SHAXSPER

Drury House,

June 24, 1604 (4:00 a.m.)

 

An armed guard arrives at the Earl of Southampton’s residence in the still of the night.  They take “Mr W. H.” to The Tower.  There, he is interrogated and held in close confinement for 24 hours.

 

Meanwhile, Sir Robert Cecil’s security forces take control of Drury House, expelling the servants into the still-dark street.  Cecil’s men go through Southampton’s private possessions.  What are they looking for ? Evidence of descent from Elizabeth ?  Connection to “Shake-speare” ?  What private papers have been destroyed ?  Is there a similar “sweep” of Oxford’s residence/papers ?

 

The next morning, June 25, 1604, Mr Wriothesley, Henry is released from The Tower.

 

Cecil House,

June 25, 1604 (6:00 a.m.)

 

Robert Cecil has been awake for an hour on this mid-summer morning.  He doesn’t sleep well and is often up in the night, working on his papers.  Today is like most other days in that regard.  But not in other ways.

 

A knock at the door causes the little hunchback to look up and, almost automatically, to speak.

 

“Come.”

 

The door opens and at the threshold stands Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton.  He looks quite ruffled, which is not surprising since he’s been up for twenty-four hours in quite terrifying circumstances.  Halting, at the threshold, he waits to be beckoned inside the sanctum.

 

“Henry, please do come in and, here, sit down next to me.  We have to talk.”

 

Warily, Southampton steps forward and sits in the low chair where he had often perched while he was under the control and wardship of Robert Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley.  This is not a room in which he feels comfortable.

 

“First, I have to extend His Majesty’s sincere regret that you were so rudely taken from your bed.  King James, as you know, is a great admirer of yours.  His very first act upon gaining the throne was to release you from your detention in The Tower, which had been ordered by Her Late Majesty.  And, as you also know, he immediately restored your estates and honours.  No longer would you be Mr Wriothesley, Henry, as you were known to Queen Elizabeth’s jailers.  Henceforth, and for the remainder of your days, you would again be the Third Earl of Southampton, and in His Majesty’s especial favour.

 

So, you must be asking yourself – “why was I grabbed, jailed, interrogated, and then released without any warning or explanation ?”  This extraordinary scenario can be only explained by His Majesty’s suspicious nature.  He grew up in a situation in which his mother killed his father, he just a child when he was installed as titular monarch surrounded by vicious in-fighting.  None of his nobles could be trusted and his wariness was proven to be right.  In fact, even his own mother was often involved in their plotting against him.

 

He suspects all men, me included.  I believe that I only serve him on sufferance.  His English advisors – and that includes me – have always warned him about the dangers of civil war.  Religion might seem like the biggest obstacle to peace but his dynastic succession to the Tudor throne has never been secure.  There are – what ? – perhaps a dozen claimants for the throne.  Some, like His Majesty, with direct lines of descent and others, like  you, whose claims are more oblique but still a danger to him.

 

Second, as you probably are now aware, something extraordinary happened to trigger this situation, bringing His Majesty’s insecurities to bear.  In the middle of the night yesterday, early in the morning of June 24^th, news reached us from Hackney that the Great Lord Oxford had died.  Since he had been so forward in urging clemency for you during those twenty-six months Her Late Majesty kept you in The Tower, King James wanted to allay any fears – irrational fears – he harboured that Lord Oxford’s death would trigger a noble uprising against his monarchy.”

 

“Why would he do that ?  Edward and I were close, to be sure.  He was like my big brother.  As you very well know, I grew up with his daughters in this house.  Lord Oxford was an almost constant presence in my life while they lived under this roof, particularly in the years after his wife’s death.  When he remarried, I saw less of him.  And after I refused to marry his Elizabeth, to the great anger of your father, we slowly drifted apart as I was beguiled by Robert Devereux.”

 

“As I recall, Lord Oxford held no grudge with you for refusing to accommodate my father’s plans.  He had done very much the same when my father worked to control his future, but you were made of sterner stuff and resisted the old man.”

 

“On the contrary, while he publicly seemed to support Lord Burghley’s scheme to marry me to his grand-daughter – your niece, the Lady Elizabeth – he was quietly advising me to be wary.  He told me that his marriage to your sister was something they both regretted.   They were both too young and Edward was always headstrong so he just hated being manipulated for the convenience of others.  But, in that instance. your father prevailed.”

 

“I know that.  He told me that my father’s plans for you and Elizabeth were precipitous.   Yes, that’s the very word he used, “precipitous”.  He didn’t want to see Elizabeth suffer in the way that my sister Anne had.  Edward has often told me how much he regretted his selfishness and the pain it caused her.  He also told me that my father was a bully and he used his powers to make everyone else conform to his plans.  Who was I to argue with him about that ?  I watched my father do exactly that with my brother, Tom, but by the time I came along, he was a bit more mellow – or it may have been that I had somehow learned to sail with the prevailing winds.

 

A few years ago, Edward told me that my father had coerced him into writing those poems which urged you to marry.  He said that his annuity was threatened.  That frightened him because Edward had lost his Oxford estates and needed that income.  Most members of the old nobility were in similar straights but they were not lucky enough to have been granted such a generous stipend from Her Late Majesty.”

 

“Yes, I heard that too.”

 

“Edward had an amazing fluency with words.  I doubt we’ll see his like again.  On a number of occasions I asked him to modify some scenes in his plays for the benefit of my strategies and he was able to do it overnight, or perhaps in a week or two when he re-wrote the whole play to incorporate my ideas. His ability to literally throw off lines always astounded me.”

 

“I know.  He did much the same thing for me.  At the time when I was disrupting your father’s plans for a dynastic marriage-alliance between our houses and he was writing those lyric verses encouraging me to breed with Elizabeth, he wrote that long poem, “Venus and Adonis”, which gave me the very opposite advice and his dedication gave me great prominence.”

 

“Yes, I remember that.  It’s that poem in which a young man – Adonis – is pursued by a much older, lascivious woman – Venus.  I think that he was writing in code because there are rumours I’ve heard that in his youth, he was in the same position when Her Late Majesty favoured him above all others.”

 

“I’ve heard stories about that, too.  Do you think that that was why she was so forgiving towards him ?”

 

“Why do you say that Queen Elizabeth was “forgiving” towards him ?”

 

“She seemed to treat him as a little brother and was always making arrangements to help him out of the scraps he found himself in.  That’s what I’ve heard.”

 

“That’s true as far as it goes but you have to remember that Lord Oxford did provide valuable entertainment for Her Majesty.  He was well-rewarded for his ability to turn a verse for political advantage.”

 

“What do you mean by that ?”

 

“Lord Oxford was wasteful and profligate with his inheritance and was skint but Her Majesty arranged for an annual annuity payment to keep him in the manner to which the Lord High Chamberlain of England should comport himself.   It was a kind of quid pro quo because he provided valuable assistance in our campaigns of the later 1580s when he wrote a number of plays which gave voice to the growing sentiment of national feeling.  These plays justified the Tudors’ apparent destiny to resolve the civil Wars of the Roses and provide a century of peace, order, and good government.

 

Did you know that King James renewed that annuity payment ?  He was a great admirer of Edward’s many writings.”

 

“OK, so why did His Majesty act in such a draconian way towards me yesterday. What have I to do with Lord Oxford’s death ?”

 

“Henry, I think you have to judge His Majesty by all his actions, not just an occasional bout of fear and desperation.  You were not the only member of the old nobility who was singled out for investigation but – don’t forget – you were the only one who was sent to The Tower.  Obviously, your involvement with Robin Devereux – in that muddle a few years ago – singled you out for special concern.  He had to know that you were loyal, fair, and true, unlike the Scottish lords he had grown up with.  I told him that you were one of his greatest supporters but he wanted to be double-safe.  I suppose that he didn’t fully trust my testimonial of your loyal character.”

 

“I see.  That does put a new light on the situation.  In these dangerous times in which we live, no man – certainly not the man who wears the crown – can be too secure in his safety, can he ?”

 

“Indeed, not.  Now, you are free to leave and go about your daily life. I wanted to reassure you of my continuing efforts on your behalf.  I have always regarded you like a little brother, I hope you know that.  I would imagine that you are exhausted from the terrors of the last twenty-four hours.”

 

“I certainly am – it was like re-living a bad nightmare.  Lord Robert, I am most grateful and appreciative for all you have done on my behalf.  You know that I am always going to be in your debt and that debt can be recalled whenever you desire – and repaid immediately upon your request.”

 

“Henry, you also know that I have always regarded you as my brother since that day when I led a little, orphaned boy into this very room and sat him down on that very chair before my father, into whose custody he had been charged.”

 

“I remember it like it was yesterday.  Entering this room today gave me an eery sense of déjà vu, all over again.”

 

“Well, my brother, you need to know that I am always going to be at your service in urging your preference with His Majesty.”

 

“Robert, you are too generous.  Let me thank you again for everything.”
“Henry, just keep in mind your situation will always be tinged with danger because of His Majesty’s suspicions.  He seems to be a haunted man.  But, for as long as you honour the bargain, your life, your estates and titles, and the King’s favour are guaranteed.  Should you break your bond then I will see to it that you are again imprisoned.  The King will not be as lenient with you as his predecessor – when your prior indiscretions were forgiven.”

 

“I understand fully that I will always be on probation.  I made my bed, I have to sleep in it.”
Afternoon, June 25, 1604

 

King’s Place, Hackney,

 

Two riders arrive at King’s Place, Hackney.  Inside the house, four women and a boy – all dressed in black – are alone in silent prayer around a black-draped coffin.

 

“What a sad, sad day.  Great Oxford has passed on.  We are all the poorer for his passing.  Will we ever see another like him, my Lord of Southampton ?”

 

Speaking first to Oxford’s widow, Elizabeth Trentham,

 

“Your Ladyship, I doubt that very much.  He was like a father to me.  From our first meeting, now more than twenty years ago when I was placed under the wardship of William Cecil, Lord Edward was the very paragon of knightly virtues.

 

Lord Edward was loved by his friends but hated by his many enemies who were jealous of his great friendship with our late monarch.  He served her well for his whole adult life, in many ways.  He had not only won honours but also suffered indignities on her account.  He did so unstintingly and with great distinction.  He had broad shoulders and took it upon himself to bear outrageous fortune for her benefit.

 

Now, we have to be on our guard.  There are rumours about and His Majesty is afraid that Lord Oxford’s passing might betoken the kind of madness that the astrologers have predicted.  King James is a suspicious and superstitious man.  He had me imprisoned for a short while when he learned of your father’s death.

 

“Henry, that’s terrible.  What did they do to you ?”

 

“Nothing.  They put me in a room and asked me some questions.  I think that they just wanted some sort of excuse to get me out of Drury House so that they could send in a few other men to look through my papers.  But they never told me what they were looking for.”

 

“That’s odd.  Three men came by here yesterday evening and demanded to be shown Lord Oxford’s study.  They were in there for about forty minutes but they hardly spoke with us.  Then they left.”

 

“That’s right, Henry, they never said a word to any one of us after Lady Elizabeth led them into Daddy’s study.”

 

“They were probably sent here by His Majesty.  Robert told me that his Scottish experience has led him to distrust even his closest advisors; I guess that my unfortunate involvement with Robin Devereux was like a red flag, signifying my dubious loyalty.  But, fortunately, the men who questioned me in The Tower found nothing incriminating against me.  I was released quickly, just this morning in fact.

 

Susan, have you been able to secure your father’s manuscripts, as he requested ?  I trust you removed them to a safe place so that Cecil’s men cannot find them ?  We shall have the fullness of time enough to determine what to do with them.  He valued them beyond money, estates, or honours so they must be safeguarded to respect his memory.

 

This man here [motioning to Will Shaksper] has been a party to our lord’s hidden identity.  Will Shaksper was his front man.  Dumb to all the world but long attached to Lord Edward.  In fact, they were distant kinsmen.  Is that not so, Will ?”

 

“Yes.  Lord Edward was descended on his mother’s side – as I was – from the Trussels of the West Midlands.  Neither of us was quite sure when the connection took place but my old Granny Arden used to tell me that she had been told it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, now more than 150 years ago.  The exact details were unknown to me but when my father spoke with Lord Edward many, many years ago in Stratford-Upon-Avon – that’s when they agreed that I would enter our lordship’s service with his players – they both were familiar with the Trussel connection.”

 

“So, is that how we are to understand that my father chose the nom-de-plume of William Shake-speare ?”

 

“Actually, Lady Susan, the real story is a bit more convoluted than that.  As you know, when your father inherited his title at his father’s death, he was already known as Lord Bulbec.  His emblem was a rampant lion holding a broken, shaking spear.  And a few years later he was saluted as a man whose “countenance shakes speares”.  Do you recall hearing those stories my Lord.”

 

“Yes, he used to regale us with them when I was a boy, living in the old Lord Burghley’s house as his ward.  Susan, you were no doubt too young to remember those stories but, Elizabeth and Bridget probably do.”

