During a three month London adventure in 1999, I got (thanks to Dan Wright) the opportunity to see Jude Law in John Ford’s T’is Pity She’s a Whore at the Young Vic. Impressed by Law’s ability to express the most intense anguish, I’ve been hoping ever since, first, that he’d do Hamlet (instead of one lame movie role after another) and second, that I’d be able to see him do it. Both wishes just came true: not only has Jude Law done Hamlet, but (once again, due to the kindness of friends) I got to see him do it on Broadway! And I was right. What a Hamlet!
Hamlet is tricky, even for the best actors. It’s become such a museum piece, there are so many famous sililoquies, every avid Shakespeare fan has a favorite performance to which they match each new approach, so that watching the play runs the risk of turning into a sort of Olympics of the Stage, where the actor playing Hamlet is not so much enjoyed as he is rated, in the same way that Olympic figure skaters get rated during their performance, feat by feat, by TV commentators.
Law sweeps this away with the utter naturalness of his style. Sililoquies flow from him as easily as he greets his old school friends or rants at Ophelia. Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language runs as trippingly off his tongue as if it were his own most natural form of expression, yet there’s none of that jack-hammer rat-a-tat-tat that some use when reciting Shakespeare, apparently in an effort to spew out the bloody awkward stuff the way they do their own native slang.
I think this is largely because Jude Law is as much a dancer as he is an actor. He expresses the beautiful but strange language as much with his body as he does with his voice. Together the two, the voice and the body, create a satisfyingly complete whole in a way that I can’t remember ever seeing before. Anger possesses him utterly. Anguish torments every fibre. How perfectly Shakespeare has captured these emotions in words and how perfectly Law renders them, his gestures flowing, not from the words themselves, but from the emotions they are meant to express. Today, thanks to television, we have all seen, over and over, how real people respond to disasters or the deaths of people they love, and so we can’t help but know how at such moments, words failing, it’s the body that reacts. With his dancer’s sense of timing, Law also knows how to pause before reacting, something many actors either never learn or tend to forget in production. It’s such an energetic performance, I can’t imagine how he can do it, not only night after night, but twice on matinee days.
Unfortunately there’s little good to be said for the rest of the production. Law’s gutsy approach was not echoed by a single other member of the cast. Apart from the King, who did prove a strong and convincing match to Hamlet’s energy, the rest simply entered, exited, stood or walked about as though waiting for something exciting to happen. Horatio was particularly disappointing, less an antique Roman than a pool hall shark. The set and lighting are good, providing some interesting accents to the action, but the costumes, modern suits in shades of gray, not only disappear into the gray walls and black floor of the castle set, but seem totally out of place. With no chairs or benches to relieve the need to stand, what group of twenty-first century people would choose to spend more than a minute or two in this cold, empty, castle foyer?
Now that my wishes have been fulfilled I have a new one, that Jude Law will repeat his performance on film, with costumes and sets that match, a Horatio whose body language speaks of his strength and dependability , a sober Gertrude who knows deep down right from the beginning that she’s damned, so that her son has only to remind her of it, and . . . and . . . oh, Michael Palin and Terry Jones as the gravediggers! Hey, let’s shoot for the moon!
Unfortunately when it comes to Ophelia, it seems the role is unplayable. Since it’s very likely that the Countess of Montgomery had a say in the publication of the First Folio, she could well have had something to say about the final version of her own mother’s unhappy fate and death. For whatever reason it seems impossible for any young actress (or director) to actually bring her to life, at least, I’ve never seen it done. With Jude Law directing, maybe we could see an Ophelia who really cuts loose. Wishes do sometimes come true.
Born as the crest of two waves, the German Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, crashed into each other, the great poet and playwright blended these two often incompatible energies into the culture that has been England’s ever since. Under the constraints of the Reformation, the passions 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 great human stories we know as Shakespeare, stories whose sources are to be found in the libraries where the Earl of Oxford spent his childhood.
Oxford’s development and survival as an artist was largely due to his patrons, surely among the best a writer ever had. He sank low at times, but not so low that he ever had to quit writing, at least, not for long. One of the most important research projects remaining to be done is on these patrons. 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 hisdedicatory Ode in the First Folio.
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, but his 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. Though there’s no sign of it (so far) in the record, that could mean that he inherited 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, some 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 these 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? It’s worth considering.
Recent questions have raised the enduring issue of fact vs. fiction. I’ve been asked to make it (more) clear where I depart from a structure of known fact to fill in missing areas with a scenario in which areas can’t be supported by the kind of cited facts that historians rely upon, or are supposed to rely upon. I’ve been considering how to deal with this ever since reading Ogburn’s The Mysterious William. Deluged with facts, what was missing was the story. Obviously Oxford was the true author, but how to perceive the living being within this mountain of argument and data?
