The Lost Years: Did Billy See Nevvy?
Her First Beloved: The Bard (Part 3)-- from AngelBio: The Eternal Life of Ginevra de' Benci (1520-2020)
Did He Really Exist?
Some scholars believe that William Shakespeare never existed at all. That he was just a figment of English literary imagination, and his actual works are the products of multiple writers under a single nom de plume—like a Franklin W. Dixon— and not of an individual.
You can't really blame them. The historical record is almost as frustratingly scant as Ginevra de' Benci's.
All we've got is a picture of a dude with a receding hairline and a gold earring, along with a few brush-stroked dates and a bunch of disconnected dots.
How Did He Become A Star?
Born in a provincial market town a hundred miles outside London in 1564 to the local glovemaker, Billy was the third of eight children. By eighteen he was married to a 26-year old woman, by whom he had a daughter six months later, followed by twins two years after that. Next thing we know, he's the Andrew Lloyd Webber of Renaissance London-- writing and producing smash hit after smash hit that he performs for royalty, with his own theatrical company, and eventually in his own theatre.
What's with that? How does someone just stroll coolly out of history and write some of the greatest verses ever in world literature?
Connection To A Whole New World
In Part One of Her First Beloved: The Bard, we see how the Ginevra motif in Much Ado About Nothing supercharges not just Shakespeare's career, but the history of Europe, starting a chain of events that will bring Leonardo DaVinci's famous first solo piece, Ginevra de'Benci, to a New World that Ginevra would have heard of through the family friend for whom these discoveries would be named (Amerigo Vespucci), and for the father (Amerigo de' Benci) whose loss would educate her in the convent that would become her final resting place-- Monastero delle Murate, or Le Murate (The Wall). And a New World of which The Bard would magically write about in his final solo work, The Tempest.
All this without once even saying her name.
Did He Cross An Ocean To Be With Her?
In Part Two of Her First Beloved: Billy Don't Be A Hero, we find out how Shakespeare calls on Ginevra to play a Hero, not just by writing herself out of the story as a lady to be rescued by a knight in shining armor, but by re-writing her own story. And in the process thwarting a rival's re-writing the story of Billy's murdered friend, Christopher Marlowe.
But that still doesn't explain how Ginevra settles on this obscure English lad who gets himself shotgunned into a marriage like she did (just without kids). Or why she moves heaven and earth just to be with him in what was regarded by the rest of the civilized world as a cultural backwater. She certainly had better choices, as we'll see in future episodes.
Looking at the timelines, maybe it wasn't Nevvy who crossed a continent to be with Billy. Maybe it was the other way around.
They could never have met, born over a century apart. But are they connected? Is there a resonant pairing? The Immortality Matrix is nodding and winking yes, but how do we begin to graft the centuries into its mesh?
As we've already seen, all you need is one connection. But that first one has got to count.
His Lost Years: Academic Speculation vs Financial Gravity
Perhaps the most intriguing blank in Shakespeare's bio occurs between 1585 and 1590, where Billy disappears from the historical record after the birth of his third child. And then shows up as a hot actor, playwright and producer on the London theater scene. With zero curriculum vitae or street creds to explain how he got there.
Scholars tend to explain away Shakespeare's Lost Years with a carefully layered speculation. Shakespeare must have taken some kind of pedagogical position in his hometown of Stratford, where he would have studied at night while teaching by day, wrote some verses that likely tickled the fancy of a local patron, who might have staked him to write a couple of sonnets that could have caught the eye of a the attention of the Earl of Southampton, who would have brought him to London, where he likely apprenticed himself to a theater guild where he would have learned his craft and earned his way to the top of his profession.
People who don't work in real jobs tend to think like that. Fame comes to you for being talented, virtuous, and speaking your truth trippingly upon the tongue. Fortunes miraculously accrue to fathers feeding families of five on teacher's and/or actor's paychecks. Enough to pay off a parent's substantial debts, purchase the second-biggest house in town, buy a partnership in the queen's acting troupe, or build a theater just outside city limits.
But when you are subject to the laws of financial gravity, everything matters and everything chatters. Even the silence. If your lips aren't speaking, your clothing is. Your jewelry is. Your hairstyle is. Your actions are. And it's not some kind of rocket science.
