SHAXSPER

Chapter 4:                                    HIDDEN FROM HISTORY

 

 St John’s College

Thursday morning

The seminar members slowly file into the meeting room.  A few look a bit the worse for wear after the previous evening’s dinner and libations.  As is always the case, people tend to sit in the chair which they had originally chosen.

Seeing this, Professor Sir Peter Schofield decides to intervene pro-actively.  He taps his pencil on the table and slowly the twitter in the room dissipates.  Taking his role as Chair and conference convenor seriously, he is going to do something about this curious form of academic inertia.

“Before we begin this morning’s session, I am going to make a change in the seating arrangements.  It has been my long experience of academic meetings – since I was a student, in fact, that left to our own devices there will be less likelihood of inter-mixing.  And I am a firm believer that one of the ways in which any meeting – be it a large conference or a small seminar like this one – garners success relates very much to one’s experience of meeting the largest possible number of colleagues.  That way, we break down walls and build bridges.  This is particularly important for our younger colleagues who must inevitably come to this meeting with some trepidation from being in the company of more august, senior scholars who have heretofore been names on a page – or the subject of questions in their recently completed doctoral examinations !”

This last remark sends a slight titter through the room.  Everyone laughs, weakly.  They had to, they have all been in that situation themselves.

A minute of musical chairs ensues.

Professor Sir Peter then summons the group to something like “attention”.

“See, that wasn’t so hard was it ?”

Neddy Shorts cann’t help muttering, “Not at all, we’re all boy scouts now.”  His remark is just loud enough for everyone to hear and, when they heard, they all burst out laughing.  Professor Sir Peter Schofield is happy.  He is in control.  Everyone knows it.

“Excellent.  Now we can begin our third session and we can all hope that it will be as interesting as the two previous ones.  There are high standards for this morning’s group to meet.  However, knowing the participants – and having read Cyril Hubert’s fascinating paper – I think we can all rest assured that this is going to be “caviar for the general”.

Following our agreed-upon format, Dr Hubert will speak for ten minutes and then we will hear comments from Dr Maurice Kelly, another one of our intrepid band of Mancunians, and Ms Joy Crayle, who is currently a visiting fellow here at St John’s College.  Anything to add before we start ?”

People around the table look at one another but there is silence from the rest.  Professor Sir Peter then turns to Dr Hubert and motions to him, acknowledging that he is the next one up to bat, so to speak.

Dr Hubert is a large man, with ruddy cheeks and a tangled mass of curly, graying, short-cropped hair.  He speaks slowly, with a definite southern American accent.

“Thank you, Sir Peter.  It is always a pleasure to reassemble with this, my band of brothers (and sisters).  We may be few, but we are a happy few.”  At that rather clumsy reference to Henry V’s famous speech at Agincourt, there are a few groans from around the table.

“My paper is not the result of original research but, rather, it’s what the Chair of the Literary Studies Department at my university in Texas calls “a think piece”.  He believes that anything other than archival or textual analysis is a second-rate kind of academic study.  Needless to say, we tolerate one another.

As some of you may know, I have been fascinated by the chronological inconsistencies in Edward de Vere’s written works for some time.  A score of lyric poems were published in his own name while he was a young man – before he travelled in Italy in 1575/6 – then the rest was silence, so to speak.  Thereafter, Oxford published nothing more in his own name yet he was frequently referred to in glowing terms. This disparity between his early poetry and these later tributes is arresting.  Let me refresh our collective memory by simply listing the contemporary accolades paid to Edward de Vere’s activity as a poet and playwright.

In 1578, at Audley End, while the Elizabethan court was on progress, Gabriel Harvey saluted de Vere: “For a long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated they mind in the arts.  English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough. ….I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea, even more English verses are extant….”

Yet two years later, the same Gabriel Harvey would write disparagingly about Oxford in a mocking verse, Speculum Tuscanismi.  His ridicule of a peer of the realm was considered to both libelous and thoroughly inappropriate.  Harvey was summoned to appear before the Privy Council.  The matter fizzled out but Harvey’s digs at Oxford’s “Tuscanish look” and “womanish works” served another purpose – they seem to have been the basis for the calumnies aimed at Oxford a few years later in the Arundell-Howard Libells.  I won’t take up this point because I know it will be thoroughly discussed later.

In 1586, William Webbe published A Discourse of English Poetry.  In it, he 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 skilful; among whom the right honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among the rest.”

In that same year, Angel Day dedicated The English Secretary to Oxford, “whose infancy from the beginning was ever sacred to the Muses”

George Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, (1589), ranked him at the head of the courtier poets who “have written excellently well if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest.”  One hardly needs to emphasize the element of covert secrecy that Puttenham links with Oxford’s known works – known, that is, among the in-crowd.

Edmund Spenser, the author of The Faerie Queene, praised his relationship with the Muses unstintingly:

“the love which thou dost bear

To th’Heliconian Imps, and they to thee,

They unto thee, and thou to them most dear”

This was by no means Spenser’s only commendation regarding Oxford’s pre-eminent contemporary reputation.  In The Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser presents a rhyming match between Willie [i.e., Oxford] and Perigot {Sir Phillip Sidney to whom the poem was dedicated in 1579].

In 1590, in the same year in which The Faerie Queene was published, Spenser again referred to Oxford as “Willie” in Teares of the Muses which provides anyone with eyes to look with a wealth of clues about de Vere’s contemporary reputation as well as his recent withdrawal from the public world:

“And he, the man whom nature self had made

To mock her self, and truth to imitate,

What kindly counter under mimic shade,

Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late;

With whom all joy, and jolly merriment,

Is also dreaded, and in dolour rent.”

But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen

Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow,

Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,

Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw;

Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,

Than so himself to mockery to sell.”

If “Our Pleasant Willy” was not dead, he was no longer a public man.  Willy was “scorning the boldness of such base-born men” who were now the darlings of the public.  In 1590, “Our pleasant Willy” was sitting in an “idle cell”, in retirement from the court at his new wife’s manor at Stoke Newington next to the parish of Stratford-le-Bow, which was then beyond the pale of London society.

A few years later, in 1595, Thomas Edwardes’ Narcissus contains an eighteen-line section which connects, albeit in an allusory fashion so beloved of Elizabethans, the recently-published Venus and Adonis with an unnamed nobleman.  To anyone with ears to hear, this was a thin disguise: the nobleman “should have been our rhyme/The only object  and the star” but he is now absent from the courtly scene, “in purple robes disdained.”

After Edward de Vere’s death in 1604, Anthony a Wood reported that “The most noble Earl of Oxford…was, in his younger days, an excellent poet and comedian, as several of his compositions that were made public showed, which I presume are now lost and worn out.”

Wood’s posthumous praise was seconded by Henry Peacham, in his 1622 book on courtly etiquette, The Compleat Gentleman, which lists the great Elizabethan poets; Edward de Vere is at the top of Peacham’s list, William Shakespeare is not even mentioned.  As Mark Anderson remarks in “Shakespeare” by Another Name, to have done so “would be a redundancy.”

A few years earlier, Peacham had published a treatise on emblems, those allegorical engravings which, as Anderson tells us, “used anagrams, pictograms, and other arcane methods of encoding secret messages to conceal everything from secrets of state to bawdy jokes.”  Anderson believes it is revealing that Peacham title, Minerva Brittanica, is itself a Latin in-joke referring to “The English SpearShaker”.  Its title page depicts a hidden man’s hand writing from behind a curtain.  And, if those clues didn’t tell a story, the hidden hand is writing “Thy name is de Vere”.

These contemporary evaluations of the pathbreaking role played by Oxford’s verse were brought together by Looney in “Shakespeare” Identified and they have more recently found grudging support in the recent, scholarly evaluation of Professor Steven May: “He [Oxford] is her first truly prestigious courtier poet, and while we cannot know to what extent his example spurred on those who followed, his precedent did at least confer genuine respectability upon the later efforts of such poets as [Sir Phillip] Sidney, [Fulke] Greville, and [Sir Walter] Ralegh.”

Since Oxford lived for another thirty years after returning from Italy without publishing anything else in his own name, this suggests that his prominence was what has been called ‘an open secret”.  It was known to those “in the know”, an “in-crowd”, but largely beyond the ken of the great unwashed.

But, I think, we can claim more than that.  The implication of the “open secret” would seem to be that he carried on writing but that his work was no longer being published in his own name.  There are two main explanations for this: first, perhaps the earlier poems were never meant to be published; and, second, his later works somehow were deemed to be dangerous, in the sense that he was opening up the world of the court to public viewing.  While everyone who was anyone knew about this later writing – which is why he continued to be praised even after his death as the pre-eminent literary figure of the age – he only circulated his works privately, among the cognoscenti.

The key point I am driving at in my paper is that there was a chasm between “the young Oxford” and the historical author known as “William Shakespeare”.  Furthermore, this chasm was created to separate the two in the public’s mind.  It was not just a matter of the bad form of the young Oxford’s publicity but also a case of transferred identity, from an aristocrat to a commoner.  But this transfer was only the second line of defence.  The first line of defence was keeping the works of “the mature Oxford” in private circulation.  I say this because it would seem that almost all of the works attributed in his life-time to “William Shakespeare” or “William Shake-speare” were pirated editions.  And, of course, the litigious Will Shaksper is not known to have complained – much less embarked on a civil suit to gain restitution for theft of his intellectual property rights.

The only exceptions to this seeming rule would have been the appearance of the two long poems – Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece – in the early-middle 1590s.  Their exceptionality seems to beg the question that lies at the heart of my argument: why were these two poems – the first of which the poet called “the first heir of my invention” – published if their intended audience was the narrow circle of the court ?  Asking this question in this way, I think, suggests its answer: in order to buttress what I have just called “the first line of defence”.  The publicity attendant on the publication of these two poems established the alternate identity of Oxford’s frontman, “William Shakespeare.”

The timing of this very public coming-out was, I believe, triggered by the earlier appearance of unauthorized versions of some of the early plays.  Rather than letting the public’s interest in their authorship result in the identification of their real author, I am hypothesizing that Oxford got out in front of the story.  He did so by creating an invented author, the heretofore unknown Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon.

What made this choice a stroke of genius is that Shaksper was a man who had already been spoken about in theatrical circles.  Greene’s “Groatsworth of Wit” drew attention to “the only shake-scene in the country”.  This was the man who was described as being a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide” which was an ingenious way of linking that person with Queen Margaret’s famous line from Henry VI, part 3: “tiger’s heart wrapped in woman’s hide”

At a stoke, thereby, Oxford’s identity was hidden and Will Shaksper was promoted from anonymity to a kind of celebrity.  Whenever.pirated or bootlegged copies of the plays or later poems got through the surveillance of the authorities – The Sonnets, especially, come to mind – there would be apparent continuity between the “William Shakespeare” of 1593/4 (the publication-dates of the two long lyric poems) and any later works which had slipped through the hands of the cognoscenti and into wider, general circulation.

Before I close, I want to compare this ruse with another one perpetrated at the same time.  I am, of course, referring to the cover-up of the identity of the subject of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, “Astrophel and Stella”, which was in circulation for almost ten years before it was published, posthumously, in 1591.  My next paragraphs are drawn from a wonderfully insightful article published by Peter R. Moore in the Shakespeare Oxford Society Newletter in Winter, 1993.

Today, of course, we know that the lady in question was Penelope Devereux, sister of the infamous Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.  In the last years of Elizabeth’s long reign, her identity was an open secret – known to the in-crowd but not publicly acknowledged.  This was not just some sort of conspiracy of silence but also a matter of decorum.  Sir Philip Sidney was a dead hero, Penelope Rich was a member of the highest level of the court aristocracy.  It just wouldn’t do to wash their dirty linen in public.

Penelope Devereux had been married at eighteen to a much older man, Lord Rich.  She did her duty by him, bearing five children in nine years but in 1590 she became the lover of  Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy.  Lord Rich acquiesced in her new neo-marital arrangement.  Various theories have been advanced for his complicity – some think he was over-awed by Lady Devereux’s brother, the Earl of Essex, who was clearly a shooting-star and the Queen’s new favourite; others think that he had other irons in the fire.  Whatever might have been the reason for Lord Rich’s compliance, no fuss was made when his wife proceeded to bear six bastard-children to her lover who was so appropriately titled “Lord Mountjoy”.

