Portia’s Estate of Belmont — Part Two of Reason 73 Why Oxford was Shakespeare: It was a Real Place that the Author Saw Firsthand

Background Image: Henry de Vere, eighteenth Earl of Oxford; and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton – the “Two Henries” circa 1619

“In Belmont is a lady richly left; and she is fair, and, fairer than that word, of wondrous virtues: sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair speechless messages: her name is Portia” – Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice

“BELMONT… the estate of Portia … apparently located on the mainland near Venice … a fictitious place” –  Charles Boyce, Shakespeare A to Z, 1990

“Belmont is a real place, though called differently in Italian: its identification has been made possible by the precise geographical information and a specific historical reference given in the play.” – Dr. Noemi Magri, De Vere Society Newsletter, 2003; reprinted in Great Oxford, 2004

Villa Foscari on the River Brenta, built by 1560, is Portia's estate of Belmont

Villa Foscari on the River Brenta, built by 1560, is Portia’s estate of Belmont

Portia’s home in The Merchant of Venice is a grand palace where trumpets sound as each new member of the nobility is received in its richly decorated Great Hall, where musicians serenade and aristocrats dance and players perform.  Shakespeare took the name “Belmont” from his main Italian source, Il Pecorone, a novella composed around 1380 and printed in Italian in 1558, wherein the character Gianetto travels a long distance from Venice to see the Lady of Belmont.

The original Belmont in the story was a port on the Adriatic coast.   To simplify things for his play, Shakespeare indicates that Belmont is much closer to Venice; but no real place by that name actually existed or exists at the location he gives — or at any location anywhere near it.   Given that William Shakspere of Stratford never left England, much less spent time in Italy, it follows that he had no real grand estate in mind to begin with; and so, as Boyce indicates above, scholars have universally viewed Shakespeare’s Belmont as a wondrous “fictitious place” he created as a vivid contrast to the crass commercial world of Venice.

The trouble, however, is that the author takes great pains to precisely locate and identify Portia’s estate of Belmont.  He indicates, for example, that the mansion is on a riverbank — in the scene with Lorenzo and Jessica outside the great house in the evening, gazing at the water, when Lorenzo exclaims: “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!”

So Portia’s great house is on a river.  And in the third act she plans to go to Venice with Nerissa, both disguised as men (to be at Antonio’s trial, where Portia will appear as a lawyer), and then to return straightaway to Belmont.  She tells Nerissa to “haste away, for we must measure twenty miles today.”   So the roundtrip is twenty miles, or ten miles to Venice and ten miles back to Belmont.

Now the author inserts another clue.  To conceal her true plan, Portia tells Lorenzo and Jessica a fake story about where they’re going:  “There is a monastery two miles off,” she says, and “there we will abide” until the trial in Venice is concluded.

malcon01So now we know Belmont is (1) on the bank of a river, (2) ten miles from Venice and (3) two miles from a monastery.   And it so happens that there was, and still is, a famous grand mansion on the bank of the River Brenta – the Villa Foscari-Malcontenta, the country residence of the illustrious Foscari family in Venice, exactly ten miles from Venice and precisely two miles from the monastery Ca’ delle Monache, the Nun’s House.

These clues from “Shakespeare” serve to identify Belmont as the architectural masterpiece Villa Foscari , designed by Andrea Palladio and constructed by 1560, when Elizabeth I of England was at the outset of her reign.  This grand villa on the River Brenta, with its richly decorated interior rooms and Great Hall, was known for receiving members of the nobility (and royalty, such as Henry III of France, in 1574) with trumpets sounding, and for entertaining the guests with music and dance and plays – an unforgettable place that the author saw firsthand, later changing its name to Belmont.

