The Launch of the “Shakespeare” Pen Name (Who Knew What & When?) and Its Aftermath

Following is a talk I gave to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Conference on 17 October 2019 at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, CT:

Part One

Samuel Clemens drew upon a wealth of personal experience in his work; and in his later years, he made the remark: “I could never tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.” Imagine old Sam on his porch out there and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, laughing along with him. And Oxford reminding him what Touchstone said in As You Like It: “The truest poetry is the most feigning” – in other words, pretending — telling truth by allegory and a “second intention.” Both men knew that more truth can be told and believed when dressed as fiction, whether it’s Huckleberry Finn or Hamlet. And, of course, both men wrote under pen names.

(Dedication of “Venus and Adonis” in 1593 to Southampton with first printing of the Shakespeare name)

I want to talk first about the launch of the pen name “Shakespeare” in 1593, on the dedication of Venus and Adonis to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, asking, “Who Knew What and When?” – or – “What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?”  The question is posed in relation to five individuals.

Queen Elizabeth – Did her Majesty see the letter to her from early reader William Reynolds, saying she was the subject of a crude parody in the character of Venus? Did she know who had written this scandalous, instant bestseller?  If she did know, when did she know it?

William Cecil Lord Burghley – Reynolds also wrote to the chief minister, saying he was offended by this portrait of Elizabeth as a “lusty old” queen. Meanwhile, Burghley was Southampton’s legal guardian and still pressuring him to marry his granddaughter, Elizabeth Vere (who may or may not have been the natural daughter of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford). Therefore anything involving Southampton would be of great interest to Burghley and his rapidly rising son Robert Cecil.

After the death in 1590 of Francis Walsingham, head of the secret service, William and Robert Cecil had taken over the crown’s network of spies and informants. They made it their business to know everything; and now they were gearing up for the inevitable power struggle to control the succession upon Elizabeth’s death.

The queen refused to name her successor, even though she was turning sixty and could die any moment. The Cecils were preparing for the fight with Robert Devereuex, second Earl of Essex, with whom Southampton was closely allied. Could they allow this “Shakespeare” to dedicate to Southampton such a popular, scandalous work and not know the author?  What did Burghley know and when did he know it?

Henry Wriothesley Lord Southampton, nineteen, whom we can imagine arriving at the royal court, where folks had their copies of Venus and Adonis with its dedication to him. Might they be curious about “William Shakespeare”? And about his relationship to Southampton? What did the earl know and when did he know it?

John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, who issued the publishing license in his own hand. He had a large staff for that purpose and normally delegated readings of manuscripts and signings-off on licenses, but now he took it upon himself. This strict archbishop was in charge of all government censorship. Why would he give his personal approval of such salacious poetry? Why would he allow this possibly dangerous political allegory into the market? Would he have done so without prior authorization from the queen and Burghley?

Whitgift had been appointed archbishop in 1583 and had gained her Majesty’s full trust and admiration. In 1586 he was given the authority to peruse and license all manuscripts and the power to destroy the press of any printer. He suppressed the Puritans so harshly that in 1588 they began to publish pamphlets against him, led by a writer using the pen name “Martin Marprelate” (who was “marring the prelates”). The archbishop responded with a ruthless campaign of retaliation, using pamphlets turned out by members of Oxford’s writing circle such as Tom Nashe and John Lyly.  Apparently, the earl himself wrote against “Marprelate” under the pen name “Pasquil Cavaliero.” (One pen name battling another!)

At the end of the 1590s, the archbishop will issue a decree ordering the burning of a long list of books, among them several based on works of Ovid. The condemned books will be publicly burned in the infamous Bishops’ Bonfire of 1599, but none will include works attributed to “Shakespeare” — not even Venus and Adonis or Lucrece, both based on Ovid.  (“Shakespeare” never got into trouble for his writing.) Now in 1593, Whitgift personally authorizes Venus and Adonis for publication by Field.

Richard Field, Publisher-Printer, who entered Venus and Adonis at the Stationer’s Register in April 1593.

“The Arte of English Poesie” – 1589

Field will print Love’s Martyr in 1601 with The Phoenix and Turtle as by “William Shake-speare” — hyphenated, as if to confirm that it’s a pen name. (Presumably he was the son of Henry Field, a tanner in Stratford-upon-Avon; but modern researchers are finding it difficult to verify that presumption.) Regardless of his background, by age seventeen in 1579 he was in London. He apprenticed for several years under the esteemed printer and French refugee Thomas Vautrollier, who died in 1587. A year later Field married Vautrollier’s widow and, at twenty-six, he took over the publishing business.

He was a dedicated Protestant, committed to the policies of Queen Elizabeth.  It’s been said Field was “Burghley’s publisher.” Later he would issue Protestant books in Spanish, for sale in Catholic Spain, under “Ricardo del Campo” – another pen name.

In 1589 Field published The Arte of English Poesie, by a deeply knowledgeable writer choosing not to identify himself. Along with Richard Waugaman and others, I hold the view that The Arte was written (wholly or in part) by Oxford, whose own verse is cited for description and instruction, not to mention that he himself is fulsomely praised as chief poet of the Elizabethan court.

The anonymous author of The Arte addresses his entire tract to Elizabeth – with distinct echoes of Oxford’s own praise of the queen in his elegant Courtier preface of 1572. The invisible author also uses the kind of alliteration Oxford so enjoyed; for example, he tells her Majesty:

“You, Madam, my most Honored and Gracious, if I should seem to offer you this my desire for a discipline and not a delight … By your princely purse, favours and countenance, making in manner what ye list, the poor man rich, the lewd well learned, the coward courageous, and the vile both noble and valiant: then for imitation no less, your person as a most cunning counterfeit lively representing Venus…”

(Here is Richard Field, who will publish Venus and Adonis four years later, issuing an anonymous book in which the author likens Queen Elizabeth to Venus.)

“Venus and Adonis” by Titian, the painting that “Shakespeare” must have seen in Venice (showing Adonis wearing his bonnet)

There is strong evidence that Oxford wrote the first version of Venus and Adonis in the latter 1570s after returning from Italy, where he had made his home base in Venice. For example, the poem contains a lifelike portrait-in-words of Venus trying to seduce young Adonis, who, significantly, is wearing his bonnet. Without question this section of the narrative poem is a vivid description of the painting in Venice at Titian’s own house, which Oxford must have visited (as most traveling nobles did) – because in that house was Titian’s only painting of Venus and Adonis (among his many others of the same subject) in which the young god is wearing his bonnet.

It may also be that Oxford was creating an allegory of his own experience as a young man pursued by Elizabeth. Adonis is killed by the spear of a wild boar — perhaps the same boar of Oxford’s earldom, as though his own identity is officially killed by the spear of “Shakespeare,” his new pen name. From the blood of Adonis, a purple flower springs up, and Venus tells it: “Thou art next of blood and ‘tis thy right.” Then the lustful goddess flies off to Paphus, the city in Cyprus sacred to Venus, to hide from the world. Her silver doves are mounted through the empty skies, pulling her light chariot and “holding their course to Paphus, where their Queen means to immure herself and not be seen.”

Oxford had an extensive personal history of publicly likening Queen Elizabeth to Venus. In Euphues and his England, the novel of 1580 dedicated to the earl, she is portrayed as both the Queen of Love and Beauty and the Queen of Chastity: “Oh, fortunate England that hath such a Queen! … adorned with singular beauty and chastity, excelling in the one Venus, in the other Vesta ….”  — the sexual goddess and the virginal goddess, both at once.

In the Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), the scholar Steven May writes, Oxford definitely likens Elizabeth to Venus: “But who can leave to look on Venus’ face?” the poet asks, referring to “her alone, who yet on th’earth doth reign.”

