What are the chances of the Stratford man Shakspere creating allegorical portraits of Elizabeth I of England? What are the chances he dared to depict this vain female ruler, an absolute monarch intensely protective of her public image, in accurate and often harshly negative detail? And if he had dared to be so bold, how could he have gotten away with it?
Edward de Vere had known Her Majesty from at least 1561, when he was eleven and she was twenty-eight. The following year she became his legal mother. He reached his majority in 1571, entering the House of Lords, and quickly gained her highest favor at court. He had a front-row seat for one of the most sensational tragicomedies in world history, the Golden Age of Elizabeth.
As Oxford was also a poet and dramatist, what are the chances of him creating allegorical portraits of the great Virgin Queen? Scholars of the traditional “Shakespeare” have fleetingly glimpsed such portraits of Elizabeth in the plays, but for them the full picture remains out of focus. Viewing the plays with the wrong author in mind, the images are blurry; on the other hand, knowledge of the true author creates a new lens through which vital aspects of the works emerge as wondrously clear. Much of what was obscure becomes obvious; through that new lens, the Shakespeare plays contain quite a few female characters that appear to reflect Elizabeth.
Once Oxford is viewed as the author, it appears he was actually obsessed with his sovereign Mistress and was constantly grappling with the extremes of her personality. Here are eight of his female characters that appear to represent her:
Cleopatra ………………… Antony and Cleopatra
Cressida ………………….. Troilus and Cressida
Gertrude …………………. Hamlet
Olivia ………………………. Twelfth Night
Portia ………………………. The Merchant of Venice
Rosalind …………………… Romeo and Juliet
Silvia ………………………… The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Titania ……………………… A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Titania, Queen of the Fairies, is the character most often cited in connection with Elizabeth, mainly because Oberon describes Cupid’s vain attempt to ensnare “a fair vestal throned by the west” (2.1). Many other aspects of Titania reflect Elizabeth, but the point of this “reason” is the sheer quantity of such characters. Taken together they reveal many sides of that extraordinary woman who ruled England for four and a half decades; some of the portraits could have been drawn only by an artist who had experienced those aspects of the queen “up close and personal.”
An image of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt on an ancient coin
For an accurate view of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the biographical and historical framework of the earliest versions must be moved back in time from the mid-1590’s to the early 1580’s. In that perspective, it’s possible to see the love affair between Queen Titania and Bottom as depicting the courtship of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Alencon.
Other instances where Queen Elizabeth is being depicted include:
* In Twelfth Night, the portrait of Elizabeth as Olivia stands beside Malvolio as a caricature of Sir Christopher Haton, Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard.
* Elizabeth banished Oxford from court after discovering his affair with Anne Vavasour, who gave birth to his illegitimate child, Edward Vere; we can hear, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Oxford speaking of his queen as Silvia in Valentine’s words:
And why not death rather than living torment?
To die is to be banish’d from myself;
And Silvia is myself: banish’d from her
Is self from self: a deadly banishment! (3.1)
* The vows of constancy made by Troilus to Cressida reflect those Oxford had to make to the queen when his court banishment ended in 1583 and old Roger Manners reported, “The Earl of Oxford came into her the queen’s] presence, and after some bitter words and speeches, in the end all sins are forgiven.”
Elizabeth I of England, a potrait
* To the Elizabethans it would have been obvious that “Shakespeare” modeled Cleopatra on Elizabeth, who sometimes appeared to be modeling herself on the Queen of Egypt.
In the Shakespeare poems and sonnets are more aspects of Elizabeth through the Oxfordian lens. She was the Queen of Love and Beauty, like Venus; she was the “chaste” queen, like Lucrece; she was the Phoenix; and, in my view, the Dark Lady of The Sonnets.
- Venus ………………………….. Venus and Adonis
- Lucrece ………………………… The Rape of Lucrece
- Phoenix ……………………….. The Phoenix and the Turtle
- Woman ………………………… A Lover’s Complaint
- Mistress (Dark Lady) …….. Shake-speares Sonnets
This post, with improvements made by editor Alex McNeil, is No. 51 of 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford.
Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog 