Addenda

Articles

Author's response

Prof. Alan Nelson’s review is posted on his website at socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/. Following is the text of his review (in blue type), with the author’s response (indented).

Diana Price's Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography (2001)

Diana Price knows how to put a sentence together, but she does not know how to put an argument together without engaging in special pleading: that is, taking evidence that has an apparent signification, and arguing with all her might that it does not fit the special case of William Shakespeare for this or that special - and wholly arbitrary - reason.

Take the fact that Ben Jonson writes a poem of dedication to the "memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare"; or the fact that Jonson reported that he had offended "the Players" who thought he had insulted their "friend" Shakespeare. Jonson explains, "I loved the man, and do honor his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any."

Master William Shakespeare, whom Jonson also calls "Sweet Swan of Avon," associating him with Stratford upon Avon for any but the wilfully deaf, is thus the recipient of a greater expression of friendship than any contemporary author.

Price cannot of course accept this evidence, so she must find some way to discredit it: such evidence is necessarily ironic, or satiric, or deliberately misleading, or written after Shakespeare's death: note that there is always some reason why evidence does not count in the case of William Shakespeare. Of course, one could make up a set of special rules for any other author of the period: why could there not have been two Edmund Spensers, one real but stupid (since any evidence that he was a writer cannot be allowed to count), another the pseudonym for some aristocrat?

Prof. Nelson apparently believes that I have succeeded in establishing a set of rules that somehow contrive to exclude all evidence proving that Shakespeare’s vocation was writing, while at the same time admitting such evidence for any other alleged writers. His criticism is perhaps more indicative of an entrenched faith in Shakespeare's biography than it is descriptive of my methods of analysis.

I need not invent any arbitrary rules to admit or disqualify literary evidence for Edmund Spenser. Despite the fact that there were several Edmund Spensers in Elizabethan England, there is no question about the poet Edmund Spenser's literary career. Spenser left behind professional evidence of his occupation of writing, and that evidence is explicit, unambiguous, and contemporaneous; some of it is cited in the appendix in my book. It is the absence of any comparably explicit contemporaneous evidence for Shakespeare that is unique to his biography.

If there is a case to be made for special pleading, it is that routinely exercised by the orthodox biographer. Biographers have made exceptions to their own rules in order to admit, transmute, or create evidence for Shakespeare to support his career as a playwright. In order to do that, they have (page numbers are to my book)

• used impersonal evidence as personal evidence (see p. 138)
• used ambiguous evidence as explicit evidence (see pp. 45-46)
• used theatrical evidence as literary evidence (see pp. 104-7)
• attempted to invent evidence (click on More and page forward to pages 127-133.)

A close examination of the documentary evidence for Shakspere [spelling chosen to indicate the man from Stratford] shows that his literary biography relies on posthumous evidence, rather than on any solid contemporaneous evidence. In the genre of literary biographies for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd string Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, that is a unique phenomenon. In the course of his commentary on my book, Prof. Nelson has himself engaged in special pleading, by selectively departing from the standards otherwise evident in the genre of literary biographies, as I demonstrate below.

The argument which is most important to Price concerns the "literary trail" which she thinks must necessarily have been left by any author of the time ... why she thinks so is never fully explained.

Prof. Nelson must have missed some introductory material in Chapter 1, including Gerald Eades Bentley's comments concerning “letters to or from or about William Shakespeare" or "diaries or accounts of his friends." According to Bentley, it is "personal material of this sort which provides the foundation of most biographies" (Handbook, 4-5).

Prof. Nelson must have also missed the opening paragraphs to Chapter 8, which read in part: “Biographers construct their narratives around documentary evidence. Some types of documentation are of a general character, such as christening, marriage, or tax records. Such records tell us that someone was born or paid taxes, but they do not necessarily tell us about the person’s profession. Other types of evidence, however, are specific to a vocation or make incidental reference to an occupation. … Shakspere’s biography is presumably about a writer. … a man of letters may be expected to leave behind personal records that reveal his chosen vocation.”

That expectation turns out to be reasonable. Each of the 24 other writers in the survey did leave behind such personal records that attest to their vocation of writing. Shakspere is the only one who did not.

