Have you heard of Samuel Crowell's "William Fortyhands"? He argues that there was not a single author of Shakespeare's plays, but instead Shakespeare was a producer who hired people like Robert Greene to write plays, then had them rewritten to appeal more to audiences (like Samuel Pepys', whose favorite parts of Shakespeare's plays are things absent from published versions now). https://www.ninebandedbooks.com/shop/book/william-fortyhands-disintegration-and-reinvention-of-the-shakespeare-canon/
I haven't read it, but Crowell is certainly correct that Shakespeare and company (like Henslowe and company at the Rose) hired numerous playwrights. So, in a way, it was kind of like Disney. Walt Disney had all these hired cartoonists and writers--but it was Disney's name going on the productions because that's who the people knew. (I'll answer this more thoroughly tomorrow, but great point.)
Here’s my issue with the court plays theory. When Marlowe debuted Tamburlaine circa 1587, it was greeted as an innovation. Marlowe himself announced as much in his opening lines: "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war." His fluent blank verse avoided the end-stopped lines and singsong accentuations of earlier poetry, his characters were larger than life, and their oratory was (sometimes tediously) grandiose. The play was a sensation and was quickly imitated by inferior playwrights like Robert Greene.
If Shakespeare had been writing court plays for more than a decade earlier, in anything like the form in which we know them, then he also had mastered this freer form of blank verse coupled to large themes and high-flown rhetoric, in which case Marlowe wasn’t doing anything new. At the time, however, Kit and his contemporaries clearly believed that he had ushered in a whole new style. This suggests to me that the court plays were comparatively primitive works like Gorboduc, and not likely to resemble the Shakespearean canon.
It is possible to argue that the court plays were always more sophisticated, and that Marlowe's innovation lay only in bringing this level of quality to the public stage. But we don’t have any examples of plays with Marlowe's style of blank verse that are unambiguously pre-1587, so this supposition is unsupported by evidence. And the contemporary reaction to Tamburlaine, even among other poets and playwrights, suggests that no one had seen anything like it before.
Finally, (Part 3 of my response), you are absolutely right that many of North's plays of the 1550s, 1560s, and 1570s were originally in end-stopped rhyme--but then he began changing them to freer blank verse by the 1580s. Indeed, it is indisputable that both Romeo and Juliet and Richard II were originally written in end-stopped rhyme and then were altered from their original form. That’s why so many of their lines still contain end-stopped rhyme—and why we find lines with what Dover-Wilson called “internal rhymes.” That is, the author merely rearranged the line so the rhyme didn’t fall at the end of the line.
Excellent and thought-provoking response. I’ll need time to digest it before I can reply in any depth. Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed answer.
First off, I was wrong in saying Marlowe’s fellow writers explicitly praised Tamburlaine as highly original. I had this impression because the play was immediately imitated by lesser talents, notably Greene, and because the play was often cited or name-checked in contemporary or slightly later writings. All of this is consistent with the play being seen as original (generally, the work that sets the trend is the one that’s imitated and remembered), but it’s not proof that other writers saw Marlowe's *style* as something new. There are possible indications of this (in 1597 Joseph Hall wrote, "One higher pitched doth set his soaring thought On crowned kings that Fortune hath brought low, etc.," in reference to Tamburlaine, suggesting that the play and its sequel were still seen as the basic "type" of the high-flown drama about royal tragedy, and many writers commented on the play's soaring rhetoric —Marlowe's "mighty line" — which suggests that such bombast wasn’t typical, at least), but nothing definitive.
Your point about end-stopped lines in Romeo and Juliet, and how some lines were reworded, is interesting and does point to a comparatively early origin. Some of the pro-North arguments strike me as doubtful, though. The Jasper Heywood quote is intriguing, but it can be read as distinguishing between playwrights (first two sentences) and prose writers (third sentence), as though one were to say, "There are many talented writers of tragic plays … and then there are other talented writers, as well, such as the translator of The Dial." I don’t think we’re at the point where we can confidently assign the Ur-Hamlet to North; it’s usually given to Kyd, I think, although this is speculation.
