Ernst Anselm Joachim (EAJ) Honigmann died in 2011; one of his most influential works was Shakespeare: The Lost Years. According to The Telegraph's obituary:
His thesis in The Lost Years followed EK Chambers’s suggestion that the young Shakespeare might have been “William Shakeshaft”, a player known to have been active in Lancashire in the 1580s. Honigmann published this as an “interim report” on the possibility that Shakespeare/Shakeshaft worked as a schoolmaster for a noble Roman Catholic family in Lancashire (and may himself have been a Catholic at this date).
His thesis in The Lost Years followed EK Chambers’s suggestion that the young Shakespeare might have been “William Shakeshaft”, a player known to have been active in Lancashire in the 1580s. Honigmann published this as an “interim report” on the possibility that Shakespeare/Shakeshaft worked as a schoolmaster for a noble Roman Catholic family in Lancashire (and may himself have been a Catholic at this date).
Historical fiction author Elizabeth Ashworth writes in her 2014 novel about that lost period, imagining that Shakespeare was involved not only as a player and a schoolmaster, but as a companion to Father Edmund Campion:
When William Shakespeare leaves his home in Stratford in the company of a Catholic priest he knows that he is walking into danger, but the vast libraries held in the name of God are enough to tempt him to risk his life in the pursuit of knowledge. However, the capture and death of his mentor, Edmund Campion, and his return to Stratford set William on an altogether different path. Marriage to Anne Hathaway means he must turn his back on the priesthood, but there are other ways for a clever and charming young man to be of use to the faith.
Many Kinds of Silence traces the story of a young William Shakespeare and his patron, Ferdinando Stanley, and reveals how religion, science and choosing in whom to place your trust meant the difference between life and death in Elizabethan England.
When William Shakespeare leaves his home in Stratford in the company of a Catholic priest he knows that he is walking into danger, but the vast libraries held in the name of God are enough to tempt him to risk his life in the pursuit of knowledge. However, the capture and death of his mentor, Edmund Campion, and his return to Stratford set William on an altogether different path. Marriage to Anne Hathaway means he must turn his back on the priesthood, but there are other ways for a clever and charming young man to be of use to the faith.
Many Kinds of Silence traces the story of a young William Shakespeare and his patron, Ferdinando Stanley, and reveals how religion, science and choosing in whom to place your trust meant the difference between life and death in Elizabethan England.
I've started reading the novel on my Kindle--it's available now at a very attractive price! One of the historical characters in the novel is the Fifth Earl of Derby, Ferdinando Stanley, whose claim to the throne came through the Brandon side of the Tudor succession, His great-grandmother was Henry VIII's younger sister Mary, the Dowager Queen of France, who married Charles Brandon, Henry's great friend. Thanks to Leanda de Lisle's triple biography of the Grey sisters, I've known about Mary's heirs through her daughter Frances, but this other line of succession is new to me. Ferdinando's grandmother was Mary Brandon's youngest daughter, Eleanor who married Henry Clifford, 2nd Earl of Cumberland. Eleanor's daughter Margaret, also an heir to the throne, married Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby, and Elizabeth Ashworth describes some of the family vicissitudes and Ferdinando's fate on her website:
Ferdinando was succeeded as Earl of Derby by his brother William--who is one of the candidates for non-Stratford Shakepearean authorship.
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