Shakespeare's Eulogies

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Eulogies for William Shakespeare, 1616-1640
3. Other Playwrights vs. Shakespeare
4. Other Nondramatic Poets, and the Question of Social Rank
5. Other Not-so-Mysterious "Silences"
6. Conclusion
7. Notes
8. Sources

1. Introduction

As with other Oxfordian arguments, this one is based on a combination of factual distortion and ignorance of context. First of all, the claim that Shakespeare's death evoked no eulogies will be puzzling to any Shakespeare scholar -- of course there were eulogies for Shakespeare, the inscription on his monument and the famous poem by Ben Jonson being only the best known of many. What the Oxfordians apparently mean is that there were no eulogies printed for Shakespeare within a year or two of his death, a fact which they find suspicious. But there is nothing suspicious about this at all. Printed eulogies in Shakespeare's day were only for socially important people like nobility and church leaders; posthumous eulogies for poets circulated in manuscript, only reaching print years later, if at all. The seven years before the first printed eulogies to Shakespeare appeared in the First Folio is actually remarkably fast, unprecedented for an English playwright, and the number of tributes written to the Bard is more than for any of his contemporaries before Ben Jonson 20 years later.

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2. Eulogies for William Shakespeare, 1616-1640

• William Basse wrote a poem entitled "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare, he died in April 1616" (thus he was very clearly referring to the Stratford Shakespeare). Basse was suggesting that Shakespeare should have been buried in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer, Beaumont, and Spenser (Chambers, II, 226):

  Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
  To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
  A little nearer Spenser to make room
  For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.
  To lodge all four in one bed make a shift
  Until Doomsday, for hardly will a fifth
  Betwixt this day and that by fate be slain
  For whom your curtains may be drawn again.
  If your precedency in death doth bar
  A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher,
  Under this carved marble of thine own
  Sleep rare tragedian Shakespeare, sleep alone,
  Thy unmolested peace, unshared cave,
  Possess as lord not tenant of thy grave,
      That unto us and others it may be
      Honor hereafter to be laid by thee.

  We don't know exactly when this poem was written, but: a) it was certainly written after Beaumont's death in February 1616, and b) it was certainly in existence by the time of the First Folio in 1623, since Ben Jonson's eulogy alludes directly to Basse's, and responds to it. Basse's poem circulated widely in manuscript, as evidenced by the fact that over two dozen seventeenth-century manuscript copies have survived (these are listed in Wells and Taylor, 163). It was also printed five times in the seventeenth century, the first time in the 1633 edition of Donne's Poems.

• John Taylor, the Water Poet, has a poem in The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620) in which he includes Shakespeare among famous dead English poets who live on through their works:

  In paper, many a poet now survives
  Or else their lines had perish'd with their lives.
  Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
  Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,
  Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excell,
  Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel.
  Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harrington,
  Forgetfulness their works would over run
  But that in paper they immortally
  Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.

• The monument to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford was in place at least by the time of the First Folio in 1623, since Leonard Digges refers to it in his poem in that volume (see below). On the front of the monument is a two-line Latin inscription:

  Ivdicio Pylivm, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
  Terra tegit, popvlvs maeret, Olympvs habet

  (In judgement a Nestor, in wit a Socrates, in art a Virgil;
  the earth buries [him], the people mourn [him], Olympus possesses [him])

  This is followed by the well-known poem in English:

  Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
  Read if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed,
  With in this monument Shakspeare: with whom
  Quick nature died: whose name doth deck the tomb,
  Far more than cost: sith all, that he hath writ,
  Leaves living art, but page, to serve his wit.
                                  Obiit anno do. 1616
                                  Aetatis 53 die 23 Apr.

  Oxfordians are forced to dismiss this monument as a hoax engineered by conspirators. However, there are numerous 17th-century references to the monument, all of which say it is in memory of William Shakespeare, the famous poet born in Stratford.

• Of course, there is Jonson's famous poem in the First Folio (1623), "To the memory of my beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us." Jonson is also thought to be the most likely author of the poem "To the reader" opposite the engraving on the title page, signed "B.I." (Ben Ionson).