Put yourself in this guy Shakespeare's shoes: you're twenty-one with a wife nearly a decade your senior, barely tolerant of your ability to barely make ends meet for her and your three kids, as you knock yourself out eighteen hours a day. What do you do?
Many men would walk. And still do.
Others, like Shakespeare, run--not to the LGBTQ+ community, as the Woke wishfully believe. But to where money was being made. And for the next three centuries, thousands of able-bodied young Englishmen voted with their feet and ran off to sea…
Because even a Bard needs to unfuck from the hopelessness
Following the Money
Trying to explain that gold earring otherwise becomes an exercise as speculative as Fauci dismissals of excess deaths following the Covid jab. You can't outrun the numbers. And being an artist makes you no exception. If anything, it makes the bills even harder to pay.
What makes Shakespeare unique is how he returns to the historical record-- with a pile of cash.
Which he uses to pay down debt, purchase real estate, and buy his way into a fledgling English theatre industry just starting to get its commercial legs.
Not the kind of financial savvy typically associated with a literary genius eking out a teacher's salary. Or with a sailor reading classics by candlelight to hardtack and grog.
So where did all that money come from?
Instead of postulating a jackpot from some high-minded aristocrat, could there have been any life-changing events in whose wake bold young Englishmen in the 1580's were riding out to sea in search of life-changing paychecks?
Turns out there were two cataclysms that turned England's economic world upside down.
Won The War, Lost the Seas
The first was the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (1570-1573), which ended badly for Venetians, forcing them to give up key territories, and fork over almost 10% of their GDP in reparations to the Turks. But the worst blow was the closing of Levant spice routes to Venetian merchants, who had dominated this lucrative trade for centuries. Previously their ships had enjoyed safe passage through Hellespont and into the eastern Mediterranean regardless of hostilities. Those days were over, with goods passing through Venice subject to punitive tariffs.
Won The War, Lost Their Temper
The second was the Sack of Antwerp in 1576 by Spain, reducing its port--through which over eighty percent of England's trade flowed-- to a pile of rubble. And closing off the overland route to Venice, leaving the country scrambling for trading partners to carry her cloth, tin, hides and wool to market, under the nose of a hostile Spain that was continually sending armadas into the Channel with the obvious aim of pulling off the Sack of London, and putting a Catholic back on England's throne.
A Mercantile Empire Is Born
By the end of the decade, the Brits decided it was time to take matters into their own hands, launching its own merchant marine to deliver English products to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, and chartering overseas ventures to transact in local currencies.
This was the era of the great English trading companies-- the Virginia Company, the Hudson Bay Company, the South Seas Company, the Levant Company, the Royal African Company and--big daddy of them all-- the British East India Company.
These entities received royal charters protecting their merchants from domestic competition within their assigned territories, and guaranteeing the Crown a percent of the returns. But sea voyages were perilous business in those days, with stiff--often violent--competition from Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch rivals, and contagious diseases that claimed the lives of one out of every three employees in the field. To attract both investors and talent, rewards had to be commensurate with risk.
And they were. Dividends as high as 30% were paid out to shareholders, while employees were permitted to trade on their own accounts, providing they colored reasonably closes to the line. But even then you had to make an extra effort to stand out.
Someone who went above and beyond was Elihu Yale, an East India Company clerk who rose to the presidency of its Madras post in the 1680's, where he built a massive fortune through a side-hustle in diamonds. Yale's corruption became so egregious even for a colonial outpost that he was finally axed and sent back to England, fortune intact. He spent the rest of his life collecting art and donating to worthy causes, including a struggling college in America that still bears his name.
The Venetian Connection: A Conspiracy Theory
One of the shorter-lived English trading ventures was the Venice Company. Founded in 1583 with a mandate to exchange English-made woolen fabrics for eastern commodities (spices, currants, silk cloth). In 1592, the company closed up shop in Venice, moved to Constantinople, and re-chartered as the Levant Company, focusing on trade with the Ottoman Empire, whose support Protestant England preferred in its tensions with Spain to the comforts of the Turks' defeated Catholic rival.
But the Venice Company's brief life may have left a legacy more enduring than Britain's mighty merchants. Interestingly, the company's tenancy in The Floating City corresponds to the period that Shakespeare was off the radar.
Which would mean little if a third of his plays weren't set in Italy, with half of those dramas taking place in the major cities of the Venetian Republic--Venice, Verona, and Padua. Along with a lot of precise details of geography, festivals and customs, particularly of Venice.
