Towards a Methodology and Case Study of a Potential Exemplar of Shakespeare's Hand by Eirenarcha

“A Writer Essential to the Others” : Towards a Methodology and Case Study of a Potential Exemplar of Shakespeare’s Hand in Annotations to an Edition of Lambarde’s Eirenarcha (c1605?) SAA 2013

Shakespeare Association of America Toronto, Canada March 2013

Professor Hart Cohen School of Humanities and Communication Arts Institute of Culture and Society Western Sydney University, Australia h.cohen@uws.edu.au www.uws.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/hart_cohen Gerald Cohen Independent Scholar www.trymbelrod.com www.twitter.com/masterquickly

“A Writer Essential to the Others”1 : Towards a Methodology and Case Study of a Potential

Exemplar of Shakespeare’s Hand in Annotations to an Edition of Lambarde’s Eirenarcha (c1605?) Part 1: Introduction: Epistemological Foundations This paper takes up the use of the relatively new, though evolving, paradigm of media archaeology as a cultural-historical framework (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011; Parikka, 2012). Our intent is to unlock textual relationships that allow for a comprehensive analysis of graphical and related features such as those found on original manuscripts/texts related to Shakespeare’s life and work. The recent work of Wolfgang Ernst (2012), Digital Memory and the Archive, provides a focus for the epistemé that lies at the foundation of media archaeology. This can be seen as informing a methodology that would link the 17th and 21st centuries (in a new temporality) and in this way underscore the persistence of time and history in contemporary scholarship. Conceptually we frame our interest methodologically within media archaeology with the ideas of cultural technique (Huhtamo & Parikka) and social energy (Greenblatt). The term, “cultural technique”, alludes to modes and analysis of representation or inscription that consider certain practices in their nascent form such as writing before stable orthographies and/or the representation of observable regularities in nature (counting) before numeracy. This is important to us because of the nature of inscriptions and markings on manuscripts that may 1 Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and ‘The Book of Sir Thomas More’, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987,

159. The full sentence reads: “What can be said about the authors’ identities strengthens these assertions but is not necessary to them: let Munday, Chettle and Shakespeare be collaborators on the original version [of Sir Thomas More]; let Dekker, Heywood and perhaps Chettle be the revisers a decade later; let Hand C be present on both occasions – a writer essential to the others; [our emphasis] and these names fit easily into the pattern of theatrical characteristics.”

challenge our usual thinking about their constituent values. The scholarly method of textual exegesis is deployed in Part 2 of this paper to elucidate a core-text (an annotated edition of Lambarde’s Eirenarcha) and open it to layers of documentation and affiliation. In Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Greenblatt is interested in how the works of Shakespeare manage to reach us with such literary power— also an instance of the persistence of influence across the centuries. Dismissing arguments relating to forms of transcendence (genius, spontaneous creativity), Greenblatt retrieves a concept from the Greek, energia, to characterize the motivated and contingently made works of Shakespeare. He shapes the sense of this concept as social energy. Energia, Greenblatt writes, is identifiable only by its effect, “manifested in the capacity of certain verbal, aural, and visual traces to produce, shape, and organize collective physical and mental experiences” (Greenblatt, 1988: 6). With the emphasis on collaboration in the theatre and the engagement of a community or collective (audience), Greenblatt is keen to situate any analytical moves on textual traces in cultural, social and political contexts and thus the energy of these works is a deeply social one. Importantly and more broadly, we locate our work within the new research field of the Digital Humanities at the nexus where cultural technologies and the conditions for knowledge creation in the Humanities meet. While our methodology follows a relatively traditional path of exegesis relating to scholarly discourse in the analysis of manuscripts, it is also enhanced by the opportunities afforded by both digitization and social media (especially Twitter) to enlarge and open the scholarly conversation about our research case beyond its usual institutional boundaries. In this manner Greenblatt’s social energy has a precise morphology in the collective and collaborative methods