I’m in the minority in believing that Groatsworth was a sustained attack on Ned Alleyn, whom Greene had worked for and probably owed money to. I do think Greene wrote the pamphlet; he was just mean-spirited enough to spend his dying days churning out malicious gossip. Alleyn was publicly associated with the "tiger's heart" line, inasmuch as he had produced and starred in the play (and probably delivered the line onstage), and he had tried his hand at play-writing (apparently he thought he was able to bombast out a blank verse as well as anybody). He was referred to as "the cobbler's crow" (by Nashe, I think) — the cobbler being Marlowe, son of a shoemaker, and crow being a slang term for a strutting, cawing actor. This, I think, is the meaning of "upstart crow." ("Beautified by our feathers" need not mean the crow is a plagiarist, only that he owes his famous roles to the writers who created them.) The Roberto in Greene's story, who meets a strolling player-producer, is Robert Greene himself, and the wealthy player was Alleyn who, as the premiere actor of that time, London's "Roscius," would have been immediately recognized by the reader. As for "Shake-Scene," I think it’s a hit at Alleyn's thunderous line delivery, which would shake the stage. The name Shakespeare would have been unknown to Greene's readers (it did not appear in print until the following year), and Greene wrote to be understood, even if he preserved a degree of plausible deniability. There’s no indication that William Shaksper had become famous in theatrical circles, or wealthy, at that time, so I very much doubt Greene would’ve parodied him as a well-dressed impresario — even if Will had gallivanted about town in fine clothes (for which there’s no evidence), Greene's readership wouldn’t have gotten the reference, since Alleyn was the far more obvious choice.
Your points about Prince Harry/Hal are intriguing. You go a long way toward establishing an early date for the trilogy.
Your knowledge on the issue is formidable -- and your argument reasonable and well-researched. But we do disagree on this issue. I do have a paper coming out in a peer reviewed journal that does confirm that not just Nashe--but Jonson and Lodge were clearly referencing North as the original author of Hamlet (and RJ, Timon of Athens, Much Ado, and JC). I believe this will likely get a some press (as we use AI for one of the analyses.) I also believe I have confirmed that North and Shakespeare are clearly the gentleman-writer and player-patron in Groatsworth -- and North is one of the three gentleman scholars warned about Shakespeare in the letter. In fact, this is why I even started studying North in the first place -- and why I have since found so many manuscripts of North that were used for Shakespeare's plays (as well as the thousands of unique parallel lines and passages.) In other words, the identity of the Ur-Hamlet came first -- and all the related discoveries afterward.
I look forward to that article, which certainly promises to be a breakthrough. And I concede that most scholars think "Shake-scene" was Shakespeare, a natural enough assumption. The Ned Alleyn interpretation is definitely a minority view. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, the use of beast fables in Groatsworth could point to North, given that he had translated a collection of beast fables. The more I study this subject, the less certain I am of anything! But I hope to attain a kundalini moment of clarity someday. 😀
My pleasure, Michael. I have a lot more too. (For example, it is fairly clear that the opening sonnet of the chorus in Romeo and Juliet is from the original 1561-2 version--and is even echoed in 1571. There's a lot of evidence to that effect). But yours is an important question -- and really would take a chapter to answer in depth. I think I might devote a full post to it at some point.
Here is another example (part 2 of my response), confirming that the Prince Harry trilogy was completed by the early 1580s [This is from an unpublished work -- and it follows a great number of well known allusions by Thomas Nashe to the King Harry plays--1, 2 Henry IV and Henry V ...]
