet Philip was surrounded by kinsmen, his uncle Leicester, his brother and his wife.(26) Is Molyneux implying that Philip's nearest and dearest worked againsthis interest? I think he is.

“At Philip's death, his contemporaries at New College, Oxford, applied to the Chancellor of Oxford, Leicester himself, for permission to publish a collection of elegies for him, mostly in Latin. The lament written by Sir John Hoskyns for this anthology, Peplus, contains some startling lines.(27) Translated from the Latin, they run: 'So I shall mourn, since he was killed by a poisoned bullet. It is no secret that poison offers a way to heaven—a well-worn way, especially well-worn in our age. Gaul has her Medea, if you were in any doubt … Alcides experienced this, so did his heir. The son of Philyra feels it, and his child too.' Medaea was a poisoner; Alcides is Hercules, who was killed with a poisoned shirt. 'Phyllirides', 'son of Philyra', is a nickname for Philip.

“Spenser's compendium anthology Astrophel,also containing elegies for Philip, came out much later, in 1595. Included in it is an elegy by Lodowick Bryskett that is in fact a translation of an elegy for the poisonedDuke Gonzaga of Mantua. In that publication there is an elegy by Matthew Roydon, who speaks of 'Astrophil by envie slaine.' (28)

“Thomas Nashe was among the crowd of the suspicious. In his Pierce Penilesse (1592), he tells a story of a wicked bear enticing a horse to his death.(29) (Philippos means 'lover of horses', and Philip plays on his own 'horseness' in the opening of his Defence of Poesie.(30) The 'son of Philyra' was the centaur.) Nashe's story becomes strangely entangled with that of the forester poisoned by the Bear, who is clearly really a human. Nashe's modern editor, McKerrow, accepts that Leicester, whose impressa was the Bear and Ragged Staff, is the target for the reference. The fables occur in the context of 'Hypocrisie', of 'Italionate conveyances, as to kill a man, and then mourne for him,' as Leicester seems to have done in authorizing the Oxford anthologies. In his Terrors of the Night (1554), Nashe has a peculiar account of a man dying in suspicious circumstances, after drinking a 'quintessence' 'in the Countrey some threescore mile off from London.'(31) We are led to believe that this refers not (to) the countryside of England, but to Holland. 'The house where this Gentleman dwelt, stood in a low marish ground, almost as rotten a Clymate as the Lowe Countreyes,' (32) Nashe manages to work into the text not only 'Molenax' (supposedly an allusion to the constructor of a great globe, but probably in fact to Edmund Molyneux), but also 'the Virgines of Marie Magdalenes order in Rome' and 'the chast daughters of Saint Philip.' We have no excuse for not spotting the frame of reference.

“So when Shakespeare inserts the poison theme (for it was not in the original tale) into his most famous tragedy, Hamlet, which itself contains a play about the poisoned Duke of 'Gonzago', I am tempted to see Hamlet's intensity as in part a reflection of Shakespeare himself, cursing himself for his cowardice in having merely put on a play (Macbeth) in the aftermath of Sidney's death, rather than executing vengeance on the murderers of his 'sweet Prince.'

“Though my mapping of Macbeth and Hamlet onto Dudleian history may seem fanciful, I would suggest that is because my mapping is unamiliar. It should not be: the critic G. French noted parallels between the Sidneys and the Hamlet family, such as the fact that the father died five months and twelve days before the son, in both cases.”(33) …
(pp. 32-34)

Notes:

(16) 18 July 1575 CSP Spanish, 2, 497-9. See Frye, The Competition, pp. 56-7

(25) Kenneth Muir, ed. Macbeth (Introductory material 1962 and 1984, Methuen; London: Arden, 2001), intro., p. xlii.

(26) Edmund Molyneux, Historical Remebrance of the Sidneys. father and son. In Raphael Holinshed, Third Volume of Chonicles (1587). Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 311-14.

(27) Peplus (Oxford: J. Barnes, 1587), pp. 14-18, 17, lines 91-8.

(28) Lodowick Bryskett, 'A pastorall Aeglogue upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney Knight', in Astrophel, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Edmund Spenser (London: T. Creade for William Ponsonby, 1595). Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 554-5. Matthew Roydon, 'An Elegie, or friends passion, for his Astrophill', ibid, Works, pp. 556-8, line 222.

(29) Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (London: Richard Jones, 1592; also Abel Jeffes for John Busbie, 1592). Ronald B. McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (1904-10), revised by F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), I. 149-245, 221-3.

(30) Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), n.p. Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney,, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 73-121, 73.

(31) Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night (London: J. Danter, 1594). Works, I. 339-86, 378.

(32) Works, I. 382.

