Thomas Hearne, Neville Wantonness, and Merry Wives of Windsor

Thomas Hearne was an antiquarian and diarist who lived in Berkshire near Billingbear, the ancestral home of the Neville family.

In his diary entry from 1706 he writes the most amusing and nasty anecdote about the Neville family's love of music on Sundays. The reference here is to "Grey Neville"  (1681–1723):

Mr. Nevil Junior Parliament Man for Abbingdon being lately married, to entertain his Lady he had some Extraordinary Musick for about a Fortnight or three Weeks at his Father's House at Billingbear in Berks, for performing which were three Musicians, two of them Oxford men, one of whom told me that he had dancing & musick upon this Occasion one Sunday night for three or four Hours. Such is the Religion of these pretended Hypocritical Saints; who always have reviled King James I. & K. Charles I. for allowing innocent Recreation in Publick on ye Lord's Day, when they themselves give themselves up to chambering and wantonness on the same day; but not with the like Innocence: it being father observable that the said Person told me yt all the time he was in ye House he saw not the least shew of Appearance of Religion, nor indeed any thing becoming a Gentleman (which this Nevil so much pretends to, & for which he is cry'd up among the Rascality of Whiggs & Low-church men) they being forc'd to come with very little Satisfaction for their Pains.

Of course, in Merry Wives of Windsor there is the legend of Herne the Hunter and Herne's Oak.

Well, at least we know in 1706 there was a "Hearne" living close enough to Billingbear to gossip about its inhabitants. His father George Hearne was born in the same location in 1649. So maybe a Hearne ancestor inspired the story. Interesting area for further research.

Neville Letters: Material

“Material” was not an unusual word around 1600. But Shakespeare first uses it in As You Like It and then uses it in many later plays. 

This is a subtle point, but I have discovered several examples like this. There are words that Neville uses regularly in his correspondence in 1599 and that enter the Shakespeare canon around the same time. They are then used often in later plays.

There are many examples like this, and they demonstrate a pattern. I think the explanation for this pattern is that a word like "material" was also common at that time as a French word. The word probably entered English initially from French, but they also existed in parallel. As ambassador to France, Neville was speaking, reading, and writing in French on a daily basis. So it is only natural that French words would enter his working vocabulary. And those words would find their way into his creative writing, i.e. the plays of Shakespeare.

Examples like this do not provide "proof of authorship," but they demonstrate that the Neville hypothesis is consistent with known historical textual evidence. Taken together, they do provide a strong piece of circumstantial evidence for Neville as the author of most or all of the Shakespeare canon.

Here the word "material" appears in Neville’s letters from 21 June 1599, 13 July 1599, and 9 April 1600:

What Restraints have been made for bringing thither the Commodities of this Country; which will be material for me to know, when I shall Treat with the Counsel here. (WW, 1.51)

Not to frustrate so good an Intention, upon a Circumstance so little material unto them. (WW, 1.64)

I wrote unto you lately by a Servant of mine own, advertising you what Propositions I had made unto the King, to discover his Intentions in the most material Points I had negotiated with him since my coming. (WW, 1.168)

And it appears thereafter regularly in Shakespeare’s plays, in the same sense as in the letters:

A material fool! (As You Like It 3.3)

She that herself will sliver and disbranch

From her material sap, perforce must wither

And come to deadly use. (King Lear 4.2)

Whose absence is no less material to me

Than is his father's, must embrace the fate

Of that dark hour. Resolve yourselves apart:

I'll come to you anon. (Macbeth 3.1) 

I have outstood my time; which is material (Cymbeline 1, 6)

He would not stay at your petitions: made

His business more material. (Winter's Tale 1.2)

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.

Cannons in the Canon 6: Overcharged

This is by far my favorite Neville cannon example. It's such an evocative metaphor and Neville calls on this metaphor in his deepest moment of despair.

As I have explained before, Henry Neville owned and operated an ironworks that produced cannons (ordnance) from the mid 1580s to the mid 1590s. This imagery, therefore, spans the entire Shakespeare canon. The timing matches with Neville's personal experience. A search on EEBO reveals this sense of "overcharge" (putting too much gunpowder in a a musket or cannon) to be quite unusual in printed English books at the time.

The fist example comes in Henry VI, Part II, 3.2; this sense could refer to a cannon or a musket of some kind:

QUEEN MARGARET. Enough, sweet Suffolk; thou torment'st thyself;
And these dread curses, like the sun 'gainst glass,
Or like an overcharged gun, recoil,
And turn the force of them upon thyself....

VAUX. To signify unto his majesty
That Cardinal Beaufort is at point of death;
For suddenly a grievous sickness took him,
That makes him gasp and stare and catch the air,
Blaspheming God and cursing men on earth.
Sometimes he talks as if Duke Humphrey's ghost
Were by his side; sometime he calls the king,
And whispers to his pillow, as to him,
The secrets of his overcharged soul;
And I am sent to tell his majesty
That even now he cries aloud for him.