 

“He absolutely loved to tell us stories.  I remember sitting on his lap and begging him for more.  Then he would get coy and tell me that he could only tell me more if I rubbed his “story spot” which, if I recall, was his forehead.”

 

“He did that with all of us, Bridgie   He loved to draw you into his story-web.  First, he’d get us to rub that silly “story spot” and that would get us excited then he’d say that the story was becoming visible but we had to rub harder.  By the time he told us that the story was visible, he had ensnared us.  It was one of those tricks that adults often play, it never got old for us.  We knew that whenever Daddy visited us, he would find time to sit with us in a quiet corner.  I will always treasure those moments and my memories of them.”

 

“Yes, girls, he was the best story-teller.  You were not the only ones to receive bounties from his wonderful imagination.  Her Late Majesty herself also beseeched Lord Edward to amuse her in that same way – although she didn’t make her rub his story-spot.  I think that that was an unusual trick he did just for you.

 

His special gift was his ability to improvise, to take an old story and make it new again.  He did that in almost all of his plays.  He didn’t need to invent stories, he made them better.  And that improvisation and revision continued to be his life-long passion.  A few weeks ago, which was the last time I visited him here at King’s Place, he told me that he had made a monument for me.  I had no idea what he was talking about so I just asked him about it, in a direct way.”

 

“What did he tell you, Henry ?”

 

“Well, first of all, I didn’t have to rub his “story spot”.  What he did was to come to the point indirectly.  First, he told me about his obsessive joy in writing and re-writing his old works.  He said it was like re-living peak experiences from his past.  He brought out a sheaf of papers which, he said, were poems that he had written many years ago.  Poems which he told me he had written to me, at Her Late Majesty’s request.  They were expressly commanded by your grandfather, Lord Burghley, who urged me to marry Elizabeth when we were still not much more than children.

 

These poems were all about the need for a young man, who led a noble house, to continue his lineage.  He was especially keen on that – he never failed to tell me (and others) that his line of descent was the oldest and most aristocratic in the whole kingdom.  Once, he even showed me a kind of map of his ancestry which he had commissioned from that man Camden, the one who knows everything about the past.

 

When he was showing me these lyrics, which I vaguely remembered – it was more than ten years ago wasn’t it Elizabeth ?”

 

“That’s right, Henry, it was right after you had gained your majority when you had turned eighteen.  I was fifteen and I was frightened that Grandfather Cecil would force me into marriage.  I was still a girl and had been frightened by stories from my governesses about what men did with women.

 

Yes indeed, that was a long time ago.  Now it’s the men who are frightened of what I will do to them !”

 

“Then that must have been in the winter of 1592/93, right after the New Year.  I distinctly remember being brought together with you by him and told that we had to pretend to be obedient to Grandfather Cecil’s commands.  Daddy said that if we appeared to be obedient and compliant then the old man wouldn’t force us to act too soon.  Lord Oxford said he would be happy enough with a betrothal and would leave us alone for a while.  But I was in no mood to be further constrained by his control over my life.  I was willful and wild.  I believed that I should be the captain of my fate.”

 

“Wasn’t that a few years after we met ?”

 

“That’s right, Will.  I first met you about three or four years earlier, in one of those riverside taverns in Southwark, when I would sneak out of Cecil House in the dark.  I think that I had even been instructed by Willy – that’s what people called Edward in those times – about how he had scarpered over the walls years before when he was Lord Burghley’s ward.”

 

“No, Lord Henry, you’re mistaken about the timing of our first meeting.  I first met you when Lord Oxford was still living at Fisher’s Folly.  I was staying there also, it was part of the bargain he had sealed with my father – he provided me with room and board and it was up to me to make the most of the opportunities that came my way.”

 

“That’s right, Will.  Now, I recall that we used to rendezvous in Southwark only a few years after that first meeting at the Boar’s Head Tavern.  Well, in any case, when Lord Edward told me about those old poems his memory rambled off into other reminiscences, what he called his remembrances of time’s past.  He called them his “sessions of sweet silent thought”.  He told me that he was making a collection of his verses so that I would have some of the ones he wrote for me.  He first told me about this after the new year, when I came up here to Hackney to visit him, Lady Elizabeth, and little Henry who, he said, was named after me and who would inherit his title as Henry the First, seventeenth Earl of Oxford..”

 

“Was that the last time you saw him ?”

 

“No, like I said before, I was here a few weeks ago.  He was in terrible pain but his mind was clear as a cathedral bell.  In fact, he repeated some lines from his play, the Second Part of Henry IV.  Even in extremis his memory was quite incredible.  It seemed as if he never forgot anything.”

 

“What were the lines, do you remember them ?”

 

“Here goes:

 

I survive

To mock the expectations of the world,

To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out

Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down

After my seeming.  The tide of blood in me

Hath proudly flow’d in vanity till now/

Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,

Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,

And flow henceforth in formal majesty.

 

I think I got it right.  I asked him to repeat these lines and then he wrote them down for me because they seemed to catch his mood so perfectly.  But I’m not as good at that sort of thing as he was.”

 

“Nobody else was; he was unique.”

 

“After telling me those lines, he said that he didn’t think he would last out the year.  Of course, I told him that he was being overly dramatic.  But I was wrong, he knew himself that the end was drawing near.  I was here for lunch and then the two of us retired to his study.  That was when he gathered up his strength to say those lines to me.  It was like he was providing me with his own eulogy.  I remember that his study was filled with huge paper-piles. He said that he had been keeping busy by putting his works in order.”

 

“I should say so, I think he was in that room ten or twelve hours every day.  He began to go in there almost religiously when you had gotten yourself into trouble.  It was then that he said he was overcome with a sense of his past closing in on him.  That’s exactly what he said to me when I asked him what was so important that he spent so many hours, each and every day, there.  He said, “Lizz-Bet, my past is closing in on me.  I want to tell my own story, myself, in my own words.”

 

At this point in the afternoon, a servant knocks on the door and, being beckoned to enter, asked if the guests want refreshments.  A few minutes later, he returns with a bottle of Lord Oxford’s favourite port wine and seven glasses – one apiece, and even one for the new, little Lord Oxford.

 

After toasting the late Lord Oxford’s memory, the conversation turns back to reminiscences as the seven people who had been most important in Edward de Vere’s last years sit together, quietly paying homage to the dead man’s memory.  Bridget asks Henry to continue with the story of his last visit to King’s place.

 

“I want to do that.  I want to share my memory of that day with you.  He said the same things to me, about his past closing in on him and how he wanted to make his reckoning on his own terms.  Lord Edward told me that he had been busily re-writing all his plays and poems.  He said that it took him a long time because he couldn’t, as he said to me, “leave well enough alone”.  He wanted to leave what he called “fair copies”.  And, for some reason, he wanted to make arrangements with Susan to be his silent executor which seemed to me to be a strange choice since you are the youngest of his daughters.”

 

“Actually, Henry, his choice was not so strange.  He knew that Elizabeth was married; you, too, Bridgie.  He didn’t want to burden you with this task.  His writing was a matter that was most dear to him and he shared a passion for literature and philosophy with his closest friends.  In fact, he told me that his reason for this choice was because I was so close with his great friend Lady Pembroke and her son, William Herbert, to whom I have become betrothed with my father’s blessing.”

 

“I don’t understand what this is about, Susan.  Why are the Pembrokes involved ?”

 

“Bridgie, for some reason, Daddy didn’t want to leave his private papers here at King’s Place. When I asked him, he just said that I shouldn’t concern myself with that.  He wanted all his papers kept securely at one of the Pembrokes’ manor houses where, he thought, there was enough of what he called “arm’s-length distance” between himself and the Pembrokes that no one would suspect that they had been put in safe-keeping there.

 

He never told me why he thought this was necessary but he did tell me that he wanted the originals to be kept together.  It was, he said, his childrens’ family’s “grand possession” because we would not be getting much in the way of an inheritance.”

 

At this point, the late Lord Oxford’s widow, Countess Elizabeth, spoke up.  “These stories are fascinating.  Everything about that man was fascinating.  But now, the day’s other business has to be attended to.  What are we going to do about the funeral ?”

 

“Lady Elizabeth, may I speak about this ?  Edward had been a very private person for about fifteen years, spending almost all that time away from the court.  He was quite contented here at King’s Place in Hackney.  Therefore, I would like to arrange for a small private burial in the churchyard of St Augustine’s.  I am sure that the vicar will be only too pleased to officiate.

 

I would be greatly honoured if you allow me to do this service to my great friend.  He was a man who was absolutely accomplished in both mind and body and I loved him dearly – like a big brother or even a father.”

 

“I agree.  There will be no official funeral.  His will needn’t be made public.  Indeed, I’m not sure he made a written will.  Did your father ever mention a will to you ?”

 

The two older daughters answered in unison, “No, Lady Elizabeth.”

 

“Did he mention anything about a will to you, Susan ?”

 

“I don’t think so.  The thing he was most concerned about was those papers.  He gave me instruction about them over and over again in his last days whenever we were alone.  Even when he was rather delirious and incoherent, he kept coming back to those papers, becoming agitated and asking me if I understood what he wanted me to do with them.  When I assured him that I had understood his instructions and had already taken care of removing the paper as he had requested, he would settle down for a while but he kept returning to that subject over and over again.”

 

“Did he mention anything else ?  What about his instructions concerning Henry ?”

 

“He only said that Henry would be well looked after.  That everything would be good for him and that we should all “let sleeping dogs lie”.”

 

“What do you think he meant by that ?”

 

“I really don’t know because I didn’t ask him.”

 

“Willy just wanted to slip away quietly.  His retirement from the court was like that, too.  For years, any official duty he could avoid, he evaded.  It was only when he was required to attend, on account of his high office, that he went down to Westminster.  This evasion became more pronounced after Henry’s trial.

 

The only exception seems to have been when he went to Cecil House to confer with Robert.  When he returned home, he would never answer any questions about what had transpired.   He just kept repeating a strange invocation from his play Julius Caesar:

 

“Cry “Havoc” ! and let slip the dogs of war;

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial.”

 

When I asked him what he meant, it was just like Susan said, he would alway reply, “let’s just let those sleeping dogs lie.”
Willy’s AfterLife

 

“I never knew about these matters.  But, then, why should I have known about them – they happened because I was DeadOnEarth !”

 

“This is interesting to me, too, because I had died the year before and also knew nothing about what followed.  It is curious to me that Robert Cecil was such an accomplished trickster.”

 

“Really ?  Why are you surprised at that Bess ?  Robert had been trained from childhood by his father, who was the eminence grise throughout your reign.  Robert could not do anything else because of his crooked back.  So, the little cripple learned to dissemble and let people under-estimate him at their peril.  But he was always conspiring and conniving, scheming and plotting.  Just like his father.  All those years of apprenticeship had leached away any youthful exhilaration he might have felt about the hunt.  He was always on the look-out for the trophy.  So, like his father, Robert always played the long game.”

 

“Henry, when did you learn about the arrangement to free you ?”

 

“I can honestly say that it was on the morning of my release from The Tower.  No one had whispered a word to me.  I never saw Willy during the twenty-six months when I was imprisoned.  He never wrote to me.  Or, if he did, I never received any letters from  him or anyone else.  Wasn’t that because your orders were to keep me in close confinement ?”

 

“Yes, that’s right; you were dead to me.  It was only because of Willy’s intervention that I refused to implement the order for your execution.  Your behaviour towards me – not just on that day but for years before – had been abominable. You showed me no filial respect and none of the loyalty due to me as your sovereign. Whatever maternal affection for you that I should have possessed had drained away.

 

I was so hurt and angry with your conspiracy with that fool, Robin Devereux, that I wanted to see you dead;   I had been betrayed by you – you, my own son ! – and wanted you to suffer the Stroke of Justice.  For weeks after the jury had handed down the death verdict, after Lord Essex had been beheaded, I was in two minds about what I was going to do.  They could not sway me into excusing your behaviour as a “youthful indiscretion” because you were no mere stripling but a grown man of twenty-seven.

 

Robert Cecil suggested that if I would moderate the verdict from High Treason to Misprision of Treason then Willy would comply with whatever conditions I laid out.  So it was that I demanded close confinement in The Tower and no communication with the outside world.  For the rest of my LifeOnEarth you would be as dead to the outside world as you were to me.  My mercy was to agree that once I was DeadOnEarth then my warrant would no longer exist.  My successor would be free to choose whether or not he would continue your imprisonment – or to follow through with the jury’s order for execution.”

 

“What Bess has just said is what happened.  What she didn’t know is that I was secretly keeping a private diary of this drama.  In fact, no one knew about my sonnet-sequence while I was AliveOnEarth.  And, I wrote it in a coded series of metaphors to provide a kind of double-deniability in the case that anyone discovered those papers.