She attaches ten categories to the trail, and rates each of many authors "Yes" or blank ... never "Possibly" or "Probably." To nobody's surprise, Shakespeare receives a blank in every category ... but would you have expected otherwise?

Yes, one would expect otherwise, IF Shakspere was the writer we are told that he was. If I can find hard documentary evidence for everyone else, why should biographers need to make an exception for Shakspere, i.e., admit evidence that has to be qualified with a “possibly” or a “maybe”? Shakespeare’s work was, presumably, pre-eminent in its own time, and one should therefore expect the author’s personal literary paper trails to be up there, qualitatively speaking, with others of the first rank, namely, Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser. He certainly should not be less well-documented than, say, George Peele, John Webster, or John Fletcher.

The ten categories represent a subset of the larger category of evidence which I define in my book as “personal literary paper trails.” The goal of the analysis is to test evidence that may support the fundamental assumption that “he was a writer.” Therefore, each piece of contemporaneous evidence is tested to determine whether it is (a) personal, and (b) related to literary activity and interests. If it satisfies both tests, it qualifies as a personal literary paper trail.

Since I don't have the patience to go into every tired but discredited argument, every instance of special pleading, and every incorrect statement or overlooked document in her book, I will simply give my own answers to Price's list of "paper-trail" topics:

1. Evidence of Education: Yes. Since his father was an alderman and burgess of Stratford, Shakespeare would certainly have attended the school at Stratford which was given active support by the aldermen and burgesses of Stratford for the education of their sons. On the other hand, we know for a dead certainty that Shakespeare did not attend the university (nor did Jonson): this is made clear by the Cambridge Parnassus play of about 1600.

There is no evidence of Shakspere’s education, and Prof. Nelson has not cited any. Prof. Nelson apparently has not understood that my comparative analysis is concerned with documentary evidence. His assumption that Shakspere “would certainly have attended school” based on his father’s civic standing, is not the equivalent of documentary evidence of an education. In contrast, I cite documentary evidence to support the educational training of Nashe, Spenser, Kyd, Marlowe, and Middleton, among others. There is no comparable evidence for Shakspere.

2. Record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters: Yes, a letter was addressed to Shakespeare by Richard Quiney (1598). (The letter is not about literature, and therefore does not qualify for Price's "especially" clause, but it does indicate that Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon was capable of reading a letter addressed to him and was thus literate).

Quiney’s letter to Shakspere concerning borrowing money is not evidence of Shakspere’s literary career; rather, it is good evidence that Shakspere was regarded as a man with financial resources. In contrast, a letter to Drummond by Drayton discussing his progress on Polyolbion is solid personal literary evidence. Quiney’s letter to Shakspere also compares poorly to Samuel Daniel’s letter to Robert Cecil, (1605), apologizing for “making the stage the speaker of my lines,” or his letter to the earl of Devonshire, 1604, explaining that “in this matter of Philotas ... first I told the Lordes I had written 3 Acts of this tragedie.” There is no comparable evidence for Shakspere.

Incidentally, I do not argue that Shakspere was illiterate. On the contrary, on pp. 234-35, I argue that Shakspere did achieve basic literacy. However, inferring that Shakspere could read a letter does not prove that he was a literary giant. I doubt that even Prof. Nelson would use Quiney's letter to argue that Shakspere was a literary giant.

3. Evidence of having been paid to write: Yes. The fact that he dedicated a second book to the Earl of Southampton is evidence that he received a reward for having written the first; moreover, he was paid for an impresa in 1613, clearly as an author, since Burbage was a painter and would have done the artwork. (It must be said, however, that Shakespeare as a fellow of his company of actors would probably not have been paid directly for his plays, which instead brought him money through the commercial success which they guaranteed to his company.)

There is no documentary evidence that Shakspere was rewarded by Southampton, or ever met him. In contrast, the earl of Leicester’s accounts show a payment to “Robert Grene that presented a booke to your lordship vli.” In a letter by Sir George Carey to his wife, we read that “nashe hath dedicated a booke unto you with promis of a better, will cotton will disburs v^ls or xx nobles in yowr rewarde to him.” The earl of Northumberland’s accounts show a payment to “to one Geo. Peele, a poett, as my Lord’s liberality 3£.” There is no comparable evidence for Shakspere concerning rewards from his potential patron.

