It was 400 years ago today that Shake-speares Sonnets were registered for publication. Funny how it seems like only yesterday.

Still, there have already been some interesting articles and new books coming out based on this milestone, and more are sure to follow. There are two that appeared today that I wish to alert readers about.

First, NPR this morning reviewed a new book on the Sonnets, So Long as Men Can Breath, by Clinton Heylin (the review includes an audio clip, a brief article with some quotes from the author, and an excerpt from the book).

The story on the NPR site (by Lynn Neary) has the headline  "Did Shakespeare Want To Suppress His Sonnets?," and the answer is yes, because they're homosexual. Heylin is quoted,

"If the sonnets are interpreted in what I think these days would be considered a fairly normal way, which is that they are about a homosexual affair with a peer, [Shakespeare] was committing several criminal offenses," says Heylin. "It would have been extremely socially sensitive to have a scandal come out that involved him and a male peer ... [The sonnets] are an insight into who the man was, and it is likely going to be as close as we are ever going to get into the mind of Shakespeare"

Meanwhile, a second story of interest ("400 years young: The magic and mystery of Shakespeare's Sonnets") appears in today's The Independent (London, UK). The image that accompanies the story tells it all:


Pink sunglasses? OK, we get it. (courtesy, Getty images)

Early on in the article we learn that "For every blissed-out 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' comes a disgusted outbreak of 'Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action'. ('Spirit' is semen, among other meanings)." But a few paragraphs later in the unsigned article (anonymous authorship??) we find, "However universal the passions they dissect, the sequence has several unusual even unique - attributes. This bard of flesh and soul also knows English law inside out ('summer's lease hath all too short a date')." Well, that's interesting. Law and love? What's the deal with that?

Anyway, the bottom line for both these stories is clearly the homosexual angle. As readers of this site know, there are other ways to look at these verses. I can only suggest that anyone surfing through here today check out Hank Whittemore's The Monument site for an entirely different take on these timeless verses. It involves sex alright (as in, "Who's your Daddy?", not to mention "Who's your Mommy?"), and plenty of law (as in treason, trial, conviction, death penalty, reprieve). But no pink sunglasses.

" with no further explanation. Word on my Internet grapevine is that the paper was asked to take it down and did. This link to the story on a different site still works. Stay tuned.]

Sir Derek Jacobi as Claudius (left) and Kenneth Branagh (center) as Hamlet in the 1996 film.

Well, welcome aboard Kenneth! Although we don't know at this point in time what the back story to all this is, there has been speculation for years that Branagh was sympathetic to the authorship debate but was hedging his bets and keeping mum on what he really thought. Perhaps all the recent news (the portrait, Jacobi and Rylance in the news saying they have doubts, the usual birthday hoopla) finally got him to commit. The comments were made during remarks at the US premiere of his BAFTA-winning Swedish detective series, Wallander.

In any event, this is big news and must be unsettling to the powers that be in the Shakespeare Establishment.

Thursday: On Thursday evening, instead of the usual opening night of papers, attendees will be treated to a performance of Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare's Treason, an astonishing dramatic work of revelation and creativity by Hank Whittemore and Ted Story. The show premiered in Portland last August, and has also been performed at Cambridge University and the Globe Theatre in London last fall. You won't want to miss this "Monumental" performance on the CU stage. Bring friends. Admission for the night is $50 for non-conference registrants, and the play will be followed by a Q&A session with the playwright. Refreshments will be served. What are you doing on Thursday that could be more worth your while?

Friday: After the close of the day's proceedings, Hank Whittemore, Bill Boyle and Dan Wright will, at 7:30pm, convene a panel at the world's largest bookstore - Powell's City of Books (at 10th and Burnside in Portland) where Hank will be presenting his revolutionary study of the Sonnets - The Monument - to the general public (always huge at Powell's!) and Bill Boyle and  Dan Wright will be commenting on its significance. Hank's presentation will be followed by Q&A and the opportunity for the public to purchase copies of The Monument. Hank will be signing copies of his book afterwards, too.

Saturday:  At the Awards Banquet (University Club, 1225 SW 6th Avenue, Portland) awards will be conferred on Renee Montagne of National Public Radio, librarian Bill Boyle and author Robin Williams. There is still time to sign up for this banquet, but it needs to be done right away! The cash bar opens at 6:30pm; the dinner (with a choice of prime rib, cedar-smoked salmon, or a vegetarian dish) will follow at 7:30pm.

Sunday: From 3:00 - 5:00pm, there will be hardhat tours of the now nearly-complete 78,000+ square-foot, three-story George White Library and Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre.