 

In those lyrics, to which I attached with some earlier ones I had written many years before, I felt free to discuss my hopes for your worldly salvation and also the recuperation of your freedom, honours, and estates.  The sequence of poems I wrote while you were imprisoned were desperately unhappy works in which my guilty feelings at failing you were expiated.  That’s why I was so insistent that Susan find a safe and secure hiding-place for them at arm’s length from my surviving family.  In addition, I didn’t want any of my daughters – or you, Henry – to know my reasons for doing this because I thought that ignorance would be your best protection.  She might have been my youngest daughter but Susan was the one I trusted; the other two were always self-centered, petty, jealous, and notoriously unreliable.  And, of course, I couldn’t involve you in this subterfuge because you would have been the first person to come under suspicion of harbouring my secret writings.”

 

“What was so dangerous about those poems ?”

 

“I had made a bargain for Henry’s life.  I had traded my word, my oath, for his survival.  If I failed to live up to my side of the bargain then not only would Henry face dire consequences but I would also.  And my wife and other children would have been inevitably implicated in our downfall.  I was required to be silent, to deny my paternity, and to continue hiding my literary identity behind the pseudonym, “Shake-peare”, which I had invented more than ten years earlier.  But, more to the point, the sequence of sonnets were dangerous.”

 

“Why ?”

 

“They were dangerous because they told the story of Henry’s birth, his parentage, his narrow escape from the Stroke of Justice, and, in the end, his release from captivity.  They were, of course, written in a coded language but intelligencers could easily have cracked that code.  It wasn’t especially complicated because I used metaphors and literary language, not ciphers.  Those lyric poems were the expression of my deepest feelings, my hopes and my joy, my regrets and my fears.  In them, Henry’s royal birth – and his claim to the throne on his mother’s death – is frankly acknowledged.  He could have been King Henry IX but that destiny was denied to him by a curious twist of fate.  His mother – Bess – denied her only son his birthright.”

 

“How do you explain that ?”

 

“I don’t explain her refusal to acknowledge her own son; I can’t explain it.  It was never explained to me and I could never understand why she acted in that way.  But, perhaps, we should ask her about that ?

 

Come on, Bess, tell us why you acted in that way ?  Help me to understand what had been inexplicable.”

 

“We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we ?  It was my prerogative right.  I was Queen of England.  I didn’t want to share that stage with anyone else.  My LifeOnEarth was all about me, wasn’t it ?”

 

“Is that all you have to say about this matter ?”

 

“Of course, what else was there ?  Like in the story of Cinderella, when I was growing up I had been the ugly sister.  Only it was much, much, much more horrific than that.

 

I had had to watch when my mother had had her head chopped off at my father’s whim.  He ignored me because his next child was a male child.

 

My brother had been preferred to me and his uncle – his mother’s brother – had raped and abused me when I was hardly more than a child myself.

 

My older sister loathed me and when she became Queen of England, I was imprisoned and continually subjected to death threats unless I buckled under to her crew of priestly vampires who wanted to suck the life out of me.  And, when I resisted them, they threatened me with earthly death and everlasting punishments.  That psycho-drama went on for five years.  I was kept in constant fear because I was incessantly threatened and subjected to new, weird forms of psychological terror.

 

Then, miraculously, my sister died without issue.  That’s how I became the rightful successor to the Tudor throne.  Me, the ugly duckling had become the swan.  Well, the family’s ugly duckling had come of age but those experiences scarred me.  I was neurotically wary of being under any other person’s control.

 

I wanted everything to revolve around me and my whims.  In that sense, I was very much my father’s daughter.  I had learned that I could trust no one.  Even my most trusted councilors stole from me but I just turned a blind-eye to those petty thefts because I was always on the look-out for deeper, more malevolent treasons.  And, I didn’t have to look very far to find them.

 

Robert Dudley, had been my childhood sweetheart and he had shared many of my tribulations during my sister’s reign.  That seemed to bond us together but I discovered that he, too, was not to be trusted.  Robin cheated on me, behind my back.  He had married but then he murdered that poor woman when he thought that their marriage stood in his way to the throne as my consort. Amy Robsart had been expendible.  I realized that I, too, would be expendable if Robin had his way with me.  So, I played him along, I toyed with his emotions.  I kept control in my hands.

 

But even keeping control in my own hands wasn’t enough to make me safe.  My cousins, led by the Duke of Norfolk, tried to wrest the throne from me and the Pope put me under a death-watch by giving potential assassins a blank cheque.  If they killed me and were themselves murdered in the process, the Bishop of Rome gave them a free pass to Paradise.

 

I was surrounded by men whose motives were suspect.  William Cecil was, comparatively, a paragon of virtue – all he wanted was money and land.  Otherwise, William was a loyal and trustworthy servant – just as long as I turned that blind-eye to his peculations and insatiable greed.

 

Living in that snake-pit, Willy’s appearance was like a breath of fresh air.  He was rich and beautiful, learned and cultured.  But he was also the seventeenth Earl of Oxford so I could never be sure of his loyalty to me.  Maybe he had ambitions on my throne ?  But because he was much younger and still callow, I could manipulate his emotions and control him.  Plus, his uncle Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, was a rare man – he was utterly loyal to my family’s house and, so, to me and me alone.  The Radcliffes had put their loyalty to the Tudors ahead of their individual ambitions.  That family had been raised from the dust by my ancestors.  They were Tudor loyalists, Thomas Radcliffe was my man, my creature.  He always helped me in controlling Willy’s enthusiasms and redirecting them into safer avenues.

 

But I had inherited a strong sexual urge from my father and it was an urge that I could not repress.  I always had pretty young girls and handsome young men flitting around me.  But I was always the Queen Bee.  Any congress which took place in that little hothouse of emotional jeopardy was going to be on my terms – I was going to be on top, in bed and in all other matters.  Willy seemed to be amenable to that – perhaps because we first came together when I was a mature woman while he was not much more than a boy.  Whatever the reason, that established the ground rules of our relationship. I made it clear to him that he played the lover’s game with me according to my rules, isn’t that so ?”

 

“We made a bargain.  It had to be kept or else I would have been discarded.  And I also had my own issues of intimacy.  Like Prince Hamlet, my mother had married quickly after my father’s suspicious death.  I was orphaned and sent to live under William Cecil’s roof.  That was a monstrous experience and Lady Cecil’s bitter coldness made me long for female kindness.  Bess saw that and we entered into a folie a deux.”

 

“That’s right, I made it perfectly clear to Willy that he was my boy-toy and that I was always going to be the boss.  It was my party and he was my guest so he had to play according to my rules or else I would discard him.  But, then, our playfulness became more serious – and more dangerous – when I became pregnant.  At first, I sought medical assistance in getting rid of the baby growing inside me but even Doctor Lopez, who first came to my attention because he was the leading practitioner of Arabic methods of abortion in England, couldn’t do anything.

 

I had waited too long.  Any medical intervention would be dangerous for my own life.  Then, Willy and I went to see the Archbishop in Southwark but he was not able to offer any practical help because, of course, by this time Willy had already been married off to Anne Cecil.  I suppose that we could have still followed my father’s example and simply had their marriage annulled because it had not been consummated but there were other considerations.”

 

“What do you mean ?”

 

“If Willy’s marriage was annulled and he was then free to marry me, what would his position be ?  Would he become King of England ?  Would I revert to being second-string ?  Would I lose my powers because it could be argued that a husband had to be master of the house ?”

 

“Well, I suppose you could have followed one of your father’s other strategies and had Willy executed – or exiled or something like that.”

 

“Henry, don’t be silly.  That wouldn’t really solve my problems because your birth would have created new complications.   In time, you would have become a rival for the throne; my own carefully-cultivated image would have been sullied.  The papacy’s claim that I was a bastard daughter of the king’s whore would be compounded with your bastardy.  So, no, getting rid of Willy was no answer to my dilemma.  The answer was that I would dispose of the baby – not by putting you into the bull-rushes beside the river like Moses -but by shifting the baby to a noble household.  That’s how you became the heir to the Wriothesleys.  You were a changeling.”

 

“But didn’t anyone know about this ?”

 

“Of course, some people did know.  William Cecil handled matters for me in my absence.  Doctor Lopez was brought in to attend to me.  Kat Ashley took control of my chamber and there were a few other nurses and servants who were sworn to secrecy but then quietly murdered after your birth.”

 

“That’s cruel and terribly callous.  How could you do that to them ?”

 

“It wasn’t all that difficult.  All my life I had to act like one of those ancient gods who meddled with other humans’ lives as if they were flies.  What do you think warfare and espionage involved ?  Men in my service were sent to their deaths all the time.  So, what was a few more women’s lives ?”

 

The baby was born alive and healthy but after just one hour he was taken away from us.  Willy you remember that ?”

 

“How can you ask that ?  Don’t you remember that I carried on quite hysterically and begged with you on my knees ?  I even said that we could raise him as my child – William Cecil would have gone along with that and Anne would have complied easily enough with her father’s command.”

 

“I didn’t like that idea ?”

 

“Why not ?”

 

“I didn’t like the idea that you would have my son.  If I couldn’t have him then you couldn’t have him, either.”

 

“This is just horrific.  Having to listen to this story all over again and again is like being fitted with a crown of thorns.”

 

“But each time we re-tell the story it’s in a new context.  This time it’s actually about you, Henry.  We are recounting it so as to make sense of Bess’ coldness towards you.  Isn’t that so ?”

 

“I guess so.  I mean, you were explaining why you had to keep your poems secret.  This re-telling came about when you began to explain about that.”

.

“That’s right.  If we can’t make sense of the context in which Bess and I were entangled then my secrecy and my grief don’t make sense.

 

Once Bess had forced the separation, I didn’t see you again for almost eight years afterwards.  But when your adoptive father died, you became William Cecil’s ward and were brought into his household.  Like me, twenty years before, you were to be educated by that man and under the domestic control of his wife.”

 

“Willy, that must have been a strange situation for you ?”

 

“I wouldn’t say that, Will.  I had been sworn to secrecy and had kept up my end of that bargain.  In these new circumstances, when Henry was quite literally being raised with some of my other children at Cecil House, I actually had the best of both worlds.  Henry was safe and secure and about as well supervised as was possible.  He might have lacked some warmth from Mildred and William but I was able to play with him and my little Elizabeth.  They were like brother and sister with one another.

 

It might have been a lie but, in reality, who knew about it ?  No one was harmed because I lived quietly with my lie.  Henry was well looked after even if you were always kept in the dark about your real parentage.  My Elizabeth was thrilled to have a big brother to play with.  And my wife, Anne, was just relieved to have some kind of normalcy in our private life after the craziness she had been subjected to in the first ten years of our marriage.  It was what those seminar-people would call a “win-win situation”.”
St John’s College

Saturday morning

 

Belying its reputation, Cambridge is glorious again this morning.  In the warm morning sun, the colourful window-boxes glittered against the red brick walls and ochre limestone window frames.

 

There is a palpable sense of excitement in the air.  Everyone is talking animatedly on the lawn in front of the seminar room.  They believe that something extraordinary was about to happen but no one was quite sure what that would be.  It is most decidedly not a day like all other days.  This is a day full of promise and adventure.

 

A few minutes after 9:00 Professor Sir Peter comes out and, like a grumpy schoolmaster with a room full of distracted students, claps to get attention in order to exert his control over proceedings.  Slowly, the talk subsides.  Choosing to ignore the whispering conversations that were continuing, he proclaims in his peremptory way that it is time to begin.  And, with that, the group file into the room.  Once again, there is no order to their seating arrangements as they fill in the seats around the big seminar-table.

 

“We have a full agenda this morning.  Too full, actually.  So, we are going to depart from the planned schedule.  We are going to have our two informal presentations before breaking for morning coffee.  There won’t be a second, separate session devoted to commentary on these two papers although we should have time to discuss their ideas without a formal response to them in this session.  After our coffee break, at 11:00, we will be joined by Professor Luhan Marshall and some of his colleagues in Media Studies.  But before we start, Tim Brooksby will tell us about his arrangement with Professor Marshall.”

 

All heads swivel to look at The Timmer   But he is not especially talkative this morning.

 

“Actually, Professor Sir Peter, I don’t have much to tell.  I briefly spoke with Luhan Marshall about our historiographical predicament, mentioning Graham Phillips’ excellent suggestion.  He and I are often table-mates at official functions in our college so I didn’t have to explain the evidentiary dilemma Oxfordians face and I was able to cut to the chase.  He was keen on meeting with us, even at short notice, because he thinks that his “Media Studies” graduate seminar needs new challenges.

 

He told me that it sounded like a win/win situation.  I was encouraged by his enthusiasm and we left it at that.  He did say that he would try to bring a few other colleagues with him to our meeting but he warned me that nothing could be guaranteed because the notice had been so short.  Therefore, I don’t actually know much more than any of you.  It promises to be a time of intellectual discovery for all of us.”

 

“That’s what I believe they – whoever “they” are – call an “executive summary”.  Let’s now turn our collective attention to the morning’s presentations which are concerned with “Posthumous Oxford.”  The first presentation will be from Dawn Reynolds of Bristol University.  Her pre-circulated paper was on “The “Dark Lady Sonnets” Reconsidered”.  Dr Reynolds’ talk will be followed immediately by Professor Hilary Rodwell, another one of our Mancunian brigade.  Hilary will present her arguments concerning the role of Oxford’s children in the publication of “The First Folio”.  Let me ask Dr Reynolds to get matters under way for us this morning.

