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The great mystery has been solved
Can you keep a secret?
"When I came across the phrase 'the stings and terrors of a guilty conscience' in an anonymous treatise from 1595 I couldn't help noticing the echo of Hamlet's famous 'to be or not to be' speech with the line 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. Not something you come across everyday, but when I discovered that the man who wrote it is cited again and again by different scholars as a major source for the plays, an examination of his life was called for, which revealed him in a sequence of unique places, places only the author could have been."
The greatest story never told. Until now.
Lewes Lewkenor published four works that can be certainly attributed to him. All have drawn interest from scholars who have divined a shadowy influence on Shakespeare. They suspected that the two men were friends and had discussed Lewkenor's manuscripts at length. No one ever made the step of investigating just how much influence Lewes Lewkenor exacted upon the playwright, the amount of that influence, combined with his very specific career path, show Lewes Lewkenor to have been the guiding hand behind the plays that have been attributed to William Shakespeare.
Marco Nievergelt discusses The Resolved Gentleman, concentrating on Lewkenor’s translation in the context of the Elizabethan court politics of the 1590’s, emphasizing Lewkenor’s own dissent and self-imposed exile to Catholic Spain in the 1580’s and his eventual return to England.[1]
Professor J.C. Santoyo recognises a clear trend for periphrastic translation, or rather over-translation; for example ‘is awakened’ becomes ‘did ... waken & revive.’ This appears to be Lewkenor’s most prominent stylistic feature and is embodied in his constant use of gemination semantics -creating meaning by combining words - most evident in the introduction of hendiadys - i.e. Solitaire & sorrowful equals. Professor Santoyo also senses a mounting verbal bombast required by Lewkenor to convey an idea that is concise and austere in Castilian.
Carol Enos[1] has identified another of Lewkenor’s ‘fugitive’ soldiers as Jaques Francesco - the melancholy Jaques - one of the roster of characters found in Lewkenor’s treatise that completes the cast of As You Like It. Clare Asquith[2] has equated the play’s exiled Duke with William Stanley and Orlando with his son, Rowland Stanley, and ‘Father Hugh the Welsh Parson’ with Hugh Owen. As You like It is closely based on Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde published in 1590, which connects back to Edmund Spenser and his love for Rosalind, and here we can decipher another character; Orlando’s faithful retainer who attends him into exile is called Adam Spencer in Lodge’s book and so we would connect As You Like It’s Adam with Edmund Spenser. Enos says ‘The play depicts a seeming first-hand knowledge about the life of exiles that a student at (William) Allen’s school (at Douai) would have seen frequently.’ Interestingly she goes on to quote from John Strype,[3] who in turn is quoting from Lewkenor’s anonymous letter.
[1] See her article ‘Catholic exiles in Flanders and As You Like It: or, what if you don’t like it at all?’ Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare.
[2] Shadowplay: the hidden belief and coded politics of William Shakespeare. Clare Asquith. 2005. P.138-9
[3] Annals of the Reformation. John Strype, V.III, p. 513.
Ferdinando Walker’s introduction sheds some
interesting light on Lewes Lewkenor’s character,
“was the first labor of a
worthy Gentleman of your Lordships Country of Sussex, . . who did it for his exercise in the Spanish tongue, and keeping
it by him many years, as judging it
utterly unworthy of his own name, did lately bestow the same upon me, with
express charge howsoever I should dispose thereof, to conceal all mention of him: wherein I should have done both him
and my self too much wrong in obeying him.”
‘When one turns over the pages of a volume such as the translation by Lewes Lewkenor of The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles of Torquemada, printed in 1600, one perceives one of the collateral helps, which served our dramatist [Shakespeare] somewhat in the same way and degree as equally trivial indications have served other original creators. A remark in a book, as in conversation, has often proved capable at the hands of a man of genius of an indirect or ulterior bearing unimaginable by the writer or speaker.’
Othello
Hamlet
Love's Labour's Lost
Lewes served under Baptista del Monte, who later became the Venetian General of the Horse – the very role assigned to Othello; Along the way he has been in the company of the duplicitous captain Rowland Yorke often cited as the blueprint for Iago.
When Lewes' first wife, Beatrice, died of smallpox he remarried to the widow of his cousin and fellow lawyer, Sir Richard Argall, described as ‘the widow of one Argal’ she too died of smallpox soon after.
This explains the obscure use of the word ‘argal’ in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet.
Twelfth Night
Pyramis and Thisbe
There is a scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost in which the author makes ‘a prolonged run upon the Roman numeral for fifty—L’.
HOLOFERNES: I will something affect the letter, for it argues facility.
The preyful princess pierced and prick’d a pretty
pleasing pricket;
Some say a sore; but not a sore, till now made
sore with shooting.
The dogs did yell: put L to sore, then sorel[1] jumps
from thicket;
Or pricket sore, or else sorel; the people fall a-hooting.
If sore be sore, then L to sore makes fifty sores
one sorel.
Of one sore L an hundred make by adding but one more L.
‘Affecting the letter,’ the author tells us, ‘argues facility’ and any grammar school boy knows that the Roman numeral for 100 is C. But that’s not what he’s telling us, ‘Of one sore L an hundred make by adding but one more L’ Of one L -to achieve 100 per cent- add but one more L, which gives you LL, the initials of Lewes Lewkenor.
But me thinks I hear it upbraid unto me, that it is now rather a time to do than to write: I confess it to be so for him that is well set on work: and yet he that writeth well is never the farther off from doing well: so that for my part I hold it no disgrace to write so long as my pen uttereth no dishonesty. My education hath been in the wars: This I only do to beguile time; wishing that whosoever shall herein censure me amiss, would be as ready as myself, both in mind and body, when either commandment of my prince, or occasion of my country shall injoin me to other courses.
Lewes Lewkenor