“Though now the central seat of the University of Venice, the Villa-Foscari-Malcontenta can be visited today,” writes Richard Paul Roe, author of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (2011), who independently came to the same conclusion as Dr. Noemi Magri.  “It was an easy reach to Venice and a fitting ‘Belmont’ for an heiress, such as Portia, whose hand was sought by princes far and wide” – just as princes came from far and wide for the hand of Queen Elizabeth.

fusina on map

But the man who wrote The Merchant of Venice supplied even more specifics — such as when Portia sends her servant Balthasar to Padua for “notes and garments” that she needs, telling him to then continue in haste “unto the Tranect, to the common ferry which trades to Venice,” where she will be waiting with Nerissa in her coach.   The two women will go from the Tranect by ferry to Venice.

According to Roe, scholars have been wide of the mark trying to identify the Tranect, unaware that it was a narrow strip of land where travelers could transfer from their coach to a ferry, which was pulled across the dry land by machinery to the water and the final lap to Venice.   Their rendezvous at the Tranect “would have to have been in Fusina,” Roe concluded, because it’s five miles alongside the river from Belmont to Fusina, and from there across the water it’s “exactly five miles to the landing place called ‘il Molo,’ which sits in front of the Ducal Palace and Courts of Justice,” where Antonio’s trial was being held.

The ten-mile journey was in two parts of five miles each.  Portia and Nerissa would return from Venice by ferrying the five miles across the water to the Tranect at Fusina, then travel by coach beside the River Brenta for five miles back to the Villa Foscari — or, as it’s called in the play, Belmont.  In total the roundtrip had four legs of five miles apiece, adding up to the “twenty miles” that Portia states so emphatically.  In other words, the great dramatist of The Merchant described not only the various lengths of the journey, but, also, the practical means by which the two women went to the trial in Venice and back.

Now for that “specific historical reference” mentioned by Dr. Magri – an event that is mentioned in The Merchant as having occurred at Belmont and that actually did happen at Villa Foscari.  The reference is made by Nerissa, who asks Portia if she remembers Bassanio’s visit to Belmont:  “Do you not remember, lady, in your father’s time, a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier that came hither in company of the Marquis of Montferrat?”

“Yes, yes, it was Bassanio, as I think, so he was called,” Portia says, but totally ignoring Nerissa’s recollection of the Marguis of Montferrat, who is neither one of Portia’s suitors nor one of the play’s characters; in fact, this is the only time he’s mentioned.  Traditional scholars have never found any good reason for the playwright to make such an allusion, but Dr. Magri, viewing The Merchant as written by Edward de Vere, found the reason — in the historical record of the visit to Venice in July 1574 by Henry III of France, who traveled with his party up the River Brenta and stopped at Villa Foscari, where he had been invited for dinner.

It turns out that with the French king on that visit was Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Marquis of Montferrat!

"il Molo," Portia's landing place in front of the Ducal Palace and Courts of Justice

“il Molo,” Portia’s landing place in front of the Ducal Palace and Courts of Justice

Just eight months later in March 1575, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Oxford arrived at the royal court in Paris and met King Henry III, who was fond of expressing his admiration for Villa Foscari and its charming location.  Oxford continued his journey to Italy and stopped in Mantua — where, Mark Anderson writes in Shakespeare by Another Name, the earl’s “probable host” was Guglielmo Gonzaga, Marquis of Monteferrat, who surely would have told Oxford about his experiences during that historic visit of the French king.

Oxford’s trip from Padua to Venice by traghetto (horse-drawn ferry) along the River Brenta lasted seven hours.  His ferry ride passed “the classically inspired Villa Foscari,” Anderson writes, “as the traghetto slowed down to round a wide curve on the riverbank.”

Noemi Magri concluded that Oxford “intended to describe Villa Foscari and had in mind the Brenta with its villas” and that he “wished to remember the Marquis of Montferrat, Guglielmo Gonzaga Duke of Mantua, the ruler of one of the greatest centers of learning in Renaissance times.”

What does it matter who wrote the Shakespeare plays?  I’d say that Belmont = Villa Foscari is one good reason all by itself.