Then we have Henry Neville writing to Robert Cecil from prison on 3 April 1602. I quote at length, spelling modernized. I urge you to read this very carefully and realize this was written approximately at the same time as Hamlet was written and/or revised. Note also that Cecil and Neville's wife Anne Killigrew were first cousins (their mothers were sisters). The use of "overcharged with grief" or "overcharged with sorrow" was relatively common at the time:

[I] beseech you to yield me your good favour in it as you have done in all the rest, that I may hope to have an end of my misery; which I do the rather and more instantly desire at this time in respect of my poor wife, whose state I do much fear, as being overcharged with grief & sorrow, besides my troubles, with the late loss of one of her children, and the likelihood to lose another: These afflictions coming one upon another I doubt will much endanger her weak body and mind, unless she may receive some comfort in some other kind: I beseech your Honour to take more compassion upon us.

And then we have Macbeth, 1.2 (this is considered another anachronistic use, just as iron ordnance in King John was anachronistic):

Yes;
As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
If I say sooth, I must report they were
As cannons overcharged with double cracks, so they
Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorise another Golgotha,
I cannot tell.
But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.

Here is an example from 1590 of the sense in which Shakespeare/Neville is using the word. Here is the wiki entry for "arquebus":

Certain discourses, vvritten by Sir Iohn Smythe, Knight: concerning the formes and effects of diuers sorts of weapons

whereas harquebuziers haue not onlie the same let, in case their peeces by ouercharging, or ouerheating, or crackes, or rifts, doo breake, but also if that through the negligence of the harquebuziers

And another example from 1594 by the same author:

[Certen] instruct[ions, obseruati]ons and orders militarie, requisit for all chieftaine

t in this case the mosquetiers must take great heed, that they do not ouercharge their peeces with powder, nor with aboue the nomber of:5: or:6: haileshott of warre at the most, as aforesaid; least that their peeces should break or recoile, and so ouerthrow them to the trouble of the piquers, from vnder whose piques they are to discharge their peeces: and this manner of discharging of haileshot of warre by mosquetiers is for diuers times and places of seruice, of great effect, so as they giue no volee at the enemie aboue:20: paces at the furthest

Neville Paradigm: Stratfordian Argues for Neville in 1903

The 1903 Contemporary Evidence of Shakespeare's Identity by Richard Lewis Ashhurst is a wonderful little book published by the Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia.

The purpose of the book is to counter Baconian and other "anti-Shakespearean" theories of Shakespeare authorship. It's a clearly written book that goes through the exact same arguments which are debated today, 115 years later. It's important to remember that almost nothing is new in these debates except one thing: Henry Neville. Neville's wasn't proposed as an authorship candidate until 2005.

James, Rubinstein, Casson, et al. have made a case for Neville in the past 13 years that far surpasses any case made for any candidate in the past 150 years. It's not even close. Not even sort of close. But the case for Shakespeare really hasn't changed.

On Page 33 Ashhurst makes a very interesting argument. He argues that Shakespeare was obviously a supporter of Essex, especially considering Shakespeare wrote nothing to honor the death of Queen Elizabeth, and since the "Phenix and Turtle" and Richard II are so critical of Queen Elizabeth. In fact, Shakespeare was a "devoted follower and friend of Essex and Southampton, trembling perhaps each hour while the Queen lived, lest he should be called to account for Richard II."

Of course, these words actually apply to Henry Neville, and have nothing to do with William Shakespeare. And, once again, they explain why Neville chose to produce his works under an assumed identity. Here are the relevant paragraphs with a few things in bold:

That the "Phenix and Turtle" is written by the same hand that wrote "Venus and Adonis," the "Rape of Lucrece," and the sonnets is reasonably clear; further, the intention of the production appears to have been distinctly political. It is set out as being "consecrated by them all to the noble knight Sir John Salisburie," who like Chester himself and Shakespeare's patron, Southampton, was deep in the Essex Plot. Therefore, if we accept Shakespeare as the author of his own poems and plays, his joining in Chester's enterprise was quite natural; but it would be strange company for Bacon, one of Elizabeth's most trusted and apparently devoted counsellors.

In 1603 Queen Elizabeth died. Not a poem, a stanza, or a line by Shakespeare, lamenting her death, or celebrating her glorious reign, appeared. Contemporary literature is full of appeals to Shakespeare to properly remember the occasion in verse, but he remained obstinately silent. This was most natural for the devoted follower and friend of Essex and Southampton, trembling perhaps each hour while the Queen lived, lest he should be called to account for Richard II.; but how can we account for Bacon's silence under such circumstances? Even if he found praising his dead mistress might not be pleasing to her successor, the well-kept secret of his pseudonym would have enabled him without danger, to have described the glories of the great Queen's reign and lamented her death. In his own person [Bacon] wrote the well known Latin encomium on his dead mistress, though it was not published until later.