Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog

In 1590 the poet Edmund Spenser published the first books of The Fairie Queene and then in 1591 The Teares of the Muses.  In the latter poem, nine goddesses bemoaned the current state of the arts, despite the fact that just two years earlier, the great renaissance of English literature and drama had reached the zenith of its glory — just in time for England’s defeat of Spain’s invasion by armada, in the summer of 1588.  Now, at the start of a new decade, Spenser was warning that the renaissance had ended.

(The English government, having used the wartime services of writers working under the patronage of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, promptly forgot them.  Lord Burghley, father-in-law of Oxford, began to pressure the earl financially; as a result, many writers who depended upon him fell to the wayside.  Lyly, his private secretary, was out of a job; Kyd was tortured to death on the rack; Watson had died in 1590; Greene would die in 1592; Marlowe would be murdered in 1593; Lodge left England — and so  forth, so that future scholars would conclude that “Shakespeare,” upon the appearance of that name in 1593, “had the field to himself.”)

One of Spenser’s laments in Teares is delivered by the goddess Thalia, Muse of Comedy, who wails over the public withdrawal of a specific poet-dramatist who has been “learning’s treasure” delivering “comic sock” to audiences at his plays:

Where be the sweete delights of Learning’s treasure,       
That wont with comick sock to beautefie
The painted theaters, and fill with pleasure
The listners eyes, and eares with melodie,
In which I late was wont to raine as queene,
And maske in mirth with graces well beseene?           

O, all is gone! and all that goodly glee,
Which wont to be the glorie of gay wits,
Is layd abed, and no where now to see;
And in her roome unseemly Sorrow sits,
With hollow browes and greisly countenaunce               
Marring my joyous gentle dalliance.

Oxford had been bringing plays to Court and the private Blackfriars Playhouse during the 1570’s and 1580’s.  (The evidence also shows he was supplying the Queen’s Men with plays for its traveling troupes during the 1580’s.)  William Webbe in A Discourse of English Poetry (1586) wrote, “I may not omit the deserved commendations of many honourable and noble Lords and Gentlemen in Her Majesty’s Court, which, in the rare devices of poetry, have been and yet are most skillful; among whom the right honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of most excellent among the rest.”  

The same praise was given to him in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), when the anonymous author* praised Court poets “who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford,” declaring elsewhere in the same pages, “For Tragedy Lord Buckhurst and Master Ferrys do deserve the highest praise: the Earl of Oxford and Master Edwards of Her Majesty’s Chapel** for Comedy and Enterlude.”

* The author of Arte has been identified variously as George Puttenham and Lord Lumley, but the evidence actually points to Oxford himself as the author.

** Richard Edwards had died more than two decades earlier, in 1566, when Oxford was sixteen.  Certainly they had worked together during 1563-66, and it may well be that the teenage Oxford, not Edwards, had written Damon and Pithias (1564) and Palamon and Arcyte (1566), the latter a “lost” play thought to be a source of The Two Noble Kinsmen as by Shakespeare.

(Other evidence makes clear that Spenser and Oxford were well acquainted and even had worked together.  Spenser certainly knew in 1590 that Edward de Vere had abruptly withdrawn from public life and, in that sense, was “dead of late.”)

Continuing her lament in Spenser’s poem, Thalia declares:

And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate,
With kindly counter* under mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late:
With whom all ioy and iolly merriment
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent**.

[* Counter – counterfeit.]
[** Drent – drowned.]

Instead thereof scoffing Scurrilitie,
And scornfull Follie with Contempt is crept,
Rolling in rymes of shameles ribaudrie
Without regard, or due decorum kept;
Each idle wit at will presumes to make*,
And doth the learneds taske upon him take.

[* Make – write poetry.]

But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of honnie and sweete nectar flowe,
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,
Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell.

There was only one man in Elizabethan England who held the mirror up to Nature with such scathingly accurate imitations of Truth that his audiences roared with laughter and swooned with delight.

“We should be convinced that by ‘our pleasant Willy,’ Spenser meant William Shakespeare,” Nicholas Rowe wrote in his Some Account of the Life of the bard in 1709, explaining that “such a character as he gives could belong to no other dramatist of the time.”

Spenser’s description has also presented an insurmountable problem, however, given that William Shakspere of Stratford upon Avon, the bard of tradition, had barely begun his alleged career in 1591.  In no way could he have withdrawn from writing for the stage, nor could he have been “dead of late” or “sitting in idle cell.”  

But such was precisely the case with 40-year-old Edward de Vere, who had become a virtual recluse by 1591 – and, in the Oxfordian view, had begun revising his previous stage works, which would be published under the “Shakespeare” pen name.  In that view he was “idle” only in terms of writing more original works for the public; otherwise he was hard at work, alone, transmuting that prior work into literary and dramatic masterpieces that would live for all time.  Perhaps it was no coincidence that, as a much younger man in 1576, Oxford had published a signed poem in The Paradise of Dainty Devices concluding he “never am less idle, lo, than when I am alone.” ***

And what about Spenser’s statement that “our pleasant Willy” was “Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,” reflecting the attitude of a high-born nobleman?  At a time when class distinctions were extremely rigid, the commoner William Shakspere of Warwickshire could never fit that description — unless he was scorning the boldness of such men as himself!  Otherwise it expresses exactly the view of proud Edward de Vere, Lord Great Chamberlain of England, the highest-ranking earl of Queen Elizabeth’s realm.

“The Faire Queene” by Spenser (1590) and his Dedication to Queen Elizabeth

One of Spenser’s seventeen dedicatory verses to noble individuals in The Fairie Queen of 1590 was to Oxford, whom he praised directly and personally as a poet, in unusual language that called attention to:

… the love which thou dost bear

To th’Heliconian imps [the Muses] and they to thee,

They unto thee, and thou to them, most dear.

Spenser was publicly writing to Edward de Vere, calling him the poet most loved by the Muses, adding:

Dear as thou art unto thyself, so love

That loves and honors thee; as doth behoove.

Charlton Ogburn Jr. translated those lines as Spenser telling Oxford:

“As dear as you are to yourself, so are you to me, who loves and honors you, as it behooves me to.”

The bafflement over the identity of “our pleasant Willy” will be cleared up quickly once the “experts” realize that Spenser was referring to the great author who was not, after all, William Shakspere, but that same Earl of Oxford who was “most dear” to the Muses — and who would soon adopt the pen name “William Shakespeare.”

*** See the entire poem as printed by J. T. Looney in his Poems of Edward de Vere in 1921.

*** Spenser’s dedicatory verse to Oxford: