There is a delicious irony in the discovery, claimed this week by British botanist and historian Mark Griffiths, that an engraving on the inside title page of the 1597 book The Herbal, or General History of Plants by horticulturist John Gerard (1545-1612), contains a portrait of “William Shakespeare.”
Based on the evidence so far, Griffiths is probably correct! And it all points not only to “Shakespeare” but, equally, to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Part of the engraving that appeared in the 1597 book “Herbal” by John Gerard — depicting Shakespeare?
(Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
So it may take a centuries-old book about plants, along with an announcement in Country Life magazine (of all places), to guide mainstream scholars to correctly answer the Shakespeare authorship question. No wonder the eminent Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has already scoffed at it – joining Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, who told The Guardian: “I can’t imagine any reason why Shakespeare would be in a botany textbook.”
Professor Wells may already know the danger that this “literary discovery of the century,” as Country Life editor Mark Hedges calls it, holds for the traditional Stratfordian view.
The engraving shows Gerard, author of Herbal, along with Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens, William Cecil Lord Burghley (Gerard’s own patron) and a fourth man “dressed as a Roman, wearing laurels and meant to make us think of Apollo and poetry,” says Griffiths, who cites visual clues identifying him as the poet who wrote Venus and Adonis (1593).
[For example, the fourth man in the engraving holds a “snake’s head fritillary,” a flower discovered in France in 1578 and whose use in British gardens was pioneered by Gerard; and “Shakespeare” in Venus and Adonis is the only Elizabethan poet who refers to this extraordinary new flower.]
The question, of course, is why “Shakespeare” would be pictured in 1597 along with Burghley, Gerard and Dodoens. The answer, Griffiths says, is that the poet had been involved in the writing of this breakthrough book on plants!
The full engraving in Gerard’s book, on the inside cover… Click on the image to enlarge it
[It is quite likely that Oxford would have helped in the writing; and just as professionals in diverse fields such as medicine and music dedicated their works to the Earl, so Gerard appears to have done so by means of the engraving.]
Mark Brown writes in The Guardian: “Griffiths believes Shakespeare was given his literary start by Burghley, the most powerful man in the country, and that he became almost a political propagandist for him.”
[Edward de Vere helped the government by patronizing writers and guiding them to create patriotic plays of English royal history. Additional evidence indicates that in the 1580s he himself was writing early versions of such plays to be published later under the Shakespeare name.]
If Griffiths is correct, Brown continues, “then Shakespeare would have moved in the same circles as Gerard, as both men had Burghley to thank for their careers.”
[Oxford grew up at Cecil House, where Burghley imported the rarest and most exotic flowers and plants to be seen in England. Oxford married Cecil’s daughter and continued to visit Cecil House as well as Theobalds, which also had an enormous garden that Gerard — for two decades, from 1577 to 1598 — apparently also tended to. The famous gardener was five years older than Oxford and the two must have known each other quite well.]
“Griffiths said his theory is that Shakespeare helped Gerard with Greek and Latin translations in the book and acted as a kind of script doctor. So the four men [in the engraving] are the writer himself [John Gerard], his patron [Burghley], his inspiration [Dodoens] and his literary advisor [Shakespeare].”
De Vere entered Cecil House on the Strand at age twelve in 1562, becoming the first royal ward of the Queen in the custody of Cecil, Master of the Wards. Here is part of a description of the place by B.M. Ward, first biographer of Oxford, in 1928:
“Let us pause for a moment and picture the dwelling in which Lord Oxford was destined to spend the remainder of his minority [1562 to 1571] … One of the chief features of Cecil House was its garden. The grounds in which the house stood must have covered many acres, and were more extensive than those of any of the other private houses in Westminster.
A page of Gerard’ book
“John Gerard, well known as the author of Herbal, or General History of Plants (1597), was for twenty years Sir William Cecil’s gardener; and Sir William himself evidently took a great pride in his garden … Indeed, it is not unlikely that he deliberately chose an inland site without a water-gate, because the congestion of existing houses along the river bank only allowed of comparatively small and narrow strips of garden.”
Ward adds that Burghley “imbued his sons and the royal wards under his charge with his own keenness in horticulture.” He notes that William Cecil’s second son, Robert, as Earl of Salisbury under King James, placed his splendid garden at Hatfield under the care of John Tradescant, the first of a noted family of horticulturists. And Lord Zouch, another royal ward in Cecil’s charge [1569-1577], later filled his garden at Hackney with plants he had collected in Austria, Italy and Spain.
We may be sure that Cecil imbued the young Edward de Vere with that same love and knowledge of plants and flowers – a passion and store of information displayed throughout the Shakespeare works. So it appears we now have a discovery that John Gerard commissioned an engraving in 1597 that included an image of a Roman Poet meant to indicate the author of Venus and Adonis, the new English Ovid, whom he knew to be Edward de Vere.
[Gerard would have loved Oxford’s reference in Venus and Adonis to the snake’s head fritillary.]
“This is the only known verifiable portrait of the world’s greatest writer made in his lifetime,” editor Hedges says. “It is an absolutely extraordinary discovery.”
It may be even more extraordinary than he knows….
Stay tuned for more developments!
Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog 