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Women are but Mens Shadows: Twelve Days of Shakespeare Part 12 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-05  

On this day, December 5, precisely 400 years ago, a 25-year-old antiquarian and book collector named Edward Dering recorded the first purchase of Shakespeare’s First Folio collection of plays. He bought two copies. As the title page does not indicate a precise date of publication Dering’s purchase and the Stationer’s Guild registration on November 8th are all we have to mark the release of what has subsequently become the most valuable and arguably most important book in the English language.

I have been working the last few years on a book about Shakespeare and the folio with a particular focus on Ben Jonson and the other figures who played a role with Shakespeare in the writing and eventual publication of the works. In honor of the 400th anniversary I have posted excerpts each day through December 5th (Twelve days of Shakespeare) to share what I have learned. It is a fascinating and largely unknown story, full of the literary and political figures whose lives shaped a critical moment in which our modern world began to take shape. Somewhat surprisingly over and over the figure at the center of that story is a woman most people have never heard of, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke.

This material can also be found on my website:

www.MarywasShakespeare.com

In previous posts I introduced Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson who, as Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Wells says, “is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare.” I summarized the events leading up to the publication of the folio and the precarious political and personal situation of William Herbert, the Lord Chamberlain who licensed the volume, sponsored the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company, and was primary patron for the publishers, printers and writers who produced the folio. He was also likely the W.H. who was ‘onlie begetter’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1609. I offered a close reading of the preface materials of the First Folio, mostly accepted as the work of Jonson. Following standard practices of literary interpretation, I argued that the most satisfactory reading of the materials and their apparent literary antecedents is that Jonson intends the reader to identify the author with Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and to see the work of Shakespeare as the fulfillment of her brother Philip’s vision for an English vernacular literature that would delight and instruct readers and audiences by creating fictive worlds that engage them with deep questions about politics, morality, gender and race.

Yesterday I reviewed the evidence which directly links the Countess to the works and the playing company that performed them. I conclude today by reviewing the post publication history of Shakespeare and Sidney biography in an attempt to explain how Mary came to be forgotten and dismissed despite Jonson’s determination to preserve her memory and her works.

Twelve Days of Shakespeare:

That Women Are But Men's Shadows

“Mary Sidney certainly makes an appealing candidate. All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.”

Bill Bryson (Shakespeare: The World as a Stage)

The irony of Bryson’s statement is that despite her many connections to Shakespeare, it has historically been Mary Sidney’s perceived unsuitability as a writer that prevented anyone from considering the overwhelming evidence connecting her with the author. The academic perception of Mary Sidney can be divided into three phases, each originating in a particularly shoddy and subsequently discredited bit of scholarship not surprisingly informed with a deep vein of misogyny reflecting ill-founded assumptions about her relationship with purportedly more important male writers, initially her brother Philip and later the author Shakespeare.