It was only in the wake of Robert Devereux’s execution in February, 1601, that Lord Rich took matters in hand and formally broke off their marriage.  Even this action did not sully Lady Penelope’s reputation or standing because Lord Rich’s action was a private matter.  So, too, was her ecclesiastical procedure to end the marriage with Lord Rich.  Lady Penelope and Lord Mountjoy were in great favour with King James, who made him Earl of Devonshire.  For the first two years of James’s reign, then, nothing changed as Penelope Rich and Charles Blount kept house and everyone who was anyone in the tight little world of the court knew about it.

But then they over-reached.  They married on December 5, 1605.  This was just too, too much because it brought their private matters to public attention.  It was not the act but rather its publicity that changed the situation.  When their adultery was made public, they were banished from court and forbidden to remarry.  Their bastard-children were not legitimated.  They both died soon afterwards, in disgrace.

Nevertheless, despite her behaviour, no contemporary publicly identified Lady Penelope Rich as Sidney’s “Stella”.  This silence is all-the-more-surprising since Sir Philip Sidney had been the English Protestant’s heroic icon in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.  Yet the identity of Sidney’s “Stella” had remained an open secret during Lady Penelope’s lifetime.  After her death, events slowly and inexorably made her identification less and less interesting to later generations.  The cover-up – really, it was an open secret – continued until 1691 when Anthony A. Wood made it public. No one paid any attention to Wood’s statement.  Her identification only became a matter of interest in the nineteenth century.  Now, however, it is generally accepted.

The parallels between these two open secrets concerning Elizabethan courtiers should serve to counter the standard Orthodox Stratfordian claim that the hidden identity of Willy Shake-speare is based on outlandish and improbable circumstances.  Indeed, quite the opposite would seem to be the case.  It was a case of “don’t ask, don’t tell”.  In those circumstances, Edward de Vere’s pseudonym served to keep the public ignorant of the true identity of William Shakespeare.”

Willy’s AfterLife

Henry turns to Willy and directs a very pointed question at him, “Has this fellow, Hubert, figured out your deception ?”

“I think so.  But you have to understand that it was not just a simple “deception”.  Rather it took place in the context of a wider set of circumstances.”

“I’m not sure that I follow you.”

“Of course you don’t understand because my “silence” was associated with the private deal I struck with William Cecil.”

“Which one ?  You’ve mentioned two such deals: one having to do with the collection of the dowry money in the low countries and another relating to his involvement in getting Bess’ approval for your trip to Italy.”

“The second part of our dealings – the Italian job.  Once I had collected the dowry money and then got Anne with child, I felt that my obligations stemming from the marriage contract were signed, sealed, and delivered.  So I felt that I could realize my dream to spend time in Italy, the center of European culture.  In my early education, I had imbibed the Latin works of Roman authors from antiquity.  When I was older I read as much as I could lay my hands on about contemporary Italian literature.  But London was a long way from Firenze or Venezia or Roma.  I was keen to immerse myself in Italian culture, in its homeland.  Bess, you remember how mad-keen I was about that.”

“I surely do.  Italy was your lodestar.  I must admit that I felt somewhat aggrieved that you valued culture over me !  But it was always clear that our dalliances were, in equal parts, about providing rest-and-relaxation for me and providing a counter-weight to Robin’s attempts to wrest a consort’s position from me.  I would never have approved of that.  But your appearance at court, your success in the tilt-yards, and your lively intelligence gave me a way to keep Robin’s insistent demands at arm’s length.  Edward, you were used to take Robin down a peg.”

“I knew that.  Even after you became pregnant – even after Henry was born – there was always something that stood between us.  That “something” was your total commitment to your office.”

“That’s right.  I was a queen, first and foremost.  My public face always took precedence over my private desires.  But we’ve talked about this already.  Tell the boys more about your dealings with William Cecil.  I know a lot from simple deduction but the details always escaped me.  William was very good as keeping his various dealings separate from one another so that he could exercise total control over them.”

“Exactly.  He was cold-blooded and, to be fair to the man who made my life seven sorts of misery, he was a most loyal servant to the monarchy of England.  Even while he was twisting and turning before your accession, his primary motivation was his patriotic loyalty.  The monarch in power was the person to whom he submitted.”

“But that did not keep him from having other irons in the fire.”

“Indeed, that has to be appreciated.  William Cecil was a sly fox, no one doubted that.  He was always two or three moves ahead of the game.  That’s why he was able to stay on top for so long.  That’s why his authority was hegemonic with you.”

“Edward, you see now what you did not understand during LifeOnEarth.”

“That’s the case for most mortals, I think.  William Cecil was cut from another cloth.  He was Machiavellian, in the sense that his primary loyalty was to the maintenance of princely power. He saw to it that that power was well protected.”

“Why do you think he had my complete trust ?  I knew that William could be relied on to put my interests first – even ahead of his own.  But, of course, that didn’t stop him from forging situations in which our interests were identical so that he could benefit richly from that identity of interests.”

Will and Henry again feel as if they were watching a tennis match.  Their heads are swivelling to-and-fro, to keep up with the repartee between Willy and Bess.  This becomes frustrating and so Henry inserts himself into their bantering.  “What does this have to do with Willy’s disappearance as a poet ?”

“OK, let me speak more directly to Henry’s question.  To do that, I have to position my silencing in the milieu of the time.  The key to that context was William Cecil’s continuing fear of the older nobility.  He feared them even though the main power brokers had been defeated in the Northern Rising.  Not even their disastrous behaviour a few years later, when their credibitily was again undermined by the Ridolfi Plot to marry Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, with Mary, Queen of Scots, shook him in his wariness.  He feared these older ruling households because of their extensive clan networks and local power-bases.  Yet in both instances, Cecil was able to turn the tables on the feudal nobles and, in so doing, increase Bess’ safety while enhancing her powers.  But – and this is the real point you have to grasp – William Cecil was convinced that these two confrontations were merely battles and did not end the war – or, to be more correct, the possibility of another civil war.”

Bess couldn’t hold herself back, “You boys were born almost a century after the end of the Wars of the Roses so you never could understand the terror that civil war held for the older generation.  It was only a generation removed from us.  In fact, in the early 1570s, it was smashed into our faces by the events in France.”

“Henry – and Will – what you have to understand is that the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre terrified us.  It was the result of a witches’ brew – the struggle for the crown aided and abetted by a new ideological stridency which made it much harder to resolve dynastic ambitions.  Having lived through a milder version of this nightmare in the decade before Bess’ accession, William Cecil’s main policy imperative was geared towards seeing that it did not happen again.”

“Willy, you’re right about my generation’s distance from those events.  In our time, there was no longer that conflation of feudalism and religious fanaticism – even Robert Devereux’s actions could not be understood in this way.  I am still convinced that my Lord Essex was a misguided patriot and not an ambitious madman as he was portrayed by his political enemy, Robert Cecil.”

Will is now getting very restless, “Let’s bring this discussion back to the main point, shall we ?  How was Willy silenced ?”

“Will, you’re right to keep us focused on the main point because, otherwise, there’s a strong likelihood that we will get bogged down with one damned thing after another.  Isn’t that what history is all about ?  As I was trying to get a grip on William Cecil’s method, I veered off-topic.  I think that we have to go back to Christmas of 1574, when I had announced to my in-laws – William Cecil and Mildred Cooke Cecil – that my wife Anne was pregnant.  I thought, quite mistakenly, that that would be the final piece of the puzzle and that William would then plead with Bess on my behalf.  I was naïve.”

“I knew that, you were never a match for William when it came to strategy.”

“Bess, I see that now but back then – during LifeOnEarth – I was younger and much more self-absorbed.  I never gave any thought to his agenda, I only cared about me and my needs and my wants and my desires.  That’s what it was to be a rising star at court.  But William was secure in Bess’ trust and so he could manipulate the rest of us.”

“We all know that.  What we don’t know is how he did it – or how he worked it out.”

“The day after Anne and I had made our announcement, I had a private conversation with William in that dark, forbidding study in Cecil House.”

“I remember being dressed down there, too.”

“Henry, all his wards – and his children, too – loathed being summoned to his study.  You never left that room feeling happy – I usually left that room feeling that I’d been sullied.  But what could you do ?  He was the man with the plan, and the power to implement his plan.

On that occasion, I put my case forward to him.  He listened and took notes, as he always did in that crabbed script of his – up and down the page, and then across those lines.  That’s how he wrote; the archival copies were re-scripted.  But that’s another story.  Let me get back to the main theme here.

After listening intently to me make my case for being given the liberty to travel abroad, he told me that I had to understand that his assistance could not be executed without charge.  I asked him: “What charge” ?  He told me that they were two-fold: first, I would be expected to come back from Italy as a changed man – one who now suspected his wife’s infidelity – who would accuse him of suborning it ? – and to make the issue public knowledge; and, second, I was to make my attachments to the old religion plain for anyone who cared to observe me.”

“You mean that he staged your break-up with Anne ?  That he sacrificed his own daughter’s happiness for his own benefit ?”

“Bess, it was for your benefit.  Anne, like the rest of us, was just a pawn in the game.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Sure it was, Henry, but you also saw that side of him if I remember correctly.  But, be that as it may be, William Cecil made it perfectly clear to me that my days at court would henceforth be limited, my powers circumscribed, and my chance of advancement curtailed.  Once I had grasped what he was up to, this really didn’t come as much of a surprise. For me, it wasn’t really a big disappointment even though it cut me off from what the ancients called “the spoils of office”. Like I said before, he was thinking two or three moves ahead.  Part of this re-making of my career would involve silencing me in relation to my literary efforts.  I went on writing poetry and continued to prepare entertainments for the court but it was never henceforth openly acknowledged.  That’s why my published poems date from the early 1570s, when I was not yet entangled in this web of deceit.

I must say, however, that I was perfectly willing to go along with this subterfuge.  For two reasons: in the short term, I wanted to get out of England; and, in the longer term, I could understand the logic of Cecil’s plans to turn me into a mole.  By burrowing deep into the company of my noble cousins, I was able to blend in with them and report back to Cecil and Walsingham.”

“I remember those reports but I never knew where they originated.  And William certainly never gave away his sources.  He really did play his cards close to his chest.”

“Bess, you never suspected me ?”

“Never.  It was obviously a very well-conceived form of deep cover.”

“It surely was.  When I returned from Italy, I palled about with the cohort surrounding my Catholic cousin, Henry Howard, and his cousin Charles Arundell.   They were playing with political dynamite and the Howards were hardly inexperienced in this kind of treasonous activity.  I think you could say that playing with fire was bred in their blood. In aid of my surveillance work, I even pretended to convert to Roman Catholicism.  A few years later, after I had gathered evidence on the Howard/Arundell party in their treasonous machinations, I submitted myself to you and the Privy Council, expecting that my spying activities would be warmly rewarded.  To my great surprise, they weren’t.

But the upshot of my revelations was that Charles Arundell and Henry Howard paniced.  They both immediately sought refuge with the Spanish ambassador.  When they were released into house arrest, they were placed in the custody of Sir Christopher Hatton, who was one of my main rivals for the Queen’s favour.  In that nasty little world of friends and enemies, Hatton used this opportunity to sponsor their accusations against me !  My reputation was thereby further blackened.  I have ever since been understood in the light of their scandalous and desperate claims.

Yet my surveillance work was finally proved true.  A few years later, Henry Howard and Charles Arundell were found to be principal instigators of  the infamous Throckmorton Plot.  News of this plan became public knowledge in 1583 when Henry Howard fled to France.  Charles Arundell went to the Tower.  I was vindicated in the court of politics but my reputation was sullied in the court of public opinion by their malicious lies, fabrications, and innuendos.  My days as an undercover agent were over and I was thereafter spending all my time with my literary friends.  In pursuing this undercover career, I had spent most of my inheritance in serving my Queen and my country.  That’s why I was granted an annuity, which was transformed into a life-long annual pension in 1586.”