Published in: on July 3, 2013 at 12:01 am  Comments (111)  
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“The Merchant of Venice” – Interlude – Reason No. 73 Why the Earl of Oxford was “Shakespeare”

When the case for Edward de Vere as “Shakespeare” finally gains popular acceptance, not the least reason will be the overwhelming evidence that the author — no matter who he was — had travelled in Italy and even must have lived in Venice for a period of time.  Such was the experience of the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Oxford in 1575, when he was welcomed from place to place as an illustrious dignitary from the English royal court – a young, high-born nobleman absorbing this land and its people and the Italian renaissance.

venice_2304966bFollowing is a beautiful paragraph, written by Richard Paul Roe in The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (2011), in the first of his two chapters on The Merchant of Venice, speaking of “Shakespeare” regardless of the author’s specific identity:

“In the latter part of the sixteenth century, the gifted English playwright arrived in the beating heart of this Venetian empire: the legendary city of Venice.  He moved about noting its structured society, its centuries-old government of laws, its traditions, its culture, and its disciplines.  He carefully considered and investigated its engines of banking and commerce.  He explored its harbors and canals, and its streets and squares.  He saw the flash of its pageants, its parties and celebrations; and he looked deeply into the Venetian soul.  Then, with a skill that has never been equaled, he wrote a story that has a happy ending for all its characters save one, about whom a grief endures and always will: a deathless tragedy.”

There is so much fascinating material about The Merchant of Venice in relation to the life of Edward de Vere that, in the next and final part of this reason to believe he must have written the Shakespearean works, I’ll focus on just one item uncovered in recent years.  Meanwhile, if Roe’s description of the dramatist’s activities is at all accurate, how can the authorship continue to be attributed to William of Stratford?  The answer can only be that the change of certain fundamental beliefs is extremely difficult and requires time.

ghetto sign veniceFerdinand Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the globe in 1519-1522, but, for up to a century afterward, universities continued to teach a flat earth.  And I am not the first to predict that future generations will look back at the Stratfordian tradition of Shakespearean authorship and wonder how it could have lasted so long.  They will also marvel that since Oxford’s identification by J.T. Looney in 1920 it took at least a century, and no doubt much longer, for his authorship to be generally recognized and accepted.  Certainly there will be many attempts – by historians, literary critics, psychologists and other kinds of experts – to explain this phenomenon.

“When you seek a new path to truth, you must expect to find it blocked by ‘expert’ opinion.” – Albert Joseph Guerard (1914-2000), Professor Emeritus of English, Stanford

Published in: on June 26, 2013 at 10:38 am  Comments (4)  
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“The Merchant of Venice” is Reason 73 to Conclude that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare – Part One

“For several years in succession I had been called upon to go through repeated courses of reading in one particular play of Shakespeare’s, namely The Merchant of Venice.  This long continued familiarity with the contents of one play induced a peculiar sense of intimacy with the mind and disposition of its author and his outlook upon life.  The personality which seemed to run through the pages of the drama I felt to be altogether out of relationship with what was taught of the reputed author and the ascertained facts of his career.”

First Quarto

First Quarto

So wrote British schoolmaster John Thomas Looney in his introduction to “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1920), explaining what led him to conduct a new investigation into the authorship of Shakespeare’s works.

“For example,” he continued, “the Stratford Shakspere was untraveled, having moved from his native place to London when a young man, and then as a successful middle-aged man of business he had returned to Stratford to attend to his lands and houses.  This particular play on the contrary bespeaks a writer who knew Italy at first hand and was touched with the life and spirit of the country.  Again the play suggested an author with no great respect for money and business methods, but rather one to whom material possessions would be in the nature of an encumbrance to be easily and lightly disposed of: at any rate one who was by no means of an acquisitive disposition.”

So it was The Merchant of Venice that inspired Looney’s search for “Shakespeare,” leading to the Oxfordian movement now approaching its centennial in less than seven years.  We have mentioned the similarities between Edward de Vere’s entrance “into bond” in 1578 with Michael Lok (or Lock) for 3,000 pounds and Antonio’s entrance “into bond” with Shylock for 3,000 ducats; now we begin Reason 73 why Oxford must have been “Shakespeare” by focusing on other aspects of the play itself.

“I am always inclined to believe, that Shakespeare has more allusions to particular facts and persons than his readers commonly suppose,” Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) commented in connection with The Merchant, adding, “Perhaps in the enumeration of Portia’s suitors there may be some covert allusion to those of Queen Elizabeth.”

Kate Dolan as Portia Painter, J.F. Millais 1829-1896

Kate Dolan as Portia
Painter, J.F. Millais
1829-1896

Dr. Johnson was speaking freely without worrying whether his perceptions fell in line within the context of the Stratford man’s life.  He noticed, for example, that Portia’s unflattering descriptions of her suitors reflect characteristics of Elizabeth’s actual suitors from different countries – including those of her main suitor, the Duke of Alencon, who visited England in 1579 and 1581, when Shakspere was only fifteen and seventeen.

Alencon was known as “Monsieur” at the English royal court; and Portia’s waiting-gentlewoman asks her:  “How say you by the French lord, Monsieur le Bon?”

The mocking reply by Portia may reflect what Oxford heard the Queen say privately about Alencon:

“God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man.  In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but he! Why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan’s, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palentine; he is every man in no man.  If a thrush sing, he falls straight a-cap’ring.  He will fence with his own shadow.  If I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands.  If he would despise me, I would forgive him, for if he loves me to madness, I shall never requite him.”

In a diatribe against the stage called School of Abuse, published in 1579, Stephen Gosson reported he had seen a now-lost play about “the bloody minds of usurers” called The Jew, performed at the Bull inn-yard in preparation for presentation at Court; and Eva Turner Clark in 1931 suggested that The Jew was performed for the royal court at Whitehall Palace on 2 February 1580 as Portio and Demorantes, which, in turn, was the original version of The Merchant of Venice.

In the play attributed to Shakespeare the character Lancelot Gobbo, a clown and servant to Shylock, refers to “Scylla,” a sea-monster, and “Charybdis,” a violent whirlpool in the strait between Italy and Sicily – invoking the proverbial difficulty of avoiding one without falling prey to the other – what today we might refer to as being “caught between a rock and a hard place.”

“Truly then I fear you are damned both by father and mother,” Lancelot tells Shylock’s daughter, Jessica.  “Thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother.”

Remarkably enough it was on 24 February 1580, just three weeks after the Whitehall performance for her Majesty and the court, when the Queen referred to the same proverb to describe her dilemma in relation to the French match.  According to Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, Elizabeth was in her chamber with William Cecil Lord Burghley and the Archbishop of York when she said:

“Here I am between Scylla and Charybdis.  Alencon has agreed to all the terms I sent him, and he is asking me to tell him when I wish him to come and marry me.  If I do not marry him, I know not whether he [and France] will remain friendly with me; and if I do I shall not be able to govern my country with the freedom and security I have hitherto enjoyed.  What shall I do?”

Had Elizabeth used the Scylla-Charybdis proverb during a conversation with Oxford?  Was the proverb still fresh in her mind after attending the recent court performance of Portio and Demorantes a.k.a. The Merchant of Venice?  Whatever the case, it turns out that the only use of this proverb within all of “Shakespeare’s” works – in a speech by Portia, who is clearly modeled on the Queen –appears to have originated at the same time, in the same context, as Elizabeth’s own historical use of it!

Portia expresses her dilemma, moreover, in virtually the same way that the Queen of England expressed her predicament; and she even invokes an image of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, who left behind a “will” instructing that Elizabeth “shall not marry, nor take any person to be her husband, without the assent and consent of the Privy-Councilors and others…”

“O me,” Portia cries out in Act 1 Scene 2 of The Merchant, “the word ‘choose’!  I may neither choose whom I would, nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.”   And later in the same scene she speaks literally as Elizabeth did:  “If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father’s will.”