The problem lies with the difference between facts and story, or truth and fiction, as this dichotomy is so often portrayed. It’s almost impossible to mix them and come up with something that isn’t seen as untrue on the one hand, boring on the other, or both. One touch of supposition and those interested only in so-called hard evidence toss the whole thing in the waste basket as unsupported theorizing. Burden it with documentation and those in search of the story lose interest because it lacks drama. Truth, however, is more than fact. There’s truth in story that can never get relayed from just the facts alone. No one knew this better than the author of the Shakespeare history plays.
At a certain point in researching the period it became clear that the lack of facts––not just on Shakespeare but on all the writers and works from that period––wasn’t simply due to entropy, the dictum that “things fall apart,” or any lack of interest in him in his own time. Facts were missing on purpose, either burned in fireplaces or never exposed to begin with. Confusion was not always due to missing data, but was often intentional. The sources of information relied upon by scholars tracking the stories behind the literature of the period, title pages, entries in the Stationers Register, Revels records, etc., were either purposely ambiguous or flat out false.
Asking why, I began to see a pervasively phobic attitude towards literature, i.e. fiction, i.e. storytelling, that infected the entire culture. Asking why again, it seemed that in rejecting the supersitions and folk tales of medieval Christianity, the reformers in power were doing all they could to throw the baby out with the bath, just as they were doing with the beauties of Renaissance Italian painting out of a Reformation mistrust of Italian sensualism. Poetry was dangerous––the better, the more beautiful the language, the more dangerous. And then there was the age-old threat of dissident voices, so often those of the best writers.
Just the facts, M’am.
None of this is new. All of it has been mentioned, usually in passing, by literary historians, who may question the truth of a title page or two and then go right on repeating the standard account based by earlier historians on those very same title pages! It’s as though archaeologists who discover the bones of a prehistoric human simply leave them lying in the order in which they find them, never making any effort to arrange them so they reveal the shape of a human being. As a result, all we have is a pile of facts, no story, no humans struggling to make their way through the difficulties of their lives, loving and hating each other, just a bunch of names without connections to each other or to the stories told by their works.
When I say “not one” has tried to tell the story behind this pile of real and phony facts, that’s not quite true. Those who’ve tried to make sense of it in human terms (I’m thinking in particular of T.W. Baldwin and Penny McCarthy) have been thrown off by the biggest falsification of all, the substitution of the true author of the primary works of the time with someone of an altogether different, even opposite, nature.
The archeology metaphor works well here, where two bodies having been buried together ages ago, their bones becoming mixed through some earth disturbance so that a pelvis, a set of shoulder blades and bits of both spines have gotten lost. Later, when scientists attempt to sort them out, the result is a single two-headed monster with two sets of arms and legs which they then attempt to sell to an ignorant world as the missing link. In Shakespeare’s case, the historians either doll up the monstrous Stratford grain hoarder cum literary genius with anecdotes and conjectures, or they ignore him and describe the flowers that “probably” grew in his garden.
At a certain point intelligent readers became sick of this paper monster and began to look for something a little more real. They could just manage to make out a shape out there, moving around in the bushes, but it was hard to define. (Francis? Is that you?) Eventually J.T. Looney gave it a name and Charlton Ogburn a wealth of detail, but we’re still stuck, first with the desire to pin the blame on a group, now with the nonsense that almost anyone alive at the time could have tossed off these erudite masterpieces.
My kingdom for a story!
By blogging there seemed the possiblity, finally, of having it both ways. I could tell the story I had begun to perceive some time ago, with links to articles that provide the kind of citations that give at least a minimum of support. With readers able to ask for specifics directly without waiting for an answer to a letter sent through the publisher or finding a booksigning somewhere within driving range, I could finally (I hoped) provide the key to the insight or the missing bit of information that would suddenly (perhaps) bring the scene to life, set the story in motion, for that reader and perhaps others as well.
I’ve only been at this blogging for a few months now and so the story, while complete in my mind, is far from complete here. I’m still working on background material for the 1580s, the most difficult decade partly because there’s so little documentation, but also because it’s then that the heart of the story, the drama, begins to take shape. Because I have to conjecture so much for that decade, I need more supportive material than was required for the 1570s or will be for the 1590s.
If it seems that much of what I write is directed to those readers who have already read the biographies (Anderson, Ogburn, Miller, Nelson), it’s because for you I don’t have to repeat so much, simply filling in a few areas that they ignored (chiefly Oxford’s childhood and education). This way I can concentrate on those areas that provide the reasons why he and the actors and their patrons, hid his authorship, reasons of culture, tradition, politics, and religion, and beyond these, the connections to the important figures of his time that he portrayed and satirized in his plays, points that can’t be made without showing why he would do such a thing and how he managed to get away with it.