"Have with you' has numerous other references to 1 and 2 Henry IV. The most obvious occurs in an attack on Harvey in which Nashe is ridiculing the different kinds of verse with which he was most familiar when he was a younger man—and that includes the blank verse version of the King Harry plays: “Indeed, in old King Harry sincerity, a kind of verse it is, he [Harvey] hath been enfeoffed in from his minority, for as I have been faithfully informed he first cried in that verse in the very moment of his birth, and when he was but yet a freshman in Cambridge, he set up Si quisses & sent his accounts to his father in those jolting heroics.” (4).
As Penny McCarthy argues, this is a reference to the plays on Henry IV and Henry V. Nashe not only makes other allusions to these plays in the work; he also forces the rare word enfeoffed into an obvious rhyming echo. “Enfeoffed in from his minority” is a takeoff on Henry IV’s line to and about his young son, “Enfeoff’d himself to popularity” (1 Henry IV 3.2.69). Both lines refer to young, impressionable men being too influenced by their disreputable surroundings. The play also uses “Harry” as the nickname for the young king, and scholars to this day use the same moniker for the subject of these canonical history plays. Phyllis N. Braxton’s exploration of the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff, for example, is titled “Such A King Harry,” itself taken from Michael Drayton’s Henry V-inspired poem, The Battle of Agincourt (1606), the last lines of which ask “O when Shall … England breed again / Such a King Harry?”
Importantly, Nashe is explicitly describing King Harry as a work of verse—indeed, one that had been adapted by someone else. Nashe also uses the word "sincerity" in its now obsolete sense to refer to a genuine, original, and authorial text. The OED records this literary definition: “Genuineness (of a passage). Obs.” and offers the following example: “Though this [passage] … be nowhere now to be found in those extant Tragedies of this Poet … yet the sincerity thereof, cannot reasonably be at all suspected by us.” This is the only possible meaning in Nashe’s comment: “old King Harry sincerity …” means “the old King Harry, the original,” the first, authorial, genuine play on King Harry, as distinguished from its more recent adaptation (i.e., The Famous Victories of Henry V). In the Prologue to Cynthia’s Revels, Nashe’s friend and co-satirist, Ben Jonson, makes the same distinction between the original and more recent adaptation of Jeronimo, mocking the self-styled theatre critic who “swears … that the old Hieronomo (as it was first acted) was the only best and judiciously-penned Play of Europe.” Old and as it was first acted distinguishes the original 1580s version of the play from its more recent staged adaptation. As with “old Hieronomo,” “old King Harry” can only refer to the old version of the play, not the actual person, as King Harry himself was never remotely old. Throughout the trilogy, he is portrayed as a rambunctious young prince and youthful and vibrant king—and he died at age 35. Again, it is the old play that Nashe is referring to and paraphrasing.
Regardless, Nashe’s description of its being a kind of verse, coupled with his pointed spoof of North’s phrase enfeoffed himself to popularity in an admonition to a young man succumbing to peer pressure, as well as the allusions to Hotspurs and Buckram Giants, the puns on Oldcastle and his size, and the many other parallel passages recorded by Dover Wilson, McCarthy, Tobin, and others, prove that the original, verse plays about Henry IV and Henry V did include these parodied lines, phrases, descriptions, and scenes—and had been completed when Harvey was still a young man (e.g., by early 1580s). The original was much like the one we know today. As indicated in Chapter 9, in 1579 Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey discussed A Jew of Venice. Here, Nashe was also underscoring Harvey’s early familiarity with North’s history plays, contending that, as a young man, Harvey, inspired by North’s blank verse plays, attempted such “jolting heroics.” And even this description recalls Nashe’s and Harvey’s other North- and Shakespeare-related comments about the swelling, bragging, brave, and puissant style of verse. In the preface to Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe refers to the Italianate translator’s plays as filled with the “swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.” Likewise, in Groatsworth, Nashe complains to the three gentleman scholars that Shake-scene “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you” (21). In A New Praise of the Old Ass, Harvey describes the title-character’s works of “doughtiest puissance or worthiest valour” (67). All these descriptions are synonymous with verse in “jolting heroics.”