In the final chapter of Arte, the author apologizes to the queen for this “tedious trifle” and fears she will think of him as “the Philosopher in Plato who failed to occupy his brain in matters of more consequence than poetry,” adding, “But when I consider how everything hath his estimation by opportunity, and that it was but the study of my younger years in which vanity reigned…”

(“When I consider how everything” will be echoed in sonnet 15, which begins, “When I consider everything…”)

The anonymous author tells Elizabeth that “experience” has taught him that “many times idleness is less harmful than profitable occupation.” He refers sarcastically, sounding like Hamlet, to “these great aspiring minds and ambitious heads of the world seriously searching to deal in matters of state” who become “so busy and earnest that they were better be occupied and peradventure altogether idle.”

(Who else would dare to write that description to her Majesty about members of her own government? Oxford had written similar thoughts in his own poetry such as, “Than never am less idle, lo, than when I am alone.” At the same time, he pledges his “service” to her, according to his “loyal and good intent always endeavoring to do your Majesty the best and greatest of those services I can.” Oxford always talks about serving the queen, as he wrote to Burghley, “I serve her Majesty, and I am that I am.”)

Richard Field publishes this work of 1589, written by an anonymous author sounding much like Oxford, and containing some of the earl’s own work, praising him to the skies – and then Field dedicates it to Burghley. “This book,” he tells the most powerful man in England, “coming to my hands with his bare title, without any Author’s name or any other ordinary address, I doubted how well it might become me to make you a present thereof.”

He was surprised and mystified to see this manuscript just flying over the transom into his hands; however, seeing that the book is written to “our Sovereign lady the Queen, for her recreation and service,” Field publishes the work and even dedicates it to Burghley. In his dedication, he also sounds as if Oxford helped him, as when he writes alliteratively of “your Lordship being learned and a lover of learning … and myself a printer always ready and desirous to be at your Honorable commandment.”

Four years later Field publishes Venus and Adonis dedicated to Southampton, whom Burghley, with the queen’s blessing, hopes to gather into his own family. Even orthodox commentators recognize that the high quality of the printing suggests Shakespeare’s direct involvement, as Frank Halliday writes in A Shakespeare Companion: “The two early poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, both carefully printed by Field, are probably the only works the publication of which Shakespeare personally supervised.” (Imagine the Earl of Oxford working side by side with Richard Field at his shop in Blackfriars, to fine-tune the printing!) Now the manuscript goes to Whitgift, chief censor for everything published in England, and he signs off in his own hand – a fact that Field quickly advertises in the Stationers Register.

The question is posed in relation to Publisher Richard Field, Archbishop John Whitgift, Queen Elizabeth, Lord Burghley and the Earl of Southampton: Who knew what and when? What did they know and when did they know it?

My answer is that they all knew about the launch of Oxford’s new pen name and knew it before this work was published. They each knew who “Shakespeare” was and they allowed the earl to publish it and dedicate it to Southampton. The very individuals who were most closely involved, with the most at stake, and could make such decisions, must have worked directly, or indirectly, with each other – and with the author himself – to launch the famous pen name.

Part Two 

There is another dimension to the pseudonym that I would like to describe. It begins back in 1583, when Protestant England and Catholic Spain were definitely at war; and gearing up to defend against this mighty enemy was the queen’s great Puritan spymaster, Francis Walsingham, who quickly organized a new company of players. The Puritans generally hated the public theater, but Walsingham knew its value in terms of propaganda.

Early version of Shakespeare’s play of King John, performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s

The new company, approved by Burghley and patronized by Elizabeth, was called the Queen’s Men. It was comprised of two separate troupes touring the country to rouse patriotic fervor and unity. All existing companies – including Oxford’s — contributed their best actors – and de Vere collected his expanding group of writers at a mansion in London (nicknamed Fisher’s Folly) for scribes such as Nashe, Lyly, Watson, Greene, Munday, Churchyard, Lodge and many others.

(Imagine Michelangelo’s studio filled with artists working together under a single guiding hand.)

In the 1580s these writers turned out dozens, even hundreds of history plays. Among them were Oxford’s own early versions of Shakespeare histories, anonymous plays such as The Troublesome Reign of King John, The True Tragedy of Richard Third, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, the latter containing the entire framework for Henry Fourth Parts One and Two and Henry the Fifth as by Shakespeare.

Their weapons were not swords or guns or ships, but words, giving birth to an inspiring new English language and vision of national identity – a powerful weapon that de Vere was creating and guiding as well as helping to finance. And in 1586 the queen rewarded him with an extraordinary annual allowance of a thousand pounds, paid according to the same formula used to finance Walsingham for his wartime secret service. When the Spanish invasion by Armada arrived in 1588, volunteers from all parts of England responded – Protestants, Puritans, Catholics, speaking different dialects and often needing to be translated, all joining in the face of a common enemy.

Once the Great Enterprise of King Philip had been turned back, however, that same government had no more use for the writers. Having harnessed their talent and work to touch the minds and hearts of the queen’s subjects, the government now became wary of them, perhaps afraid of their freedom of expression and power to influence her Majesty’s subjects.

After defeating the enemy without, the government now focused upon its real or potential enemies within. The end game of internal power struggles was just beginning. Who would gain control of the inevitable succession to Elizabeth? Oxford had been the central sun from which the writers had drawn their light, and around which they had revolved; but now he was deliberately squeezed with old debts and could no longer support them, so they began to fly out of orbit and disappear.

By 1590, the year Walsingham died, Oxford’s secretary and stage manager John Lyly was out of a job; in 1591, Thomas Lodge escaped poverty by sailing to South America; in September 1592, Thomas Watson died and so did Robert Greene (if, in fact, Greene was a real person and not another pen name); on 30 May 1593, Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death; later that year, Thomas Kyd was tortured on the rack, leading to his death.

Lyly, Lodge, Watson, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd: all gone. They disappeared in a kind of bloodbath, into a metaphorical graveyard of writers; and Oxford himself disappeared. He withdrew from court and vanished from London. He remarried (his first wife, Anne Cecil, had died in 1588) and became something of a recluse at Hackney – undoubtedly revising his previous plays.

As far as the general public knew, Oxford no longer existed; some people even thought he was dead; but in the spring of 1593, just when Marlowe was being murdered, something else was afoot. From below the graveyard of writers, without any paper trail or personal history, the heretofore unknown “William Shakespeare” – a disembodied pen name — suddenly rose in defiance, shaking the spear of his pen and asserting his power in the Latin epigraph from Ovid on the title page of Venus and Adonis, translated as: “Let the mob admire base things! May Golden Apollo serve me full goblets from the Castilian Spring!” Who is this Shakespeare?  And which side is he on?

The sudden appearance of this name was not on the title page, but, rather, inside the book, and linked (directly, and uniquely) to nineteen-year-old Southampton. And in the very next year, 1594, the poet made himself even clearer, dedicating Lucrece to Southampton: “The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end … What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being all I have, devoted yours.” All that the pen name has is a multitude of written works to be published under that name – the two poems, plus any other writings that will use “Shakespeare” in the future.

The 1594 dedication of “Lucrece” to Southampton — by “Shakespeare” 

A metamorphosis has taken place. In this second dedication, the pen name is speaking for itself and not, in the first place, for the Earl of Oxford, who has disappeared; the pen name is saying to young Lord Southampton: “ALL I HAVE – ANYTHING WRITTEN UNDER THIS NAME — IS NOW AND FOREVER DEVOTED TO YOU. THEY ARE YOURS, TO DO WITH WHAT YOU WILL.” It is all “YOURS … YOURS … YOURS.”

The disembodied pen name has declared itself on the side of the young nobility, in favor of the Essex faction of which Southampton is a prominent member. Soon that young earl firmly and finally rejects Burghley’s marriage plans for him. Essex has been in secret communication with James in Scotland – pledging his support for the King, in return for the promise of James’ help against Burghley and his son Robert Cecil.