of interpretation that we see as assisting with this research case, with the use of social media (Twitter) and the necessary custodianship inherent in the engagement with a collection and archive. As one commentator notes in relation to a keynote by Sir Ken Robinson that he had missed attending live but which he followed on Twitter, “The “big ideas” aren’t necessarily what comes from the podium…The best ideas are the ones that are heard by a massive audience— collectively chewed and digested, and then captured in a collective mass of about 2,500 tweets, under a single hashtag (#iste12). It’s as if Sir Ken were talking to a giant brain comprised of 750 busy tweeters, waiting to pounce on the next nugget” (Taylor, 2012: 5).2 Living Archives In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida traces the archive etymologically from the Greek, Arkheion, translated as a residence of superior judges where important documents were kept and for which they had a duty of care as guardianship as well as interpretation of the works of the archive. The archive’s early meaning gives an emphasis to both a sense of place for safe-keeping a collection and the authority for maintenance and operations of interpretation. The access to a collection also requires a technical framework. The technical framework comprises affordances that permit access to the letters, documents and manuscripts that form the ground for a hermeneutical analysis but also crucially for its distribution and dissemination. The Humanities may be said to have always been “technical” with regard to these affordances (practices of reading, writing) that permit access and analysis—even if not executed with digital tools.

See Children’s Technology Review, August 2012, Vol 20 # 8 Issue 149. Scott Taylor, —ISTE, “Sir Ken through a Mirror Called Twitter”.

Media archaeology uses the idea of technical frameworks to articulate an interest in “undead” or zombie media. This has relevance to our project insofar as print and handwriting as techniques of inscription of early antiquarian texts drive the case study. As Greenblatt has written in an echo of Derrida’s characterization of the archive’s affective power, “we do experience unmistakable pleasure and interest in the literary traces of the dead” (Greenblatt, 1988: 3). The contemporary machines for representation (the typewriter, the PC and the scanner) allow for the re-mediation of materials such as antiquarian books and manuscripts to assess the objectives of the writers, their provenance and textual significance, which we may be able to extend in light of these techniques. The analysis of the seminal text of our research case demonstrates that a new temporality has been enabled by this methodology to give agency to an exemplar of tangible media under conditions of representation afforded by these new technical frameworks.

Part 2: A Potential Exemplar of Shakespeare’s Handwriting Found in a 17C Manual of Common Law Introduction With eleven reprintings (when two would have been unusual), the book at the heart of this investigation, William Lambarde’s Eirenarcha, was well known and widely used during Shakespeare’s time. In it “men of alert and inquiring minds could find appropriate legal phrases for use in plays” (Dunkel, 1960: 1340). On Shakespeare’s extensive acquaintance with the law, Fripp (1924, quoted in Knight, 1973) reminds us: His legal terms are legion, are sometimes of a highly technical character,

are frequently metaphorical, and, most convincing of all, are often wrought into the very fibre of his writing. When our attention has once been drawn to them it is difficult to get away from them. If they were not so obviously part of himself they might injure our pleasure in some of his finest passages. (p. 117)

On the possibility that Shakespeare made specific use of the Eirenarcha, Knight (1973: 73) notes that “some scholars believe that it [the Eirenarcha] was a source for Shakespeare’s lower judicial types in his Henry IV”. The authenticity of a Shakespeare signature discovered in another Lambarde book, the Folger Library’s copy of Archaionomia (1568), has been discussed by Schoeck (1973), and investigated by Knight (1973) and others earlier in the 20th century, but also more recently by a team from the University of Mississippi, using advanced imaging technology: http://bit.ly/AoHOCV . Description Appearing in a private collection of Shakespearean critical- and biographical-related material inherited from a family member: a copy of Lambarde’s Eirenarcha (1605?) unrecorded in STC 3; lacking the title page; bound with the Duties of Constables (1602) and containing: • •

several autograph signatures; extensive handwritten annotations on three end pages, comprising a personal index to statutes contained in the book and some apparent rhyming lines of doggerel; further marginalia; a thumb- or fingerprint pressed in ink.

