Here’s the Front Cover, Back Cover and Table of Contents for an important new book just published (For a larger view, click on each image):
New Support for the Monument Theory of the Sonnets: Discovery of a Poem Begging Queen Elizabeth for Mercy: by the Earl of Southampton, while in the Tower during February-March 1601, when Facing Execution
New support for the Monument theory of the Sonnets has come from the discovery in the British Library of a 74-line poem by Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, written in the Tower of London while he awaited execution for his role in the Essex rising of 8 February 1601. In this unique scribal copy of a “verse letter,” Southampton pleads with Queen Elizabeth for mercy.
My thanks to the scholar Ricardo Mena for passing on this discovery, reported by Lara Crowley, Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University, in the winter 2011 edition of English Literary Renaissance. The poem, entitled “The Earle of Southampton prisoner, and condemned. To Queen Elizabeth,” was found in BL Manuscript Stowe 962, which contains 254 miscellaneous folios prepared mainly in the 1620’s and 1630’s.
The “high level of accuracy” of attributions in the manuscript “enhances the likelihood” that the ascription to Southampton “proves accurate as well,” Professor Crowley writes, adding that this “heartfelt” plea to Elizabeth points to a familiarity with “specific, intimate details” of the earl’s career and health and even writing style. “Multiple references” identify Southampton as appealing to the Queen for a pardon.
The Monument theory holds that Edward de Vere the seventeenth Earl of Oxford arranged the Sonnets to record that he worked behind the scenes to save Southampton’s life and gain his freedom with a royal pardon. The theory claims that part of the price Oxford paid, forced upon him by Secretary Robert Cecil, was the permanent destruction of his identity as author of the “Shakespeare” works (“My name be buried where my body is” – Sonnet 72).
Professor Crowley offers some speculations which, when viewing Oxford-Shakespeare as helping Southampton, are striking:
“It seems possible, even likely, that someone or something else influenced Elizabeth’s decision, making one wonder if, at his time of greatest need, Southampton – a ‘dere lover and cherisher’ of poets * – composed what could be his lone surviving poem … One possibility is that the poem was composed in 1601 to mollify the Queen, but by a more practiced poet who composed the verses for Southampton to offer Elizabeth as his own … Yet the notion that Shakespeare, or any other poet, provided Southampton with the poem proves improbable. Access to the earl early in his imprisonment was restricted …”
[*Thomas Nashe, in his dedication of The Unfortunate Traveler, 1594, to Southampton]
The Monument theory is supported in a number of other ways; for one, we may now claim that all three earls – Oxford, Essex and Southampton – wrote verse in relation to this same situation of English political history:
Oxford: If he was the author of the Sonnets, then at the very least he wrote Sonnet 107 celebrating Southampton’s liberation by King James in April 1603, after the death of the Queen as “the mortal Moon” a few weeks earlier.
Essex: During his final four days in the Tower before he was executed on 25 February 1601, he wrote a 384-line poem to Elizabeth entitled The Passion of a Discontented Mind.
Southampton: Here we have Southampton, the fair youth of the Sonnets, also in the Tower with expectation of execution, writing a 74-line poem to the Queen in February or March 1601, pleading for her mercy and a pardon.
A remarkable aspect of Southampton’s verse epistle is how close he comes to a theme Oxford expressed in a letter to Cecil on 7 May 1603, alluding to a monarch’s ability to offer Christ-like mercy and forgiveness: “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.”
More than two years earlier, Southampton wrote in his poem to Elizabeth from the Tower:
If faults were not, how could great Princes then
Approach so near God, in pardoning men?
Wisdom and valor, common men have known,
But only mercy is the Prince’s own.
Mercy’s an antidote to justice…
Southampton had been “supposed as forfeit to a confined doom,” as Oxford writes in Sonnet 107 of the Fair Youth Series; and in Sonnet 145 of the Dark Lady Series, as I see it, he describes Elizabeth’s decision to spare Southampton this way:
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom…
The phrase “Great Princes” used by Southampton also appears in Sonnet 25: “Great Princes’ favorites their fair leaves spread…”
At one point Southampton writes that “prisons are living men’s tombs” and that “there I am buried quick” – recalling Sonnet 31, which in the Monument theory corresponds to 12 February 1601: “Thou art the grave where buried love doth live…”
He refers to himself as “dead in law,” reflecting his status in the Tower as “the late earl,” who has become legally dead.
He mentions his “legs’ strength decayed,” reflecting the fact that, while in the Tower at this early stage, he was suffering from a “quartern ague” that caused a dangerous “swelling in his legs and other parts,” as the Council reported to Sir John Peyton, Lieutenant of the Tower.
At one point near the end of the poem, he reveals his terror and dwindling hope for mercy:
Horror and fear, like cold in ice, dwell here;
And hope (like lightning) gone ere it appear…
Southampton uses many words in his poem that also appear in the Sonnets, among them the following forty-seven words: Blood, Buried, Cancel, Cheeks, Chest, Condemned, Countenance, Crimes, Dear, Dead, Die, Eyes, Faults, Favor, Furrows, Grace, Grave, Grief, Groans, Ill, Lamed, Liberty, Light, Loss, Mercy, Offend, Offenses, Pardon, Parts, Power, Princes, Prison, Prisoners, Proceed, Rain, Religious, Sacred, Sorrow, Stain, Stone, Tears, Tombs, True, Vial, Worm, Worthy, Wrinkles.
A number of these words are related literally to Southampton’s situation: Condemned, Crimes, Faults, Liberty, Mercy, Offend, Offenses, Pardon, Prison, Prisoners – more evidence, in my view, that Oxford uses the same words in the Sonnets to refer to Southampton’s plight in the same circumstances.
There is much more about this discovery to be examined here, in future posts; but meanwhile, here is the text of Southampton’s poem, based on Professor Crowley’s transcription from secretary hand and put into (mostly) modern spelling/punctuation for readers of this blog:
The Earl of Southampton Prisoner, and Condemned, to Queen Elizabeth:
Not to live more at ease (Dear Prince) of thee
But with new merits, I beg liberty
To cancel old offenses; let grace so
(As oil all liquor else will overflow)
Swim above all my crimes. In lawn, a stain
Well taken forth may be made serve again.
Perseverance in ill is all the ill. The horses may,
That stumbled in the morn, go well all day.
If faults were not, how could great Princes then
Approach so near God, in pardoning me?
Wisdom and valor, common men have known,
But only mercy is the Prince’s own.
Mercy’s an antidote to justice, and will,
Like a true blood-stone, keep their bleeding still.
Where faults weigh down the scale, one grain of this
Will make it wise, until the beam it kiss.
Had I the leprosy of Naaman,
Your mercy hath the same effects as [the river] Jordan.
As surgeons cut and take from the sound part
That which is rotten, and beyond all art
Of healing, see (which time hath since revealed),
Limbs have been cut which might else have been healed.
While I yet breathe, and sense and motion have
(For this a prison differs from a grave),
Prisons are living men’s tombs, who there go
As one may, sith say the dead walk so.
There I am buried quick: hence one may draw
I am religious because dead in law.
One of the old Anchorites, by me may be expressed:
A vial hath more room laid in a chest:
Prisoners condemned, like fish within shells lie
Cleaving to walls, which when they’re opened, die:
So they, when taken forth, unless a pardon
(As a worm takes a bullet from a gun)
Take them from thence, and so deceive the sprights [spirits]
Of people, curious after rueful sights.
Sorrow, such ruins, as where a flood hath been
On all my parts afflicted, hath been seen:
My face which grief plowed, and mine eyes when they
Stand full like two nine-holes, where at boys play
And so their fires went out like Iron hot
And put into the forge, and then is not
And in the wrinkles of my cheeks, tears lie
Like furrows filled with rain, and no more dry:
Mine arms like hammers to an anvil go
Upon my breast: now lamed with beating so
Stand as clock-hammers, which strike once an hour
Without such intermission they want power.
I’ve left my going since my legs’ strength decayed
Like one, whose stock being spent give over trade.
And I with eating do no more ingross
Than one that plays small game after great loss
Is like to get his own: or then a pit
With shovels emptied, and hath spoons to fill it.
And so sleep visits me, when night’s half spent
As one, that means nothing but complement.
Horror and fear, like cold in ice, dwell here;
And hope (like lightning) gone ere it appear:
With less than half these miseries, a man
Might have twice shot the Straits of Magellan
Better go ten such voyages than once offend
The Majesty of a Prince, where all things end
And begin: why whose sacred prerogative
He as he list, we as we ought live.
All mankind lives to serve a few: the throne
(To which all bow) is sewed to by each one.
Life, which I now beg, wer’t to proceed
From else whoso’er, I’d first choose to bleed
But now, the cause, why life I do Implore
Is that I think you [Elizabeth] worthy to give more.
The light of your countenance, and that same
Morning of the Court favor, where at all aim,
Vouchsafe unto me, and be moved by my groans,
For my tears have already worn these stones.
[As mentioned, there’s more commentary on this to be posted here in the future.]
Reason No. 23 to Believe Oxford = Shakespeare: Those “Haggards” That Fly From Man to Man
Before 1920, when J.T. Looney was searching for the true Shakespeare, he opened an anthology of sixteenth-century verse and looked for any poems in the stanza form that Shakespeare employed for Venus and Adonis. The stanza in that narrative poem had six lines, each of ten syllables, with a rhyme scheme using a quatrain [a-b-a-b] followed by a couplet [c-c] … for example, the opening stanza:
Even as the sun with purple-colored face [a]
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, [b]
Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase; [a]
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn. [b]
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, [c]
And like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo him. [c]
Poems having this kind of stanza were “much fewer than I had anticipated,” Looney recalled; and he found just two that could have come from the same hand that wrote the Shakespearean verse. One was anonymous, leaving only a poem about “Women” by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, with this opening stanza:
If women would be fair and yet not fond, [a]
Or that their love were firm not fickle still, [b]
I would not marvel that they make men bond, [a]
By service long to purchase their good will: [b]
But when I see how frail these creatures are, [c]
I muse that men forget themselves so far. [c]
Oxford’s verse stood out, conveying “a sense of its harmony with Shakespeare’s work” in terms of “diction, succinctness, cohesion and unity.”
What then caught Looney’s attention was Oxford’s use of “haggard” – a wild or imperfectly trained hawk or falcon — as a metaphor for “fickle” women in his second stanza:
Queen Elizabeth and her attendants out hawking -- Her Majesty is riding side-saddle; the man at left has just released his hawk, while above a hawk is bringing down a bird
To mark the choice they make and how they change,
How oft from Phoebus do they cleave to Pan,
Unsettled still like haggards wild they range,
These gentle birds that fly from man to man:
Who would not scorn and shake them from his fist
And let them fly (fair fools) which way they list?
In the several places where Shakespeare uses “haggards” he almost always employs it as a figure of speech referring to wild, untamed, fickle women. In Oxford’s poem it refers to women who “fly from man to man,” a sentiment identical to Shakespeare’s use of the word in Othello:
“If I do prove her haggard, though that her jesses were my dear heart strings, I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind to play at fortune.” [3.3.263]
As Ren Draya and Richard F. Whalen report in their edition of Othello from an Oxfordian perspective, the Moor’s speech is “an extended metaphor from falconry, the sport of aristocrats.”