• The First Folio prefatory material also contains poems by Hugh Holland ("Upon the lines and life of the famous scenicke poet, Master William Shakespeare"), Leonard Digges ("To the memorie of the deceased author Maister W. Shakespeare"), and I. M., most likely Digges's friend James Mabbe ("To the memorie of M. W. Shake-speare"). Digges was the stepson of Shakespeare's Stratford friend Thomas Russell, and kept close ties with Stratford to the end of his life. The only surviving letter in his hand (written in 1632, three years before his death) tells of the "mad relations of Stratford" and contains a jesting description of William Combe, brother of the Thomas Combe to whom Shakespeare bequeathed his sword in his will. (Hotson 1937, 251.)

• In a copy of the First Folio now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the following poem is written in a hybrid secretary-italic hand from the 1620s:

  Here Shakespeare lies whom none but Death could Shake,
  And here shall lie till judgement all awake,
  When the last trumpet doth unclose his eyes,
  The wittiest poet in the world shall rise.

  The same hand has on the same page transcribed the verses from Shakespeare's monument ("Stay passenger why go'st thou by so fast") and his grave ("Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear"), so he is obviously referring to William Shakespeare of Stratford. (Evans 1988)

• Appended to Michael Drayton's Battaile of Agincourt (1627) is an elegy called "To my most dearely-loved friend Henery Reynolds Esquire, of Poets & Poesie," in which Drayton gives his opinion of various English poets, both deceased and living. Of Shakespeare he says:

  Shakespeare thou hadst as smooth a comic vein,
  Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain,
  As strong conception, and as clear a rage,
  As any one that traffick'd with the stage.

• The Second Folio of Shakespeare's works (1632), in addition to the eulogies from the First Folio, contains three additional ones. The first of these, "An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare," was unsigned in the Folio, but later appeared in John Milton's 1645 Poems with the date 1630. The second eulogy, also unsigned, is entitled "Upon the Effigies of my worthy Friend, the Author Maister William Shakespeare, and his Workes." The third, signed only with the initials "I.M.S.," is a well-written 77-line poem called "On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems."

• Thomas Heywood, in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635), goes through a long list of his fellow playwrights and affectionately notes the nicknames they had been known by. Of Shakespeare, he writes:

  Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose enchanting quill
  Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will.

• Sir William D'Avenant's Madagascar, with other poems (1638), contains an ode entitled "In Remembrance of Master William Shakespeare."

• Thomas Bancroft's Two Books of Epigrammes, and Epitaphs (1639) contains two short poems entitled "To Shakespeare" and "To the same."

• The anonymous Wits Recreations (1640) has an epigram entitled "To Mr. William Shake-spear."

• The 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems contains Basse's poem noted above, plus three new eulogies: Leonard Digges's "Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Author, and his Poems" (obviously written years before, since Digges himself had died in 1635); John Warren's "Of Mr. William Shakespeare"; and the anonymous "An Elegie on the death of that famous Writer and Actor, M. William Shakespeare" (which must have been written before 1637, since it speaks of Ben Jonson in the present tense). Note that three of the four eulogies in this volume must have been circulating in manuscript for a number of years before 1640.

To anyone familar with seventeenth-century poetry, this is a very impressive group of tributes, virtually unmatched for any other contemporary poet or playwright. But, someone might object, these eulogies were spread out over decades; why wasn't there an immediate torrent of praise for the man we now recognize as the greatest writer in the English language? Such a question, while understandable from our twentieth-century perspective, reveals an ignorance of seventeenth-century practice. In Shakespeare's day only "important" people (e.g. noblemen, or at least knights) were eulogized immediately in print, and as hard as it may be for us to believe, playwrights were simply not considered important enough for such an honor. Many of them were clearly admired by their fellow playwrights and poets, but our evidence for this generally comes from many years after their deaths, and is in virtually every case much less than what we have for Shakespeare.

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3. Other Playwrights vs. Shakespeare

• A good example is Francis Beaumont, half of the famous and popular dramatic team of Beaumont and Fletcher. Beaumont retired from the stage in 1613, around the same time as Shakespeare, and the two men died in the same year, 1616, though Beaumont was 20 years younger. Beaumont was buried in Westminster Abbey, but without any monument or even an inscription indicating where his grave is, and we know nothing about his funeral. Other than the record of his burial, the earliest notices we have of Beaumont's death are Taylor's poem in The Praise of Hemp-seed and Basse's MS eulogy to Shakespeare -- the same two poems which contain the earliest mention of Shakespeare's death. (Charlton Ogburn asserts in The Mysterious William Shakespeare (112) that there was a "shower" of praise for Beaumont upon his death, but this shower appears to be a product of Ogburn's fantasies; no contemporary evidence for it exists.)

