From Percy Allen, in The Life Story of Edward de Vere as “William Shakespeare” – 1932:
“Ever since beginning an intensive study of the Life of Edward de Vere as ‘Shakespeare,’ it has been more and more insistently borne in upon me that, if we could fully understand them, Oxford’s personal relations with Queen Elizabeth would provide the clue to a complete understanding of his life, and particularly to his mysterious withdrawal from court in 1589, the secret of which, as Lucio phrases it in Measure for Measure, must be ‘locked between teeth and lips.’
“The references in the plays and poems, to love affairs between de Vere and Elizabeth are many; but they are self-contradictory, and difficult wholly to reconcile with one another.
“First of all, there is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, obviously dealing with incidents closely following upon Oxford’s return from Italy in 1576, and dramatizing himself as Valentine and Silvia as Queen Elizabeth…
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Speed: You never saw her since she was deformed.
Valentine: How long hath she been deformed?
Speed: Ever since you loved her.
[Valentine refers to “her passing deformity.”]
“…and what other conclusion is possible than this – that Silvia-Elizabeth’s ‘passing deformity,’ or, in other words, maternity, was the work of Edward de Vere.”
“…it seems to me possible that the Earl’s withdrawal from court in 1589 – evidently done, as the plays conclusively show, at the Queen’s request, and for some profoundly secret reason – must have been due, in part at least, to some change in his relations to her…”
“When all is so contradictory, so dependent upon circumstance, and upon the variable moods of two notoriously fickle and capricious creatures, it is impossible to form any precise or definite conclusions upon this delicate matter; but I have, I hope, set down enough here to justify my innate conviction, that de Vere’s relations with Queen Elizabeth – could they be sufficiently known – would completely solve the mystery that still hangs about ‘Shakespeare’s’ paradoxical and enigmatic career.”
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