As we have seen with Shakespeare, seventeenth century readers did not display much interest in the biographical details of early modern writers. Mary Sidney did not even warrant consideration as a writer. Her most enduring literary contribution, her completion of the Psalm translation started with her brother, circulated only in manuscript. It was not published until 1823 and then only in 250 copies. Her metrical translations of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine and Petrarch’s Triumph of Death were influential in the developing literary world of Elizabethan England but of limited, mostly historical interest thereafter. Literary interest in Mary Sidney largely ended with her death in 1621 and was not revived until the twentieth century. Characteristically, it was the discovery of a lost earlier edition of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia that made the Countess suddenly relevant to the nascent literary academy. Properly titled The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sidney’s sprawling romance started in 1580 as entertainment for his sister while he was exiled from court and she was pregnant with her first child. Philip would bring pages each day to read to Mary and her ladies during her lying in, the period of confinement prescribed noble women as the birth of a child approached. These circulated as a manuscript which has come to be known as the “Old Arcadia.” In the years that followed, Philip decided to correct some errors of composition that rendered the work imperfect in light of the critical theory he developed in his Defense of Poesy, also written during this time. By his death in 1586 he had completed revision of the first two chapters and left notes for the remainder, but the work remained unfinished. In 1589 Philip’s friend Fulke Greville arranged for publication of the partially revised manuscript then in his possession, relying on his Italian secretary John Florio to edit the text and adding introductions to each section which aligned Philip’s work with the Tacitean views of Greville’s new patron, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. Essex was the stepson of Philip’s uncle and mentor, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by virtue of Leicester’s marriage to Lettice Knowles Devereaux dowager Countess of Essex. On Philip’s death Essex inherited his best sword and shortly after married his wife Frances nee Walsingham. After Leicester’s death in 1588 the anti-Spanish, protestant coalition he headed fractured as Essex tried to assume leadership but the earlier generation headed by Mary’s husband Henry Herbert broke ranks. The Earl of Pembroke viewed Essex as rash, impulsive and encouraged by a dangerous sense of entitlement which led him to imprudently antagonize the much more subtle Robert Cecil, heir and successor to the powerful Lord Treasurer. Eventually Pembroke would be proven correct as Essex was manipulated into disgrace and ultimately the rebellion which led to his execution for treason. In the meantime the political division became a literary battle as the two factions contested the political legacy of the apotheosized Philip Sidney.

Mary would not have others lay claim to the work her brother had done as he wrote in the dedication, “onely for you, only to you,” entrusting it to her, “if you keepe it to your selfe, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the ballance of good will, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchaunce made much of, though in it selfe it haue deformities.” In 1593 with the help of her secretary, Hugh Sanford, she produced her own revised edition, clearing away the editorial contributions of Greville and restoring the missing three chapters with material reworked from the Old Arcadia. The prefatory address which disparaged the previous work of Greville and Florio bore Sanford’s initials H.S. igniting a feud with Florio that echoed through the literature of the decade:

The disfigured face, gentle Reader, wherewith this worke not long since appeared to the common view, moved that noble Lady, to whose honor consecrated, whose protection it was committed, to take in hand the wiping away those spottes wherewith the beauties therof were unworthely blemished. But as of in repairing a ruinous house, the mending of some olde part occasioneth making of some new; so here her honourable labour begonne in correcting the faults, ended in supplying the defectes; by the view of what was ill done guide to the consideration of what was not done.1

Florio responded in his World of Words with a barrage of insults constructed on Sanford’s intials,

And might not a man that can do as much as you (that is, read) find as much matter out of H.S. as you did out of I. F.? As for example H. S. why may it not stand as well for Haeres Stultitiae, as for Homo Simplex? or for Hara Suillina, as for Hostis Studiosorum? or for Hircus Satiricus, as well as for any of them? And this in Latin, besides Hedera Seguace, Harpia Subata, Humore Superbo, Hipocrito Simulatore in Italian. And in English world without end. Huffe Snuffe, Horse Stealer, Hob Sowter, Hugh Sot, Humphrey Swineshead, Hodge Sowgelder.

Mary’s version of the Arcadia supplanted the earlier printing, something she assured by using the same printer, William Ponsonby. Subsequent editions driven by the popularity of Philip’s writing and his personal celebrity added his other works; his sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella, his critical theory Defense of Poesy and even miscellaneous poems were included in the 1613 edition that Mary kept for her own library and passed to her niece Mary Sidney Wroth. While Mary was forgotten, her brother became a cornerstone of the English literary canon, with only Chaucer and Spenser of similar importance among the writers that preceded Shakespeare.

First edition of Arcadia (Fulke Greville and John Florio eds.)

