Neville i Shakespeare
By DAVID KEYS
Wednesday, October 5, 2005 Page A3
Special to The Globe and Mail
LONDON -- He was a relative of William Shakespeare, he practised the thespian's signature...
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By DAVID KEYS
Wednesday, October 5, 2005 Page A3
Special to The Globe and Mail
LONDON -- He was a relative of William Shakespeare, he practised the thespian's signature and was best of friends with his patron and mentor. Now two British scholars are suggesting that Sir Henry Neville, an English courtier and diplomat who lived from 1562 to 1615, is the real author of all of the bard's plays. They argue that Shakespeare directed the plays, acted in them and part-owned the company performing them but did not write a single one.
The revelations, based on five years of detailed archival research by Shakespeare scholar Brenda James and additional work by historian William Rubinstein of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, will be published later this month in a book to be launched at Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London.
"We correlated the chronology of the plays with Neville's life and found that they match perfectly in a way that illuminates the evolution of the plays, " Prof. Rubinstein said.
The political content and geographical location of the plays currently attributed to Shakespeare accurately reflect the known travels and adventures of Sir Henry, a highly educated diplomat and politician who lived from 1562 to 1615 and came from Berkshire.
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There are also striking similarities of style and vocabulary between Sir Henry's private and diplomatic letters and Shakespeare's plays and poems.
"The beauty and eloquence demonstrated in Neville's diplomatic and personal letters display a linguistic liveliness and inventiveness that is echoed boldly in the works attributed to Shakespeare, " Ms. James added. "Examining his letters I have found examples of particular unusual words and constructions not normally found outside Shakespearean literature."
Word frequency analysis reveals a statistical correlation, and there is direct, long-ignored evidence in a document discovered in 1867 that Sir Henry practised faking Shakespeare's signature. The document, in Sir Henry's handwriting and with his name at the top, features 17 attempts at practising various forms of Shakespeare's signature.
Academics have always been puzzled as to how Shakespeare wrote plays requiring detailed geographical and political knowledge and advanced skills in reading Latin, Greek, French, Spanish and Italian textual sources despite ceasing formal education at age 12.
Over the past 130 years, many have courted controversy by suggesting someone other than Shakespeare was the true playwright. Some contended they were written by the lawyer and scientist Francis Bacon, by the Tudor playboy and courtier Edward de Vere or even by the playwright Christopher Marlow, but most scholars believed that the evidence never stacked up.
Now the new proposal that Sir Henry -- never before mentioned in connection with Shakespeare -- is the real bard will have to be analyzed in detail by Renaissance scholars worldwide.
"It must certainly be a major piece in the puzzle of the creation of the Shakespeare work and potentially a central piece which will unblock many other pieces, " Mark Rylance, actor and artistic director of the Globe theatre, writes in the book's foreward.
The scholars, however, haven't yet provided a smoking quill that unequivocally identifies Sir Henry as the author and not Shakespeare. Scholars will be quick to point out that some of the theory relies on the same circumstantial evidence used by other Shakespeare authorship critics.
In The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, the two scholars propose that Shakespeare was Sir Henry's front man because he could not afford to be seen as the author of the plays as some of them were politically too sensitive and controversial. Indeed, if the Elizabethan authorities had known that Sir Henry was the author of Richard II, he would probably have been executed rather than merely imprisoned for his involvement in the Earl of Essex's revolt in 1601.
Sir Henry's fundamental political problem was that he was a member of a rival dynasty to that of the Tudors. He was descended from the Plantagenets. His own grandfather and great uncle had been executed by Henry VIII. With such politically controversial ancestry, he couldn't afford to be seen writing politically controversial plays. Richard II, a play that deals with the forcible deposition of a monarch, was performed in London 40 times immediately before Essex's revolt and was regarded by the authorities as a seditious theatrical production. Shakespeare and his colleagues were questioned by government investigators, but were not arrested.
One of the few documents officially attributing the plays to Shakespeare was the First Folio edition, published in 1623. The writer Ben Jonson was involved in putting Shakespeare's name on that first edition and at the time he was employed by a college in London associated with the Neville family. Ms. James and Prof. ...
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