So long as Elizabeth remains alive, she can still name her successor; meanwhile, a main goal of Essex and Southampton is to keep the Cecils from assuming even more power after she dies. We are now in the very short period spanning 1595 to 1600 – six years – in which the great issuance of Shakespeare plays occurs: earlier plays that are now revised for the printing press and the public playhouse.

Robert Cecil becomes Principle Secretary in 1596; in the following year, he tries to have all public playhouses shut down and nearly succeeds; in fact, he does succeed in destroying the Swan Playhouse as a venue for plays.

And upon the death of his father, Burghley, in August 1598, Secretary Cecil begins to gain the full trust of Her Majesty and the power to control her mind, emotions and decisions. Now the gloves come off and “Shakespeare” suddenly – for the first time — makes its appearance on printed plays. Over the next three years comes the historic rush of quartos. In 1598 and 1599, four plays are printed with “Shake-speare” hyphenated, emphasizing it’s a pen name: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard III, Richard II and 1 Henry IV. The playwright had “newly corrected” two of these plays, quite obviously having written them their first versions much earlier.

Four more plays are published in 1600, all using the pen name without any hyphen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2 Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. And three others also appear in that time frame, but still anonymous: Romeo and Juliet, 3 Henry VI, and Henry V.  Many of these plays – especially the histories – deal with issues of kingship, of what kind of monarch should or should not rule, the right and wrong ways to choose a successor, the consequences of deposing a rightful king. These issues are swirling on and off the stage, in allegory and in real life, all around the aging queen, who refuses to make a choice while she still has the strength to do so.

Edward, Earl of Oxford was summoned as a judge to the 1601 trial of Essex and Southampton — the same Southampton to whom “Shakespeare” had pledged his “love … without end.”

Southampton takes charge of planning an assault on Whitehall Palace, aiming to remove Cecil and confront Elizabeth without interference. If they gain entrance to her presence, they will beg the queen to fulfill her responsibility by choosing a successor.

Members of the Essex faction meet with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, paying the actors to give a special performance of Richard II at their own playhouse, the Globe, on Sunday 7 February 1601. Southampton is in charge of the Shakespeare plays and, most likely, he himself pays for the performance – with its deposition scene of King Richard handing over his crown to Bolinbroke, who becomes Henry IV.

(The play is instructional. It’s also a cautionary tale: Richard is murdered in prison by Pierce of Exton, who mistakenly believes he’s carrying out the king’s wishes.)

Cecil uses this performance to summon Essex that night and trigger the chaotic events of the following day. By midnight of the Eighth of February, Essex and Southampton are both arrested and taken by river through Traitors Gate into the Tower, facing charges of high treason and almost certain execution. Of course, this play of royal history is another allegory, and Elizabeth will famously cry out six months later, “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?”

So long as Southampton is in the prison, there will be no authorized printings of new Shakespeare plays. In effect, the pen name goes silent. The actors of Shakespeare’s company are summoned for questioning, but never the author … but why not? Well, he can’t be summoned, can he?  He has no flesh and blood, because “Shakespeare” — after all – is but a pen name.

Postscript

While Southampton languishes in prison, another metamorphosis takes place, as recorded by Oxford in the Sonnets. First, his disappearance: “My name be buried where my body is” (72); and “I, once gone, to all the world must die” (81). Then his sacrifice to the pen name, in a sequence that traditional critics call the Rival Poet series. The true “rival,” however, is not a flesh-and-blood person; rather, it is Oxford’s own pseudonym on the printed page.

Oxford understood that “Shakespeare” would remain attached to Southampton, even as he himself, the true author, faded from the world’s view. The Sonnets would be suppressed upon their publication in 1609, and the quarto would remain underground for more than a century until it reappeared in 1711, like a message in a bottle, carrying Oxford’s true account for posterity.  The story — of how Oxford sacrificed himself to save Southampton’s life and gain his freedom — remains within the “monument” of the Sonnets:

“Your monument shall be my gentle verse,/ Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read” (81); “And thou in this shalt find thy monument,/ When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent” (107).

 

 

 

Published in: on December 2, 2019 at 2:48 pm  Comments (10)  
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The Monument of “Shakespeare” in Stratford-upon-Avon

Image result for whalen on monument fraud shakespeare bust

 

A sketch of the monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, was made in 1634.  I am no expert, but a reader of this blog site has inquired, so I attach here an article by Ricbard Whalen at the site of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. (Just click on this short paragraph.) 

Here, in the sketch of 1634 above, it is plainly a sack of grain or “woolsack.” I believe it was later altered to include him holding a quill pen in one hand, a piece of paper in the other; but why would he write on a pillow in the first place? Directly below is the engraving published first in 1656:

And below – ah! – the bust as it appears today:

 

Published in: on September 30, 2019 at 5:42 pm  Comments (2)  
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“You are not ‘Ipse,’ for I am he!”: Re-posting no. 58 of 100 Reasons Shake-speare was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

One scene in the Shakespeare plays, viewed through the lens of de Vere as the dramatist, is so starkly illuminating that it quickly shatters the myth that the author could have been William Shakspere. The scene opens Act Five of the comedy As You Like It. Set in the Forest of Arden, it has no function in the plot and appears to be one of several late additions to the play.  In this short scene the courtier-clown Touchstone confronts William, the country fellow (who appears nowhere else in the entire play) and orders him to stop claiming possession of Audrey, the country wench who is betrothed to Touchstone. Orthodox scholars and teachers are constrained to treat the scene seriously, trying to make sense of it in the context of the rest of the comedy. They often come up with interesting explanations, except for the most obvious one, that it represents the author speaking directly about authorship and trying to tell us the truth by means of allegorical fiction.

Touchstone the courtier-clown stands for the playwright, Oxford, the courtier who was praised as “best for comedy” at Queen Elizabeth’s royal court; Audrey the country wench stands for the body of Oxford’s plays, regarded by the Puritans as immoral; and William the country fellow is William of Stratford-upon-Avon in the Warwickshire countryside.

In this short allegorical scene, Oxford accuses Shakspere of trying to claim credit for the Shakespeare plays (or to gain profit by selling them), and tells him to abandon all pretensions as author: “All your writers do consent that ipse is he; now, you are not ipse, for I am he” (5.1). 

[“All the writers who worked under my patronage know that I am the man himself, the master writer. Now you, William, are not he himself, because I am!”]

Touchstone is one of Oxford’s clearest self-portraits. Just as in the 1570s and 1580s he had enjoyed the queen’s license to write and produce plays satirizing members of her court, Touchstone is an “allowed fool” (as Olivia calls Feste in Twelfth Night) who can say what he wants and get away with it.  He is brilliant, insightful, witty and argumentative. He can laugh at the madness of the world and at himself. Above all, he is a “touchstone” or identifier of truth and true value (or the lack of it) beneath the surface appearances.

We are prepared in Act Three to recognize Touchstone as the dramatist. In the forest with Audrey (who represents the plays), he tells her: “I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths” (3.3). Ovid, the ancient Roman poet and Shakespeare’s favorite source, was banished to the land of the Goths, just as Oxford was prevented from taking credit as author. Touchstone then sets up the truth as told best by “feigning” or being deceptive:

Touchstone – When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with [acknowledged by] the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.  Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.

Audrey – I do not know what poetical is.  Is it honest in deed and word?  Is it a true thing?

Touchstone – No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning …

The best (or only) way for Oxford to tell the truth is by means of symbolism and allegory in his dramatic works, which are otherwise fictional; but, he warns, if you fail to understand my “hidden” meanings you will be denying my existence; you might as well kill me in the little room of a torture chamber.

William, Touchstone and Audrey

Here is Act Five, Scene 1 with some of my comments inserted. The Forest of Arden [which, in real life, lay between Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford’s estate on the Avon known as Bilton.] Touchstone [Oxford] and Audrey [the plays] are onstage. Enter William [of Stratford]

WILLIAM – Good even, Audrey.

AUDREY – God ye good even, William.

WILLIAM – And good even to you, sir.