In summary, we know that the latter histories on the Prince Hal trilogy were penned by the early 1590s (indeed early 1580s) because of the many allusions to them in the Nashe-Harvey pamphlet wars. We know that Nashe was following the dramatist and not the other way around because (a) the allusions appear as puns and forced jokes in Nashean satires that also spoof other literary works, while in the canon they are authentically historical elements derived from Hall and Holinshed; (b) Nashe refers to the original King Harry plays as a work of verse in “jolting heroics”; (c) Nashe spoofs a line in the play enfeoffed himself to popularity, confirming that was part of the original work; (d) Harvey quotes some of Nashe’s allusions and accuses him of using them in reference to another writer; (e) Nashe even admits that his quotations about 1 and 2 Henry IV and Midas have literary precedence in “foreign writers,” a frequent jab at North and Lyly. Indeed, Nashe even contends that Harvey was aware of these plays when a young man.
All this confirms what we earlier learned from Philip Sidney’s references to 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V, along with the Henry VI plays, Pericles, and Coriolanus, in his Defense of Poesy (1582), and from the Chorus in Henry V, which alludes to and rebuts Sidney’s attacks and refers to an Irish rebellion that can only be the Captain MacMorris rebellion. All this fits seamlessly into the life of North, who penned the “jolting heroics” of the King Harry plays in 1581-82 when he was a captain of troops trying to quash the Captain MacMorris rebellion in Ireland (1579-83).
Great question. This requires a much longer repsonse, but they won’t let me comment at such length. First, can you please cite a few examples of contemporary literati referencing Marlowe's works as being revolutionary (I do think that's an over interpretation based on the fact scholars believe Marlowe’s works were revolutionary and so interpret comments in that fashion). Regardless, it would help if we can compare 1580s, early 1590s comments on Marlowe and references to North's writing and his early plays -- to see who really received greater praise at the respective time of their penning, especially regarding their originality.
Importantly, there are numerous commendatory comments about North and his plays—but they just have not been widely recognized for what they are. For example, Brooke references the first "Romeo and Juliet" in 1562: as “lately set forth on stage with more commendation than I can look for — being there much better set forth than I have or can do." Now, if this version had been recognized as North's and as something far closer to the extant "Romeo and Juliet," all scholars would be interpreting these lines as proof of North's extraordinary abilities and that Brooke was signaling a new and powerful playwright had appeared in Elizabethan England.
In fact, two years earlier, Jasper Heywood does the same thing, praising North’s ability with tragedy – and placing him at the top of the list of best tragedians:
In Lincoln’s Inn and Temples twain, Gray’s Inn and other mo’
Thou shalt them find whose painful pen* thy verse shall flourish so,
That Melpomen**, thou would’st well ween, had taught them for to write
And all their works with stately style and goodly grace t’indite.
There shalt thou see the self-same North, whose work his wit displays,
And Dial doth of Princes paint, and preach abroad his praise.
**Melpomen: Muse of Tragedy; *Painful pen: Skill at writing tragedies
Moreover, Nashe, Harvey, Jonson and others also repeatedly describe North as an original playwright that others frequently imitated—especially noting his blank verse (and his fearless violations of the classical unities—which some considered barbaric). Nashe’s 1589 reference to the “swelling bombast of bragging blank verse” of the Italianate translator of Plutarch is clearly referring to North. Nashe also describes his Hamlet as yielding “many good sentences” and filled with “tragical speeches.” These comments just have not been recognized for what they are because scholars didn’t know the identity of the author the literati were referencing and simply couldn’t believe they're really alluding to Shakespearean plays. I have many other examples like this.
The text is, as always, concise and persuasive. But since I’ve already read your book, what I find really impressive is the production values you’ve added to this presentation- the real artwork and the AI generated ones really add punch!