  The first printed eulogy specifically for Beaumont was "An epitaph upon my dearest brother Francis Beaumont," in the posthumous edition of his brother Sir John Beaumont's poems; this did not appear until 1629, thirteen years after his death and six years after the Shakespeare First Folio. Beaumont received passing mention in a few poems over the years (most of them alongside Shakespeare and/or Fletcher), and the anonymous Wits Recreations (1640) contained a short poem entitled "To Mr. Francis Beaumont and Mr. John Fletcher gent." It was not until 1647, though, that the next eulogies specifically for Francis Beaumont appeared in print: the First Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, printed in that year, contained George Lisle's "To the memory of my most honored kinsman, Master Francis Beaumont," John Earle's "On Master Beaumont (written thirty years since, presently after his death)," and Richard Corbet's "On Master Francis Beaumont (then newly dead)." As their titles indicate, the last two of these had been written three decades earlier, and had presumably been circulating in manuscript all that time. By the time they finally appeared in print, more than a dozen such eulogies to Shakespeare had been published.

• Beaumont's writing partner, John Fletcher, was not eulogized in print until 1639, fourteen years after his death; in that year, the quarto of Fletcher's play Monsieur Thomas contained a 20-line poem by Richard Brome entitled "In Praise of the Author and His Following Poem." The following year saw the publication in Wits Recreations of a short epigram to Beaumont and Fletcher as a team, noted above; seven more years then passed before the publication of the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio, which contained many poems in praise of Fletcher. Our only account of Fletcher's death comes from John Aubrey, writing some 50 years later (Aubrey, 22); compare our only account of Shakespeare's death, written some 45 years after the fact (cf. note 1).

• Thomas Middleton died in 1627, but it was not until thirteen years later that he was eulogized, in the same 1640 collection (Wits Recreations) that contained poems to Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. Middleton had been briefly mentioned, along with a dozen other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, in Thomas Heywood's The Hierarchie of Blessed Angels (1635).

• John Webster is last heard from alive in 1625, and while some scholars think he was dead by 1634 (because Heywood in The Hierarchie of Blessed Angels speaks of him in the past tense), others think he lived on until 1637. We just can't tell for sure, because nobody bothered to say anything about his death in print, or in any datable document such as a diary or a letter.

• John Ford suddenly disappears from the literary record in 1639, but no record of his death has been found, and nobody is sure when he died. The 1640 collection Wits Recreation contains a poem to Ford written in the present tense, but this doesn't necessarily mean he was still alive, since the poems to Shakespeare, Chapman, Middleton, and Jonson (all long dead) are also in the present tense.

• John Marston's death in 1634 appears to have gone completely unnoticed by Caroline men of letters. I have been unable to find any seventeenth-century eulogies to him at all, or even any significant mentions of him by name after his death.

• Thomas Heywood's death in 1641 was also completely unnoticed, as far as the literary record goes.

• Henry Chettle is last heard from in 1603, and while he may well have died in the plague epidemic of that year, the first clear indication that he was dead is Thomas Dekker's 1607 pamphlet A Knight's Conjuring, which mentions Chettle as following Thomas Nashe into the Elysian Fields of heaven (Jenkins, 28).

• Greene's squalid final days were gleefully recounted by his enemy Gabriel Harvey in a pamphlet rushed into print a week after his death, and over the next few years several more critical works appeared, such as Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell (1593). The one work which might conceivably be called a eulogy was Greenes Funeralls (1594), a relatively favorable (though woodenly written) 17-page pamphlet of poems; but the anonymous author (possibly Richard Barnfield) mentions only Greene's prose works, which were his claim to fame, and gives no indication that he knew that Greene was a playwright. Indeed, no other writer during Greene's lifetime had ever mentioned his play-writing activities or alluded to any of his plays, and these plays were all published posthumously, beginning in 1594.

• Charles Nicholl in The Reckoning discusses the reactions to Marlowe's death in considerable detail. The first of these was in George Peele's The Honour of the Garter, written less than a month after Marlowe's murder and published later that year, which contains a brief mention of the "unhappy end" of "Marley, the Muses darling." Then, despite some possible oblique references^[2], four years passed before anyone mentioned Marlowe's death again in print. Beginning in 1597, a series of hostile accounts appeared -- by Thomas Beard (1597), Francis Meres (1598), and William Vaughan (1600) -- which saw Marlowe's violent death as divine retribution for his blasphemous ways.

The playwright who finally broke the pattern, and who finally surpassed Shakespeare in the number of eulogies he received after his death, was Ben Jonson. As Oxfordians (e.g. Ogburn, 112) are fond of pointing out, Jonson was honored within a year of his death in 1637 by a volume of elegies (Jonsonus Viribus). But this volume did not appear in a vacuum; its existence was the result of a number of converging factors which had not been present when Shakespeare died 21 years earlier. For one thing, the professional theater had been steadily growing in respectability, and by the 1630s plays were almost considered literature by some people. Although Jonson was at least as well known for his nondramatic poetry and his court masques as for his plays, he had done the unheard-of by including his plays alongside his other poetry in the Folio edition of his 1616 Works. While this move was ridiculed at the time, in retrospect it was a major step in making plays more respectable as reading material, a process which was helped tremendously by the publication of the Shakespeare First Folio in 1623 and the Second Folio in 1632. Then, too, Jonson was a relentless self-promoter and flamboyant personality who cultivated a band of proteges (the "Tribe of Ben") to carry on his poetic legacy.

Even with all this going for him, though, the volume of tributes to Jonson nearly didn't come off. Doctor Brian Duppa, Dean of Christchurch, had been gathering manuscript elegies for Jonson, but Sir Kenelm Digby had to write Duppa to urge that the collection be printed, or else it would have followed previous custom and remained in manuscipt (Bradley and Adams, 201). The unprecedented publication of Jonsonus Viribus in 1638 seems to have made the idea of printed eulogies for playwright-poets respectable, and a small flurry of such tributes followed in its wake. As noted above, the next three years saw eight published poems honoring Shakespeare, at least three of which had actually been written years before; the first two printed tributes to Fletcher; and a number of other tributes in such collections as Wits Recreation.

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4. Other Nondramatic Poets, and the Question of Social Rank

First, consider Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne. Both of these men were outstanding and innovative poets, and both were honored with printed eulogies within a few years of their deaths. However, they also share a number of characteristics which differentiate them sharply from Shakespeare and his fellows. Neither was a professional poet; all of Sidney's poetry and the vast majority of Donne's circulated only in manuscript and was published posthumously; and the relatively little of Donne's poetry which did reach print during his lifetime was published anonymously. Most importantly of all, both men were high in the Elizabethan social order, and well-known for reasons having nothing to do with poetry; they would have undoubtedly been eulogized even if they had never written a line of verse.

• While Sidney is today best remembered for his poetry, at the time of his death almost all of this poetry remained unpublished, and he was much better known as a courtier, diplomat, military hero, and embodiment of the Renaissance man. Within a year of Sidney's untimely death at the age of 32, seven volumes of memorial verse appeared, including one collection from Cambridge and two from Oxford. These eulogies from immediately after his death make almost no mention of his poetical works, and in fact most of them are little more than hackwork. (The lot of them were reprinted in facsimile by Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints in 1980, edited by A. J. Colaianne and Bill Godshalk.) The eulogies for Sidney which have any poetic merit were not published until the 1590s and later, presumably after circulating in manuscript; the best-known of these, Spenser's Astrophil, was not published until 1595, nine years after Sidney's death.

• Like Sidney, John Donne is most famous today for his poetry, but in his own lifetime he was best known to the general public as a churchman and Dean of St. Paul's, an important position in Jacobean London. During his lifetime, several of his sermons and other theological writings were published, but his verse remained in manuscript except for a few anonymously printed poems. The year after Donne's death in 1631, a small quarto volume entitled Death's Duel was published, containing his last sermon along with eulogies by two of his fellow divines, Dr. Henry King and Dr. Henry Hyde. The following year, Donne's collected poems were finally published, along with a group of ten eulogies; the second edition in 1635 added three more. Some of these eulogies praise his poetry, but as a whole they are more concerned with his reputation as a learned preacher. Given that Donne had been relatively unknown and without steady employment before finally receiving Holy Orders in his early forties, it seems rather unlikely that he would have received such posthumous tributes because of his poetry alone.