 

Dawn Reynolds was another person who had come to England to do her doctoral research but never left.  She had been awarded a post-doctoral, junior fellowship at St John’s in the late 1990s and was then hired to teach at Bristol two years later.  Now in her early forties, she still kept her straight, bleached-blonde hair at shoulder-length.  Like Neddy Shorts, who had been her graduate supervisor in California, she dressed in hiking clothes.  Her self-presentation could only be described as “west coast casual” but, after living in England for so long she now spoke with a mid-Atlantic accent.

 

“Thank you, Professor Sir Peter.  It is heartening to see that revisionism is still a hallmark of Oxfordian Studies.  I have listened to the previous papers and discussion with great interest – and some trepidation.  After yesterday’s sessions – and in the expectation that this morning would be more connected with other matters than previously anticipated – I revised my paper’s organization so as to make it coherent for this shorter presentation.  I trust you will bear with me as I weave together the various strands of my argument.

 

Most Oxfordians now follow Hank Whittemore’s line of reasoning about the sonnets, although there is not a complete agreement with all of his claims.  His magisterial work, The Monument, is based on a close reading of the language of the poems which he  explains works on two levels: first, it’s lyric poetry; but, second, these seemingly-innocent poems are actually a screen in front of a parallel universe of hidden meaning.

 

Whittemore’s great achievement is the skilful way he relates these hidden meanings to the circumstances of Lord Oxford’s relationship with Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton.  In doing this, he is standing on the shoulders of earlier scholars like G. Wilson Knight and Leslie Hotson who drew attention to the royal imagery that saturates these poems.  But, unlike Knight and Hotson, Whittemore has looked behind the metaphorical screen to show us how these images consistently relate to the poet’s fascination with his hidden son, Prince Tudor.  Henry Wriothelsey should – by right of birth – have been recognized as the future King Henry IX except that his mother – Queen Elizabeth aka “The Dark Lady” – has denied him that right for her own, selfish reasons.

 

In particular, the central section of his argument is that the one hundred poems, from number twenty-seven through 126, constitute an autobiographical diary which recounts Oxford’s tribulations following Southampton’s participation in the Essex revolt of February, 1601, through to his release from The Tower, which was the first act of King James’ monarchy in April, 1603.  His explanation provides us with a comprehensive understanding of sonnets twenty-seven through 126.  This body of work is “The Monument” and, indeed, throughout these poems it is referred to as such.  I didn’t concern myself with these 100 sonnets (or the first twenty-six in the sequence) in my pre-circulated paper but I am going to discuss them now insofar as they create the platform upon which my own argument stands.

 

What I argued in my pre-circulated paper was that Whittemore’s Monument would be, as it were, more monumental if he had not tried to shoehorn the so-called “Dark Lady Sonnets” (# 127 – 152) into his argument.  Readers of his book – and his blog – will, I would imagine, be in agreement that the “Dark Lady Sonnets” fit awkwardly with Whittemore’s deceptively-simple explanation of the meaning of, and context in which, the sonnets dealing with Oxford’s fear for Southampton (i.e., 27-126) were written.

 

In contrast to his clever deployment of Occam’s Razor, these later sonnets – they were only “later” in terms of their published numbers – are not so easily explained.  Neither their chronology nor their date of composition fits so easily with Whittemore’s argument.  Moreover, the addition of  these twenty-six poems in the 1609 publication raise a number of other questions which have been rather overlooked in our rush-to-appreciation of Whittemore’s Monument.

 

Whittemore explanation of “The Monument” suggests that Oxford had planned and carefully edited the sequence of 100 sonnets so that they formed a coherent whole.  This structure memorializes the poet’s “invention” with which the sequence pays tribute to Henry Wriothesley.  It would seem that some of the additional poems in the published collection of 1609 – the first twenty-six – were written well before the momentous events of February 8, 1601.  In sonnet 27 it is apparent that something has gone terribly wrong – the boyish charms of the writer’s “fair youth” have become like “a jewel hung in ghastly night”.  Images of darkness, disgrace, treason, danger, and imprisonment immediately replace those of light, admiration, honour, love, and privilege in the “The Monument”.

 

If it is difficult to date the first twenty-six sonnets with precision, Whittemore argues that the twenty-seventh, which inaugurates the poet’s times of tribulation and the fair youth’s long passion play, can linked with the events of February 8, 1601.  Essex’s power-play had been aborted.  Oxford’s son was captured after his foolhardy comradeship with Robert Devereux led them to over-reach – or to be trapped by the machinations of Robert Cecil.  This point is not significant in the sonnets.  What is important is the jeopardy that has been attached to Southampton’s actions.  Henry Wriothesley – as second-in-command – was immediately at risk of being tried and executed for High Treason.

 

The next ninety-nine poems, (i.e., # 28-126), would seem to have been written in the form of a diary.  They record the vicissitudes of the poet’s emotions in response to the fair youth’s long passage through the valley of the shadow of death.  Sonnet 107 is known to both Oxfordians and some open-minded Orthodox Stratfordians as “the dating sonnet” because it tells us

 

 

The mortal Moon hath her eclipse endured,

And the sad Augurs mock their own presage,

Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims Olives of endless age.  (# 107)

 

In the language of the sonnets – and, more generally, in later sixteenth century culture – the “Moon” was one of the metaphors for Queen Elizabeth.  Thus, sonnet 107 can be precisely linked with the Queen’s death on March 24, 1603.  The remaining sonnets in “The Monument” (# 108 -126) were, according to Whittemore, written daily, ending twenty days after Elizabeth’s death when Southampton was released from The Tower.

 

Whittemore’s explication of the chronology, language, symbolism, and “hidden in plain sight” meaning of these “Prison Sonnets” is extraordinarily compelling.  He has, quite literally, inaugurated a paradigm shift in our understanding of Edward de Vere’s literary achievement.  In so doing, he has made sense of the poet’s claim that these poems will commemorate

 

The living record of your memory,

‘Gainst death and all oblivious enmity (# 55)

 

But that commemoration has been achieved at a cost:

 

I may not ever-more acknowledge thee,

Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,

Nor thou with public kindness honor me,

Unless thou take that honor from thy name. (# 36)

 

This means that not only must Oxford deny his real-life paternity but he must hide his other, literary “off-spring” behind the poet’s pseudonym, “Shake-speare”.  And it is this pseudonymous identity who is “The Rival Poet” in numbers seventy-eight through eighty-six (number eighty-one excepted).

 

The 1609 publication, whose title page describes itself as “Shake-speare’s Sonnets Never before Imprinted”, thus seems to be something of a medley.  It contains fifty-four “other” sonnets, which are thematically related to “The Monument” but which are not evidently written by the poet in what we might call real time in the form of a diary.  The first twenty-six are concerned with “the fair youth” in happier times while the last two (# 153 and 154) which are appended to the Sonnet Sequence as a kind of epilogue, seem to be very early works by Oxford which commemorate the birth of “The Little Love-God” in 1573.  The twenty-six “Dark Lady” sonnets (# 127-152) seem to be almost an addendum to the poet’s main concern with his son’s birth, maturation, crisis, and ultimate freedom.

 

To my mind, something is amiss here which can, I think, be understood by asking a simple, straightforward question:  “Why were the one hundred “Prison Sonnets” published alongside fifty-four others ?”   Clearly, these additional poems muddle the chronology of the “Prison Sonnets” and – I think this is crucially important – obscure their meaning.  Of course, this might very well be the main justification for their inclusion in the collection.

 

Readers of “Shake-speare’s Sonnets” during the last two centuries have been so obsessed with fitting the “Prison Sonnets” into a coherent whole alongside the first seventeen “breeder sonnets”, the next nine addressed to the “fair youth”, and the twenty-six “Dark Lady Sonnets” that they have all overlooked the poet’s diary which Whittemore argues has been hidden in plain sight, in the middle of the sequence.

 

If this line of argument has any “legs”, so to speak, then we would want to know more about the provenance of these “non-Prison Sonnets”.  By this I mean to draw our attention to their dates of composition and/or revision.  And, asking about this, I think, leads us into another set of hypothetical questions – a virtual history, so to speak – concerning the production of Oxford’s verse.

 

Let me digress in order to put this point in perspective.  We know that Oxford’s uncle, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, introduced the Petrarchan sonnet to England in Henry VIII’s reign.  We also know that Oxford himself is credited with writing the first Elizabethan sonnet in the recognizable Shakespearian form of three quatrain and a final couplet.  “Love Thy Choice” was published in 1573, it was an expression of devotion from the youthful favourite to his Queen and his lover, who was soon to be the mother of his child.  What is quite incredible is the unexplained fact that Oxford’s verse-trail stops cold just a few years later.

 

As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub”.  How do we write a history of silence ?  Or, to put this in slightly different terms which were used earlier in our meeting, does the absence of evidence necessarily mean an evidence of absence ?  Did Edward de Vere stop writing sonnets in the mid-1570s ?  Or, is it the case that we just don’t have access to the other ones he wrote ?  And, since we don’t have access to these poems can we thus assume that whoever assembled the 154 sonnets in the 1609 collection did – or did not – have access to a larger body of work, of which these might – or might not – represent the tip of the proverbial iceberg ?  These inter-related questions become urgently and insistently problematic when we place the one hundred “Prison Sonnets” next to the fifty-four others.

 

OK, let me now go back to the main thread of my argument.

 

How do we make sense of the inclusion of these “others” – the twenty-six “breeder” and “fair youth” sonnets, the twenty-six “Dark Lady” sonnets, and the two final two (# 153 and 154) which are reworkings of the Anacreontic parable ?  And, indeed, since these “others” do not seem to have been written within the same chronological frame as the “Prison Sonnets” an even larger question is begged – when were they written and why were they included and, of course, which other ones had been written but weren’t included in the 1609 publication of “Shake-Speares  Sonnets” ?

 

Where do we begin this investigation of silence and absence ?  A good starting-point is well known and already in plain sight for everyone who has considered Shake-speare in relation to the so-called sonnet craze of the 1590s.  In 1598, as we told in Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia,

 

“As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.”

 

These three dozen words – in particular the references to Euphorbus and Ovid – almost speak the poet’s name although our concern now is the last phrase “his sugred Sonnets among his private friends”.  So, this would seem to be proof-positive that after 1573, Oxford/”Shakespeare” was not silent but that he was privately circulating his poetry, writing “sugred Sonnets”.

 

Corroborating this line of argument is the appearance of the small octavo volume called THE PASSIONATE PILGRIME in 1599 which contained two of the “Dark Lady” sonnets, which later appeared in the 1609 Quarto as numbers 138 and 144.  Additionally, we have a number of other sonnets interspersed within the plays of Shake-speare.   The competing lovers in the so-called “rhyming contests” in the third scene of the fourth act of Love’s Labour Lost are mocked by their appalling sonneteering.  In contrast, the beautiful exchange between the star-struck Romeo and his Juliet, in the scene at the Capulet’s Ball (I, v, 91-104.), begins with a pair of quatrains, followed by quickly-interchanging lines.  To these examples, we should also add the Prologues to Acts I and II of the same play in which “The Chorus” sets the action in motion.

 

Thus, it would seem that there is some scattered, almost-random evidence that after his early experiments in writing fourteen-liners, Oxford/Shake-speare was not averse to having recourse to this mode of poetic expression if the occasion demanded it.  But there is no evidence that Oxford/Shake-speare needed to publish his own sequence during the height of the “sonnet frenzy” in order to be recognized as primum inter pares among Late-Elizabethan versifiers.

 

Thus, it is within that time-frame that we must locate the composition of the “Dark Lady” sonnets.  This makes obvious sense if we follow the logic of Whittemore’s argument Oxford’s antipathy – or, more correctly, his ambivalence – towards Elizabeth did not materialize on February 8, 1601.  It had festered since 1573 when his Queen arbitrarily took control of his son, thereby denying the baby boy his identity, and Oxford’s paternity.  One can assume that Oxford’s obsessive indignation would find an outlet in a verse-form which he had long-since mastered.

 

Can I make this argument more convincing by providing external documentary evidence for it ?   No !

 

But, I think, a compelling analogy is at hand.  Let me refer you to Heloise’s wistful recollection of her failed love affair with Peter Abelard:

 

“so delectable were the lovers’ joy which we sought together, that they still cannot seem displeasing to me, nor can I yet forget them.  Whichever way I turn, I always see them calling to me, luring me.  They do not even spare my dreams at night.  Even in the celebration of the Mass, when prayer should be wholly pure, the obscene phantoms of those pleasures that utterly encompass my wretched soul, that my time is spent more in such wicked thoughts than in prayer.  It is not only the actions, but places and times when we enjoyed each other are so instilled in my mind’s eye that I go over them again and again even in my sleep.”