[Haggard = “a young female hawk captured after getting its adult plumage, hence still wild, untamed”; Jesses = “leather straps tied to the legs of a hawk and attached to a leash”; “Whistle her off … down the wind” = to send her off the way a hawk is “usually sent off upwind to take flight and pursue prey, but downwind when turned loose because it’s not performing well.”]
Further striking parallels in Shakespeare are to be found in the third and final stanza of Oxford’s poem:
Yet for disport we fawn and flatter both,
To pass the time when nothing else can please,
And train them to our lure with subtle oath,
Till, weary of their wiles, ourselves we ease;
And then we say, when we their fancy try,
To play with fools, O what a fool was I.
[The “lure” was a decoy bird made of feathers, with some flesh attached.]
A falconer in the sixteenth century
The Taming of the Shrew contains the same idea when Petruchio speaks of himself as a falconer training his wife Kate as a falcon who needs to be kept hungry (or less than “full-gorged”), so she’ll continue to follow his lure:
“My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, and till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, for then she never looks upon her lure. Another way I have to man my haggard, to make her come and know her keeper’s call, that is, to watch her, as we watch these kites that bate and beat and will not be obedient.” [4.1.176]
[Kites = birds of prey, such as the falcon; to bate = to beat down and weaken, although she still won’t obey.]
Just as Oxford writes of men using “subtle oaths” (while “fawning and flattering”) as lures or bait to “train” women to their wills, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing speaks of “the false sweet bait that we lay” for Beatrice, of whom he says, “I know her spirits are as coy and wild as haggards of the rock.” (3.1.32-36)
Coming back full-circle, Venus and Adonis, contains an example Looney failed to mention, with Shakespeare writing of the goddess: “As falcons to the lure, away she flies…”
“What we have in this instance, as a matter of fact,” Looney wrote, “is a complete accordance at all points in the use of an unusual word and figure of speech. Indeed if we make a piece of patchwork of all the passages in Shakespeare in which the word ‘haggard’ occurs we can reconstruct De Vere’s single poem on ‘Women.’
“Such an agreement not only supports us in seeking to establish the general harmony of De Vere’s work with Shakespeare’s, but carries us beyond the immediate needs of our argument – for it constrains us to claim that either both sets of expression are actually from the same pen, or ‘Shakespeare’ pressed that license to borrow (which was prevalent in his day) far beyond its legitimate limits. In our days we should not hesitate to describe such passages as glaring plagiarism, unless they happen to come from the same pen.”
Sonnet 91 speaks of hawks, hounds and horses; and if the Sonnets are autobiographical (and I have no doubt that they are), then we are hearing the voice of a nobleman spontaneously referring to various aspects of his everyday world:
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse…
[Later in this sonnet the poet blurts out to the Earl of Southampton, “Thy love is better than high birth to me.” Well, now, if Will of Stratford wrote that sonnet to Southampton, that high-born young lord would have retorted: “You, a base commoner, are offering to give up ‘high birth’ for me? Even though you have no such high birth to sacrifice in the first place? How dare you insult me by offering to give up what you don’t have?!” Then the earl would have run his sword through him. No … the Earl of Oxford writes in Sonnet 91 about his own high birth as hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England, saying he would give all that up for Southampton.
“Masters, you are all welcome,” Prince Hamlet exclaims to the players, spontaneously adding, “We’ll e’en to’t like French falconers, fly at anything we see!”
“Hst! Romeo, hist!” Julliet calls out. “O for a falconer’s voice to lure this tassel-gentle back again!”
A falcon swooping down...
One of the most terrifying stanzas in The Rape of Lucrece portrays the rapist Tarquin as a falcon circling above his helpless prey:
This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade,
Which, like a falcon towering in the skies,
Coucheth the fowl below with his wings’ shade,
Whose crooked beak threats if he mount he dies;
So under his insulting falchion lies
Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcons’ bells. [505-511]
(Coucheth the fowl = causing the bird to hug the ground; falchion = sword; marking = listening to; falcons’ bells = in hawking or falconry, bells were attached to the hawks or falcons.)
There’s no question that the Earl of Oxford was an expert falconer. So was the author known as Shakespeare.
On “Anonymous” Panel with Roland Emmerich
Hank on the Panel with Roland Emmerich (to our left) after the “Anonymous” advance premier in Portland, Oregon:
“Shakespeare-Oxford” Books by Whittemore now on Kindle
I’m pleased to announce that the following books are now available on the KINDLE format — and can be viewed for free at KINDLE FOR PC — a service from Amazon that I hadn’t known about until recently: THE MONUMENT ... SHAKESPEARE’S SON AND HIS SONNETS
… and SHAKE-SPEARE’S TREASON [script of the one-man show by me and Ted Story] …
A Flyer for the Show
Some Reactions to the Debate in London
A couple of early reactions to the Debate in London yesterday:
From the BBC – DIRECTOR EMMERICH DEFENDS SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP FILM
And this one is from THE AUSTRALIAN – Full Story at This Link
Oldest literary conspiracy theory trotted out again
A HOLLYWOOD film that claims William Shakespeare was an illiterate buffoon who passed off a nobleman’s plays as his own got off to a wobbly start at the Hay Festival in Wales when actor Ralph Fiennes described the premise as a “dead-end argument”.
Roland Emmerich, one of Hollywood’s most successful directors, presented clips of his film Anonymous to the public for the first time at the festival and answered questions about why he chose to portray the Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford as the true author of the plays.
But Fiennes, who has not seen the film, says he is puzzled by the obsession with giving credit to other authors. “Instinctively, I don’t buy it,” he says.