• • Provenance Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale (pastedown). Abraham Margolian (novelist, d.2007). Annotations On the parchment: WamS. Upside-down = ‘will’

3 Prof. Peter W.M. Blayney in personal correspondence.

Transcription On the Front Parchment: WamS. (upside-down: ‘Will’) Page A2: Willm Trymbelrod Endnotes Page 1: Servantes. 326. 179 huy and Crye the partyes robbed ex and [i.e., ‘examined’] bound to prosecute the offenders 189 187 fol – 448 Inmates & Cottages 31 Eliz. 43 Eliz & 43 Eliz Bastardes fol 482 340/346 The Recapitulacion etc. 303 Guns 294 Alehouse. 398 3[?] /343/ Bal [i.e., ‘bail’] for 343 – 337 Appendix or presidents [i.e., precedents] ar next before the Indictmetes [i.e., ‘indictments’] & processes in this bokk [i.e., ‘book’] 302 Rate the assess upon the parise [i.e., ‘parish’] 293 Rougue 189 [line coursing downward from ‘Rougue’ and connecting it to ‘This…’] This the same [ ] Soe for why [Shake]S[peare] taucr (?) Hathn’t yot another HamLet aut—[authored] W [topped with an abbreviation diacritic and bearing an apparent thumb- or fingerprint] Endnotes Page 2: Alehouse without lycense vide Baylemt [i.e., ‘bailment’] 340 Bastard reputed father or Mother fol 340 Servant that will not serve. fol 340 prophesaes etc. fol end The oth [i.e., ‘oath’] of the undershref [i.e., ‘under-sheriff’] fol 346 2 Justyces must nomynat oversers [i.e., ‘two justices must nominate overseers’] for the poore fol 349 a proclam [i.e., ‘proclamation’] for unlawfull assemblies – 8 183 173 laborers. 176. vide the statute apprentices la: [i.e., ‘labourers’ ?] & servantes 179 unlawfull games fol 180 [upside-down] Richard Prenton ? Oliver Porter ? Endnotes Page 3 : Egiptians 183 - Semynarie or Jesuit 185 Rougue 189. Testymonyal of a roge 190 193 Parsons or vicars to releve the poore fol 195 Homycide or manslaughter 236 felo de se 249

The Annotations: A Cursory Explication Any one of this Eirenarcha’s many annotations could provide the impetus for voluminous scholarly discussion, documentation and cross-referencing, all of which, ultimately, would greatly exceed the parameters of length assigned for this paper; moreover, extensive further discussions could easily ensue here, based on the unique cumulative effects implied by these annotations vis- à-vis their potential relevance to other extant primary documents containing Shakespeare’s hand, and to Shakespeare studies in general—all of it, again, requiring much more space than is available here. What follows, then, is a cursory examination of a selection of salient items in the annotated corpus, based on the tentative transcription provided, and on a few, select corresponding references from the published literature on Shakespearean palaeography and criticism. This short summary is intended mainly as a point of departure—for the purpose of identifying, at this initial stage of discovery, specific grounds for implementing a more detailed, structured investigation of this copy of the Eirenarcha and its annotations. We have adopted an abbreviated formatting style to allow for a sampling of some of the wide-ranging types of annotative layering that may be deployed in the course of digital curation. Comments are in blue, and are sorted according to each annotation’s potential relationship to either Shakespeare’s hand (H), Shakespearean text (T), or to biographical details (B):

On Page A2:

Willm Trymbelrod (H): Exaggerated angular loops, in as in: from the Belott-Mountjoy deposition signature4, both signatures bearing abbreviation bars. On Endnotes Page 1: Servantes. 326. 1795 (T): “Shakespeare deploys a range of servant types, often for comparative thematic purposes . . . the fidelity of Adam, the old servant in As You Like It, and the protests of the nameless servant who objects to Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear, are put to work to question the values of appetitive and ego-driven societies” (Burnett 1997, quoted in Dobson and Wells, 2009: 416).

huy and Crye the partyes (H): Legal abbrev. robbed ex and [ie 'examined'] bound

to prosecute (H): Legal abbrev. The Book of Sir Thomas More (Greg, 1911) the offenders 189 187

as in

as in Hand D,

(Belott-Mountjoy)

, Addition IIc,

fol -- 448 Inmates & Cottages 31 Eliz 43 Eliz & 43 Elz (B): On 24 July, 1605 Shakespeare purchases a half-interest or ‘moiety’ in a lease of ‘Tythes of Corne grayne blade & heye’ in three nearby hamlets . . . along with the small tithes of the whole of Stratford Parish (Schoenbaum, 1975).