Despite Prof. Nelson’s assertion, the wording in the second dedication to Southampton is not evidence that patronage was received, as I go to some length to demonstrate. The dedication is couched in typically formulaic language, suggesting that the poet had heard reports of the prospective patron’s presumably generous disposition. So I reject the Lucrece dedication as evidence that Shakspere obtained patronage, but this is not, as Prof. Nelson asserts, an arbitrary disqualification. Rather, this issue provides a good example of special pleading by the orthodox in defense of Shakspere's literary biography. By accepting the Lucrece dedication as evidence that Shakspere obtained patronage from Southampton, Prof. Nelson attempts to transmute an impersonal dedication into a personal one, thus upgrading its evidentiary value.

Perhaps it is useful to take the time here to show how another biographer dealt with this question of personal vs. impersonal dedications. In his Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems, Arthur Freeman was considering whether Kyd did or did not know personally his dedicatee, the Countess of Sussex. Freeman analyzed the language Kyd used to address her:

All these phrases, especially the ‘service’ and ‘honourable favours past’, indicate that Kyd was personally acquainted with the Countess, and that he had been in a position to receive her favours earlier – presumably before his imprisonment. Boas comments that ‘Kyd may be merely alluding to some token of good will which she extended to him as to other men of letters, including Greene, who dedicated to her his Philomela’. But the fact is that the ‘other men of letters’ who dedicated books to the Countess at this period did not know her personally, by their own testimony, and Kyd, by his, did. Greene presented her Philomela in 1592 because he was ‘humbly devoted to the Right honourable Lord Fitzwalters your husband’, but the Countess herself he knew by repute only. Likewise the publisher William Bailey, who dedicated a book of lute music to her in 1596, writes of ‘your Honourable Ladyship, whom I have heard so well reported of.’ (Freeman, 33)

In the dedication to Lucrece, Shakespeare writes that “the warrant I have of your Honourable disposition” made his poem “assured of acceptance.” In other words, Shakespeare had heard reports of Southampton’s presumably generous disposition, just as Bailey writes of "your Honourable Ladyship, whom I have heard so well reported of." Freeman is demonstrating the same standard to test personal vs. impersonal evidence. One must suspend this standard in order to use the Lucrece dedication as evidence that Shakspere succeeded in gaining patronage from, or personally knew Southampton.

With respect to the impresa payment, the document in question provides inadequate evidence with which to draw any conclusion with confidence. The record does not contain the first name of the payee (although the association with Burbage lends weight to the assumption that William is indeed the payee), but unlike the payment to Burbage "for painting and making it," there is no specification as to the capacity in which “Mr. Shakspeare” was paid, whether it was to write a motto, fashion an equestrian accessory, or act as agent for someone else. Of three interpretations offered by orthodox scholars, I expect that Stopes’s hunch that Shakspere was paid as an agent for someone else is the correct one. Prof. Nelson's assertion that Shakspere was paid "clearly as an author" is unsupported by the record in question.

4. Evidence of a direct relationship with a patron: Yes, the Earl of Southampton.

There is no evidence that Shakspere ever met, much less established a direct or personal relationship with Southampton. In contrast, John Florio dedicated his Italian-English Dictionary to the “most Honorable Earl of Southampton, in whose pay and patronage I have lived some years.” Spenser’s dedication of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe to Sir Walter Raleigh refers to his “infinite debt” owed for “singular favours and sundry good turns.” The language in Florio's and Spenser’s dedications is comparable to that used in Kyd's to the Countess of Sussex (see extract from Freeman’s discussion, above). There is no comparable evidence for Shakspere and Southampton.

5. Extant original manuscript: Yes, if Hand D in The Book of Sir Thomas More is his.

The case for "Hand D" as Shakespeare’s was advanced by A.W. Pollard and several others in 1923 in an attempt to counter the anti-Stratfordian challenge, coming at that time from Sir George Greenwood and Mark Twain. Pollard and his colleagues were attempting to compensate for the deficiency of Shakspere's personal literary paper trails, which my comparative analysis has clearly exposed. Although there is insufficient evidence with which to make a paleographic case for "Hand D" as Shakespeare’s, such a case was advanced nonetheless. The balance of arguments introduced to corroborate the paleographic case are inconclusive. Please click on More and page forward to pages 127-133 for my essay that addresses this topic more fully.

