Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog

Five Shakespeare plays are set at least partly in France — King John, Henry V, 1 Henry VI, All’s Well That Ends Well and Love’s Labour’s Lost.  Would most playwrights deliberately set a play in France if they had never been there?  Well, maybe they’d set one play in France, but five?  Was it possible for Shakespeare to create scenes set in France without ever having spent time in that country?  Well, maybe, but the author of the Shakespeare works also wrote French dialogue – I know, not necessarily good dialogue, but in fact it was French, right?

In the play King Henry V the entirety of Act III, Scene 4 is set within the French king’s palace and consists of French dialogue between Princess Katherine and Alice, the lady attending on her.  I have reprinted the scene below and here include a video of it from the brilliant 1989 Kenneth Branaugh film, with Emma Thompson as Katherine and Geraldine McEwan as Alice.  And yes, I realize, some of it is even “vulgar” French, but wouldn’t that have been deliberate?

Young Oxford would have learned all about the De Vere family and its French origin — the name apparently derived from Ver, near Bayeux — as well as about its founder, Aubrey de Vere, who had come into England with William the Conqueror in 1066, five centuries earlier.  Edward would have learned to read, write and speak French at a very early age, perhaps in the household of Sir Thomas Smith, where he apparently was sent after turning four years old.  In any case, following are just fragments of recorded information:

The letter in French written by 13-year-old Edward de Vere to Sir William Cecil, master of the royal wards, in August 1563. (CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW)

When Edward de Vere was twelve and entered Cecil House in London in September 1562 as a royal ward in the custody of William Cecil Lord Burghley, the printed “Orders for the Earl of Oxford’s Exercises” involved a daily routine that included two hours of French studies per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  In a letter dated August 23, 1563, the thirteen-year-old boy wrote to Burghley entirely in French.   Six years after that, Oxford at nineteen ordered books that included “Plutarch’s works in French” as well as works in Italian and English.

Henry III of France (1551-1589)

When Oxford almost twenty-five in February 1575, he and his retinue arrived in Paris, where he was entertained at the French court by the royal family: Henry III, Catherine de Medici (the Queen Mother) and Marguerite de Valois.  Valentine Dale, the English ambassador in Paris, wrote Burghley on March 7^th of having ‘presented my Lord of Oxford unto the French King and Queen, who used him honorably.  Amongst other talk the King asked whether he was married.  I said he had a fair lady.  ‘Il y a donce ce,’ dit-il [he says], ‘un beau couple.’”

A few days later, after Oxford had left Paris for Strasburg, the ambassador again wrote to Burghley, conveying that he had been favorably impressed by the young earl.  “I will assure your Lordship unfeignedly my Lord of Oxford used himself as orderly and moderately as might be desired, and with great commendation, neither is there any appearance of the likelihood of any other.”  So we have Oxford as a young man at the French royal court, undoubtedly speaking fluent French with the royal family – and Mark Anderson suggests in Shakespeare By Another Name:

Map of Paris - 1575

“At the time she sent de Vere overseas, [Queen] Elizabeth required the attentions of a high-ranking courtier fluent in French and Italian for important diplomatic missions in Paris and Venice.   Could it simply be coincidence that the Queen gave de Vere license to travel to these two key cities at the same time she needed these tasks completed?”

At the end of Sonnet 73, which proceeds from autumn to winter in the poet’s life, the final couplet reads:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

In that last line the phrase “leave ere” is the exact sound of l’hiver, French for winter, and simultaneously playing upon Oxford’s own name Ver or Vere.  Then there is the Shakespeare play The Winter’s Tale, which, translated into French, is l’histoire de l’hiver…

Of course Oxford’s entire life as a high-ranking nobleman was involved with matters involving France, such as the so-called French Match during the 1570’s and early 1580’s when Queen Elizabeth carried on the great public fiction that she would marry Alencon.

Pierre de Ronsard, 1524-1585

And all of the above items are merely tips of an iceberg when it comes to the deep knowledge of the great French poet Ronsard that “Shakespeare” reveals.  As Richard Malim observes in his new book The Earl of Oxford and the Making of Shakespeare, so full was Oxford-Shakespeare’s knowledge of Ronsard  that he “comes perilously close to plagiarism of Ronsard,” who wrote in 1564:  “Le monde est la Theatre, et les hommmes acteurs” or, if you will, “All the world’s a stage…”