Neville Letters: Vehemency and Celerity

On 28 August 1600, Neville wrote from London:

Prosecute those Things which you have in charge, with such Vehemency and Celerity, as conveniently you may. (Winwood's Memorials, 1.248)

Both words don't appear in pre-1599 plays but they do appear in 1599 and after. Once again, neither word is particularly uncommon. But we can date its entry into the canon roughly in-line with its use in a Neville letter. "Celerity" in particular is a French borrowing; perhaps it's a word he started to use in France.

Nay, I prithee now, with most petitionary vehemence, tell me who it is. As You Like It, 3.2

Would it apply well to the vehemency of your
affection, that I should win what you would enjoy? Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.2

Stands without blemish. Next, it imports no reason
That with such vehemency he should pursue Measure for Measure, 5.1

Fail not to use, and with what vehemency
The occasion shall instruct you Henry VIII, 5.1

Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies
In motion of no less celerity Henry V, 3.0

Ay, with celerity, find Hector's purpose
Pointing on him. Troilus and Cressida, 1.3

Hence hath offence his quick celerity,
When it is born in high authority: Measure for Measure, 4.2

Than let him so be lost. O most kind maid,
It was the swift celerity of his death, Measure for Measure, 5.1

she hath such a celerity in dying. Antony and Cleopatra, 1.2

Celerity is never more admired
Than by the negligent. Antony and Cleopatra, 3.7

Neville Letters: Caution (Strong Evidence of Authorship)

In a previous post I gave the example of "exasperate" and how it appears in a letter from Neville before it appears in in the Shakespeare canon several times.

I have discovered a much stronger example, "caution." According to the OED, "caution" has a long history in English and a search on EEBO shows it to be relatively common. However, the word doesn't appear at all in the Shakespeare canon before 1600 and it occurs afterwards seven times. The word is a direct borrowing from the French. Here Neville uses it in a letter from 12 March 1600:

We have evoked the matter before the Counsail, where I labour to gett him enlarged, upon his Juratory Caution, and such other Caution as he is able to give... This is all I can doe for him, if I can effect that. They require Caution of Burgesses, or men known here to be sufficient Estate. (Winwood, 1.160)

Note that Neville is using it here in a technical legal sense which the OED defines as "security given for the performance of some engagement; bail; a guarantee, a pledge."

What I am suggesting is that as ambassador to France, Neville started using this word in his official duties. It entered into his active working vocabulary, and then he started using it in his creative writing. I have shown many similar examples, and I am working on ways to present this evidence in a convincing way. But it is extremely strong evidence of authorship.

Here are the examples from the Shakespeare canon. Note especially the example of All's Well That Ends Well. It's spoken by the King of France and it is used in the precise technical sense mentioned above. Compare to my post about "credence".  Taken together, these two posts actually provide strong evidence of authorship.

There is a very specific trajectory of diplomatic language being used by Neville as ambassador and it appearing a few years later in Shakespeare's plays. I have shown many more examples of this. This is a consistent pattern. See this post for several impressive examples.

Hamlet, 1.3:
POLONIUS. If it be so- as so 'tis put on me,
And that in way of caution- I must tell you

All's Well That Ends Well, 1.2
KING OF FRANCE. A certainty, vouch'd from our cousin Austria,
With caution that the Florentine will move us

King Lear, 2.1:
Been well inform'd of them, and with such cautions
That, if they come to sojourn at my house,
I'll not be there.

Macbeth, 3.6:
LENNOX. And that well might
Advise him to a caution, to hold what distance

Macbeth, 4.1:
MACBETH. Whate'er thou art, for thy good caution, thanks;
Thou hast harp'd my fear aright: but one
word more,—

Coriolanus, 2.2
JUNIUS BRUTUS. Most willingly;
But yet my caution was more pertinent
Than the rebuke you give it.

Henry VIII, 2.4:
That many mazed considerings did throng
And press'd in with this caution. First, methought

Note: Please Compare This to Other "Candidates"

These are time-specific examples that connect Neville's life experiences directly with the content of the plays. Neville was ambassador to France in 1599-1600. Henry V includes French dialog, As You Like It is set in France, as is All's Well That Ends Well. Those are the only two plays in the entire canon set entirely in France and they both appear within a few years of Neville's ambassadorship.

All's Well That Ends Well features the King of France as a main character; as the ambassador to France, Neville had many audiences with Henry IV. He is simply writing what he knows. He has experiences and he incorporates that into his creative writing. This is a normal process one would expect. It's only in the delusional world of Shakespeare studies where that is not expected.

How do "orthodox" researchers explain Shakespeare's sudden interest in France and French language? How do they explain his detailed knowledge of Windsor Forest? Why did the tragedies begin around 1601/2? etc. etc. etc. People have grown to accept the anomaly of an author completely disconnected from his work as normal. It's not normal. It's a huge anomaly.

Neville Letters: Exasperate

In a letter from 12 March 1600, Sir Henry Neville wrote to Robert Cecil:

The States have at length suspended their proceeding against the French, and have rendred the Shippes they had taken; which hath pacified the King and his Counsail, who were greatly exasperated against them. (Winwood's Memorials, 1.159)

Note the word "exasperated". It wasn't a rare word at the time, according to EEBO, but it also wasn't too widely used. Neville's correspondents, Cecil and Winwood, used it too in their letters. However, the first appearance of this word in the Shakespeare canon appears in Twelfth Night, 3.2:

She did show favour to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver.

Then in King Lear, 5.1:

If both remain alive. To take the widow
Exasperates, makes mad her sister Goneril;

And Macbeth, 3.6:

Hath so exasperate the king that he
Prepares for some attempt of war.

And Troilus and Cressida, 5.1:

No! why art thou then exasperate, thou idle
immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarcenet

This is interesting evidence of authorship. It shows a word in Neville's vocabulary that works its way into the later Shakespeare canon. One example isn't proof of anything, of course. I have several dozen of these examples accumulated, some much more interesting (like the ones in this post), but that doesn't really prove anything either.

One of my projects is to develop a scientific, verifiable, and falsifiable method to track these usages and compare them with controls. I haven't figured quite how to do that yet, but it's a very promising direction for demonstrating Neville's authorship in an objective manner.

One challenge is that the vast majority of the written texts we have from Neville are from the period 1599-1601. We have very few letters from 1588-1598 and a handful from 1602-1615.

In any case, in the absence of some kind of "smoking gun" evidence, I think this type of corpus analysis has the best chance of providing convincing evidence of Neville's authorship of the plays and poems.