Hello friends. Thank you so much for joining me for another Creator’s Roulette. Today we are going to learn about a famous classic – Robin Hood from Anna Faktorovich. She is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press and has previously taught for over four years at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, an MA in Comparative Literature, and a BA in Economics. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014).
It is wonderful to host someone knowledgeable as Anna. There are a lot of interesting pieces of history in this post and I have learned so much from it! I hope you enjoy this guest post!
On the Ghostwriting Behind Robin Hood
By: Anna Faktorovich, PhD
The mythology of Robin Hood that is familiar to most modern readers largely stems from nineteenth-century children’s books and 1938-to-present films that have simplified this character to a highway-robber who steals-from-the-rich-and-gives-to-the-poor. Scholars who have searched for Hood’s roots have pinpointed two Renaissance tragedies as foundations, but have missed the comedy, called Look Around You, that is the actual first part of this trilogy. This scholarly failure is used in this article to explain that all texts from the British Renaissance have been incorrectly attributed. Among the 104 tested bylines, all of “William Shakespeare’s” plays and sonnets are attributed to the Workshop. William Percy ghostwrote both the entire Robin Hood trilogy and most of the “Shakespeare” tragedies. I have solved this group of related mysteries in my newly-released British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series. I cannot squeeze all of the evidence into this article; thus, if it catches your interest, you can find the rest of my evidence by purchasing volumes from it in the links included here: https://anaphoraliterary.com/attribution.
The Unacknowledged First Part of the Robin Hood Trilogy
How could there be overwhelming evidence that a Ghostwriting Workshop of six wrote all of the published books from the British Renaissance (1560-1650), and yet this conclusion has never before been proposed by literary scholars? This brief case-study helps to answer this question. The description of Look Around You by the Shakespeare’s Globe’s “Read Not Dead” series presents it as a “response to Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood plays”. Firstly, “Munday’s” name is spelled as “A. Monday” as one of its spelling variants; this version obviously points to this being a fictitious pseudonym as it is jointly the phrase: a Monday. Secondly, A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama lists the likely first-performance range for it between 1597-9, and a first-publication in 1600. The other two Robin Hood plays the Globe is referring to are: The Downfall of Robert (performance in 1598; publication in 1601) and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington (1598; 1601). All three were performed by the Admiral’s troupe, and all were initially anonymous in print. All share several of the same characters that include King John, Queen Eleanor and Robin Hood. These simple chronological dates and credits blatantly argue that Look was the first part of this trilogy, and not an unrelated later “response” as the Globe claims. There were earlier Robin Hood stories, but this trilogy is first to combine Hood’s character with the historical figure of the Earl of Huntington who is mentioned in “Raphael Holinshed’s” Chronicles.
Figure 1. “The Book of Sir Thomas Moore: Shakespeare’s Handwriting in the Harley MS 7368, folio page 9r.” (British Library, 1601-4).
Errors in the Unsubstantiated Re-Attributions of Robin Hood
Critics have re-attributed the Downfall and Death parts of the series to “Monday” without any documentary evidence, but they have failed to acknowledge that the similarly anonymous Look had to have been written by the same author. The second and third parts of the trilogy—Downfall and Death—had been clustered together in early catalogs such as William Mears’ 1713-9 editions that assigned them without evidence to the “Thomas Heywood” byline. The 1732 catalog printed for W. Feales deletes the “Heywood” byline and returns these plays to their initial anonymity. All three of these catalogs list Look separately because it does not have “Robert” at the start of its title, so it is listed under L, while the others are under R. While Feales deleted the “Heywood” byline, a decade later it was re-introduced in the biographical note about “Heywood” in Dodsley’s 1744 Collection of Old Plays. Dodsley’s 1744 series also reprinted an anonymously-attributed unedited version of Look Around You, which was then re-printed nearly as-is by W. Carew Hazlitt in 1874 in A Select Collection of Old English Plays. If either Dodsley or Hazlitt had edited or translated any of these three plays; they would have realized that they were part of a series, and thus had to share a byline, or that it was illogical to leave Look anonymous while assigning Downfall and Death to “Heywood”. Seemingly scholars finally took a closer look at these plays’ authorship by the time Death of Robert was re-attributed in the 1921 Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge sale catalog to “Monday”. However, upon closer examination of what led to this change, it becomes clear that scholars were now committing errors of omission or willful-ignorance.
Figure 2. “William Shakespeare’s” Will.
Figure 3. John-a-Kent and John-a-Cumber manuscript in “Monday’s autograph” (December 1595; reprinted in facsimile in John S. Farmer’s The Tudor Facsimile Texts: 1912).