19th century bibliographers seized on the Sanford preface of the revised Arcadia as evidence that Mary had meddled with her brother’s text, inevitably to its detriment. The pervasiveness of this view can be inferred from an 1891 article dismissing the criticism via comparison of the Greville and Sidney texts, “The statements concerning the relationship of the quarto to the first and all other folio editions generally given by bibliographers and literary scholars are erroneous. There do not exist numberless variations between the two texts... Nobody seems ever to have compared the two texts, and the erroneous statement seems to be caused by the words in the preface in the folio edition 'To the Reader.'3” Mary’s reprieve was short lived. In 1907, Bertram Dobell discovered several complete manuscripts of the original “Old” Arcadia which revealed important changes from that text in the last three chapters as they had been known for centuries. A succession of comparisons all concluded, "As will be shown, Mary, so far from faithfully reprinting the original version with only such alterations as the revised books rendered necessary, subjected it to a good deal of bowdlerizing.” The term bowdlerize came from an early 19th century editor of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler, who censored any sexually suggestive material to make the bard appropriate for prudish Victorian sensibilities. This vision of pious, prudish Lady Pembroke was ironically reinforced by the recovery of at least some of her works. The Sidney Psalms which were not printed in any of the editions of Philip’s writing, at last saw a small print run of 250 copies in 1823. It was not known at the time which were written by Mary and which by Phillip but the age of bibliography had finally caught up with Mary, and eventually documents surfaced that revealed Philip had written only 43 at the time of his death. Shockingly for those scholars diligently working to cleanse her influence from the Arcadia, it was also apparent that Mary had completed the rest in a dazzling array of verse forms that somehow managed to be at once more vibrant, more poetic and more faithful to the original Hebrew (did Mary really read Hebrew?) than anything Philip, or indeed anyone else had done previously. In 1877 the editor of the first scholarly volume of Philip’s works lamented that he could not lay claim to Mary’s psalms. “Finally: it has hitherto been thought (e. g. Dr. Macdonald in Antiphon) that it was impossible to determine which Psalms belonged to Sidney and which to the Countess of Pembroke. But the evidence is multiplied that to Sidney belong only the first xliii., e. g. Lord Brooke's Letter given in our Essay (vol. i.) names 'about forty psalms ': Woodford, at end of Ps.xliii., notes from the autograph-corrected Sidney MS. 'Thus far Sir Philip Sidney': British Museum MS. 12,048 writes there, ' Hactenus Sir Philip Sidney '; and so elsewhere. I should gladly have welcomed more as Sir Philip's, for there can be no question that the Countess's portion is infinitely in advance of her brother's in thought, epithet, and melody. Her most remarkable poetry is found in these Psalms.” Groshart (1877) p79. Groshart did not include any of Mary’s psalms in his complete works of Philip Sidney. A complete edition of the Sidney Psalms would not be widely available until 1963.

Mary would not finally be cleared of the charge of expurgating her brother’s work until 1939, by which time decades of suffragettes, flappers and working women had made room for an image of women other than the devout Victorian bluestocking envisioned by 19th century Sidney scholars. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe summarized the case in three arguments. First, that while the final version of Arcadia did redeem some of the more controversial behaviour of the heroes in the manuscripts, the Old Arcadia was after all written solely to entertain Mary and her friends, by a brother who knew her well and was therefore unlikely to have offended them in any significant way. Second, Rowe’s review of contemporary literature and its critics revealed nothing to suggest the Old Arcadia, which had circulated widely in manuscript, was or would have been in anyway controversial, especially when compared to Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, full of sonnets pining for a woman married to another man. Finally, Rowe found evidence in the manuscripts that suggested the changes had been planned by Philip as a way to reconcile the narrative with points of his critical theory developed in Defense of Poesy.

Bluestockings and Rough Lads

Unfortunately, Mary had finally escaped the shadow of her brother, only to find the deeper shade of William Shakespeare himself, courtesy of a Yale graduate student, Alexander MacLaren Witherspoon. By the time Witherspoon reached Yale’s august English Department, the whisps of Authorship Controversy that had smoldered since the 1850s were threatening a conflagration that might burn the place down. Mary made a handy fire brake.