Raising an obvious question:
How does an eldest surviving son from a wool-town in England inherit his father's business, work off its crushing debt, support a growing family, while turning himself into a literary genius and subject matter expert on an Italian city he has never visited?
Are we to believe that Shakespeare walked a hundred miles to London on his day off to sit in gentlemen's libraries, act in plays, work on his writing, and be back in time to open up shop on Monday?
He was staying in London? So he was not working in Stratford, but pulling down so much as an amateur actor and novice writer that he could pay for room, board, costumes, books, etc and kick in to the family finances?
He had support? Meaning somewhere in all of the above, a still unnamed benefactor drops a bag of gold in his lap and whispers in his ear, "Go invest this in real estate and the theater, son-- you’ll be rich and famous!"
And anyone who questions the logistics, mathematics or likelihood of all that is peddling conspiracy theories?
If No Conspiracies, How Do Coincidences Get A Free Pass?
Like how Shakespeare's plots and characters for Twelfth Night, Taming of The Shrew, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing miraculously follow commedia dell'arte productions well known in Italy, but yet unknown or unavailable in England?
Or how he knows of an inland waterway between Verona and Milan--which literary experts deny existed--that the city of Milan is trying to restore?
Or how he comes by his familiarity with the Catholic faith-- teaching of which was criminal at the time in England-- and how a papal declaration of faith signed by his father was found many years later in the attic of the Stratford homestead?
Or how his two narrative poems--Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis-- take their subjects from paintings of the same subjects by Italian masters Titian and Veronese on display at the Spanish embassy in Venice during the tenancy of the Venice Company?
Evidence Of An Italian Escapade?
All of which requires an act of faith--believing that Shakespeare never left the country--despite of evidence of things seen: doors opening abroad for men of talent, ambition, and fortitude looking for the chance to leap a few rungs up the economic ladder.
Having been there done that myself, the signs of an expat adventure here are too obvious.
It's far easier to believe that Shakespeare finagled a business connection Eli Yale-style to get himself in the door at the newly-founded Venice Company just as it was staffing up with traders experienced in a commodity he knew, get himself on a cargo ship bound for Venice, and find himself an excuse to extend his stay (illness, accident, bluebird opportunity). It's not like they couldn't use the help.
And what was Shakespeare's side-hustle? We'll probably never know, but there could be a connection with Verona, where three of his plays are situated, and where he could have seen commedia dell'arte productions so impressive he pocketed a script or two for translation by a John Florio after he returned to England.
What The Experts Won’t Tell You
And how would he have seen those paintings by Titian and Veronese on the same sexual themes that define his own Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, had he not visited the Spanish embassy?
And what would Shakespeare, private citizen of an apostate nation have been doing in the inner sanctum of the embassy of a belligerent country, unless he had presented his credentials as a clandestine Catholic believer?
And on what business could he have been there? Perhaps to secure letters of passage from an official to present if a shipment on which he was staking his fortune got pulled over by the Spanish armada swarming the seas?
Circumstantial evidence, to be sure. But of far better quality than the speculative academic gossamer that the Never-Left-Englanders desperately weave.
Allowing me to indulge one more deliciously tempting question--if Shakespeare had managed to see a Titian masterpiece, could he also have possibly seen a Da Vinci? And not just any Da Vinci, but Leonardo's painting most closely connected to Venice-- his portrait of Ginevra de' Benci?
Her Lost Years: A Theory Of Two Cities
To answer that question we have to understand something of Ginevra's own lost years--a 255-year gap between 1478, when we are reasonably sure Ginevra sat for her portrait, and 1733, when Leonardo's painting was catalogued in the Liechtenstein Princely Collection.
No transaction or anecdotal evidence remains to establish how the painting got from Florence to Vienna. The Benci family died out in 1611. If the picture was still in their ownership, it may have entered the art market at that time, and would have been acquired by the Liechtenstein's sometime after 1632, when Prince Carl Eusebius (1611-1684) succeeded to his inheritance, and began building the family collection in earnest.
On paper, at least, that shrinks the gap to about a hundred years, but several factors tug the timeline either way, mostly around questions concerning the portrait's use case-- ie who it was painted for, why, and what occasion.
