Signed, Sealed, and...almost....delivered.

Lynne and I are thrilled  to announce that our book, A Movable Feast: Sources, Chronology and Design of Shakespeare’s Tempest, has been accepted by McFarland publishers.

Although some of the book’s conclusions have previously appeared in our  peer-reviewed articles as reproduced on this site, the book also contains a wealth of new material supporting the theory of a play written at least by 1603 for Shrovetide performance.

Contrary to longstanding belief, the play’s New World imagery is derived not from William Strachey’s account of a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda, but from Richard Eden’s 1555 Decades of the New World. The book will include detailed point-by-point rebuttals to two newly published critiques of our work: one by  Alden Vaughan (2008) in Shakespeare Quarterly and  another by Tom Reedy (2010) in Review of English Studies, showing how their misplaced confidence in traditional authority has led to misinterpretations of the evidence of the date and influence of Strachey’s manuscript.

While many  books have been published in recent months advocating the “Oxfordian” theory of Shakespearean authorship, ours  will be the first to directly challenge the longstanding orthodox belief that Oxford could not have been the author because he died in 1604, before  the Tempest and several other plays were written. At least in the case of the Tempest, that argument is no longer credible.

The Tempest is among best loved plays of Shakespeare.  And, for several years, it is a play in which I and my collaborator Lynne Kositsky have developed a special  interest.

In all, we have now published five articles on various aspects of Tempest sources, chronology, and literary themes, as follows:

“O Brave New World: The Tempest and Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo.”  Critical Survey 21:2 (fall 2009), 7-42.

“Pale as Death: The Fictionalizing Influence of Erasmus’ ‘Naufragium’ on the Renaissance Travel Narrative.” Festschrift in Honor of Isabel Holden,  fall 2008, Concordia University, 141-151.

“The Spanish Maze and the Date of The Tempest.”  The Oxfordian, fall 2007, 1-11.

“Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited.”  The Review of English Studies, September, 2007 (published online June, 2007), 447-472.

“How Shakespeare Got His Tempest:  Another “Just So” Story,” Brief Chronicles I (2009), 205-266, print edition.

A Movable Feast: The Tempest as Shrovetide Revelry, The Shakespeare Yearbook (Volume XVII), 365404.

We have now compiled these  articles, which include a detailed reply to Professor Alden Vaughan, whose Fall 2008 Shakespeare Quarterly article responds (sort of) to our Fall 2007 Review of English Studies article, and some other materials,   into a book manuscript which is currently under review with a major academic publisher in the United States. On this  website, you can track the progress of this project. Once the book is published, this site will publish regular updates, including reviews and promotional literature.

And the articles themselves, as time and permissions permit, will be directly available on the site, along with copious background material, useful to student, scholar, and actor alike.

A sixth article — to our way of thinking the most important of the series –  is forthcoming in 2010 in The Shakespeare Yearbook. This article, “A Movable Feast: The Tempest as Shrovetide Revelry,” was accepted for publication more than three years ago by SY editor Douglas Brooks, but was regrettably delayed due to Brooks long, courageous (and ultimately losing) battle against cancer. Brooks died this past December, and his work as editor of the Shakespeare Yearbook has passed on to surviving hands. It is an understatement to say that the world of Shakespearean studies has lost one of its great hopes in Brooks’ passing. He was not just a fine a scholar and editor, but a visionary one at that.

Our Shakespeare Yearbook article argues that many elements of symbolic design in Shakespeare’s late play connect it to the liturgical event, for which so much early modern drama was composed, of Shrovetide (modern carnival).  This annual celebration,  which encouraged the temporary indulgence of sensual pleasures, concluded the annual winter season of christmastide (which it was customary in the Early modern English court to celebrate with plays and masques), and prepared participants for the penitential season of Lent, during which plays, like eating, marriage, and sex, were curtailed if not prohibited.

We believe that the evidence connecting Tempest to Shrovetide,  presented in our forthcoming article, is persuasive beyond the usual norms of early modern scholarship.  When we started off to investigate the hypothesis of the play’s  Shrovetide genesis, we were merely curious; but the more deeply we examined the motifs and themes of the shrovetide season, and compared the symbolism and themes of Shakespeare’s play to those found in other dramas known to be written for the occasion, the more apparent it became to us that the association of the play with the holiday is beyond reasonable dispute.

Traditional Shakespeare scholars would have realized this long ago, but their vision was obscured by a critical error. It has been an article of faith for decades, if not centuries, that the first recorded Tempest production, on Nov. 1, 1611, was the first actual production, and that the play had been written shortly before this. Several scholars had even tried without success to connect The Tempest to the liturgical holiday of Hallowmass, which was celebrated on Nov. 1.

