Response to Ofelia: Lawrence Nowel: Excerpta Quaedam Danica (1565)
Lindley, Arthur
Early Modern Culture, No. 3 (2003)
Abstract
In case any of you missed the clues, let’s run through them quickly. We are offered what purports to be a translation of a manuscript without a physical location or cataloguing information, the original text of which is not provided. That text, wherever it may be, is a Latin translation of a lost Danish original. “There is no other trace of any of the ‘Hamlet’ documents translated in Nowel’s manuscript” (Intro., ¶11), but they are “of course indisputably genuine.” These are in turn linked to an unverified and unverifiable story, not even sourced, about a portrait whose whereabouts are also unknown (or at least not given). And all this is supposed to solve a mystery that apparently does not exist: if the historical Lawrence Nowel fled England in 1570, he somehow managed to retain the offices of rector of Drayton Bassett; Archdeacon of Derby, Dean of Lichfield, rector of Haughton, and Prebendary of York until his death in 1576, in spite of royal hostility (see DNB, s.v. Nowel). More remarkably perhaps, he managed to father a son who was baptized in St. Mary’s church, Lichfield, on 7 December 1571. At this point, I probably don’t have to remind you that if Graham Holderness had actually found a lost source for Hamlet, he would have taken the news to the New York Times, or at least The Guardian, rather than a scholarly journal of elite but modest circulation.
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