Murders were all too easily accomplished, and on all social levels, but the more important a person, the more likely they were to attract envy, hatred, or any one of a number of reasons for getting rid of them, either by outsiders or by members of their own family. People travelled in groups when moving beyond their own safe neighborhoods, with everyone carrying with some kind of weapon. Peers used “tasters” to make sure they weren’t being poisoned, or at least fed tidbits to dogs before eating. With no real police yet, and no forensics, the only recourse was protection, revenge, or doing unto others before they could do unto you.

Also, was murder of the peerage common — as opposed to ‘legal’ beheadings, religious burnings,or deaths in wars/ plagues/ tournaments?
(War of the Roses notwithstanding)

Mr. Story writes that Ben Jonson’s Sogliardo, with his unique purchased crest featuring the rampant, headless boar, turns out to be the set-up to a joke that Jonson uses 24 years later to deliver a bigger punch-line with his stage crafting of the Droeshout First Folio engraving.

I already knew a great deal about all the strange features of the engraving before reading Mr. Story’s revelation. I didn’t think that any of the explanations: That the head was too large for the body, that the too-dark line around the face making it appear like he’s wearing a mask and that the too-small body having two opposite sides (a front and a back) sewn together were enough to prove that Jonson knew the truth about the two men sharing a name but only one was the true author. But what Mr. Story said next was enough for me to suddenly admit–by George, I think he’s got it!

It turns out that the punch-line is the shape of the collar. The too large head is actually resting upon a collar that looks very much like a crest/shield and it does indeed look like Mr. Jonson is saying, “Here at last is the head–from that missing purchased crest.” Here is the thinking, real mind behind these immortal works (not the straw man whose name adorns them).

It seems obvious that Oxford’s anger was not so much from any suspicion that the child wasn’t his as it was at Burghley for having made the issue, as he called it, “the fable of the world.” If he was angry at Anne, it was probably for having allowed her anxieties to set her up, and him as well, for the rumor that inevitably followed. As for the idea that the child was Burghley’s, that was surely the work of Henry Howard, whose pattern it was with many besides Oxford, to involve them in one of his Byzantine plots, then destroy them with rumors and accusations. Howard was a nasty piece of work.

As for the six plays, the first was Pericles, in which it seems he still struggled with the vision of Anne and Burghley as the wicked correspondents of Howard’s rumor. Considering how Elizabeth Vere and her sisters must have felt about this play, it’s no surprise that it was left out of the First Folio.

The next was probably The Winter’s Tale, in which he takes the blame on himself for allowing his all too easily aroused jealousy to get the better of him.

In the third version, Much Ado, Anne’s sorry tale has been reduced to the sub-plot. Here the villainy has been foisted off onto a cartoon version of Don John of Austria, while the miraculous resurrection of Hermione in WT has become Hero’s trick resurrection. Significantly, while Anne’s story was relegated to sub-plot in Much Ado, the main plot reflects the relationship between Oxford and the first real love of his life, Ann Vavasor, suggesting that the first version of this play was written in 1579 or 1580, before the discovery of their relationship and consequent banishment.

The fourth version was probably Cymbeline, in which he shifts the blame onto Henry Howard, naming him Iachimo, another name for Jacob, the wily deceiver of the Biblical story who cheated his honest brother out of his patrimony. The addition of Howard as villain puts the date after 1581, when he and his cousin had their massive falling out.

The fifth, All’s Well, may have come before Cymbeline or after it, but either way it must have been written about the time he was anxious to get back to Court. In both of these he fantasizes Anne as an intrepid girl who dresses as a youth in order to track down her true love, rather the opposite of the part she actually played.

The sixth, of course, is Othello, in which the story is finally told as an out-and-out tragedy. Named Iago, another version of Jacob, this portrays Howard as the sick creep that he actually was. Of the six, this is the only genuine masterpiece, and as such it was probably one of those he polished in his final phase. With memories of his wife’s death to haunt him, the death of Desdemona is far from the hocus pocus of Hermione’s resurrection or the trick that resurrects Hero’s reputation. Written with a heart torn with remorse, it is operatic in the grandeur of its language. “Yet the pity of it, Iago, O Iago, the pity of it!”

The story is touched on in at least two other plays, in Hamlet’s otherwise inexplicable attitude towards Ophelia, and in the cruel treatment of Mariana by Claudio in Measure for Measure.