Several years ago, Roger Stritmatter and Lynn Kositsky, active proponents of the notion that the 17th Earl of Oxford (or “Oxenford”, as he preferred to style himself) wrote the works of Shakespeare, embarked on an attempt to refashion themselves as mainstream Shakespeare commentators. They didn’t abandon their authorship theories. Instead, they hoped to undermine the “Stratford man” indirectly. This book examines one of the most oft-cited objections to the Oxenford case, viz., the fact that the generally accepted date for The Tempest is 1610 or 1611, well after the earl’s demise in 1604.

The founder of the Oxenford school, J. T. Looney, sidestepped this chronological difficulty by declaring that The Tempest didn’t belong in the Shakespearean corpus; it was an inferior work by another hand, that had somehow intruded itself into the First Folio. Stritmatter and Kositsky don’t follow that path. Instead, they argue that the play must have been written years earlier than the consensus date – before 1603, in fact.

The authors’ ulterior motive, which they frankly acknowledge in their concluding chapter, doesn’t prove that their hypothesis is false. It is annoying, though, that they repeatedly insist that the conventional dating is a product of “ideology” rather than the result of its adherents’ good faith reading of the evidence. A psychologist might detect a certain degree of “projection” in their unrelenting demeaning of adversaries’ motives.

At some other time and place, I hope to look at S&K’s arguments in detail. For the moment, here are a few observations regarding the quality of their presentation and methodology.

The book is oddly incomplete. Unless one first reads the authors’ article “Shakespeare and Voyagers Revisited” (published in a respectable journal, though S&K resent the editor’s refusal to give them space for a surrebuttal to a rejoinder) and their on-line critique of David Kathman’s on-line article “Dating The Tempest”, On the Date, Sources and Design will be hard to follow, if not incomprehensible. What’s more, although the book refers readers to the anti-Kathman piece (“Having replied at length to Kathman’s case in another context, we here offer only a few examples of his mistaken reasoning”, p. 23), it doesn’t provide the URL. Indeed, as of this writing, the S&K reply can be found only in the form of an archived copy in the Wayback Machine.

Looking at the arguments that the book presents rather than simply alludes to, the text brims with references to contemporary Shakespeare scholarship, much of which, in S&K’s telling, supports whatever assertion they are making at the moment. When one looks at their footnotes, however, it often turns out that the support consists of one or two articles or a single book. Left undiscussed are views to the contrary and the extent to which S&K’s preferred opinions have won general acceptance.

If, for instance, it is important to S&K’s case to establish that many plays were written specifically for performance during Shrovetide (the days immediately preceding Ash Wednesday in the Western Christian calendar), they owe us more than a citation to one book that proposes that thesis and a handful of articles that purport to find Shrovetide themes in some of Shakespeare’s plays. They should, at the very least, confront the obvious objection that the plays produced at the Royal Court had previously appeared in the public theaters at all sorts of times. Did the playwrights include Shrovetide elements in some of them on the chance of an eventual performance at Court during that particular season? Or did the Court commission plays for the season (and, if so, how does one account for the disappearance of all records of those transactions)?

The support that S&K do cite for their assertions is also suspect. In a disconcerting number of instances, their footnotes lead to contradictory statements or to pertinent evidence that they have neglected to consider. Here are two examples:

1. Wishing to link what they regard as the “mazes” that the Tempest dramatis personae wander with the Christian liturgical year, they declare that the labyrinth is a significant Christian symbol that would have been immediately recognized by Elizabethan Englishmen. “By the 15th century,” they inform us, “walking the labyrinth had replaced the Easter pilgrimage to Palestine for Christians unable to undertake the hazards and hardships of the actual journey.” That statement has a footnote. One would assume that the note corroborates the statement. In actuality, the work cited there denies the existence of evidence for the speculation that Christians anywhere at any time engaged in labyrinth walking as a form of pilgrimage.

2. S&K are convinced that a German play called Die Schöne Sidea, which must have been written no later than 1605 (because its author died in that year), is based in part on The Tempest. Their information about the play derives from a book on the performances given in Germany by English acting companies and the influence that they had on early German drama. That book includes a long discussion of Sidea. Among other matters, it considers the theory, proposed by other writers, that Sidea drew its story from an English play – and rejects it. S&K neglect to mention this, nor do they offer any reason (not even an implausible one) why a German imitator of The Tempest would depart wildly from the prototype’s characters and plot.

S&K are not even very good at describing their own previous work. The thesis of their earlier article “Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited” is that a widely accepted inspiration for The Tempest, William Strachey’s True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, could not have been written earlier than 1612 and thus couldn’t have been seen by Shakespeare before he wrote the play (which had a court performance on November 1, 1611). Referring to that article, S&K’s book states, “We did, however, speculate that an early draft of the document [the True Reportory] might have been sent to England with Gates in July 1610.” (p. 17) No, they didn’t. The closest that they came to mentioning what they now call “our hypothesized document” was “It is certain that Strachey’s ‘letter’, at least in the form in which it appeared in print in 1625, was not transmitted on Gates’ voyage”.

Indeed, “an early draft . . . sent to England with Gates in July 1610” would have reduced the article’s thesis from, “Strachey’s True Reportory is no longer even a possible source for Shakespeare’s Tempest” to “The version of the True Reportory seen by Shakespeare differed from the one printed several years later by Samuel Purchas”, an idea that would be neither highly controversial nor particularly interesting.

As it happens, an earlier draft of the True Reportory does exist and had been published (albeit in a very obscure journal) in 2001, before S&K wrote “Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited”. Having since become aware of the new evidence, S&K now acknowledge (pp. 123-27) that the True Reportory unquestionably predates The Tempest and was transmitted to England in plenty of time to influence the play’s author. With what one might term “ideological” stubbornness, they refuse to let this fact undermine their theory. ( )