One Handwriting Style for “Shakespeares”, “Monday”, “Chapman” and “Northumberland”
Back in 1912, John S. Farmer re-attributed Sir Thomas More (Figure 1) to the “Monday”-byline when he printed a facsimile of the unpublished handwritten manuscript of John-a-Kent and John-a-Cumber (1595: Figure 3). Farmer explained that the handwriting styles in More and John were similar, with matching combinations of opening Latin quotes and “ornamental capitals” in the title. The argument has been repeated recently in studies such as T. H. Howard-Hill’s Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which credits the dominant Handwriting S in More as matching the handwriting in John-a-Kent. Recent re-attributors have also agreed that there are linguistic echoes between John and the Downfall of Robert that seemingly re-affirm that all of these texts were written by a single author called… a Monday. The “ornamental capitals” that Farmer observed in John appear not only at the top of More, but also at the top of all other backstage plot outlines, such as The Second Part of Fortune’s Tennis (Figure 4), which has been erroneously claimed back in 1954 in W. W. Greg’s Dramatic Documents to illustrate a distinct-style (or different from Handwriting S) Handwriting C in these Tennis and More manuscripts. There is indeed clearly one dominant handwriting style in Figures 1 and 3-4. The absurdity of re-attributions in this field begins to seem more deliberate—as opposed to accidental—when one compares Figures 1 and 3-4 to the handwriting in the three differently-spelled variants of “William Shakespeare’s” name in his legal will in Figure 2. This same handwriting also appears in the anonymous Northumberland MS together with variedly-spelled “Shakespeare” signatures, as well as on the passport of 7th Earl of Northumberland, and also in the handwriting of “John Shakespeare” on a deed in 1596, and in a receipt for a £3 loan in 1599 to “George Chapman” in “Philip Henslowe’s” Diary. What conclusion would you logically reach if you found the same handwriting style in the signatures of different bylines? There is obviously a fraudster behind this pattern who is writing and signing legal documents under multiple bylines.
Figure 4. “The Second Part of Fortune’s Tennis (fragmentary)”, Add MS 10449, f. 4r (British Library, 1600-3?).
The Mysteries Solved
My approach led to unbiased and purely quantitative conclusions because it was grounded in a computational-linguistics authorial-attribution method I invented that combines 27-tests for punctuation, lexical density, parts of speech, passive voice, characters and syllables per word, psychological word-choice, and patterns of the top-6 words and letters. I applied these tests to 284 central texts from the British Renaissance to determine that all of them were ghostwritten by a Workshop with six members: William Percy (son of the 8th Earl of Northumberland, and brother of the 9th Earl), Ben Jonson, Richard Verstegan (exiled Catholic publisher), Josuah Sylvester (official Court Poet), Gabriel Harvey (Cambridge Rhetoric Professor) and William Byrd (music/poetry publishing monopoly patent holder). The Percy-group included: all three parts of Robin Hood, the previously erroneously-assigned-to-“Monday” and initially-anonymous Fedele and Fortunio (1585), most of the “Shakespeare”-bylined tragedies, and 7 out of 8 of the tested “Chapman”-bylined plays. Percy wrote under his exclusive “Heywood”-byline that he had written or contributed to over 220 plays in The English Traveler (1633), so this massive re-attribution to Percy fits with his own confession. The handwriting styles in Figures 1-4—currently assigned to “Shakespeare”, “Monday” and a clerk—are similar to each other because they all belong to Percy’s hand. There are 698 pages of other types of scholarly proof for these re-attributions in Volumes 1-2 of this series. And Volumes 3-14 present the first ever accessible translations of 12 extraordinary texts with annotations that add further evidence for their re-attribution to Percy. These volumes not only include the first part of the Robin Hood series—Look Around You—but also Fedele and Fortunio, Hamlet’s “bad” or homosexual first quarto, and the only actual sonnet-collection that Percy wrote—Coelia.
If you have come to this point in the article, and you now believe me; then, you are all set; you can spread the word to others that six ghostwriters wrote the British Renaissance. If you find that my conclusions are trying to overturn your essential beliefs about the history of the world, and you are insisting that I must have made some horrible mistake; then, you need to read the rest of my Series because it was written for the audience of the most extreme skeptics.
Do you believe the conclusions Anna reached in this article or in her re-attribution study? If so, how so? If not, why not?
Tell us in the comments.
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It’s insane. The paleography doesn’t hold up – these documents are not all in the same hand. The letterforms and aspect are not close at all, except in the letters that are common in most hands from this period. In addition, the overall thesis that involves the Shakespeare authorship controversy at all has already been debunked by James Shapiro about a decade ago (or more). No one prior to the 19c doubted Shakespeare wrote the plays. Also, Ben Johnson was plenty busy writing the works attributed to him, and the antiquarian suggested by Factorovich is incredibly unlikely. But, regardless, there is zero actual analysis of the handwriting that supports any of the claims being made here. “These are the same” is not evidence. Talk to me about the ways letter forms, aspect, ductus, etc., are the same, and I will start listening.