Long defined as a “natural” genius in contrast to the learned but labored Jonson, the identification of the author with William Shakspere of Stratford was under attack on the grounds that his humble origin, lack of university education and apparent preference for commercial over literary activities were not consistent with the evident knowledge and passion of the author. The Victorian adulation of Shakespeare was so extreme that George Bernard Shaw coined the term Bardolatry to describe the elevation of Shakespeare and his work to the level of the Holy Bible. In 1840 essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote, “That King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs, indestructible.” Where Romantic writers had happily celebrated the unschooled genius whose free flowing-pen effortlessly tapped the wellspring of the human experience, increasingly professional (mostly American) writers saw the craftsmanship and scholarship in the works and doubted writing had come any more easily to Shakespeare than it did to them. First Emerson, then Whitman, Hawthorne and many others expressed growing conviction that Shakspere of Stratford was a fiction, a brand icon that had long ago replaced the real author. They recognized in Shakespeare the same process that the Coca Cola company followed to turn a Turkish Christian martyr into the jolly red-suited Santa Clause. In 1908 Mark Twain wove his own experience as a writer and celebrity into the sparse record of Stratford’s Shakespeare to summarize these views in “Is Shakespeare Dead?”

If Stratford had not produced the writer, another source was needed. The same lack of evidence that ruled out Shakspere as a writer argued for a substitute who had ready access to the political, social and scholarly content that filled the plays, and who had little to gain and much to lose from public exposure. In short it suggested a courtier. An American woman, Delia Bacon, proposed Sir Francis Bacon, whom published volumes had already ensconced as the father of modern science and whose esoteric philosophy was found woven through the works. In Delia Bacon’s view Francis had organized a group of great minds to deliver his ideas to the masses through the medium of the theater, with Walter Raleigh doing most of the writing. Unfortunately, when she traveled to England to find the evidence she was sure would validate her theory, she found neither evidence nor the intellectual support she had had from the likes of Emerson in America. In the end, she was institutionalized at the behest of her family, portrayed as a deluded spinster tilting at windmills. A similar fate eventually claimed the movement she started; the esoteric writing that suggested Bacon as author included instructions for encrypting information in hidden codes that could be deciphered using numerology and codes. The search for a stash of documents shifted to sifting the printed texts for encoded signatures. Some found this unproductive and unconvincing, others found a wealth of unexpected revelations. One woman, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, found a whole new play hidden in type variations so subtle that only she could see them. American millionaire George Fabyan hired a pair of professional cryptologists, William and Elizabeth Friedman, to work with Gallup. The Friedmans, who would go on to found the NSA, subjected the lot to scientific scrutiny and declared it all hogwash.

By then a new contender had arisen. In 1920 J. Thomas Looney compiled a lengthy list of qualifications the author must surely possess and, after considering the candidates among Elizabethan worthies, declared that Shakespeare could be none other than Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. It would be Oxford, the Sidney family nemesis, who would be the primary alternate candidate from then on. Ironically, de Vere’s daughter Susan’s marriage to Philip Herbert after Oxford’s death would provide a critical link from the earl to the production of Shakespeare’s works. Worse, it was an early feminist academic who would somehow turn the emerging authorship controversy against Mary Sidney.

Alice Hanson Luce was a Boston schoolteacher, daughter of a Maine preacher, and graduate of Wellesley. In the 1890s she decided she wanted more from life than teaching in a high school for girls and set out to Europe to gain a PhD in literature. Befitting her feminist ambitions, she determined to produce a scholarly version of the 1595 edition of Mary Sidney’s Antonie, translated from Garnier’s French play Antoine. In 1897 Luce published her dissertation at the University of Heidelberg as The Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie.

