humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

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I'm rereading A True Repertory ('Strachey letter') with
the hypothesis that it was written by The Compiler to
Prince Henry.

I've always been skeptical about the address 'Excellent
Lady.'

What gentleman (Strachey was a 'Worship' due to his
university MA) would write, for example, a graphic
account of cannibalism, then send it off to the Countess
of Suffolk?

The Compiler would certainly know better than to
describe to Her Ladyship a graphic account of a
colonist's violent murder of his wife and the consumption
of the wife's flesh over the winter not to speak of the particularly
brutal execution of the cannibalizer among
other low grotesqueries that befell the Virginia Company.

The generic address 'Excellent Lady' -- I have yet to see
an an anonymous address from that period -- looks like
something the plagiarist Purchas would do to obscure his
heavy editing of the one hundred and fifty-seven page
'letter.'

Writer's may want to remain anonymous but it kind
of defeats the purpose to dedicate a hundred and
fifty-seven page 'letter' to an anonymous dedicatee,
especially since dedications were social currency
among the English aristocracy.

We know from the eminent historian Alexander Brown
that Purchas liked to chop up manuscripts and paste
the parts hither and thither. That and Purchas' penchant
for redaction has made him a pariah to modern historians.

Hatred is not too strong a term.

I've marked all the portions of A True Repertory that
contain Purchas' interpolations of material from A True
Declaration, I'm just in the process of getting a reading
on what's left.


As to the importance of Prince Henry to the debate over
Kathman's Dating The Tempest, the fact that the Prince
was made Patron to the Virginia Company in 1610 opens
up new avenues of research, so far those avenues
have lead to Henry's intense interest in sailing, ships,
exploration, colonization and plans to defeat Spain
in a war over the New World, all germane to the question
of the purpose of A True Repertory and to the validity
of Dating The Tempest as a source for the play.