 

Heloise’s haunting words are, I submit, both powerful and germane to the claim that I am making with regard to Shake-speare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets.  Heloise’s statement “They do not even spare my dreams at night” is like a paraphrase of the opening quatrain of sonnet 27, which is the key that opens the door to the following sequence of “Prison Sonnets”:

 

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travail need,

But begins a journey in my head

To work my mind, when body’s work expired.

For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,

Looking on darkness which the blind do see;

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight

Present thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night,

Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new:

Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,

For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.

 

Oxford’s obsessive attachment to his son-in-mortal-danger is the starting-point with the Whittemore argument.  Add to this his smouldering fear, his passionate sense of betrayal, and then the constant experience of having his nose rubbed in his disgrace and humiliation as a result of his powerlessness to change Elizabeth’s fait accompli and you have, I would argue, a fertile seed-bed in which he could plant his rage against her might.  This was a man broken by “passion, jealousy, and madness.”

 

I am assuming that Oxford was both prolific and effortlessly articulate in throwing off these verses.  What brings this to mind is, admittedly, an example from out of court – but how many people can spin a limerick at the blink of an eye ?  To be sure, the bar is set much lower with limericks but what this analogy would draw us towards is a particular mindset which obsessively fits its thoughts within a certain – and quite particular – set of limits.  The Shakespearian sonnet-format is a particularly useful structure for such a purpose.  The movement, development, and counter-movement of emotions in the three quatrains and their resolution in a final, rhyming couplet provide a framework within which the mental gymnastics of composition are required to complete a series of compulsory actions with regard to rhyme, meter, and, above all, ideas.

 

Having led you down a conjectural path of my own imagination, I want to conclude with some further suggestions sparked by reconsidering strengths and problematic weaknesses of Whittemore’s monumental re-envisioning of the “Prison Sonnets” which, he painstakingly explicates, were written in the form of a confessional diary in their own private, metaphorical, and referential language.  Following Whittemore, we can see Lord Oxford compulsive mode of production for these one hundred poems.  Living in retirement at King’s Place, Hackney, he was far away from the court and its attendant indignities.  Yet, the hegemony of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Cecil was persistently invasive, as was his impotent apprehension about Southampton’s fate.  After he did whatever he could to save his son’s life, he poured his anxiety into his poetic diary-writing.

 

How did he do it ?  Can we make sense of how Oxford wrote these poems ?  Did he sit at a desk when he wrote – or did he do so slouched in his bed ?  Was he an insomniac, writing in the wee small hours of the morning ?  Did Edward de Vere write each of these sonnets in one go ? or did he continually revise them, polishing them to the fine gloss we can now appreciate ?  Did he share them with his friends or did he keep them private ?  Are the sonnets which were published after his death “finished products” or did he consider them to be works-in-progress ?  And, what can we finally say about the sequence of 154 sonnets – were they a selection from a much larger body of work ?  If so, who selected them – and how many sonnets were there in total ?  And, finally, why were the “Prison Sonnets” kept as a coherent monument ?  Did Oxford’s dead hand reach out from his grave to dictate the organization of this collection ?

 

Like Levi-Strauss’ cultural artefacts, Shake-speare’s Sonnets and Whittemore’s Monument are, quite truly, “goods to think with”.”

 

In bringing her presentation to a close, it is clear that Dawn Reynolds’ carefully cultivated climax leaves its audience both depleted and bemused.  Where could one go from here ?
Cecil House,

June 25, 1604

Late morning

 

Robert Cecil is still sitting on his chair in front of a desk which is covered with official papers.   Henry Wriothesley leaves him about twenty minutes earlier and he has plunged into his administrative tasks.

 

A knock at the door causes him to raise his eyes and, automatically, to speak: “Come”.

 

Three rough-and-ready men enter the room.  The leader of the group is Robert Poley, a long-time “fixer” for the Cecils, father and son.

 

“My Lord Robert, we went up to Hackney as you ordered and searched Lord Oxford’s house for what you said would be incriminting papers but we found nothing that fit with your description.”

 

“Nothing at all ?”

 

“Well, your Lordship, we found stacks and stacks of old letters – some dating back thirty years or more – and lots of play scripts and other things like that but no material of the sort you told us to look for.  We left the letters and play scripts at Lady Oxford’s house, they’re still in His Late Lordship’s study.  We also left his books there.  You didn’t tell us to bring any of them back.  Should we go back to get them ?”

 

“No.  That won’t be necessary.

 

Poley, you did a proper job for me.  I imagine that I was tricked into thinking about things that weren’t there.

 

By the way, did anyone at the house pay any particular attention to you ?”

 

“No, your Lordship.  They were all sitting around Lord Oxford’s body, crying and praying, like.  They took no notice of us when we left.  The Countess did come to the door to see us out – she’s a real lady, sir.  We were offered refreshments but I knew that you wanted to see us back here, right quick.

 

That was all that happened.

 

Can we do anything else for you today, your Lordship ?”

 

“No, Poley, that will be all for today.  See my man outside for your payment.  I’ll be in touch with you again, I’m sure.”
Willy’s AfterLife

 

“Was that woman right about the way you wrote poems ?”

 

“Yes.  Her guesses – what she calls “conjectures” – were very much on the mark.  But I suppose that the fact she set her claims in the form of questions will not convince others.”

 

“From what we’ve seen of these goings-on, these conjectures don’t seem to lead them anywhere.  What they’re always banging on about is the need for documentary evidence.  As if we would leave that for anyone to look at !”

 

“Why do you think Robert Cecil didn’t do anything those letters and play-scripts ?”

 

“He was a careful, fussy man.  I’m rather surprised that he didn’t send Poley back to Hackney to bring them to him at Cecil House.”

 

“Maybe he did that later, or the next day ?”

 

“I don’t think so.  He seemed to have something quite definite I mind and Poley didn’t find what he was told to look for.

 

But I’m also surprised that Robert Cecil didn’t want to look through the letters and other materials himself.  From what we just witnessed, he must have been optimistic that Poley would find what he was sent to look for.”

 

“What do you suppose he would have done with the letters and play-scripts if they were brought back for him to look through personally ?”

 

“If there was nothing that had piqued his interest enough to send Poley to locate, he probably would have had it all burnt in his fireplace – or in the kitchen.  I doubt that he would have kept my letters or old, working versions of my other writings.  I mean, what for ?   Why would he do that ?”
St John’s College,

Saturday morning (continued)

 

There is an odd silence in the room following from Dawn Reynolds’ presentation.  Have the limits of conjecture had been reached ?  Or is it because the audience is looking past her presentation – and the one following – to the new initiative.

 

This strange hush augurs ill for Hilary Rodwell.  She is probably not likely to get a very excited hearing, either.

 

“Thank you so very much Dawn.  That was a most interesting argument.  All too often the Orthodox Stratfordians try to brush the Oxfordian arguments aside by claiming that since Edward de Vere died in 1604, he could not have been the author of the plays and/or sonnets.  But, of course, their claims are based on a chronology that is insufficient to bear the weight they want to put on it.  Our last presentation confronts their inadequate chronology head-on by considering the connections linking the long-dead Earl of Oxford and the group of people who oversaw the 1623 publication of The First Folio.

 

Hilary Rodwell teaches Elizabethan and Stuart poetics at the University of Norwich.  Of course, she needs no introduction to this group since she has been one of its founding members and, if memory serves, Hilary has attended all of our previous bi-annual meetings.”

 

“Thank you, once again, Professor Sir Peter.  Your leadership in organizing the Oxford Studies seminars has always been greatly appreciated.

 

Like Dawn before me, I have been greatly pleased by the risk-taking involved in the conjectural arguments which have been advanced here.  However, my internet-circulated paper does not follow that path.  Rather, it aims to explicate the familial and patronage networks which found common cause in the publication of The First Folio.  Yet, if my paper is not bristling with conjectural hypotheses, it nonetheless begins with one.

 

As we know, the thirty-six plays in The First Folio were evenly divided between those which had previously been published and another group of eighteen which had never before been either published or even mentioned in the documents of the period.  The Orthodox Stratfordian explanation for this extraordinary peculiarity turns on their emphasis of the role of Hemmings and Condell.  The Orthodox Stratfordians take their cue from the interlineated note in Will Shaksper’s will, giving these two men each a small bequest.  This rather dodgy bit of evidence is then used as the foundation upon which their gigantic edifice is constructed.  However, it needs to be made absolutely clear that there is no evidence whatsoever to connect Hemmings and Condell with the scripts from which the thirty-six plays comprising The First Folio were copyedited.

 

Like so much else in the Orthodox Stratfordians’ arguments, this is based on a series of inter-linked claims that are each hedged in with a “maybe”, “it seems likely” and, of course, “one would think”.  Endless repetition of these claims become like an endlessly-repeated mantra which induces a state of semi-comatose acquiescence.  Since Oxfordians don’t accept the first premise of this argument, much of what follows in their explanation about the publishing pre-history of The First Folio is moot.

 

Having addressed the weakness of the Orthodox Stratfordian case in the first part of my paper, I next turn to a genealogical exercise to explicate the connections between Edward de Vere’s children and the two men who bankrolled the publishing project.  Indeed, these connections themselves have a pre-history.  Mary Sidney Herbert, the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, was both a great friend of Edward de Vere and the mother of William and Philip Herbert who were the The First Folio’s bankrollers, as well as being Ben Jonson’s patrons.

 

This familial nexus linking the de Veres with the Sidneys is frequently misunderstood because far too much emphasis is placed on the testosterone-driven silliness attached to the “tennis court quarrel” of 1579.  This occurred when Lord Oxford pulled rank on Sir Philip Sidney.  Being called “puppy” got Sidney’s mad blood stirring but nothing came of this spat once Queen Elizabeth emphatically sided with her ranking nobleman against the upstart commoner.  Just how trivial this affair really was can be best understood by noting that less than sixteen months later, in mid-January 1581, both men were team-mates in the tiltyard.  In acknowledging Sidney’s contribution to the winning team’s effort, de Vere praised Sidney in glowing terms in front of the Queen’s reviewing-stand by saying that “the White Knight” was above their opponent “in zeal and worthiness”.

 

More concretely, the marital alliances between the Herberts (and thus the Sidneys) and Edward de Vere’s family were densely intricate.  In 1597 the teen-aged Bridget de Vere – the second daughter of Edward de Vere and Anne Cecil de Vere – was betrothed to William Herbert, but this match didn’t work out.  Philip Herbert, the younger brother, would later marry Susan de Vere, the youngest of Oxford’s three daughters in December, 1604, which was about five months after de Vere’s burial.  Yet another instance in which the funeral feast furnished forth the wedding’s sweet meats.

 

Bridget Vere’s refusal to be badgered into a marriage she didn’t want – just like the earlier refusal of Henry Wriothesley to be browbeaten by Lord Burghley into marrying Elizabeth, the oldest of de Vere’s three daughters – lends credence to the role of individual choice in the selection of marriage partners.  These aristocratic marriages are best understood as dynastic alliances but that is not to say personal attraction was an irrelevant consideration.  Of course, this issue of “individual choice” cannot be understood in modern or contemporary terms.  After all, the three daughters of Edward de Vere didn’t just marry anybody, two of them married members of the aristocratic inner circle and Bridget’s husband, Francis Norris, would later become the Earl of Berkshire.  These men were hardly chosen from a random sample of the English population – all three were ranking aristocrats.

 

Every one of Edward de Vere’s daughter thus became a Countess in her own right, through marriage.  This fact surely belies the common Stratfordian slur against the Earl of Oxford – that he was a ne’er-do-well and a wastrel who was considered by contemporaries to be a spectacular failure.  The Stratfordians’ view seems to be at odds with the success that Oxford achieved in marrying all three of his daughters into the richest, most powerful families in England.  Clearly, his contemporaries regarded him in rather better terms than do Stratfordians.

 

The third tid-bit of evidence is, in my opinion, the most significant one.  But it is not unproblematic.  What we have is a second degree of separation from a side-ways reference which we are told occurred in a letter that was sent to William Herbert by his mother.  Lady Mary Sidney Herbert was playing hostess to the newly-crowned King James at the family’s pleasure palace, Wilton House, at the end of August, 1603.  The original document noted by the royal chronicler, John Nichols, has been lost but it was apparently still on view at Wilton House in the nineteenth-century when William Cory noted in his journal that he had seen the reference: “We have the man Shakespeare with us.”

 

There has been deep disagreement about who was being referred to – Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.  Yet I submit that if we consider this evidence in the usual framework for analyzing circumstantial, hearsay evidence then in terms of the classic nexus of “motive and opportunity” it would be hard not to believe that Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Dowager Countess of Pembroke, was referring to her great friend Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

 

After all, who exactly was Will Shaksper in relation to these upper-crust aristocrats ?  Nobody.  Nothing.  No one has ever linked the man from Stratford with any one of them apart from the dedications in twopoems published a decade earlier.  That is to say, there is no independent corroborating evidence that Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon was ever connected with these members of the upper aristocracy.  That being the case, it surely beggars belief that Will Shaksper would be an invitee at a country-house weekend at Wilton House.  And this was not just a random country-house weekend but one that was graced by the presence of the newly-crowned King James – the cynosure of high society’s pinnacle.

