Mrs Shakespeare
Times Literary Supplement, 5 March 1993
Sir, - Robert Nye (Letters, February 26) continues to invent his facts. But at least he now prefers to forget his fantasy about John Shakespeare's late conversion, for which "all the evidence" (Letters, February 12) has aparently evaporated. Nye also changes his plea about "Hamnet". He now cites serious scholarship, instead of a Stratford clerk (February 12), as Mrs Shakespeare's authority for thus misnaming her only son; a nvel citation indeed.
However, the facts remain even more obstinate than Nye. The boy was named after the Stratfordian Sadler, whose name was written or dictated as "Hamlett" by Shakepeare himself, in his 1616 will. Nye ignores this point also; but others may find it authority enough. If more is needed, E. K. Chamers (William Shakespeare, 1930) and Mark Eccles (Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 1961) record Sadler's name as "Hamlet" and add other such exmples from the Stratford archives. Sadly, Eccles wrongly states that Shakespeare bequeathed money to "Hamnet", instead of Hamet, Sadler. S. Schoenbaum has persistently promulfated the same error (for example in his Documentary Life, 1975) during two decades.
Such misakes are certainly serious; but is the scholarship? Suppose that James Joyce's only son had been given a name which the leading authorities always spelt "Unysses"; would not Nye find that even faintly funny?
My point about the 1592 document was that it denounces recusants, not debtors, but names John Shakespeare as a debtor rather than a recusant, which of course meant "Catholic" in that context. Nye stays silent about his mistaken claim to the contrary, and about his unevidenced assertion that in Elizabethan as well as Jacoean parlance "gonorrhoea was equated with the pox". On that alleged equation, his best authority is a character in a 1631 play, whom Nye calls "Massinger", just as he attributes his own mistake to his own character. In that respect at least he may be right.
Eric Sams
32 Arundel Avenue,
Sanderstead, Surrey