So powerful was the unexamined assumption that Tempest was written during the summer or fall of 1611, that it never occurred to anyone, until Lynne Kositsky (under the stimulating influence of Richard Malim) speculated out loud about Shrovetide,  that the play might have been written for some other liturgical occasion.  The reason such fine scholars as R. Christopher Hassell or Grace Hall could not deliver on the seemingly plausible hypothesis of a Hallowmass connection was that they were looking in the wrong place.

Please check back to our site to follow the development of this project.

– R. Stritmatter, PhD

Associate Professor

Coppin State University

Looking for the New World sources of Shakespeare's Tempest? Try Eden first.

A July 2011 article by Barry R. Clarke, published in the Journal of Drama Studies, contests the idea that the Tempest author had access to Strachey’s “True Reportory” manuscript account of the Sea Venture wreck, but goes on to argue that the 1609 wreck “was [itself] a source event for the Tempest.”

Believing that “Vaughan and Reedy have organised substantial evidence” against the objection of our 2007 RES article that “TR” was not completed until 1612, Clarke develops another criticism of the theory of “TR”‘s influence — one that we also explore in our unpublished manuscript — that the canons of secrecy imposed by the Virginia company make it unlikely that documents such as Strachey’s manuscript would ever have made their way into the dramatist’s hands.

Most of Clarke’s article is devoted to a valuable exploration of why the theory, first proposed by Morton Luce and  Charles C. Gayley, of Shakespeare’s access to a secret Bermuda Company pamphlet, is improbable on its face, given the degree of secrecy imposed on information about Bermuda, which was considered a vital asset in England’s “cold war” against Spain for control of the new world.

Instead,  Clarke argues for a more diffuse and circumstantial  influence of the Bermuda literature and other Jacobean  gossip on Shakespeare’s play.  For example, he devotes a number of paragraphs to discussing the possibility that the names “Stephano” and “Trinculo” are derived from the name of the Prince of Moldavia, Stephano Janiculo, who visited the Jacobean court in 1607. He notes that Ben Jonson parodied Janiculo’s courtship of Lay Arabella Stuart in in Epiocene (produced 1609, published 1616), and that the same play mentions (in the same lines) “Nomentack,”described by Clarke as “an Indian chief from Virginia.”

This certainly proves that Jonson’s play was written after 1607, but it’s relevance to the Tempest is a bit obscure. While the proposed connection between Janiculo and the names of the characters in Shakespeare’s play seems. maybe,  possible, its a slender thread on which to hang the argument of a Jacobean Tempest, especially if one has started the discussion by dismissing the otherwise far more credible (but ultimately inconclusive) evidence of proposed verbal parallels with Strachey.

Worse still is Clarke’s failure to register the significance of our 2009 Critical Survey article, which supplements our case for a late completion date of TR by showing that the alleged verbal connections between Tempest and “TR” are an illusion that depends on the reader’s ignorance of Shakespeare’s actual primary source of New World imagery and language — Richard Eden’s 1555 Decades of the New World (or the original Iberian documents on which Eden’s translation is based).  Clarke seems to have missed this work entirely in composing his article.

While we sympathize (it’s easy enough to miss something important in any literature review), it’s painfully clear that this omission effectively invalidates Clarke’s entire argument.  His list of “six notable  shipwrecks” for comparison with the Tempest doesn’t even include mention of Eden’s numerous and — as we showed in CS – relevant wreck accounts.

Clarke goes on from this omission to identify one central motif from the shipwreck literature that, he believes, ties Tempest indubitably to the events of the Bermuda wreck:

The fleet’s flagship, the Sea Venture, was the only vessel of the nine to be permanently separated from the rest and when it failed to appear in Virginia all hands were assumed lost….[this] combination of circumstances surrounding the shipwreck in The Tempest seems not appear elsewhere in the contemporary travel narratives. (14)

This assertion imitates the mistaken logic of Vaughan, in his Shakespeare Quarterly “rebuttal” of our original RES article. Unfortunately, neither Vaughan nor Clarke is in possession of all the relevant facts.

Such events were rather common, and the  argument has been anachronistic since 1874, when Elze (11), pointing out the flaws in Malone’s theory of Jourdain’s influence, noted that both Columbus and Drake experienced a similar division of their fleets.

But the case is stronger than even this general refutation might suppose. Here is the relevant passage from Tempest, compared to its obvious immediate source in Eden:

Concordia University's new Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre (now completed) as originally envisaged by architects.