Have you heard of Samuel Crowell's "William Fortyhands"? He argues that there was not a single author of Shakespeare's plays, but instead Shakespeare was a producer who hired people like Robert Greene to write plays, then had them rewritten to appeal more to audiences (like Samuel Pepys', whose favorite parts of Shakespeare's plays are things absent from published versions now). https://www.ninebandedbooks.com/shop/book/william-fortyhands-disintegration-and-reinvention-of-the-shakespeare-canon/
I haven't read it, but Crowell is certainly correct that Shakespeare and company (like Henslowe and company at the Rose) hired numerous playwrights. So, in a way, it was kind of like Disney. Walt Disney had all these hired cartoonists and writers--but it was Disney's name going on the productions because that's who the people knew. (I'll answer this more thoroughly tomorrow, but great point.)
Here’s my issue with the court plays theory. When Marlowe debuted Tamburlaine circa 1587, it was greeted as an innovation. Marlowe himself announced as much in his opening lines: "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war." His fluent blank verse avoided the end-stopped lines and singsong accentuations of earlier poetry, his characters were larger than life, and their oratory was (sometimes tediously) grandiose. The play was a sensation and was quickly imitated by inferior playwrights like Robert Greene.
If Shakespeare had been writing court plays for more than a decade earlier, in anything like the form in which we know them, then he also had mastered this freer form of blank verse coupled to large themes and high-flown rhetoric, in which case Marlowe wasn’t doing anything new. At the time, however, Kit and his contemporaries clearly believed that he had ushered in a whole new style. This suggests to me that the court plays were comparatively primitive works like Gorboduc, and not likely to resemble the Shakespearean canon.
It is possible to argue that the court plays were always more sophisticated, and that Marlowe's innovation lay only in bringing this level of quality to the public stage. But we don’t have any examples of plays with Marlowe's style of blank verse that are unambiguously pre-1587, so this supposition is unsupported by evidence. And the contemporary reaction to Tamburlaine, even among other poets and playwrights, suggests that no one had seen anything like it before.
Finally, (Part 3 of my response), you are absolutely right that many of North's plays of the 1550s, 1560s, and 1570s were originally in end-stopped rhyme--but then he began changing them to freer blank verse by the 1580s. Indeed, it is indisputable that both Romeo and Juliet and Richard II were originally written in end-stopped rhyme and then were altered from their original form. That’s why so many of their lines still contain end-stopped rhyme—and why we find lines with what Dover-Wilson called “internal rhymes.” That is, the author merely rearranged the line so the rhyme didn’t fall at the end of the line.
Excellent and thought-provoking response. I’ll need time to digest it before I can reply in any depth. Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed answer.
First off, I was wrong in saying Marlowe’s fellow writers explicitly praised Tamburlaine as highly original. I had this impression because the play was immediately imitated by lesser talents, notably Greene, and because the play was often cited or name-checked in contemporary or slightly later writings. All of this is consistent with the play being seen as original (generally, the work that sets the trend is the one that’s imitated and remembered), but it’s not proof that other writers saw Marlowe's *style* as something new. There are possible indications of this (in 1597 Joseph Hall wrote, "One higher pitched doth set his soaring thought On crowned kings that Fortune hath brought low, etc.," in reference to Tamburlaine, suggesting that the play and its sequel were still seen as the basic "type" of the high-flown drama about royal tragedy, and many writers commented on the play's soaring rhetoric —Marlowe's "mighty line" — which suggests that such bombast wasn’t typical, at least), but nothing definitive.
Your point about end-stopped lines in Romeo and Juliet, and how some lines were reworded, is interesting and does point to a comparatively early origin. Some of the pro-North arguments strike me as doubtful, though. The Jasper Heywood quote is intriguing, but it can be read as distinguishing between playwrights (first two sentences) and prose writers (third sentence), as though one were to say, "There are many talented writers of tragic plays … and then there are other talented writers, as well, such as the translator of The Dial." I don’t think we’re at the point where we can confidently assign the Ur-Hamlet to North; it’s usually given to Kyd, I think, although this is speculation.