Prof. Nelson would allow a checkmark in this category, qualified with a very big “If.” For other writers, however, there is no need to enter a provisional checkmark qualified with “If,” because we have handwritten manuscripts of the creative work of, e.g., Jonson, Nashe, Massinger, Harvey, Daniel, Peele, Drummond, Munday, Middleton, and Heywood. There is no such evidence for Shakspere.

6. Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters. Yes. In a sense this category merely repeats "Record of correspondence" above. But a letter survives in the hand of Leonard Digges, who in 1613 compared the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of "our Will Shakespeare" - notice the use of the familiar "Will" by a close neighbor of Shakespeare's in both Aldermarston and in London.

Leonard Digges’s notation concerning “our Will Shakespeare” is found in an inscription (not a letter) written on the fly-leaf of a book by Lope de Vega. Notice that Digges uses the impersonal “our.” Had Digges written “my good friend Will Shakespeare,” Prof. Nelson would have had a point. Although Digges and Shakspere lived within proximity to one another, there is no evidence that the two men knew, or ever met each other.

7. Commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams contributed or received: Yes, first and foremost in the First Folio, but also in numerous contemporary manuscripts and printed books.

The Folio testimony is indeed personal and literary and therefore can be used to support the statement “Shakspere’s vocation was writing.” But, as I conclude in chapter 10, “the authorship attribution in the Folio constitutes the first historical evidence identifying Shakspere in personal terms as the dramatist. The evidence is posthumous, and for no other writer of Shakespeare’s time period are we asked to trust such ambiguous and belated information, uncorroborated by any solid documentation left during the author’s life, as evidence of authorship.”

The balance of testimony to which Prof. Nelson may refer will be either impersonal evidence (such as title pages), impersonal allusions (such as Weever’s sonnet about Shakespeare), or posthumous references. Prof. Nelson will not be able to cite any personal allusions or evidence comparable to that cited for other writers from the time period; the evidence collected in the appendix for the two dozen writers is hardly exhaustive, but it is representative. Whereas Scoloker writes of “Friendly Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” with no hint of any personal knowledge of Shakespeare, other writers refer to their “beloved friend,” “their approved good friend,” their “honest as loving friend,” etc. There is no comparable personal evidence for Shakspere.

8. Miscellaneous records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer): Yes, many such records in print, including Meres (1598) who reports that Shakespeare's sonnets were circulating among his private friends (an astonishingly personalized revelation!), and Thomas Heywood's reference (1612) to Shakespeare's being upset over a book of poems published by Jaggard.

Prof. Nelson has apparently not understood the distinction between personal and impersonal evidence, despite the attention I give to that distinction in chapter 8. If the testimony need not require firsthand knowledge of the subject, if an allusion demonstrates familiarity only with the written work (and not the author), or if it merely expresses the common opinion, it is impersonal, not personal evidence.

It may be that Prof. Nelson is simply following the lead of other orthodox scholars. On pp. 137-38 of my book, I show how Samuel Schoenbaum transmutes impersonal literary allusions (e.g., “Friendly Shakespeare’s Tragedies” and “so dear loved a neighbour…Shakespeare”) into personal evidence of Shakspere’s circle of friends and acquaintances.

In Meres’s case, there is no evidence that he knew who Shakespeare was. As I point out in the section dealing with Palladis Tamia, “Meres could have written his commentary based on what he had been reading, seeing, or hearing around town. In contrast, one could claim that Meres knew the poet Barnfield, because he described him as his ‘friend master Richard Barnfield.’ But Meres named dozens of writers in his section on English poets, and no one would suppose that he personally knew every single one of them” (135).

9. Evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given: Yes, possibly, in a book now at Stratford and in another at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (This category perhaps deserves a blank, but it does not merit a positive "No.")

Not one book has been authenticated as having been owned by Shakspere, so Prof. Nelson has again demonstrated the need for special pleading in Shakspere’s case. For Jonson and Harvey, Spenser, and Drummond, we don’t have to say “yes, possibly” they owned books. We can say, “yes, certainly,” because we have their books. And for Nashe, Chapman, Marston, Lodge, and Fletcher, we have other evidence that they owned, wrote in, or were bequeathed books, so we don’t have to suppose a “maybe” for their access to books either. Once again, Prof. Nelson cannot cite evidence for Shakspere comparable in quality to that for his lesser contemporaries.  