Concordia University’s Dr. Daniel Wright, Director of the University’s Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre, has announced that the 2012 annual Vero Nihil Verius Award for Distinguished Scholarship will be awarded “to the team of Prof Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky for the outstanding achievement, recognition, and prestigious juried publication of their research on the origins of Shakespeare’sTempest.”

The award will be conferred at Concordia’s Annual Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference, scheduled for April 12-15, 2012.

Others honored with the award for 2012 include  journalist and novelist, Al Austin, in particular appreciation for his work on the breakthrough PBS Frontline documentary, The Shakespeare Mystery, as well as for his forthcoming Oxfordian novel, The Cottage.

Katherine Chiljan, in special tribute to the scholarly achievement of her most recent book, Shakespeare Suppressed:  The Uncensored Truth About Shakespeare and His Works, will also be honored with the award in 2012.

As reported on the Oberon blog, Shakespeare authorship researcher and novelist Lynne Kositsky, co-author with Roger Stritmatter of A Movable Feast,  has been honored by the Canada Council for the Arts with a $25,000 grant. The funds were awarded to help Kositsky finish her young-adult novel with the working title of A Scattering of Stars. Kositsky said:

Every year, in October, Canadian authors can write applications to the Canada Council for the Arts for grants to help them finish their new books. I entered last year, enclosing about 15 pages of my new young-adult novel — all I’d written of it at the time. I added some pages from one of my published novels, as allowed.

There are, obviously, a limited number of grants available, and fierce competition for them. Yesterday afternoon I received a letter from the Canada Council telling me that I’d been awarded a $25,000 grant — the maximum given — to help me finish my book. The grant covers living, research, and travel expenses. It’s very welcome and I’m totally thrilled.

Congrats, Lynne!

-R.S.

“The setting on both the ship and the tropical island are stunning,” wrote a Resource Link reviewer.

“Readers will gasp with horror at conditions on the ship, tremble at the storm scenes and thrill to the tension around the solving of the puzzle. The pace of the plot is relentless and this book is impossible to put down.”

Congrats, Lynne.

–R.S.

Maze engraving from Francis Quarles' Emblems, divine and moral, together with Hieroglyphicks of the life of man (1634). The image appears as an illustration in David Lindley's recent New Cambridge edition of The Tempest.

It has long been known by Shakespearean scholars that The Tempest has a special (but never fully articulated) connection to the idea of the labyrinth. In the middle ages and up through the age of Shakespeare labyrinths and mazes remained an influential technology and a set of social practices central to the ideals of (the predominantly) Christian culture of Europe. In an era when the idea of pilgrimage was still a living practice, the maze functioned as a microcosm of the pilgrim’s journey.

Visibly central to such holy landmarks as Chartres, as well as found in such nominally secular installations as English turf mazes or the 14th century garden maze or “Daedalus“of Charles the V of France, the labyrinth became an emblem for the twists and turns, the epistemic confusions and blind alleys of the self-reflective life.

As such, the maze is, just under the surface, the play’s central organizing motif, both in terms of dramatic action (plot) and geography (setting). As Vaughan and Vaughan recognize in their Arden Tempest of 1999, the play’s action largely consists of circumscribed

geographic movement writ small. The firsts four acts conclude with an invitation to move on: “Come, follow” (1.2.502); “Lead the way” (2.2.183); “follow, I pray you” (3.3.110); “follow me and do me service” (4.1.266)….The characters perambulate in small groups from one part of the island to another; only at Prospero’s final invitation, “Please you, draw near” (5.1.319), do they join in one place. Although their physical and psychological journeys through the island’s maze have ended, the play concludes with plans for a sea journey back to Milan…(17).

Indeed, Tempest includes a number of overt maze references such as when, in the third act, the wearied Gonzalo announces,

By’r lakin, I can go no further, sir;
My old bones ache: here’s a maze trod, indeed,
Through furth-rights and meanders!

(3.3.1)[1]

The prominence of the motif is well known to Tempest editors. To Barbara Mowat among others the metaphor of the maze is deeply rooted in the play’s classical sources as well as pivotal to its action and symbolism:

Prospero is the creator of the maze in which the other characters find themselves…. Gonzalo’s “Here’s a maze trod indeed”…picks up suggestively Ovid’s description of that most infamous of mazes, created by Daedalus to enclose the Minotaur….[2]

Such distinctive internal references to mazes, as well as the  testimony of the secondary literature confirming the centrality of the metaphor to the play’s dramatic texture, fell into proper focus for Lynne and me when we first read Richard Malim’s 2004 essay, “The Spanish Maze.”  Malim proposed that an apparently lost play, performed on Shrove Monday, 1604/5 before the Court at Whitehall, under the title “A Tragedy of the Spanish Maze,” may have been The Tempest under another name.

