Current blog: THE RULE OF LAW: JUDE LAW IS HAMLET! *
ROBERT GREENE: KING OF THE PAPER STAGE *
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ABOUT POLITICWORM
Hamlet: Act IV Scene 3: When pressed by the King to tell where he’s left the body of Polonius, Hamlet responds with seemingly pointless wordplay:
The King deplores Hamlet’s criminal lunacy, but is Hamlet really nuts? Or is he only faking? His responses may be inappropriate, but maybe they have a meaning that he’s hoping the audience sees, even if the King can’t. By worms he means the maggots who are “e’en at” Polonius. But why “politic”? Why “convocation”?
Most critics accept that Polonius was based on England’s Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, who was known to boast that he was born in 1521, the year the convocation of clerics and politicians known as the Diet of Worms collected in the little German town of the same name, where they proceeded to condemn Martin Luther for heresy––a moment in time often marked as the true beginning of the Reformation.
But why on earth does Shakespeare take the time to have his frantic hero make arcane jokes about the Reformation? Why, as numerous scholars have shown, is the whole play steeped in Reformation language and concerns? Why does Shakespeare make Wittenberg Hamlet’s university––Wittenberg, where Luther kick-started the Reformation when he nailed his 95 complaints to the door of the local church?
Although the Reformation began as a religious movement, the establishment of an English government based on Reformation policies was Burghley-Polonius’s lifelong goal. Does the author mean that as Burghley’s body is being dissected by gobbling maggots, his reputation is being dissected by historians and the politicans who will gobble up his wealth and his offices once he’s gone? Does it mean the Reformation in its ideal form is dead, feasted upon by greedy self-servers? Or is the play on the word worms simply one of those “quibbles” (puns) for which, as Samuel Johnson noted, Shakespeare was always willing “to stoop from his elevation.” Surely, as is so often true with Shakespeare, the answer is “all of these” and probably more.
Today, Authorship scholars are the “politic worms” who are “e’en at” Polonius-Burghley and all of Shakespeare’s characters and their originals among his friends, family members, and most notably, his enemies. We’re the ones dissecting both the historical records and the texts of the plays, baring the bones of the true story of the man who wrote the Shakespeare canon, and why he and his constitutents thought it so necessary to hide his identity.
What you’ll find here
After 20 years of research into the Authorship Question, I have a scenario that may finally be the truth, or that comes close to it. Facts are useless if they don’t tell a story. But this is a complicated story that would take a book of many volumes to tell in sufficient detail. Better perhaps to tell it in a series of blogs and essays, with the longer, more detailed, and more fully cited articles available in pdf format. This way readers can follow their own lines of questioning through links in the text.
For months to come I’ll be adding pages as they amplify blogs, plus the links that connect old pages to new, so keep checking. If you connect directly with me through one of the comment fields, I’ll add your email address to the list I inform of every new blog. Words in bold within the text are (usually) reminders to myself where to add a link once there’s something to link to. And do please make comments and ask questions as these help me to be clear.
BLOG: Click here for current commentary and responses to some of your questions.
SHAKESPEARE WHO? Essays on the Authorship Question, the London commercial Stage, and the plays of Shakespeare and other writers of the time.
OXFORD: Essays on the leading candidate, his life, his education, his colleagues, his career, and the many connections between his life story and the works of Shakespeare.
SOURCES: Articles that support various points in my scenario, some by other Oxfordians, some by myself, many published first in The Oxfordian; links to online articles; and a bibliography (coming soon).
QUESTIONS: Ask here and I’ll answer under QUESTIONS or occasionally, if it seems important enough, in a blog. Be yourself or, if you’d rather your colleagues at the university don’t spot your name, make one up; no one will ever know, including me. (How about Robert Greene? Or John Webster? Nobody’s used them for awhile.)
The search field in green type in the upper right hand corner replaces the index in a book; type a keyword into the box (i.e., Marlowe, Bacon, Venus and Adonis, etc.) and a list of essays that contain it will appear. Most graphics will open into larger versions if you click on them.