If I can reach you, then together we can find ways to communicate the Authorship Issue, not just as a series of talking points, arguments, and facts, but as a story that, motivated by the life force that is our common heritage as humans, simply tells itself. Surrounded as I am by all the stuff I’ve accumulated, it’s hard for me to see the forest for the trees. By telling it this way in bits and pieces, and by answering your questions, it helps put things in perspective.
So please bear with me, and do ask for clarification of those points that, to you, seem little more than wild surmise. My idea of support may be somewhat different than those historians who, when the paper is lacking, simply skip over the anomalies, but be assured, nothing I suggest is spun purely from thin air.
John Shahan pushed me hard in his comment on my response to Alex McNeil’s question. Sometimes an exchange that follows a blog gets lost in the drift, but this is too important to let that happen, so I’ll respond here to some of his more pertinent points. If you missed it in full, it follows Alex’s question.
John:Why was the cover-up maintained after his death? It’s a separate question that you haven’t answered. It’s a good question, and one that many people ask when they come to the controversy for the first time. We should have a good answer at the ready, and providing an explanation of why he would have kept hidden during his lifetime doesn’t cut it. It sounds evasive to answer a question other than the one that was asked.
I wasn’t being evasive, I was being too general. His authorship would have been kept a secret after his death for exactly the same reasons that it was kept a secret during his lifetime, the same reasons that all the covers he used throughout his life remained in place, the same reasons that Mary Sidney’s descendents never revealed all she wrote or that Francis Bacon never revealed himself as a “hidden poet.” And for some of the same reasons that got Christopher Marlowe murdered or transported.
If I got lost providing background it’s because it’s so difficult for people today to understand the realities of Shakespeare’s time. However, there is one that might stand out a little better than most: namely the fact that so many of his characters satirized respected and high ranking members of the Court community, some portrayed as buffoons, some involved in scandalous love affairs, some even accused of murder! That they might possibly be identified with these infamous characters would have had these highly status conscious people, their retainers and descendants, in a real tizzy.
As long as William of Stratford was known as the author, the originals of these characters were protected, but had the Pembrokes and the Kings Men revealed the truth about the authorship they would have had an extremely serious situation on their hands. This is one of the reasons why the publication of Oxford’s collected plays took as long as it did. It had to wait until the Earl of Pembroke achieved the Court position where he finally had the power to take the matter of its publication into his own hands, overpassing the wishes of some who would have preferred that everything Oxford ever wrote be destroyed.
Most agree that Polonius was a demeaning portrait of Lord Burghley, something that would certainly have been as obvious to members of the Elizabethan Court community as it is to us today. If, as I believe, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and other of his more serious and philosophical plays were written, not for the Court or the public, but for his Inns of Court audience, it could mean that Elizabeth never saw them, or if she did, not in the versions that we know from the First Folio. Thus it’s possible that Burghley never saw himself derided as Polonius, or his daughter portrayed as a lunatic and a suicide. For who would tell him? There were no newspapers, so there were no reviews. All publication was tightly controlled. By whom? By Lord Burghley.
Were it ever to become public that it was the Earl of Oxford who had created these popular characters––so popular that they made the Lord Chamberlain’s-King’s Men a fortune––how long do you think it would have taken the public audience to connect Oxford’s father-in-law with Polonius, his wife with Ophelia, his political adversary the Earl of Leicester with Claudius, or his Queen with Gertrude? How long to connect Richard III with Robert Cecil, Mildred Burghley with Volumnia in Coriolanus, Southampton with the Fair Youth, Philip Sidney with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Emilia Bassano with Cleopatra, and so forth.
Oxford’s own daughters were the daughters of Ophelia, the granddaughters of Polonius. That, plus the fact that his youngest had married a Pembroke, shows that however you look at the cover-up, by 1615 when Pembroke finally got the office of Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, putting him officially in charge of the Court Stage and the King’s Men, publication of the First Folio was as much a family affair as it was a literary event. Pembroke wanted the plays published, but he also wanted to protect his family and his community from scandal and, not least, himself from the odium that would be inevitable were he to allow these connections to be revealed.
If it’s a good talking point you’re after, maybe this will do. Yet even here we run into the problem of readers not understanding enough about the period to get it. Again the main problem is our inability to grasp how small were these communities, and how static. Where our communities today consist of thousands, many of whom are no more to us than names, theirs consisted of a dozen, two dozen names, in positions that may have changed only once or twice over a lifetime. During Elizabeth’s reign the number of peers went from 60 to 25! Our communities are in continual flux; as one worker, neighbor, merchant leaves for greener pastures, retirement, or intensive care., another takes their place. The only way that things changed in Oxford’s time was through death.