• Sir John Beaumont was a poet like his brother Francis, but instead of writing for the rabble at the public theater, he cultivated friends at Court (his wife was related to the ill-fated Duke of Buckingham) and was eventually created a Baronet. The one poem of his published during his lifetime, The Metamorphosis of Tabacco, was printed anonymously. One year after Sir John's death in 1628, his son John Jr. brought out a collection of his poems entitled Bosworth-Field: With a Taste of the Variety of Other Poems. This included 13 eulogies Beaumont had written over the years for various people (including his brother Francis), as well as ten eulogies for Beaumont himself. Two years later, in 1631, William Colman's La Danse Macabre, or Death's Duel included a 24-line poem entitled "An Elegie upon the Honorable Sir John Beaumont, Knight Baronet."

• Fulke Greville had been a prominent courtier for decades, and was created Lord Brooke in 1621. He wrote some poetry and several plays, but these remained in manuscript until after his death (with the exception of his play Mustapha, printed anonymously in 1609). Two years after Greville was murdered in 1628, Martin Peerson's Mottects or Grave Chamber Musique contained a "Mourning Song on the Death of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke." (Greville had been Peerson's patron.)

• First, consider Edmund Spenser. Spenser was unquestionably regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest English poet since Chaucer; in fact, he was compared to Chaucer so often that it almost became a cliche. (Interested readers can consult Wells 1972 for examples.) Unlike the other three men, Spenser's fame was entirely due to his poetry (he was a civil servant all of his adult life), and unlike them his work had been published during his lifetime. Yet despite his much greater reputation as a poet, he received a small fraction of the printed eulogies that Sidney and Donne, or even Beaumont, had received. There was no organized collection of tributes. Instead, there was a poem by John Weever in 1599; a poem by Nicholas Breton, a Latin epitaph by William Camden, and a non-elegiac poem by Francis Thynne in 1600; a Latin poem by Charles Fitzgeoffrey in 1601 that doesn't actually refer to Spenser's death; three references to the death of "Collin" (Spenser's alter ego) in 1602-03; a two-line Latin poem by John Stradling in 1607; a couple of other passing references to Spenser in the past tense; and nothing else in the ten-year span after Spenser's death. This motley collection was by far the greatest collection of tributes to an untitled English poet, within five years after his death, until the Jonson volume nearly 40 years later; yet it is far surpassed by the organized tributes to Sidney, Donne, and Sir John Beaumont.

• Samuel Daniel was one of the most respected and best-known poets of Shakespeare's day; he was Poet Laureate under Elizabeth, and his works went through many editions during his lifetime. After Daniel died in 1619, the first notice of his death in the printed record is John Taylor's 1620 tribute to deceased English poets (quoted above), which also contains the first datable mention of the deaths of Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont. Daniel's collected works were published in 1623, edited by his brother John, but this volume contains no eulogies for the author. In fact, not a single eulogy for Samuel Daniel appeared in print during the entire seventeenth century, though he was mentioned along with other poets in several poems (such as Drayton's Battaile of Agincourt ).

• Michael Drayton was another of the most popular poets of his day, a year older than Shakespeare. He died late in 1631, but the exact date is not known. Ogburn (112) repeats a story that Drayton was honored with "a funeral procession to Westminster escorted by gentlemen of the Inns of Court and others of note." However, it turns out that the source for this story is an undated manuscript note by the antiquary William Fulman, who was born in 1632 -- the year after Drayton died (Newdigate, 219). By the standards Ogburn applies to posthumous stories about Shakespeare, he should have dismissed this Drayton story out of hand. No original poems in Drayton's honor appeared in print in the decade after his death, but two works did reprint the verses from his tomb in Westminster Abbey: the fifth edition of Camden's Remaines, with supplementary material by John Philipot (1637) and our old friend Wits Recreation (1640).

• Though George Chapman had written plays, he was best known in literary circles for his nondramatic poetry, particularly his translation of Homer. Chapman has the distinction of being the only nontitled poet between Spenser (1599) and Jonson (1637) to be eulogized in print within a year after his death. One year after his death in 1634, the second edition of his friend William Habington's Castara contained a poem in Chapman's memory. That was it, though; the only other posthumous poem to Chapman that I've been able to find in the seventeenth century is one in Wits Recreation that refers to him in the present tense.

