Captain Underwit: Volume 14: British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series

A country comedy about the absurdly corrupt purchases of military titles.

Captain Underwit has succeeded in becoming a “paper” Captain by bribing the Lieutenant with favors and a below-value land-purchase. Underwit then sends his servant Thomas to purchase books to prepare him to actually carry out military duties, but Thomas instead purchases the “Shakespeare” Folio, and other impractical or irrelevant books in a manner that echoes Don Quixote’s belief he could imitate the actions of knights in romance novels. Meanwhile, Underwit withdraws from London into his father-in-law Sir Richard’s country estate. Underwit hires Captain Sackburie to build his military acumen, but Sackburie only has him perform a few military dances before they escape to drink at a tavern. The plot then digresses from these heavy subjects to romantic entanglements as Sir Richard’s wife (Lady) attempts to have an affair with Sir Francis, and Sister flirts with Mr. Courtwell, and Lady’s maid, mistress Dorothy, devises a fraudulent scheme to make suitors falsely believe she comes from an aristocratic family to secure a husband. There are gems under this visage of simplicity, as Engine is attempting to bribe his way into a monopoly on periwigs, and Device the poet recites elegant songs to Sister that he is not sure if he has plagiarized. The introductory materials explain that the plagiarism of the “Catch” dice-game-song that repeats in the “James Shirley”-bylined Poems &c. (1646) re-affirms Percy’s ghostwriting of most “Shirley”-bylined plays as well as Captain, instead of proving “Shirley’s” authorship of this group of texts, as critics have previously claimed.

William Percy (1567?-1648) is the dominant tragedian behind the “William Shakespeare” pseudonym according to the computational-linguistic study in The Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus. Percy was a younger son of the assassinated 8th Earl of Northumberland and the brother of the imprisoned in the Tower 9th Earl.

This series solves most of the previously critically discussed mysteries concerning the authorship of British Renaissance texts (including the “William Shakespeare” and 103 other bylines) by applying to 284 of them a newly invented for this study computational-linguistics method that uses a combination of 27 different tests to derive that six ghostwriters were their authors: Richard Verstegan, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, Benjamin Jonson, William Byrd and William Percy. This computational method as well as structural, biographical and various other attribution approaches that led to the attribution conclusions are discussed in Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus. A larger portion of this series is Modernization of the Inaccessible British Renaissance, which tests the quantitative attribution-conclusions by closely analyzing and explaining the contents of re-attributed texts that are uniquely significant for the revised history of this period, and yet have never been translated into Modern English before. Some of these texts were initially anonymous, others were self-attributed by the ghostwriters, and yet others were credited in bylines to pseudonyms or ghostwriting-contractors. The annotations to each of their translations provide thousands of new confirming clues of shared authorship within a given authorial-signature. These texts are polished for the first time to allow their superiority to shine so that readers can see how they rival the standard “Shakespeare” canon.