We can say these things, but do they sink in? Do we really understand what it meant to live in what to us would seem intolerable constriction while under the constant threat of death for ourselves, our children, our loved ones, whether by disease (no doctors) or by violence (no police)? Added to the equation must be their ignorance of science, of medicine, even of their own history––a problem that Oxford’s history plays were intended to address.
The closest thing we have to their peers, their kings, queens, earls and countesses, knights and ladies, are celebrities. Of these we have so many that, as happened a few days ago, I can see someone introduced to an audience on television, an audience of cheering thousands, as one who has sold millions of platinum records and received a cartload of important awards, someone I’d never heard of before. And while their handful of important persons changed only when one died and was replaced by another, ours are continually changing, usually simply by disappearing into anonymity, beauty queens into middle-aged matrons, sports stars into businessmen, some onto the pages of history, a history already jammed with names and faces.
The problem isn’t only of numbers and stasis, it’s one of attitude. We have no respect for our celebrities. Largely due to their numbers, their lack of background, the ephemeral nature of their importance, they seem to exist largely as vessels for our scorn. Their very renown calls forth efforts to bring them down, to expose them, to show the world their weaknesses. These Elizabethan celebrities had no photographers with telephoto lenses to catch them with their pants down, they were known to their people only from a dignified distance, dressed in crimson, ermine, and gold, or from copies of stately portraits. Descended from the heroes of past glories, they came as close to living gods and goddesses as humans could. Their lessers might hate them and blame them for hard times, but they did not, they simply could not, disrespect them.
When Shakespeare came along and revealed these gods and goddesses as human beings with problems and weaknesses like themselves and their neighbors it was fascinating, yet for all their speculation, they did not know, they could not know, how closely based they were on the real thing. To have known who among those distant and admired figures were the real models of these fools and villains was simply more information than the culture could bear. As a general statement, that may be putting it a little too strongly, but not by much.
John: Lots of authors use pseudonyms to conceal their identities during their lifetimes without the cover-up continuing after they die. So why was Oxford different?
Lots? Who? Who of Oxford’s social stature? Who in his time, or the time before his, or the time after his? Not all statements have to be substantiated, but this is crucial. Who else of his status in the Elizabethan era published works of the imagination under his (or her) own name? I don’t know of a single one.
John:There’s a difference between knowledge and belief, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we fail to make the distinction. That’s what Stratfordians do.
Having repeated this twice I assume you’re taking me to task for making unsupported statements. I’ve made it clear from the start that my purpose with this blog is to provide a scenario that accounts for what facts we have, not just a few here and there, clustered around one or two circumstances (such as the writing of the Sonnets), but as many as possible. I did a lot of substantiating of statements while I was editing The Oxfordian. That was important, but this, however different, is just as important.
We’ve had most of the facts on Oxford for decades, and where have they gotten us? Facts are to story as flour, water, salt and yeast are to bread; the ingredients, not the thing itself. We can eat bread, we can’t eat flour, water, salt and yeast. Creating a story out of facts is like mixing, kneading, and finally, baking. We are not inventing the bread, what form it takes depends solely on the ingredients. All we’re doing is assembling them, giving them a thump or two, and letting them rise into a living story.
To be convinced, hearts must be touched as well as minds, something that can’t be be done without characters and a plot. What’s most real about us are not the facts of our lives, but our stories. To understand the past, we need more than dates of battles, we need heroes and villains, tyrants and underdogs, damsels in distress. Without these, the audience leaves at intermission. No one understood this better than Shakespeare.
There’s another reason for what I’m doing. The Stratford bio as generated by Ben Jonson and others has sent generations of Shakespeare enthusiasts on an utterly fruitless 400-year-old wild goose chase through the archives in search of something that will reveal a believable Shakespeare story. While true stories must be based on facts, it’s also the case that the search for facts will go off-track quickly if there isn’t a logical scenario in place directing it where to look. How do we get such a scenario? By doing what I’m doing, filling in the blank areas with informed guesswork.
Hopefully there will be some, or at least one, who’s located close enough to the relevant archives who gets sufficiently intrigued by what I’m proposing to begin looking where I’m pointing. Centuries of investigators have read the letters of Burghley, Walsingham, Alleyn, Pembroke, and others, looking for something, anything, about Shakespeare. Nothing anywhere near this scale has yet been done for Oxford. Who knows what he or she will find once they begin to look?