“Yes, that’s quite right.  After you had outed the Howard/Arundell clique, your days of underground spying were over and you were nearly broke.  Providing you with an annual pension was the very least that we could do to repay you for your service.”

“These were the larger political forces that framed my literary silencing.  As I said, only a few of my earlier poems had been published before I went to Italy, a few of the unpublished early ones made it into print under my own name, as the years went by.  For over a decade after I returned from Italy nothing seemed to be amiss.  But then in the early 1590s, after the stage had become a spectacular success and the main means – together with the mandatory sermons preached in churches – for reaching out to the public so as to create a positive vision of England’s national history and national culture, things changed.   Principally, the massive upsurge in public interest meant that my plays were being performed before the theatre-going public.  There was growing interest in their authorship.  That was when we hit upon the idea of creating a front-man – as matters would fall out, that was Will.  But, I am getting ahead of myself.

What I want to impress on the two of you is that in this earlier period – the later 1560s and the early 1570s – writing poems and sonnets in the Italian style was fashionable within courtly circles.  These were written for private circulation and what you have to understand is that there was a stark division of opinion about the propriety of a nobleman’s verse being seen to have been published.  Traditionalist – and religious fundamentalists – decried this craze.  But it got approval from Bess, herself.”

“That’s right, Willy.  I even tried my hand at writing verses but my efforts were terrible. My verses were jejeune and shallow.  My mind just didn’t work that way.  In fact, my failure gave me a really deep appreciation of the skill involved in creative writing.  I couldn’t do it but I could envy those who had the gift because I had tried and failed.”

“Bess, can you recall any of your verses ?”

“Henry, silly boy, of course I can’t – but if I could, I’d never repeat them to you or to Will.  Willy, I think, heard a few but I do hope he has forgotten them.”

“Indeed – your verse was eminently forgettable !  She might have been my superior in political matters but she couldn’t string two lines together.”

“That, alas, is too true.”

St John’s College,

Thursday morning (continued)

Cyril Hubert has just finished his presentation, turning to Professor Sir Peter whose job as the coordinator/chair is to move matters along.

“Thank you, Cyril.  I think that we can all appreciate the kind of lateral thinking that went into your paper.  I fully agree with you that the reliance on conjectural history is crucial.  The conundrum we face is that, quite clearly, the Orthodox Stratfordians position can be rather easily controverted by its flimsy evidentiary linkages but presenting a convincing alternative argument is equally bedeviled by the paucity of documentary materials in the archive.  In a sense, we are at a dead end from which we can extricate ourselves through looking at the authorship issues in another dimension.  To me, that’s what makes what is called “virtual history” so attractive.  It gives us, as the French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss would have said, something to think with.

Now, in the second part of this morning’s session we have two sets of comments; the first one will be from Dr Joy Crayle; the second will be from Professor Maurice Kelly of Cheetham Hill Teacher’s College.  We spoke beforehand and agreed that Dr Crayle would go first.

The seminar’s eyes swing around to the left side of the room, towards a slim woman of a indeterminate age.  She is neither young nor old, but forty-something.  Joy Crayle talks with a modified South African accent, which has been softened by having spent six years of graduate studies at Princeton.  Since then, she moved on to a position at the University of Chicago.  This coming academic year, however, she is to be a visiting research fellow at St John’s College.

“Thank you Sir Peter.   However, I must dispute your suggestion that we won’t find a “smoking gun” or a “DNA fingerprint” with which to connect Oxford with the canonical Shakespeare.  In fact, we actually have exactly those things: Looney’s pathbreaking method of regressive detection is amply substantiated by Sobran’s linguistic correlations between the two in terms of vocabulary and usage.  I should also mention the earlier work by William Plumer Fowler, Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford’s Letters, which makes the same points but does not do so in reference to the poetry which is the subject of Professor Hubert’s paper.  What seems to me to clinch the argument is Benezet’s “composite poem” because it seems to me to be the product of a single imagination.

Perhaps the strongest single piece of evidence is one that Looney alerted us to: the use of “haggard” by both writers.  The word, which refers to a wild or untrained hawk, was by no means common at the time.  Moreover, its usage is not strained, but natural.  And that naturalness, the ease with which the writer reached for this arcane word, is a major piece of evidence since only a man with an intimate familiarity with the aristocratic sport of falconry would have had access to it.  Let me quote from Othello:

“If I do find her haggard,

Though that her jesses were my dear heart stings,

I’d whistle her off, and let her down the wind,

To play at fortune.” (III, ii)

Next, in The Taming of the Shrew, we read,

“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.”  (IV, i)

In, Much Ado about Nothing (III, i), Hero states:

“Then go we near her, that her ear lose nothing

Of the false sweet bait that we lay for it.

I know her spirits are as coy and wild

As haggards of the rock.” (III, i)

As Looney tells us, if we join together the occurrences of “haggard” in the canonical plays then we have a virtual reconstruction of de Vere’s poem on “Women”, in which Oxford writes:

”Unsettled still like haggards willd theye range,

These gentlle byrdes that flye from man to man,

Who would not scorne and shake them from the fyste,

And let them flye, fayre fooles, whiche waye they lyste.”

This very particular usage of an obscure word is not unusual when considered alongside Joseph Sobran’s argument that there are 200 phrases and images in de Vere’s scant score of poems that parallel more than 500 he has located in the canonical-Shakespeare texts.

An even more telling example is provided to us by Louis P. Benezet’s seventy-line “jumble poem” – six passages from Oxford are inter-mixed with seven from the canonical-Shakespeare texts.  I know that you have all seen this before but, it has always seemed to me to be the more compelling when it is read aloud.  So, please indulge me:

“If care or skill could conquer vain desire,

Or reason’s reins my strong affections stay:

There should my sighs to quiet breast retire,

And shun such sights as secret thoughts betray;

Uncomely love, which now lurks in my breast

Should cease, my grief by wisdom’s power oppressed.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic mad with evermore unrest.

Fain would I sing but fury makes me fret,

And rage hath sworn to seek revenge of wrong;

My mazed mind in malice is so set,

As death shall daunt my deadly dolours long;

Patience perforce is such a pinching pain,

As die I will or suffer wrong again.

For if I should despair, I should go mad,

And in my madness might speak ill of thee:

Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,

Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be.

Love is a discord and a strange divorce

Betwixt our sense and rest, by whose power,

As mad with reason, we admit that force

Which wit or labour never may endower,

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

As random from the truth vainly express’d;

For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright

Who art as black as hell and dark as night,

Why should my heart think that a several plot

Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place ?

Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,

To put fair truth upon so foul a face ?

Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, my heart “

Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint ?

Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart ?

Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint ?

Who first did paint with colours pale thy face ?

Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest ?

Above the rest in court who gave thee grace ?

Who made thee strive in honour to be best ?

Who taught thee how to make me love thee more

The more I hear and see just cause of hate ?

O, though I love what others do abhor,

With others thou shouldst not abhor my state:

What worldly wight can hope for heavenly hire,

When only signs must make his secret moan;

A silent suit doth seld to grace aspire,

My hapless hap doth roll the restless stone.

Yet Phoebe fair disdained the heavens above,

To’joy on earth her poor Endymion’s love.

And shall I live on earth to be her thrall ?

And shall I live and serve her all in vain ?

And shall I kiss the steps that she lets fall “

And shall I pray the gods to keep the pain

From her that is so cruel still ?

No, no, on her work all your will.

And het her feel the power of all your might,

And let her have her most desire with speed,

And let her pine away both day and night,

And let her moan and none lament her need;

And let her all those that shall her see,

Despise her state and pity me.

Let him have time to tear his curled hair,

Let him have time against himself to rave,

Let him have time of Time’s help to despair,

Let him have time a beggar’s orts to crave,

And time to see one that by alms doth live

Disdain to him disdained scraps to give.”

If you’ll excuse my rather artless delivery, it is readily apparent that these lines would seem to come from the imagination of one man’s mind.  Now, here’s an interesting point about this jumble poem – and a point that is rarely commented upon – the lines from Oxford were all written before 1575 while the verses from the Shakespeare canon were written as long as three decades later.  Yet the poet’s mind seemed to be marvelously consistent over that long stretch of time.

These examples I have suggested all point in favour of the conjectural method that has been employed in Dr Hubert’s argument.  And, as Professor Sir Peter said, even if we didn’t have such powerful evidence as this provides, surely this cumulative impact of this evidence points in only one direction.”

Willy’s AfterLife

“How very interesting this woman’s claims are to me.”

“Willy, you couldn’t hide from detection forever.  What is astonishing as we oversee this meeting of scholars is that these linkages could have been missed – or ignored – for so long.”

“That’s right, Will.  I can only imagine that all the academic work has been misled by the Orthodox Stratfordians’ refusal to consider any other explanation.  It is as if they made up their minds about the supposed “fact” that you were the poet/playwright and simply wouldn’t countenance alternatives.  But I do wonder if they really ever considered any other explanations.”

“What do you mean by that ?”

“Well, Bess, we already heard that the Orthodox Stratfordians have been beguiled by the doctored evidence that the Cecils created for their own benefit and for the benefit of posterity.”

“I see.  William Cecil was always concerned about how history would judge him.  I used to tell him that he couldn’t begin to predict that since neither he nor I nor anyone else living at that time could imagine how the world might change and how its values would shift.  But William was rigid in his understanding of right and wrong – that Calvinist belief in providence permeated all his thinking.  He believed that there was truth and there was heresy, and that was that.”

“For sure he was very narrow-minded.  I found his certainty very off-putting.”

“Me, too, Henry.  But his certainty was a small price for me to pay for his loyal devotion.”

“Excuse me, but I still don’t understand how all those other academics who held positions of power and influence in all the best universities would seem to be so closed-minded.  I would have thought that even a brief, cursory survey of the evidence about Will’s life would alert them to the fact that he was a front man.  There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of your contemporary connections to the life of literature.”

“That’s right.  My parents, my wife and my two daughters were all unlettered.  Even my little boy Hamnet was sickly, rarely went to school, and so he couldn’t read very well before he died.  In an out-of-the-way place like my Stratford, there was no reason for the average person to be able to read or write.  The everyday lives of townsmen (and women, especially) were governed by strict rules of traditional behaviour.  The closest that they came to the written word was the preaching in the Church, and Stratford’s ministers were rather wary of Protestantism’s idea that the common man should be empowered to read the Bible.  And, so far as I can recall, my teachers during those years I was a student at the Grammar School were also adherents of Catholicism.  One even had a brother who went to the papist seminary across the Channel.  Our culture in Stratford was profoundly oral.”

“That’s as may be, but it was not like that in my court.  My father had been carefully educated and he made sure that Edward, Mary, and I were also well-schooled.”

“You’ve already told us about your tutor, Roger Ascham I think you said.  And we’ve known about William Cecil’s dedication to educating his wards – he thought that if he could get ahold of us early then he could wean us away form our feudal connections.  He was right so far as he could understand but once we left the tiny world of the court, other forces took hold of us.  The life of a courtier and the life of a locally-based landlord pulled in opposed directions.”

“I knew that which is why I tried to keep all of you as close to court as possible.  To do that, we had to make life at court both exciting and charged with the possibility of great reward.  We knew that we could only keep you under surveillance if we could keep you nearby.  Once the nobility scattered then it was impossible to keep tabs on them.  Although, even keeping your lot under a kind of house arrest while the court was in London carried its own dangers.”

“What do you mean, Bess ?”

“Henry, when we brought the nobility together we created the opportunity for you to conspire together.  And we couldn’t keep really close tabs on you so we needed to create alternative means of surveillance.  That’s what led William Cecil to suborn Willy.  His son Robert did the same two decades later when Robert Devereux got too big for his breeches.  You know, it was a master-stroke to get Willy to divert his energy away from politics and to turn him into our master of entertainment.  That way, he could be both at court and apart from its politics.”

“It was pretty obvious to me, even before that time, that I wasn’t going to have much of a future in the politics of the court.  My so-called career had started out brilliantly – I won the tilts in 1571 and I was told that not only was I nominated for the Order of the Garter but I also garnered unanimous support only to have Bess reject that advice.”

“Willy, I was afraid that you were being presumptuous.  It was too much too soon.  But you took even a slight rejection very badly.  Then after Henry was born and I refused to acknowledge his birth in public, you turned away from me and my court.  It was pretty obvious that while you were there in the flesh, your spirit was elsewhere.”

“Well, of course I did.  It was a stinging rebuke – a double rebuke: in private and in public.  You thwarted my career and you refused to acknowledge our love-child.  And, to make it worse, you had backed William Cecil’s plan to marry me off to his daughter. What else was I to think ?  I was blocked head-on by you, while seeing my progress being obstructed on the one side by William Cecil and on the other side by Robert Dudley, what future was there for me at court ?  Those obstacles seemed insuperable to me.”

“You quit rather easily.”

“I don’t think it was so much a matter as quitting the political game as losing any appetite for that fray while being much more attracted to literary matters.  From the time I was a child, I loved to learn, to read, and to write.  It just seemed to me that I had a better option than being continuously overlooked for promotion; so I plumped for the alternative.  And, given my motivation to purse a non-public life, it proved to be easy for William Cecil to use that momentum to his own purposes because he held both the carrot and the stick.  So, when he dangled his approval of my Italian trip before me, I was like putty in his hands.”

“He was very crafty.”

“And I was very gullible and easily tricked.  If I knew then what I know now, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have gone along with his plans.  But his plans made sense to me in that situation.”

Cecil House,

Christmas, 1574

William Cecil is alone in his study, with his paperwork.  A knock on the door causes him to look up, “Come.”

“Edward, have you had a chance to think about our conversation ?”

“Yes, my lord, I have. While you haven’t really given me much choice in the matter, I’m quite willing to accept your offer.  I desperately want to travel now, when I’m still young enough to do so. Since Anne is with child, my family’s line will hopefully be provided with a male successor and, even if the baby is a female, we’ve proven to be able to reproduce together so there will be time enough to deal with that matter at some later time.”

“Edward, as I mentioned before, when you return there will be the pretence of a major discord between you and Anne.  She will know nothing about this plan so as to insure that her behaviour will seem to be quite believable.  So, when you return you will not resume conjugal relations with her.”

“That’s right.  I was only talking about the impact of my travels in regard to her child-bearing.  Of course, if we are estranged for a time then our conjugal relations will not commence again because in the hothouse world of the court, nothing can be a secret for long.  But, Anne is still very young and if this situation continues for three years – or even five, god forbid – she will still be in her prime.”

“I know that.  It’s one of the reasons why I am making this sacrifice on her behalf.  In the large scheme of things, she’ll be hurt but won’t be too disadvantaged.  However, our country and our Queen will be well served by this ruse.”

“If we are in agreement can we then speak with Her Majesty and make the necessary arrangements for my leave-to-travel ?  I am assuming that you will oversee the administration of my estates while I am away.”

“I won’t watch over your estates personally but I will have my men – Cordell and Dewhurst – attend to the details with your steward, Mr Gent.”

“That’s a good plan because since my wardship ended, this trio has been involved in day-to-day oversight so it won’t require much change to have that arrangement continued will it ?”

“Not in the least.  They are all careful men and completely trustworthy.”

“What about the Queen, will she be directly involved in any way ?”

“No, why should we trouble her with these details ?  I will talk about the leave-to-travel agreement and she will know that the other matters are well in hand.”

“How will we communicate when I am away ?”

“Oh, there are diplomats in Paris, Venice, Rome and other main cities.  They have couriers to deal with such matters.  Don’t worry about that.  What we will have to arrange is for some secret communication to take place when you return via Paris.  But that’s an issue which is a long way down the road.”

“OK, I think that you can trust my man Rowland Yorke with that when the time comes.”

“Fine, I’ve written down his name in my ledger so I can contact him at the appropriate time.  In the meanwhile, we need to make arrangements for your trip.  I want you to meet with the French court at Paris before you turn towards the south.  If you leave London in January or February, you won’t be able to cross the Alps before the snow melts.  The passes to Italy are re-opened in the springtime so that a stop-over in Paris wouldn’t inconvenience you.”

“I suppose that I could travel to the south of France and then take a coastal vessel to Genoa but I want to visit Strasbourg to meet Johannes Sturm so that means the Alpine crossing will be before me.”

“How long do you expect to be gone ?”

“I want to spend a year in Italy – although I know that Milan will be impossible to visit because of the tight security exerted by the Spaniards there.  Mainly, I want to go to Venice, it’s the cultural capital of our times and on the terrafirma nearby, there’s Padua and its famous university.”

“Yes, yes.  We’ve heard all about those dreams of yours.  Now you will be able to reach them with your grasp.  You must be happy with this resolution to our common problems.”

“Indeed, I am.  You have, as they say, killed two birds with one stone.  I am once again impressed with your mastery of the art of the possible.  But I am rather upset that Anne has to sacrificed.”

“I am, too.  But, it can’t be helped.  Besides, she has been taught that it’s a woman’s role to suffer and be silent so I would imagine that she will get plenty of solace from her mother.”

John’s College

Thursday morning (continued)

As agreed, when Dr Crayle ended her presentation, it is Maurice Kelly’s turn to speak.  He is a rough-hewn kind of person – a great shock of white hair, a white beard and ruddy, red skin.  He looks like a lion yet he speaks like a lamb.  His sonorous voice is never raised and is occasionally almost inaudible.  His audience is kept attentive.   He rarely talks from a prepared script and his extemporare wit is something of a legend among academics in the field of Oxford Studies.

“Well, that’s quite an act for me to follow on, isn’t it ?

But I shall try my best to keep you informed and entertained.  My topic is going to be tangentially related to Professor Hubert’s paper.  And it is not at all related to Dr Crayle’s presentation.  I am going to comment on the relative normalcy of Oxford’s social position.  But before I get down to the meat-and-potatoes of it, I need to said that by “normalcy” I have a very specific meaning in mind because Edward de Vere was a quite unforgettable personality in his own time.

Edward de Vere’s “normalcy” should be considered in relation to the educational backgrounds of the other literary giants of his era.  Renaissance giants like Dante, Erasmus, Camoes, Cervantes, and Moliere.  Let me discuss each one in turn:

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), was born into a thirteenth-century Florentine noble famly; as a child he was taught Latin grammar before being enrolled in an abacus school where he would have learned mathematics, and then he rounded off his education at the Franciscan medicants’ school at Santa Croce, where he would have studied Greek and Arabic.  He was influenced by Guido Cavalcanti and Brunetto Latini, who were the prime movers of the Dolce Stil Novo, the most advanced intellectual current of the late duocento and early trecento.  In addition to the Divina Commedia, he is the accepted author of seven more works and the possible author of two more.

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469-1536) was an illegitimate child of a clergyman who died a few years after Erasmus’ birth.  As an orphan and a bastard, he was “donated” to the Church and received a first-rate education at a school run by the Bretheren of the Common Life.  As a young man, without any familial resources, he entered an Augustinian monastery but was soon able to enroll at the University of Paris’ College de Montaigu, a center of reforming activity and humanistic studies.  He spent time in England at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity.  It was at this time that he was befriended by King Henry VIII and the Thomas More, who was later beheaded by the Tudor monarch when he wouldn’t agree to the King’s Great Matter.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) was born out of wedlock in Arezzo yet by the time he was twenty-four he was patronized by the rich Roman banker, Agostino Chigi who was also the patron of Raphael..  At that time his brilliant satire about the death of Pope Leo X’s pet elephant.had announced his arrival and established his fame.  In 1527 he took up residence in Venice where he was friendly with the painter, Titian.  Over the years, his poisoned pen produced hugely popular satires in the form of both neo-Platonic dialogues and comedies, known for mocking the deceptions and flattery of courtiers.  In later years he would be patronized by an array of Renaissance popes, kings, and noblemen.  So, like Erasmus before him, illegitimate birth and his obscure origin did not inhibit his rise to the very pinnacle of the social world.

Luis Vaz de Camoes (c. 1524 – 1580) was the brightest star of the Portuguese Renaissance.  His uncle was Chancellor of the University of Coimbra as well as being the Prior of the Monastery of Santa Cruz.  At the university, then considered to be the finest in Europe, he was exposed to classical Greek, Roman, and Latin works.  Camoes’ own masterwork, The Lusiads, derives its great power from the authors’ own experience. Camoes travelled along the African coast and all around the Indian Ocean in his seventeen-year career overseas. The national epic of Portugal was written by a man who took part in the great age of discovery in which the Portuguese were at the vanguard during his lifetime.

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) was known as in his lifetime as the Prince of Poets,  He was educated at the College de Navarre in Paris and then lived from 1537-1540 in the Scottish King’s service when James V married Madeleine, a French princess. When he returned to France he was enrolled in the service of the Duke of Orleans for a time before enrolling in the College Coqueret which was a hothouse of the literary avant garde, called Les Pleiades. Ronsard’s writing was widely popular and he was patronized by the highest levels of the court aristocracy.  Despite being on the wrong side, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre did little to undermine his popularity although his later years were blighted by ill health. Ronsard was prolific and his work was varied in style but while he did not introduce the sonnet form to France he was its most famous exponent.

Miguel de Cervantes Savedra (1547-1616) was the fourth son of a Spanish, minor-gentry family.  Little is known of his early life or his education although some biographers believe that he studied at the University of Salamanca because Cervantes worked in his later years as a professional in the state apparatus as a letrado, many of whom were graduates of that university.  Some other biographers speculate that he was a novice with the Jesuits in Cordoba or Sevilla.  If his education during youth and adolescence is poorly documented  and therefore uncertain, there is clear evidence that by the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two he is known to have been in the service of Giulio Acquaviva, a wealthy Italian priest who became a cardinal in 1570.  During the War of Cyprus, Cervantes served in the Spanish forces, fought at the Battle of Lepanto, and was later captured by Algerian pirates in 1575.  He was freed upon the payment of a ransom and returned to Spain where he worked as a tax collector and also as an outfitter for the Spanish Armada.  Despite his checkered personal history, Cervantes interacted with the most prominent court poets; one of whom was Francisco de Robles, who sponsored the publication of both parts of Don Quixote.

Lope de Vega (1562-1635) grew up in a plebeian household.  His father was an embroiderer in Madrid.  He was a recognized child genius – by the time he was twelve he had already gained fame by translating Latin verse and had written his first play.  He was soon afterwards enrolled in the Jesuit school, Colegio Imperial, and then was patronized by the Bishop of Avila who sponsored his entry to the University of Alcala de Henares.  His personal life was picaresque but his dramatic contributions were steadily accumulating and he is reputed to have written an astounding total of 1500 three-act plays (comedias), of which about one-third survive.  By 1590, after an abortive role in the Armada of 1588, he became the secretary of the Duke of Alba and later occupied the same role in the household of the Duke of Sessa.  His later years combined baroque religiosity – he took holy orders in 1615 – with unbridled promiscuity, cross-cut with personal tragedies.  These personal trials and tribulations resonated in his capa y espada plays (“cloak and sword”) which connect love intrigues ordeals relating to honour relations among the gentry, who formed the backbone of his audience.

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622 – 1673) is known to posterity as Moliere,  His father, who was a valet de chambre in the household of Louis XIII, had mapped out a conventional career for him – he was educated at a petty school in Paris and then enrolled in the prestigious Jesuit College de Clermont.  Then he studied to be a lawyer but he rebelled and became an intinerant actor and playwright, combining elements from the Commedia dell’Arte with more refined classical French comedy.  He was patronized by Philippe I, Duc d’Orleans, the brother of Louis XIV and became the Sun King’s favourite, personally receiving a royal pension while his troupe was known as Le Troupe du Roi.

You might well ask “what’s the point of this little biographical tour” ?   It’s simple; what we see in these eight potted histories of de Vere’s greatest contemporaries are all the characteristics which distinguish the Earl of Oxford from the Orthodox Stratfordians’ William Shakespeare.  Like de Vere, these men were very well-educated and/or connected to the highest circles in their time. These men were Renaissance artists and in that time one had to be connected, whether through birth or recognition of their brilliance.  Even those who did not enjoy the privileges of noble birth found their genius patronized by courtiers.  Some were quite conventional but most were self-marginalized, in one way or another.

To be sure, my little list is highly selective but if we added such giants as Leonardo de Vinci or Michelangelo Buonarotti  to our list we wouldn’t change its overall colouration but, instead, we would only add more detail with which to underline the point of my exercise – William Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon sticks out like a sore thumb.  He simply doesn’t fit this “profile” in much the same way that Diana Price’s “Literary Paper Trails” shows us that the Stratford man’s non-profile was distinct from his English theatrical contemporaries.  Now this is not to say that a genius cannot conform to the Romantic stereotype of an unknown struggling to break free from his family and destiny to the sunlit plains of recognition.  Rather, it is to say that it just didn’t happen that way in the sixteenth century.  For Edward de Vere, on the other hand, this intellectual profile of the early modern period fits like a glove.”

When Kelly had ended his presentation, a murmur moves around the seminar table.  Professor Sir Peter Schofield knew that the group is getting restless.  It’s time for their morning coffee.

“Oh, my goodness.  Our commentators have given us a lot to chew upon in the second half of the morning session.  Let’s now adjourn to the common room where the staff have laid on coffee and biscuits for us.  Since it’s a lovely morning, why don’t we take out refreshments outside and enjoy the Fellow’s Garden.  I can’t imagine there will be any objection to our interloping in that sacrosanct ground since we will be protected from rude inquiries from officious college porters by the College’s Master !”

Willy’s AfterLife

“This really is surprising to me.  Who would have imagined that our lives would be so closely investigated four hundred years later ?”

“Speak for yourself, Will.  As Queen, it was always lurking in the back of my mind that what they call “my place in history” was important.”

“We know that, but I don’t think that you made decisions based on their evaluation, did you ?”

“No, of course not.  Like you, Willy  – but in my own way, and for my own reasons – I made decisions based on what made sense to me at the time.”

“That’s right.  What these people consider to be “history” is really only the remnants of our LifeOnEarth.”

“I can see the force of that argument.  When those Orthodox Stratfordians these scholars talk about so incessantly, refer to me they seem to be more concerned with their fantasies than the realities of my life.”

“I agree with that, Will.  But let’s go back to Willy’s point about the “remnants” on which they have to base their evaluations.  This seems to me to be crucially important since we know – well, we know it from our present vantage-point – that by no means all the relevant information or documents about our LifeOnEarth survived.  Sometimes it was willfully destroyed as Willy argued to us that William Cecil’s man, Camden, reworked the evidence in such a way as to show Cecil in the best possible light.”

“Henry, that’s an act of commission but there were also acts of omission to which I can testify.  For all the huffing and puffing that the Oxfordians do on my behalf, they are stymied by the absolute and total disappearance of all my writings except those letters which were kept in the Cecils’ archive.  When I was living with Elizabeth Trentham, my second wife, those papers were in my study at King’s Place in Hackney.  Perhaps not all my correspondence but all my manuscripts – they were my most valuable possessions.  But, somehow, they seem to have been lost.  Lost forever.  Lost to eternity.  How ?  Why ?  I just don’t know.”

“Look at it another way.  If your manuscripts had survived then this kind of conference would never happen.  There would be no mysterious controversy about the authorship of your poetry and plays.”

“Yes, that’s quite true isn’t it Will ?  All these people have to go on is my reputation among our contemporaries.”

Cecil House,

January, 1575

William Cecil is sitting in his favourite chair, working through his papers.  There is a knock on the door.

“Come.”

“Hello my lord.”

‘Edward, you’re on time for a change.”

“Today is a very important day for me.  We can tie up all the loose ends for my trip.  And that is something that I want more than anything else.”

“I know that, only too well.  When you want something it’s impossible to change your mind.”

“I’m not fickle.  I’m determined – even if the objects of my determination don’t agree with yours.  I would hope that you respect that in me. Even if that respect is grudging.”

“That’s fair to say.”

“Are we going down the river to Greenwich to see Her Majesty this morning ?”

“I’ve already arranged for the boat.  It’s ready and waiting for us at The Embankment.  Because the river is now ebbing towards the sea, it should be a very quick voyage downstream.

Now, Edward, I want you to be very circumspect this morning.  Perhaps it might be best if I do the talking with Her Majesty.  You should not speak unless you are spoken to.  This meeting has to negotiate a few tricky issues and I think you’d agree with me that I am better able to do that.”

“My Lord, I cannot disagree with you about that.  Besides, when I’m with Bess – Her Majesty – there is always some confusion about whether I am talking with a friend or our ruler.  As you know, she likes to change her role according to her whims.  I know you’ve seen he do it many times with Robert Dudley and probably a few times with me, too.”

“I have indeed.  Her unpredictable moods are something more than female vanity because they serve her political purposes.  It’s one of the ways she controls you – and Leicester, too.”

With that said and their strategy agreed, the two men get up and de Vere steps back to let William Cecil leave the room first.  This morning, de Vere is being ultra-cautious in stroking his father-in-law’s ego.  As they walk through Cecil House, the servants have been called aside, so the corridors are empty.  When they get to the front door, a knot of liveried retainers provide them with an escort, which accompanies them across The Strand, down the alleyway to The Embankment.  A boat is waiting for them, with its flags already unfurled.  Today the boat is sporting the royal crest as well as Cecil’s banner.  In a status-conscious world, these flags give clear-and-present warnings that this vessel is on official, state business – anyone seeing these banners knows instantly that they have to give way immediately, without question.

Cecil and de Vere walk onto the deck of the river-boat, seating themselves in the cushioned chairs on the raised dais, under their own canopy.  Once they have been seated, the captain issues his commands, the deck-hands pull in the ropes and push the river-boat into the tidal flow.  The captain then instructs the drummer-boy to beat out the rowers’ rhythm and in a few moments the galley is speeding down-river, its speed enhanced by the ebbing tide.

After a quarter of an hour, Cecil’s riverboat has passed under Tower Bridge and is coming in sight of Greenwich.  The river, east of Tower Bridge, is crammed with all manner of small, agile vessels that bring Tyneside coal – to heat Londoners’ homes – as well as Baltic timber – to supply the booming city’s building trades – from the deep-water trans-shipment area in the Pool of London down to the quays and warehouses in the shallower, dockland waters closer to the City of London.

Despite all this activity, the sound of the approaching drum-beats opens the way ahead of them, like the parting of the Red Sea before Moses and the Israelites.  In fact, Cecil’s river-boat has been preceded a few minutes earlier by its very own river-navigator, whose progress is sounded by a trumpet-call that signals to the small wherries, lighters, and other craft that they must yield right-of-way for the important personage following behind.  This is a strictly-enforced rule-of-the-river, offenders didn’t get a second-chance to obey its order.

This rule-of-the-river was implemented earlier in the century so that the Tudors could move more freely from the political center in Westminster to the residential court at Greenwich.  Despite the burgeoning activity on the Thames, which has increased massively in recent years, this rule-of-the-river has worked well and allowed for quick official movement between the two sites of England’s government.  The fact that the Tudors – and especially Elizabeth – spend only a small amount of time at Greenwich means that the rule-of-the-river did not unduly interrupt commerce.

When Cecil’s riverboat docks at Greenwich, it is met by a royal guard who are already standing at attention on dockside.  The nobles, Cecil again leading the way, insert themselves inside the two ranks of guardsmen and the whole cortege makes its way to the Queen’s residence, which is just a short walk from the dock.

A blast from the quay-side attendants’ cannon had announced their arrival and so the Queen is present to welcome them into her palace, with all due ceremony.  As was her custom when residing at Greenwich, she is not outfitted in full regalia although there is no mistaking her sumptuary magnificence.  Her clothing bespeaks majesty.  Nor is she alone.  Alongside the Queen, to her right, her ladies-in-waiting are arrayed according to their rank while to her left there is a group comprising the official gentlemen of the court.  Flanking them, to the left and right of these members of the royal household, are a few dozen other people whose massed, liveried presence is a key component of regality.

For Cecil, all this ceremonial ritual is nothing more-nor-less than a nuisance to be endured because, in the course of his seventeen years as her principal advisor, he visited Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich so often that it now seems to be an unnecessary formality.   An unnecessary formality that serves no apparent purpose, other than slowing down the business of governing.  William Cecil is not a man for symbolic expressions.   For the Earl of Oxford, on the other hand, it just adds to the exhilaration of the morning.  Edward de Vere is nervous, anxious, and very excited.  This promises to be the day he could break free to given liberty from the constraints of court, marriage, and family.  He could finally be his own man.

After the Queen conducts the formal greetings, she strides ahead of her two visitors.  The three of them make their way through the large front doors and into the palace.  Once the Queen’s Majesty departs, the throng of her attendants dispersex.  The courtyard is suddenly empty and quiet.  Only a few guardsmen stand at their posts but the real business of government is taking place elsewhere.

St John’s College

Thursday, mid-morning

The morning-session’s paper and the two responses had been completed. It is time for a coffee break.  The seminar participants shuffled out of the seminar room.  Some are talking with one another, some walk out on their own, possibly lost in thought or concerned with their own performance.

The group saunters across the lawn – blithely disregarding the signs saying (in both French and English) that it is forbidden for visitors to walk on the grass.  The college porters, who are most often superannuated policemen or soldiers, are not amused at the way these guests flout the rules.  They consider themselves to be the guardians of order and they are usually much more officious about the College’s rules than the Fellows, who mostly regard such by-laws as petty irrelevancies.  Only a few of the seminar members are Fellows of Oxbridge colleges so they have no idea that they are breaching etiquette in such a gross manner.  Professor Sir Peter Schofield led them across the lawn, rather like the Pied Piper of legend.

Professor Sir Peter Schofield carefully cultivates his image as a kind of latter-day Pied Piper.  His dress-style fits perfectly with one’s image of a “pied” man – today, he is wearing a bright orange sweater, a lime green shirt, and purple corduroy trousers, with red and yellow argyle socks and white tennis shoes.  He is unmistakeable – and that is just how he wants it to be.  Compared to him, the rest of the seminar members’ sumptuary scheme is entirely predictable.  The older males seem to favour shabby, genteel clothing while the tenured females are attired in no-nonsense, power-dressing styles, usually in black.  The majority of the younger participants clothe themselves with that kind of nostalgie de la boue which junior academics often favour as an expression of their solidarity with the working people of the world.

When the group re-assembles in the Senior Fellows’ lounge, Professor Sir Peter again steps forward to appropriate for himself the role of master of ceremonies, as he had before the morning session.  He is especially concerned to make an intervention in regard to seating arrangements.

“Hello, everyone.  In order to keep our group from forming into cliques, I want you all to sit with colleagues other than the ones you sat beside this morning or yesterday.  I’ve already explained my reasons for intervening in this way and I hope that it does not prove to be disagreeable to anyone.”

Having been given this ex cathedra injunction, no one believes s/he is in a position to disagree.  And, in fact, it has proven to be a marvelous way to integrate the newcomers into the charmed circle of veterans.

Professor Sir Peter took it upon himself to gather together three people for his own table.  In addition to Dr Jason Williams of Warwick University, he singled out Ms Penelope Thompson of The Australian National University, as well as his old friend Professor Maggie Bailey, who has recently retired from her Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge.  It is an odd group but that is the point of the exercise – it certainly wouldn’t have come together in this way if anyone else had taken the initiative.  Having intervened to assemble his coffee-mates, Professor Sir Peter starts their conversation with a question.

“Maggie, what did you make of the argument from silence concerning Cecil’s silencing of the Earl of Oxford ?”

“Peter, we all very well know that this kind of argument has been tried before.  The surprising gaps in the documentary record relating to Edward de Vere’s life have led numerous other scholars to make wild projections.  A few have even gone so far as to argue that he was the sole translator of the Authorized, King James version of the New Testament.  That is clearly impossible because Oxford died in June, 1604.”

“Maggie – may I call you that ? – it’s my understanding that the evidence for the Earl of Oxford’s death is very nearly circumstantial.  There is no recognition of it in the official record.  The State Papers are silent on the matter which is odd since he was the senior peer in the realm, holding a ceremonial high office.  Also, no one has yet found a will nor is there any record of a funeral.”

“Jason – and, yes, you can call me Maggie if I can call you Jason – that kind of revisionist line smacks of a conspiracy theory.  It might make sense that there was no will and no recorded funeral if he had committed suicide, perhaps in the terror of a plague epidemic or in the context of despair about his declining health.  We can speculate but, honestly, we don’t know.  But there is much more compelling evidence to the contrary.’

“You mean the eulogy of his half-cousin, Percival Golding.  But that was written some time after his death, was it not ?”

“That’s true.  Nothing is simple or straightforward when we try to delineate the outlines of Edward de Vere’s life – or his death.”

“That uncertainty is one of the intellectual attractions of his biography.  But it’s more than just “uncertainty” resulting from a lack of documentation.”

“Penny, what do you mean by that ?”

“Well, Sir Peter, whenever anything happens to Oxford it is shrouded in mystery.  Some of the mysteries are directly connected with his actions; but others are only indirectly connected to him.”

“What do you have in mind ?”

“First, there’s the strangeness of the way in which King James acted in regards to Henry Wriothesley.  Upon being acknowledged King – and before his coronation and almost three weeks before Elizabeth’s burial – James immediately ordered the release of Southampton from the Tower.  James restored him to the titles and honours that he had enjoyed before his association with Essex in their foolhardy insurrection – I often wonder what we can call their mad-cap activies in those winter days in 1601 since it has never been clear to me that they were treasonously in revolt against the Queen but, rather, they were protesting against Robert Cecil’s hegemonic domination over the Queen’s Council.  And, as if that weren’t puzzling enough, I wonder what we can make of the events of June 24^th, 1604, when Southampton was imprisoned overnight and then just as suddenly released.”

“I am also confused about that latter turn of events.  Why was Southampton imprisoned on that day ?  Did his imprisonment have something to do with Oxford’s death ?  Why was he released the next day ?  And why was no action taken against him ?”

“Sir Peter, the usual explanation for these odd events is that there was some connection with Oxford’s death.  But that argument is only advanced because of the apparent coincidence in dates between these events.  Nothing substantial can be substantiated, as it were.”

“So, Jason, are you of a mind to believe that a similar situation prevailed thirty years earlier, when Oxford was thought to have been intimate with Queen Elizabeth ?”

“I’m not sure I follow you.  What do you mean “a similar situation” ?  [a brief pause ensues]  OK, I get it.  Yes, I do believe that that’s a possibility.  But what is absolutely disconcerting for the Oxfordian claims is that, where the key events in his life are concerned, all the waters are muddied.  That certainly gives credence to what Maggie called a “conspiracy theory”.

The standard twenty minutes for the coffee break has now passed and, as is the case throughout the conference, Professor Sir Peter takes it upon himself to call the group to order.
Willy’s AfterLife

“You know….”  Willy starts to talk but just drifted away.

“What were you going to say ?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about the ways in which my LifeOnEarth has been discussed by those scholars.  More particularly, I am bemused – yes, that’s the right word – I am bemused that it is being subjected to this kind of scrutiny.  When I was alive, I lived in the moment and never really gave much heed to what others thought of me.”

“That, Willy, was a big problem for you.”

“No, Bess, it was a big problem for everyone else.  I did what I wanted to do.  The very idea that “history” would have an opinion of me would have been just weird to me   It’s not as if I was a significant courtier – well, at least, I wasn’t of much significance after those fruitless efforts in my early years.”

“Willy, you were never going to be an immediate sensation, regardless of what you thought of yourself.  You were a handsome young man, an excellent dancer, and an entertaining partner, but you were stuck behind Cecil on the one hand and Robert Dudley on the other.  In your early years, you amused me.”

“That’s exactly so.  I was a plaything and you made sure that I knew it.”

“What do you mean by that ?”

“Will, you would not have been privy to the inner workings of the court scene.  Of course, you wouldn’t because you were only a mere child in the early 1570s and, besides that, you were living in provincial obscurity.”

“That’s true.  So tell me what you are getting at.”

“What I am referring to was the way in which Bess toyed with me.  The best example is the way in which she acted in relation to my candidacy for membership in the Order of the Garter.  It was a little thing to her, but when it occurred I was deeply offended.”

“Willy, you have to remember that neither Henry nor I know anything about those events which occurred in the early 1570s – Henry wasn’t even  born until 1573, as you both well know.  Please, tell us more.”

“The Order of the Garter was a silly, frivolous, exclusive club.  No more than twenty-five men could be members.  And, to become a member one not only had to be nominated by a sitting member but also accepted by a vote from the committee of ten.  If one passed this test, then it was up to the reigning monarch to accept or block the nomination.  That’s the way it worked.  Bess had the veto power.  And, in my case, in 1571, she used it to block me even though all ten voting members had accepted me.  The next year, so I was told by William Cecil who had recently become my father-in-law when I married Anne in December, 1571, I received seven votes but Bess blocked me again.  No explanation was forthcoming but Bess’ double rejection meant that my pride was deeply stung.”

“Edward, you were too prideful by half.  And, besides, didn’t I give you other favours ?”

“Bess, I know that.  But what your actions seemed to indicate to me was that I was going to have to wait – for how long ? – before I would be accepted into the inner circles of power.  I was not willing to wait.  I was always impatient.”

“That’s too true.”

“But I had options.  If I was going to be your toy-boy then that had its benefits but it was clearly a short-term role.  Even back then, you were grooming Christopher Hatton to be a rival to me in the same way that you had chosen me to be an adversary in love, to be played against Robert Dudley.”

“Edward, we’ve been through this already.  You know very well that I had to use my discretionary powers to look after myself, first and foremost.  That meant that I had to make awful, terrible choices which cut me to the quick.  You were a private person, I was not.  You were a male, I was not.  So you had alternatives, I did not.”

“Bess, I grudgingly accepted that.  Really, the straw that broke this camel’s back was the way in which you rejected our son.  But, I could dimly see – as the Bible says, “as through a glass darkly” – that there were insuperable obstacles ahead of me in public life. The Garter decisions were thus the first significant reversal of fortune for me.  Your decision to execute my cousin, Norfolk, also showed me that my influence would be marginal.  But, in looking back on those decisions a few years later, after the debacle which occurred with our baby boy, it hardened my resolve to go my own way and to look out for myself, above all.”

“Edward, I’m not sure that I completely believe what you’re saying because it sounds like what those academics call “revisionism”.”

“I know that.  You would say that, wouldn’t you ?  But you have to understand that I had been brought up with the expectation of being special.  Your actions – and those decisions I’ve just mentioned – showed me that matters were not going to be so easy for me.  I think that that’s what you’d call an un-sentimental education.  For me, that was the equivalent of discovering that those things which didn’t kill me, made me stronger.”

“You two are wandering off the topic again.  I believe that what Willy had started to say was that these academics’ concerns with the details of his life are bemusing.  I think that he was going to reflect on the distance between our lives as we live them and the way in which others interpret our actions.  Isn’t that so, Willy ?”

“Henry’s exactly right about that.  Although, perhaps towards the end of my LifeOnEarth, I became aware of the importance of what I had achieved in my literary endeavours.  Of course, when you’re in the midst of events, you don’t always see or appreciate differences in perspective about oneself.  This is what I was commenting on in relation to their discussions.

I never thought about the immortality of my writing or its place in history.  That way of looking at things was just foreign to me.  While I was fully engaged in writing and directing my plays, I was driven to do those things in my own way and to my own satisfaction.

Looking back, I can now see that the events which occurred in my early twenties when I was married off to Anne Cecil and then Bess thwarted in my political career combined to create a very real turning-point.  I would probably have completely forsaken political life at that time if I hadn’t been kept on William Cecil’s short leash.  It was because of the bargain I made with him that I was plunged into the conspiratorial world of the Catholic nobles.  But that activity took place under the cover of my playwriting and performing my works on stage.  As it happened, my public activity was a perfect fit with my private passions.”

“Was that unexpected ?”

“Yes and no.  That’s not much of an answer, is it ?  By the time I was in my early twenties, I had already written a lot of poetry and, even earlier – as a teenager – I had translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses that was published under my Uncle Golding’s  supervision and in his name.  But, as I described earlier, William Cecil silenced me.  He stopped me from putting my name – or my works – forward before the public.  He took that recognition away with his one hand but gave me something much better with his other hand, so to speak.

As I told the three of you before, the cost of the bargain I made so that I could travel to Italy was that I became one of Cecil’s creatures, part of his spying network.  The benefit to me was that as a result of this bargain I had quite unwittingly freed myself from aspiring to rise in the snakepit of courtly politics.

The oppositional role he crafted for me was really beneficial for me.  I could spend a lot of time reading, writing, acting, directing, and just fooling around with people that Cecil neither understood nor admired.  But for me, these were people who were exciting precisely because they were so unlike me.  And, like Will, they came from backgrounds that were radically different from mine.  Inadvertently, William Cecil created the situation in which I expanded my horizons.”

“It’s true that in LifeOnEarth, there was always a price to pay.  You were lucky, though, because you also got the prize of posthumouos recognition.”

“That’s not so obvious to me, Henry.  Those seminar-people might all believe that I was the author of poems, sonnets, and plays but almost no one else does.  From what I can understand, most people living in their time believe that Will, who was chosen to be my front-man, was the iconic author.  Why, there even seems to be a huge industry devoted to preserving his fame.  I don’t believe that there has been much posthumous recognition for me.  And we can see from the Oxfordians’ fulmination that their opponents, the Orthodox Stratfordians, seem to hold sway over public opinion.  From what I can understand, almost no one believes in my authorship and therefore there’s not much in the way of posthumous recognition for me.”

St John’s College

Thursday, mid-morning (continued)

Coffee-time is now over and the seminar members have wandered back to the meeting room.  It is now time for discussion of Cyril Hubert’s paper and the two responses.

Again, Professor Sir Peter Schofield intercedes, beginning the session with his own opinions.

“I am happy to see that we have all embraced the spirit of collegiality and continued to shift our seating arrangements.  Breaking down barriers – especially informal barriers – is a significant thing in these academic interchanges; it reduces the distance between people and creates goodwill amongst us.  I know that sounds corny, as the Americans would say, but I can tell you that my opinion on this matter is based on many more experiences than I care to recall.  Having got that business out of the way, I want to begin our discussion with a small autobiographical reminiscence which is, I think, germane to our topic.  I first became engaged with the Oxfordian movement when I was an undergraduate, working on my honours essay in my final year.  That was a long time ago but I remember it was like it was the day before yesterday, as it were.

My topic was “Shakespeare’s Standpoint: Political Consciousness-Raising in the Renaissance.”  My special interest was with Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida.  Looking back now, I can see that I was under the sway of E.M.W. Tillyard and Christopher Hill who, despite their opposed ideological viewpoints, were in agreement that the playwright was a social conservative whose ideas were in tune with upper-class fear and loathing of the plebeians.

It was during one of my infrequent meetings with my director of studies that I mentioned how I thought that the speeches of Coriolanus and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida

could be analyzed in relation to Renaissance theories of political subordination.  When I had finished, my supervisor asked me a simple question: “what would happen to your theory of authorship if you analyzed the History Plays ?”  He caught me off-guard and I muttered something about how those plays had been written to glorify the Tudor monarchy.  I could see that I was not convincing him so I realized that I had to turn the tables on him.  So, I asked him if he thought that my answer was satisfactory.  He said quite firmly, “No.”

But I persisted with questioning him and asked him why he was unconvinced. That was a clever move because he was now the one who was caught off-guard.  It was the case then – and usually is nowadays, too – that students go into this kind of meeting in order to be grilled, not being the one to do the grilling.  I had turned up the heat.

His answer was both short and to the point.  “Schofield, I think that you are confusing Renaissance political principles with a feudalist’s opinions.”  That answer shook me.  And, as I left his office, I was in part humiliated and in part excited.  I had a new way to argue my thesis.

Sometimes we learn the hard way.  Sometimes we get a shock of recognition and change our ideas – rather like the man who began his journey on the Damascus Road as the Hebrew Saul but arrived at his destination as the Christian Paul.

I wanted to share this experience of mine because I think it relates to how we might think with these arguments.  How ? in what ways ? for what reasons ? was the author of Shakespeare’s works a spokesman for the declining nobility of Elizabethan era.”

Neddy Shorts, never one to hide his light under a bushel basket, talks as soon as it became apparent that Professor Sir Peter had finished.

“That’s uncanny. I became alerted to Oxford’s authorship from another direction.  I was an undergraduate, at UCSanta Cruz in the heady days during the advent of the new historicism.  At that time, my admiration for Walt Whitman knew no bounds so when I came across the great democrat’s assessment of TheBard, I was taken aback to see that he had been there before me.  My previous undergraduate classes had included an obligatory Shakespeare seminar, taught by an older gentleman who had been educated thirty years earlier in “the new criticism”.  So, my education in Shakespeare really lacked any historical context – the play was the thing, and the author was a genius who sprang from the sullen earth of Warwickshire in full command of his powers.

Whitman’s view was that “Shakespeare…is not only the tally of feudalism, but I should say Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism in literature”.  Reading this stopped me dead.  I was a Damascus-Road convert, to repeat Professor Sir Peter.  Later, when I was digging more deeply into Whitman’s views, I came across an even more powerful statement which I have long since committed to memory:

“Conceiv’d out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism – personifying in unparallell’d ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own particular air of arrogance (no mere imitation) – only one of those ‘wolfish earls’ so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works….”

How right he was; but since he was not a literary scholar – or detective – he didn’t follow up this profound insight.

What sticks in my mind is the quite incredible disjunction between Whitman’s bloodthirsty “ ‘wolfish earls’ “ and the effete Earl of Oxford.  I’m not saying that de Vere was Whitman’s kinda guy, if you get my drift, but he was also not a man’s man.  The times forbade that because he was raised to be a Renaissance courtier, not a soldier.  And, Elizabeth seemed to go out of her way to thwart his desire for soldiering-glory at every juncture.  By the time of the Armada, Oxford was lame and marginalized from all military actions.  Yet his uncle Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, had been the military commander when the royalists crushed the Rebellion of the North in 1569 and his cousins were known as “the Fighting Veres”.  What had happened to Oxford is that he was caught in the middle when the monarchy struggled long and hard to “domesticate” the aristocracy.  As Professor Tolmie, my professor and mentor, would say, the monarchy centralized the means of violence.  And, by and large, the Tudors’ gain was Oxford’s loss.

In Cyril’s paper, we understand how the Tudors operated.  Having gained the throne through warfare – by conquest – they were served by men who were skilled in espionage.  But as long as the old nobility persisted, the crown lay uneasily on the head of the monarch.  The Tudors might have succeeded in centralizing the means of violence but they did not have complete agreement as to the legitimacy of their sovereignty.  Between their dubious legitimacy and the subjugation of their main rivals, there was an uneasy peace.  It was in that contested space that Oxford was born and lived.”

Professor Sir Peter seems to be chuffed with what Neddy Shorts has had to say.  He looks around the table.  His attention is caught by Dr Brianna Di Palma, a shooting-star, in the ascendant.  Her recent article on “Class Consciousness, Blood Relations, and the Wars of the Roses” (published in 2013 in Oxfordian Studies) has been hugely influential.  It has brought her the kind of recognition which more usually only came to an academic author with the publication of a monograph.

When Dr Di Palma begins to speak, her piercing voice catches everyone’s attention.  She talks very quickly, punctuating her sentences with that “yeah ?” which was such a distinctive feature of “estuary English” that had become widely popular among young people a decade earlier.

“These comments from my two senior, male colleagues resonate with me.  I got into Oxfordian Studies in a not-dissimilar way – when I was doing undergraduate English at UC London, yeah ?, my professor taught a fourth-year seminar on “Shakespeare’s English Kings”.  A good part of our course dealt with the revisionism in the plays touching on the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century.  We were made acutely aware of the propaganda role that these works were designed to achieve for the popular audience of the Elizabethan stage.  What really caught my attention, though, were the scenes in Henry VI, part 2, Act 4 in which the playwright is concerned with the rebellion of Jack Cade.

The context for the rebellion was the death rattle of the Hundred Years War.  Just twenty years after Joan of Arc’s execution, when English victory seemed possible if not likely, things had fallen apart.  What concerned the rebels led by Cade was that taxes were rising, and rather than leading to increased military effort in France, the money was supposedly being diverted into the pockets of the king’s evil councilors.  The response of the King’s Council was savage repression which was not very successful and led to an army mutiny.  So parlous did the state of affairs seem that the King fled to Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire.  The power vacuum that ensued created conditions for a wider uprising.  After the inconclusive battle for control of London two weeks later, the forces of law and order slowly gained the upper hand, yeah ?  Within another fortnight it was over.  Cade was executed and the world was turned right-side up again.

Historians are in general agreement that the forces led by Jack Cade (whoever he might have been) had serious grievances yet the play treats them as “The rascal people, thirsting after prey” who are all too willing to “join with the traitor [Cade]”.  Obviously, the play’s author has no sympathy for popular sense of injustice, yeah ?  To underline his view that the triumph of the commons would lead to something like a social revolution, Cade is made to claim:

“There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it a felony to drink small beer.  All the realm shall be in common…there shall be money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.”

When Cade’s men are attacking London, yeah ?, he tells them “Now go some and pull down the Savoy; others to the inns of court; down with them all.”  Private property and the institutions of civil society were both in peril, yeah ?  For the author, the lesson of Cade’s rebellion is that the flimsy promises of the unknown, new model world of the revolutionary will be worse than any known grievances which are borne by the common people.

In these scenes, the common people are faceless followers led astray by a madman, yeah ?  Instituting the dictatorship of the plebs would mean that “The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me tribute”.  In Cade’s tyrannical regime, “there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead, ere they have it.” And, to underscore Cade’s megalomaniacal fantasies of a world turned upside-down, “men shall hold of me in capite.”  The construction of this last wild prediction is particularly telling, yeah ?, since it is clear that the author’s legal background is used to put words into the rebel’s mouth.

Thus, popular rebellion is fraught with the perils of dictatorial demagoguery, yeah ?  I’ve mentioned the author’s treatment of Jack Cade and his rebellious followers because it seemed to me back then that too little attention was being paid to the re-contruction of historical reality that was integral to these plays.  When commoners or plebs are introduced, they are given few lines and they usually are buffoons, yeah ?  They are given animal-like personal characteristics.  We are told that they smell and that they are usually very stupid.  If they have a political stance, it is dangerous.  This is clearly the view of the social order as seen from the top-down, yeah ?  Such a viewpoint would seem natural to a man born into a feudal system of power, yeah ?  It would hardly seem to be way in which a small-town, tradesman’s son would understand popular grievances.”

Sensing that Dr Di Palma had finished, Professor Sir Peter Schofield again takes command.  “These two comments have been very interesting – not least, of course, because they echo my own experience.”

Pleased with himself, Professor Sir Peter looks around the table to see if anyone else wants to commend him.  No one does.

“Well, if no one else has anything further to add at this juncture then I suggest that we go for our luncheon in the Fellows’ Dining Room.  We will re-assemble here at 2:30 for the afternoon – the pre-ciculated paper is by Professor Tim Brooksby of University College, Oxford on “The Earl of Oxford and Literary Patronage”.  Tim will summarize his argument and then we will have comments from Dr Juliette Lewes of Sussex University and Professor Sir Harold T. Roper of the University of Toronto.”

Since no one else seems to be willing to contribute to the comments section of the morning session, the seminar breaks down into chatting sub-groups.

Willy’s AfterLife

“You know what ?  This is really amusing.  I could never have imagined that I could have so much fun without laughing.”

“Willy, you’re just happy to be the center of attention – here and there, now and then !”

“Of course I am happy that these seminar-people seem bent on recovering my hidden glory.  Will, what do you feel about having our subterfuge “exposed” ?”

“To be honest, I don’t have much of an opinion about being “exposed” as you said.  For me, it was never about stealing the limelight or claiming glory.  At the time, it was obvious to people in the theatre – as opposed to people who went to the theatre – that I could never have been the author of those poems and plays.  I mean, they knew about me.   I was a shrewd dealer, a manager, an entrepreneur but there was never any suggestion that I was a writer, much less a poet.  Henry Chettle might have had Robert Greene suggest that because everyone knew that Robert Greene was full of bile.  And, besides, Greene was dead.”

“Will, don’t minimize your own experience.”

“That would not be possible, Henry.  I am proud of being able to rescue my father – and my family – from the perils of penury.  In my lifetime, the Shakspers became rich.  We were just about the most important family in Stratford in my last years.  I married my daughters well.  We lived comfortably in a large house.  I owned land and loaned out money, so I was a man of some substance.  But a poet ?  Never.  That was never on the horizon for me.”

“But you were a witty and clever guy.”

“Oh, sure, I was that all right.  But my wit never outreached my grasp.  Within the infinitely smaller world of theatrical production, I had talent and skill and drive and energy and I was very well recompensed for that.  I also had recognition and, if I’m not mistaken, it was because of that recognition that Willy approached me to be his front man.  Isn’t that so ?”

“You’re right about that.  For as long as my poetry circulated privately and my plays were kept in the ambit of the court for its private entertainment, there was no “danger” that you would be associated with that activity.  But things changed in the later 1580s.”

“How ?  Please tell me more.”

“Bess, I don’t think that you ever met Kit Marlowe but he was the key agent of change.  Kit was an amazing young man.  Like Will, he came from a humble background.  His father was a shoemaker in Canterbury.  But unlike Will, Kit was very well educated.  He gained a scholarship to Cambridge.  While he was there he became involved with Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis’ cousin.  Sir Francis was always trawling the universities to find young men to employ in his espionage business.  Kit was a natural – he was smart and he knew vernacular French because he had grown up among Hugenot refugees, who were living in Canterbury during his youth.  These Protestants had fled France in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.”

“I seem to recall that he got himself into some hot water with the University Authorities.  William Cecil brought his problems to our attention.”

“That’s right, Bess.  There was a message sent to the Vice-Chancellor who had tried to block his matriculation with a Master’s degree because, apparently, Kit was rarely in attendance at College and completely absent from Cambridge for long periods of time.  He said that William Cecil had told the Vice-Chancellor, in no uncertain terms, to quit making mischief because Kit’s absences were to do with matters of the highest national security and that the Vice-Chancellor was meddling in matters beyond his ken.  I guess that it was during those stretches of time that he was engaged in Walsingham’s espionage business.  He never told me any more.”

“Willy, how come you know so much about this ?”

“Oh, that’s straightforward enough.  Kit was one of the denizens of my house, Fisher’s Folly.”
St John’s College,

Thursday afternoon

The seminar has now re-assembled after lunch.  Professor Sir Peter Schofield once more calls the meeting to order.

“I expect that this afternoon’s session – “Courtier Poets and University Wits” – will be every bit as interesting as the morning’s.  That was prime stuff.”

Looking around the large conference-table to determine where the next speaker is seated, Professor Sir Peter is pleased that there was no order to the seating arrangements.

“I am glad to see that my school-masterly exhortation to seat yourselves randomly seems to have been taken on-board.  It’s the only way to break free from the entropy that otherwise condemns us to rigid conformity.  I couldn’t help noticing, too, that the ways in which we organized ourselves at morning coffee and lunch, too, seemed to provide further evidence of the triumph of collegiality over entropy.  Damned-good, that.

So, this afternoon we are going to move ahead.  Professor Timothy Brooksby shall provide us with a synopsis of his paper on “The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and Literary Patronage”.”

A tall, slim man with graying hair, Timothy Brooksby speaks with a clearly-enunciated, grammar-school accent. Like a number of other members of the seminar, he had Manchester roots.  His demeanour suggests he had been to the manner-born but, in fact, he had clambered his way from a two-up, two-down row house in the mean streets behind Strangeways Prison to the very pinnacle of academic life.  As a twelve-year old, he had won one of the twelve open scholarships which the founders of Manchester Grammar School had written into the school’s by-laws on its founding in 1515.