 

In contrast, the associations which drew together Mary Sidney Herbert and her son, William Herbert with Edward de Vere and his daughter, Susan de Vere, were multi-stranded.  These linkages seem to have been carefully maintained throughout the period 1579 and 1623.  So, in terms of “motive” the case for “the man Shakespeare” being an in-joke referring to Edward de Vere by his pseudonym seems overwhelming.

 

With regard to “opportunity”, the timing of this reference also powerfully reinforces the Oxfordian claim that the knowledge of this pseudonym was an open secret among the cognoscenti.  When King James VI of Scotland came to England in the summer of 1603 to be crowned as King James I of England, his very first act was to exonerate Oxford’s son, release him from imprisonment in The Tower, and to reinstate him in his lands and titles.  Shortly thereafter, on August 2^nd, he renewed Edward de Vere’s annuity.  Two weeks earlier, King James had granted him the reversion of the Oxford manors of Waltham and Havering for which he had unsuccessfully petitioned Queen Elizabeth throughout her reign. This gift coincided with de Vere’s integral role in the coronation ceremonies at Westminster which he had attended because he was Lord High Chamberlain of England.

 

Furthermore, what strikes me as particularly germane about this tid-bit of information is that the ostensible reason for the letter being sent to William Herbert was to inform him (and also King James who was with him, nearby in Salisbury in late August, 1603) that the upcoming entertainment at Wilton House was going to include the production of As You Like It a play that remained unpublished until the appearance of The First Folio in 1623.  It would appear that King James and Queen Anne liked it a lot.

 

This brings us to the lynchpin of this question of “opportunity”.  In 1604, King James wrote to Robert Cecil about the renewal of Oxford’s annuity that “never greater gift of that nature was given to England.  Great Oxford when his state was whole ruined got no more of the late Queen.”  That winter, after Lord Oxford’s death, seven of the eight performances in the King’s Christmas entertainment were plays written by William Shakespeare.  Taken together, James’ words and actions would seem to provide overwhelming circumstantial proof that he, too, was a party to the open secret of Oxford’s pseudonym.

 

I have digressed in order to come to my main point in a roundabout way.  Let us now fast-forward our spotlight.  The First Folio of Shakespeare was officially announced on November 8, 1623, when William Jaggard presented copies of the unpublished plays (which would be incorporated into the larger work along with the already-registered plays) to the London Stationer’s Company to be registered.  The first print-run was 750 copies, each selling for the then-princely sum of one pound.  The first recorded sale took place on December 5, 1623.

 

The First Folio has Edward de Vere’s fingerprints all over it.  Susan de Vere’s husband, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and her brother-in-law, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, bankrolled the publication and it was to them that the project was dedicated.  Ben Jonson, a long-time Herbert retainer edited the collection and wrote the famous dedicatory verse, about which so much controversy has swirled.  It is not my intention to rehash Oxfordian criticisms of the superficial Stratfordian readings of Jonson’s ironic compliments and/or those veiled clues which insinuate that the “sweet swan of Avon” was most likely Edward de Vere, the owner of the manor of Billesley on the river Avon.  Nor do I intend to deal with the use made of Heminges and Condell to maintain the subterfuge of pseudonymous authorship.  Instead, I want to address several other subjects.

 

First, the surprising choice made by the Herbert brothers to employ William Jaggard as the Folio’s printer/publisher.

 

Second, why was Ben Jonson chosen to be the editor-in-chief of The First Folio ? and,

 

Third, the timing of the collection’s issuance and the multiple connections in the politics of the early 1620s that drew together Susan de Vere, the Herbert brothers, Henry Wriothesley, and Henry de Vere.  By placing The First Folio’s publication in the context of this network operating in opposition to “the Spanish Match” we can understand more clearly not just “when” and “how” but also “why” these plays were published together for the first time.

 

First, then, who was William Jaggard ?  A native Londoner, Jaggard became a freeman of the Stationers Company on December 6, 1591.  He was obviously successful in his printing/publishing activities because, in time, he became the premier man in the field, as evidenced by his appointment to the position of Official Printer to the City of London in 1611.  His brother, John, and his son, Isaac, were also members of the Stationers Company.  Thus, when it became a matter of finding a man with the shop and recognized expertise to take on a major publishing project like The First Folio, Jaggard was in some sense the obvious choice at the time.

 

But the choice of William Jaggard was not without its complications.  These complications were related to his 1599 publication of The Passionate Pilgrim. By W. Shakespeare, the volume in which two of Shake-speare’s Sonnets first appeared.  Katherine Duncan-Jones has argued that this was a pirated publication and that, as a result, “Shakespeare” (by whom she means Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon) was angry with Jaggard.  Of course, this assertion is not backed by documented fact because Will Shaksper himself left no recorded evidence of his involvement with these works.  Nor was there any evidence of a contemporary lawsuit launched by “W. Shakespeare” to stop Jaggard’s unauthorized printing of his privately-circulating poems.  Nor was The Passionate Pilgrim burned in that year when the “Bishop’s Ban” consigned other “degenerate works” to a puritanical bonfire of the vanities.  One wonders how the Puritans, abetted in this instance by Archbishop Whitgift, could overlook W. Shakspeare’ titillating and salacious octavo volume if they believed that Will Shaksper of Stratford was the author.

 

Duncan-Jones suggests that The Passionate Pilgrim did “the rising playwright no great credit” and argues that Thomas Heywood’s 1612 testimony was that “Shakespeare” (not Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon) was “much offended with Mr Jaggard – that altogether unknown to him presumed to make so bold with his name”.  What Duncan-Jones doesn’t tell us about this incident is that Thomas Heywood was a servant to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, and that he had also worked with the Earl of Derby, William Stanley, who was married to Edward de Vere’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth.  It seems not just odd but downright peculiar for someone as mercenary as Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon to be “much offended” with Jaggard for making “so bold with his name” yet not to take legal action to protect his name and his intellectual-property rights.  In 1599, Will Shaksper’s name was obscure whereas the pseudonym “William Shake-speare” was known to consumers of poetry books as the author of “Venus and Adonis” and “Lucrece”, both of which had been reprinted in several editions in the previous five years.  Thus, it seems quite reasonable to accept Heywood’s 1612 statement on the condition that one understands that he was, in fact, referring to Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who wrote under the pen-name of “William Shake-speare”.

 

What cinches this identification is the fact that William Jaggard came out with an expanded edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1612.  Surely, if Will Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon had been “William Shakespeare” then he would have been expected to restrain its publication.  Once again, that didn’t happen.  On the other hand, if Edward de Vere was “William Shakespeare” then he had not only been dead for eight years but his heirs seem to have already used this pseudonym a few years earlier when Shake-Speares Sonnets were published.   This little deception in 1612 would dovetail perfectly with Hank Whittemore’s arguments about the poet’s identity hiding in plain sight, which Dawn mentioned earlier this morning.  Whatever offense “Shakespeare” had taken in 1599 was clearly long-forgotten by 1612 when Heywood wrote his testimony and Jaggard again made so bold with Shakespeare’s name.  Thus, far from being an insurmountable complication, choosing William Jaggard to be the printer/publisher of The First Folio fits quite neatly into the conspiracy-of-silence which perpetuated the open secret of Edward de Vere’s hidden identity, in much the same way that Thomas Heywood’s testimony has to be read in the context of his connections with the de Vere network.

 

Second, why Ben Jonson ?  Again, we come back to our earlier network analysis.  Ben Jonson was a highly-favoured client of the Herbert family.  Jonson had been a servant to Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and this relationship with female family-members carried on into the next generation.  Jonson dedicated one of this Epigrammes to Susan de Vere Herbert, Countess of Montgomery, who acted in four masques which Jonson prepared for the entertainment of James’ court between 1605 and 1621.

 

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Jonson dedicated his Epigrammes, was Jonson’s primary patron in the next generation, during the second and third decades of the seventeenth century.  William Herbert’s office of Lord Chamberlain gave Pembroke control over the Jacobean theatre-world which made it a simple matter for him to arrange a royal, annual pension of one hundred pounds for Jonson in 1616.   This was temporarily doubled in 1621-1622 when Jonson was the interim Master of the Revels at the exact-same time that he was directing the de Vere/Herbert project of collecting and editing all of Shakespeare’s plays for publication.

 

As fulsome as Jonson was in his praise of his patrons, he was silent in 1616 when Will Shaksper died in his home-town obscurity of Stratford-Upon-Avon.  This silence is in sharp contrast to the effusive praise he heaps on “William Shakespeare, the “sweet swan of Avon”.  Yet his celebrated lines obscure more than they illuminate.  The First Folio contains none of the poetry for which William Shake-speare was famous in his own life-time and afterwards.  This omission is in accordance with Jonson’s deviously-clever eulogy which has been so consequential in seeming-to-substantiate the Stratfordian claim that The Bard was a one-off, rustic genius.

 

This omission also distances “William Shakespeare” from Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, to whom both “Venus and Adonis” and “Lucrece” were dedicated and whose identity as “the fair youth”, who was “beauty’s pattern to succeeding men” (sonnet 19).  Distancing Southaampton and the poetry from The Bard underlined – indeed, manufactured – the Stratfordian myth of a democratic prodigy who sprang from the sullen earth of Warwickshire to sing hymns at Heaven’s Gate.

 

And, third, why were the plays collected and printed – at great expense and effort – in the 1620s ?  The Orthodox Stratfordian line on this argues fancifully that Heminges and Condell were able to horn-swoggle the “illustrious [Herbert] brothers” into laying out a huge sum of venture-capital (perhaps as much as one thousand pounds) in order to memorialize a playwright whose death, seven years earlier, had evoked not a scintilla of notice in the literary world.  I used the slang term “horn-swoggle” in the previous sentence advisedly – how else can we understand this feat of entrepreneurial prestidigitation ?

 

When the Folio project was set in motion in 1620 or 1621, The Bard’s known literary output was eighteen works, none of which had been published in the previous decade.  The King’s Men theatrical company apparently were willing to hand over another eighteen unpublished manuscripts – the so-called “foul copies” – without so much as a penny in compensation for their lost income.  This notion absolutely and completely contradicts everything we know about the hard-bitten business practices of graspers like Alleyn and the Burbages and their ilk.

 

Even in rhetorical flights of fantasy, it beggars our knowledge of historical reality to believe that anyone in early Stuart England would have termed commoners like Alleyn or the Burbages as “grand possessors” of the original manuscripts.  These men – and others like Heminges and Condell and Phillips – might have been newly-monied but the smell of dis-respectability was not so easily washed off them.  None of them had connections with aristocrats like Ben Jonson did.  Heminges and Condell were entrepreneurs, men on the make – just like Will Shaksper.

 

If we dispense with the romantic fantasy of self-sacrifice on the part of Will Shaksper’s old colleagues, we are forced to ask a very troubling question: who, exactly, possessed manuscripts of the thirty-six plays ?  Again, the answer is apparently hiding in plain sight – Edward de Vere’s daughter Susan de Vere Herbet would seem to be the most obvious candidate.  She was, of course, married to one of the Folio’s dedicatees and sister-in-law of the other one.  She seems to have also had a close relationship with Ben Jonson that followed on from her mother-in-law’s patronage.  So, clearly she had the “opportunity”.  What was her “motive” ?  Why was it deemed worthwhile to spend a huge sum of money on the works of Susan de Vere Herbert’s long-dead father ?  And, even more to the point, why was this expensive project undertaken so long after Edward de Vere’s death ?

 

It is at this point, I think, that Peter Dickson has made a most exciting discovery.  Well, not exactly a “discovery” but, rather, what Dickson has done is to connect a series of hitherto unconnected elements in the history of the early 1620s and to show that they were, in fact, connected.

 

The starting-point is Dickson’s recognition of the centrality of the actors who formed the key opponents to the “Spanish Match” which would have married Charles, Prince of Wales, to the sister of the King of Spain.  Henry de Vere, Eighteenth Earl of Oxford, was twice imprisoned – for a short while in the summer of 1621 and then again for twenty months in 1622-3 – for his very aggressive resistance to the Stuart’s 180-degree compass-swing in England’s foreign policy.  In 1621, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, was sent to the Tower along with his younger, half-brother.

 

The imprisonment of Oxford and Southampton was the lightening-rod for resistance to the divine right tendencies of King James and his minion, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.  Moreover, the well-attested fact that the ruling clique was actually under the sway of the Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar, escaped no one’s notice at the time.  What further inflamed political passions – and nationalist Protestantism – was that this crisis came only a few years after Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1618 execution had been engineered by Gondomar, who had demanded this sacrifice in order to be able to report favourably to his King in Madrid about the Stuarts’ pacific intentions – and to enhance Gondomar’s own reputation in the corridors of power in the Escoril.  What drove these Spanish machinations was, of course, the Thirty Years War on the continent and the Spanish/Habsburg/Catholic strategy to keep themselves from being entangled on two fronts.  The Stuarts were willing partners for the most simple of reasons – they were broke and could not afford to participate in any further military campaigns.

