Cervantes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay is going into my college's literary magazine. Please feel free to comment! I hope you like it.


“I am...” says Henry James, “haunted by the conviction that the divine William [Shakespeare] is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.” For centuries, including the transition into the modern epoch, incredulity has arisen about the authorship of the dramas and sonnets attributed to William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. Doubts were born in 1785 when Reverend James Wilmot proposed that English Renaissance man and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon penned the plays. Continuing these ideas sprouted other names, such as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Christopher Marlowe; Sir Walter Raleigh; Queen Elizabeth I herself; or the fabled author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Doubtless grim, we have all read Shakespeare. He is, after all, the greatest writer in history. Such dramas require highly-skilled areas in Elizabethan politics, courts, romance, nobility, and a wide-range of geographic knowledge. How could the son of a glove-maker have written these masterpieces if there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that he did so? “There is nothing in the contemporary Stratford-on-Avon history to suggest he was a writer. The men of Stratford knew William Shaksper only as a grain dealer and property owner.” Nothing in his explicit will suggests any books or papers that he had, supposedly, written. “The local records only confirm that William Shaksper was a merchant, not a lyricist or genius of letters. Shaksper’s will mentions no books or manuscripts. There is no remnant of any evidence that he was even literate himself. His parents and his children could not read....Nor did his children benefit, or show they had any knowledge of his alleged celebrity as a playwright.”

Despite the lack of biographical references, another slice of evidence refers to his massive, intriguing vocabulary. For one man, who was the son of an illiterate glove-maker, he had the vocabulary of 15,000 – 34,000 words 7,000 were used only once in his dramas. During his epoch of existence, the typical parish laborer had a vocabulary of three-hundred words; educated scholars and academic thinkers had four to six-thousand words; John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, had eight-thousand words; and highly-educated, precisely-verbal humans with eloquence had up to nine-thousand words. Clearly, this exemplifies that Shakespeare could not have possibly written the masterpieces by himself—or that he did so at all.

If Shakespeare did write these masterpieces, then he was possibly a genius. The only other personage in this mystery is Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans. Not much is known about his life. He did begin the philosophical movement of empiricism, which is the process of gaining knowledge through experience. He also dove into the metaphysical world, and was, perhaps, a “man of words.” There are many connections between Bacon and the works of Shakespeare. Bacon was a master of ciphering information into things. A brilliant display of words and phrases connect him to the plays of Love’s Labour’s Lost and possibly The Tempest. Consider this passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost:




The nonsense word honorificabilitudinitatibus is actually a Latin anagram. Unscrambled, the anagram reads: “Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi.” This roughly translates to “These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.” Would Shakespeare know this? If the evidence suggesting that he had no formal education is true, then he did not incorporate the anagram into the comedy. Francis Bacon would know it; his intelligence far surpassed those during his time. Critics denounce this as coincidence. Bacon penned a notebook which he called the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, which contained 1,655 hand-written proverbs, metaphors, aphorisms, salutations, and other miscellany. Most of the entries appear original; others are from Latin and Greek philosophers. Also in this notebook appear phrases that are strikingly similar to Shakespeare’s words.


Again, is this coincidence? One might think so. Bacon was truly a “Renaissance man.” He highlighted English philosophy. If what appear in the Promus are indeed not of coincidence, which many believe, then Francis Bacon could be considered the true Shakespeare. Indeed, any commoner would read this and think that Bacon simply loved the quote and wrote it down. However, there are many of this type. Many of these “Shakespearean-entries” occur in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work.


Wikipedia notes: “A great number of these entries are reproduced in the Shakespeare plays often preceding publication and the performance dates...” Many of Bacon’s personal letters claim that he is a “concealed poet.” In a letter to King James I, Bacon claims: “...for my pen, if contemplative, going on with The Historie of Henry VIII.” Shakespeare, it is speculated, penned his own Henry VIII, which was published at a much-later date. In a letter to Sir John Navies, Bacon claims: “So, desiring you to be good to concealed poets, I continue....” Coincidence? According to Mather Walker, “In his letters to Bacon, Bacon’s closest friend Tobie Matthew indicates in one passage that he is returning the work Measure for Measure Bacon had sent him, and at another time that Bacon wrote Julius Caesar.” Walker also claims, with evidence, that Bacon’s metaphors and expressions appear in Macbeth, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, and the sonnets—many of these appear in Bacon’s Novum Organum or his personal letters.

Infatuation with Bacon’s presence in Shakespeare has diminished. Cryptographers claim that anybody’s name could appear in any one of Shakespeare’s plays with today’s technology. They conclude that it is all coincidence, and that the ciphers are invalid. However, they are too stark and grim to overlook.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford is an interesting name to consider. There are multiple similarities between Oxford’s biography and Shakespeare’s plays. He was himself a poet and playwright, being very close to Queen Elizabeth the first and the court. Parallel phraseology and similarity of thought appear between Shakespeare’s work and Oxford’s remaining letters and poetry. It is Oxford’s extensive knowledge of Italian cities that gave him fame in this controversy—Shakespeare has placed many of his plays in Italy, notably Verona, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Naples, and Venice. “...the cities Oxford visited in 1585 were...all cities Shakespeare wrote into the plays, while the Italian cities Oxford bypassed are the same cities Shakespeare ignored.”