(H): Overcapitalization of c in ‘Cottages:’ “Shakespeare’s three pages in the Sir Thomas More manuscript reveal his characteristic habit of capitalizing initial ‘C’ in mid-sentence verbal forms . . . “ (Eric Rasmussen, quoted in Dobson & Wells, 2009: 66).

Bastardes fol 482 340/346 (T): see, e.g., “Edmund’s Ancestry” in Danby (1949). The Recapitulacion (H): spelling; see Pollard (1923); etc. 303 Appendix or presidents ar (H): spelling of ‘ar,’ as in Hand D, Addition IIc,The Book of Sir Thomas More (Greg, 1911) next before the Indictmtes [ie 'indictments'] & processes in this bokk [ie 'book'] 302 (H): consonantal reduplication (Pollard, 1923) Rate the assess upon the parise [ie 'parish'] (B): see, e.g., Lewis, (1940: 262) “The Payment of His Taxes Defaulted by William Shakespeare, 1597-1600”.

4 Image reproduction from Alan Keen and Roger Lubbock, The Annotator (London: Putnam, 1954), plate VIII. 5 These numbers are page numbers in the Eirenarcha.

Rougue 189 [line coursing downward from "Rougue" and connecting it to "This. . . "] This the same [ ] Soe for why [Shake]S[peare] taucr Hathnt yot another HamLet aut[hored]

(H): in [Shake]S[peare], as in the signature in the (Dulwich collection) letter from ‘wp’ to Ned Alleyn (see Everitt, 1954); archived here: https://bit.ly/2w444JK

“this [ ] was the actual method of abbreviation used when others wrote down the name Shakespeare” (Lewis, 1941: 432). On Endnotes Page 2: Servant that will not serve fol 340 (T): “First Servant” in King Lear? see e.g., Strier, Richard and Stephen Greenblatt (2007) on "virtuous resistance" in King Lear: http://bit.ly/USKq6h prophesaes etc. fol end (T): see, e.g., Sisson (1965); Booth (1983). The oth [ie 'oath'] of the undershref [ie 'under-sheriff'] (T): Addition IIc, The Book of Sir Thomas More (Greg, 1911). fol 346

2 Justyces (H): Extended s-tag: (Sams, unpublished) must nomynat (H): lacks final e. (see., e.g., J. Dover-Wilson in Pollard,1923): http://archive.org/stream/shakespeareshand00polluoft#page/132/mode/2up oversers (H): single e used. for the poore fol 349 a proclam [ie 'proclamation'] for unlawfull (H): spelling assemblies - 8 183 273 (T): Addition IIc, The Book of Sir Thomas More (Greg, 1911).

laborers 176 . vide the statute (H): spurred ‘a’ in ‘statute’: also Pollard, 1923:118): “In the Addition a and u are frequently quite indistinguishable;”

(see, e.g., Dawson, 1990;

apprentices (T): Addition IIc, The Book of Sir Thomas More. la: [ie 'labourers' ?] & servantes 179 unlawfull (H): spelling (Pollard,1923; Sams, Unpublished): “The doubling of consonants has also already been dealt with… in some detail. But one example calls for separate consideration, namely Shakespeare's preference for the ending -full as distinct from –ful” ) games fol 180

On Endnotes Page 3: Egiptians 183 (T): see, e.g., Deats (2005: 232): "Public perception of gypsies and their meanings in the early seventeenth century is . . . crucial to Shakespeare's representations of his female hero [Cleopatra] and to the meanings of the play as a whole." "[A]ntigypsy legislation stresses the foreignness of gypsies to English ethnicities and practices . . . "