Ockham’s razor is a slang term for the simplification that takes place when the truth is finally located at the center of a mélange of clues and complicated hypotheses. We can be fairly certain we have the truth when whole cartloads of contradictions start vanishing, leaving a simply, believable story. But of course, first it’s necessary to stop ignoring the contradictions.
In the tiny community that was the English Literary establishment in the 1570s-90s, there were not a dozen different men (and/or women) who, over this 20 year period, wrote for a time and then ceased to write. There were two who for reasons of social propriety and privacy, used a number of different names, most of them the names of friends, family members, or retainers. These two, the pioneers, are Edward de Vere and Francis Bacon. The other two giants of Early Modern English Literature, Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe, who both died young, did not take pseudonyms, though for very different reasons. Raleigh probably makes a fifth, if we only knew which of the anonymous poems in the anthologies were his. (Raleigh wrote only for the Court community, he didn’t write pamphlets or dramas; his primary art was seamanship and adventure.) Mary Sidney is a transitional figure, carrying the torch from the first, gifted amateur generation to the following, which, if not totally professional in todays terms, was closer. And then came those who, again for different reasons, were far more free to write under their own names, writers like John Donne and Ben Jonson.
Why so much hiding of identities?
All that needs to be said here is that they did. Yes, we don’t have much hiding of identities today. Yes, it seems bizarre to us today that anyone would want to hide their identity when getting their precious work published. The reasons why these folks hid are complicated; I’ve covered some of them in other essays. Other scholars have also dealt with this. All that needs to be said here is that there is no doubt whatsoever that during this period the hiding of identities by poets, playwrights, satirists, writers of romance tales, novelists, and anyone who wrote any sort of imaginative literature was rampant. We may question this, but the readers, writers, and publishers of 16th and 17th-century England certainly did not.
How can we be certain that an identification is correct?
Well, we can’t. But we can come awfully close, much closer than any of the guesswork that’s gone into turning the handful of prosaic facts we have about William of Stratford into the lifeless biography that haunts us today. Our methods include the following:
Treating the information on title pages and front material with the same sort of rigor that we question anecdotes and rumors.
Understanding how very small were these early literary communities, and so realizing that there could only be a handful of writers involved in the beginnings of the commercial Stage and Press.
Locating repetitive styles and themes: There are habits and quirks that writers simply can’t eliminate and themes that they return to again and again. When both of these continue to appear together in a series of works––no matter what their title page attributions––chances are we’ve located a hidden writer. True, this was a period of experimentation, when styles came and went and when writers delighted in imitating the styles of others, either because they admired them or because they wished to satirize or annoy them. Nevertheless, if there’s enough congruence of style and themes, a general profile will appear that goes beyond names.
Locating connections between the names on title pages and the Court writers who had reason to hide their identities: Such connections include Oxford’s to John Lyly (secretary 1578-90), Anthony Munday (secretary, 1576?-1580), Thomas Watson (retainer 1583-92), Robert Greene (possibly Essex neighbor), Emilia Bassano(probably lover), William of Stratford (through Richard Field, his neighbor at Blackfriars), and Henry Evans (assistant); Mary Sidney to John Webster (her coachmaker, weak, but plausible) and to a fellow courtier (Fletcher); and Bacon to Spenser (fellow student at Cambridge), Nashe (student at Cambridge), Harvey (fellow at Cambridge), and Whitgift (tutor at Cambridge).
Locating the connections between the themes and subjects of the works in question with the lives of these Court writers: Most notably almost everything ever published under the name William Shakespeare can be connected rather neatly to persons and events in the life of the Earl of Oxford. Mary Sidney can be connected to Webster by the rather obvious reflection of her sons’ situation at Court in the events and characters portrayed in The White Devil and between her personal situation in 1601-1612 and the plot and characters of The Duchess of Malfi (and earlier by her personal knowledge of the events portrayed in Lady Jane, written for Philip Henslowe in 1602). Bacon’s authorship of Nashe by his financial straits and the theme of Pierce Penniless, his authorship of Spenser by his relationship with Gabriel Harvey from days at Cambridge University and (as Nashe) their pseudo-pamphlet duel, and so forth.
And by connecting them in time: It’s no coincidence that Robert Greene and Thomas Watson “died” just before Shakespeare appeared. It’s no coincidence that Webster’s plays appear only at times in Mary Sidney’s life when she isn’t busy with family stuff. It’s no coincidence that the works attributed to Spenser begin appearing just after Bacon arrives back in England but that Spenser’s name isn’t used for that or for The Faerie Queene until after Spenser departed for the distant wilds of Ireland. It’s no coincidence that Nashe appears for the first time during the ferocity of the Mar-Prelate dustup, or that he suffers nothing for the Isle of Dogs, while Court outsiders like Jonson, Shaa, and Spencer go to jail. The timing of these and scores of other events, set beside each other, form the pattern of a very interesting story, if we let them.