I’m in the minority in believing that Groatsworth was a sustained attack on Ned Alleyn, whom Greene had worked for and probably owed money to. I do think Greene wrote the pamphlet; he was just mean-spirited enough to spend his dying days churning out malicious gossip. Alleyn was publicly associated with the "tiger's heart" line, inasmuch as he had produced and starred in the play (and probably delivered the line onstage), and he had tried his hand at play-writing (apparently he thought he was able to bombast out a blank verse as well as anybody). He was referred to as "the cobbler's crow" (by Nashe, I think) — the cobbler being Marlowe, son of a shoemaker, and crow being a slang term for a strutting, cawing actor. This, I think, is the meaning of "upstart crow." ("Beautified by our feathers" need not mean the crow is a plagiarist, only that he owes his famous roles to the writers who created them.) The Roberto in Greene's story, who meets a strolling player-producer, is Robert Greene himself, and the wealthy player was Alleyn who, as the premiere actor of that time, London's "Roscius," would have been immediately recognized by the reader. As for "Shake-Scene," I think it’s a hit at Alleyn's thunderous line delivery, which would shake the stage. The name Shakespeare would have been unknown to Greene's readers (it did not appear in print until the following year), and Greene wrote to be understood, even if he preserved a degree of plausible deniability. There’s no indication that William Shaksper had become famous in theatrical circles, or wealthy, at that time, so I very much doubt Greene would’ve parodied him as a well-dressed impresario — even if Will had gallivanted about town in fine clothes (for which there’s no evidence), Greene's readership wouldn’t have gotten the reference, since Alleyn was the far more obvious choice.
Your points about Prince Harry/Hal are intriguing. You go a long way toward establishing an early date for the trilogy.
Your knowledge on the issue is formidable -- and your argument reasonable and well-researched. But we do disagree on this issue. I do have a paper coming out in a peer reviewed journal that does confirm that not just Nashe--but Jonson and Lodge were clearly referencing North as the original author of Hamlet (and RJ, Timon of Athens, Much Ado, and JC). I believe this will likely get a some press (as we use AI for one of the analyses.) I also believe I have confirmed that North and Shakespeare are clearly the gentleman-writer and player-patron in Groatsworth -- and North is one of the three gentleman scholars warned about Shakespeare in the letter. In fact, this is why I even started studying North in the first place -- and why I have since found so many manuscripts of North that were used for Shakespeare's plays (as well as the thousands of unique parallel lines and passages.) In other words, the identity of the Ur-Hamlet came first -- and all the related discoveries afterward.
I look forward to that article, which certainly promises to be a breakthrough. And I concede that most scholars think "Shake-scene" was Shakespeare, a natural enough assumption. The Ned Alleyn interpretation is definitely a minority view. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, the use of beast fables in Groatsworth could point to North, given that he had translated a collection of beast fables. The more I study this subject, the less certain I am of anything! But I hope to attain a kundalini moment of clarity someday. 😀
My pleasure, Michael. I have a lot more too. (For example, it is fairly clear that the opening sonnet of the chorus in Romeo and Juliet is from the original 1561-2 version--and is even echoed in 1571. There's a lot of evidence to that effect). But yours is an important question -- and really would take a chapter to answer in depth. I think I might devote a full post to it at some point.
Here is another example (part 2 of my response), confirming that the Prince Harry trilogy was completed by the early 1580s [This is from an unpublished work -- and it follows a great number of well known allusions by Thomas Nashe to the King Harry plays--1, 2 Henry IV and Henry V ...]
