Thank you David, for your interesting and informative essay. But I take issue with Mary being Harvey's gentlewoman. Here are three points.
1/ "No other suitable candidate has ever been proposed." In my book, 'Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare's Co-Author' (Routledge, 2022), I presented evidence for Lanyer being this gentlewoman.
2/ Harvey "describes her in terms that can only refer to the Countess of Pembroke". But Harvey said that "she was neither the noblest, nor the fairest, nor the finest, nor the richest lady, but the gentlest, the wittiest and bravest and invinciblest gentlewoman that I know". Mary Sidney was very fair, noble and rich, compared to commoner, Aemilia Lanyer.
3/ Nashe's "Have With You To Safftron Walden" levels misogynistic abuse at Harvey's gentlewoman. If she were Mary Sidney, Nashe would have been pilloried, if not hung, drawn and quartered.
ANOTHER MATTER You mentioned Marprelate's threatened 'Reckoning". This was commonly associated with reference to Zechariah 11:17. Consider this perhaps being Marlowe's 'Reckoning" with a knife in the right eye. And in addition to the 3 sonnets by Harvey's gentlewoman, she may have written the sonnet, "An Apostrophe to the Health of his Abused Friends" as Marlowe's eulogy. Kind regards, Mark Bradbeer
Thanks for reading my work and for your comments. A couple thoughts in response.
1. There is no doubt that Aemilia was part of the circle of women attached to Mary Sidney, and her connection to Hunsdon is even better documented. However I do not find that argument that she "was Shakespeare" very persuasive. Her known writing does not look much like Shakespeare's, it is not at all obvious why her identity would have been closely held and the many references to Shakespeare that seem to identify the writer with Sidney do not really offer much to tie them to Lanyer.
2. The one excepted by Nashe is universally accepted to be the Queen. It was a matter of protocol to acknowledge the Queen paramount in all virtues, and this would be utterly conventional in this respect if praise of Mary Sidney. Taken as a whole the references to the Gentlewoman are difficult to interpret elsewise - that is the overwhelming conclusion of the academics who have considered the question, while a few support the notion that this is wishful thinking on behalf of Harvey and that the intended confusion creates an unsupported identification few argue that the reader is not intended to identify the Gentlewoman with Sidney. It seems very unlikely that Harvey would refer to Lanyer as his patroness or that she would have fulfilled that role.
3. The point of using a pseudonym (Shakespeare or Gentlewoman patroness) in this context is that it allows an aristocrat to get into the mud with Nashe. He can hardly be charged with attacking a Countess who uses a false name to engage with him. Nonetheless, the Bishops' ban does seem to specifically target works Harvey. Nashe, the Labeo satires of Hall and Marston that treat the identity of Shakespeare so a certain amount of pilloring did ensue.
About Marlowe and the Reckoning, Peter Bull noted the parallel with Hiram Abiff in the origin myths of Freemasonry. I do not have a settled read (to my satisfaction) of the gentlewoman sonnets, although I have no reservations asserting that they generally serve to castigate Nashe (and by association Florio and Greville) for the presumption in publishing Philip's works and usurping his name for their literary and political ends. An Apostrophe engages with Ovid's Amores 3.14, but I cannot offer a definitive reading.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Being a new visitor to your website, I am unaware of the “many references to Shakespeare that seem to identify the writer with Sidney”. Can you give me some examples?
You say that “I do not find that argument that she "was Shakespeare" very persuasive.” Judging from the responses to Elizabeth Winkler’s Atlantic essay “Was Shakespeare a Woman ?”, this is a common reaction to any female candidate before seeing the evidence.
I do not contend that Lanyer was the only Shakespeare, but that she was an unacknowledged co-author with “Shakespeare”, just as were Marlowe (e.g. 1Henry VI) and Fletcher (e.g. Henry VIII).
Obviously in Elizabethan times, a commoner woman had to hide her identity, but in 1611, Lanyer was gutsy enough to be the first Englishwoman to publish a book of her own poetry under her own name. Her poetry defended women, and Eve in particular, against misogynists. The prime misogynist was Thomas Nashe, who propagated misogyny in his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589) and Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem (1593).
In his New Praise for the Old Ass (1593), Harvey called his gentlewoman “my patroness, or rather my championess”, as she gave him more than encouragement, advice and sonnets. ‘Her Old Comedy’ sonnet by this gentlewoman, promised to immortalise the ass, Nashe. Also in Harvey’s book, a mystery male sonneteer wrote ‘His Sonet, that will justify his Word, and dedicateth Nashe’s S. Fame to Immortality’, promising to collaborate with her.
