Introduction

This book presents the case for Henry Neville, Elizabeth I’s ambassador to France, as the author of Shakespeare’s works.

Extensive archival research, transcription and digitization of Neville’s surviving writings have made possible much more detailed comparisons with the plays and poems. These qualitative and quantitative comparisons form the backbone of this book. Any study of Neville’s possible authorship must put his own writing at its centre.

New documents, a fuller life

Newly identified letters and other documents recording Neville’s four years abroad with Henry Savile provide insight into their studies and friendships. For instance, Andreas Dudith asked Neville to encourage Savile’s work on Copernicus and sought instructions about books Neville had left with him. Recommendations sought access to scholarly libraries for the travellers.

The book also examines Neville’s work as a gunfounder in greater detail, from the inspection, delivery and sale of cannon to the woodland fuel on which the furnaces depended. Shakespeare’s imagery of furnaces, smoke, heat and discharged cannon is set beside the practical business Neville conducted.¹

Neville’s papers also preserve Italian newsletters received through Thomas Savile. They bring reports of military movements, political decisions and disputed intelligence into the study of Othello. On a sheet in the collection, pen trials repeat the names Alibech and Rustico, the characters in a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron.

The Billingbear library catalogue adds another substantial body of evidence. It records key sources for Hamlet, Othello and Measure for Measure, histories covering the ground of the Roman plays, and books no longer found at Audley End. Surviving annotated volumes allow closer study of Neville’s reading with Savile.

What Shakespeare adds

The comparisons in this book draw on fuller access to Neville’s correspondence and systematic searches of early modern writing. They examine the words themselves, the circumstances in which Neville used them, and the dramatic situations in which they recur.

What Shakespeare adds to his sources brings Neville’s experience into sharper focus. In Measure for Measure, the Duke gains access and trust by dressing and acting as a friar—a device absent from Cinthio’s novella and Whetstone’s play. Neville’s dispatches describe an agent who would assume a priest’s habit and function to win trust, as well as a friar he used to penetrate a suspected conspiracy. In Othello, Iago arrives at a night-time fight “in his shirt,” carrying weapons—a detail absent from Cinthio’s account of his return. Neville had reported Henri IV rushing from bed to a fight outside his lodgings “in his shirt with a sword in his hand.”

Henry Cuffe, an Oxford Greek scholar and longstanding acquaintance of Neville, gives particular substance to the discussion of As You Like It. His account of the seven ages, dated 1600 and printed in 1607, includes a vigorous prime governed by the Sun. Jaques’s speech removes that flourishing middle and expands the decline into old age. The book examines this transformation alongside further comparisons between Cuffe’s writing and Jaques’s language.²

Astronomy supplies another connection. In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses places Earth at the centre but gives the Sun the authority of a king. The book sets this combination beside Savile’s investigations of planetary motion during his travels with Neville. Neville’s correspondent William Lower later observed Jupiter’s moons, newly announced by Galileo, through Thomas Harriot’s telescope. Scholars have connected the discovery with the four ghosts and Jupiter’s descent in Cymbeline.³

Tacitus provides a sustained example of Neville’s reading in action. He draws on the historian in an embassy dispatch, his confession after the Essex rebellion, a letter after his release and his advice to King James. The book examines his Latin and his adaptations alongside the plays. In 3 Henry VI, a sequence traced by David Womersley to Tacitus, available in Savile’s 1591 translation, recurs: a soldier searches the body of a man he has killed, discovers that it is his father, and asks forgiveness. The book also examines Tacitus in relation to Titus Andronicus, Henry V and Macbeth.

A pattern across the writing

Three language studies extend these comparisons beyond selected passages. A computational model trained on early modern English compares the patterns of words surrounding their use. In equal samples of diplomatic correspondence, Neville consistently stands closer to Shakespeare than Winwood or Cornwallis does. Among ten dramatists, Shakespeare is almost always Neville’s closest match.

A second study finds that nineteen diplomatic and administrative terms selected from Neville’s letters become more frequent in Shakespeare during Neville’s embassy and its aftermath, while comparison drama shows a much smaller change. A third compares recurring two-word combinations: a Shakespeare play resembles Neville’s writing more closely than a play by another dramatist in roughly four out of five pairings. These are tests of repeated patterns across the writing.⁴

People, manuscripts and printed books

A letter from Robert Drury supplies a direct connection with Shakespeare’s London associates. Humphrey Fludd, who later testified in the same lawsuit as Shakespeare, reported seeing Southampton’s letter to Drury on a table in Neville’s house.

The evidence continues after Neville’s death. George Carleton’s Astrologomania appeared from the Jaggard printing house in 1624, a year after the First Folio. Twenty years earlier, John Chamber’s will had placed responsibility for publishing a work by Carleton on astrology with Neville and Savile. Robert Nevile, very probably Neville’s great-nephew, later ended his comedy The Poor Scholar with two lines derived from Othello: the Duke’s advice to a resisting father becomes the reconciled father’s own conclusion.

John Hales, who helped edit Savile’s Chrysostom, was remembered by Dryden as saying that whatever another poet had written about, he could find it “much better treated of in Shakespeare.”⁵

The appendices explore more speculative possibilities: whom Bacon meant by “concealed poets” in his 1603 letter; the gentleman called Nevill, his disguises and Shakespearean echoes in Nathan Field’s A Woman Is a Weathercock; and the cryptic address “A never writer, to an ever reader” prefixed to some copies of Troilus and Cressida in 1609. These studies ask whether the names, wordplay and circumstances contain further allusions to Neville.