The Shakespeare Resource Center offers this about de Vere’s involvement: “This contemporary of Shakespeare has been strongly advanced since the 1930s as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. A well-educated and well-traveled nobleman of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, de Vere has been championed by the author Charlton Ogburn using parallels of the Earl’s life with material from the plays—for instance, noting similarities between Polonius of Hamlet and the Earl’s guardian, William Cecil. The Earl of Oxford apparently stopped his literary pursuits at an early age—unless, as Ogburn postulates, the Earl continued writing under the pen name of William Shakespeare.”

There are apparent mistakes in the geography of the plays. Shakespeare refers to Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) as having a coastline (it is landlocked). He refers to Verona and Milan as sea-ports when they are inland. He suggests in All’s Well That Ends Well that a journey from Paris to Spain would pass through Italy. If the Earl of Oxford is the “true Shakespeare,” he would have known this. Nothing satisfies the notion that Shakespeare was a part of the nobility—since he was the son of a glove-maker, who was poor, how could he reckon the life of the court? “There is nothing in the contemporary Stratford-on-Avon history to suggest he was a writer. The men of Stratford knew William Shaksper only as a grain dealer and property owner.”

The arcanum of Sir Walter Raleigh needs recognition. In her book, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, Delia Bacon mentions Raleigh as the mastermind behind a collaboration of authors, including Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere. While it seems unlikely that Raleigh ever had such a position, Bacon leaves open an interesting notion. She writes: “He became at once the centre of that little circle of high born wits and poets, the elder wits and poets of the Elizabethan age, that were then in their meridian there. Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of Oxford, and some other, are included in the contemporary list of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, who refers to the condition of the Art of Poesy at that time.”

Of all the name previously mentioned, Cervantes is perhaps the least likely; after all, he was a Spaniard, having never left his native country, becoming infamous for his satire on Spanish feudalism. Don Quixote, while an uniquely “Spanish book,” does hide a good dose of “Englishness” deep within its pages. In Part II of the novel, Cervantes mentions an “Arab” by the name of Cide Hamete Benengeli as the true author of Don Quixote. Part I makes no mention of such a character. The name is clearly Latinized. “Cide” is a title, like “sir” or “lord” is in Britain; it translates as “Lord.” “Hamete” is Latin for “Hamlet.” The prefix Ben— means “son;” the suffix —engeli is translated to “England.” The name translates as “Lord Hamlet, son of England.” The name appears thirty-three times in Part II. Why would Cervantes place an English character in his Spanish novel?


Interestingly, Cervantes died on the same day and year as Shakespeare—April 23, 1616. There isn’t a marked grave where he is buried; there is one for Shakespeare. Carlos Fuentes, in his book Myself With Others: Selected Essays, proposes “...that perhaps both were the same man.” There are other hidden clues of an English presence in the novel. Cervantes wrote Part I in 1605—during the Spanish Armada, when Spain and England were at war. Part II definitely has discrepancies in the chronology and story-telling; a sort of non-sequitur, in which the second half does not follow the first. Sonnets appear in Part I, after the prologue, transferring into the second part. Part II opens with “Cide Hamete Benengeli in this second part of this history...” Whereas Part I begins “At a village of La Mancha...” The differences between the two parts occur in mood and flow. Cervantes served on the Armada as a commissary. Perchance, during the ten-year lapse between Parts I and II, could Cervantes have lived in England under the alias of William Shakespeare?

Don Quixote serves as a reconciliation between Spain and England. Shakespeare’s only Spanish play was Love’s Labour’s Lost, published in 1598. Don Quixote attacks the nobility in many ways. If the theory of Shakespeare being a poor commoner and not a noble playwright holds true, then perhaps Cervantes is the true Shakespeare. The Englishman was the Spaniard’s only peer and contemporary. Most of the sonnets in the novel pertain to loved ones, like Shakespeare’s. Don Quixote, in all his ingenious, stupefied mannerisms could be a metaphor for King James I of England, stressing his stupidity and one-eyed view of English politics while Sancho Panza, his trusted companion, could be seen as the Protestant reformer, warning James about his Catholic ambitions and denouncing the “Divine Right of Kings.” Sanson Carrasco could be a metaphor for the villainous Guy Fawkes. Rozinante, Don Quixote’s trusted steed, is symbolic of James I’s control of England. Dulcinea del Toboso, Don Quixote’s love-interest, is symbolic of the fall of Queen Elizabeth I: James’s cruel nature is trying to re-capture the gentle and philosophic period of Elizabeth’s reign.

Cervantes is the true Shakespeare. Don Quixote is Shakespeare’s last epic ever penned.


Cide Hamete Benengeli writes:

__________________
(Love’s Labour’s Lost V.i)

Cervantes

Any thoughts?

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(Love’s Labour’s Lost V.i)