Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog

In 1732 the antiquary Francis Peck published a book called Desiderata Curiosa or a Collection of divers Scarce and Curious Pieces relating chiefly to matters of English History, consisting of Choice Tracts, Memoirs and so on.  This was Volume I, which ended with a list of items to be included in Volume II, among them an intriguing manuscript described as “A pleasant Conceit of Vere Earl of Oxford, discontented at the Rising of a mean Gentleman in the English Court, circa 1580.”  (Note: the list is not online, but survives in the volume in the British Library.)

Edward de Vere was thirty in 1580 and had served for a decade as the highest-ranking nobleman at the Court of Elizabeth.  He had enjoyed Her Majesty’s continuous royal favor, with gossip in the early 1570s that he was the Queen’s lover.  During that decade, however, he had been increasingly “discontented” at the “rising” in fortune of his rival Sir Christopher Hatton, Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard, whom he regarded with disdain as “mean” – inferior by birth, as a commoner, but also in terms of his conniving and duplicitous character as well as his mawkish personality.

Christopher Hatton
1540-1591

Peck noted that the “pleasant conceit” by Oxford (likely a satire for the stage) was within the sixteenth-century collection of Abraham Fleming, one of the earl’s secretaries and literary protégés.  Was it in Edward de Vere’s own hand?  Or perhaps Fleming had copied it from his master’s original manuscript or from dictation.  Given that Oxford would be cited in the 1580s as “best for comedy,” it appears this was one of his plays and he was making fun of Hatton, strictly for the merriment of the Queen and insiders at the court.  Alas, however, Peck never published his second volume and those papers from Fleming’s folders are missing.

Only after 1920, when John Thomas Looney identified Edward de Vere as “Shakespeare,” would anyone have likely wondered about the earl’s “pleasant conceit” in relation to the Shakespeare plays.  Only then would anyone have realized, surely with sudden excitement, that the earl’s “pleasant conceit” must have been the earliest version of Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, and that the character of Malvolio is no less than a blistering, hilarious caricature of Christopher Hatton!

One of the amazing aspects of the Shakespeare authorship question is that within each play is an entire world, which, however, remains invisible until returned to its true context of time and circumstance.  Suddenly the curtain opens on Twelfth Night and we see the world of the English royal court in the 1570s and 1580s.  Now we can see Malvolio-Hatton in relation to Olivia, who represents Queen Elizabeth, and Edward de Vere portraying himself as Feste, the jester or clown in service to Olivia-Elizabeth, who calls him her “allowed fool” – an expression, Eva Turner Clark wrote in 1931, which “Elizabeth probably applied to Oxford, for he would never have dared to include the many personal allusions in his plays had not the Queen permitted, even encouraged, him to do it.”

Traditional scholars still view this comedy as written circa 1600, with a performance at the Middle Temple in 1602 recorded as “a play called Twelve night or what you will.”  But it was never published in quarto and appeared in print only as part of the First Folio of Shakespeare plays in 1623 – a sign it was one of Oxford’s “comedies” that began, in its earliest form, as a “private” entertainment at court.  As such it would have contained material that, if printed too soon, would have been embarrassing to either Elizabeth or King James and to various noble families whose relatives had been satirized.

Elizabeth & Courtiers

I have often imagined the performances during the 1570s and 1580s within those Elizabethan palaces – Whitehall, Richmond, Greenwich, Nonsuch, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, and so on – as being staged for a small but powerful group of “cousins” who have been stranded there by a snowstorm (or some other disruption) for several days.  In that context, Oxford was providing much needed entertainment by mercilessly “roasting” many of these same well-known individuals, among them Hatton and even the Queen as well as himself; and much later he would have revised these political satires, adding new layers of material, for public consumption.

This is just the beginning of Reason No. 68 to believe Oxford was Shakespeare; more to follow.

Endnote:  Oxfordian researchers have done a ton of work on the subject of Twelfth Night in the context of its authorship as by Edward de Vere, in works such as:

Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays (1931) by Eva Turner Clark; third revised edition by Ruth Loyd Miller, editor, in 1974, pp. 364-392

This Star of England (1952) by Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn, pp. 266-294

Shakespeare by Another Name (2005) by Mark Anderson, pp. 69; 153-156

De Vere as Shakespeare (2006) by William Farina, pp. 82-87

(Other sources to be added in Part Two)