The Florentine Theory
One theory, for example, holds that the Da Vinci remained in the hands of the Benci estate. How would that have happened? A couple of ways. First, Ginevra's picture could be a "lost daughter" portrait. Families frequently had final images painted of daughters who were leaving to marry into a family in distant city or region, or into a higher social class, or in an alliance involving latter and or former. This possibly explains Ginevra's lack of adornment.
Or the painting may have traveled with her to the Niccolini household in commemoration of her union with Luigi, which she looks less than thrilled about. And was likely one of the first things to return with her along with what remained of that 1,400 florin dowry after her husband predeceased her.
The Venetian Theory
A second theory holds that Da Vinci's Ginevra made a stop in Venice before proceeding on to Vienna. This scenario finds support in the painting's association with legendary diplomat Bernardo Bembo, who served two stints as the Venetian ambassador to Florence, from 1475-1476, and from 1478-1480.
In Renaissance Italy, you married for power, money and love, in that order. At that time it was all the rage among rulers and their wannabes who had married for the first and second to indulge in the third under the guise of taking a platonic lover. This could be a woman of any age or marital status. And because the relationship was platonic, there was nothing a husband or father could do about his wife or daughter suddenly finding herself showered with paeans celebrating her chasteness and surpassing beauty of her soul as seen in her heavenly body.
These attentions took the form of letters, poems, art, concerts, public spectacles such as jousts by knights in full armor-- the more elaborate the better. Just more chivalrous proof that true love could exist between two souls without sex. But that does not mean high-minded drawing room conversations couldn't move off to the bedroom under the right circumstances.
New Kid In Her Town Too
For a new ambassador in town this was a great way to ingratiate oneself with Florence's ruling Medici Family, and Bernardo Bembo quickly declared his platonic devotion to Ginevra de'Benci, and pursued her with visible and public fervor.
And how would he have been smitten by a cloth merchant's wife? Did someone-- perhaps Lorenzo the Great, who knew Ginevra as granddaughter of the man who had multiplied his family's fortune-- and no doubt knew of her bitter disappointment at being denied a Medici man--steer Bernardo her way... as a kind of consolation prize?
Because Lorenzo is constantly floating loans to Bernardo to help him foot the bills for this expensive habit--love poems by leading men of letters such as Cristoforo Landino, Naldo Naldi, and Alessandro Braccesi, and for objets d'art from the A-List studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, where all the city's leading artists, including a rising star named Leonardo da Vinci, had learned their crafts.
The attentions of the ambassador from the world's most powerful merchant fleet apparently swept Ginevra off her feet. Landino alludes to a certain expectation of elopement, and of Ginevra's following him weeping (in a painting?) back to Venice (after he jilted her?). Lorenzo de' Medici finds time to pen two sonnets consoling Ginevra for dreams (he had bankrolled?) that have turned to ashes.
And under this light Da Vinci's portrait becomes the study of a young woman struggling to control her emotions as she sits for the memento that will accompany the man she loves back to the arms of his waiting wife, leaving Ginevra herself once more to a life that has turned out exactly as feared.
Forensic Evidence Just Beneath The Surface
The Venice Theory is the newer entry to the provenance discussion, rising out of a recent revelation from Ginevra herself.
Da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci consists of a single wooden panel, painted on the front with Ginevra's image, and on the reverse side, an emblematic design containing a wreath of laurel, palm and juniper, and a scroll inscribed with the motto Virtutem Forma Decorat ("Beauty Adorns Virtue"), a neo-platonic sentiment that would have been in tune with the times.
The emblem is identical to Bernardo Bembo's, which he had impressed on the front-pieces of books produced for his extensive library-- remember, no printing presses were mass producing books yet.
And a recent discovery by the National Gallery in Washington DC closes that gap, using infrared reflectography to peel back the layers of paint to show that the motto Virtutem Forma Decorat covers over an earlier motto that read Virtus et Honor-- Bernardo's motto:
Whether it was Ginevra or Bernardo who had the banderolle painted over is not clear-- and becomes almost irrelevant. Because wherever that painting was, it was not with either the Benci or Bembo families. The First Lady of the World, Marquessa of Mantua, eldest child of Ferrara's great Duke Ercole, Isabella d'Este, made sure of that.
First Lady Of The World, All About Art, All The Time
In our prior episode The Lady Was A Tramp, we learned of Isabella's tireless efforts to get Leonardo da Vinci to finish in oils the portrait he had so fetchingly started in charcoal over the Christmas holidays in 1499. We saw that Isabella had agents and informers tracking Leo's every move, but that how every time he had managed to slip through her fingers.