Luce explains the attraction of Garnier to Mary is that he follows the precepts of her brother’s Defense of Poesy, “The sister of Sir Philip Sidney could hardly fail to be a lover of plays "full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile and full of a notable morality," as Philip says of Gorboduc. Unfortunately, Luce misses Philip’s point. He continues that while the play, “dooth most delightfully teach, and so obtaine the verie ende of Poesie. Yet in truth, it is verie defectious in the circumstaunces,” and therefore might not remaine as an exact modell of all Tragidies.” The problem according to Sidney is a failure of verisimilitude. Philip argues for observing the classical unities of action, time and place, not as ends in themselves, but rather that plays should have a coherent plot and consistent characters in a plausible setting in order to achieve something beyond spoof and spectacle. “For proofe whereof, let but moste of the Verses bee put in prose, and then aske the meaning, and it will be founde, that one Verse did but beget an other, without ordering at the first, what should bee at the last, which becomes a confused masse of words, with a tingling sound of ryme, barely accompanied with reasons.”

Luce’s misreading of Sidney aligned her with the broader intent of the nascent English academy, to isolate Shakespeare and his theater from aristocrats who were being offered as more likely candidates for authorship. She continues to paint with an even broader brush, “Her Antonie is the first of that series of pure Seneca plays which appeared in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, and which indicates the continuous revolt in higher literary circles against the overwhelming progress of the English romantic drama.”

For confirmation Luce turns to Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra written in the style of Garnier and dedicated to the Countess as a sequel to Antonie. “Like his patroness, Daniel was a decided opponent of the romantic drama, and in dedicating his play to Lady Pembroke, he complains of the "barbarism" of the public taste, and praises the protest against the ruling dramatic fashion which Sidney had made in his Apologie for Poetrie.”

Pallas defends the theater from Puritan barbarism (Hal Richardson artist)

Now when so many Pennes (like Speares) are charg’d, To chase away this tyrant of the North; Grosse Barbarisme, whose power grown far inlarg’d Was lately by thy valiant brothers worth First found, encountered, and provoked forth: Whose onset made the rest audacious. Whereby they likewise have so well discharg’d Upon that hideous Beast incroching thus.

Here we see the basis of the claim that Mary and her circle were opposing the “romantic theater” and can reveal its absurdity. It is clear that Daniel is referencing a passage in which Philip quotes Joseph Caesar Scaliger, “Qua authoritate barbari quidam atq; hispidi abuti velint ad poetas e rep. Exigendos.” (There are some barbarians who would exile poets from the republic on the authority of Plato). Sidney wrote the Defence of Poesy in response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, an attack on the public stage, and its players. Gosson dedicated the polemic to Philip expecting that the Protestant champion would be sympathetic to his cause. Instead, Philip wrote what would remain the most influential work of literary criticism for centuries, elevating Poesy (fiction) writing above all other literary endeavors. In an effort to recast the battle so as to divide Classical court writers like Sidney and Jonson from “popular” romantic writers (eg Shakespeare), Luce had turned the point of Sidney’s spear-like pen from the Puritan censors who would successfully ban theater in 1642 and toward the very works he was defending. Luce apparently was not aware that Mary Sidney Herbert sponsored the company of Richard Burbage which is believed to have first performed the works of Shakespeare as Pembroke’s Men. It is harder to justify her failure to recognize that Jonson was referencing the same metaphor in the folio eulogy, “Looke how the fathers face lives in his issue, even so, the race of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines in his well toned, and true-filed lines: in each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance, as brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.”

Alexander MacLaren Witherspoon

In the history of academia there may have never been another successful dissertation as terrible as the work Alexander MacLaren Witherspoon foisted upon the august Yale English department in 1924. The criteria for earning a PhD then, as now, was to establish the value of your contribution, the originality of your thought and the quality of your scholarship. Witherspoon opened his opus “The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama” by expressing his incredulity that Garnier had ever warranted a reputation as a dramatist. “Living now, after the wonders of Shakspere's dramas, we find an absurd exaggeration in these expressions of enthusiasm, and posterity has since condemned Garnier to two centuries of obscurity. In the eighteenth century, we read that "peu³ de personnes voudroient se donner la peine de le lire" and the criticism of our own age has censured him as wanting in the first essentials of a dramatist, though recognizing his great importance in the development of the modern drama. But the faults which modern criticism censures, the lack of action, the endless monologues, the long-winded messengers, all these formed his highest praise in the estimation of his contemporaries.”

