Born as the crest of two waves, the German Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, crashed into each other at right angles, the great poet and playwright blended these two not always compatible energies into the culture that has been England ever since. Under the constraints of the Reformation, the passionate energies that went into painting, sculpture, and architecture in the Southern European Renaissance, in England went into language: a bare stage, good costumes, superb actors, and the glorious stories we know as Shakespeare. One way of tracking the author through the theater scramble of the 1580s, is by following his changes in style and his need to create the perfect team for the play he’s writing at the moment.
Oxford’s development and survival is largely due to his patrons, surely among the best an artist ever had. He sank low at times, but not so low that he ever had to quit writing, at least, not for long. The next important piece of scholarhip that needs to be done will be on these patrons. We know who they are, many of them, we haven’t yet put into order just how and when they interacted with him and with each other.
Burghley, Sussex, Walsingham, Hunsdon, Charles Howard, Southampton, the Pembroke brothers, are the leading figures, but there were others as well who contributed to his survival in various ways. Even when they were disgusted with him, as Hunsdon must have been when the bum took up with his mistress, they kept him afloat because they knew his value. For the great ministers of that time who had the dreams and aspirations of both Italian and Reformation humanism alive within, he was the great instrument of their policy, though this would be fully realized only when he was gone, as so well expressed by Ben Jonson in his dedicatory Ode in the First Folio.
Oxford too played the part of a patron to other artists, hiding his identity in that endeavor almost as thoroughly as he hid his writing. Today the Press has overwhelmed the Stage in impact, but it was so unimportant then that the so-called conspiracy to hide his identity was little more than an afterthought, a problem that had to be resolved in whatever way worked at the time, one that kept coming back as those members of the audience who were not members of the Court community pushed to find out who was writing this terrific stuff. Oxford tried to run a theater from behind several sets of curtains, but inevitably there were critical moments when he was forced to show himself.
Historically Oxford’s role in Early Modern theater is as a patron, a role that tends to get lost in the argument over his role as a writer. Nobody disagrees that he was one of the foremost patrons of his day, not so much in the importance of the companies to which he lent his aristocratic name as in the longevity of his presence, first appearing as an entertainer of his Court community in the early ’70s and last when Oxford’s Men combined with Worcester’s Men in 1602. That’s an official presence of 30 years, which is actually about average for one of these patrons, who often took up the responsibility for an acting company or other entrerprise as soon as they came of age, often of the company patronized by their parent before them, passing it on to their own heirs when they died.
Oxford’s involvement as patron of the arts and sciences went a good deal deeper than what shows on the historical surface. He patronized musicians and composers as well as other writers, and was praised by them as one of themselves. When looking for a model for Oxford within our own times, the composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein comes to mind, an entertainment genius of the same all-encompassing nature, only, shall we say, considerably less fearful of recognition.
One question that hasn’t been dealt with yet, so far as I know, has to do with the company maintained by Oxford’s father. Were they, perchance, the one we know as Leicester’s Men in the 1560s? When Earl John died in 1562, Elizabeth gave Leicester control of the Oxford estates. Did that mean that he also became the patron of what had been the sixteenth Earl’s acting company? Unlike our world today, the arts community was very small. Leicester’s Men were a handful of Court actors, essentially the same men who later became the core of the company that called themselves Hunsdon’s Men and operated out of Burbage’s Theater, just up the street from Fisher’s Folly. Were some of them the same men who, decades earlier, had performed John Bale’s King Johan in Ipswich in 1561, just prior to the Queen’s entertainment at Hedingham Castle?