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5. Other Not-so-Mysterious "Silences"

• Camden's Annales only covered the reign of Elizabeth; the first three books, published in 1615, covered 1558-1588, and the fourth book, published posthumously in 1627, covered 1589-1603. Since Shakespeare died in 1616, it's hardly surprising that a narrative which only goes up to 1603 should make no mention of the event. What the anonymous author of the Beginner's Guide probably meant to say was that John Stow's Annales, not Camden's, fails to mention Shakespeare's death in 1616. Stow first published his Annales in 1580, covering the entire history of England up to that year; later editions, appropriately updated, were published in 1592, 1600 and 1605. In the latter year Stow died at the age of 80, but that did not mean the end of his Annales: ten years later, in 1615, Edmund Howes came out with an updated edition which carried the narrative forward through 1614. It was in this edition that Howes listed contemporary poets, including "M. Willi. Shakespeare gentleman," but since Shakespeare's death was not to come for another year, we obviously shouldn't expect Howes to mention it.

  The next edition of the Annales did not appear until sixteen years later, in 1631. Sure enough, in the section on 1616, Shakespeare's death is not mentioned. But this is hardly surprising, because Stow/Howes do not mention the deaths of any poets or playwrights -- the only people whose deaths they mention are noblemen, bishops, and criminals who had been executed. They do not mention Spenser's death in 1599, or Beaumont's in 1616, or Fletcher's in 1625, or Marlowe's in 1593, or any of Shakespeare's illustrious contemporaries. (Stow does note the death of Sir Philip Sidney in 1586, but he was primarily known at the time as a courtier, war hero, and diplomat, and only incidentally as a poet.)

• There was no list of "Stratford Worthies of 1605," by Camden or anybody else. What the anonymous author is apparently referring to is the 1607 edition of Camden's Britannia, as cited by Ogburn and various other Oxfordians. To begin with, the first edition of this work was published in 1586, written entirely in Latin, with the full title of Britannia, sive florentissimorum regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae et insularum adjacentium ex intima antiquitae chorographica Descripto ("A description of features, to the earliest time of the powerful kings, of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the adjacent islands). As the title implies, it was a work of antiquarian scholarship, intended to give the history of the various areas of the British Isles, and not intended as a guide to the contemporary literary scene, or indeed any contemporary scene. After the first edition of 1586, further editions of Britannia came out in 1587, 1590, 1594, 1600, and 1607 (the only one Ogburn notes); an English translation by Philemon Holland appeared in 1610, with a second edition in 1637.^[3]

  In discussing Stratford, Camden mentions John de Stratford, the fourteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, and Hugh Clopton, the fifteenth-century Lord Mayor of London who built the bridge over the Avon (and who also built New Place). There is absolutely no reason to expect Camden to mention Shakespeare here; he only occasionally mentions living people (none below the rank of knight) and then only if they are descendants of some illustrious person from the past and/or if they live in some historic castle or manor which he's describing. Thus, after describing Hugh Clopton and the bridge he built in Stratford, Camden writes a bit about Clopton's lineage and notes (in the 1607 edition) that his most direct living descendants are two sisters, one of whom is married to Sir George Carew, Vicechamberlain to Queen Anne. Camden's Remaines of a greater work concerning Britain, the first edition of which was published in 1605, was intended as a supplement to Britannia, containing material not appropriate to an antiquarian work, including a discussion of literature. Here Camden does mention Shakespeare along with nine other contemporary poets.

6. Conclusion

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Notes

^[1] We don't know anything about Shakespeare's funeral, but it must have been reasonably elaborate, given that he was buried in the church proper rather than in the churchyard, and that a monument in his honor was put in the church. The only local anecdote about his death which has come down to us was written down 45 years later by John Ward. Shortly after he became vicar of Stratford in 1661, Ward wrote in his diary that "Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard for it seems Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted" (Chambers, II, 250). We have no way of knowing whether this anecdote is true, but it was obviously the story going around Stratford several decades after the fact, and it seems plausible enough.

^[2] Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller has a discussion of the Italian playwright Pietro Aretino which some (including Nicholl) have seen as an oblique tribute to Marlowe, though this is a matter of conjecture since his name is nowhere mentioned. "Gorgon," a poem by Gabriel Harvey published late in 1593 as an appendix to his New Letter of Notable Contents, has generally been taken to be about Marlowe's death, though it does not mention him by name either. Nicholl, however, argues persuasively that the poem is actually about the death of Peter Shakerley, a well-known eccentric habitue of St. Paul's churchyard whose name does appear in the poem, and who died days before it was written.

^[3] In 1695 Edward Gibson published another English translation of Camden's work, with additions; Gibson does mention Shakespeare in his section on Stratford, since by then Shakespeare was history rather than news.

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Sources

Anon. 1593. Greenes Newes Both from Heaven and from Hell. London: A. Charlwood. [STC 12259] [Facsimile reprint along with Barnfield 1594, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911]

Anon. 1640. Wits Recreations, Selected from the Finest Fancies of Modern Muses. London: R. Hodgkinson for H. Blunden. [STC 25870] [Facsimile reprint, Scholar Press, 1990]

Anon. 1996. "Beginner's Guide to the Shakespeare Authorship Problem." World Wide Web http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/guide.htm

Aubrey, John. 1949. Aubrey's Brief Lives. Ed. by Oliver Lawson Dick. London: Secker & Warburg.

Bancroft, Thomas. 1639. Two Books of Epigrammes, and Epitaphs. London: I. Okes for M.Walbancke. [STC 1354]

Barnfield, Richard. 1594. Greenes Funeralls. London: J. Danter. [STC 1487]

Beard, Thomas. 1597. The Theatre of God's Judgements. London: A. Islip.[STC 1659]

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Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. 1647. Comedies and Tragedies. London: H. Robinson and H. Moseley.

-----. 1854. The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher. Ed. by Alexander Dyce. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co.

Beaumont, John. 1602. The Metamorphosis of Tabacco. London: F. Kingston for J. Flasket. [STC 1695]

-----. 1629. Bosworth-Field: With a Taste of the Variety of Other Poems. London: F. Kyngston for H. Seile. [STC 1694]

-----. 1869. The Poems of Sir John Beaumont, Bart.. Ed. by Alexander B. Grosart. Printed for private circulation.

Camden, William. 1615. Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha, ad Annum Salutis MDLXXXIX. [STC 4496]

-----. 1627. Tomus Alter Annalium Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha. [STC 4496.5]

-----. 1586. Britannia sive florentissimorum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae chorographica descriptio. London: R. Newbery. [STC 4503]

-----. 1587. [2nd edition]. London: R. Newbery. [STC 4504]

-----. 1590. [3rd edition]. London: G. Bishop. [STC 4505]

-----. 1594. [4th edition]. London: G. Bishop. [STC 4506]

-----. 1600. [5th edition]. London: G. Bishop. [STC 4507]

-----. 1607. [6th edition]. London: G. Bishop & J. Norton. [STC 4508]

-----. 1610. Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands Adjoyning, out of the Depth of Antiquity. (translated by Philemon Holland) London: G. Bishop & J. Norton. [STC 4509]

-----. 1637. [2nd edition]. London: F.K., R.Y., and J.L. for A. Heb. [STC 4510]

-----. 1695. Camden's Britannia, newly translated into English: with large additions and improvements. (Translated by Edward Gibson) London: F. Collins for A. Swalle.

-----. 1605. Remaines of a greater worke, concerning Britain. London: G. Eld for S. Waterson. [STC 4521]

-----. 1614. [2nd edition] London: J. Legatt for S. Waterson. [STC 4522]

-----. 1623. [3rd edition] London: N. Okes for S. Waterson. [STC 4523]

-----. 1629. [4th edition] London: A. Islip for S. Waterson. [STC 4524]

-----. 1637. [5th edition; additions by John Philipot] London: T. Harper for J. Waterson. [STC 4526]

-----. 1657. [6th edition; additions by John Philpot]. London: Simon Miller.

Chambers, E. K. 1930. William Shakespeare: A Study of the Facts and Problems. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Colaianne, A. J., and William Godshalk, eds. 1980. Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney (1587): facsimile reproductions. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints.

Colman, William. 1632. La Danse Macabre, or Deaths Duel. London: W. Stansby [STC 5539]

Daniel, Samuel. 1623. The Whole Works of Samuel Daniel Esquire in Poetrie. London: N. Okes for S. Waterson.