The problem as Witherspoon saw it was Garnier’s adherence to classical precepts for drama gleaned from Aristotle and his Victorian prissiness which he contrasted with the masculine vigor of Shakespeare. “Garnier's tragedies will be found to tally with these instructions in every point. His eschewing of anything vulgar is one of his most characteristic traits. It is this custom, indeed, which accounts largely for the lack of vigor in his dramas. They are wanting in that element of 'roughage' which is as necessary for the well-being of a dramatic organism as for any other”.

The critical point was that enthusiasm for Garnier distinguished court writers from the main strain of English drama, which was written for the public stage. “The study of (Garnier’s) influence is valuable so far as English literature is concerned chiefly because it shows us what English drama might become had it not been for the influence of that profanum vulgus which Sidney so hated and from which his sister and her friends kept themselves so carefully aloof. In France where the playwrights belonged chiefly to the and court circles the stage for three centuries was limited and conditioned by the rules of classical drama. In England the great dramatists sprang from the common people and like the fabled Antæus drew their strength from their common mother, the Earth,”

Witherspoon summarizes his thesis with astonishing misogyny.

The passion of Lady Pembroke and her circle for elegance and correctness was thus thoroughly satisfied in Garnier's tragedies. The French poet, like a careful housewife, had refined away from the myths and the histories which he had used all their crudities and obscenities, and it would have been difficult for even the most meticulous person to be offended by anything in his plays. The authors of these plays were writing drama not for the drama's sake, but for the sake of certain theories and principles and opinions, or for the sake of certain private ends and aims. Lady Pembroke, from a pure sense of duty, coupled with affection for her late brother and his plans, was led to carry on the work which his untimely death had interrupted. With a somewhat Calvinistic feeling that she was predestined to set right the English tragedy that her brother had found so sorely out of joint, she went about the task with the executive ability of a good housewife. She gathered about her the friends of her brother, admitted promising young poets into the circle, chose the tragedies of Garnier as working models, and formally launched the campaign against the romantic tragedy by herself translating one of his tragedies. What intellect, determination, energy, and executive ability were needed, she supplied. It was not her fault, though her misfortune, that she could not give to the movement the one or two things needful—dramatic instinct and poetical ability.

The specific characteristics of Garnier’s writing which Witherspoon finds most objectionable will puzzle modern readers because they are precisely those elements for which Shakespeare is most famous, the coining of new words and the use of soliloquies to reveal the thoughts of characters.

Shakespeare is recognized for the tremendous number of unique words and for having contributed more new words to the English language than any other writer.

“The sturdy, familiar words of everyday life get short shrift with Garnier, as do also the sturdy, workaday people of the world about him. Garnier exhibits the conscious effort to enrich the language by the coinage of new words, and by the employment of Latinisms. Some of his coinages are words like enfruiter, horribler, exclaver, orager, bavoler, chetiver, redifier, escumasser, demaisonner, patronner, hosteler, testifier. His adjectives include such unusual forms as larval, verdureux, vinotier, tétrique, bustuaires, adextre, sepulturable, animeux, bluettant.”

Among the usages Witherspoon singles out are “literal translations of phrases from various Latin poets. The nuit brunette of Garnier corresponds to the nigra tenebræ of Statius,” Thank God ‘the dark of night’ never entered English usage. One more has potential implications for the Horacian anagrams identified by William Bellamy, “the French poet's cordage de l'amour is the vincula amoris of Ovid,” both of these translate as cords or knots of love, in latin nodus amoris, precisely the terms Jonson used for his anagrams.