Like so many MGS scholarship boys before him, he went on to gain double honours in the “classical transitus”.  From there, it was a comparatively short step to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he had been granted another Open Scholarship.  At Oxford, he gained a “starred first” in “Greats”.  In days gone by, young men with this sort of accomplishment were destined for the upper reaches of the civil service, often getting apprenticed in places like India or Burma as a testing-ground before being installed in the Treasury or Foreign Office.  But after World War II, the Labour government changed that system of cherry-picking Oxbridge’s best-and-brightest to a more bureaucratic method of recruitment and advancement.  Tim Brooksby declined to follow in his predecessors’ footsteps and, instead, switched sides and enrolled in the Cambridge doctoral program.

He went on to complete his doctorate – on “Patrons and Poets at the Elizabethan Court” – under Professor Sir Peter Schofield’s supervision.  It was so successful that he was awarded a junior fellowship at St John’s.  The publication of his first book greatly enhanced his reputation and the now-celebrated Professor Brooksby was lured to America.  He taught there for a number of years at Stanford University in California.  He had returned to England about ten years earlier when he was offered – and accepted – a special University Chair, which was attached to a fellowship in University College, Oxford.

Timothy Brooksby is a gregarious man who seems to know everybody – and everybody seems to know him.  Most of the seminar members are even on nickname-terms with “The Timmer”.

“Thank you, Professor Sir Peter.  As you know, my paper is an attempt to flesh out the membership of Oxford’s retinue during the time he operated his cultural bazaar at Fisher’s Folly.  The documentary evidence indicates that he bought the lease on this large, rambling home in 1580.  The house was named after the first owner, a wealthy goldsmith called Jasper Fisher who had bankrupted himself in constructing a pleasure palace on the outskirts of the booming metropolis.  At that time, it was a large, rambling structure set in two acres of gardens located just north of the intersection of Houndsditch and Bishopsgate.  Not altogether unsurprisingly, it was situated across the street from the Bethlehem Hospital, which was better known by its nickname, “Bedlam”

de Vere’s property was located only a few hundred yards from The Theatre and The Curtain.  Being located outside the city walls was crucial because it meant that the puritanical City of London Aldermen were powerless to intervene in the area’s wide offering of illicit pleasures – gambling, prostitution (male and female), thieves’ dens, and other forms of popular entertainment were all available there to Londoners in search of a good time.

de Vere’s choice of this location was hardly fortuitous.  Nor was his timing in absenting himself from active service at court.  His apparent estrangement from his wife – and, correlatively, Lord Burghley – had marginalized him in terms of the scramble for high office, patronage, and riches.  Yet he kept the Queen’s favour and, in the years after he returned from Italy, he was becoming ever-more involved with his literary and theatrical pursuits.  In the spring of 1580, at the same time he purchased the lease of Fisher’s Folly, he took over control of the Earl of Warwick’s Men and the troupe became known as the Earl of Oxford’s Men.  And, it was at this time that Oxford hired Anthony Munday and John Lyly to work for him as his private secretaries.”

Looking up, the Timmer surveys his audience, “Parenthetically, I might note that it was his refusal to hire Gabriel Harvey that prompted Harvey to write his sarcastic Speculum Tuscanismi, which was discussed in the morning session by Cyril Hubert.

From what we can understand, Fisher’s Folly became a gathering place for a motley crew of litterateurs, aspiring playwrights, and all varieties of hangers-on.  A very brief list of the most famous – or should one say infamous – of them was as follows: Anthony Munday, John Lyly, Thomas Churchyard, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Barnabe Riche, Thomas Watson, Henry Evans, George Peele, John Day, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, George Gascoigne, Thomas Lodge, Angel Day, Robin Christmas, and George Chapman.

This list is by no means exhaustive – further research will no doubt add more names to it – but it is indicative of the breadth and depth of Oxford’s following among the glitterati of the day.  Two names, of course, stand out for modern scholars of Elizabethan literature – Spenser and Marlowe.  I want to concentrate on de Vere’s connection with Kit Marlowe because it is, I think, crucially important to understanding the synergy that created the glorious efflorescence of the Elizabethan theatre.

Perhaps the first point to make about the linkage between de Vere and Marlowe is that when we learn about Marlowe’s residence in London, after his student days at Cambridge, we find him living in the Liberty of Norton Folgate, a stone’s thrown from Fisher’s Folly.  He shared his rooms with Thomas Watson, another one of de Vere’s acolytes. Watson was, at the time, much more renowned in literary circles than Marlowe.  Five years earlier, he had dedicated a collection of eighteen-liners, Hekatompathia, the Passionate Century of Love, to de Vere.  But if Watson’s fame was in the ascendant in the middle years of the decade, it would soon be obscured by Marlowe’s shooting star.

In our eyes, the canonical Shakespeare stands out head-and-shoulders above his Elizabethan contemporaries but in real time, as it were, his pre-eminence only became recognized later, towards the end of the 1590s.  In the later-eighties and early-nineties, Kit Marlowe was the paragon of all new theatrical virtues – and, of course, vices.

When Marlowe burst on the London theatrical scene in 1587 with Tamburlaine the Great the result was shock-and-awe.  Marlowe’s play was both formally and thematically iconoclastic.  To theatre-goers, this was a decisive break with what had previously been on offer.  So tremendous was the demand for sensationalism which he himself had created, that Marlowe wrote a sequel, The Second Part of the Bloody Conquests of Tamburlaine, which continued to draw both groundlings and the beau monde through the turnstiles in record numbers. It’s not too much to say that it was Marlowe who made the Elizabethan stage into a hugely profitable operation for entrepreneurs.  In this context, Will Shaksper’s move from Stratford-Upon-Avon to London (in or about 1586) was an incredible piece of good fortune.  Like the remora fish, Shaksper fed from the leftovers of the feeding frenzy of the big sharks, with whom he seemed to have attached himself.

In the years after his meteoric breakthrough, Marlowe followed up his initial successes with Tamburlaine with a series of other, transgressive dramas –  Dido, Queen of Carthage (which was actually his first work that was performed by “the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel” [i.e., Oxford’s Boys] in 1584 while Marlowe was still a student at Cambridge), The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, The Massacre at Paris, and The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus. It was not just the sensationalism of Marlowe’s drama that riveted the audiences, he had made a crucial literary breakthrough, too.  Marlowe’s transgressive subject matter was echoed – and its effects enhanced – by his break with the older, versifying style.

Freeing himself from the constrictions of rhyming couplets, Marlowe’s blank verse was dynamic.  It was urgently and electrically stimulating for the audience.  Blank verse made the speaking roles more accessible, as well.  Marlowe’s subjects – blasphemy and iconoclasm, forbidden knowledge and unbridled imagination, astrological chiliasm and warring jihadist religiosities, duplicity and Machiavellian intrigue, queer sexuality and moral depravity, wanton violence and uncontrolled upwards social mobility, new-found riches accompanying dire poverty and downwards mobility leading to vagabondage – were lurid, topical, dangerous, controversial, and extraordinarily exciting.  For English men and women living in the perilous Armada years, these themes held up a veritable mirror to their lives.

In addition to his espionage activities and his stagecraft, Marlowe was also an aspiring scholar, albeit one whose scholarship was carried out in his own key of life.  He translated Ovid’s Elegies as well as the first book of Lucan’s Civil War.  These two Latin texts spoke volumes about Marlowe’s own recklessness with regard to personal, erotic liberty and his resistance to the yoke of authority.  His lyric poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is, of course, echoed in the “Dead Shepherd passage” in As You Like It (III, 5, 80-81).  It is also generally assumed that when Touchstone remark that when a man’s verse is not understood that “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” (III, 3, 13.14) refers to Marlowe’s apparent murder which resulted from a squabble over “ye recknynge” on May 30, 1593, in a Deptford tavern.  But there is an additional link that needs to be mentioned because Touchstone’s remark also resonates with Avarice’s paradoxical ideal of wealth – “as their wealth increase, so enclose/ Infinite riches in a little room” – from The Jew of Malta.

The coincidence of Marlowe’s death and the subsequent publication – a few weeks later – of Venus and Adonis, the first work in which William Shakespeare was announced to the world, seems, as it were, more than coincidental to many.  It is true that Venus and Adonis had been cleared for publication two months before, but that clearance did not specify the author’s name.  And, most authorities agree, it was in the spring of 1593 that Marlowe was actively composing his own neo-Ovidian poem, Hero and Leander, which was published posthumously in 1598 by George Chapman – another one of Oxford’s coterie.

But let’s not digress too far from the main point I am getting at.  I’m not here to argue that Christopher Marlowe – and not Edward de Vere – was the author of the canonical works of William Shakespeare.  Rather, the point I want to make is different – it is that Marlowe’s exuberance and the sheer novelty of his genius took shape within the orbit of Oxford’s literary circle.  And, vice versa, de Vere must surely have been in Marlowe’s intellectual debt.

If all genius stands tip-toe on the shoulders of giants then we need to think long and hard about the relationship between the aristocratic Edward de Vere and the plebeian Christopher Marlowe.  There is, I think, a strong sense of de Vere’s debt in Hamlet’s ”rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy in which the Prince of Denmark bemoans his own insufficiency when comparing his timourousness with the players’ intense vitality::

“what would he do

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have ?  He would drown the stage in tears

And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

Make mad the guilty and appal the free,

Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed

The very faculties of eyes and ears.” (II, ii, 594-600).

In the 1580s, it was Kit Marlowe who, indeed, amazed the very faculties of eyes and ears on the London stage.  Yet if we cannot conclusively determine which way the causal arrows flowed between de Vere and Marlowe, we can instead make a corollary point that there was a synergy akin to the explosive powers of a nucleur fission taking place within the walls of Fisher’s Folly which continued for some time thereafter when Oxford had sold his lease on the house, disbanded his retinue, and moved on to set up a domestic retreat in the suburb of Hackney with his second wife, Elizabeth Trentham.”

Willy’s AfterLife

“What do you say about that, Willy ?”

“He captures the excitement which surrounded Kit’s meteoric rise but he seems to leave out some of the internal tensions between those people who were sometime-residents of Fisher’s Folly.  Roughly speaking, these tensions divided what we called “The Gentlemen Scholars” from “The University Wits”.  In Brooksby’s paper, too many diverse tendencies are lumped together.  Saying that, the man is clearly right in drawing the seminar-people’s attention to Marlowe’s creative genius.  He was unique, exceptional in all he did.  Kit was unfettered.  He followed his own star.  He was a wild and crazy guy who had to live on the edge with danger, in jeopardy.  Not for him, the safety or the security of patronage.  To be sure, he would take money and favours from anyone but he never felt the slightest iota of obligation or reciprocity for what he took.”

“Willy, that man sounds dangerous. And evil, too.”

“You could say that, Bess, but saying that only captures a tiny fragment of his character.”

“I met him when I was first in London.  He was the prince of the demi-monde.  Danger doesn’t really catch his allure.  It was more than that.  He was enthralling, he exuded a kind of magnetic appeal.  I think that the word Willy used – “charisma” – is relevant in describing him.  Kit seemed to be the sum of all possibility for a country bumpkin like me.”

“Me, too.  I was alienated from the strict regimen of Cecil House and here was this young man, with not a jot of reverence or appreciation for subordinated hierarchies.  He was totally, absolutely, and completely uncompromising in his resistance to authority.  The seminar-people use a nice word for that: “transgressive”.  That summons up for me an image of Kit Marlowe, who simply refused to tolerate what he found to be intolerable.  I was too young to have frequented Fisher’s Folly in its heyday, before the Armada.  But I do recall crossing paths with him on several occasions in the next few years when his reputation was the envy of all alientated youngsters like me.  His “transgressive” appeal hardly accepted class boundaries.”

“That’s true, Henry, Kit might have been a craftsman’s son and a scholarship boy, but he never accepted that a man’s origins had much to do with his innate worth.  For me, that was difficult to deal with because I had been brought up with a strong sense of privilege.  Like Will, in that way, Kit had had to struggle for anything and everything he could lay his hands on in LifeOnEarth.”

“Did you trust him, then, Willy ?”

“Oh, Bess, no one “trusted” Kit Marlowe !  If you did trust him then you’d be sorry.”