The Presence of Spenser in Sonnets 85 and 86

In the original post under this title dated April 18,  2020, as above, I put forward an argument that Edmund Spenser was probably the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 85 and 86. Since then, though, I have reconsidered some of the details of that post, and also realised that there are additional ways in which I can strengthen the argument. As a result, I have removed the original text from the post, and will concentrate on writing an updated version to post here later, or perhaps even submit to a journal.

The 'Oleo' Imbroglio

There are two words I hate: ‘Snapsack’ and ‘Oleo’. Not ones you think about much, I know, but for our  understanding of Guy of Warwick they may be very important.

Helen Cooper noted in Guy of Warwick, Upstart Crows and Mounting Sparrows that these two words found in Guy were 'first recorded by the OED (both editions) only in the seventeenth century'. ‘Snapsack' was 'first attested in 1632 but possibly current in dialect before that'. 'Oleo' (OED s.v. 'olio'), meaning ‘any mixture of many heterogeneous elements; a hotchpotch, medley, jumble [OED 2a]’ was 'a word frequently recorded towards the middle of the seventeenth century but unattested elsewhere in the sixteenth'.

These middle seventeenth century first dates for ‘snapsack’ and ‘oleo’ are a serious problem for the prevailing opinion, including mine, that Guy is from the 1590s. Cooper herself did not dwell too long on the issue, other than to say that the existence of ‘snapsack’ and ‘oleo’ in Guy 'tends to push' the date of the play 'forwards' i.e. later. But that’s an understatement. The earliest date for ‘oleo’, in particular, is – let’s be clear about this - over a half a century later than the 1590s. That’s too big a gap to ignore, much as we might like to.

I’m reasonably unstressed about the existence of the word ‘snapsack’ in Guy. It’s clearly related to the earlier 'knapsack', and may well have been current in dialect before 1632, as Cooper suggests. Even if it wasn't, it’s easy enough to imagine a silent or unconscious changing of 'knapsack' to 'snapsack'  during printing.

'Oleo', though, is a worry. It occurs in Time’s chorus to Act 2 of Guy:

Enter Time. Devotion and Divine Atchievments cause

Great Guy of Warwick to neglect all Lawes,

Of Nuptial League, he leaves his pregnant VVife,

Countrey and Kindred for a holy Life,

But in his progresse, makes himself a prize

To multitudes of matchlesse miseries;

By which it may be justly understood,

He is not truly great, that is not good:

In Holy Lands abroad his spirits roame

And not in Deanes and Chapters lands at home,

His sacred fury menaceth that Nation,

VVhich hath Indea under Sequestration:

He doth not strike at Surplices and Tippits,

(To bring an Oleo in of Sects in Sippits) [my italics]

But deales his warlike and dead-doing blowes,

Against his Saviours and his Soveraigns foes;

That Coat of Armour fears no change of weather,

Where sanctity and souldier go together:

So doth our Champion march up to the fight,

Sit, silent, pray, Time will bring all to light.

An ‘oleo’ (or ‘olio’/’oglio’) was  'A spiced meat and vegetable stew of Spanish and Portuguese origin. Hence: any dish containing a great variety of ingredients' [OED 1]. However, the word later took on the figurative meaning of 'any mixture of many heterogeneous elements etc', the sense in which it is used in Guy:

He doth not strike at Surplices and Tippits,

(To bring an Oleo in of Sects in Sippits)

The earliest OED example of the use of ‘oleo’ in this figurative sense comes from the Eikon Basilike, The Pourtrature of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings, a series of meditations supposedly written by King Charles I of England (the authorship is disputed) , and published very shortly after his beheading in 1649:

'Tis strange that so wise men, as they would be esteemed, should not conceive, That differences of perswasion in matters of Religion may easily fall out, where there is the samenesse of duty, Allegiance, and subjection. The first they owne as men, and Christians to God; the second, they owe to Me in Common, as their KING; different professions in point of Religion cannot (any more than in civill Trades) take away the community of relations either to Parents, or to Princes: And where is there such an Oglio or medley of various Religions in the world again, as those men entertain in their service (who find most fault with me) without any scruple, as to the diversity of their Sects and Opinions!

Hmm. Two things concern me here. First, the fact that the Eikon Basilike refers to 'Oglio or medley', rather than just 'Oglio', which suggests that the author (whoever he was) thought the use of the word 'oleo' in this sense was sufficiently new in or about 1649 that it needed to be explained as 'medley'. Second, Guy and the Eikon Basilike just happen to use ‘oleo’ in the same context i.e in reference to religious division arising from ‘sects’:

He doth not strike at Surplices and Tippits,

(To bring an Oleo in of Sects in Sippits)

And where is there such an Oglio or medley of various Religions in the world again, as those men entertain in their service (who find most fault with me) without any scruple, as to the diversity of their Sects and Opinions!