"Have with you' has numerous other references to 1 and 2 Henry IV. The most obvious occurs in an attack on Harvey in which Nashe is ridiculing the different kinds of verse with which he was most familiar when he was a younger man—and that includes the blank verse version of the King Harry plays: “Indeed, in old King Harry sincerity, a kind of verse it is, he [Harvey] hath been enfeoffed in from his minority, for as I have been faithfully informed he first cried in that verse in the very moment of his birth, and when he was but yet a freshman in Cambridge, he set up Si quisses & sent his accounts to his father in those jolting heroics.” (4).
As Penny McCarthy argues, this is a reference to the plays on Henry IV and Henry V. Nashe not only makes other allusions to these plays in the work; he also forces the rare word enfeoffed into an obvious rhyming echo. “Enfeoffed in from his minority” is a takeoff on Henry IV’s line to and about his young son, “Enfeoff’d himself to popularity” (1 Henry IV 3.2.69). Both lines refer to young, impressionable men being too influenced by their disreputable surroundings. The play also uses “Harry” as the nickname for the young king, and scholars to this day use the same moniker for the subject of these canonical history plays. Phyllis N. Braxton’s exploration of the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff, for example, is titled “Such A King Harry,” itself taken from Michael Drayton’s Henry V-inspired poem, The Battle of Agincourt (1606), the last lines of which ask “O when Shall … England breed again / Such a King Harry?”
Importantly, Nashe is explicitly describing King Harry as a work of verse—indeed, one that had been adapted by someone else. Nashe also uses the word "sincerity" in its now obsolete sense to refer to a genuine, original, and authorial text. The OED records this literary definition: “Genuineness (of a passage). Obs.” and offers the following example: “Though this [passage] … be nowhere now to be found in those extant Tragedies of this Poet … yet the sincerity thereof, cannot reasonably be at all suspected by us.” This is the only possible meaning in Nashe’s comment: “old King Harry sincerity …” means “the old King Harry, the original,” the first, authorial, genuine play on King Harry, as distinguished from its more recent adaptation (i.e., The Famous Victories of Henry V). In the Prologue to Cynthia’s Revels, Nashe’s friend and co-satirist, Ben Jonson, makes the same distinction between the original and more recent adaptation of Jeronimo, mocking the self-styled theatre critic who “swears … that the old Hieronomo (as it was first acted) was the only best and judiciously-penned Play of Europe.” Old and as it was first acted distinguishes the original 1580s version of the play from its more recent staged adaptation. As with “old Hieronomo,” “old King Harry” can only refer to the old version of the play, not the actual person, as King Harry himself was never remotely old. Throughout the trilogy, he is portrayed as a rambunctious young prince and youthful and vibrant king—and he died at age 35. Again, it is the old play that Nashe is referring to and paraphrasing.
Regardless, Nashe’s description of its being a kind of verse, coupled with his pointed spoof of North’s phrase enfeoffed himself to popularity in an admonition to a young man succumbing to peer pressure, as well as the allusions to Hotspurs and Buckram Giants, the puns on Oldcastle and his size, and the many other parallel passages recorded by Dover Wilson, McCarthy, Tobin, and others, prove that the original, verse plays about Henry IV and Henry V did include these parodied lines, phrases, descriptions, and scenes—and had been completed when Harvey was still a young man (e.g., by early 1580s). The original was much like the one we know today. As indicated in Chapter 9, in 1579 Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey discussed A Jew of Venice. Here, Nashe was also underscoring Harvey’s early familiarity with North’s history plays, contending that, as a young man, Harvey, inspired by North’s blank verse plays, attempted such “jolting heroics.” And even this description recalls Nashe’s and Harvey’s other North- and Shakespeare-related comments about the swelling, bragging, brave, and puissant style of verse. In the preface to Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe refers to the Italianate translator’s plays as filled with the “swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.” Likewise, in Groatsworth, Nashe complains to the three gentleman scholars that Shake-scene “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you” (21). In A New Praise of the Old Ass, Harvey describes the title-character’s works of “doughtiest puissance or worthiest valour” (67). All these descriptions are synonymous with verse in “jolting heroics.”