Rouge 189 Testymonyal of a Roge 190 193 (H): spelling (Pollard, 1923) (T): “Writing in an era that extensively criminalized vagrancy, Shakespeare, in King Lear, presents a radical deconstruction of the dominant discourses of homelessness. While the play is a commercial exploitation of the social anxieties surrounding the confluence of elder abandonment and homelessness, it nonetheless provides a public contestation of the governmental rhetorics used to justify the persecution of vagrants. King Lear exposes the complex social and economic roots of vagabondage, shows that familial codes of responsibility were largely compensatory constructions that effectively obscured the reality of vagrancy, and parodies the popular stereotype of the dissembling beggar. Shakespeare’s subversive representation of vagrancy was in part motivated by a distinct professional concern to disconnect the worrisome cultural and judicial linkages between stage performers, dissimulating rogues, and the homeless poor” (Stymeist, 2007, Abstract). Homycide or manslaughter 236 (T): Ref. to killing of Polonius by chance medley [?]: “[I]f it is true that courts had become used to implying malice aforethought by the time of Hamlet, why did Parliament feel it necessary to enact the ‘Statute of Stabbing’ in 1604 which expressly removed the benefit of clergy from all cases involving little or no provocation? Horder argues that the 1604 statute was simply unnecessary, since the courts had indeed begun to adopt implied malice as a common law doctrine and thus to treat unprovoked homicides as murder” (Horder 1992, 30-1, 18-9, cited in Gurnham, David: Memory, Imagination, Justice: Intersections of Law and Literature, Farnham: Ashgate 2009 p. 58.) felo de se 249 (T): For a detailed discussion see e.g., Keeton (1967).

Conclusion: A fluid ontology6 of the archive The physicality of human-made manuscript is undeniably at the heart of the analysis. In what Ernst calls “micro-temporality and the mechanics of remaining” (Ernst, 2012), the tension between the archive as a keeping place and as a thing-in-the-making drives this research case. While we can take from Ernst an unflinching commitment to the tangibility of media—its material existence—it is to a fluid ontology that this tangibility must respond. The concept of ontology has separate meanings in at least two lexical fields—one philosophical and the other in computational and information technology.7 In philosophy, ontology is the philosophical inquiry into existence and essences. It seeks to know the nature of existence and

6 The concept of fluid ontologies was first put forward by Michael Christie (2004) in “Words, Ontologies and

Aboriginal Databases” published by Charles Darwin University at: http://www.cdu.edu.au/centres/ik/pdf/WordsOntologiesAbDB.pdf

7 T.R. Gruber, What is an Ontology? Stanford University, 2000, https://bit.ly/32gAc7L . According to Gruber (1993),

https://stanford.io/2OTmGDm ,"Ontologies are often equated with taxonomic hierarchies of classes, class definitions, and the subsumption relation, but ontologies need not be limited to these forms. Ontologies are also not limited to conservative definitions that is, definitions in the traditional logic sense that only introduce terminology and do not add any knowledge about the world. To specify a conceptualization, one needs to state axioms that do constrain the possible interpretations for the defined terms.”

being, particularly in its relation to language. A fluid ontology allows, for example, for a representational system of signs to vary in their relational instances within the ‘system’ in which they appear. For example, if we understand the need to translate between languages in order to exchange information, a fluid ontology may be a tool in the sense of an interlocutor that provides a channel for exchange between two differing language communities. It therefore suits the crossmethodological interests represented by our research case. We propose to assign a ‘fluid’ ontology to the archive within which we are deriving our material and suspend closure as to its institutional values and determinations. As such it will reflect the view that this case is contingent—one that opens and shuts with regularity—and therefore we suggest that no contribution to its elucidation should automatically be ruled out. ______________________________

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Acknowledgements We acknowledge the generous assistance of the following people in the writing of this paper: Peter W.M. Blayney, W. Nicholas Knight, Tiffany Stern, Heather Wolfe, Georgianna Ziegler. Thanks also to Rachel Morley for her editorial assistance. HC GC