No single one of these points can stand on its own as evidence, but when we find that every item in every one of these categories points in a particular direction, we can be pretty sure we’re on the right track.
QUESTION: Joe Eldredge of Martha’s Vineyard asks: “In developing your flow of facts and events of Oxford’s last years, how have you dealt with the tempting possibility of Southampton (3rd) as a royal “changeling”? Is it: 1) of interest?; 2) a challenge to be dealt with? 3) Significant and/or necessary to explain much of the identity aspects of authorship? 4) at the very least a delightful threat to the names of two of our eastern states? Time: Thursday June 25, 2009 at 12:01 am
Thanks for asking, Joe. To #1, yes, if only because I began researching the authorship question in Boston in the 1990s where the Prince Tudor theory reigned supreme: #2, yes, it was “a challenge to be met,” along with many other theories, blanks and anomalies; #3, no, I never found it significant or necessary to explain the identity aspects of authorship, most of which, in my view, originated from Oxford’s need for privacy and later by the business policies of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. I’m not sure what you mean by #4.
The “royal changeling” (or “Prince Tudor,” or “Royal Bastard”) scenario, that has Elizabeth giving birth to the illegitimate child of Oxford (or Seymour, or Leicester), was not particularly “tempting” to me at the start because my personal experience as a woman functioning in a man’s arena made it seem unlikely, from the little that I knew about Elizabeth, that a woman in her position would have dared to develop a sexual relationship with any of her courtiers.
Working in Manhattan in my younger years with a team of other young designers, photographers, studio managers and salesmen, all men, some attractive, to have gotten sexually involved with one of them would have meant a permanent loss of place as a member of a creative and competitive team. Had I become “his” to one of them, the rest would no longer regard me as a colleague. The team spirit would be disrupted, and this would be blamed on me, not on him, so while he ( as one of “the guys”) would remain part of the team, I would lose my independent standing. Even a little flirting with an outside salesman caused ripples. Women I’ve talked to about this with a similar work experience, have verified this view. If you let it happen, suddenly it’s all about your sex, not your ability. So the question I sought to answer was, could Elizabeth’s situation have been different in some way from my own?
Years of research have left me where I began. Everything in her history, and the history of the period, reveals the Queen quite clearly as, in private, a rather sad figure whose normal female “urge to merge” had been disrupted in such brutally traumatic ways that there can be no possibility, tightly wound and neurasthenic as she was, that she could ever have overcome her fears, even had her position or her community allowed her to, which they did not. It’s amazing to me that, in the face of so much evidence, theories that set her up as some sort of Messalina continue to thrive.
To cut to the chase
By the time Oxford showed up, Elizabeth was the survivor of at least three traumas that left her incapable of a normal sexual response: her mother’s execution, her “first love” experience with Thomas Seymour that ended in his execution, and her attraction to Robert Dudley that ended with their highly publicized implication in the murder of his wife. These experiences, compounded, rendered her incapable of enjoying any aspect of sex but the preliminaries, which explains her continual indulgence in florid but unconsumated public flirtations and her obsession with preventing sex from taking place, not only for herself but for any courtier whose life she had any control over––and when they went ahead and did it anyway, reacting with hysterical cruelty.
The fact is that Queen Elizabeth simply could not have had a child, not because of a “membrana” as Ben Jonson put it, but because she could not and would not have allowed a man to “have her.” Hitchcock’s Marnie is a good example of a woman whose behavior can be traced to a similar trauma. Only for Elizabeth there could have be no Sean Connery to heal her with patient understanding. Elizabeth’s position wouldn’t allow it, nor would the Reformation of which she was the leading female example.
Although Elizabeth didn’t murder her mother’s lover (as did Marnie), she would have felt guilt for her mother’s fate in that had she been born a boy her mother would not have been condemned as a whore and executed, and for Seymour’s, in that, however innocently, she was to some degree the bait that tempted him to perdition. Where irrational self-blame is in control, innocense is no defense.
Thus any scenario that relies on Queen Elizabeth giving birth to one or more notable artists, scientists, or political figures are simply outside the realm of possibility, however “tempting.” That other factors compounded her problem, such as the devastating political ramifications of becoming pregnant, or even of marrying, her lack of any family support, the utter lack of privacy at Court, the fact that every other queen she knew of (but Marie de Medici) was done in by her sexuality, her probable fear that she inherited syphilis from her father, all add to a psychology too racked with guilt and fear to ever allow herself to be backed into a situation where she might have to yield herself sexually.