In summary, we know that the latter histories on the Prince Hal trilogy were penned by the early 1590s (indeed early 1580s) because of the many allusions to them in the Nashe-Harvey pamphlet wars. We know that Nashe was following the dramatist and not the other way around because (a) the allusions appear as puns and forced jokes in Nashean satires that also spoof other literary works, while in the canon they are authentically historical elements derived from Hall and Holinshed; (b) Nashe refers to the original King Harry plays as a work of verse in “jolting heroics”; (c) Nashe spoofs a line in the play enfeoffed himself to popularity, confirming that was part of the original work; (d) Harvey quotes some of Nashe’s allusions and accuses him of using them in reference to another writer; (e) Nashe even admits that his quotations about 1 and 2 Henry IV and Midas have literary precedence in “foreign writers,” a frequent jab at North and Lyly. Indeed, Nashe even contends that Harvey was aware of these plays when a young man.
All this confirms what we earlier learned from Philip Sidney’s references to 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V, along with the Henry VI plays, Pericles, and Coriolanus, in his Defense of Poesy (1582), and from the Chorus in Henry V, which alludes to and rebuts Sidney’s attacks and refers to an Irish rebellion that can only be the Captain MacMorris rebellion. All this fits seamlessly into the life of North, who penned the “jolting heroics” of the King Harry plays in 1581-82 when he was a captain of troops trying to quash the Captain MacMorris rebellion in Ireland (1579-83).
Great question. This requires a much longer repsonse, but they won’t let me comment at such length. First, can you please cite a few examples of contemporary literati referencing Marlowe's works as being revolutionary (I do think that's an over interpretation based on the fact scholars believe Marlowe’s works were revolutionary and so interpret comments in that fashion). Regardless, it would help if we can compare 1580s, early 1590s comments on Marlowe and references to North's writing and his early plays -- to see who really received greater praise at the respective time of their penning, especially regarding their originality.
Importantly, there are numerous commendatory comments about North and his plays—but they just have not been widely recognized for what they are. For example, Brooke references the first "Romeo and Juliet" in 1562: as “lately set forth on stage with more commendation than I can look for — being there much better set forth than I have or can do." Now, if this version had been recognized as North's and as something far closer to the extant "Romeo and Juliet," all scholars would be interpreting these lines as proof of North's extraordinary abilities and that Brooke was signaling a new and powerful playwright had appeared in Elizabethan England.
In fact, two years earlier, Jasper Heywood does the same thing, praising North’s ability with tragedy – and placing him at the top of the list of best tragedians:
In Lincoln’s Inn and Temples twain, Gray’s Inn and other mo’
Thou shalt them find whose painful pen* thy verse shall flourish so,
That Melpomen**, thou would’st well ween, had taught them for to write
And all their works with stately style and goodly grace t’indite.
There shalt thou see the self-same North, whose work his wit displays,
And Dial doth of Princes paint, and preach abroad his praise.
**Melpomen: Muse of Tragedy; *Painful pen: Skill at writing tragedies
Moreover, Nashe, Harvey, Jonson and others also repeatedly describe North as an original playwright that others frequently imitated—especially noting his blank verse (and his fearless violations of the classical unities—which some considered barbaric). Nashe’s 1589 reference to the “swelling bombast of bragging blank verse” of the Italianate translator of Plutarch is clearly referring to North. Nashe also describes his Hamlet as yielding “many good sentences” and filled with “tragical speeches.” These comments just have not been recognized for what they are because scholars didn’t know the identity of the author the literati were referencing and simply couldn’t believe they're really alluding to Shakespearean plays. I have many other examples like this.
Very clear explanations!
Thank you, Bill!
The text is, as always, concise and persuasive. But since I’ve already read your book, what I find really impressive is the production values you’ve added to this presentation- the real artwork and the AI generated ones really add punch!