An absolutely fascinating story on the BBC website today.
The mystery of William Cantelo. The sounds of rapid gunfire from the basement
in a house in Southampton in the 1880s – an inventor
called William Cantelo tells his sons that he has invented a new type of gun
that will fire bullets in rapid succession. He packs it away and sets off –
presumably to sell it. He vanishes into thin air.
A couple of decades later, another inventor, Sir William
Maxim, is getting rich from an invention of his own – the Maxim gun, mowing down
thousands of men in the First World War.
But Maxim and Cantelo look uncannily alike. And Cantelo’s
sons put a private detective on the case. They spot ‘Maxim’ at Waterloo Station and shout "Father"…but the
elusive figure gets away. And money disappears from Cantelo’s account after he
vanishes. Maxim meanwhile has a reputation for ‘brain-sucking’ – stealing people’s
ideas. Were Maxim and Cantelo the same man? Did Maxim somehow steal Cantelo’s
invention? Who knows? A murky Victorian melodrama? Read it here.
I admit to having a slightly nerdy interest in Shakespeare. We know so
little about him. His personality, his biography, his relationships - these are
almost a blank. Yet we think we know so much through the rich, complex,
evocative worlds that are the plays. It's so tempting to make connections
between the man and the work, as it is for any writer. The plays and their
inhabitants are so vivid, yet, as Shakespeare suggests, they’re all just
unstable illusions, magnificent cloud structures conjured out of words. They
die when the players depart the stage, leaving the master puppeteer invisible in
the darkness beyond.
So from the fragmentary information that we do have, I'm absolutely
fascinated when someone is able to find new hard data about his life. In today’s
Guardian Saul Frampton makes a
hugely convincing case based upon linguistic analysis, close study of contemporary
writers and scrutiny of English parish records for having identified theDark Lady, one of the addressees of
his sonnets (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’). It's a tale of sexual jealousy
and literary revenge on Shakespeare by a man called John Florio that concerns
his wife AD, Avis Danyell, baptised February 8 1556, died of the plague
sometime around the end of the century. Absolutely fascinating. The wonder of dogged
scholarship. If you're interested in the step by step process of patient
deduction you can read it here.
That still leaves unresolved the equally fascinating issue of
Shakespeare's relationship with a young man, Henry Wriothesley, and a possible
love triangle...