If you didn’t know any better, you’d have to suspect that Time’s lines in Act 2 of Guy are alluding to this passage in the Eikon Basilike. Truth is, I don’t know any better. I think it’s a distinct possibility. Guy was printed in 1661, shortly after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 - a perfect time to make an allusion to the Eikon Basilike. This leads to the disquieting thought that Time’s lines in Act 2 of Guy may have been written sometime during the period 1649 to 1661.

Strictly speaking, of course, we need only conclude that the couplet containing the word ‘oleo’ was written during that period, not the passage as a whole. We could then just see the two lines as late topical additions to a play that was itself much older. Though I’d like to believe this, I’ve got my doubts. The passage seems of a piece. You can’t really detach the couplet from the surrounding lines, so I think we have to accept the possibility that Time’s chorus to Act 2 in its entirety was written sometime around the middle of the seventeenth century. If so, perhaps all of Time’s choruses in Guy were written around the middle of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the whole play was.

As you can see, the implications of this single word ‘oleo’ can lead to a cascading series of possibilities, none of which are at all palatable to those who, like myself, argue that Guy of Warwick is a play from the 1590s. At this point, though, I’m going to say no more on the subject. I just don’t have the time at the moment to work through all the complexities raised by these possibilities. Maybe later.

What I'd prefer is for someone out there to tell me that I actually don't need to return to the subject, because that someone has found a usage of 'oleo' decades earlier than 1649, and therefore I have made a big issue out of nothing. I can't find a single such usage, but if you can, please let me know!

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Two Late Dates for The Two Gentlemen of Verona

In my article Why A Dog? A Late Date For The Two Gentlemen Of Verona,  in the September 2007 issue of Notes and Queries, I put forward the hypothesis that Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written later than scholars had previously suspected. In particular, I challenged the notion, espoused most notably by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in their 1987 Oxford William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, that Two Gentlemen is a very early work, perhaps even Shakespeare’s first play. Wells and Taylor proposed a date of 1590-91 for Two Gentlemen. Roger Warren, in his  2008 Oxford edition of the play, even speculates that it may be as early as 1587.

In the same issue of Notes and Queries as Why a Dog? there also appeared a paper by MacD. P. Jackson, A New Chronological Indicator for Shakespeare's Plays and for Hand D of Sir Thomas More, based on the work of Hartmut Ilsemann, who had noted that “in plays written up to 1599 the speech-length most frequently used was of nine words and that thereafter it fell to four words”. Ilsemann's point was a broad one - that the opening of the Globe in 1599 changed the way Shakespeare wrote - but Jackson analyses his data in more detail to show that speech-length provides a useful chronological indicator for Shakespeare's plays overall.

To illustrate this, Jackson divided Shakespeare’s plays into six groups, based on the chronological order given in the Oxford Textual Companion. He then calculated for each group the percentage of speeches 3-6 words long of all speeches 3-10 words long. The results are shown in his Table 1 below.

Table 1

(a)	(b)	(c)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Titus Andronicus	(1590-1 to 1592)	33.6
Richard III to A Midsummer Night’s Dream	(1592-3 to 1595)	37.4
King John to Much Ado About Nothing	(1595 to 1598)	46.9
Henry V to Troilus and Cressida	(1598-9 to 1602)	58.8
Measure for Measure to Macbeth	(1603 to 1606)	62.7
Antony and Cleopatra to Henry VIII	(1606 to 1613)	65.0

(a) plays in groups of six in chronological order (last group contains seven plays)

(b) dates of composition

(c) speeches of 3-6 words as percentage of all speeches of 3-10 words.

Presented in these broad groupings, speech-length data certainly does seem to provide a strong chronological indicator for Shakespeare’s plays. Jackson then goes on to look at the data for each individual play, to see how well it matches the Oxford chronology. The results are shown in his Table 2 below.