Nashe’s immortality was perpetrated on stage as well as page. Locrine (1594), was published, ‘newly set forth, overseen and corrected by W.S.' (Note that W.S. was overseeing another playwright.) The play’s clown is the pseudo-poet, Strumbo, whose poetry ‘goeth arsward’. He calls himself an ‘Ass-Tom’, and he cites Lactantius. Tom Nashe cites Lactantius in his Pierce Penniless (1592).
Other satirical caricatures of Nashe followed, - like Moth (Love’s Labour’s Lost), Launce (Two Gentlemen of Verona), Dromio E. (Comedy of Errors), Jaques (As You Like It), Dogberry (Much Ado) and Bottom (Midsummer Night’s Dream).
In The Unfortunate Traveller (1954), Nashe spoke of a delicate wench named Aemilia who had “devised the means to make me immortal”. I suggest that Shakespeare’s Early Comedies were collaborations between Aemilia Lanyer and “W.S.”
In her poetry, Lanyer paid homage to Mary Sidney, and in chapters 4 & 5 of my book, Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author (2022), I provide evidence that Lanyer cowrote Pericles as a homage to Mary’s brother, Philip.
The feminist poet, Aemilia Lanyer, is worthy of serious consideration.
I think we may have an opportunity to explore collaboration as your book illuminates some connections I have been exploring or intending to explore. The posts on this site consider the evidence linking Mary Sidney to the writing and reception of the Shakespeare Canon. Last November I covered the evidence from Ben Jonson and the First Folio which appears to identify Mary with Shakespeare in "12 days of Shakespeare." More recently I reviewed the political and literary context which informs Venus and Adonis. Succinctly, Mary was the patron of the company formed as Pembroke;s Men around Richard Burbage in May of 1591. According to Lucas Erne's interpretation of Kyd's letter to John Puckering, Thomas Kyd had been in her employ for some six years, and Marlowe for 18 months when authorities arrested and tortured Kyd in association with the Dutch Libel. As Shakespeare's first works were performed by the company during this period it is reasonable to infer that "he" too was in her employ. Within a few months of the arrest of Kyd and the extrajudicial execution of Marlowe, the Pembrokes severed all direct ties with the Theater and dramatic writers.
During this period Mary was engaged in a legal and literary battle over control of her brother Philip's works with members of Philip's circle who had aligned with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. John Florio and Fulke Greville edited and published an edition of Philip's New Arcadia in 1590. In 1592 (according to recent work by Mark Bland) Florio was responsible for publication of Astrophel and Stella with a dedication by Nashe to the Mary. This edition including poems from Samuel Daniel's Delia which he had contracted to another printer. Daniel was in Europe when the volume came out, when he returned he entered the employ of Mary Sidney and asserted his authorship rights through the stationer's guild which resulted in "calling in" unsold copies and an agreement to release them only after Daniel's poems and Nashe's dedication were removed. In 1593 Mary released her own edition of Arcadia, removing Greville's commentary and abusing his editor Florio for defacing the work (Mary used the same publisher, Ponsonby, and thereby gained control over the publication rights). Venus and Adonis constitutes an a memorial to Philip and a literary claim to his mantel by exemplifying the principles declared in his Defense and in his fictional writing. The dedication to Wriothesley is not an actual appeal for patronage - he serves as "Pasquino" for posting the works in the squabble/
Nashe's participation in the expropriation of her brother's work draws Mary into the Nashe/Harvey conflict and initiates a decade long conflict with Nashe, hence his Unfortunate Traveler is Jack Wilton.
Susan Bertie was a member of Mary Sidney's Wilton circle. Her brother Peregrin fought with Philip at Zutphen (Philip reportedly saved his life before suffering his mortal gunshot). Aemilia would have been connected with Mary from childhood.
Pericles has represented a problem for me, as not only is Pericles clearly recalling Philip, but Mariana (another changed name) is pretty clearly meant to represent Mary. It is not characteristic for her to self aggrandize herself as the alchemical child, so I have hypothesized that the play was written to honor Philip and Mary in Shakespeare's style by someone else in her circle, my thoughts ran to Jonson and Mary Wroth, but Lanyer makes a lot of sense. The play was almost certainly written for the Garter celebration of 1608 when Philip Herbert was inducted into the order and the recently deceased Edward Dyer was replaced as Chancellor by a Herbert cousin, hence the elaborate alchemical allegory and evolution of language and style celebrating the Sidney's contributions to English letters. The incest riddle is connected to the Queen Elizabeth's translation of Mirror of the Sinful Soul from Margarite de Navarre and so further celebrates woman writers.