TOUCHSTONE – Good even, gentle friend. Cover thy head, cover thy head; nay, prithee, be covered. How old are you, friend?

WILLIAM – Five and twenty, sir.

[Note: William of Stratford was twenty-five in 1589. By then Oxford would have completed the original versions of all the plays; but he would have written this scene no earlier than 1599, when the “Shakespeare” name had just begun to be printed on the plays, and possibly as late as 1603.]

TOUCHSTONE – A ripe age. Is thy name William?

WILLIAM – William, sir. [If the playwright’s name was William, would he decide to give that name to this country bumpkin?]

TOUCHSTONE – A fair name. Wast born i’ the forest here?

WILLIAM – Ay, sir, I thank God.

TOUCHSTONE – ‘Thank God;’ a good answer.  Art rich?

WILLIAM – Faith, sir, so-so.

TOUCHSTONE – ‘So-so’ is good, very good, very excellent good; and yet it is not; it is but so-so.  Art thou wise?

WILLIAM – Ay, sir, I have a pretty wit.

Touchstone in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1996-97

TOUCHSTONE – Why, thou sayest well. I do now remember a saying, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” The heathen philosopher, when he had a desire to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put it into his mouth; meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open. You do love this maid?

WILLIAM – I do, sir. [William wants to marry the plays, i.e., claim them for himself.]

TOUCHSTONE – Give me your hand. Art thou learned?

WILLIAM – No, sir. [William is uneducated; perhaps illiterate.]

TOUCHSTONE – Then learn this of me: to have, is to have; for it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being poured out  of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; [By filling Shakspere with credit for the plays, Oxford is being emptied of credit] for all your writers do consent that ipse is he: now, you are not ipse, for I am he.

WILLIAM – Which he, sir?

TOUCHSTONE – He, sir, that must marry this woman. [Oxford is the one who deserves to be associated with the plays.] Therefore, you clown, abandon,–which is in the vulgar leave — the society — which in the boorish is company — of this female — which in the common is woman; which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage: I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado [beating with sticks], or in steel; I will bandy with thee in faction [engage in controversy with you]; I will o’errun thee with policy [conquer you with cunning strategy]; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways: therefore tremble and depart!

AUDREY – Do, good William.

WILLIAM – God rest you merry, sir. (Exit)

Oxford may have written and inserted this gratuitous scene in 1603, after he had agreed to the complete obliteration of his identity as the author of the “Shakespeare” works. Perhaps he inserted it for a private performance at Wilton in December 1603, some nine months after the succession of King James. For those at Court and possibly others who knew the truth about Oxford’s authorship, it must have been wildly funny and yet profoundly sad.

[This post is now no. 88 in 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford (2016), published by Forever Press.]

[Thanks to editor Alex McNeil for his help, as usual; and see his article “Is Touchstone vs. William in As You Like It the first authorship story?” in Shakespeare Matters 2.3 (Spring 2003); 14-22.]

[Also my thanks again to Brian Bechtold for his editorial help.]

Published in: on September 29, 2019 at 9:54 am  Leave a Comment  
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Shakespeare & Italy – A Tribute to Richard Roe

Published in: Uncategorized on August 31, 2019 at 2:58 pm  Comments (2)  

“Oxford’s Final Love Letters to Queen Elizabeth” by Robert Prechter

The following article is reprinted from the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Newsletter edition of Summer 2015. It calls to mind one powerful thought about Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford: Under any name, he is consistently telling his own story. Comments and questions are invited and encouraged.

“Oxford’s Final Love Letters to Queen Elizabeth” by Robert Prechter

Thomas Proctor’s compendium of verse titled A gorgious Gallery, of gallant Inventions…by divers worthy workemen (1578) contains ninety-two poems. I count sixteen of them as Oxford’s. By far the most important among them are three poems that appear to be Oxford’s personal entreaties to Queen Elizabeth, written after what seems to have been—and, in light of these poems, must have been—their affair of approximately 1571 to 1574, as postulated in numerous Oxfordian sources. The poems’ titles and first lines are:

(1) A loving Epistle, written by Ruphilus a yonge Gentilman, to his best beloved Lady Elriza (“Twice hath my quaking hand”)

(2) Narsetus a wofull youth, in his exile writeth to Rosana his beloved mistresse, to assure her of his faithfull constancie, requiring the like of her (“To stay thy musinge minde”)

(3) The Lover forsaken, writeth to his Lady a desperate Farwell (“Even hee that whilome was”)

(Numbers below in parentheses refer to these three poems. Original spellings have been kept.)

The addressee of these poems is easy to discern. The name Elriza is an anagram for Eliza R, i.e., Eliza Regina. Rosana is another name for Queen Elizabeth, the only woman then living whose symbol was the Tudor Rose.

Who is addressing the Queen? One of the most revealing aspects of the three poems is how similar some of their lines are to those in the Earl of Oxford’s poem The Loss of My Good Name. The final stanza of that poem reads:

Help gods, help saints, help sprites and powers that in the heaven do dwell,

Help ye that are to wail, ay wont, ye howling hounds of hell,

Help man, help beasts, help birds and worms that on the earth doth toil,

Help fish, help fowl that flocks and feeds upon the salt-sea soil,

Help echo that in air doth flee, shrill voices to resound

To wail this loss of my good name, as of these griefs the ground.

 

The three poems from gorgious Gallery resound with Oxford’s words, images and 
parallel constructions:

Help thou Minerva, graunt I pray, some of thy learned skill.

Help all you Muses nine, my wofull Pen to write: (1)

Let all the furies forth, that pine in Hell with payne,

Let all their torments come abroad…

Come wilde and savadge beastes, stretch forth your cruell pawes,

Dismember mee, consume my flesh: imbrew your greedy jawes. (3)

And yee my sences all: whose helpe was aye at hand…

Ye sonne, ye moone and starres…

Forbeare to show your force a while. 

Yet for the worldly shame…

Or for the losse of your good name… (3)

 

We may reasonably conclude, then, that these poems are missives from Oxford to Elizabeth.

In keeping with changing authorship—both indicated and hypothesized—within gorgious Gallery, suddenly the versification in the book leaps to a level above that of the surrounding material. The poet begins by expressing his fear and hesitancy:

Twice hath my quaking hand withdrawen this pen away

And twice again it gladly would, before I dare beewray

The secret shrined thoughts, that in my hart do dwell,

That never wight as yet hath wist, nor I desire to tell. (1)

In our proposed context, Oxford would indeed have possessed “secret shrined thoughts,” ones of which no one else was aware (“never wight as yet hath wist”) and which his beloved’s social rank would have barred him from revealing. The poet quickly employs a thoughtful comparison:

But as the smoothered cole, doth wast and still consume,
And outwardly doth geve no heate, of burnyng blaze or fume:
So hath my hidden harmes, been harbred in my corpce,
Till faintyng limes and life and all, had welnigh lost his force. (1)

Shakespeare uses “coals” metaphorically fourteen times, including “dying coal” in Venus and Adonis (Stz.55) and “dying coals” in Lucrece (Stz.197).

The poet next admits, “stand I halfe in doubt,” and hesitates. He finally resolves, “I will lay feare aside” and write. Several lines in the poems link the names Elriza and Rosana to the Queen by using terms of political power. Consider:

Who yeeldeth all hee hath: as subject to thy will,

If thou command hee doth obey, and all thy heastes fulfill. (1)

I am banisht thus from thee….(2)

I doo commend to thee: my life and all I have,

Commaund them both as hee best likes; so lose or else to save. (2)

Thou art Queene of women kinde, and all they ought obay.

And all for shame doo blush, when thou doost come in place…(3)

And every wight on earth: that living breath do draw,

Lo here your queene sent from above, to kepe you all in awe. (2)

 

One comparison begins with words that imply a throne:

As highest seates wee see be subject to most winde…(1)

 

He says to his poem:

Fall flat to ground before her face: and at her feet doo lie:

Haste not to rise againe [until she] rayse thee with her hand.

…A pardon crave upon thy knee, and pray her to forgeve…(2)

 

Royal suitors had been assailing Queen Elizabeth, as they are Elriza:

Though Princes sue for grace: and ech one do thee woo

Mislyke not this my meane estate: wherewith I can nought doo. (1)

 

And in one line, Oxford seems to identify himself as her subject:

The subject Oxe doth like his yoke: when hee is driven to draw. (1)

 The original aphorism shows up in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (I,i):

“In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.”

 

Many Oxfordians believe that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis describes Elizabeth’s pursuit of Oxford. Echoing an equally unbalanced courtship, the anonymous author of these poems attributes romantic advances firmly to the lady. He speaks of “thy bewailing words” (3) while asserting his own innocence:

“Sith first I did you know: I never spake the thing/ That did intend you to beguile.” (3)

 

Further fitting Oxford’s relative youth, the poet confesses naiveté in allowing his beloved to use him:

Unskilful though I bee, and cannot best discerne,
Where craft for troth doth preace in place, yet am I not to learne.
And I did thinke you such: that litle knew of guile,
But seemings now be plaste for deedes, and please fulwel the while. (2)

The poet’s youth, in turn, provides a reason for the lady’s reluctance to commit:

Have you thus sone forgot, the doutes and dreades you made,

Of yongmens love how litle holde, how sone away they fade. 

 

As it happens, a report written in July 1571 to Regent Catherine de’ Medici by the French ambassador to England, de la Mothe Fenelon, confirms that Oxford’s youth would have doomed a permanent match with Elizabeth. He wrote (in French) that “she wanted to tell me freely that, given her age, she would not willingly be led to church to be married to someone who looked as young as the Earl of Oxford and that that could not be without a certain feeling of shame and some regret.”

We may even have evidence to date the start of Oxford and Elizabeth’s involvement. At the beginning of the third poem, the poet reveals the length of time he has been enthralled. Speaking of himself in the third person he writes, “thrise three yeeres hath spent & past, reposing all his trust/ In thy bewailing words, that seemed sugar sweet…(3) Counting back nine years from the publication date of the book gives 1569. By this reckoning, we may conclude that Elizabeth first flirted with Oxford in 1569, when he was nineteen years old. (On the other hand, the poet may have taken some temporal license in favor of employing the parallel and alliterative phrase “thrise three.”)

The poet refers to “My absence longe” (1), implying that for a time he had left the area. This recollection corresponds with the fact that Oxford had departed for a trip through the continent that had ended just two years before the publication of these poems. Yet he begs his beloved to remember—while using another term fitting her royal prerogative—what drove him away:

But if thou call to minde: when I did part thee fro,

What was the cause of my exile: and why I did forgo

The happy life I held, and lost therewith thy sight…(1) 

And I in cares doo flame, to thinke of my exile,

That I am barred from thy sight. (1)

 

Some sort of breakup, then, seems to have prompted Oxford to run away, without royal permission, to France in early 1575 and then spend a year on the continent in 1575-76.

Coincident with the time of Oxford’s return, the poet’s beloved has barred him from her presence. This “exile” confuses him. He hurls a charge of infidelity:

Well mayst thou wayle thy want of troth: & rue thy great unright

If thou be found to fayle thy vow that thou hast sworne…(1)

and could you gree thereto?

Thus to betray your faithful freend, and promis to undo? 

Thy fawning flattering wordes, which now full falce I finde…

Yet pardon I do pray: and if my wordes offend…(3)

 

He entreats her to explain,

what trespass have I done?/That am banisht thus from thee…(2)

 

and wonders if false rumors found her ear while he was gone, thus explaining why she won’t see him:

Or if my absence long: to thy disgrace hath wrought mee

Or hindring tales of my back freends: unto such state hath brought mee…

…Yet blame mee not though I doo stand somewhat in feare

The cause is great of my exile, which hardly I do bear. (1)

 

The poet reminisces about their intimate time together:

And then I call to minde, thy shape and cumly grace,

Thy heavenly hew thy sugred words, thy sweet enticing face

The pleasant passed sportes: that spent the day to end…(2) 

 

He flatters his beloved by declaring that Venus “Shall yeeld the palme of filed speche, to thee that doth her staine” (2).

Eloquence is one of Elizabeth’s well-known traits. He entreats her to answer a heartfelt, personal question: “How are you?”

But oh Rosanna dere: since time of my exile

How hast thou done? and doost thou live: how hast thou spent the while

How standeth health with thee? and art thou glad of chere? (2)

 

The poet richly describes the anguish of his feelings for his beloved:

O thou Elrisa fayre, the beuty of thine eyes

Hath bred such bale within my brest, and cau’sde such strife to ryse. (1) 

Awake, asleape, and at my meales, thou doost torment my brest. (1)

Thus Joyfull thoughtes a while, doth lessen much my payne

But after calme and fayer tides, the stormes do come agayne. (1) 

Thy bewty bids mee trust, unto thy promise past,

My absence longe and not to speake: doth make mee doubt as fast. (1)

 

Despite his hurt, the poet vows eternal loyalty:

But oh Elrisa mine, why doo I stir such war
Within my selfe to thinke of this: and yet thy love so far?
…No length of lingring time: no distance can remoove,
The faith that I have vowed to thee: nor alter once my love. (1) 

the greatest care I have,
Is how to wish and will thee good; and most thy honor save. (2)

Though time that trieth all, hath turnde the love you ought,
No changing time could alter mee: or wrest awry my thought. (3)

I doo commend to thee: my life and all I have. (2) 

I am all thine, and not my owne. (1) 

 

and begs her to reciprocate:

Bee faythfull sound therfore, bee constant true and just
If thou betray thy loving freend, whom hensforth shall I trust? (2)

 

But she will not, and perhaps cannot, do so. Befitting our case that the Lord Great Chamberlain is speaking to the Queen of England, the poet understands that their public eminence restrains her and admits they must be discreet, because the world is watching them:

Though Argus jelus eyes: that daily on us tend,
Forbid us meat [meet] and speech also, or message for to send. (2)

 

But as the third poem’s title indicates, the young man by 1578 had finally realized that his quest was futile. He bids his wished lover “a desperate Farewell.” In the first poem he had begged her,

Let not thy freend to shipwracke go: sith thou doost hold his helme (1)

yet by the third poem he is resolved to the futility of his hopes:

And I thus tost and turnd: whose life to shipwracke goes…. (3)

The poet proved prescient. Elizabeth ignored Oxford’s entreaties, and after her demise the Earl of Oxford wrote to his brother-in-law Robert Cecil on 27 April 1603, lamenting:

“In this common shipwracke, mine is above all the rest.” (3)

Shakespeare uses shipwreck as a metaphor three times: in Henry VI Part 1 (V,v): “driven by breath of her renown/ Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive/ Where I may have fruition of her love”; in Titus Andronicus (II,i): “This siren, that will charm Rome’s Saturnine,/ And see his shipwreck and his commonweal’s”; and in the positive in Twelfth Night (V,i), when Duke Orsino celebrates, “I shall have share in this most happy wrack.”

We may be sure that these three poems form a united group, as all of them are linked in terms of theme and language. In addition to the parallels cited above, the term pistle meaning epistle is in the first two poems; and the image, “hollow lookes, the pale and ledy hew” in the second poem is repeated in the third poem as “pale and lean with hollow lookes.” At the outset of the first poem the poet sighs, “Twice hath my quaking hand withdrawen this pen away,” in the third poem his hesitancy is augmented: “Thrise hath my pen falne downe: upon this paper pale.”

The anonymous poet’s writing fits Shakespeare’s proclivities. There are parallel constructions, serial questions, metaphors of fishing, birding and sailing, “as…so” comparisons, a mention of Ovid, and effective alliteration, for example: “Then should my sorowes seace, and drowne my deepe dispaire.” To shape his entreaties, the poet cites a bevy of classical figures, including Pyramus and Thisby and Troylus and Cressid, whose stories Shakespeare treated in two plays.

The poems are full of Shakespeare’s terms and phrases. The line, “A thousand deathes I do desire” echoes Shakespeare in Henry IV Part 1 (III,ii): “I will die a hundred thousand deaths”; and in Twelfth Night (V,i): “To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.”

The lines “time too long doth try mee” and “Though time that trieth all” echo in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (I,i): “as time shall try.” Variations of “when time shal serve” appear eight times in six Shakespeare plays as well as in Sonnet 19 of The Passionate Pilgrim.

The metaphor “Lament unlustie legges: bee lame for ever more” calls to mind Shakespeare’s line “So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite” in Sonnet 37.

The Bard, moreover, links two of these words in King Lear (II,iv): “a man’s/ over-lusty at legs,” and two others in Henry VIII (I,iii): “They have all new legs, and lame ones.”

The poet worries, “stand I halfe in doubt,” but resolves, “I will lay feare aside,” and muses, “Who never durst assaile his foe: did never conquest win”; Shakespeare offers the same ideas in similar words: “Our doubts…make us lose the good we oft might win/ By fearing to attempt” (Measure for Measure, I,iv) and “To outlook conquest and to win renown” (King John, V,ii).

The line, “No more then water soft, can stir a steadfast rocke,” is the flip side of a theme that Shakespeare employs in Troilus and Cressida (III,ii): “When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy”; in Othello (IV,iii): “Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones”; and four times in Lucrece, including the mixed-image line, “Tears harden lust, though marble wear with raining.”

 

What may be interpreted as paired Ver self-references appear several times in these poems:

I never will agree to like, or looke on other wight.

Nor never shall my mouth consent to pleasant sound…(3)

Let never soyle bringe forth, agayn the lusty greene

Nor trees that new despoiled are, with leafe be ever greene (3)

Beleeve this to bee true: that now too true I prove…(3)

 

and a possible signature also appears to lie within the final line in each of the first and last poems:

And that my love doo never fleet out of thy secret brest…(1)

A better hap and that hee may, a truer Mystrisse finde. (3)

I think these are Oxford’s last love letters to Elizabeth before he gave up on being her lifelong companion. Yet as Oxford’s and Shakespeare’s activities demonstrate, the anonymous poet stayed true to his promise of devoted service.

///

Proctor, Thomas, ed., A gorgious Gallery, of gallant Inventions…by
divers worthy workemen, London: Richard Jones, 1578.

Fenelon, De la Mothe, July 1571, report to Catherine de Medici. Quoted in

Elizabeth Imlay, “Scoop in the Bibliotheque Nationale,” De Vere Society Newsletter (July 2006): 25.

De Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford: “Personal Letter to Robert Cecil,” April 27 1603, Letters and Papers of Edward de Vere 17th earl of Oxford: Personal Letters (#39), Ed. Nelson, Alan H. https://socrates.berkeley.edu/~PERSONAL/030427.html.

Transferred to:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/oxlets.html

Published in: on June 25, 2019 at 8:09 pm  Comments (5)  
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Daughters and Dedications: Re-posting No. 57 of 100 Reasons Oxford Wrote the Shakespeare Works

Only three men received dedications of Shakespeare works. Each man had been engaged to (or was married to) one of Oxford’s daughters:

Elizabeth de Vere (1575-1627) was engaged to Southampton but married William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, to whom Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) were dedicated, was then engaged to Oxford’s eldest daughter Elizabeth de Vere. He refused to marry her despite pressure from William Cecil, the girl’s grandfather and his guardian. Elizabeth de Vere married William Stanley, earl of Derby at Greenwich Palace on 26 January 1595, when A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the view of many scholars, was performed for the guests.

The only other “Shakespeare” work dedicated to a named individual (I thus omit the “Mr. W.H.” in the Sonnets of 1609. whom I believe to be Southampton) was the First Folio in 1623, with thirty-six plays in over nine hundred pages, offered to “THE MOST NOBLE And INCOMPARABLE PAIRE OF BRETHREN”:

William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630)

William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, who had been engaged in 1597 to Oxford’s second daughter, Bridget de Vere; and

Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery (William’s brother), who married Oxford’s youngest daughter, Susan de Vere, in 1604.

The Folio of 1623 appeared nineteen years after Oxford’s death and seven years after Shakspere’s death.  The introductory matter, supervised by Ben Jonson (who also wrote its main epistles), never explicitly identifies the Warwickshire man; instead, it contains one reference to the dramatist as “sweet Swan of Avon” and a separate mention of “thy Stratford moniment,” leaving it to people in the future to conclude that Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon was the great author. It is upon this shaky foundation that an entirely  fictional “biography” has been built.

Philip Herbert the first Earl of Montgomery (1584-1650) at age 25 in 1609

Oxfordian researcher Ruth Loyd Miller called the Shakespeare folio “a family affair” that began with the marriage of Susan de Vere and Philip Herbert during the 1604-05 Christmas season, six months after Oxford’s reported death on 24 June 1604.  Court festivities for the wedding included performances of seven “Shakespeare” plays, an unspoken tribute to the absent author.

The first two plays were “The Moor of Venice” (Othello) and The Merry Wives of Windsor.  Two more were performed, before and after the main event:

26 December: Measure for Measure

27 December: Wedding of Susan de Vere and Philip Herbert

28 December: The Comedy of Errors

In January the performances continued with Love’s Labour’s Lost, hosted by Southampton, followed by Henry the Fifth and The Merchant of Venice, the latter presented twice.

Susan de Vere dancing in Ben Jonson’s “Masque of Blackness” on 6 January 1605 at Whitehall in the Old Banqueting House

Also presented was Masque of Blackness by Jonson at Whitehall Palace; its performers included the bride and groom, Susan and Philip; Elizabeth de Vere and her husband, Derby; and Bridget de Vere’s former fiancé William Herbert, earl of Pembroke.

“This was the beginning of a long and intimate association between the daughters of the Earl of Oxford and their families, and Ben Jonson, climaxed in 1623 with the publication of the First Folio,” Miller writes. Jonson remained “particularly close” to Susan de Vere and the Herbert brothers, Pembroke and Montgomery, with Pembroke bestowing on Jonson twenty pounds every New Year “with which to purchase books.”

It was also the start of “an active, determined and intense campaign by Pembroke for the position of Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household,” Miller continues, noting the position “had purview over the office and properties of the Revels Office” and those of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, now the King’s Men.

Jonson published a folio of his own works (the first of its kind in England) in 1616, listing “Shakespeare” as having acted in two of his plays, Every Man in His Humour of 1598 and Sejanus of 1603 (without mentioning him as a writer).

Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio of his Collected Works

Jonson’s costly folio was dedicated to Pembroke, his patron, who apparently financed it; in addition, Pembroke arranged at that time for Jonson to receive an annual pension of 100 marks. Jonson’s folio was issued just a few months after the death of Shakspere in April 1616, an event that occurred without any public comment. The identification by Jonson that year of Shakespeare an actor would be repeated in the front matter of the Folio of 1623 as “The Names of the Principals Actors in all these Places” – a further attempt to emphasize the Bard as strictly a theatrical man. It should be noted that the 1623 Shakespeare folio included only his plays; conspicuously, it contained none of the poems and sonnets, nor any mention of Southampton, to whom the poetry had been dedicated.

In 1621 Pembroke temporarily increased Jonson’s pension to 200 pounds.  Having become the Chamberlain, now “all [Pembroke] wanted to do was retain” his position, Miller writes, “and under no conditions was he willing to accept more lucrative posts unless he might leave his place to his brother Montgomery.” The logical deduction is that Pembroke was fiercely committed to publishing Shakespeare’s plays in folio.