Table 2

(a)	(b)	(c)	(d)	(e)
1	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	8	46.2	15
2	The Taming of the Shrew	8	43.7	13
3	2 Henry VI	9	35.9	7
4	3 Henry VI	9	14.5	1
5	1 Henry VI	8	19.7	2
6	Titus Andronicus	9	26.2	3
7	Richard 3	9	32.2	5
8	Comedy of Errors	10	28.4	4
9	Love's Labour's Lost	9	45.4	14
10	Richard 2	9	37.1	9
11	Romeo and Juliet	9	40.5	10
12	A Midsummer Night's Dream	9	32.9	6
13	King John	9	37.0	8
14	The Merchant of Venice	8	42.5	12
15	1 Henry IV	6	49.1	16
16	The Merry Wives of Windsor	5	51.8	18
17	2 Henry IV	6	52.7	19
18	Much Ado About Nothing	8/9	42.0	11
19	Henry V	5	54.0	20
20	Julius Caesar	4	55.3	21
21	As You Like It	5	51.4	17
22	Hamlet	4	65.7	32
23	Twelfth Night	6	56.0	23
24	Troilus and Cressida	4	62.9	28
25	Measure for Measure	4	60.5	25
26	Othello	4	63.6	29
27	All’s Well That Ends Well	4	55.7	22
28	Timon of Athens	5	62.8	27
29	King Lear	4	65.1	30
30	Macbeth	4	69.2	37
31	Antony and Cleopatra	4	66.1	34
32	Pericles	4	57.1	24
33	Coriolanus	4	66.0	33
34	The Winter’s Tale	4	61.6	26
35	Cymbeline	4	68.0	36
36	The Tempest	4	65.4	31
37	Henry VIII	4	67.9	35

(a) position of play in Oxford Textual Companion’s chronological order

(b) title of play

(c) most frequently used speech length in terms of number of words in speech

(d) speeches of 3-6 words as percentage of all speeches of 3-10 words

(e) position of play in order of size of figure in previous column.

In general, while the exact chronological position usually varies, each play sits within the same broad position. There are, however, two major exceptions: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, which, as Jackson notes, “are placed much later on the ‘short-speeches’ scale than in the Oxford chronology”.

Let’s look more closely at The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Firstly, the play is clearly the biggest outlier when comparing the Oxford and speech-length based chronologies. Listed as Shakespeare’s first play in the Oxford chronology, Two Gentlemen comes up as the fifteenth play in the speech-length chronology. Secondly, its speech-length ratio of 46.2 clearly aligns it with the group ‘King John to Much Ado About Nothing (1595 to 1598)’, which has a ratio of 46.9. Lastly, under the speech-length chronology, it comes after both Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, a more natural position for it than in the Oxford chronology, where the clear affinities between the plays need to be tortuously explained as Two Gentlemen 'anticipating' the 'later' works.

Obviously, I was very pleased to read Jackson’s results, and I was even more pleased recently to discover another study where an entirely different stylometric approach to dating Shakespeare’s plays also points in the direction of Two Gentlemen being later than usually thought. The paper is Statistical Stylometrics and the Marlowe-Shakespeare Authorship Question, by Neal Fox, Omran Ehmoda and Eugene Charniak. As the title implies, the paper is mainly concerned with a stylometric approach to determining authorship (it was joint winner of the 2011 Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Prize). However, it also looks at whether the approach can be used for dating, which is the part I will concentrate on here.

Fox, Ehmoda and Charniak divided Shakespeare's plays into two corpuses, defined as 'Early' (plays written up to and including 1601) and 'Late' (plays written after 1601). The date for each play was taken from the Third Edition of the Annals of English Drama, 975 - 1700 (Harbage, 1989). They then examined each individual play using two different approaches ('General Vocabulary' and 'Generative Model', details provided in their paper), and compared the results against the early/late corpus to which the play belonged. In the majority of cases, there was no difference. For example, Romeo and Juliet, a member of the 'Early' corpus, was also defined as 'Early' using both the General Vocabulary and Generative Model approaches. Six plays, however, diverged from the corpus of which they were a member, as shown below:

Play	Predicted Date: General Vocabulary	Predicted Date: Generative Model	Corpus Date
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593)	Late	Early	Early
The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)	Late	Early	Early
As You Like It (1599)	Late	Early	Early
Julius Caesar (1599)	Late	Early	Early
Hamlet (1601)	Late	Late	Early
Twelfth Night (1601)	Late	Late	Early

Fox et al describe the results for these plays as “misclassifications”, which, strictly speaking, is correct. However, apart from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, all the plays are dated near, or actually in, 1601 i.e. they are near or on the cusp of the year used to divide Shakespeare's plays into ‘early’ and ‘late’ corpuses. In some ways, this more of a vindication of the approach used than a cause to doubt it.

The only serious outlier here is Two Gentlemen. Although a member of the 'Early' corpus, the General Vocabulary test classifies it as 'Late'. To put this into perspective, remember that ‘late’ here means 1602 or later. The result is saying that Two Gentlemen has characteristics that make it more compatible with a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays written after 1601 than a corpus of those written earlier – surprising for a play the Oxford chronology lists as Shakespeare’s first play, written 1590/1!

We are left, then, with the interesting situation that since I suggested that The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written later than usually thought, two independent stylometric studies have come up with results suggesting that … The Two Gentlemen of Verona may have been written later than usually thought.

‘Curious’, isn't it?

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