Fiennes, who was at the festival to talk about his forthcoming film adaptation of Coriolanus, says: “People say, ‘How could he have known about Italy and how could he have so much [knowledge],’ and I’m puzzled because he went to a grammar school, which were very good schools, and why couldn’t a unique individual be able to imagine and encompass a massive range of linguistic expression? (Full Story at Link Above)
==
I remember having the same reaction that Fiennes expresses. I put a lot of stock on good ol’ imagination, and still do — but when I dug a little deeper and discovered how much knowledge — and specific knowledge — gets into the plays, poems and sonnets, well, it boggles the mind and calls for some reassessment. If you go to a good library and find the Shakespeare section, my goodness it seems there’s an entire book (or two or more) devoted exclusively to Shakespeare’s handling of every single subject such as law, heraldry, music, kingship, flowers, hunting, war, ships, Italy, France, the classics, astronomy, horsemanship, fashions, the bible — I mean, we are not talking just about some “good” or even “great” author but about some kind of amazing giant of whom there may have been no equal in all the rest of history before or since.
Investigation is required — or the result, which I have seen over and over, is what you might call “the dumbing down” of Shakespeare; that is, attempts to reduce him down to more normal size, so he can fit the framework of traditional biography. I am not speaking of him as a god or a miracle, but, rather, a rare human being who must have had not only “nature” on his side but “nurture” as well — and this is also not about snobbery, please, and not even about who “could” have written these masterpieces but who “did” write them.
Reassessment … Investigation!
Reason No. 11 (Part Three of Three) of 100 Reasons Why I Believe Oxford was “Shakespeare” — More on Oxford’s Public Letter for “Hamlet’s Book”
“I thought myself to commit an unpardonable error, to have murdered the same in the waste bottoms of my chests … further considering so little a trifle cannot procure so great a breach of our amity … and when you examine yourself what doth avail a mass of gold to be continually imprisoned in your bags, and never to be employed to your use … What do they avail, if you do not participate them to others … So you being sick of too much doubt in your own proceedings, through which infirmity you are desirous to bury and insevill your works in the grave of oblivion … “ – Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in his prefatory letter to Thomas Bedingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comforte in 1573 from Italian into English.
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) the Italian philosopher and author of "Cardanus Comforte," was still alive when Oxford was in Italy during 1575-1576
The 23-year-old earl created an elaborate “excuse” for publishing the work despite his friend’s wish that he refrain from doing so. This apology or justification was not meant to be taken seriously by the readers; rather it was a literary device that Oxford used to create an elaborate, lofty, amusing piece of writing while introducing Cardano’s work that has come to be known as the book Hamlet carries with him and reads on stage.
What Oxford produced was a piece of Elizabethan prose that Percy Allen described in the 1930’s as “one of the most gracious that even those days of exquisite writing have bequeathed to us, from the hand of a great nobleman … with its friendship that never condescends, its intimacy that is never familiar, its persuasive logic, its harmonious rhythms, its gentle and compelling charm.” [The Life Story of Edward de Vere as “William Shakespeare” – 1932]
Here is surely the same voice we hear in the Prince of Denmark’s words, Allen noted. Here is prose that sounds like Hamlet’s speech to the common players who arrive at the palace. As Delia Bacon had put it in the 19th century, the author of the play must have been quite like “the subtle Hamlet of the university, the courtly Hamlet, ‘the glass of fashion and the mold of form’” – a description that perfectly fits Lord Oxford in the early 1570’s, when he was in the highest royal favor at the Court of Elizabeth. [The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded – 1857]
Oxford and “Shakespeare” both argue that the possessor of a talent has a duty to use it, that anyone with a virtue has a responsibility to share it with others rather than hoard it for himself alone. The earl writes that if he had failed to publish Bedingfield’s translation he would have “murdered the same in the waste bottoms of my chests.” By contrast his act of causing the work to be published is but a “trifle” to be overcome; and from “Shakespeare” we shall hear the same words within the context of the same theme in the sonnets to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton:
So the time that keeps you as my chest – Sonnet 52
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid? – Sonnet 65
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are – Sonnet 48
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it;
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murderous shame commits. – Sonnet 9
Oxford rhetorically asks his friend to consider how it avails “a mass of gold to be continually imprisoned in your bags and never to be employed to your use?” What good are Bedingfield’s studies if he chooses to “not participate them to others”? Why would he want to “bury” his works “in the grave of oblivion?”
By new unfolding his imprisoned pride – Sonnet 52
Th’imprisoned absence of your liberty – Sonnet 58
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament [“time’s best jewel”]
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world! Or else this glutton be:
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee – Sonnet 1
In Venus and Adonis of 1593, the goddess Venus lectures young Adonis on the same theme using the same words:
What is thy body but a swallowing grave,
Seeming to bury that posterity
Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity – Venus and Adonis, lines 757-762
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live – Sonnet 31
The Tudor Rose - "That which we call a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Juliet
Oxford enlarges upon his theme:
“What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit to another … What doth avail the Rose unless another took pleasure in the smell … 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. Why should this man be more esteemed than that man, but for his virtue through which every man desireth to be accounted of? Then you amongst men I do not doubt but will aspire to follow that virtuous path, to illuster yourself with the ornaments of virtue…”
And Shakespeare more than two decades later:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
– Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Lose but their show; their substance still smells sweet.
– Sonnet 5
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odor which doth in it live.
The Canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the Roses …
But for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so:
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made. – Sonnet 54
Oxford writes:
“ … wherein I may seem to you to play the part of the cunning and expert mediciner or Physician, who, though his patient in the extremity of his burning Fever, is desirous of cold liquor or drink to qualify his sore thirst, or rather kill his languishing body …”
And Shakespeare uses the same image:
My love is as a fever longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please:
My reason, the Physician to my love…” – Sonnet 147
And finally, to choose among many such examples, Oxford anticipates one of Shakespeare’s major themes in the Sonnets printed in 1609, the power of his pen to create a “monument” for posterity:
“Again we see if our friends be dead, we cannot show or declare our affection more then by erecting them of Tombs: Whereby when they be dead in deed, yet make we them live as it were again through their monument, but with me behold it happeneth far better, for in your life time I shall erect you such a monument, that as I say in your lifetime you shall see how noble a shadow of your virtuous life shall hereafter remain when you are dead and gone. And in your life time again I say, I shall give you that monument and remembrance of your life…”
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of Princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall Statues overturn
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth! – Sonnet 55
Oxford and Elizabeth -- the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, carrying the Sword of State, with Queen Elizabeth the First
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead.
You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
– Sonnet 81
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent – Sonnet 107
So that’s it for No. 11 of 100 reasons why I believe Oxford wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.
But I’m just warming up, so stay tuned!
(Significant work on Oxford’s public letter to Bedingfield has been done by many Oxfordians including, for example, Gwynneth Bowen in the Shakespearean Authorship Review [England] of spring 1967, reprinted online in Mark Alexander’s Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook and also in So Richly Spun: Volume 5 of Building the Case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare , edited by Dr. Paul Altrocchi and yours truly. Also, as mentioned previously, Joseph Sobran included an essay on the letter in an appendix to his book Alias Shakespeare in 1997.)
Reason No. 11 (Part One) Why Oxford was “Shakespeare”: His Prefatory Letter for “Cardanus’ Comforte” is … Shakespearean!
When J. Thomas Looney hypothesized that Edward de Vere the seventeenth Earl of Oxford was “Shakespeare,” he came upon Oxford’s prefatory letter for Thomas Beddingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comforte published in 1573 when Oxford was twenty-three (reprinted in 1576); and one can only imagine Looney’s amazement upon finding such self-evident support for his thesis. Here is a letter that we might well expect to find from “Shakespeare” as a young man…
"CARDANUS Comforte, translated And Published by commaundement of the right Honourable the Earle of Oxenforde."
Looney wrote in “Shakespeare” Identified (1920) that Oxford’s letter “gives us a glimpse into the nature of the man himself as he was in these early years. Whatever may have been the pose he thought fit to adopt in dealing with some of the men about Elizabeth’s court, this letter bears ample testimony to the generosity and largeness of his disposition, the clearness and sobriety of his judgment, and the essential manliness of his actions and bearing towards literary men whom he considered worthy of encouragement…
“As a letter it is, of course, prose, but it is the prose of a genuine poet: its terse ingenuity, wealth of figurative speech, and even its musical quality…”
Oxford had taken the court by storm; an expert in horsemanship, he was the new champion of the Whitehall tiltyard; and already he had risen to the heights of the royal favor, amid gossip that he and the queen were lovers despite his marriage to Lord Burghley’s daughter Anne Cecil. In addition, breaking with tradition as he had done with sponsorship of The Courtier by Castiglione, the young earl was clearly England’s great champion of literature and the Italian renaissance.
John Thomas Looney (1870-1944)
Looney’s parting word on the Cardanus preface was a plea to his readers to “familiarize themselves thoroughly with the diction of this letter” and then “read the dedication of Venus and Adonis” to Southampton printed in 1593. “So similar is the style that it is hardly necessary to make any allowance for the [twenty] intervening years.”
An Oxfordian who picked up on the latter theme was Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), who, in the appendix section of Alias Shakespeare (1997), offered perceptive observations such as:
“This document unmistakably prefigures the Southampton poems of Shakespeare: the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece. Written when Oxford was only twenty-three, the letter anticipates these poems in spirit, theme, image, and other details. Like those poems, it borrows, for figurative use, the languages of law, commerce, horticulture, and medicine. It speaks of publication as a duty and of literary works as tombs and monuments to their authors. It has echoes in the plays, and the points of resemblance to the Southampton poems are especially notable…
"Alias, Shakespeare" (1997) by Joseph Sobran
“Oxford’s letter is Shakespearean in a wider respect too: in its overwhelming warmth and generosity, verging on excess, yet controlled by a pleasant irony. He loves to praise, but he avoids the risk of fulsomeness by disguising praise as admiring accusation. ‘For shame!’ he says: ‘You want to hoard your own excellence, deny your virtue to the world!’ This is exactly the rhetorical strategy of Sonnets 1 through 17, using much the same language and many of the same images…”
We’ll continue in the next blog post with Part Two of Reason No. 11, but meanwhile here is Oxford’s letter in 1573 to Bedingfield in full, followed by the dedication of Venus and Adonis in 1593 to Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton:
“To my loving friend Thomas Bedingfield Esquire, one of Her Majesty’s gentlemen pensioners.
“After I had perused your letters, good Master Bedingfield, finding in them your request far differing from the desert of your labor, I could not choose but greatly doubt whether it were better for me to yield you your desire, or execute mine own intention towards the publishing of your book. For I do confess the affections that I have always borne towards you could move me not a little. But when I had thoroughly considered in my mind of sundry and divers arguments, whether it were best to obey mine affections or the merits of your studies, at the length I determined it better to deny your unlawful request than to grant or condescend to the concealment of so worthy a work. Whereby as you have been profited in the translating, so many may reap knowledge by the reading of the same, that shall comfort the afflicted, confirm the doubtful, encourage the coward, and lift up the base-minded man, to achieve to any true sum or grade of virtue, whereto ought only the noble thoughts of men to be inclined.
“And because next to the sacred letters of divinity, nothing doth persuade the same more than philosophy, of which your book is plentifully stored, I thought myself to commit an unpardonable error, to have murdered the same in the waste bottoms of my chests and better I thought it were to displease one than to displease many: further considering so little a trifle cannot procure so great a breach of our amity, as may not with a little persuasion of reason be repaired again. And herein I am forced like a good and politic captain oftentimes to spoil and burn the corn of his own country lest his enemies thereof do take advantage. For rather than so many of your countrymen should be deluded through my sinister means of your industry in studies (whereof you are bound in conscience to yield them an account) I am content to make spoil and havoc of your request, and that, that might have wrought greatly in me in this former respect, utterly to be of no effect or operation: and when you examine yourself what doth avail a mass of gold to be continually imprisoned in your bags, and never to be employed to your use? I do not doubt even so you think of your studies and delightful Muses. What do they avail, if you do not participate them to others? Wherefore we have this Latin proverb: Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter. What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit unto another? What doth avail the vine unless another delighteth in the grape? 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. Why should this man be more esteemed than that man, but for his virtue, through which every man desireth to be accounted of? Then you amongst men I do not doubt, but will aspire to follow that virtuous path, to illuster yourself with the ornament of virtue. And in mine opinion as it beautifieth a fair woman to be decked with pearls and precious stones, so much more it ornifieth a gentleman to be furnished in mind with glittering virtues.
“Wherefore considering the small harm I do to you, the great good I do to others, I prefer mine own intention to discover your volume before your request to secret the same; wherein I may seem to you to play the part of the cunning and expert mediciner or physician, who, although his patient in the extremity of his burning fever is desirous of cold liquor or drink to qualify his sore thirst, or rather kill his languishing body, yet for the danger he doth evidently know by his science to ensue, denieth him the same. So you being sick of too much doubt in your own proceedings, through which infirmity you are desirous to bury and insevill your works in the grave of oblivion, yet I, knowing the discommodities that shall redound to yourself thereby (and which is more, unto your countrymen) as one that is willing to salve so great an inconvenience, am nothing dainty to deny your request.
“Again, we see if our friends be dead, we cannot show or declare our affection more than by erecting them of tombs; whereby when they be dead indeed, yet make we them live as it were again through their monument; but with me, behold, it happeneth far better, for in your lifetime I shall erect you such a monument, that as I say [in] your lifetime you shall see how noble a shadow of your virtuous life shall hereafter remain when you are dead and gone. And in your lifetime, again I say, I shall give you that monument and remembrance of your life, whereby I may declare my good will, though with your ill will as yet that I do bear you in your life.
“Thus earnestly desiring you in this one request of mine (as I would yield to you in a great many) not to repugn the setting-forth of your own proper studies, I bid you farewell. From my new country muses at Wivenghole, wishing you as you have begun, to proceed in these virtuous actions. For when all things shall else forsake us, virtue yet will ever abide with us, and when our bodies fall into the bowels of the earth, yet that shall mount with our minds into the highest heavens.
“By your loving and assured friend, E. Oxenford”
DEDICATION OF “VENUS AND ADONIS” – 1593:
“TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE Henry Wriothesley, Earle of Southampton, And Baron of Tichfield
“Right Honourable,
“I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only, if your Honour seem but pleased, I account my self highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather: and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your Honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation.
“Your Honors in all duty, William Shakespeare”
Reason No. 9 Why “Shakespeare” was Edward de Vere seventeenth Earl of Oxford: “I AM THAT I AM”:
“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM’: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” — Exodus, 3.14
To my knowledge only two individuals during the Elizabethan age declared in writing, “I AM THAT I AM,” and apparently they did so within identical contexts: the author of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
William Cecil Lord Burghley & His Mule
After composing a letter to his father-in-law William Cecil Lord Burghley on 30 October 1584, Edward de Vere signed off in his own hand. Then he added a postscript bitterly protesting the chief minister’s attempts to use his own servants to spy on him. He set forth the facts and continued (with my emphases):
“But I pray, my Lord, leave that course, for I mean not to be your ward nor your child. I serve her Majesty, and I AM THAT I AM, and by alliance near to your Lordship, but free, and scorn to be offered that injury to think I am so weak of government as to be ruled by servants, or not able to govern myself. If your Lordship take and follow this course, you deceive yourself, and make me take another course than yet I have not thought of. Wherefore these shall be to desire your Lordship, if that I may make account of your friendship, that you will leave that course as hurtful to us both.”
(When Oxford warns, “If your Lordship take and follow this course, you … make me take another course than yet I have not thought of,” it appears that he anticipates King Lear’s outburst against his two selfish daughters, “I will do such things – what they are yet I know not; but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” – 2.4.280)
The other personal use of I AM THAT I AM occurs in Sonnet 121, which follows here with my emphases on SPIES as well as I AM THAT I AM; and can’t you feel the same mind at work? The same protest … the same angry, accusing voice?
Sonnet 121
Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed,
Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing.
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer SPIES,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I AM THAT I AM, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own.
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain:
All men are bad and in their badness reign
God’s words to Moses “I AM THAT I AM” are in the Geneva Bible, a gilt-edged copy of which Edward de Vere had purchased in 1569/70 from William Seres, stationer; and thanks to the landmark studies by Dr. Roger Stritmatter of that same copy, held by the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., we can be sure that the earl was intimately acquainted with its passages. To put it bluntly, both Oxford and “Shakespeare” were biblical experts – one more reason why, in our view, they were one and the same.
Referring to the likelihood that Oxford’s postscript and Sonnet 121 were written virtually at the same time in response to the same situation, Percy Allen wrote in 1930: “So forcible, individual, and wholly characteristic an expression … is a very strong piece of corroborative evidence.” *
Sonnet 121 is positioned within Sonnets 107 to 126 — a sequence which, as expressed in The Monument, uses one sonnet per day from Sonnet 107 (Southampton’s release from the Tower on 10 April 1603) to Sonnet 125 (Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on 28 April 1603) and Sonnet 126 (the “envoy” of farewell). This sequence is a thundering “movement” concluding the fair youth series to/about Southampton, but in no way does it preclude Oxford having originally written Sonnet 121 at the time he wrote the 1584 postscript; the likelihood is that he pulled out this old verse to use in the final construction of his “monument” for Southampton.