The motif of the three caskets comes from an old story, but in the play their contents correspond to the three crowns of England: silver for the French, gold for Irish and lead for the English kingdom – exactly as depicted at Elizabeth’s coronation.

Given such topical allusions to the great issue of the French match at the English royal court circa 1579, how can it still be maintained that it was even possible for William of Stratford to have written The Merchant of Venice?  In part two we’ll look at more remarkable aspects of this particular Reason to believe it was the Earl of Oxford who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.

Published in: on June 22, 2013 at 11:56 am  Leave a Comment  
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“I am but mad north-northwest” – Hamlet; “For the discovery of Cathay by the northwest … I will enter into bond” – Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Reason 72 Why He Was “Shakespeare”

“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”  – Prince Hamlet

These lines operate on at least two levels:

On the surface Hamlet appears to be referring to an Elizabethan notion that melancholy grows worse when the wind comes out of the north; his madness worsens when the wind is northerly, but, when it’s southerly, he grows clear-headed and can tell one different thing from the other.

frobisher_routeOn another level the author, Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford, is referring to his own investment in the 1578 expedition by Martin Frobisher to discover the Northwest Passage to Cathay, or China – an act of financial madness ending in his loss of all three thousand pounds that he had put into it.

frobisher stampJust four days before the eleven Frobisher ships set forth, hoping to find “gold ore” as well as to establish a settlement on the Meta Incognita peninsula, Oxford dispatched a letter to “My Very Loving Friends,” the commissioners for the voyage:

“Understanding of the wise proceeding and orderly dealing for the continuing of the voyage for the discovery of Cathay by the northwest … as well for the great liking Her Majesty hath to have the same passage discovered … [I] offer unto you to be an adventurer therein for the sum of 1000 pounds or more, if you like to admit thereof; which sum or sums, upon your certificate of admittance, I will enter into bond … I bid you heartily farewell.  From the Court, the 21st of May 1578.  Your loving friend, Edward Oxenford.”

The earl’s share soon rose to three thousand pounds.  He entered into bond to buy the stock from Michael Lok (or Lock), a London merchant who also did business in the Mediterranean.  The two men may have met in Venice or Genoa, during Oxford’s 1575-76 travels in Italy.   Oxford became the largest investor – that is, the gambler with the most at stake.  The expedition resulted in no gold, however, so Oxford got no return at all – a staggering loss of three thousand pounds, the sum for which he was “in bond” to Lok, akin to the three thousand ducats for which Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is “in bond” to Shylock.

Al Pacino as Shylock

Al Pacino as Shylock

A mob of furious men attacked Michael Lok, with Frobisher himself calling him “a false accountant to the company, a cozener of my Lord of Oxford, no venturer at all in the voyages, a bankrupt knave.”  Convicted upon testimony that he had known beforehand that the ore was worthless, Lok wound up in the Fleet prison.

Added to Hamlet’s mention of “north-north-west” (for the Northwest Passage) are the repeated references in Merchant to “three thousand ducats” (echoing Oxford’s three thousand pounds) and the “bond” (echoing Oxford’s bond), not to mention the name “Shylock” and its similarity to the name of Michael Loc or Lock.

In Merchant the phrase “three thousand ducats” becomes a kind of insistent drumbeat, with the precise of three words uttered exactly a dozen times.  And the word “bond” is used thirty-nine times, with different meanings but forming another emphatic, persistent drumbeat:

“Three thousand ducats; I think I may take his bond … I’ll seal to such a bond … You shall not seal to such a bond for me … I do expect return of thrice three times the value of this bond … I will seal unto this bond … let him look to his bond … let him look to his bond … let him look to his bond … Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel [as did Oxford’s own creditors, as he descended into insolvency], my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit …

“I’ll have my bond; speak not against my bond: I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond … I’ll have my bond … I’ll have my bond … I will have my bond … to have the due and forfeit of my bond … I would have my bond … I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond … “

Michael Lok “may or may not have been a Christianized Anglo Jew,” writes William Farina in De Vere as Shakespeare (2006).  “Add to this the prefix ‘Shy’ (one meaning of which is ‘disreputable’), and it would be an understatement to say that the (otherwise mysterious) origin of Shylock’s name is strongly suggested.”

On 2 February 1580, a little over a year after the fiasco of the third Frobisher voyage, The History of Portio and Demorantes was performed at Whitehall Palace by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, whose patron was Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, under whom Oxford had served in 1570 in the successful (and brutal) campaign to defeat the Northern Rebellion of Catholic earls.   Sussex had been Oxford’s mentor and supporter at Court ever since; and in the view of Eva Turner Clark, Portio and Demorantes was the early version of Edward de Vere’s play The Merchant of Venice, to be attributed to Shakespeare two decades later in 1598.

Once Oxford is viewed as the author of Merchant, the character of Antonio may be viewed as standing in for Oxford himself; and, too, Portia quite distinctly becomes Queen Elizabeth – making it a pretty safe bet that “Portio” in Portio and Demorantes had been the early Portia-Elizabeth.  (It has also been suggested that “Demorantes” could have been a misspelling of “the merchants.”)

Antonio’s friends appear to voice the concerns and anxieties Oxford must have experienced while the ships were away and there was little to do but wait for the results:

“Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth,/ The better part of my affections would/ Be with my hopes abroad, I should be still/ Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind,/ Peering in maps for ports, and piers, and roads … My wind, cooling my broth,/ Would blow me to an ague [fever] when I thought/ What harm a wind too great might do at sea … ”

The orthodox dating of The Merchant of Venice has been roughly 1596, but all the major sources for the play were available by 1558, according to Joe Peel and Noemi Magri in Dating Shakespeare’s Plays (2010) edited by Kevin Gilvary.  And others connections to Oxford and Elizabeth and the doings at the English court are so strong that this play will become a separate “reason” to believe that Edward de Vere was the great author and, in 1593, adopted “Shakespeare” as a pen name.

Published in: on June 6, 2013 at 12:05 pm  Comments (12)  
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“The Quality of Mercy” – Reason No. 32 to Conclude that the Earl of Oxford Wrote the “Shakespeare” Works

The works of “Shakespeare” contain the results of the author’s own meditations on justice and mercy, emphasizing the need for kings to carry out lawful remedies and punishments with compassion and kindly forbearance.  In Portia’s famous speech in The Merchant of Venice about “the quality of mercy” being “not strained” (not constrained), she declares that mercy is “mightiest in the mightiest” and “becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.”  Mercy is above such trappings and is “enthroned in the hearts of kings,” she says, adding:

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice (4.1)

On May 7, 1603, six weeks after Queen Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England, 53-year-old Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford wrote a business letter to Secretary Robert Cecil and, in passing, made this comment, which is printed below in the form of a speech in a Shakespeare play:

Nothing adorns a King more than justice,

Nor in anything doth a King more resemble God than in justice,

Which is the head of all virtue,

And he that is endued therewith hath all the rest.

By no means am I the first to notice a remarkable similarity of thinking between Oxford and “Shakespeare” and of the words expressing it.  Portia’s statement that when a King combines justice with mercy his “earthly power doth then show likest God’s” is reflected in Oxford’s remark that “nor in anything doth a King more resemble God than in justice” – by which he clearly means a justice that contains the “virtue” of mercy or the capacity for forgiveness.

Surely it’s not difficult to imagine Oxford giving Isabella these words about monarchs in Measure for Measure:

Not the King’s Crown nor the deputed sword,

The Marshall’s Truncheon nor the Judge’s Robe,

Become them with one half so good a grace

As mercy does.  (2.2)

In Chapter 30 of his 2001 dissertation on the “marginalia” of Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible, which the earl had purchased in 1568-69 before the age of twenty, Roger Stritmatter reports that Oxford had marked a series of verses in Ecclesiasticus on the theme of mercy.

