"Shakespeare" the East Anglian: Hawks, Handsaws & Hamlet

In 2006 Greg Hancock, a reader from Coburg, Ontario, sent an email to the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Bulletin sharing his revelation that Hamlet's enigmatic line "When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually derives from hawking lingo popular in East Anglia -- where Edward de Vere was born and spent part of his childhood.

Today, Mr. Hancock sent an update on this fine little nugget. Thanks to Google Books, he uncovered a fuller explanation of what Hamlet is talking about.

"Harnsa" (phonetic spelling) was East Anglian slang for a heron. When a hawk chases a "harnsa," the heron often flies with the wind to escape its predator. When the wind is from the south, the sun is at the hunter's back, so he can easily differentiate between his bird and his bird's prey. (By contrast, when the wind is from the north, the hunter might have to squint into the sun -- and would have a harder time telling the difference between the two birds.)  

What the commentator (from H.H. Furness's 1877 edition of Hamlet) doesn't say, however, is that the gloss only holds if the author of Hamlet's line knows East Anglian regional dialect -- and, presumably, has some experience hawking in that part of the country. De Vere, yes. Will of Stratford? Another misfit. 

In Mr. Hancock's words:

Basically the important point is that a heron or hernsew is pronounced "harnsa" in Norfolk and Suffolk, which together constitute East Anglia.  East Anglia is only about 150 miles from Stratford on Avon, but even in 2011 it is culturally and linguistically in a different country. ... It was presumably the same in the 16th century.

The Earl of Oxford was of course brought up in Suffolk, so he would have understood.  It is very unlikely Stratford Shakespeare would have been familiar with Suffolk dialect, or would have [understood] written references to it.

It is pleasing to me that the reference to a handsaw had been correctly identified as being a "harnsa" or heron before 1877 by a Fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge, and as such gives a little more academic credibility to the theory.

His original email to the SBAN Bulletin is below, after the jump. 

This. Looks. Big. (pt. 2)

Sony Pictures released its second Anonymous trailer last week. US & UK release dates are still set for Oct. 28. (Other worldwide release dates are here.) 

[Aug. 17 addendum: The movie's international trailer was also recently released: More dialogue snippets, less short-attention-span smashcutting between visual baubles. (Ahem, not the most flattering commentary about American audiences, no?) Clearly providing more hints about the movie's storyline. Facebook discussion about all the above here.]

Anonymous questions: Did Queen Elizabeth have children?

[Aug. 9, 2011 EXCLUSIVE: See below for a crucial clarifying point from the screenwriter of Anonymous.]

In our sexually enlightened (obsessed?) times, discovering that a female monarch was once celebrated as "the Virgin Queen" immediately calls the pronouncement itself into question. Doth the lady protest too much?

The chaste public image campaign of the (ostensibly) childless spinster Queen Elizabeth I -- selling her to English Catholic revolutionaries as something like a royal, secular Virgin Mary -- was a piece of pure agitprop. And a brilliant one at that, engineered in no small part by her political genius of a chief counselor, William Cecil, Baron Burghley.

Queen Elizabeth was a woman with her own private sexual appetites. And no doubt like anyone else, some were fulfilled, some not. But, as portrayed considered in the movie Anonymous (and stated as fact by a host of Oxfordian and even Baconian books over the decades), the story of the Bard is allegedly one of almost unspeakable Elizabethan desires: Royal incest. Elizabeth, these claims state, was mother to "Shakespeare" and lover of "Shakespeare" who then produced a child by "Shakespeare."

The movie's director Roland Emmerich (2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) has never been known to let the facts get in the way of a blockbuster storyline. The man has a track record for getting millions of butts into movie seats all over the planet. So let me not here be guilty of pettifogging a tub of popcorn.

On the other hand, the latest book that does unequivocally assert the royal incest theory of Oxford, Elizabeth and Southampton  that, by all accounts I can find, inspired the royal incest storyline in Anonymous is Charles Beauclerk's Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom. That's a book purporting to present a lost history of the Elizabethan court. That's fair game for more serious debate.

Nowhere have I seen a more thorough consideration of SLK than in Christopher Paul's review [PDF] in the 2011 edition of the online journal Brief Chronicles. Anyone interested in the so-called "Prince Tudor" debate would be well advised to familiarize themselves with Paul's characteristically cogent analysis.

Memo to an Internet Critic - huff and puff and tweak the wording

At the end of October when it debuts in cinemas worldwide, the movie Anonymous will undoubtedly bring many new eyes and ears to the Shakespeare authorship mystery.

In the meantime, movie fan sites like IMDB have been hosting ongoing online debates that are never short on definitive opinions stated definitively. (Film nerds are not known to be shrinking violets when it comes to expressing their point of view.)

In one recent conflagration, I was called out for being "completely wrong" and "completely clueless." Other adverb-laden barbs loudly and boisterously made their presence known too.  

So what was the critique? It concerned a sentence I wrote in a 2006 online discussion forum about my book. (The same sentence also appeared in Appendix C of "Shakespeare" By Another Name -- "The 1604 Question.")

As I'm now in the midst of making some minor edits to the next edition of SBAN that will be appearing in September -- more on that soon -- I wanted all the more to know exactly what I'd gotten wrong in Appendix C so I could make the correction. 

The critic's contention and my examination of his contention follows after the jump.

Who Was "Shakespeare"? - The Essay Contest

This year the two major American Oxfordian membership organizations -- The Shakespeare Fellowship and the Shakespeare Oxford Society -- are sponsoring an essay contest for high school students (or those who graduated from high school in 2011).

The four possible essay topics involve considering if the authorship debate is based on valid evidence and if it matters; analyzing the movie Anonymous; and (its one not-strictly-authorship-related question) discussing the role and significance of the Shakespearean heroines. 

The Shakespeare Fellowship has posted a gallery of winners and honorable mentions from 2002. Contest rules and details for this year are here (PDF). 

The prize values are $1000 for first, $800 for second, $600 for third and three $200 honorable mentions. If you're a high school English or history teacher or know one please consider/pass along this blog post.  Previous years have seen upwards of 600 entrants, and with the attention Anonymous will bring to the topic, that number may well go up this year. 

This is a great way to engage the next generation of Shakespeare fans and students about that "fine mystery" (as Charles Dickens put it) about the Bard's identity. "I tremble every day," Dickens continued, "Lest something should come out." 

Creative Commons image by Keith Williamson 

Sir Derek Jacobi and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford a.k.a. "Shakespeare"

"...A piece many years in doing and now perfectly perform'd."

–The Winter's Tale

On Thursday night at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, I had the great pleasure and honor of helping present a noteworthy statute to Sir Derek Jacobi at a benefit fundraiser for the newly launched theatrical company The Ensemble Theatre Company of New York. 

Jacobi is fresh off a widely acclaimed run as perhaps the greatest King Lear of our time -- one that brought him this spring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (He also serves as the narrator of this fall's Oxfordian feature film Anonymous.) 

Thanks to some stealthy planning and gracious goodwill (see acknowledgments below), my co-conspirator Gerit Quealy and I had set beneath a concealing veil the very first ready-for-primetime Edward de Vere bust from the entrepreneur Ben August and sculptor Paula Slater. (The story of the de Vere bust was blogged about here and here.) 

At the completion of the evening's program celebrating the legendary Shakespearean actor -- and longtime Oxfordian advocate -- we were generously allowed to include a surprise presentation of the de Vere bust to Jacobi. 

The five-minute presentation featured Quealy, who'd originally conceived of bestowing the statue on Jacobi, recalling the recipient's peerless Prospero and Lear. She said in her experience as an actor, the finest practitioners of the craft are forever searching for new windows on the truth. My contribution concerned great artists being unafraid to take big and sometimes controversial risks. (I wrote the remarks beforehand but tossed it out the window almost completely when the moment came. The one thing preserved word-for-word, though, was a poignant and funny Bertrand Russell quote -- someone else's quip, yes, but it still gave this admitted fanboy a thrill to say something witty enough to make one of his heroes laugh out loud.) 

Jacobi was surprised, touched and most grateful for a bust of the Bard that he could claim as "Shakespeare." 

Hamlet, Elsinore and an exploded world

Yesterday, NASA posted as its Astronomy Picture of the Day an x-ray image of something called "Tycho's Supernova Remnant." (Pictured here) What the copy didn't mention is this astronomical object is also arguably known as "yond same star that's westward from the pole" in Hamlet. 

Yet it's predictably opaque and inexplicable why Shakespeare of Stratford (if he were the author of the play) would make such a seemingly random association between an old exploded star and a Danish fable whose inspiration supposedly derived from some kind of nominal homage to his recently deceased son Hamnet. (The boy was named after a Stratford neighbor of Shakspere's, Hamnet Sadler.) 

On the other hand, the allusion fits comfortably within a broader framework that supposes Edward de Vere behind the "Shakespeare" pen. 

Here's the story. 

It's hard to imagine today, but in 1572 when the light from this stellar explosion first became visible on Earth, it was a world-shaking event. Here was a new star -- not on any previous charts -- so brilliant that it was visible even in the full brightness of day. 

There was, simply, no cosmic or scientific explanation for such an unprecedented heavenly phenomenon.  

In England, the mathematician Thomas Digges studied the "new star" and wrote a book about it. Digges dedicated his book to Edward de Vere's new father-in-law Lord Burghley. In Denmark, the legendary astronomer Tycho Brahe made the most precise observations of the object in the world. Thus the object's modern-day name. 

This new star, in effect, upended everything. It provided damning confirmation of an emerging scientific understanding of a dynamic universe. Under the prevailing Ptolemaic system -- which posited all heavenly bodies were unchanging and firmly fixed in place -- such nearly unimaginable notions were heresy. 

Hamlet's reference to Tycho's Supernova (as it's known today) at the beginning of the Danish tragedy, in fact, constitutes a perfect setup to a cosmological debate that takes place throughout the drama. 

Hamlet, in fact, enacts a specific astronomical dispute that Edward de Vere arguably witnessed first-hand in 1583. (Worst case scenario: De Vere did not witness the back-and-forth at Oxford University himself but was privy to courtly gossip about it at the time and enjoyed ample insider access to every detail after the fact.) 

The debate was about old worldviews colliding with new — a familiar and comforting geocentric universe colliding with Copernicus's revolutionary heliocentric one. Hamlet, however, goes into more specific detail concerning both the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (a geocentrist) and the obscure 1583 court appearance of a bombastic Italian scholar (a Copernican) named Giordano Bruno.

There is no explanation for how a 19-year-old Shakspere of Stratford would have witnessed, read about or even cared about this esoteric, egghead dispute, one that was certainly antithetical to crowd-pleasing entertainments at the Globe Theatre. (And that's what we're told a Stratfordian Shakespeare canon is all about.) 

After the jump, two excerpts from "Shakespeare" By Another Name that pick up the story where Tycho's Supernova Remnant leaves off.