Can you keep a secret?
For nearly four hundred years the world has believed that the actor William Shakespeare was the greatest writer that has ever lived.
The world was wrong.
The key that finally unlocks the great Authorship debate is found in a single sentence- “The stings and terrors of a guilty conscience” echoing Hamlet’s famous To be, or not to be speech.
Thinker, Traitor, Soldier, Spy.
Serving as a soldier in the catholic forces of the Duke of Parma in the Low Countries, this exiled recusant has gained his experience of the wars, but at the cost of his left arm, to return to his home country and make his apologies to his angry protestant Queen, Elizabeth I, will mar him as a traitor… or a spy.
This recusant catholic sat at the heart of Elizabeth I's court, working as her translator and receiver of foreign ambassadors, a position that allowed him to be alone in the royal presence, this traitor turned lapdog provides us with unique connections to the plays of ‘Shakespeare’ as we learn of the man who translated the great work on Venice from which The Merchant of Venice and Othello were drawn.
King James I created the position of Master of the Ceremonies for him, where he resided at the highest echelon of Stuart society, charged with entertaining foreign ambassadors and visiting dignitaries, placing him front-row at the recorded performances of many of Shake-speare’s plays. Finally we have found the courtier-author that the world and the works deserve. In this startling biography of the life of the Master of the Ceremonies we discover for the first time the traces left by the hand of Shake-speare.
The greatest story never told.
Until now.
Purchase your copy now!
Can you keep a secret?
For nearly four hundred years the world has believed that the actor William Shakespeare was the greatest writer that has ever lived. The world was wrong.
Thinker, Traitor, Soldier, Spy.
The Master of the Ceremonies manipulated king and princes, but his greatest work remained hidden, his name unknown for four hundred years. The story reaches in to the heart of the Reformation and underlies the plays Lewes Lewkenor published under the name of an actor, a compelling tale of deceipt and intrigue at the highest level.
Finally we have found the courtier-author that the world and the works deserve.
The greatest story never told.
Until now.
Having lost an arm in the wars, Lewkenor sought a dispensation from the Queen for his return to England, and he was welcomed back by William Cecil, Lord Burghley in exchange for information- essentially he had been spying for Cecil throughout his exile and service under the Spanish King.
On his return, Lewes was well received by the Queen and found patronage from one of her closest friends, Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick. Lewes praises the Countess for her willingness to do him good at court and being something of a linguist, he finds himself in demand as a translator. During the period 1594-1600 he published three important works which won him great acclaim from his peers. However, with his own original works we see that he takes steps to make sure, for political and religious reasons, they are not attributed to him.
The Estate of English Fugitives Under the King of Spain was written as a private letter sometime in 1588-89 and was later expanded and printed in 1595. It takes the same form as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the evil deeds and ultimate downfall of the protagonists. But these protagonists happen to be the real-life people that scholars have long associated with characters in Shakespeare’s plays: Sir Roger Williams, the Welsh soldier, who is the basis for Fluellen in Henry V; Captain John Smith, the previously unnoticed source for Falstaff, who likes to get ‘wel-tipled’ and whose legs had swollen to ‘the thickness of a mans middle’ and who, like the real Sir John Fastolf, was from Norfolk, and had deserted the soldiers he had mustered to fight in the Low Countries without pay, a matter which came to the attention of Lord Burghley and the Queen; ‘Black’ Jack Norris, whose reflection we find in ‘Black’ Jack Cade of Henry VI. Lewkenor talks at length about Sir William Stanley, whose ancestor appears in Henry VI, part III; Roland York, often cited as the basis for Shakespeare’s Iago, is mentioned in familiar terms. There are a number of people with strangely familiar names like Hamyel or Scurlocke, Don John and Don Pedro from Much Ado About Nothing, Captain Jaques Francesco - the Jaques of As You Like It, and Doctor Roderigo Lopez, who is considered to be the model for Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
Lewkenor’s use of such specific language, years before it appeared in the plays, and his choice of subjects, can be explained away. We may suggest that Shakespeare had read his manuscripts and absorbed his style, his education, and even his life. We can conjecture (a dangerous business when we have few facts) and place William Shakespeare in the Low Countries between 1585-89, reading Lewkenor’s treatise in 1595 and recognizing the same characters he had been inspired to write about in Henry VI and would later elaborate in Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor (written in 1596 for George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, at his investiture into the Order of the Garter).
Lewkenor would have encountered the actors at court; he was a member of the inner circle, a well-educated and literate gentleman who rose rapidly. He was chosen for diplomatic service and attended on ambassadors who visited the English court, and this is where his connections to the plays begins to flourish, as in 1599 he escorted the ambassador for the Spanish Netherlands, Vereiken, to the Lord Chamberlain’s play Sir John Oldcastle, a play written to undo the unfavourable character painted in Henry VI of the previous Lord Chamberlain’s ancestor.