What is remarkable about the fight over this "new" portrait—and it is, indeed, developing into a scholarly shootout—is that one of the leading eminences of British academic Shakespeare, Stanley Wells, general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare series, has lent his name to the venture. It was Wells who spearheaded a press conference unveiling the "Cobbe portrait" as the centerpiece of the upcoming exhibition, which is somewhat grandly called "Shakespeare Found." His support is especially surprising given how quickly and credibly other scholars, such as Oxford's Katherine Duncan-Jones, have presented evidence that the portrait isn't of Shakespeare at all but rather of a Jacobean contemporary, Sir Thomas Overbury. (Duncan-Jones' piece on this subject in the Times Literary Supplement is worth clicking on because it presents a portrait that is indubitably Overbury and it looks exactly like the one Wells claims to be of Shakespeare.)

The whole contretemps reminds me of the recent debate about whether Shakespeare wrote the "Funeral Elegy," a wretched, mind-numbingly sententious, and witless 600-line poem found in a manuscript that had long been gathering dust in an Oxford library. As I recounted in my book The Shakespeare Wars, the false (and eventually discredited) claim about the ludicrous elegy was nonetheless a serious matter: If that dreadful work had survived persistent jeers from outsiders such as myself, and definitive debunking by scholars such as Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers, and been taken for authentic, it might have forced us to re-evaluate, through the prism of its rebarbative verse, everything we thought we knew about Shakespeare's attitudes toward life, death, and mortality. We would have had to take the text especially seriously, in fact, because the claim was that it had been written by Shakespeare in 1612, four years before his death, and that he was writing in his own voice—eulogizing a friend—and thus not speaking through a character whose clumsy words could be excused or explained by dramatic irony or some other literary device.

There is so little established certainty about Shakespeare's personal traits that it is almost always a reductive and foolish thing to try to read his work through urban legends about his life, or his life through his work.

But look at the different Hamlets one gets—the different Shakespeares one gets—depending on how one understands the relationships between Gertrude and Claudius, and Hamlet and Ophelia. Was Shakespeare's vision in his plays misogynist, one that saw women as weak and unprincipled, subject to the whims of desire, abandoning fidelity for the lure of a hottie or someone royally powerful?

And why is it so difficult to find any certainty about these questions in the text? Is the ambiguity part of a deliberate design in which Shakespeare prompts us to ask these questions while deliberately withholding the answers? The play, after all, begins with an unanswerable question: "Who's there?" Who indeed is out there in the darkness of the universe that surrounds the battlements of Elsinore castle? All the questions of the play can be seen as variations on that initial question. Who are these women actually, who's there beneath the artifice and costume that Hamlet denounces in that misogynist attack on Ophelia—and women in general—for using makeup and (my favorite sign that Hamlet's view of women is a bit deranged) giving nicknames to pets?

...But how Hamlet judges the queen, his mother, and how we judge Hamlet's judgment of her (and women in general) may depend on how we answer Stanley Wells' question: Did Hamlet sleep with Ophelia? 

I think the important thing here is that—after centuries of argument and pettifoggery—there is no "correct" answer to these questions about who slept with whom and when. And why is that? Because Shakespeare either couldn't make up his mind himself or—more likely—had a preference for indeterminacy, for open-endedness (no pun, etc.), for the possibility of both answers being true or at least intriguing, in which the conclusion one comes to says more about the observer than about the indeterminable "facts" of the case.

which apparently appears only on the Cobbe portrait, making it a unique addition to the story. The unique appearance of the motto on this portrait is significant since there are apparently four other versions of it

So, just what does this Latin two-word motto/inscription say, and does what it says matter in understanding anything about Shakespeare? Over at the New York Times Lede Blog (in an item we highlighted the other day under Touchstone's Recommended Reading) they take a closer look at the motto by  providing a very informative (and lengthy) quote from a Latin scholar somewhere in academe (he wishes to stay anonymous):

The phrase “principum amicitias” does look like a quotation of the Horatian ode. The idea of translating it “beware the friendships of of princes” is certainly not explicit in Horace, who addressed this poem to Asinius Pollio, a writer but himself an important political man who had written or was writing a history of Rome from the time of the so-called first triumvirate to the death of Cicero, 60-43 BC. That was a very dangerous time, and the end of it was not more than 20 years in the past when Horace wrote the ode, so he characterizes writing about it as dangerous as well. There were plenty of people around who did things during that period that they would just as soon forget, including Augustus, who was complicit in the murder of Cicero.