If Garnier’s coining of new words seems an odd point of contrast with Shakespeare, Witherspoon’s argument that Shakespeare found no use for soliloquy is positively incomprehensible. “An English audience, or English readers, might therefore tolerate some of the externals of French drama, whether tragedy or comedy, but they could not away with the interminable soliloquies and monologues of the French school, however well-worded they might be, or however elegant the descriptive passages, or however elegiac and graceful the moralizing. Instead of words the English demanded action— action that should begin with the first scene, and continue with little abatement until the last act was concluded. The attenuation of any sentiment, however noble, into a long monologue, however elegant, they could not endure. The announcement of a death, which in French tragedy would have called forth pages of rhetorical declamation, evokes in an English tragedy the brief response, ' She should have died hereafter.'” Readers of Shakespeare might recall that response being somewhat less brief than Witherspoon would have it. The author, apparently indifferent to the demands of an English audience, lets Macbeth continue:

Wilton Statue in honor of Mary Sidney

There would have been a time for such a word, Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Ironically, the famous soliloquy Witherspoon chose to demonstrate Shakespeare’s distaste for soliloquy provides the verse for the statue of Shakespeare erected at Wilton in 1747 to “honour Mary Sidney” (according to a Wilton tour guide as reported by Elizabeth Winkler in Shakespeare was a Woman and other Heresies.)

Lorde, our fathers true relation often made, hath made us knowe

Mary Sidney PSALM 44 DEUS, AURIBUS

To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.

probably Bill Vaughan, often misattributed to Paul Ehrlich

In the 1990s a group of students at Claremont College used stylometric analysis to identify the author. When ten established metrics like feminine endings and open lines failed to distinguish Shakespeare, they constructed new measures based on the frequency of certain words chosen to best separate Shakespeare from other writers. By this measure, the most different were the devotional poems of John Donne and Mary Sidney.

Their advisors, Ward Elliot and Robert Vallenza, reported they had eliminated all alternate authorship candidates. “The most distant blocks are those of the Earl of Oxford, the most popular claimant today, and Mary Sidney Herbert, who also has a significant following.”

They explained their work: “No doubt some plays, by virtue of their subject matter would have, say, more lords and ladies than others frustrating the use of the ratio between lord or lady and all other words as an identifier. but it is hard to imagine subject-matter variation changing the ratio of lord to lords or of lady to ladies.”

The text sample for Mary Sidney was from her translation of the Psalms, beginning with Psalm 44: “Lorde, our fathers true relation often made, hath made us knowe…”

Vallenza and Elliot summarize their findings, “Shakespeare’s known writing is consistent enough, and different enough from that of his contemporaries, to distinguish him from everyone else we tested. If Shakespeare’s works were written by a committee, as some anti-Stratfordians claim, the committee was astonishingly regular and predictable in its range of stylistic habits. If they were written by any of the claimants we tested, or by the same person who wrote any of the apocryphal plays and poems we tested, that person was astonishingly irregular and unpredictable.” Unfortunately by choosing their test words to include the known works of Shakespeare and exclude other authors, they had ensured exactly this result.

In 2014 a new team of researchers also used word frequencies to reveal the relationships between Early Modern English Plays and Poems and their writers. Unlike Elliot and Vallenza, Arefin et al used the entire corpus of words, not just 52 cherry-picked to identify Shakespeare.

Arefin et al 2014 Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems are most similar to work of Mary and Philip Sidney, Samuel Daniel, and John Donne

Their unsupervised method did an excellent job of putting together the works known to be from the same author and identifying potential collaborations. In 2018 their analysis provided the basis of Oxford Shakespeare’s wholesale re-evaluation of Shakespeare attribution. It also identified the Donne’s poems and Mary Sidney’s Psalms as the works most closely related to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and narrative poems, placing Shakespeare at the center of the Sidney circle, surrounded by Philip’s sonnets, Samuel Daniel’s Delia, George Herbert’s Temple, and the works of Sidney secretary John Davies.

In his 1619 conversations with William Drummond told the story of an assignment he received from the Countess of Pembroke. Drummond records it, “Pembrok and his Lady discoursing, the Earl said, The woemen were mens shadowes, and she maintained them. Both appealing to Johnson, he affirmed it true; for which my Lady gave a pennance to prove it in verse, hence his epigrame.”

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