Nevillean theory of Shakespeare authorship
For authorial attribution of unknown authors, academics rely on title pages, testimony by contemporary poets and historians, and official records.
[1] James and Rubinstein argue that "Neville's experiences, such as travel on the Continent and imprisonment in the Tower, correspond with uncanny exactness to the materials of the plays and their order.
[7] James and Rubinstein advance their argument by what MacDonald P. Jackson calls "tracing improbable connections between Shakespeare's works and Neville's busy public life".
[9] James and Rubinstein assert that a conspiracy "must have occurred" and that John Heminges and Henry Condell, who helped prepare the first printed edition of Shakespeare's plays, were in on it.
One page of the notebook contains descriptions of protocols for the coronation of Anne Boleyn which are similar to stage directions in Henry VIII, a play Shakespeare co-wrote with John Fletcher.
[15] A further argument is based on handwritten annotations in a 1550 edition of the book Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancashire and York by Edward Hall.
Casson discovered in the British Library an annotated copy of François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques (1576), a French translation considered a possible source of Hamlet.
[20] In addition, Casson found handwritten annotations in Neville's library; they appear to match the types of research that would have been necessary to write the works of Shakespeare.
In 2005, using the same setting, Brenda James assembled additional fragments which first led her to identify and to research the biography of Sir Henry Neville,[24] a name previously unknown to her.
[28] English literature professor Brean Hammond writes that in Bear, Casson "argues that Double Falsehood is indeed the lost Cardenio -- that Shakespeare's hand is certainly in it".
Hammond writes that Casson's claims of telling connections between Neville, Fletcher, and Spain suffer from "a degree of" fluellenism – the imparting of non-existent significance to mere coincidences.
[30] The theory of Nevillean authorship was first proposed by Brenda James who had drafted an entire book before meeting her eventual co-author, historian William D. Rubinstein.
[33] Reviewing the 2007 American edition of The Truth Will Out in the Shakespeare Quarterly, David Kathman wrote that despite its bold claims, "the promised 'evidence' is non-existent or very flimsy," and that the book is "a train wreck" filled with "factual errors, distortions, and arguments that are incoherent" as well as "pseudoscholarly inanities".
[34] Robert Pringle rejected Neville's authorship, explaining that "Shakespeare received a thoroughly good classical education at the Stratford grammar school and then, for well over 20 years, was involved in artistic and intellectual circles in London.
"[36] In answer to the negative reception the book received, editions following the first English one carry an afterword from Brenda James complaining about what she describes as a lack of "informed academic response".
