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The Enhanced Serving Man

  In his Quake-speare Shorterly post of 4 June 2013, Rambler devoted a few paragraphs at the end to the anonymous play, The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600) and the character within, the Earle of...

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Shaksper Iscariot

Returning to Ben Jonson’s A Tale of A Tub for a post. Rambler has demonstrated over and over the use of M-B-L as a Vere marker, including various characters in plays of the day. In Tub, there’s Justice...

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An Unfrequented Place, an Idle Cell

Oxfordians are quite familiar with Edmund Spenser’s verses from Teares of the Muses, 1591 and their reference to “Pleasant Willie,… ah is dead of late.” The common interpretation is that, ‘Pleasant...

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Apparel Makes the Man

In The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (anonymous 1600) A peasant changes clothes with the ‘drowned’ prince, Alberdure, who awoke from unconsciousness. Albedure was made “mad” by the potion of Doctor...

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Hamlet’s Feet

Rambler’s blog returns again and again to the M-B-L (sometimes M-P-L) marker which over time, one realizes is attached to so many allusions of Vere in works of his contemporaries. Vere is often...

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to take more liberty of behavior

In The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, (anon 1600)  Earl Lassinbergh, who is a ‘painter by day, and an earl by night’ is confronted with his deception. “FLORES: Heere you young gentlemen; do you know this...

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A Well-Promising Fore-head

  An earlier post, “Cover Your Head” discussed the various references to a gentleman usher ‘bare-headed before’ in various places in the literature. I argued there that the Droeshout portrait’s bare...

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The Invisible Man

Troilus & Cressida in Histrio-Mastix The play Histrio-Mastix, dated to near 1599 and possibly by Marston contains a number of plays within plays. One of these is Troilus & Cressida. In this...

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The Informant

Get the Joke, Solve the Puzzle Following the anonymous Histrio-Mastix, Ben Jonson wrote Poetaster. These plays are part of the sequence of Elizabethan plays known as the Stage Quarrel, or Poetamachia....

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A Fabled Pair

I am currently reading, and recommend, Censorship and Interpretation by Annabel Patterson. The book is critical to understanding the climate of censorship in the Tudor and Jacobean periods (and...

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A Knought Companion

Much has been written about the identities of Crispinus, Demitrius and Horace in Poetaster. But scholars are less sure of the identities of Ovid and Virgil, although Ovid is admittedly the central...

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Gentleman Ushers Plural

There are two ways to slice up the literary evidence as we work through contemporaneous accounts of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Plays can be examined individually, with each scene, character,...

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Usher the Third

Adding to our survey of Gentleman Ushers as allusions to the SAQ, I’ll add Chapman’s comedy, The Widow’s Tears, to our list. This link will pull up the 10 posts on Quake-speare Shorterly that includes...

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The Fourth Usher

The fourth gentleman usher reference to consider is a passing reference  in Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive. D’Olive is a play that, in my opinion, contains quite a bit of important clues and information to...

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The Devil’s in the Name

A brief digression from our quest for gentleman ushers. I remember looking through old photographs with my parents, and a picture of an old car brought an exclamation – “Simpy!”  It seems they had...

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Get Beds Prepared

I promise to return to the topic of gentleman ushers, but I’ve another tasty morsel to share before we resume the feature attraction. The Great Bed of Ware Ben Jonson’s The New Inn tells the story of...

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The King Desyred

The next, and fifth example of a gentleman usher as an allusion to authorship is in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass.  The gentleman usher in the play is Ambler, and he’s serves Lady Tailbush. Another...

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The True Disaster

 The Devil Wants to Wear My Razed Shoes The Lord Mayor’s banqueting House, Oxford Road, 1750.   The action in The Devil is an Ass occurs over the course of a single day. Ambler, Lady Tailbush’s...

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Valley Beneath the Waste

Continuing with Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (1616). Mrs Fitzdottrel is speaking. Fitzdottrel is a Vere character. He’s taken on a new groom, Devil, who stands for Shaksper. Act II,ii Fitzdottrel’s...

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Will for Ever

Wrapping up our fifth gentleman usher, Ambler from The Devil is an Ass and Pug/De-vile who steals his things and takes his job. There are two references to Pace, one when Fitzdottrel shows Merecraft...

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