10. Notice at death as a writer: Yes, positively and abundantly, in a poem written by William Basse; the literary allusions (including to Virgil) in the Funeral Monument; and above all in the First Folio, which is the greatest tribute to a recently-deceased writer in all of English literature.

As I have noted several times, “The authorship attribution in the Folio constitutes the first historical evidence identifying Shakspere in personal terms as the dramatist. The evidence is posthumous, and for no other writer of Shakespeare’s time period are we asked to trust such ambiguous and belated information, uncorroborated by any solid documentation left during the author’s life, as evidence of authorship.” And considering the presumed magnitude and impact of Shakespeare’s career during his lifetime, one reasonably expects to find the type of contemporaneous professional documentation one finds so readily for his lesser contemporaries. By continuing to cite the First Folio as the definitive evidence supporting Shakspere’s literary biography, critics merely reinforce my point: there is no evidence left during Shakspere’s lifetime that likewise qualifies as both personal and literary. It is a uniquedeficiency.

You will note, if you have read Price's book with care, how hard she has worked to discount all evidence which could possibly contribute to a "Yes" response for Shakespeare in any of her categories. In fact, the selective demolition of evidence is what her entire book is about.

In my analysis, I employed consistent standards to qualify or disqualify evidence as a "personal literary paper trail." It will be evident that I did not play favorites when one looks at the evidence I rejected for other writers from the time period (see below). In accepting or rejecting evidence, I merely followed the guidelines or examples found in other biographies, such as that cited above from Freeman’s biography of Kyd. I simply made no exceptions for Shakspere.

In every biography that I analyzed, including Shakspere’s, I found contemporaneous documentary evidence of the individual’s professional or vocational activity. For two dozen writers, that professional evidence supported the statement that “he was a writer.” However, in Shakspere’s case, the professional evidence supported his activities as a shareholding actor, real estate investor, commodity trader, and landlord, but not a writer. Not until 1623 is there personal literary evidence for Shakspere.

If Price had worked with equal diligence to discredit the evidence which applies to other writers of the period, she would have succeeded in reducing all historical evidence of any kind whatsoever to utter meaninglessness. Fortunately, all one has to do is to watch for Price's instances of special pleading, dismiss any associated arguments, and let the documentation which survives this exercise speak for itself.

I did work with equal diligence to accept or disqualify evidence for other writers. Among the evidence that did not qualify, and my reason for rejecting the following as personal literary paper trails, are:

• Christopher Marlowe's signature as witness to a will; the signature demonstrates his penmanship, but does not relate to literary activity
• numerous letters in Edmund Spenser's handwriting, but they were written in his capacity as secretary to Lord Grey, and are unrelated to literary activity
• handwritten verse, Happy ye leaves, possibly in Spenser's autograph, but there is no certainty
• commendatory verse by George Peele to Thomas Watson for Hekatomathia; the tribute is impersonal
• Robert Greene's dedication of The Myrrour of Modestie to the Countess of Derby; the dedication is couched in impersonal language, and there is no evidence that Greene obtained her patronage
• Rymer's Foedera records a 1618 "license to Samuel Daniel ... to print The Collection of the Historie of England, compiled by himself," but since the entry makes no mention of payment, I did not give Daniel a checkmark in the category "paid to write." However, after my book went to press, I came across two records of payments to "Danyell the Poet" in the earl of Hertford's accounts (John Pitcher, "Samuel Daniel, the Hertfords, and A Question of Love," Review of English Studies 35 [1984], 449-462). I would now add a checkmark for "paid to write" for Daniel.
• Thomas Nashe's epitaph by Fitzgeffery which may have been written within twelve months of Nashe's death, but Nashe's exact death date is not known
• George Chapman's funerary monument, arranged for by the architect Inigo Jones; the date of its installation is unknown

Finally, I agree that the documentation speaks for itself, and that is why I compiled the appendix of comparative evidence for Shakspere and two dozen of his contemporaries.