The Shakespeare dedications all lead back to Edward de Vere and his daughters and other relatives. To repeat Miller’s phrase, what we have here is “a family affair.”

[This post is now no. 99 of the book 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford, edited by Alex McNeil.)

Published in: on June 15, 2019 at 7:09 pm  Comments (1)  
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Richard Edwards and Edward de Vere: Re-posting No. 56 of 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford

“For Tragedy, Lord Buckhurst and Master Edward Ferrys do deserve the highest praise: the Earl of Oxford and Master Edwards of Her Majesty’s Chapel, for Comedy and Enterlude.” – The Arte of English Poesie, 1589

Elizabethan musician and poet Richard Edwards was thirty-eight in 1561 when he became Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, the director of the choirboys who entertained the queen with plays and concerts. In the following year, Edward de Vere arrived in London as the first of Elizabeth’s royal wards. During the rest of his life he would actively patronize the Chapel Children and the Children of St. Paul’s (later known in the countryside as Oxford’s Boys), and an adult acting company as well.

Although “Damon and Pithias” was written and performed for Queen Elizabeth in the Christmas season of 1564, it was first printed in 1571 and attributed to Richard Edwards, who had died in 1566.

In the Christmas season of 1564-65 a play attributed to Edwards was performed by the Chapel Children for Elizabeth and the court at Whitehall. The play, Damon and Pithias, was the first “tragicomedy” in England and the high water mark of English drama up to then. It was set in the royal Greek court of Dionysius, but its closing songs expressed loyalty to the queen by name, revealing that the royal court of Elizabeth had been intended all along – an early example of what would become Shakespeare’s habit of using foreign settings to reflect England itself.

The prologue of Damon and Pithias (printed in 1571), referring to its author, stated that “to some he seemed too much in young desires to range.” Then it switched to the plural “Authors” of the play, adding, “I speak for our defense.”  Did de Vere collaborate on Damon and Pithias with Master Edwards, as the The Arte of English Poesie suggests?  Or was he the sole author of this youthful, highly spirited play?

The closing song evoked Oxford’s motto Nothing Truer than Truth:

True friends talk truly, they gloss for no gain…

True friends for their true prince refuseth not their death.

The Lord grant her such friends, most noble Queen Elizabeth!

Decades later Sonnet 82 by “Shake-speare” would echo those lines:

Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathized

In true plain words by thy true-telling friend

Christ Church Hall – yes, used in a scene for Harry Potter…

In August 1566 the Queen visited Oxford University and presented de Vere with an honorary Master of Arts degree. [The young earl studied mainly with private tutors.]  During her Majesty’s historic visit she arrived at Christ Church Hall for the student performance of Palamon and Arcyte, a new play attributed to Edwards, dramatizing Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; and this performance on two separate nights became a major event of campus lore.

Word of mouth from rehearsals and previews had served to build up tremendous excitement and anticipation. After Elizabeth and her court were seated, the incoming crowd swelled to the point that a wall beside the stairs ripped away, crushing three persons to death and injuring five others. Elizabeth sent for her own doctors to help; after all the hurt or dead had been carried off, the show went on as scheduled.

“The Two Noble Kinsmen” as by Fletcher and Shakespeare, printed in 1634, was probably based on surviving parts of the “lost” play “Palamon and Arcyte” by sixteen-year-old Edward de Vere in 1566

Palamon and Arcyte is now a “lost” play, but is often cited as a source of The Two Noble Kinsman, printed nearly seventy years later in 1634 as by (according to the title page) “the memorable Worthies of their times, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, both cited as “Gent.” Scholars have identified the “Shakespearean” sections as well as the “lesser” contributions by Fletcher; but they are baffled as to why the Bard, near the end of his illustrious career, would decide to collaborate with an inferior writer.

The logical answer is that he did nothing of the sort — on the contrary, the “young Shakespeare” wrote Palamon and Arcyte by age sixteen in 1566, with some of his text surviving into the next century, when Fletcher filled in the missing parts, with his own inferior writing, to create the play known as The Two Noble Kinsmen.

During the 1566 performance, with Oxford in attendance, the queen was thrilled by the staging of a “cry of hounds” for Theseus, Duke of Athens. Reacting to the realism of the scene, students began “hallooing” and Elizabeth is reported to have shouted, “O excellent!  Those boys are ready to leap out at windows to follow the hounds!”

Perhaps the author of Hamlet recalled Her Majesty’s delight at the naturalness of it all when he wrote the prince’s statement that “the purpose of playing” is “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature…”

“Hounds at Full Cry” – the oil painting by Thomas Blinks

In the future, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by “Shakespeare” would also present Theseus, Duke of Athens, who says: “My love shall hear the music of my hounds … My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind … A cry more tuneable was never holloo’d to nor cheered with horn.”  When the queen attended the latter play at court, did she recall the earlier play from 1566? Did she realize that Oxford must have inserted the hounds as a private, shared recollection of those earlier hounds at the university?

The alleged playwriting career of Richard Edwards lasted just two years. His death on 31 October 1566 occurred only weeks after Palamon and Arcyte had been staged for the queen at Oxford. A decade later in 1576 came publication of The Paradise of Dainty Devices, a collection of ninety-nine poems (and/or song lyrics) that Edwards had compiled “for his private use” before he died, according to the printer Henry Disle. Ten of the verses were attributed to “M. Edwardes,” with eight signed “E.O.” for Edward Oxenford, as he often signed his name.

If in fact Edwards had compiled the poems ten years earlier, Oxford would have composed his contributions by age sixteen; but if the earl himself had done the compiling for the 1576 edition, he might have written his own poems at any time up to then. Of the nine contributors whose names or initials appear on the title page, only Oxford and Lord Vaux were noblemen, and the latter was deceased.

There are many unanswered questions about The Paradise, not least of which is how many other verses in the volume might have come from Oxford’s pen. Alexander B. Grosart in Fuller Worthies’ Library of 1872 identified twenty-two poems by de Vere, remarking that “an unlifted shadow lies across his memory.”

“Shakespeare” would later use part of a song, attributed in The Paradise to Edwards, entitled In Commendation of Music (“Where griping grief the heart would wound,” etc.).  The excerpt appears in Romeo and Juliet:

When griping grief the heart doth wound,

And doleful dumps the mind oppress,

Then mustic with her silver sound…(4.5)

Hyder Rollins in his edition of 1927 reports that The Paradise was “the most popular miscellany printed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth” and that by 1606 it had “reached at least a tenth edition.”  Additional poems were included with many of the new printings.

So we find the teenage de Vere and the Master of the Chapel Children with intensely shared interests in music, lyrics, poetry, players and plays, strands of which are all intertwined with, and connected to, the future “Shakespeare” works.

(This reason is now No. 18 in 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford. Many thanks to editor Alex McNeil for his invaluable expertise and help.)

Published in: on May 25, 2019 at 9:32 pm  Comments (4)  
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Oxford’s Uncle Surrey, Father of the English Sonnet: Re-posting No. 55 of “100 Reasons” why Edward de Vere was “Shakespeare”

If Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon could have boasted that one of his uncles had introduced into England the sonnet form later made famous by “Shakespeare,” who would question his authorship of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS?

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

Of course, he had no such uncle; but Edward de Vere’s uncle  Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1517-1547), was one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, who belonged to the cultivated circle at the Court of Henry VIII and was Surrey’s senior by fifteen years

One of Oxford’s aunts, Frances de Vere (a sister of his father, the sixteenth earl), had married Surrey, the nobleman-poet who, with his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), had pioneered the writing of English sonnets.

Wyatt and Surrey are known as the “Fathers of the English Sonnet.” Surrey created the rhyming meter and quatrain divisions of the “Elizabethan” or “Shakespearean” form of sonnet.

Surrey was beheaded in January 1547 by the dying Henry VIII, who had become increasingly paranoid as illness overwhelmed him. Without evidence the king had accused the poet-earl of treason, charging him with planning to usurp the crown from his nine-year-old son, the future Edward VI of England.

