Obscure literary erudition appears on the front page of the
Times infrequently, so that when it does your bloguiste must sit up and take notice. An energetic English
professor at the University of Texas, Douglas Bruster, following in the traces
of a British scholar named Brian Vickers, had advanced the theory that there is
more to Shakespeare than we ever imagined. Specifically there are some mysterious gobbets of text in
Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (or Hieronimo is Mad Again) that first show
up in the printed quarto of 1602.
The play itself was probably written about 1590. Thomas Kyd shed this
mortal coil in 1596. We have no
idea whether he and Shakespeare had ever laid eyes on each other, though
Shakespeare had certainly laid eyes on his play, which he plundered pretty
thoroughly in writing Hamlet.
There
are pendulum swings in scholarship as in so many aspects of cultural life. For more than a century it was all the
rage to argue that Shakespeare didn’t really write most of Shakespeare, or
maybe even any of him. This might be called the “college graduate theory” advanced
by—well, college graduates. The
supposed plays of Shakespeare exhibit extraordinary invention, wit, and (yes)
erudition. But we have it on the
authority of Ben Jonson that Shakespeare had “small Latine & lesse Greeke.” How is somebody like that going to
write King Lear or come up with
three-guinea words like Lady Macbeth’s “incarnadine”?
Nobody
paused to ask why we should be so impressed by the educational authority of
somebody who can’t even spell “Latin” or “Greek” correctly. Instead they rushed on to attribute
pseudo-Shakespeare’s plays to somebody else, and especially to Francis Bacon,
who was very smart and a Cambridge
man who habitually wrote out his shopping lists in correctly accented Greeke.
The
Baconian heresy eventually drowned in the sea of its own Rosicrucian
cryptograms. As the pendulum
swings back, the current tendency—it might be called “Shakespearian
maximalism”—is to try to foist off on the Bard, in addition to his own stuff, a dubious assortment of unclaimed
freight languishing about in Elizabethan songbooks. The suggestion that Shakespeare was the author of some or
all of the additions to the old text of the Spanish
Tragedy found in the 1602 quarto is among the most plausible, and most ably
argued; but in my view it is still iffy.
Admiration
for the Roman writer Seneca accounts for the popular theme of gory revenge on
the Elizabethan stage. The Spanish
Tragedy is not quite the goriest of such spectacles, but it is right up
there. Hieronimo, Marshal of
Spain, plots a grisly revenge for the murder of his son Horatio, which involves
the device of a “play within the play,” with a principal villain named
Soliman. In the 1602 quarto
Hieronimo’s speeches, and the dreadful pageant of Soliman, are considerably
expanded. In one of the additions,
in which Hieronimo madly or ironically suggests that the murder of a man’s son
should cause no greater discomfort than the slaughter of a domestic animal, Professor
Bruster finds a significant clue:
What is there yet in a sonne,
To make a father dote, raue, or runne mad?
Being borne, it poutes, cryes, and breeds teeth.
What is there yet in a sonne? He must be fed,
Be taught to goe, and speake. I, or yet? [14]
Why not a man loue a Calfe as well?
Or melt in passion ore a frisking Kid,
As for a Sonne?
Methinks a young Bacon
Or a fine little smooth Horse-colt
Should mooue a man, as much as doth a sonne. [Act 3, sc 11. Lines 10-19]
Bruster is not the first to note the crux in line 14, but he
is certainly has an original and engaging theory about it. It is this: Shakespeare is the writer
who supercharged Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy,
but he had terrible handwriting.
In old manuscripts punctuation is highly arbitrary and often lacking, so
that what we are reading on a page is always half the work of a Renaissance
printer or a modern editor or both.
What does “I, or yet?” mean—apart from nothing, that is. According to Bruster “I, or” is
probably the printer’s misreading of Shakespeare’s abbreviation (Ier) of the name of Hieronimo, speaker
of the lines!
Strange textual accidents do happen. In
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the
worldly wise Pandarus tries to cheer up the heartbroken Troilus, abandoned by
Criseyde. Women are like the M4 bus,
he assures him. Another one comes
by every twelve minutes:
“And ek, as writ Zanzis, that was ful wys.
‘The newe love out chaceth ofte the olde’.” [4.414/15]
Trouble
is, nobody has ever heard of a wise old writer named “Zanzis”. The sentiment sounds like Ovid to me,
but scholars have found something vaguely
like it Seneca, a name Chaucer habitually spells as a disyllable (Senec,
Senek). Now if a copyist didn’t know who Senek was, and if in the original manuscript there was a marginal gloss explaining
that he was “L[ucius] Annæus,” and if the L looked very like
a Z, then he might have thought the
name was Zannæus, or in English Zanzis. QED.
My
hesitation with this part of Bruster’s argument must be tentative, since so far
I know only what I read in the papers.
But I would note that Hieronimo is already thirteen lines into a speech at this point. Furthermore one doesn’t normally
indicate the speaker in the middle of
a line.
How
goes King my good lady?
O!
My dear Queen husband! Passing fair, withal.
Further furthermore if you remove the “I, or” you are left
with a seriously infirm seven-syllable line ending with a formal conjunctive
adverb.
a young Bacon
Ashley
Thorndyke, editor of the two volumes of The
Minor Elizabethan Drama in the Everyman’s Library, accepts the common
emendation of reading “Ay, or…” at the end of line 14, thus beginning a new,
coherent, and plausible sentence.
The anonymous Bryn Mawr undergraduate of the 1920s (the original owner
of my set) wrote thus, in ink, at the top of the Dramatis Personae page of the
Kyd drama: “Italicized portions written by Ben Jonson.” She undoubtedly knew that the Latin
word for sun is sol—so that the name
of the archvillain in the play within the play (Soliman) might mean sonne-manne. She had looked carefully at the
italicized speeches, especially, perhaps, the following lines:
What is there yet in a sonne?
…
Why not a man loue a Calfe as well?
Or melt in passion ore a frisking Kid,
As for a Sonne?
Methinks a young Bacon…
a frisking Kyd
Oh, rare Ben Jonson!
Well done.
in the poet's corner, Westminster Abbey