Here is my take on Sonnet 121 as it appears in The Monument:
THE FINAL DAYS
FOUR DAYS TO THE QUEEN’S FUNERAL
Sonnet 121
24 April 1603
Oxford records his commitment to the truth rather than to false appearances. He repeats the words of God to Moses in the Bible – I AM THAT I AM – in echo of a postscript to Lord
Burghley in 1584, when Southampton was ten years old: “I serve her Majesty, and I am that I am.” In reality, as father to a rightful king, he should be Elizabeth’s consort on the throne and, therefore, a king or god on earth entitled to use God’s words of self-description. Oxford here recalls his own postscript, related to “spies” working for Burghley and poking into his personal affairs. Nearing the end of his diary, he also sums up his own life to be preserved in this monument.
1 ‘TIS BETTER TO BE VILE THAN VILE ESTEEMED,
“It’s better to be vicious that to be thought vicious” – Tucker; VILE = wicked; criminal; in this case, treasonous; “That I was of a strange and vile nature” – Oxford, in a memo circa 1601-1602, Cecil Papers 146.19; Chiljan, 72; quoting false charges against him; ‘TIS BETTER, etc. = Oxford would rather have the genuine guilt for his son’s crime than merely to be deemed guilty without making any sacrifice for him; “This vile traitor, Somerset” – 1 Henry IV, 4.3.33; TO BE = echoing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, with “not to be” in line 2 below; indicating that he is undoubtedly revising Hamlet (Q2 of 1604) by now; ESTEEMED = deemed in the eyes of others, recalling the theme of Sonnet 29, line 14: “Then I scorn to change my state with kings”
2 WHEN NOT TO BE RECEIVES REPROACH OF BEING,
WHEN NOT TO BE, etc. = when not actually wicked but blamed for being such; NOT TO BE = the other half of “To be or not to be,” the soliloquy of Hamlet, its full version to be published in the next year, 1604.
3 AND THE JUST PLEASURE LOST, WHICH IS SO DEEMED,
JUST = legal; the word “just” is on Oxford’s mind in this final Fair Youth sequence: “Just to the time, not with the time exchanged” – Sonnet 109, line 7; “And on the just proof surmise accumulate” – Sonnet 117, line 10; and it was on his mind near the end of the Dark Lady series, when Elizabeth was in her final eclipse: “Who taught me how to make me love thee more,/ The more I hear and see just cause of hate?” – Sonnet 150, lines 9-10; JUST PLEASURE = the happiness Oxford derives from having made a legal bargain for his son; also, for Southampton’s “royal pleasure”; DEEMED = judged; “The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem/ For that sweet odor which doth in it live” – Sonnet 54, lines 3-4
4 NOT BY FEELING BUT BY OTHERS’ SEEING.
NOT, etc. = “Not in our opinion, but in the view of others” – Booth; Oxford and Southampton
do not agree with the loss of the throne, but that was arranged by others, i.e., Cecil and James; and the truth is that Southampton should have succeeded; OTHERS’ SEEING = the “others” see only the dark guilt of Southampton, and are unaware of or refuse to see (or take into account) his royal blood; in effect, they are blind and see only “darkness which the blind do see” – Sonnet 27, line 8
5 FOR WHY SHOULD OTHERS’ FALSE ADULTERATE EYES
FALSE = opposite of True, related to Oxford; also “false” related to treason as in “false traitor”; ADULTERATE = counterfeit; not truthful or real; FALSE ADULTERATE EYES = the false view of others that Southampton is a traitor; “I am thy King, and thou a false-heart traitor” – 2 Henry VI, 5.1.143; also, the false view that he is not a king by blood; “Why should false painting
imitate his cheek” – Sonnet 67, line 5; “Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue” – Sonnet 138, line 7, referring to Elizabeth; 6 GIVE SALUTATION TO MY SPORTIVE BLOOD?
SALUTATION = (“And in his private plot be we the first to salute our rightful sovereign with honor of his birthright to the crown” – 2 Henry VI, 2.2.5961; “Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths, even in the presence of the crowned king” – 1 Henry IV, 3.2.53-54); Oxford giving salutation to Southampton as a king; MY SPORTIVE BLOOD = i.e., Oxford’s reckless blood that is also part of Southampton’s reckless blood; echoing the royal blood of his son; “And that fresh
blood which youngly thou bestow’st” – Sonnet 11, line 3
7 OR ON MY FRAILTIES WHY ARE FRAILER SPIES,
OR ON MY FRAILTIES, etc. = why do weaker people look on my weaknesses; “Frailty, thy name is woman!” – Hamlet, 1.2.152, another indication that Oxford is revising that play at this time (see lines 1-2 and 8); FRAILER = lack of royal blood, i.e., less royal than my son, i.e., Robert Cecil, but even King James is less royal by blood than Southampton; SPIES = William and Robert Cecil both relied heavily on spies to assist them in running the government; recalling the spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, hired by Polonius-Burghley.
William Cecil Lord Burghley with his son and successor Robert Cecil, who both used networks of spies and informants
8 WHICH IN THEIR WILLS COUNT BAD WHAT I THINK GOOD?
WILLS = royal wills; the royal will of James; a play on “Will” Shakespeare; COUNT BAD WHAT I THINK GOOD = add up his royalty as nothing good or genuine = “To leave for nothing all thy sum of good” – Sonnet 109, line 12; “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking
makes it so” – Hamlet, 2.2.250-251; COUNT = as in praying upon the Rosary beads: “Nothing, sweet boy, but yet like prayers divine,/ I must each day say o’er the very same,/ Counting no
old thing old, thou mine, I thine” – Sonnet 108, lines 5-7; referring to the accounting of Southampton’s royal blood; “What acceptable Audit can’st thou leave?” – Sonnet 4, line 12; “Her Audit (though delayed) answered must be,/ And her Quietus is to render thee” – Sonnet 126
9 NO, I AM THAT I AM, AND THEY THAT LEVEL
I AM THAT I AM = “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM” – Exodus, 3.14; “I am myself alone” – Richard in 3 Henry VI, 5.6.83; “you alone are you” and “you are you”
– Oxford to Southampton, speaking to his royal son as king or god on earth, in Sonnet 84
"I serve her Majesty..."
“I serve Her Majesty, and I am that I am, and by alliance near to your Lordship, but free, and scorn to be offered that injury to think I am so weak of government as to be ruled by servants, or not able to govern myself. If your Lordship take and follow this course, you deceive yourself, and make me take another course than yet I have not thought of.”
– Oxford writing to his father-in-law William Cecil Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in England, on October 30, 1584 – in a postscript in his own hand, when Southampton was ten years old and a ward of the Queen in Burghley’s custody. Oxford was complaining about Burghley planting servants to spy on him (see “spies” in line 7 above); and in passing he angrily (and indirectly) reminded him that he, Oxford, was the father of a royal son and virtually a king entitled to be Elizabeth’s king-consort.
“Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. In following him I follow but myself: Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty but seeming so, for my peculiar end, for when my outward action doth demonstrate the native act and figure of my heart in complement extern, ‘tis not long after but I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at: I am not what I am” – Othello, 1.1.56-64
I am not as I seem to be,
For when I smile I am not glad:
A thrall although you count me free,
I, most in mirth, most pensive sad.
I smile to shade my bitter spite…
– Oxford poem, signed E. O. The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576
O that you were yourself, but love you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live
Sonnet 13, lines 1-2
(In the above lines, Oxford is reminding Southampton that he is no longer what he appears to be; i.e., he is a royal prince who cannot be himself in public)
This is I, Hamlet the Dane!
Hamlet, 5.2.255, the prince asserting his identity and independence
LEVEL = aim; “the direction in which a missive weapon is aimed” – Dowden; “The harlot king
is quite beyond mine arm, out of the blank and level of my brain” – The Winter’s Tale, 2.3.6
10 AT MY ABUSES RECKON UP THEIR OWN:
AT MY ABUSES, etc. = at my deceptions; “Is it some abuse?”– Hamlet, 4.7.49; RECKON UP THEIR OWN = add up their own lies; recalling “reckoning time” of Sonnet 115, line 5
11 I MAY BE STRAIGHT THOUGH THEY THEMSELVES BE
BEVEL.
BEVEL = heraldic for crooked; alluding to Oxford’s brother-in-law, the hunchbacked Robert Cecil, and his crooked physical figure
12 BY THEIR RANK THOUGHTS MY DEEDS MUST NOT BE
SHOWN,
RANK = despicable, foul, festering, large, grievous, bloated, serious, growing ever worse; “O, my offense is rank” – Hamlet, 3.3.36, King Claudius to himself; “Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely” – Hamlet, 1.2.136, the Prince, speaking of the world and specifically the state of
Denmark; the terrible, sinful thoughts of others who have deprived Southampton of his claim; but Oxford must stay silent; suggesting high rank or office; ranked in battle order
13 UNLESS THIS GENERAL EVIL THEY MAINTAIN:
UNLESS, etc. = unless they admit their evil openly and generally; unless they want to make the
following general argument:
14 ALL MEN ARE BAD AND IN THEIR BADNESS REIGN.
ALL = Southampton, One for All, All for One; ALL MEN ARE BAD = Southampton is as “bad” or guilty as all men; but this is ironic, sarcastic; earlier, in the Dark Lady series, Oxford wrote to the still-living Elizabeth in desperate anger: “Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,/ Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be” – Sonnet 140, lines 11-12
Southampton commissioned this portrait of himself in the Tower after his release by King James in April 1603.
“Why, then, ‘tis none to you; for there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” – – Hamlet, 2.2.250
AND IN THEIR BADNESS REIGN = and he “reigns” as King; (i.e., Oxford standing the whole
picture on its head, reverting back to line 1; so it’s better to be a real king, i.e., one with true rights, than just to be esteemed as one; and if his son is regarded as un-royal, then he should “reign” as king anyway); the new ruler is King James, along with Robert Cecil; and they are reigning over England in all their evil or badness; REIGN = the final word of the sonnet, emphasizing the true nature of the verse as political and related to the issue of whose reign it should be.
“Save her alone, who yet on th’earth doth reign …” – Oxford poem, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576, referring to Queen Elizabeth
* The Case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as “Shakespeare” by Percy Allen, 1930
A “Makeover” for “The Monument” Website
In addition to being given a new look, the website of THE MONUMENT has been upgraded with more and clearer content within its many pages. In an old-fashioned way, perhaps, there’s a lot of text — which, it seems to me, this topic deserves.
The change has been guided by my colleague and friend Bill Boyle, whose SHAKESPEARE ADVENTURE page is going strong. We fully admit that this activity is in no small degree motivated by anticipation of the release of ANONYMOUS, the new feature film by Roland Emmerich, due in late September this year. With the release of the very first major motion picture to feature Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford as “Shakespeare,” the all-important [that’s right] topic of “authorship” will be brought to many, many people who have never been told that any such question about the Bard’s identity has ever existed. Well, that’s a relatively big step; after all, students can’t go trying to solve a mystery if they don’t know it exists.
Check out the new website (WWW.SHAKESPEARESMONUMENT.COM) and tell us what you think. Comments, suggestions, criticisms — all welcome. Cheers from Hank
Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog 
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