“Songs and Sonnettes,” usually called Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557, was the first printed anthology of English verse, containing 271 poems, forty of them by Oxford’s uncle the Earl of Surrey and ninety-six by Sir Thomas Wyatt

In 1557, ten years after Surrey’s death and when Oxford was seven, the publisher Richard Tottel issued Songes and Sonettes written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward, late Earle of Surrey and other, known later and more famously as Tottel’s Miscellany.  (It was the custom for noblemen’s poetry to be printed posthumously.) This was the first printed anthology of English poetry and the most important verse collection of the sixteenth century, running into many editions during Elizabeth’s reign of nearly forty-five years.

With his translations of two books of Virgil’s Aeneid, Surrey was the first English poet to publish blank verse; in this, too, Oxford’s uncle prepared the way for Shakespeare. Well before his death Surrey’s poetry (inspired by the Italians) had been circulated in manuscript, so a young de Vere would have seen copies owned by his relatives. Aunt Frances, his father’s sister and Surrey’s widow, herself a versifier, lived until 1577, when Oxford was twenty-seven.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), creator of the English or “Shakespearean” form of sonnet and uncle of Edward de Vere

As a young man Oxford was close to his cousins, Surrey’s son Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1536-1572), and the duke’s younger brother Henry Howard, the future 1st Earl of Northampton (1540-1614). Norfolk was executed in 1572 for taking part in the Ridolfi plot to put Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots on the throne; and Henry Howard was one of those responsible for turning Oxford against his wife Anne Cecil in 1576. This younger son of Surrey was extremely well-educated and intelligent, which drew Oxford to him, but he also had a “stupendous want of principle,” as Sir Sidney Lee writes in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Oxford would accuse Howard in 1580 of plotting a Catholic overthrow of Queen Elizabeth on behalf of the still captive Mary Stuart.

Oxford’s relatives and their friends had been actively involved in the rise of English poetry that would flourish in the Elizabethan age and reach its extraordinary heights in the poems, plays and sonnets of “William Shakespeare.”  These poets had included not only Wyatt and Surrey, but others:

Thomas, Lord Vaux, who died in 1556; two of his poems appeared in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557); thirteen are in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), which contains youthful poetry of Edward de Vere

Thomas Lord Vaux (1509-1556), inventor of the six-line stanza used for verses of both Oxford and “Shakespeare.”  Lord Vaux contributed some verse posthumously to The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), in which seven of Oxford’s poems appeared under the initials E.O.; Vaux had also composed a song adapted by “Shakespeare” into the Gravedigger’s song in Hamlet.

Edmund Baron Sheffield (1521-1549), another of Oxford’s poet-uncles, was the husband of the sixteenth Earl of Oxford’s sister Anne de Vere. Sheffield has been linked with Surrey as an upholder of “chivalric poetry.”  He was reported to have had great “skill in music” and to have written “a book of sonnets in the Italian fashion,” but all these have been lost. Sheffield had little time; he died at twenty-eight, in the act of helping to suppress a rebellion.

Tottel’s Miscellany, Penquin Classics

Thomas Churchyard (1520-1604), a soldier-poet who was also an indefatigable “miscellaneous” writer. The DNB records he was “attached in his youth to the household of the famous Earl of Surrey, whose memory he fondly cherished throughout his long life.”

After serving militarily against Spain in the Low Countries on behalf of Prince William of Orange, the Protestant champion, Churchyard returned to England in 1567 and a year later entered the employ of eighteen-year-old de Vere. He soon embarked on an intelligence mission abroad, probably for William Cecil.

In 1580, according to Steven May, Churchyard proposed dedicating two works to “the most worthiest (and towards noble man), the Erle of Oxford,” who was spending his own money (and draining his purse) on patronizing many men of letters. Among them was Churchyard, who must have captured Oxford’s full attention while recalling his youthful service to Surrey.

 

(This Reason is now No. 15 of 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford)

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“Set Me Whereas the Sun Doth Parch the Green”

A Sonnet by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

(In the form to be known as “Shakespearean”)

Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green

Or where his beams do not dissolve the ice,

In temperate heat where he is felt and seen,

In presence prest of people, mad or wise;

Set me in high or yet in low degree,

In longest night or in the shortest day,

In clearest sky or where clouds thickest be,

In lusty youth or when my hairs are gray.

Set me in heaven, in earth, or else in hell,

In hill, or dale, or in the foaming flood;

Thrall or at large, alive whereso I dwell,

Sick or in health, in evil fame or good:

Hers will I be, and only with this thought

Content myself although my chance be nought.

Published in: on May 20, 2019 at 9:56 pm  Leave a Comment  
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“ALL IS TRUE” is ANYTHING BUT!

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/05/all-true-and-problem-shakespeare-biography/589018/

Published in: on May 13, 2019 at 3:56 pm  Comments (3)  
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Gardens & Gardening: Re-posting No. 54 of 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford

“One occupation, one point of view, above all others, is naturally his, that of a gardener; watching, preserving, tending and caring for growing things, especially flowers and fruit.  All through his plays he thinks most easily and readily of human life and action in the terms of a gardener … it is ever present in Shakespeare’s thought and imagination, so that nearly all his characters share in it.” – Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and what it tells us (1935)

Edward de Vere was a ward of Queen Elizabeth for nine years, living at the London home of William Cecil. “One of the chief features of Cecil House was its garden,” B.M. Ward writes. “The grounds in which the house stood  must have covered many acres, and were more extensive than those of any of the other private homes in Westminster.  John Gerard would become Sir William Cecil’s gardener for twenty years (1578-1597); and Sir William evidently took a great pride in his garden … Cecil imbued his sons and the royal wards under his charge with his own keenness in horticulture.” 

We can easily imagine the teenage lord roaming through the great Cecil gardens, examining and smelling the flowers and learning about them.

John Gerard’s landmark book (1597)

Referring to Cecil’s country seat of Theobalds, Charlton Ogburn Jr. writes that gardens “were laid out on three sides of the mansion by the horticulturalist John Gerard … Trees and shrubs seen rarely if at all in Britain were imported from abroad.  The gardens were widely known in Europe.”

O, what pity is it
That he [the king] had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty: superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.

— The Gardener in Richard II (3.4)

The gardener sows the seeds, whereof flowers do grow,

And others yet do gather them, that took less pain I know.

So I the pleasant grape have pulled from the vine,

And yet I languish in great thirst, while others drink the wine.

— Oxford, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576

O thou weed,

Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet

That the sense aches at thee…

When I have plucked the rose,

I cannot give it vital growth again,

It must needs wither: I’ll smell it on the tree.

John Gerard, 1545-1612

— Othello in Othello (4.2 & 5.2)

“What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit unto another?  What doth avail the rose unless another took pleasure in the smell?  Why should this tree be accounted better than that tree, but for the goodness of his fruit?  Why should this vine be better than that vine, unless it brought forth a better grape than the other?  Why should this rose be better esteemed than that rose, unless in pleasantness of smell it far surpassed the other rose?  And so it is in all other things as well as in man.” – Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford, prefatory letter to Cardanus’ Comfort, 1573

“Shakespeare’s Imagery” by Caroline Spurgeon, 1935

The laboring man that tills the fertile soil

And reaps the harvest fruit, hath not indeed

The gain but pain, and if for all his toil

He gets the straw, the Lord will have the seed.

The machete fine falls not unto his share,

On coarset cheat, his hungry stomach feeds.

The landlord doth possess the finest fare,

He pulls the flowers, the other plucks but weeds.

– Oxford’s poem for Cardanus’ Comfort, 1573

Oxford was uniquely positioned to assume the point of view of the gardener, as well as to acquire the love and knowledge of seeds, plants, flowers and trees exhibited by Shakespeare.

(This reason is number 65 in 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford)

Published in: on April 28, 2019 at 9:22 pm  Comments (4)  
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