I have mostly assumed that Emilia references were motivated by her presence in the Sidney circle and connection to Hunsdon, but based on your book I am reconsidering whether she had a more substantial role as a writer.
It is just possible to rationalize the Stratford Shakspere as author by connecting him to Mary Sidney, who certainly provided the missing access to works including unpublished manuscripts and could have provided education and language skills that seem to defy the traditional biography. Since many of the Sidney records were lost in a series of fires there is additional room for undocumented biography. It is possible to account for Covell, Jonson, Nashe and others apparent efforts to identify Mary with Shakespeare because of her role as patron. I believe it is much more likely that she was the author, and he happened to share a similar name. I suppose that Aemilia could have contributed to or even been the primary author of the canon under the same guise (there is considerably more evidence for her than Stratford). I really like the idea that Aemila provides the link to Wilkins and that she used that psuedonym just as Mary used Shakespeare.
I’ve started reading through your other interesting online essays, but I have yet to read the majority of them. We have points of commonality, and I would be delighted to collaborate and swap ideas.
Although we have different interpretations of Pericles, Alan Young’s “A Note on the Tournament Impresas in Pericles” (Shakespeare Quarterly 36, (1985), 453-6) is compelling evidence for Philip Sidney being a model for the character of Pericles. It is difficult to conceive of our man from Stratford knowing that the “withered branch that’s only green on top”, was Sidney’s impresa. As Young says:
“How Shakespeare may have known of Sidney's impresa is impossible to say, since its most likely date of composition is November 1577, following Sidney's recent service with his father in Ireland and an important European mission for Elizabeth. The identification of Sidney's tournament impresa as Shakespeare's source for that of Pericles must thus remain tentative.”
And of course, Sidney’s Pyrocles is the inspiration for Pericles.
Your reading of the character of Henry Carey will make your understanding of Lanyer very poignant. Unlike most writers, I believe he was not an altogether virtuous master of his mistress, Lanyer. I think he was abusive as well as indulgent of her.
Thank you David, for your interesting and informative essay. But I take issue with Mary being Harvey's gentlewoman. Here are three points.
1/ "No other suitable candidate has ever been proposed." In my book, 'Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare's Co-Author' (Routledge, 2022), I presented evidence for Lanyer being this gentlewoman.
2/ Harvey "describes her in terms that can only refer to the Countess of Pembroke". But Harvey said that "she was neither the noblest, nor the fairest, nor the finest, nor the richest lady, but the gentlest, the wittiest and bravest and invinciblest gentlewoman that I know". Mary Sidney was very fair, noble and rich, compared to commoner, Aemilia Lanyer.
3/ Nashe's "Have With You To Safftron Walden" levels misogynistic abuse at Harvey's gentlewoman. If she were Mary Sidney, Nashe would have been pilloried, if not hung, drawn and quartered.
ANOTHER MATTER You mentioned Marprelate's threatened 'Reckoning". This was commonly associated with reference to Zechariah 11:17. Consider this perhaps being Marlowe's 'Reckoning" with a knife in the right eye. And in addition to the 3 sonnets by Harvey's gentlewoman, she may have written the sonnet, "An Apostrophe to the Health of his Abused Friends" as Marlowe's eulogy. Kind regards, Mark Bradbeer
Thanks for reading my work and for your comments. A couple thoughts in response.
1. There is no doubt that Aemilia was part of the circle of women attached to Mary Sidney, and her connection to Hunsdon is even better documented. However I do not find that argument that she "was Shakespeare" very persuasive. Her known writing does not look much like Shakespeare's, it is not at all obvious why her identity would have been closely held and the many references to Shakespeare that seem to identify the writer with Sidney do not really offer much to tie them to Lanyer.
2. The one excepted by Nashe is universally accepted to be the Queen. It was a matter of protocol to acknowledge the Queen paramount in all virtues, and this would be utterly conventional in this respect if praise of Mary Sidney. Taken as a whole the references to the Gentlewoman are difficult to interpret elsewise - that is the overwhelming conclusion of the academics who have considered the question, while a few support the notion that this is wishful thinking on behalf of Harvey and that the intended confusion creates an unsupported identification few argue that the reader is not intended to identify the Gentlewoman with Sidney. It seems very unlikely that Harvey would refer to Lanyer as his patroness or that she would have fulfilled that role.
