did Henry Neville write Shakespeare's plays?

[miriam_e]

Did anybody else hear the middle section of Artworks recently where the question was asked, "Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?". I've heard the old theories that the real author might have been Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, or someone else. I'd never been particularly interested in the theories. I mean, honestly, who cares, right? Well there is a couple of very puzzling things about Shakespeare himself. His parents were illiterate, his children were illiterate, he had no education, and is not known to have ever written any letters. A number of people in his day actually doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him.

Enter Brenda James in England. She became fascinated by the enigmatic dedication at the head of Shakespeare's Sonnets and set about trying to understand it, in the hope of uncovering who they were dedicated to. The odd layout led her to suspect that the dedication was actually a cryptogram. When she decoded it the name Henry Neville "popped out". She hadn't heard of him before. He was an extremely well-read, highly educated, widely travelled man who spoke several languages and was a relative of William Shakespeare. Fascinatingly, the the plays tend to reflect the nature of Neville's own life in ways that they don't relate to the ups and downs of Shakespeare's. Neville had good reasons for wanting to be anonymous. He was already extremely well off and the slightly dangerous political sentiments expressed in some of the plays, particularly after he was imprisoned by the Queen, would have meant a quick death for him. Brenda James has now written a couple of books on the topic.

Two Australians, James Goding and Bruce Leyland have written more about the decoding of the dedication. They worked independently of Brenda James after hearing of her theory. There are a couple of [shudder] powerpoint files on their website that explain their decoding.

Additional: Oh dear. I've finally managed to download the large powerpoint files on my very slow dialup and I have to say I'm seriously underwhelmed. The name "Henry Neville" doesn't obviously appear. The laborious and unlikely steps taken in order to make something from the sea of gibberish render this "decoding" extremely unlikely, in my view. How disappointing. It doesn't make it impossible that Neville wrote the plays, but it does seem to show that the dedication is probably just a dedication and that particular link to Neville is just a mirage.

Comments

Re: How about Mary Sidney?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

heheh :) No, I don't think it necessarily was her, but she certainly is a better candidate than Neville. I didn't only check out that site, but some others as well. Being some months ago I've forgotten what some of the others were, but I remember checking what Wikipedia has about her:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sidney

Also there is a Wikipedia page on the actual authorship dispute:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespearean_authorship_question

When everything is said and done, I tend to think it is very likely the actual author of the plays was really a woman. If you look at the female characters in the plays they are quite unusual for the period. They are strong, intelligent, and often able to hold their own against the males. This is more what you would expect to come from a well educated, privileged woman of the time.

Mary Sidney was, by any standard, a truly remarkable person. She certainly would have had the capability, given her talent, to create the works attributed to Shakespeare. I'm not convinced it actually was her -- we will likely never know one way or the other.