 

The rise of George Villiers had its parallels with Piers Gaveston’s ascendancy three centuries earlier.  But the outcome was different – history doesn’t repeat itself.  In the early seventeenth century, Villiers/Buckingham’s rise took place in the aftermath of the death of Prince Henry Stuart in 1613.  The sudden, unexpected death of the first Stuart Prince of Wales turned the court-world inside-out.

 

Those who had been connected with Prince Henry Stuart – especially de Vere, Wriothesley, and the incomparable pair of Herbert brothers – lost influence.  As Villiers/Buckingham grew in confidence there were profound reverberations in the diplomatic sphere away from the now-traditional Elizabethan antipathy to Spain.  Gondomar’s influence rose and rose, irresistibly.

 

These political shifts provide the back-drop within which The First Folio was hurriedly planned, slap-dashedly printed, and then published.  A particularly telling harbinger of the de Vere/Wriothesley resistance was the publication of Othello in 1622.  This was the first play by Shakespeare to have appeared since 1609.  In the interim, William Herbert had attained the position of Lord Chamberlain which gave him absolute control over the theatre-world.  As one of the “grand possessors” of the de Vere/Shakespeare original manuscripts, Herbert’s decision to release this particular play at this particular time is of extraordinary significance in understanding the pre-history of  The First Folio’s publication.

 

Othello, which was probably first written in the 1580s, doesn’t only concern a husband’s mis-directed jealousy but also the politics of a marriage match.  The play is set in the context of seemingly endless warfare in which Othello, The Moor, has successfully commanded the Venetian fleet against the infidels.  Othello is undone by the machinations of Iago – a diminutive version of Diego/James.   Forty years later, direct allusions could be drawn between the actions of Iago and James Stuart and Don Diego Sarmiento de Acua, Count Gondomar, against the Protestant Loyalists who formed the “Patriot Coalition”.

 

Dickson’s contextualization of the circumstances in which The First Folio enterprise was undertaken gains added importance when we place it alongside the choice of William Jaggard to print this massive volume.  Furthermore, Jaggard was not just the most likely man for the job, he had been lobbying for it.  In 1619 he put on sale a series of seven, already-published Shakespearian quartos – the “Pavier Quartos” [named after his colleague and collaborator, Thomas Pavier]  re-issued Henry V,  The Second and Third Parts of Henry VI, Pericles, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This proved to be a money-spinner and Jaggard was thirsty for more product.  So, next, he went overboard in flattering Susan de Vere Herbert, her husband, Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and his brother, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.  Roger Stritmatter has argued that Jaggard’s effusive dedications in another one of his 1619 publications, ARXIAO-PLOUTOS, were part of his (ultimately successful) campaign to ingratiate himself and his printing business with the “grand possessors” of the other Shakespeare manuscripts.  Stritmatter’s circumstantial argument lacks only the “smoking gun” of direct evidential confirmation to cinch the connection he is arguing for.

 

While the lack of that “smoking gun” is unfortunate it is not, I would submit, insurmountable.  Indeed, when we tie together the various strands of circumstantial evidence concerning “motive and opportunity” that I have delineated in explaining the genesis of The First Folio, the only remaining weakness in the argument relates to another question – what would the reissued “Shakespeare’s” plays mean to their target audience ?

 

Here, again, the gap in our present knowledge can be addressed with another recourse to conjectural history.  What gives this conjecture leverage is, I believe, the recognition that for those who were member of the “Patriot Coalition” in the 1620s the actions of King James/Buckingham in their collaboration with Count Gondomar was akin to an eery sense of déjà vu.  The terrible memories of the 1580s danced before their eyes. For Oxfordians, then and now, Edward de Vere’s play-writing – political propaganda for the stage, for which he received a huge annuity from Queen Elizabeth – takes on a crucial explanatory relevance   The reissuance of Shakespeare’s plays in the early middle 1620s – at another time of Spanish threat – was a very real way of making politics by another means

 

In closing, then, I think that my paper – like so many others – has led us to the recognition that for the Oxfordian argument to gain traction with a wider acceptance it needs to break free of conjectural, virtual history and discover new archival evidence.”

 

“Thank you so very much, Hilary.  That is just fascinating and very provocative.

 

As you have all no doubt noticed, I have not set up my sand-timer nor have I cut off these two presentations which have both gone beyond their fifteen-minute limit. Indeed, these two, long presentations have taken up almost all of our time.  That being the case, I am going to invoke closure on the first part of this morning’s proceedings.  We are now scheduled to meet up again after coffee, at eleven.  Let’s synchronize our watches – I now make it 10:18 – so we will be re-commencing here in forty-two minutes.  That should give us time to chat informally about Dawn’s and Hilary’s wonderful papers.  I think that after several full days of sitting and listening intently to our presenters, it will do us good not to tax ourselves too much but to take a break from the serious business of sitting and listening.  Hopefully, we will all return with recharged batteries.”

 

No one demurs.

 

Everyone has been engrossed in listening to the presentations on The Sonnets and The First Folio.  They are all mentally drained.

 

As people began to file out of the seminar room into the brilliant morning sunshine, Neddy Shorts and Cyril Hubert are seen to be engaged in a vigourous exchange.  But they aren’t talking about the morning’s papers, they are discussing their plans to get from Cambridge to Heathrow Airport on Sunday morning; their flights were in the early afternoon and both are scheduled to stay overnight at St John’s.  What hasn’t been sorted out is the way they would travel down to London, and then on to Heathrow.

 

“You know, Cyril, things have actually changed here in the last few years.  Now there’s a fast train to King’s Cross and from there there’s a direct subway link, via the London Underground, which takes you right into the airport.  I think that the door-to-door travel time is under three hours.  We can get a cab from here tomorrow morning to catch a train at Cambridge station around nine.   Then we can be at Heathrow by noon.  Or we could go earlier.  I’ll check this out with one of the porters to get the details.”

 

“OK, Neddy, you do that. Right now, I really need a jolt of caffeine.”
Willy’s AfterLife

 

“What do you think of that ?”

 

“You very well know, Henry, that Will, Bess and I were all DeadOnEarth years before those events transpired.  But it was interesting to see that my little boy, Henry, became a man to be reckoned with.  What kind of friendship did you have with him?  Tell me more about my little boy ?  This time-travelling is quite amazing.  I’d never have thought that I could to learn about the remains of my LifeOnEarth.  I can’t quite believe that I can look into my very own future – or, my future without me, or whatever you would call it.”

 

“After you died, there was no ceremony or public mourning. As she said, you were quietly buried in Hackney a few days later.  Afterwards, I saw little of your Elizabeth, Dowager Countess Oxford or young Henry.  I was newly-rehabilitated and greatly enjoying my liberty.  King James bent over backwards to accommodate me, the more so after that strange interlude on the day and night of your DeathOnEarth.

 

Then, in 1608 – no, it was in early 1609, just after Henry had turned sixteen, Lady Elizabeth invited me to King’s Place.  She wanted me to act as a kind of surrogate big brother.  Well, that’s what she told me.  I had no idea that I was actually Henry’s half-brother nor the half-brother of the three girls.  These blood-relationships were hidden from me whenever I was told about my own history.”

 

“Henry, keep to the point.  You were telling us why Lady Elizabeth wanted to talk with you.”

 

“That’s right.  She was worried about Henry’s wild, debauched escapades.  He had bristled against the strictures of wardship – didn’t we all ? – and was sent down from Oxford and then, next, was supposedly reading the Law at Inner Temple.  Really, he was so young – he went to Oxford when he barely ten, after your DeathOnEarth, and I’m told he was a poor student.  But they gave him the consolation prize anyhow.  He received one of those meaningless Master of Arts degrees from Oxford in 1605.

 

Being in London only fed his waywardness and it was on account of these wild activities among the other young law students that Lady Elizabeth wanted me to supervise him.  Can you imagine that ?  It was like she was asking the fox to guard the chicken coop !

 

I suppose that she imagined the years of imprisonment had had an impact on my wild and crazy behaviour.  And, I suppose she was right.  I was almost thirty when Bess died and I was freed from The Tower.  Twenty-six months of imprisonment had taken their toll.  The same man did not emerge from The Tower as the young buck who was taken in.”

 

“You de Veres were absolute terrors.  Willy was impossible to control when he was in his twenties, too.  So, I can well understand Lady Elizabeth’s concern about her Henry.  She must have heard stories about you – how could she not ?  Your mad-cap activities were the fable of the age.”

 

“Enough about me, what about Henry ?  Tell me more.  Please.”

 

“First of all, he was a terrible student – so unlike you it was hard to believe that he could have been your son.  It was apparent that spending time in one of those academic or legal finishing schools was going to be a waste of time if not counter-productive.  But he was a brave, courageous, and bold lad.  So, it was agreed that I would get in touch with your cousins – Horace and Francis – to make arrangements for him to embark on a military career in their service of “the Fighting Veres”.

 

But the time was out of joint.  After more than two decades when Englishmen were fighting against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, peace broke out in 1609.  Your cousins had been fighting in the Low Countries almost continuously since before the Armada.   Francis died almost immediately upon returning to London, Horace lived on.  He was still alive when I was DeadOnEarth.  But no one knew if the peace would hold so they took on Henry as a kind of apprentice-soldier.  He looked splendid in a uniform, that boy.

 

He was also a minor courtier.  That’s how he allied himself with the circle surrounding the young Prince of Wales, Henry Frederick Stuart, who was exactly the same age but rather more serious and disciplined than your Henry.  Their friendship was how he came to become imbricated in the oppositional groups who were repulsed by the growing Catholic influence at James’ court.  I really don’t know how much your Henry had to do with his sisters or their husbands but he was clearly a young man on the rise.

 

Oh, my, I’ve gotten ahead of myself.  When your widow, Elizabeth, died in 1613, Henry was twenty.  He inherited a huge sum of money from his mother to go along with all those titles he inherited from you.  And, like you, the first thing he did with the money was to arrange for a continental tour.  After that, a few years later, he got into an embroglio with George Villiers’ brother about a woman.”

 

“Bess, that sounds like he’s telling my story all over again, eh ?”

 

“Willy, yet again, the apple didn’t seem to fall far from the tree.  After all, look at the way that this Henry behaved.”

 

“OK, but this isn’t about me.  I’m trying to tell Willy about his second Henry.

 

It was at this time, in the second decade of King James’ reign, after Prince Henry died, the life of the court became crazy.  James had developed an uncontrollable, licentious desire for George Villiers.  Hilary Rodwell was right, the way that Villiers seemed to cast a spell over King James was just like Piers Gaveston’s sway over Edward II.”

 

“With the same disastrous results, no doubt.”

 

“Yes, I’m going to tell you about that but let me set these matters in perspective.

 

The first decade of James’ reign had been pretty uneventful – you know, the usual factional squabbling and the “outs” bitching and moaning about the “ins”.  Nothing very much out of the ordinary.  The ascendancy of Villiers created a poisoned madness that just seeped into everything. The situation was made more explosive and dangerous because of the role played by that man Gondomar. He bewitched Villiers and, in turn, gained incredible influence over King James who was powerless not to shame himself because he behaved like Villiers’ lap-dog.

 

Slowly, an opposition began to coalesce against Villiers’ influence over the King, who seemed powerless to behave in a manly manner.  The reorientation of policy towards the Spanish created consternation and anger which was only heightened by James’ highhandedness towards his English noblemen, who were slowly marginalized as all power – spiritual and temporal – came to issue from Villiers.

 

The policies and politics of James’ second decade marked an about-face.  After all, King James had come to throne under some suspicion but had won great admiration for his ability to smooth over the frictions of Bess’ last decade.  He released me from The Tower even before he left Scotland.  He was amenable to Lord Oxford’s requests.  He kept on Robert Cecil as his principal Secretary and main adviser.  He authorized a new, English translation of the Bible.  He had married his daughter to the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate.  He had kept up the English presence against the Spanish in the Low Countries.  But these policies were slowly abandoned.   The death of Prince Henry Stuart seemed to be a kind of pivotal moment which coincided with Robert Cecil’s fall from grace.

 

Without the countervailing influences of Prince Henry and Robert Cecil to oppose them, the hegemony of the Villiers clique  – James raised him to the title of Duke of Buckingham, which made him the first nobleman in the realm – grew and grew.  Gondomar’s appearance and his influence over Villiers added a dangerous twist to this new policy.  Their authority was enhanced by the promotion of Prince Henry’s younger brother, Charles, who had all of his father’s faults and none of his strengths.

 

Charles was easily led and that failing was compounded by the fact that he was just plain stupid.  In a sense he had inherited not only the worst characteristics of King James but also the worst characteristics of his grandmother, Mary the Scots Queen.  For a man like Villiers, Charles was an easy conquest.

 

Thus, by the end of the second decade – not even twenty years after Bess was DeadOnEarth – the country was being effectively governed by an upstart who had bewitched not just the King but also the Prince of Wales.  To make matters ever worse, Villiers himself was under the sway of the Spanish Ambassador.