3. The point of using a pseudonym (Shakespeare or Gentlewoman patroness) in this context is that it allows an aristocrat to get into the mud with Nashe. He can hardly be charged with attacking a Countess who uses a false name to engage with him. Nonetheless, the Bishops' ban does seem to specifically target works Harvey. Nashe, the Labeo satires of Hall and Marston that treat the identity of Shakespeare so a certain amount of pilloring did ensue.
About Marlowe and the Reckoning, Peter Bull noted the parallel with Hiram Abiff in the origin myths of Freemasonry. I do not have a settled read (to my satisfaction) of the gentlewoman sonnets, although I have no reservations asserting that they generally serve to castigate Nashe (and by association Florio and Greville) for the presumption in publishing Philip's works and usurping his name for their literary and political ends. An Apostrophe engages with Ovid's Amores 3.14, but I cannot offer a definitive reading.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Being a new visitor to your website, I am unaware of the “many references to Shakespeare that seem to identify the writer with Sidney”. Can you give me some examples?
You say that “I do not find that argument that she "was Shakespeare" very persuasive.” Judging from the responses to Elizabeth Winkler’s Atlantic essay “Was Shakespeare a Woman ?”, this is a common reaction to any female candidate before seeing the evidence.
I do not contend that Lanyer was the only Shakespeare, but that she was an unacknowledged co-author with “Shakespeare”, just as were Marlowe (e.g. 1Henry VI) and Fletcher (e.g. Henry VIII).
Obviously in Elizabethan times, a commoner woman had to hide her identity, but in 1611, Lanyer was gutsy enough to be the first Englishwoman to publish a book of her own poetry under her own name. Her poetry defended women, and Eve in particular, against misogynists. The prime misogynist was Thomas Nashe, who propagated misogyny in his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589) and Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem (1593).
In his New Praise for the Old Ass (1593), Harvey called his gentlewoman “my patroness, or rather my championess”, as she gave him more than encouragement, advice and sonnets. ‘Her Old Comedy’ sonnet by this gentlewoman, promised to immortalise the ass, Nashe. Also in Harvey’s book, a mystery male sonneteer wrote ‘His Sonet, that will justify his Word, and dedicateth Nashe’s S. Fame to Immortality’, promising to collaborate with her.
Nashe’s immortality was perpetrated on stage as well as page. Locrine (1594), was published, ‘newly set forth, overseen and corrected by W.S.' (Note that W.S. was overseeing another playwright.) The play’s clown is the pseudo-poet, Strumbo, whose poetry ‘goeth arsward’. He calls himself an ‘Ass-Tom’, and he cites Lactantius. Tom Nashe cites Lactantius in his Pierce Penniless (1592).
Other satirical caricatures of Nashe followed, - like Moth (Love’s Labour’s Lost), Launce (Two Gentlemen of Verona), Dromio E. (Comedy of Errors), Jaques (As You Like It), Dogberry (Much Ado) and Bottom (Midsummer Night’s Dream).
In The Unfortunate Traveller (1954), Nashe spoke of a delicate wench named Aemilia who had “devised the means to make me immortal”. I suggest that Shakespeare’s Early Comedies were collaborations between Aemilia Lanyer and “W.S.”
In her poetry, Lanyer paid homage to Mary Sidney, and in chapters 4 & 5 of my book, Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author (2022), I provide evidence that Lanyer cowrote Pericles as a homage to Mary’s brother, Philip.
The feminist poet, Aemilia Lanyer, is worthy of serious consideration.
I think we may have an opportunity to explore collaboration as your book illuminates some connections I have been exploring or intending to explore. The posts on this site consider the evidence linking Mary Sidney to the writing and reception of the Shakespeare Canon. Last November I covered the evidence from Ben Jonson and the First Folio which appears to identify Mary with Shakespeare in "12 days of Shakespeare." More recently I reviewed the political and literary context which informs Venus and Adonis. Succinctly, Mary was the patron of the company formed as Pembroke;s Men around Richard Burbage in May of 1591. According to Lucas Erne's interpretation of Kyd's letter to John Puckering, Thomas Kyd had been in her employ for some six years, and Marlowe for 18 months when authorities arrested and tortured Kyd in association with the Dutch Libel. As Shakespeare's first works were performed by the company during this period it is reasonable to infer that "he" too was in her employ. Within a few months of the arrest of Kyd and the extrajudicial execution of Marlowe, the Pembrokes severed all direct ties with the Theater and dramatic writers.
