Francis Meres Revisited

Abstract

Francis Meres’ 1598 Palladis Tamia, subtitled in English ‘Wit's Treasury’, is a quintessential document in Shakespeare studies. With ten Shakespeare plays already in print anonymously, Meres’ commonplace book for the first time identifies ‘Shakespeare’ as a playwright, and within weeks of Meres’ book, the name ‘Shakespeare’ appears on the second quarto title pages of Richard II and Richard III, transforming ‘anonymous’ into ‘Shakespeare’ in a blink. This article analyses the methods of commonplace book arrangement used by Francis Meres, Master of Arts at both Cambridge and Oxford, to have his private say about Shakespeare. In his 1597 God's Arithmetic, Meres approves the opinion of Pythagoras who wrote over the door of the entrance to his school: ‘Let none enter here that is ignorant in Arithmetic’. The ideas of God's Arithemetic, applied to Palladis Tamia, disclose Meres’ meticulous mastery of erudite humanist design that is the hallmark of his pedagogic method and his ‘post-Stratfordian’ conclusions.