Elizabeth was a survivor, a person who found ways to make lemonade out of the lemons she was handed by life, so, with the help of her portrait artists and poets she turned her incapacity into a selling point. Privately, however, it made her crazy with frustration. This is obvious from her more fact-oriented biographies. Based on the kind of documentary evidence that’s available only to a biographer, in every incident, in every character trait, Queen Elizabeth demonstrates the kind of hysterical emotional rigidity that, back in the 1950s, Kinsey diagnosed as frigidity caused by a stringent moral code that sees sex as sinful and dirty.
Although this kind of moralistic attitude towards sex has not been completely dispelled from our culture today, it has been diminished (largely due to the efforts of Freud’s protégé, Wilhelm Reich, who paid dearly for his pioneering stand). Most intelligent people today see a certain amount of sex as healthy, but this was hardly the case in Elizabeth’s time, or indeed for centuries until the 1960s when the pill freed unmarried women from the threat of pregnancy. During the Middle Ages, when a large percentage of the population, both male and female, more or less voluntarily signed on for a lifetime of abstinence as nuns, monks, priests, or friars, nobody regarded such a life as unhealthy. In later centuries, unmarried men and women were expected to remain celibate, and many did, particularly women.
In a way it’s unfair to one of England’s greatest leaders to refuse to see her as she truly was, a woman in a man’s world, wrestling heroically, if not always kindly or logically, with one excruciating dilemma after another. That one of those dilemmas was the unrelenting pressure from her councillors, her parliament, and her people to marry and give birth to an heir to the throne hardly fits with the notion that she would risk everything by having unprotected sex with one of her ambitious courtiers. That she stayed the course for 40 years, maintaining the kind of stability that gave England time to build the strength among the nations of the West, was, if you look objectively at the background to her reign, largely due to her success in remaining single.
As for Oxford
Theories based on Oxford’s having sex with Elizabeth are unfair to him as well. If Oxford was Shakespeare he was one of the most romantic souls who ever lived. As a teenager, raised in isolation from children his own age, the impulse that gave rise to stories like Romeus and Juliet was a romantic yearning for intimacy with a beautiful girl his own age. True love was what he wanted, from one for whom he was the one and only, not from a tough-minded dominatrix, 17 years his senior.
As contemporary evidence makes clear, Elizabeth was attracted to Oxford in his youth. She was intelligent and liked to laugh. He was a witty fellow, and witty fellows like to make others laugh. They both liked to dance. But that they ever did any more than dance and exchange witty ripostes is so unlikely as to be impossible.
Oxford had a rather distant relationship with his own mother, due to the policies of the time which placed young peers out of the parental home shortly after birth, and it’s unlikely, given the background of his life with Sir Thomas Smith, that Smith’s wife saw him as anything but a rival for her husband’s attention. In other words, he was lacking a mother figure in his life.
Elizabeth was just old enough to be his mother (they were 17 years apart in age). She exerted the kind of control over his every move that only a wealthy and powerful mother could have exerted over someone of his rank and status. In every respect, Elizabeth filled the role of mother towards him. But only in an external sense because Elizabeth was not motherly towards Oxford at all.
In fact, she was cruel to him, not allowing him the use of his own estates, using the power given her by the Court of Wards to allow her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, to use them to his advantage during the 9 years that Oxford was an underage ward of the Court. Oxford would have known that Leicester was unkind towards his mother during this time, while she was continuing to live in one of the Oxford estates after the death of his father. Oxford would have hated both Leicester and Elizabeth for that, and for any number of other things.
If it’s unthinkable that Elizabeth would have had sex with any of her courtiers, it is even less thinkable that the romantic young Oxford would have had the slightest desire to have sex with her. To have a sexual relationship with someone who has such power over every aspect of one’s life suggests passivity, even masochism. Nothing in Oxford’s history suggests such traits. Everything indicates the opposite.
We know that in his teens and early twenties he was writing romantic poetry to girls and women at Elizabeth’s Court. I think it very likely that some of it was written to please the Queen herself, because he knew, as did everyone at Court, how she yearned to believe that she was surrounded by adoring suitors. But that it ever went any further than some contrived Petrarchan verses is to make bread out of air.
Those who wish to draw parallels between Venus and Adonis and the relationship between Oxford and the Queen should take a closer look at the plot. Venus lusts after Adonis, but he turns away, not because he’s repelled by her, but because as he explains, he’s not ready yet. Like so much of what Oxford wrote, the poem carried a message to his friends and patrons, who may have wondered about their early relationship, just as some do today: “the Queen was hot, but I was not.” And as he was so adept at doing, there was a message in it for Elizabeth too: “You were hot, but I was too young,” a message that, from a man in his early 40s to a woman who was turning 60, would have been a much appreciated compliment.