 

Matters came to a head at the beginning of the 1620s.  I was imprisoned – again – in The Tower along with Henry during the summer months but we were both released shortly thereafter.  But things got much worse for Henry in April of the following year when he was again jailed in The Tower after personally insulting Villiers.  He was actually in very real danger of losing his life.  This would have occurred at Gondomar’s instigation, in much the same way that Sir Walter Raleigh’s execution was demanded by Gondomar a few years earlier.  Fortunately, your Henry escaped Sir Walter’s meeting with the Stroke of Justice but it was a close-run thing.

 

Ultimately what saved Henry’s life was the abject failure of the final act of the Spanish Marriage fiasco.  Charles and Buckingham came home from Spain empty-handed.  They landed at Portsmouth on October 5, 1623.  They had failed to seal the deal to the great delight of the general population and to the great relief of the patriots who had opposed this silly business.  All their toadying to Gondomar had come to nothing.   They had been made to look ridiculous.

 

In response to their humiliation, Villiers and Prince Charles almost immediately switched course and played the French marriage card.  Prince Charles was betrothed to Princess Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of Henri of Navarre.  They subsequently married the next year, after James had died and Charles became King of England even though Buckingham remained the power behind the throne for as long as I lived.

 

The French Marriage also encountered popular opposition but this was largely mollified when Charles/Villiers had reached out to me.  They were clever enough to effect a public reconciliation with the members of the Patriot Coalition who had vigourously opposed the Spanish Match.  In so doing, it was also agreed that Henry would be released from The Tower.  And, as a further sop, Henry was given royal approval to marry his cousin, your grand-niece, Diana Cecil.  Lady Diana was the grand-daughter of Thomas Cecil and the great grand-daughter of Bess’ right hand man, William Cecil.  This was a windfall of epic proportions – once more, the de Veres were rich.  Diana Cecil came into the marriage with huge pots of money.

 

All of this dynastic politics provided the context in which your youngest daughter Susan, her husband, and his brother hurried The First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays through the press.  Hilary Rodwell got the story straight.  But since the plays were published under Willy’s old pseudonym your good name remained, in effect, buried with your body.  The ruse with Will, who was paid to be the dumb man, had continued for years after your death only ending when Lady Elizabeth, your dowager countess, was DeadOnEarth.  Some people knew about this deception but most others were ignorant about it.”

 

“Henry, that’s just fascinating but what about my other boy ?  Did he have children ?  Did the family line continue ?”

 

“I can’t answer that.  I was DeadOnEarth the next year – November 10, 1624.  I had gone with my own son to fight for the Protestant forces in the Low Counties, against the Spanish.  My boy James was just twenty but he died before me.  I died a few days later.  We caught the bloody flux and that fever killed us before we even saw a moment of battle.  About my half-brother Henry, all I can tell you is that by the time when I was DeadOnEarth he, too, had already joined the Elector Palatine’s forces.  He was a colonel in charge of a volunteer regiment of foot soldiers; he was proud to be following in his uncles’ footsteps.  What happened after that, I do not know.  I do know that he was alive during my last days of LifeOnEarth.”

 

Will had been quiet all this time while Henry was telling Willy about LifeOnEarth without him.  Now that the story-telling seemed to be ended, he began to speak.

 

“My LifeOnEarth was much more mundane.  After Willy had died, I kept up some of my business dealings in London but I had long since begun to split my time between London and Stratford.

 

I was rich.  I purchased a coat-of-arms for my old father.  I owned the second biggest house in Stratford and lots of other property in my home town.  I loaned out money at interest.  I bought and sold commodities like wool, grain, and malt.  My London activity provided me with some income – and I got an annual payment for lending my name to Willy’s writings – but my main base of operations was in Stratford-Upon-Avon.  I enjoyed being a big fish in a small pond.

 

The money that Willy paid me for my services continued for as long as Countess Elizabeth lived.  I recall that I received my last payment in 1612, the year before she died.  After her death, the payments stopped but it didn’t matter to me any longer.  Like I said, I was rich.  I had achieved all that I had hoped for when I left Stratford to join Willy’s players almost thirty years before.”
St John’s College,

Saturday morning (continued)

 

Everyone is on pins-and-needles, anticipating some new excitement.  But, inevitably, they are likely to be disappointed.   Things just don’t happen like that in academia.  Everything moves in slow motion.

 

Professor Sir Peter rings his silly little bell and the group immediately files into the seminar room.  Professor Luhan Marshall of Media Studies is already seated in the seminar room with Tim Brooksby and a few other unknown people.

 

Luhan Marshall is a man in the full flush of his middle age.  He is well-tanned with a very high forehead and a neat mustache.  He is casually dressed, as if he has just come in from a round of golf.  The seven people accompanying him are graduate students – and they are just like students at any other university, dressed in t-shirts, nasty blue jeans, and sandals.  Two are wearing shorts.  They are seated in a make-shift back row.  They are more likely to be seen, not heard.

 

Within a few minutes, the whole group has assembled.  Professor Sir Peter does not assume control of events because this impromptu session would be chaired by The Timmer.

 

“I am very please to introduce Professor Luhan Marshall to you.  He is the Chairman of Media Studies Program at this university.  I have already chatted twice with him about our situation and, this morning, Graham Phillips joined me in describing the new initiative which he suggested to us.  So, we don’t need to re-hash that.

 

I am going to let Professor Marshall introduce his seven graduate students to you and then we can go around the table identifying ourselves to them.  It would be helpful for Professor Marshall and the students if you could name yourself, your institutional affiliation, and give them a very brief overview of your research activities.

 

There won’t be a quiz afterwards to see if you can remember everyone’s name.”

 

There was a pause while these introductions take place, then Professor Luhan Marshall begins to speak.

 

“Tim has told me about your evidentiary predicament.  In fact, it has come up on a number of occasions over the years that we have known one another.  My life-partner, you see, did a Master’s degree with Professor Brooksby a long time ago.  So, I have been introduced to the strong points as well as the pitfalls of the Oxfordian case.

 

My understanding, then, is that you’re caught on the horns of a dilemma – on the one hand, the case for Edward de Vere is very strong in terms of circumstantial arguments but, on the other hand, the definitive documentary linkages needed to substantiate those arguments don’t seem to exist in the present state of archival knowledge.  And, your hope is that you might be able to address that lack of documentation by undertaking a more thorough archival search.  Furthermore, I understand that mention was made of the great benefits that accrued to historical demographic research by tapping into the very English desire to volunteer for community service.

 

I know all about that campaign because when I was an undergraduate here, my tutorial in historical geography was conducted by a chap named Richard Smith who later went on to become Professor of Geography and the head of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.  Although he’s now retired, Richard and I go a long way back and we still see one another regularly, either playing cricket or, sometimes, just for a drink and a chat.  So, after The Timmer rang me up yesterday afternoon, I called Richard to find out if my memory was correct about how their data-base was collected.  I was rather surprised to learn that the only part that I hadn’t remembered correctly about that story was that the volunteers were responding to a radio talk given by old man Laslett, who had been the chap who got their resesarch group organized in the early 1960s.

 

In any event, times have changed and I don’t think that a radio broadcast is as likely to bring you the same kind of reaction.  That’s not really surprising – fewer people listen to Radio Four these days   Indeed, I don’t even know if the Third Programme still operates on the wireless.  An increasing number of people in England get their news over the internet.  Even television news’ viewership has been in a state of decline recently.

 

You will probably be surprised to learn that all of our surveys indicate that the ownership – and recreational use – of computers is more broadly based here in England than in any other country in the world.  The usual explanation I’ve heard for that statistic is that it can be related to grown-up boys who want to recreate their toy-train hobbies.  I don’t believe that – after all, it does nothing to explain the use of computers by women of all ages, although that is rather beside the point.  What’s germane to you about this finding is that there is a huge potential audience you can reach.  What’s problematic about that statistic is that our surveys also indicate that most people have the attention-span of a newt, constantly flicking from one internet site to another.  Therefore, I think that you might regard the electronic media as a kind of secondary, reserve army which could be held in wait until you have identified your target group. My suggestions to you, therefore, are actually quite conservative in their initial aims.

 

First, I think it is absolutely imperative to engage in some very old-fashioned genealogy.  This is necessary in order for you to specify your possible research sites.  I understand that Henry de Vere, the Eighteenth Earl of Oxford, died without issue and that therefore a new line of descent took place when the title lapsed in the male line of descent.  I think, therefore, that the very first item you need to address is the creation of a genealogical data-base.  This is going to be a huge undertaking but I think that there are electronic short-cuts available since most of the standard books on the peerage are now available in an electronic format.

 

Once you get that done, then you will need to identify those people who were living when the Seventeenth Lord Oxford died who were likely to have been trusted with his papers.  You will need to cast your net very widely since I would imagine that if the originals were, in fact, kept together, they would not have been kept too close at hand, as it were.  What I am saying is that you will need to identify second- and even third-order degrees of separation among Lord Oxford’s contemporaries.

 

Let me give you an example of what I mean by that.  I know The First Folio was dedicated to the two Herbert brothers.  Professor Brooksby has told me that one of them was married to Edward de Vere’s daughter.  So, it would seem logical to consider them as first-order suspects.  Retrieving their genealogies is simple – I spent ten minutes on Wikipedia this morning to do that.

 

But problems arose when I began to look at their collateral relations, what the country-set used to call their “cousinage”.  It’s at this point that matters get complicated because the computer-generated, automatic linkages spew out too many options – some form of discretion seems necessary.  I can only think that you will have to develop some protocols to guide your search in order to keep from being swamped.

 

I’m not here to tell you what such protocols should be like although I would imagine that any contemporary evidence of partiality, patronage, friendship, inter-marriage, and so on would certainly be pointers in the right direction.  I have no idea how many “likely” candidates you will need to survey like this but I can imagine that more than five or six wouldn’t be enough; certainly, a dozen would not be excessive, given the need to supplement their basic identification with some additional historical genealogy.

 

Second, I think that the first order of business needs to be completed before you move on.  I can’t emphasize this point enough.  But, the second step I would recommend would be to identify the possible descendants who are alive today so as to create another data-base. To do this, I think that one or two of my graduate students could participate by providing assistance so that they can use this experience as a case-study for their “Special Subject” paper next year. Once that second data-base has been completed then I think you can begin a two-stage search.

 

As you may know, every county in England has a local records office and – after having identified the seventeenth-century people who interest you – it would be a rather straightforward matter to communicate with the local record offices to discover the location of their seventeenth-century homes.

 

Now, we are getting to the point where you can begin to enlist the energies of volunteers.   Having established your persons-of-interest, as the police in this country like to say, then you will need to involve your volunteer associations.  The first step in doing this I would suggest would involve communicating with the three or four dozen county history societies to tell them about your project.  The second step would be – one hopes – to get a group of local volunteers who are ready-and-willing to assist you.  They would be the ones to do the local spadework.  I think that we can arrange for another student assistant (or perhaps two) who can provide technical support to you while getting valuable field-experience for his or her “Special Subject” paper.

 

The third prong of your offensive is most likely going to be the most difficult.  This is going to cost money to do and somehow you will need to tap into some source of financial support.  Perhaps this might be the occasion for getting a media-savvy person to help you put your story on the air and in the press.  Until you rattle the trees, you never know what might fall to the ground.  Richard Smith told me that that’s how old Laslett made his connection with the Persian oil trader – a man with the fantastical name of Nubar Gulbenkian  – and discovered that there was some accessible research money in his Foundation’s accounts.

 

I’d like to have been able to provide you with a solution that would produce immediate results but snapping one’s fingers would make about as much impression on the tides of academic life as Canute’s presence had had when the waves lapped against his feet.”

 

A certain sense of deflation and disappointment seems to fill the room.  Perhaps some of the seminar have had unreasonable expectations or, perhaps, the excited frenzy that Graham Phillips’ unsolicited remarks created is beginning to subside.  Either way, there is going to be no instant gratification or immediate pay-off.

 

The Timmer thanks his friend and then suggests that it might be more profitable for all concerned to break up earlier than scheduled and to form themselves into smaller, informal working-groups.  Then the whole seminar could re-assemble after lunch to spend a couple of hours in the afternoon setting up a few formal working groups, even though this time has been scheduled to be “free time”.   He adds that it isn’t going to be appropriate to have these discussions at this evening’s final dinner at the St John’s Master’s Lodge, which has been organized by Beth Raine.

 

No one seems aggrieved by this additional re-jigging of the seminar’s schedule.  A profound sense of torpor has spread through the room as they realize that there is not going to be a quick, happy resolution to their dilemma.

 

A voice from the far end of the table does ask, “Will drinks be served ?”

 

Even that mini-mutiny is stopped in its tracks when Professor Sir Peter immediately replies, “Neddy, do you think that white wine spritzers would suffice ?”

 

Obviously, no response is forthcoming – none has really been expected.  So, Professor Sir Peter calls an end to the morning’s proceedings.