Not without Mustard

Harmen Hals, The Bassoonist (1650)

What follows is an extract from my essay "Not without Mustard: Shakespeare and the Bassoonists," which appeared in the New English Review [NER] in September 2023

(https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/not-without-mustard). Footnote numbering has been adjusted.

The argument is (a) that Shakespeare indeed wrote Shakespeare, and (b) that I am myself descended from the family of Aemilia Bassano, assumed to be the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets."

Moving in Bohemian (avant la lettre) circles in Elizabethan London, an actor hobnobbing with slumming aristocrats and French and Italian immigrants like the Bassanos, an extensive family of Venetian musicians and instrument makers employed at the English court since the time of Henry VIII, it would have been easy enough for Will Shakespeare to drum up and fake the erudition that is the basis of the anti-Stratfordian argument [by those who contend that a hobdehoy like Shakespeare could not have written the works of Shakespeare, which must therefore be by some aristocratic figure].

Let us imagine that Aemilia Bassano (1569–1645), “the first woman in England to assert herself as a professional poet” (Wikipedia), was indeed the Dark Lady (she was half-Italian) of the Sonnets, which is to say Shakespeare’s muse, language mentor, petite amie, mistress, or what you will (“He was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smoothe Witt,” John Aubrey says). She or her cosmopolitan Bassano relatives, of whom there were a great many, could have supplied most or all of the sophisticated knowledge Shakespeare’s writings exhibit, if he lacked it.[1]

Ben Jonson parodied the motto in the coat of arms Shakespeare had applied for (and received) on his father’s behalf, “Non sanz Droict” (Not without Right), with a character in his play Every Man Out of His Humour comically applying for the motto “Not without Mustard.” In the “Battle of the Books” pitting the so-called University Wits (Greene, Nashe, Marlowe, and Lodge) against the “ill-bred” Grammar School boys Shakespeare and Kyd, Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil also trots out what was doubtless a popular joke at Shakespeare’s expense at the time, exclaiming: “Not without mustard, good Lord, not without mustard.” Nashe also uses the term “kill-cow vanity,” which would certainly seem to target Will Shakespeare specifically, very likely the only Elizabethan playwright who had actually killed cows himself. The upper-class contemporary playwrights of the day unequivocally recognized, and resented, “the Stratford man” as the author of so many stage hits.

In Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598), Francis Meres, who wrote the first critical account of Shakespeare’s work and listed his plays, calls him “the most passionate among us to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Loue.” Nashe satirizes Shakespeare’s membership of “an overtly Italianate circle” and charges that he and Thomas Kyd read “dubious French books.” Shakespeare, like Kyd, had been a noverint, a lawyer’s clerk, or scrivener. Both would thus have had to be able to write “a trained legal hand.”

Inevitably, there are mysteries. There are always mysteries to any life. Sure, we may wonder, why didn’t Shakespeare educate his daughters, who seem to have been illiterate? Why did he bequeath his wife only his “second-best bed”? Why doesn’t he mention his writings in his will? Why isn’t he buried in Westminster Abbey like Ben Jonson? But all of these questions, taken together do not remotely counterbalance the mass of evidence for the Stratfordian position.

The anti-Stratfordians, Eric Sams points out, fail to notice the deep understanding of the agricultural world, country life, horses and cattle, leatherworking, and butcher’s work exhibited in Shakespeare’s writing. I cannot go into more detail here, but let me quote Sams on the latter point:

John Shakespeare, as a Tudor farmer … was also a butcher … Of course an eldest son would lend a hand at need … in slaughtering; the young Shakespeare, constrained to kill a calf, might well do so “in a high style, and make a speech”, just as Aubrey says … When Brutus [kills] Caesar in the Capitol “it was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there”; thus [too] Polonius is mocked by Hamlet (III.ii.106) … The effect on a sensitive child of killing a calf can readily be imagined … it takes a grown man’s strength to pole-ax an ox. But calves though more amenable are also more appealing, as Shakespeare recalls in many a memorable image … Shakespeare has a whole rich vocabulary of blood … He knows how it forms into gouts (Macbeth, V.i.46) … and how it darkens on coagulation … But his imagination flows with rivers … or even a sea of blood (1 Henry VI, IV.vii.14). He knows at firsthand how

the butcher takes away the calf

And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays,

Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house …

And as the dam runs lowing up and down,

Looking the way her harmless young one went . . . (2 Henry VI, III.i.210f.) [2]

The inimitable Bill Bryson sums things up: “One really must salute the ingenuity of the anti-Stratfordian enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history, without the benefit of anything that could reasonably be called evidence, four hundred years after it was perpetrated.”[3]

A contemporary of Shakespeare’s named Thomas Basson (1555–1613) fled from England to the Continent, apparently to escape Puritan persecution, and settled in Leiden, becoming a prominent printer (1585–1612), bookseller, English schoolmaster and active Familist and Rosicrucian.[4]

Subsequently, in the mid-1660s, a man named Arnoldus (Arnout) Willemsz Basson (1647–98) emigrated from Wessel in the Rhineland—less than a hundred miles from Leiden, the hometown of Thomas Basson’s descendants—to the Dutch East India Company settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, where he acquired the nickname “Jagt,” short for “Jagter” (hunter). On December 15, 1669, Jagt Basson married the manumitted Bengali slave Engela van Bengalen at the Cape. He died in 1698, but Engela lived into the 1720s and was the foremother of a host of South Africans, some black, some white, all obviously “mixed,” if that means anything. I am one of them myself, since I descend in a direct line from Engela and Jagt (see “My Slave Foremother Engela van Bengalen,” NER, August 2023).

Basson, be it noted, is neither an English nor a Flemish/Dutch surname. In French, it simply means “bassoon.”

[1] Ibid., 317–18. See David Lasocki, with Roger Prior, The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665 (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995). Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1952) says of the family: “They were so numerous and their names were entered so carelessly in court records that it is impossible to establish a genealogy for them. Among the instruments they played were lutes, trombones, recorders, hautboys, flutes and violins, and some were singers.” The family had a house until at least 1571 at Bassano in the foothills of the Alps, about forty miles from Venice, of which the town was a dependency. The Italian word bassone (French basson) surely derives from it, signifying the double-reed musical instrument called a “bassoon” in English, albeit fagotto is now the common term for it in Italian.

[2] Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594, 92–93.

[3] Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage (New York: Atlas Books, 2007), 96.

[4] See J. A. van Dorsten, Thomas Basson, 1555–1613: English Printer at Leiden (Leiden: Published for the Sir Thomas Browne Institute by the Universitaire Press Leiden, 1961).

Bibliographic Note

Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594, pp. 256. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Id., The Real Shakespeare II. Retrieving the Later Years, 1594–1616. Centro Studi Eric Sams, 2008, rev. 2009; e-book, pp. 596. https://ericsams.org/index.php/onshakespeare/books-on-shakespeare/828-the-real-shakespeare-ii (accessed August 8, 2023).

Saturday, November 8, 2025