Fully aware of the radical implications of Malim’s theory for the longstanding belief that The Tempest was not written until 1611, we set out to cross-examine and test the idea on several counts, eventually publishing our conclusions in the 2008 issue of The Oxfordian (the last one edited by Stephanie Hughes).

The idea took some getting used to, but the more we learned, the more confident we became that Malim had gotten it right. Not only was it fully plausible to think of The Tempest as a kind of “Tragedy of the Spanish Maze” (The play’s “tragic” dimension has long been acknowledged by leading Shakespearean scholars. Naples and Milan were Spanish possessions during the better part of the 15th century. And, as we have already seen, the idea of the maze is central to Tempest‘s action), but the theory opened an entire new vista on the symbolism and structure of the Shakespearean masterpiece.

One of Lynne’s first questions about Malim’s theory was whether or not we could prove by independent analysis that The Tempest was a play suitable, or even written for, Shrovetide. It soon became evident that no one in the history of Shakespearean scholarship had ever asked this question, for the simple reason that everyone — or nearly everyone — assumed that the Nov. 1, 1611, Hallowmass performance date was the first performance date. If The Tempest had any liturgical resonance, it was assumed — as in the case of John Bender’s ELH article –  to be to Hallowmass.

The many reasons for concluding that The Tempest was in fact written with Shrovetide performance in mind form the basis for our Shakespeare Yearbook “Movable Feast” article and need not be rehearsed in detail here.

But imagine our surprise when we discovered that in the Christian  liturgical calendar there was a definite association between Shrovetide (and, even more so, Lent) and the maze. It was during Lent, the period of contrition following immediately on the heels of Shrovetide festivals of license, that Christian devotees undertook pilgrimages of penitence, long and small, including “treading the labyrinth.”

Suddenly Vaughan and Vaughan’s argument that The Tempest’s “uninhabited island” was a kind of maze — into which Prospero had materialized  his enemies to exact the vengeance of their penitent self awareness, like a high priest of Lent — as well as Mowat’s observation of the play’s deep mythic roots, going back to  the maze-builder Daedalus himself –assumed their proper significance in our understanding of what the play does.

As James Walter eloquently summarizes, “The figures that establish the setting, oppositions of characters, and progression of plot in The  Tempest make visible certain archetypal desires, states, and actions common to the experience of Christian pilgrims” (62).

Joining Vaughan and Vaughan and Mowat with Walter we could now see that these  pilgrims perambulate within the confines of the magic island, kept within Prospero’s spell, in a maze constructed by his magic art, until reaching the center of the Maze — the magician’s “cell.”

Just as the real laity of Elizabethan England would follow the “movable feast” of Shrovetide with a penitential pilgrimage through a literal or metaphoric maze, Shakespeare’s characters under the influence of Prospero’s magic undertake to discover themselves by navigating the maze of life:

O, rejoice beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis;
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom
In a poor island; and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.

(5.1.206-13)

Although such scholars as Vaughan and Vaughan, Mowat, and Walters (among others)  understood some aspect of the Tempest puzzle, Malim supplied the lost piece by connecting the play to the “Spanish Maze.”

Assembling all these pieces it becomes blindingly obvious that Shakespeare’s play was, as we were the first to argue, originally written for Shrovetide, when Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would be enjoying the licentious and gustatory frolics of the festival while anticipating the penitential rites of lent. Thus Ariel, in service to Prospero, first tempts the sinful members of the court party with an abundant feast and then — only when they surrender to the temptation to eat, snatches it away and “devours” them with a fire and brimstone sermon just like those that thundered from every Elizabethan and Jacobean pulpit during the fasting days of Lent.

The early modern "wild" or "green" man, associated in popular folk tradition with the rites of spring, including Shrovetide, April 23 (the Feast of St. George), and May Day.

Marie Merkel posted a request for further documentation on the statement in our Shakespeare Yearbook “Tempest as Shrovetide Revelry” article, that the “Green Man” was associated in the folk tradition with Shrovetide and April 23 (St. George’s Day).

Since the answer is somewhat involved, and may be of general interest, we’re doing a full post on it.

The short answer is that the calendrical associations of the Green Man with these dates are so ubiquitous in the extant literature that we didn’t imagine that the topic could become a point of controversy. Remember, Google is your friend!

In this case, however some background enables effective search strategy as Lynne and I discovered when we attempted to retrace our own steps to provide the documentation Ms. Merkel requested.

It helps to know that the “Green Man”  went under many different names and guises. He  was also known, for example as the “Wild Man” – and in relation to Shrovetide in particular that’s the best search term if you want to connect the dots.