D'Avenant, William. 1638. Madagascar, with other poems. London: J. Haviland for Thomas Walkly. [STC 6304]

Donne, John. 1632. Deaths Duell. London: T. Harper for R. Redmer and B. Fisher. [STC 7031]

-----. 1633. Poems, by J. D. With elegies on the authors death. London: M.F. for J. Marriot. [STC 7045]

-----. 1635. [2nd edition]. London: M.F. for J. Marriot. [STC 7046]

Drayton, Michael. 1627. Bataille of Agincourt. London: A. Mathewes for W. Lee. [STC 7190]

-----. 1941. The Works of Michael Drayton. Ed. by J. William Hebel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Duppa, Brian, ed. 1638. Jonsonus Virbius. London: E. Purslowe for H. Seile. [STC 14784]

Evans, Robert C. 1988. "'Whome None But Death Could Shake': An Unreported Epitaph on Shakespeare." Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 60.

Fletcher, John. 1639. Monsieur Thomas. London: T. Harper for J. Waterson. [STC 11071]

Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke. 1870. The Works in Verse and Prose Complete of the Right Honorable Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Ed. by Alexander B. Grosart. Printed for private circulation.

Grosart, Alexander B. 1869. "Memorial-Introduction" in Beaumont 1869.

-----. 1870. "Memorial-Introduction" in Greville 1870.

Gurr, Andrew. 1996. The Shakespearean Playing Companies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Habington, William. 1635. Castara. 2nd edition. [STC 12584]

Harvey, Gabriel. 1592. Three Letters, and Certaine Sonnets. London: J. Wolfe. [STC 12899.5]

-----. 1593. A New Letter of Notable Contents. London: J. Wolfe. [STC 12902]

Herford, C.H., and Percy Simpson, eds. Ben Jonson. Volumes I & II: The Man and His Work. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Heywood, Thomas. 1635. Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels. London: A. Islip. [STC 13327]

Hotson, Leslie. 1937. I, William Shakespeare. London: Jonathan Cape.

Jenkins, Harold. 1934. The Life and Works of Henry Chettle. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

Jonson, Ben. 1616. The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. London: W. Stansby. [STC 14751]

Meres, Francis. 1598. Palladis Tamia, or The Wits Treasury. London: C. Burbie. [STC 17834]

Milton, John. 1645. Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, Composed at Several Times. London: R. Raworth for H. Mosedey.

Nashe, Thomas. 1594. The Unfortunate Traveller. London: T. Scarlet for C. Burby. [STC 18380]

Newdigate, Bernard. 1941. Michael Drayton and His Circle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Nicholl, Charles. 1992. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. Harcourt Brace & Company.

Ogburn, Charlton. 1992. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth & the Reality. 2nd edition. McLean, VA: EPM Publications.

Peele, George. 1593. The Honour of the Garter. London: A. Charlwood for J. Busbie. [STC 19539]

Peerson, Martin. 1630. Mottects or Grave Chamber Musique. London: W. Stansby. [STC 19552]

Shakespeare, William. 1623. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. London: I. Jaggard and E. Blount. [STC 22273]

-----. 1632. [2nd edition]. London: T. Cotes for R. Allot. [STC 22274]

-----. 1640. Poems. London: T. Cotes for J. Benson. [STC 22344]

Spenser, Edmund. 1595. "Astrophil." In Colin Clouts Come Home Again. London: T. Creede for W. Ponsonbie. [STC 23077]

Stow, John. 1580. The Chronicles of England. London: R. Newberry for H. Binneman. [STC 23333]

-----. 1592. Anneles of England [2nd edition of the above]. London: R. Newberry. [STC 23334]

-----. 1600. [3rd edition]. London: R. Newberry. [STC 23335]

-----. 1605. [4th edition]. London: G. Bishop and T. Adams. [STC 23337]

-----. 1615. [5th edition, continued by Edmund Howes]. London: T. Adams. [STC 23338]

-----. 1631. [6th edition, continued by Edmund Howes]. London: R. Meighen. [STC 23340]

Taylor, John. 1620. The Praise of Hemp-seed. London: E. Allde for H. Gosson. [STC 23788]

-----. 1637. A Funerall Elegie, in Memory of the Rare, Famous, and Admired Poet, Mr. Benjamin Jonson, Deceased. London: E. Purslowe for H. Gosson. [STC 23759]

Vaughan, William. 1600. The Golden-Grove, Moralized in Three Books. London: S. Stafford. [STC 24610]

Ward, B. M. 1928. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604. London: John Murray.

Wells, William, ed. 1972. Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor. 1987. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford University Press.

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