Finally, she journeyed to Florence in the spring of 1506 to hunt him down, only to find Leo had just left town for the mountains. Isabella visited Leo's classmate from their days at Verrocchio's studio, Lorenzo di Credi. And she visited his uncle, who promised to bring Leo to his senses. But once more her hopes were dashed, as the Master agreed to complete Isabella's portrait, only the following month to be spirited back off to Milan on a commission from the French governor of that city, never to return to Florence.
Isabella had an insatiable appetite for art. She spent whatever the Mantuan treasury allowed her, then tapped into her Daddy Ercole's account, then borrowed artworks from others when that ran out, and then asked lenders to go the extra mile. For example, she asked Cecilia Gallerani in April, 1498 to ship her personal Da Vinci (Lady with Ermine) while Milan was in the middle of hostilities with France. In August, 1502, she traveled to Venice, knocked on the door of Bernardo Bembo's doge, and asked to see his growing gallery. Bernardo was away in Verona at the time on official business, so she asked his son Carlo if she could borrow several of his signature pieces--paintings of Petrarch, Dante, Bocaccio, and a diptych by Hans Memling-- so she could have copies made. And then in 1504 asks for an extension on the loaners.
Leaving zero doubt that if Leonardo's Ginevra had been in Bernardo's possession in Venice in 1502, Isabella would have asked for it. And if Leonardo’s Ginevra had been in Ginevra's possession in Florence in 1506, Isabella would have asked for it, with zero hesitation at borrowing the prize possession of a newly widowed woman. That was how Izzy D rolled:
Take care of your nobles, and we’ll take care of you.
One thing we can be sure of: wherever Leo's Ginevra was, it was in a place from which not even the First Lady of the World could buy or borrow it.
And topping any short list of those places will be Monastero delle Murate, the beloved walls known as Le Murate that had welcomed Nevvy at the loss of her father, and would embrace her once more with the loss of her husband.
And it only made too much sense for the picture that marked her departure to return with her, as surety against the costs of her declining years. When she left, Leo was a novelty. When she returned, he was a master. And while she may have been tearing down her monuments, torching her writings, and reaching for immortality by erasing herself from memory, Nevvy would have known that Leo's Ginevra was proof of a fellowship far more sublime than any earthly offering. And presented the painting to the blessed abbess, who would have graciously received this pearl of great price, and asked no more.
Call it conspiracy theory. It just makes too much sense. As so many of them do these days.
So Were They Ever A Thing?
So did Billy ever see Nevvy? Friends, I've built this house of cards as high as I can, clambered atop, and looked about all 360 degrees, knowing that the slightest change in breeze or rumor of discovery could blow it all over. But within my ken right now, no cloud, not even the mirage of a coincidence appears upon the horizon.
And that's fine. A little certainty in uncertain times is a good thing:
Shakespeare probably was in Venice; Nevvy probably was not.
But like that dreamer, she also was living by faith when she died. And would have spoken of a better country to be named for a father she had lost. And thus gave instructions concerning her bones, her poems, and her image that was not her but Ginevra herself. That the abbey should await the arrival of the prince from the east who had returned to the faith, bearing gold from afar. Then and only then would she depart once more from Le Murate, never to return.
Billy Was Her Hero
In 1613, William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was staged at the English court to celebrate the marriage of King James' only daughter Elizabeth Stuart to Frederick V Elector of Palatine of the Rhine in the Holy Roman Empire.
In 1713, Elizabeth's grandson returned to England to be crowned King George I the following year, beginning the two hundred year reign of the House of Hanover.
Sometime between these two dates, Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci departed from the walls of Le Murate and entered the House of Liechtenstein, where she would reign as its prized possession for at least three hundred years.
The next time she would change hands would be to come to America
Whether or not they ever met, Billy was her first beloved, and her hero:
He set her free.
Harvey Oxenhorn, is a cybersecurity consultant, founder of Malwords Weekly, and author of the upcoming book, Biography of an Angel: The Eternal Life of Ginevra de’ Benci (1520-2020). He writes The Five Stages of Unf*ck, Red Pill Journey to January 2.0. , also on Substack. Follow him on Gettr, Gab, @HarveyOxenhorn, and on Twitter @HarvOxenhorn