During this period Mary was engaged in a legal and literary battle over control of her brother Philip's works with members of Philip's circle who had aligned with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. John Florio and Fulke Greville edited and published an edition of Philip's New Arcadia in 1590. In 1592 (according to recent work by Mark Bland) Florio was responsible for publication of Astrophel and Stella with a dedication by Nashe to the Mary. This edition including poems from Samuel Daniel's Delia which he had contracted to another printer. Daniel was in Europe when the volume came out, when he returned he entered the employ of Mary Sidney and asserted his authorship rights through the stationer's guild which resulted in "calling in" unsold copies and an agreement to release them only after Daniel's poems and Nashe's dedication were removed. In 1593 Mary released her own edition of Arcadia, removing Greville's commentary and abusing his editor Florio for defacing the work (Mary used the same publisher, Ponsonby, and thereby gained control over the publication rights). Venus and Adonis constitutes an a memorial to Philip and a literary claim to his mantel by exemplifying the principles declared in his Defense and in his fictional writing. The dedication to Wriothesley is not an actual appeal for patronage - he serves as "Pasquino" for posting the works in the squabble/
Nashe's participation in the expropriation of her brother's work draws Mary into the Nashe/Harvey conflict and initiates a decade long conflict with Nashe, hence his Unfortunate Traveler is Jack Wilton.
Susan Bertie was a member of Mary Sidney's Wilton circle. Her brother Peregrin fought with Philip at Zutphen (Philip reportedly saved his life before suffering his mortal gunshot). Aemilia would have been connected with Mary from childhood.
Pericles has represented a problem for me, as not only is Pericles clearly recalling Philip, but Mariana (another changed name) is pretty clearly meant to represent Mary. It is not characteristic for her to self aggrandize herself as the alchemical child, so I have hypothesized that the play was written to honor Philip and Mary in Shakespeare's style by someone else in her circle, my thoughts ran to Jonson and Mary Wroth, but Lanyer makes a lot of sense. The play was almost certainly written for the Garter celebration of 1608 when Philip Herbert was inducted into the order and the recently deceased Edward Dyer was replaced as Chancellor by a Herbert cousin, hence the elaborate alchemical allegory and evolution of language and style celebrating the Sidney's contributions to English letters. The incest riddle is connected to the Queen Elizabeth's translation of Mirror of the Sinful Soul from Margarite de Navarre and so further celebrates woman writers.
I have mostly assumed that Emilia references were motivated by her presence in the Sidney circle and connection to Hunsdon, but based on your book I am reconsidering whether she had a more substantial role as a writer.
It is just possible to rationalize the Stratford Shakspere as author by connecting him to Mary Sidney, who certainly provided the missing access to works including unpublished manuscripts and could have provided education and language skills that seem to defy the traditional biography. Since many of the Sidney records were lost in a series of fires there is additional room for undocumented biography. It is possible to account for Covell, Jonson, Nashe and others apparent efforts to identify Mary with Shakespeare because of her role as patron. I believe it is much more likely that she was the author, and he happened to share a similar name. I suppose that Aemilia could have contributed to or even been the primary author of the canon under the same guise (there is considerably more evidence for her than Stratford). I really like the idea that Aemila provides the link to Wilkins and that she used that psuedonym just as Mary used Shakespeare.
Dear David,
I’ve started reading through your other interesting online essays, but I have yet to read the majority of them. We have points of commonality, and I would be delighted to collaborate and swap ideas.
Although we have different interpretations of Pericles, Alan Young’s “A Note on the Tournament Impresas in Pericles” (Shakespeare Quarterly 36, (1985), 453-6) is compelling evidence for Philip Sidney being a model for the character of Pericles. It is difficult to conceive of our man from Stratford knowing that the “withered branch that’s only green on top”, was Sidney’s impresa. As Young says:
“How Shakespeare may have known of Sidney's impresa is impossible to say, since its most likely date of composition is November 1577, following Sidney's recent service with his father in Ireland and an important European mission for Elizabeth. The identification of Sidney's tournament impresa as Shakespeare's source for that of Pericles must thus remain tentative.”
And of course, Sidney’s Pyrocles is the inspiration for Pericles.
Your reading of the character of Henry Carey will make your understanding of Lanyer very poignant. Unlike most writers, I believe he was not an altogether virtuous master of his mistress, Lanyer. I think he was abusive as well as indulgent of her.