Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] Boyd on Nabokov on Shakespeare of Stratford
From:
piano forte <pianissimo.nyc@gmail.com>
Date:
Fri, 6 Jul 2012 19:03:53 -0400
To:
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>

Dear Brian Boyd,

I agree with you that historically, and taken as a whole, anti-Stratfordians have often been "ridiculous" and refused "to engage seriously with even evident counter-evidence." However, I believe the Oxfordians' intellectual rigor--and the overwhelming if circumstantial evidence they've turned up--sets them apart. For this reason I suspect Nabokov may have been attracted to the Oxfordian cause, while rightfully scorning Baconian acrostic-hunting and the like.

(If the words "Oxfordian rigor" made you laugh, see this internal document: http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=81)

Most people who dismiss the Oxford theory seem not to have investigated it fully--by reading, say, Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare by Another Name" or Charlton Ogburn, Jr.'s "The Mysterious William Shakespeare." This is understandable, because no one can read everything, and  Stratfordian books vastly outnumber Oxfordian ones. (I was lucky enough to stumble on a copy of Ogburn's book before my views were fixed.) But it also gives rise to gross--if innocent--errors and misrepresentations.

You cite as "evident counter-evidence" to the Oxford theory that "Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, died in 1604, nine years before Shakespeare’s last work, and before the wreck of the Sea-Adventurer in 1609 and the 1610 account of it that Shakespeare drew on for The Tempest..."

This is a reference to the 1609 wreck of the Sea-Venture, and in particular William Strachey's True Reportory [sic] of the Wrack, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, not published until 1625 but dated July 15, 1610 and circulated at that time. Shakespeare's alleged indebtedness to accounts of the wreck is detailed in "Dating the Tempest" by the Stratfordian scholar Dave Kathman  [http://shakespeareauthorship.com/tempest.html]

If "Dating the Tempest" were the final word on the matter, you would be right to doubt de Vere's authorship of the Shakespeare canon, since the pre- and post-1604 plays are obviously by the same hand. The Tempest/1604 death conflict was a final stumbling block for me, though the other evidence for Oxford was so convincing that I assumed the dating issue would be resolved with time.

And in 2005 it was resolved, when Lynne Kositsky and Roger Stritmatter demolished the theory that Shakespeare was indebted to Strachey's
True Reportory, or to any account of the Sea-Venture's wreck. They proved that more striking parallels with The Tempest's shipwreck existed in Eden's 1555 The Decades of the New Worlde Or West India, augmented by Willes in 1577, Erasmus' 1523 "Naufragium”/”The Shipwreck,” and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516; revised 1521 and 1532). For Kositsky and Stritmatter's stunning discovery, see http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/tempest/kositsky-stritmatter%20Tempest%20Table.htm

As for the assertion that 1604 was "
nine years before Shakespeare’s last work," this too is supposition. The evidence that any play was composed after 1604 is shaky at best, the orthodox chronology being retrofitted to the Stratford man's lifespan. As argued at http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/chronogate.htm and more fully at the "Oxfordian rigor" link above:

"One rational objection against the de Vere theory is that he died in 1604, before several Shakespearean plays were allegedly written. Conventionally Lear (1605), Macbeth (1605), Timon (1605), Pericles (1607), Antony and Cleopatra (1607), Coriolanus (1608), Cymbeline (1609), Winter's Tale (1610), The Tempest (1611) and Henry VIII (1613) are dated after his death. When orthodox scholars are being honest, however, they admit that these dates are the insecure result of inferences which may be far less than conclusive. Often, in fact, orthodox chronological reasoning is circular. The great E.K. Chambers, to whom most subsequent scholarship on the chronology is greatly indebted, concedes the significant element of doubt in his chapter on chronology:

'I have attempted to bring together the results of chapter ix and fit them into the facts of Shakespeare's dramatic career as given in chapter iii. There is much of conjecture, even as regards the order [of composition], and still more as regards the ascriptions to particular years. These are partly arranged to provide a fairly even flow of production when the plague and other inhibitions did not prevent it" (Chambers 1930 I: 269).'"

As for the contention that "Shakespeare is the second-best documented playwright of his era (after only Ben Jonson)", Samuel Schoenbaum himself, at the conclusion to Shakespeare's Lives (p. 767), laments: "Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record. What would we not give for a single personal letter, one page of diary!" And as for VN's praise of Schoenbaum's work, it needn't necessarily be taken as agreement with Schoenbaum's Stratfordianism, since Shakespeare's Lives is more a "biography of Shakespeare's biographers" than a life of the poet himself. Nabokov may simply have found Schoenbaum's frank acknowledgment of his ignorance a welcome relief from bios like Frayne Williams’ Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, of which VN (in a review for the New Republic) wrote: “The biographical part of this book will not disappoint the imaginary not-too-bright giant for whom blurbs are fattened and human interest lavishly spread.” It seems VN had zero tolerance for those who would fantasize about what Mike Marcus calls "the infinitely elastic" lost years of the man from Stratford.

Note, by the way, how Schoenbaum's lament echoes the following lines from VN's 1924 cri de coeur: "Reveal yourself – whose memoirs/refer to you in passing? Look what numbers/of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace,/what countless names Brantome has for the asking!/
Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,/ you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!" Stephen Blackwell's judgment that "It...seems plausible that Nabokov's poem was deliberately adopting a temporary perspective--has a fictitious lyrical I...rather than a 'sincere' or autobiographical voice" is contradicted by the poem's heartfelt tone. This is is no fictional "I" but Nabokov himself. I agree with Mike Marcus that Blackwell's interpretation "seems grossly implausible." Likewise, while I agree with you that many poems "play with possibilities, they do not vouch for verities," I don't believe VN's "Shakespeare" is one of these, or that he merely "entertained an anti-Stratfordian position" for the sake of literary exercise.

I genuinely don't want to ignite an authorship debate, since my aim is only to discover Nabokov's beliefs on the matter, especially at the end of his life. But I fear those beliefs may never be fully known as long as scholars are unacquainted with the Oxford theory's merits. Worse, VN's views may be dismissed as youthful indiscretions, followed by a charitable sigh that even Nabokov nods. On the contrary, I believe he was correct in his doubts, and possibly in his final conclusions, as he was correct about so many things. A summary of what I suspect he'd believe were he alive today can be found here: http://www.authorshipstudies.org/articles/oxford_shakespeare.cfm

As for Elliott and Valenza's linguistic study of Shakespeare's and de Vere's writings, I only ask that you read, without the benefit of statistical analysis, the 21-year-old de Vere's introduction to Clerke's 1571 translation of Castiglione's The Courtier. Can this possibly be the man Harold Bloom claims "couldn't write his way out of a paper bag"? http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/vere106.htm

Cheers,

Brian Tombe
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