Hamlet’s Book Revisited: The Identity of the ‘Satiric Rogue’ Revealed with Earl Showerman

The commonly held view among Oxfordians is that Hamlet was holding a copy of Cardanus Comforte when confronted by Polonius in Hamlet Act 2. Cardanus Comforte was translated into English by Thomas Bedingfield in 1573, and published by “commandment of the right honorable the Earl of Oxenford,” Edward de Vere. Professor Hardin Craig, founder of the Philological Quarterly, published his article “Hamlet’s Book” in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 1934, reviewing and supporting the theory that Hamlet was holding a copy of Cardano. Sky Gilbert critiques this theory in his Oxfordian 24 article “What is Hamlet’s Book?” and argues for the Greek Sophist philosopher Gorgias’ book, On Nature, or the Non-existent. “The witty satirical tone of the scene in which Hamlet and Polonius discuss Hamlet’s book is remarkably similar to the tone of Gorgias’ essay.”

In The Classical Element in the Shakespeare Plays (1909), Baconian William Theobold proposed that Decius Junius Juvenal (60-140 CE), a much admired satirist, was the “satiric rogue” author of “Hamlet’s Book”. The credibility of the theory that Shakespeare was familiar with Juvenal’s Tenth Satire is confirmed by several additional previously unrecognized intertextual parallels in Hamlet.

In Shakespeare’s Books (2001) Stewart Gillespie acknowledges that there are “passing resemblances to Juvenalian lines in Hamlet, where most possible echoes of him have been found in Shakespeare; they are insufficient to establish direct acquaintance.” (270) The fact that there were no English translations of Juvenal’s satires during Shakespeare’s lifetime, that editions were only available from Continental publishers, may explain the reluctance to accepting the Roman satirist as a credible source.

For Oxfordians, however, this would not be an impediment as the inventory of William Cecil’s library from that era includes item 238, Juvenalis & Persii Satyr. Given the attention of early Shakespeare scholars, but largely neglected over the past century, Decius Junius Juvenal’s satires as potential Shakespeare sources merits further investigation. “Hamlet’s Book” is every bit as likely to be an edition of the satires of Juvenal as it is to be an edition of Cardano or the upstart Gorgias.

Bio: Dr. Earl Showerman, president of the SOF, graduated from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Medical School, and practiced emergency medicine in southern Oregon for 30 years. After retiring in 2003, he enrolled at Southern Oregon University (SOU) to study Shakespeare. Over the past two decades he has presented and published scholarly papers on a variety of topics, including the Greek dramatic sources of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Much Ado about Nothing, Timon of Athens, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2012, he presented the keynote address on the playwright’s medical knowledge at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust Conference in London. Over the past decade he has taught a series of courses on Shakespeare and the authorship question at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at SOU, and is the author of a chapter on Shakespeare’s medical knowledge in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2013), and contributed three topics to Know-It-All Shakespeare (2017), edited by Ros Barber. He is the executive producer of the first collection of songs related to Edward de Vere, My Lord of Oxenford’s Mask, by the lute duet Mignarda (2006).

Learn more at https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/