Prof. Alan Nelson’s reply to my rebuttal is posted on his website at socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/. Following is the text of his rebuttal in blue, with the author’s response (indented).

Diana Price's reply to my "review" is just another instance of special pleading. To avoid an exponential inflation of argument I limit myself to one topic, from which the reader may extrapolate to others.

I will concentrate on Price's Topic 6, which she herself entitles: "Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters."

In her reply, Price overlooks the point of her own argument, for in 1613, while Shakespeare was still alive, Leonard Digges composed a handwritten inscription directly concerning William Shakespeare and directly touching on literary matters. Regardless of anything else, Price's analysis of this particular topic should have led her to respond with an unequivocal YES. Thus this single topic demolishes her controlling thesis that William Shakespeare fails to qualify in a single one of her categories.

Price asserts that Digges did not write a letter in 1613, but merely an inscription. This is a quibble. Yes, Digges wrote on a flyleaf of a book, but what he wrote on that flyleaf is clearly a letter, addressed to "Will Baker" and signed "Leo: Digges".

With respect to an acquaintanceship, Price asserts:

Although Digges and Shakspere lived within proximity to one another, there is no evidence that the two men knew, or ever met each other.

In point of historical and documentary fact, there is an extraordinarily close family connection between the two: Leonard Digges was the step-son (from 1603) of Thomas Russell, a man who was not only a neighbor of Shakespeare's both in London and in Stratford, but whom Shakespeare remembered in his will, and indeed appointed one of the two overseers of his will.

In short: Leonard Digges was the step-son of Shakespeare's particularly close personal friend and overseer.

So close was Digges himself to Shakespeare that he called him not "Shakespeare," "William Shakespeare," or "Mr. Shakespeare," but - with singular affection and using his nick-name - "our Will Shakespeare".

With regard to the latter, Price states:

Notice that Digges uses the impersonal "our." Had Digges written "my good friend Will Shakespeare," Prof. Nelson would have had a point.

But to assert that "our" is impersonal while "my" is personal is both inaccurate and tendentious, for "our" is simply the plural of "my", entirely appropriate in a literary discussion among three close friends, Will Baker, James Mabbe, and Leonard Digges.

Note that Price goes so far as to specify the language she would consider acceptable; since the language she specifies does not occur here, she rules the phrase - and the document - out of court.

Granted that the phrase in question could mean "our (English) Will Shakespeare" as well as "our (common friend) Will Shakespeare," Price has no grounds beyond sheer personal bias for prefering the first of these two significations over the second. Perhaps more important as concerns her argument, even the second remains a "Handwritten inscription, touching on literary matters."

Diana Price responds:

Prof. Nelson and I disagree over whether Digges’s allusion to Shakespeare is personal or impersonal. This distinction is critical in the construction of biography. As I demonstrate in my book (137-38), Shakespeare’s biographers, including Samuel Schoenbaum, convert impersonal allusions to Shakespeare’s works into personal evidence of his character and circle of friends. Yet, as many biographers of other subjects have pointed out, some allusions "are of a purely literary character and necessitate no personal knowledge" (Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle, London, 1934: 11).

Leonard Digges’s comments about Lope de Vega and Shakespeare is an impersonal allusion, and fortunately, the inscription is sufficiently straightforward as to leave no room for doubt. Here is the full text of the inscription (Paul Morgan, Shakespeare Survey #16, 1963: 118-20):

Will Baker: Knowinge
that Mr Mab: was to
sende you this Booke
of sonnets, wch with Spaniards
here is accounted of their
lope de Vega as in Englande
wee sholde of o[u]r: Will
Shakespeare. I colde not
but insert thus much to
you, that if you like
him not, you muste never
never reade Spanishe Poet
Leo: Digges

This is not about mutual friends, it’s about comparing the reputations of two poets who are recognized as the pride of their respective countries. Digges compares Lope de Vega’s literary reputation in Spain with Shakespeare's in England ("which with Spaniards here is accounted of their lope de Vega as in Englande wee sholde of o[u]r: Will Shakespeare" [emphases added]. There is nothing in this inscription to suggest that Digges was a friend of, or was known to Shakespeare.