Under both names the figure is associated with the seasonal symbolism of rebirth that has been part of the human experience of springtime for thousands of years. In many but not all of the rituals associated with him, he undergoes the same ritual of sacrifice and rebirth that is part of the Shrovetide festival when the victim’s name is “Jack-a-lent.”

In fact, as E.K. Chambers makes clear in his classic English Folk Play, all these names essentially allude to the same symbolic referent. The green man is a variant of the Shrovetide  “Jack-a-lent (of distinctive Shrovetide/Lent fame), who is also, says Chambers

“the Pfingstl or Wild Man, the equivalent of English Wod-woz and Jack-in-the-Green….In a [Swabian] Shrovetide ceremony, Dr. Ironbeard  bleeds a sick man, who falls as dead, and the Doctor thereupon restores him to live by blowing air into him through a tube. On Whit-Monday, the Wild Man, as elsewhere, is executed. All this is very much like the Mummer’s play. The German rites do not take place at Christmas, but most often at Whitsuntide or on May Day, and occasionally at Shrovetide or mid-Lent. In Carinthia and among the gipsies of Transylvania and Rumania the Wild Man becomes Green George, and goes at East or on St. George’s Day, but there is no death or combat.”

Not only does the wild man go under diverse names, but the particular days on which his rites were celebrated varied from place and place and changed historically, making it difficult to make secure generalizations about them. In some form or another the rituals of spring, including Shrovetide, May Day, and eventually Easter, seem to have existed throughout Europe, and the “green” or “wild” man is among the pan-European motifs generally linked to the passage of winter and welcoming of the spring.

The most definite and distinctive evidence for the association between the Wild Man  and Shrovetide comes from Germany, which is no surprise since Shrovetide rituals (and the associated drama, which even had its own genre tag, fastnachtspiele), were more central to the liturgical calendar there than they seem to have been in England or other European countries. In their The wild man within: an Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Edward J. Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak observe that

“The Wild Man occupies a position of considerable prominence not only in German folklore but also in Early German literature; for instance, a number of Shrovetide plays of the sixteenth century center on the wild man…”

The connection between Shrovetide and the “wild man” was not static, however.

Among the more interesting  insights of the research conducted for our Shrovetide article was the discovery that the Shrovetide “spectacle of strangeness” — to use John G. Demaray’s apt phrase — accommodated itself to the voyages of discovery, blending the European tradition of the wild European woodsman with the emerging image of the new world native.

That there is an undeniable link between the Jacobean Shrovetide masques and spectacles of the “new world” is not the least of the many connections that emerge from our study tying Tempest to Shrovetide. To our knowledge, we were the first to draw attention to this connection between the liturgical festival and imagery of the new world in early modern dramatic representation.

According to Hal Rammel in his Nowhere in America: the Big Rock Candy Mountain and other Comic Utopias,

“A rite associated with May day in one part of Europe may turn up slightly altered in the Shrovetide feasts of England…In the sixteenth century, the English Robin Hood became the personification of the Wildman of the Woods, the Jack-in-the-green or Green man, and along with his May Marion took part in the May games…in general, these many associations and parallels with seasonal sacrifice and drama provide, for many scholars, argument for consideration of the mummers’ play as a folk survival…celebrating the fertile rebirth of the natural world at the coming of each new year.”

From this it is evident that the Green Man/Wild Man was associated with a diversity of dates, as our original analysis indicated – he could make an appearance at Shrovetide, as we have seen, but April 23 and also May 1 (which a more comprehensive analysis of this particular motif would be obliged to note) were also days on with the rites of spring and the Green Man were celebrated.

Thus as Gary R. Varner describes it in The Mythic Forest, the Green Man and the Spirit of Nature, citing the work of Janet and Colin Bord, “The theme [of the Mummers] is generally the same as in the Green Man or Green George Ceremony of May Day, that is, of the death and rebirth of nature…”

Varner goes on to note that these rituals are closely related to the celebration of St. George’s day on April 23:

“Pagan festivals that have merged with St. George’s Day include Ploughing Day and the Shedding of the Yellow Leaves celebration. The festival day of the pagan God Pergrubius, god of flowers and all plants, falls on April 23 which is the church calendar day for St. George.”

More directly, Christian Roy in  the reference work Traditional Festivals: A Multicultural Encyclopedia (vol. 2) states unambiguously that St. George in England “appears on his April 23 feast as Green George in much European folklore and is often identified in Britain with the Green Man of May Day customs.”

-RS

We ask the reader to take a moment to remember the Yearbook‘s editor Douglas Brooks.  He will be greatly missed.