The handwriting style in the samples presented in this article have several obvious similarities like the one Andrea McNichol describes in “Handwriting Analysis” (1994): “The loop crosses too high, so it looks like a balloon floating on a string. This trait means psychosis. Whenever you see malformations, or any kind of distortion of the shaping of loops (unless you’re looking at calligraphy, which graphologists don’t analyze), it’s a psychotic projection onto paper. Twisted thinking produces twisted writing” (164). The science of handwriting analysis has always been open to questioning and contradiction in courts as demonstrated by this statement from Mr. Rothwacks in “US Congress: Committee on Ways and Means: Hearings” (1953): “…the Treasury experts took one view of handwriting, we had the matter submitted to the FBI and they took almost a completely contrary view.” Recent studies, such as the one led by Noor Fazilla Abd Yusof, “Preliminary Study: Graphology-based Prediction Model for Learning Style Assessment in Primary Schools” (2021), have attempted to derive some indisputable statistically-verifiable elements in handwriting including: “graphology features i.e., letter size, and slant”, as well as distinctions between “handwriting inclined rightward” or “leftward” that indicate different “personality traits”, and they project future work into elements such as “margin, word spacing, pressure”. The “FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin” published an article on “Handwriting Analysis” in March 1954 that demonstrates at least one case where a potentially wrongful conviction for murder resulted from two handwriting styles being too similar for the FBI Lab to distinguish the difference, but still the abstract claims, “Expert testimony based on handwriting analyses is now an approved, often essential, part of court trial procedure.” Most of the documents I used to prove my findings in this article and in the rest of the series falls into what this FBI article considers as an especially difficult category to judge of “Disguised Writing”, where “the writer” deliberately imitates “the writing of another person… to alter his own normal writing. These attempts at alteration usually destroy only the more obvious characteristics, leaving completely untouched the unconscious and inherent writing habits.” These changes include “slant”, “size”, “extra flourishes in capital letters, angular formations of small letters”. A forger of this type tends to use “slow or ‘drawing’ movements, inconsistencies in letter formations, and an erratic overall appearance.” Now I will apply all this to the four figures in my article. All four include exaggerated letters that are so stretched or elongated that they hit the letters on a neighboring line. The “disguised” exaggerated handwriting features are most similar in Figures 1 and 2 or between “Sir Thomas More” and “Shakespeare”, and this is why experts have previously claimed they belong to a single hand; the main similarity is in the obviously forged or unnatural loops in changing directions in letters. If one focuses on just one of these curly letters “I” in “Shakespeare’s” will, similar “I’s” are easily spotted in Figure 3: “John-a-Kent”. The difference is that Percy appears to have deliberately used an ultra-exaggerated style in Figures 1-2 because these documents were both legal documents – “Shakespeare’s” will had a monetary impact on an inheritance, and “More” was contested by censors that barred this play’s performance. In contrast Figures 3 is an examples of Percy’s more casual sloppy, hurried handwriting with more natural elongations and loops. And Figure 4 might indeed be Josuah Sylvester’s handwriting (which is also found in “Mary” and “Philip Sidney’s” archival signatures); he was one of the other ghostwriters and I explain his handwriting style and include examples of other variants of it under multiple variants in Volumes 1-2 of the series. I have included these handwriting samples in this article simply because they communicate similarity more easily visually than if I had included a data table. All of my computational-linguistics data is available here: https://github.com/faktorovich/Attribution. So all who want to test my findings should follow this. Handwriting analysis is in no way a major part of my study, which instead relies on linguistic, documentary and various other types of evidence to confirm my re-attributions of the Renaissance. To address your comments: “aspect” and “letterform” are synonyms, with the second more precisely meaning the “shape of a letter” in “design”; as I explained the unusual curls in the letters in “Shakespeare” and “More” were blatantly designed by this forger to represent a unique handwriting style that is very rare, and thus must be by a single hand. By saying that these “letters… are common in most hands from this period” proves my precisely theory that only six ghostwriters wrote for “most hands from this period”. As for Shapiro, you must be referring to his “Contested Will”, which makes false claims even in its description on the publisher’s website, as it claims that “no one doubted that” “Shakespeare” “had written his plays” for the first 200 years (which you repeat in your “19c” note), whereas doubts started if not with the first byline then certainly in the Third Folio (1663), most of which is still not accepted as being by “Shakespeare”. Instead of addressing the scholarly questions that have been raised about “Shakespeare’s” linguistic similarities with other “authors” Shapiro looks at vague intuitive claims made by non-literature/linguistic-scholars such as Freud and Twain. As scholars of “Henslowe’s Diary” have pointed out writers worked on a 3-weeks schedule to produce a finished play; so Jonson would have needed to write at least 17 plays annually to be fully busy with this work, and only a couple dozen plays across his entire lifetime are currently attributed to Jonson. I can address all of the similarities, but this has already been a pretty long comment. Let me know if I should proceed. Or if you have begun listening? Your replies are most warmly welcomed. I do not understand one point: what is “insane” about my findings? By “insane” do you mean “shocking; outrageous” or “mentally ill” and unable to have “social interactions”? Obviously, since I am first in presenting my six-ghostwriters conclusion, it must be “shocking” as it is unusual. But a “mental illness” is a disease of the emotions, thinking or behavior. In-depth scholarly research proves my thinking is in-order. You are not seeing any behavioral abnormalities without seeing by body performing anything strange online. So, are you saying there is something wrong with my emotions? What on earth do emotions have to do with computational-linguistics or handwriting-analysis. I am very curious to find out what you are trying to say.