To Henry James, “the divine William . . . is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”
The fraud can be found in this book, Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623, many years after the death of the author.
In The First Folio: A Shakespearean Enigma, thirteen scholars show how the Folio was designed both to conceal and reveal the real “Shakespeare.” Uncovering this history allows us to witness “literary politics” on the ground while it is happening.
The work is edited by Prof. Roger Stritmatter and includes peer-reviewed essays by Katherine Chiljan, Gabriel Ready, Shelly Maycock, and many others. Stritmatter is a professor of Humanities at Coppin State University and the author of numerous books and articles on the authorship issue.
The First Folio: A Shakespearean Enigma is available through Amazon.
Its topics include how many people sought to brand the Folio as a fraud, a dissection of the famous (and weird) Droeshout engraving that serves as its frontispiece, and the role Ben Jonson played in supporting the fraud.
The First Folio was born in a moment of national crisis over James I’s plan to marry his son Charles to the heir to the Catholic Hapsburgs, in the so-called Spanish match.
During the approximately 20 months of printing of the Folio (c. March 22-November 23, 1623), Henry de Vere, the 18th Earl of Oxford, was in the Tower of London for speaking against the match.
The Folio’s two patrons and dedicatees, William and Philip Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, were brothers-in-law to the imprisoned Oxford and staunch opponents of the Spanish match. All were Protestants.
The four editorial names associated with the book by their authorship of prefatory poems were members of the international intelligentsia. At least two of them were translators of Spanish literature.
The Folio’s backers, editors, and designers were against the match but also defenders of Spanish writers against the Hapsburg Inquisition with broad literary interests.
In The First Folio: A Shakespearean Enigma, we see how orthodox Shakespeare scholars reduce as much as possible both Ben Jonson’s role and its connections to these international events and social networks created through marriages.
For example, Phillip Herbert, the younger of the “incomparable pair,” was married to Susan Vere, 2nd daughter of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
The first folio was a “family affair” arranged for a beloved elder who was, as Ben Jonson said, “not for an age, but for all time.”
While covering this historical context, including the fast-moving political scene, The 1623 Folio: a Shakespearean Enigma, shows how:
The two dedicatory epistles, one to the “Two Noble Brethren,” William and Philip Herbert, the Folio’s patrons, are subscribed by the names of “John Heminges” and “Henry Condell” but long believed to actually be written in full or in part by Ben Jonson.
While the traditional biography of Shakespeare depends on taking the Folio literally and at face value, including the publication of 18 previously unpublished plays, the Folio itself does not support such a naïve reading but rather invites attention to its own oddities of construction to raise doubts about the origins of the plays.
Ben Jonson’s epigram to the Droeshout engraving, according to orthodox scholar Leah Marcus, “sets readers off on a treasure hunt for the author. Where is the ‘real’ Shakespeare to be found?”
In short, the First Folio constitutes the best possible evidence for the existence of what Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in his essay “The Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction,” calls the “imaginative conspiracy” that preserved the plays of “Shakespeare” in the Folio.