Ecclesiasticus 28.1-5, as marked by Edward de Vere in his Geneva Bible

The question of mercy “is central to the unfolding action of The Tempest,” Dr. Stritmatter notes.  “In this fable Prospero, like Hamlet, learns to abandon the lust to punish his enemies and realizes that ‘the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.’ (5.1.27) — in which statement ‘virtue’ is a metaphor for ‘mercy.’ ”  He points out that previous students of Shakespeare and the Bible had failed to notice that Prospero’s epilogue “as you from crimes would pardoned be…” derives “direct, unequivocal inspiration” from Ecclesiasticus 28.1-5, which Oxford had marked in his Geneva Bible.

Ellen Terry as Portia in 1885

I recommend an informative (and amusing) exchange on this subject between William J. Ray and Alan Nelson, author of Monstrous Adversary (2003), the anti-Oxfordian biography of Oxford.  The dialogue was initiated by Ray, who pointed out similarities between Oxford’s “remarkable sentence on the theme of justice” and Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy.

“Apparently De Vere studied kingship and justice from Old Testament teachings,” Ray observes in the course of the exchange, adding later, “I do not see your implacable opposition of justice and mercy as represented by the one quotation versus the other, since to my ear they both [Oxford and “Shakespere”] were speaking of the same virtue(s) … and with virtually the same cadence and language.”

"The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringay Castle" painted by Edouard Berveiller (1843-1910)

“There can be little doubt as to which side Oxford’s sympathies would lean” during the treason trial of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in October 1586,” J. Thomas Looney wrote in “Shakespeare” Identified in 1920, introducing the Oxford theory of Shakespearean authorship – in other words the earl, who sat as one of the commissioners at the trial, would have been on Mary’s side; and “as we read of her wonderfully brave and dignified bearing, and of her capable and unaided conduct of her own defense, we can quite believe that if the dramatist who wrote The Merchant of Venice was present at the trial of the Scottish Queen … he had before him a worthy model for the fair Portia…”

Looney quoted Martin Hume on the trial: “Mary defended herself with consummate ability before a tribunal almost entirely prejudiced against her. She was deprived of legal aid, without her papers and in ill health. In her argument with [William Cecil Lord Burghley] she reached a point of touching eloquence which might have moved the hearts, though it did not convince the intellects, of her august judges.”

Drawing of the Trial of Mary Queen of Scots as part of the official record made by Robert Beale (1541-1601)

[Hume had quoted a letter in which Burghley says of Mary, “Her intention was to move pity by long, artificial speeches” – and Looney wrote, “With this remark of Burghley’s in mind, let the reader weigh carefully the terms, of Portia’s speech on ‘Mercy,’ all turning upon conceptions of royal power, with its symbols the crown and the scepter … Now let any one judge whether this speech is not vastly more appropriate to Mary Queen of Scots pleading her own cause before Burleigh, Walsingham, and indirectly the English Queen, than to an Italian lady pleading to an old Jew for the life of a merchant she had never seen before.  Who, then, could have been better qualified for giving an idealized and poetical rendering of Mary’s speeches than ‘the best of the courtier poets’ [Oxford], who was a sympathetic listener to her pathetic and dignified appeals?”

I include Looney’s remarks despite the fact that I share the view of many Oxfordians that Edward de Vere had written the first version of The Merchant of Venice several years prior to the trial of Mary Queen of Scots – that is, in the early 1580’s, four or five years after he had returned (in April 1576) from fifteen months on the Continent with Venice as his home base.

Portia’s speech in 4.1 of The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway;

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That, in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much

To mitigate the justice of thy plea;

Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice

Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

Prospero’s farewell at the end of The Tempest:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,

Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands:

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

Let your indulgence set me free.






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	 on January 29, 2012 at 4:09 pm
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