The following year he is working as Spanish translator to the embassy from Barbary, the very visit that is considered to be the inspiration for Othello, and he introduces the Moor, Massouad, to the Queen, who is seated in great state, and we may be surprised to learn that he escorted the Duke of Orsino to the debut of Twelfth Night, which opens with the character of the Duke himself, who speaks the famous lines, ‘If music be the food of love, play on!’
Lewkenor’s close working relationship with Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I and James I, the Herbert brothers, Fulke Greville, Francis Bacon, and many others, place him at the centre of court life from the 1590’s until his death in 1627.
When James I ascended the throne in 1603, Lewkenor rode to Newark to greet him and was duly knighted. King James was entertained with a dozen plays by Shakespeare, issuing the actors with a Royal charter within days of taking the throne, but his surprise choice for the newly created post of Master of the Ceremonies was Sir Lewes Lewkenor, a position that was conferred on him for life in 1605. James I’s choice of Lewkenor to handle the delicate diplomatic position that he brought to the fore during his reign suggests that Lewkenor’s C.V. provided some special skill not easily found; indeed, the position of Master of Ceremonies is credited as the start of the Diplomatic Corps and the plays of Shakespeare expertly deliver diplomacy and propaganda via the theatre.
His wife, Beatrice, died of smallpox and Lewes 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. His third marriage was to Mary Blount, with whom he had more children. Lewkenor attended Count Gondomar, the only known foreign subscriber to First Folio, when the actors of The Fortune feasted them, and he returned to Catholicism under the hand of Gondomar’s Confessor, Fuente.
Lewes Lewkenor’s published writings provide a tangible connection to the most obscure elements of Shakespeare’s plays, from the unexplained use of ‘Argall’ instead of ‘ergo’ in Hamlet, and the use of ‘borachio’ (a Spanish insult) as a character name, to the corrupted Castilian and Italian mottoes that are used by his soldiers. His personal involvement with so many of the characters from the plays is astonishing, and his time at Cambridge is parodied in Loves Labours Lost, the only play in the whole canon to be the authors own invention. It is here that we come across Holofernes riddle, the answer to which is LL. Another clue falls out if we turn to Ovid’s telling of the tale of Pyramis and Thisbe, we will find that Arthur Golding had made a mistake in his famous translation, confusing the names of the various narrators, for after the tragic tale the line that follows should read, ‘There was a pause, and then Leucanoe began to speak’.
The life and works of Lewes Lewkenor connect in a myriad of ways with the plays of William Shakespeare; what their relationship may have been, and how their writings coincide will always be a matter for debate, but the similarities in their writing style, their plots, their characters and their subjects are so numerous, that they confirm beyond doubt that Sir Lewes Lewkenor, Master of the Ceremonies, was, in reality, the man who wrote the works attributed to the actor William Shakespeare.
After a pause of four hundred years, Lewkenor begins to speak.
Welcome to the Web site of Historian William Corbett. William is an author of assiduously researched and insightful histories. We invite you to pull up a comfortable chair and explore William's writings.
"I was surprised to find that no one has ever written a book on Lewes Lewkenor, a fascinating character at the heart of the English Court, and a man who can shed more light on the plays of Shakespeare than anyone has done in four hundred years. Lewes Lewkenor is best known as the translator of On Commonwealth of Venice, from which the background information in The Merchant of Venice and Othello was drawn and we find the story of Lewkenor’s life is inextricably entwined with the plays attributed to the actor, William Shakespeare."
Don't miss William Corbett reading from his new book Master of the Ceremonies, at the Poltroon Literary Salon! See the schedule page for details.
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The Master of the Ceremonies
William Corbett's book
rips apart the Shakespeare Authorship debate and rewrites everything we
thought we knew about the plays attributed to the actor
William Shakespeare.
Lewes Lewkenor Resources on the web
The Commonwealth of Venice
The Estate of English Fugitives
The anonymous play Prinz Hamlet written in German by an Englishman ©1585
Anonymous translation of Hystorie of Hamblet 1608 which I attribute to Lewes Lewkenor on stylistic similarities
For the history of the Lewkenor family I am indebted to Mr. Malcolm Mercer
Driven to Rebellion
Huw Griffith's article comparing the two prefatory sonnets to Lewkenor and the chorus in Henry V
The Sonnet in Ruins
David A.L. Morgan's
article on Lewkenor's Resolved Gentleman
For studying the war in the Netherlands
Motley
Schiller
Further reading
Nichol's Progresses of Elizabeth I
Dana F. Sutton's excellent website-
William Camden-Elizabeth I
William Camden-James I
Antonio Perez
Antonio Foscarini
Ben Johnson particularly XLVI
Gondomar
Memoirs of the Duc de Sully
For Lewkenor's pangyric verse to Thomas Coryat
Coryat's Crudites
Search for books etc.
http://www.archive.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