Digges’s inscription to Will Baker is evidence that Digges knew Baker; that Digges at one time had possession of this book; that he considered Lope de Vega an excellent writer; and that in his opinion, Shakespeare’s works deserved to be esteemed in England as Lope de Vega’s were in Spain. This literary opinion is consistent with Digges’s two poems about Shakespeare. But the inscription is not evidence that Digges knew the man who wrote the works of Shakespeare, nor for that matter, Lope de Vega. Digges’s impersonal allusion to Shakespeare can be transmuted into personal evidence only by special pleading.

Leonard Digges subsequently wrote two poems on Shakespeare: the first, published in the 1623 First Folio, refers openly to the playwright's Stratford monument; the second, published in 1640 (but written like the first about 1622), openly credits Shakespeare with the enduring success of his company, the King's Men.

My point is proved: for Price to deny the obvious significance of Leonard Digges's letter of 1613 is nothing but special pleading.

The assumption that Digges and Shakespeare were personally acquainted is widely held, so I will take this opportunity to comment further. Morgan, who introduced Digges’s inscription in the Shakespeare Survey, qualifies his statements about Digges and Shakespeare; Morgan cites Leslie Hotson’s I, William Shakespeare, and concludes that "it seems certain that Digges was personally acquainted with his great contemporary" (118-19). The reason that Morgan must write that "it seems certain," as opposed to "it is certain" is quite simple. It is not certain. The very allusion Morgan was introducing did not remove doubt, as his own qualified statement demonstrates. Since there is no documentary evidence showing that the two men knew each other, and no personal literary allusions, Shakespeare’s and Digges’s personal relationship remains a matter of conjecture.

As far as we know, Leonard Digges wrote about Shakespeare three times, the flyleaf inscription being the first. He also wrote two tributes to Shakespeare, one published in the 1623 First Folio, the other in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems. According to John Freehafer ("Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry," Shakespeare Quarterly 21, winter 1970, 63-75), Digges’s tributes "refer vividly to the early staging and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays, reveal an exceptional enthusiasm for those plays, and record the views of a scholar who was associated with the Shakespeare circle in both Stratford and London" (63). To support his statement that Digges was "associated with the Shakespeare circle," Freehafer cites pp. 237-59 of Leslie Hotson’s I, William Shakespeare.

But Leslie Hotson’s discussion of the links between the Digges family, Thomas Russell, and Shakespeare, provides no evidence that Shakespeare knew Digges, either. Shakespeare’s will is good evidence that he and Thomas Russell were acquainted, but it does not tell us that Shakespeare knew Thomas Russell’s family, including Russell's step-son, Leonard. Hotson says that Digges "in his youth in Aldermanbury had well known the actors Heminges and Condell; and finally he had grown up under his stepfather’s care as Shakespeare’s neighbor and friend at Alderminster by Stratford" (244). But this is an assumption that relies on proximity, on the assumption that two people living in the same neighborhood know each other. A few degrees of separation does not constitute evidence of personal relationships.

The circumstances under which Digges contributed his poem to the First Folio point, not to Shakespeare, but to Digges’s documented relationship with one of its publishers, Edward Blount. Arthur W. Secord points out that "commendatory verses were sometime written in the interest of the publisher," and he argues that this was the case with the First Folio ("I.M. of the First Folio of Shakespeare and Other Mabbe Problems," Journal of English and German Philology 47, 1948: 374-81). Hotson (244) likewise supposes that Blount "was probably responsible" for soliciting verses from James Mabbe and Leonard Digges. (The case for Mabbe as the author of the poem subscribed with "I.M" in the Folio was summarized by Secord and is accepted today by most scholars.)

Blount published Digges’s translation of Claudian in 1617 and his translation of Cespeses’s Gerardo the year before the Folio. In 1623, Digges contributed an impersonal commendatory verse to Guzman’s The Rogue, translated by James Mabbe, and published by Blount. Ben Jonson wrote verse for Mabbe’s book, and Blount had published Jonson’s 1605 Sejanus. Finally, Hotson (255) cites Digges’s letter to one Philip Washington in 1632, with the postscript: "I pray send the enclosed to Ned Blount," further corroborating their relationship. In short, Digges’s poem in the First Folio is accounted for by his documented relationship with Blount, but his personal relationship with Shakespeare remains a matter of speculation.