Anyway, the “first triumvirate” was just an agreement among Caesar, Pompeius, and Crassus to cooperate with one another for mutual advantage (rather than, say, for the good of the state). Cicero was invited to work with them, but refused to do so. When the agreement became public, people were rightly alarmed. But the agreement — the “friendships of princes” in Horace’s phrase — kept the three men from one another’s throats, until Crassus was destroyed when he decided to make war on the Parthian Empire (roughly, Persia). After he was out of the way, Caesar and Pompeius found it impossible to cooperate, and between 49 and 45 B.C. they fought a civil war that left Caesar as dictator for life. When he was assassinated in 44, an actual triumvirate consisting of Octavian (the future Augustus), Marcus Antonius, and C. Lepidus was appointed by the senate. These triumviri had many of their enemies murdered, including Cicero, and this is where Pollio’s history stopped.

Whether in Horace the plural “friendships” refers to the various one-to-one relationships among Caesar, Pompeius, and Crassus, or to that three-way friendship and other friendships as well, is hard to say. The “second triumvirate” could be considered a form of amicitia, since that was the word that the Romans used to denote political alliance; and Pollio may have structured his history by beginning and ending it with these two instances of friendship among princes. Note that for Horace the apparent meaning is just that — “friendships among princes,” not “friendships of princes with other, lesser people.” So if the meaning is in any sense “beware the friendships of princes,” it should mean (in Horatian terms) not beware of friendships with princes, but beware for the state when princes form friendships with one another. It’s certainly a cynical comment on Machiavellian political friendships, though.

How does all of this relate to Shakespeare?

It could just be that the phrase is not meant to interact in any direct way with the Horatian context. “The friendships of princes” might then refer to Shakespeare’s friendships with noble patrons, as a kind of compliment and an acknowledgment that their patronage was a factor in his success. In this case, the classical reference would also be a compliment to his culture, but not a specific reference to whatever Horace was talking about.

There could on the other hand be a more pointed reference to the history plays that deal with how the current dynasty came to power, although I’m not sure that I can think of any close parallel in that process to the “first triumvirate.” But maybe the phrase “friendships of princes” had some currency as a way of acknowledging the cynical behavior of the powerful towards one another and towards everybody else [From the New York Times, emphasis added].

This is very interesting. The motto can clearly be tied to an instance of Roman POLITICAL history (which is exactly the sort of thing Shakespeare did a lot ... Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, etc.), and, significantly, the friendship being alluded to would be "among Princes" (NOT "between Princes and 'other lesser people'").

And please note just what the Latin scholar explains this motto is saying (if one assumes the Horatian ode connection): "beware for the state when princes form friendships with one another" and the possibility that the reference could also be about "how the current dynasty came to power."

It is, on the other hand, Oxfordians who already have Shakespeare and Southampton in the same social class, and therefore can consider that the Horatian ode allusion might be deliberate. But "Princes"? Should we take that literally as meaning those who are not just Earls, Dukes, etc., but those who have "royal" blood? Or at least, for some reason, have "royal" aspirations? For "royal" aspirations does get right into the Essex Rebellion and the fact that Essex was accused at his trial of wanting to be King Robert I. And Southampton was his co-conspirator all the way (i.e., for the six years leading up to the Rebellion). And Shakespeare's Richard II (written or re-written around 1595-96?) was an eloquent argument for the "rightness" of their cause, and was performed on the eve of the Rebellion. Connect all these dots and there it is: Shakespeare, Southampton and Essex are three peas in a pod.

Stratfordian scholars keep trying to deal with this "inconvenient truth," but keep coming up short. However, for Oxfordians who subscribe to the so-called "Prince Tudor" theory (i.e., a theory concerning the politics of the Elizabethan succession crisis of the 1590s and the possibility that the "non-Virgin" Queen had at least one or more bastard children) of how the authorship problem came to be, the Essex Rebellion is the "Ground Zero" of the whole authorship debate, a nexus where all the key players and elements came together and wound up producing one of the most incredible stories in the history of Western Culture.

That the Stratfordian camp, speaking from their own "Ground Zero" (the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust), has now introduced into the debate this portrait with this motto is incredible. And they tell us further that its provenance is clearly that Southampton once owned it, and that it is likely the model for the Droeshout engraving ---well, what a world! For the latest in considering the Southampton factor in all this, check out this post from Linda Thiel at the Oberon Shakespeare Study Group blog.

Perhaps when Wells and Cobbe publish their book on Shakespeare and Southampton next year they will deal with all this, and perhaps they feel that they have an answer to the "inconvenient truth", and that they will once and for all try to deal with the Shakespeare, Southampton, Essex, and Essex Rebellion problem. I hope they do try. The authorship debate could then get really interesting.