(33) Cited by H. H. Furness, ed. Hamlet: A New Variorum Edition, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1963), 2. 238-40.

(34) See Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991); E. A. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press, 1965), esp. pp. 12, 90.

(35) The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstock 1575 (London: Thomas Cadman, 1585). Citations are from the edition of A. W. Pollard, The Queen's Majesty's Entertainment at Woodstock. 1575 (1903; Oxford: Daniel and Hart, 1910).

H. C. Manning, Shakespeares Speache. Echoes of Elizabethan & Stuart Pronunciation 1929, Friary Press, Dorchester, Dorset. (privately printed)

“Comparatively few who read Shakespeare ever give a thought about the difference which separates the spoken English of his day and of our own.* Indeed, so long as he is read garbed only in modern orthography, no suspicion of this fact is likely to cross the mind. And even if it did many might feel repelled by such enunciation, deeming it boorish compared with the more familiar and supposedly more refined accents of modern speech. Yet how much is lost by lack of such knowledge! Many of his rhymes remain discordant or do not seem to rhyme at all. Some of his paronomasias fall flat or are altogether missed. And lastly, we are but poorly equipped for emending the printed mistakes of the earliest editions, so many of which are errors of sound.”

____________________
(p. 1, “Introduction”)

___________________

* (this is published in 1929)

“The e pronunciation of ea *deserves a more detailed discussion insomuch as upon it is solved one, if not indeed two, of the most difficult of the Shakespearean cruxes.

“Its regular diphthongal tone was A-sharp, as if indeed it had no e prefixed to it. Many such words are heard therefore as if proceeding from Irish lips. Thus, in the Orpheus Song in Henry VIII.:

“Euerything that heard him play,
Euen the Billowes of the Sea” *

And rhymes are found where not suspected:

“Farewell my Lord: I as your louer speake:
The foole slides orethe Ice that you should
breake,”

_________________________________________________________

(footnotes to p. 32):

* The iotacising of ea, now so common in modern speech, seems hardly to have begun in Shakespeare's time, at any rate in the more Southern parts of England.
Starting from the throat and going forwards the natural order of palato-lingual vocalic positions, assuming the dipthongs to hold a mean between their two sounds, is:


┌───────────────────┐┌──────────────────────┐
ā (heart), E. ai (aisle), ay (break), I, (ee)
è (bear), ĕ (head) | ĭ short (bit) ī long (beat)
────────── | └──────────────────┘
|
└────────────┘└────────────┘

The diphthongs, loosely compunded of two simple sounds, can easily get thrown out of gear, and slip into
either one or the other of their component parts.
Thus the undiphthonging of ea then, as a rule, was effected by a backward dislocation rather than the forward
one, since become customary.
Etacism and epsilonism in fact prevailed over iotacism. Strangely the rhymes sound now to our ears: ---

"And truly not the morning Sun of Heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of th' East,
Nor that full starre that Vshers in the Eaven,
Doth halfe that glory to the sober West."
Sonnett cxxxii

_________________________________________________________

(p. 33)
“Giue sorrow words; the grief that do's not speake,
Whispers the o're-fraught heart, and bids it
breake.”

“But so often does the diphthong ea back-fire to ӗ† that it must be regarded as having a dual—or even triple-tone potentiality. Thus words like feast, east, beast, bequeath, least, etc. are usually spoken as fest, est, best, bequeth, lest. Such words are also found spelt phonetically, e.g.: esterne, redy, breth, yest, helth, becon (beacon) stelth, welth, brest, spred, underneth, heds, fethers, etc.

“Ear + another consonant was, however, usually heard as ar; heard being as hard, and beard as bard. Thus, George Herbert says:

“Compare also M. Drayton's :

“That instrument ne'r heard,
Strooke by the skilfull Bard,”


and:

“I hard of thy rare cuniuring.” (Theh Puritaine Widdow).

“The Battell hard a farre off.” (Edward III).

Serch occurs for search, Erle for Earle, and contrariwise, Shepheard for shepherd, heards for herds, hearb for herb, tearne for terme, and clearke for clerk or clark.



Manning (pp. 32-33)
____________

(* Note: I.e the above is taken to rhyme “play” (plā) and “sea” (sé (as in our contemporary “say”)) )

McCarthy is right to be always on the alert for puns.

I would like to suggest, in light of the excerpts from H. C. Manning, above, the possibility that the initials "R. L."
may have been used (and heard) as a pun on "Earle" (or, as above, "Erle") and heard in Elizabethan and Stuart English speech the way we hear the French town of "Arles" pronouced, "Arle". since, said fluidly, "R.L." suggests "arle" for "Earle", the English nobele title equivalent to a Count.