Point being: nothing happened! Which is really what Elizabeth wanted all along, of course. All she ever wanted, all she was capable of wanting, at least by the time Oxford got to Court, was to be desired, not just by him, but by everyone. Desired by everyone, touched by no one, like the Moon.
I don’t think so. Because if he did die on that day it would be one heck of a weird coincidence, almost as bizarre as the author of the canon being born with a name that perfectly fits his role as militant teacher and awakener––“I willshake a spear”; or that the first two successful yearround commercial theaters in England just happened to open both their doors within weeks of the Earl of Oxford’s return from theater-savvy Italy.
As I got more familiar with Oxford’s biography I became increasingly suspicious of this date. He could hardly have picked a more significant day to “pass on” than the day after the traditional summer solstice celebration in the pagan calendar, Midsummer’s Eve, or, in the Church calendar, on the Feast of St. John the Baptist. To die on such a day seems most suspiciously like another gesture from behind the curtain of his anonymity. But if so, what did it mean?
Suspicion increased upon noting that after being turned down for the Presidency of Wales in 1601, plus several other attempts to establish himself as something other than the bankrupt husband of Elizabeth Trentham, he drops all similar suits for properties, offices, and monopolies, setting his sights once again, as he has so often, on getting back his inherited rights in the Forest of Waltham.
Why the forest of Waltham? There was some income associated with these offices (keeper of the Forest and steward of Havering-atte-Bower), but there must have been something about these forest offices that kept him coming back to them every few years. For one thing the stewardship of the Forest was an office that had been his family’s for generations. His father had lost it to the Crown under Henry VIII, but as was true of many aristocrats who had similar inherited offices in other forests, he considered it his. Documents collected by Chris Paul make it clear that once he was given it back by James, he considered his role as forest official seriously. It’s also clear from his letters that he was suffering from physical problems in his final years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was at death’s door. Some people live and continue to function for years with all kinds of disabilities and pain. After all, he was only fifty-four.
Letters of strange tenor
Months after his supposed death, eight Shakespeare plays are produced for the Court holiday season. One of these is Measure for Measure, in which a nobleman very like himself disappears on purpose. Duke Vincenzio has large executive powers over his constituents, much like those recently acquired by Oxford over the inhabitants of the Liberty of Havering. Six months after he was supposedly dead, Measure for Measure is performed for the Court the night his daughter marries Philip Herbert, brother of the Earl of Pembroke, leading patron of Shakespeare’s company.
The play is replete with philosophical thoughts on death, and also on the duke’s disappearance. Lucio complains, “It was a mad fantastical trick of him to steal from the state, and usurp the beggary he was never born to.” Later, contriving the scheme whereby Claudio is to be saved and Angelo hoist by his own petard, a monk (the duke in disguise) tells the prison provost that the duke is coming back, that “within these two days he will be here” a thing that “Angelo knows not; for he this very day receives letters of strange tenor; perchance of the duke’s death; perchance entering into some monastery.” Getting close to home here.
Another play produced for the Court that season was The Spanish Maze. That this was a version of The Tempest has been convincingly demonstrated by Roger Stritmatter and Lynn Kositsky. It portrays a great magician whose powers, limited to the creatures of a remote enclave, he voluntarily renounces upon the wedding of his daughter to a worthy nobleman to whom he gives his little kingdom as a wedding present. Again, awfully close to home.
Oxford’s powers have been demonstrated over the years by the all too obvious stage portraits of his contemporaries, some complimentary, some quite otherwise. As pseudo-Harvey put it in 1593 “all you that tender the preservation of your good names were best to please Pap-hatchet [Lyly], and fee Euphues [Oxford] betimes, for fear lest he be moved, or some one of his apes hired, to make a play of you, and then is your credit quite undone forever and ever, such is the public reputation of their plays.”
As far back as 1595 Oxford had announced to the Court, during the version of The Tempest he produced in January of that year for his oldest daughter’s wedding, “this rough magic I here abjure,” promising that as soon as he’s cleaned up certain problems, he’ll “drown” his “book.” He follows this by reopening his suit for Waltham Forest at some point before October (Nelson 351), and a month later Roland Whyte writes to his boss, Sir Robert Sidney, “some say the Earl of Oxford is dead” (354). So “Prospero-Vincenzio” may have tried to pull this disappearing stunt as early as 1595. Which suggests the real reason why the Queen wouldn’t let him have the forest. She knew how frustrated he was, but as long as he couldn’t get what he wanted she also knew that she kept him tied to her, a trick she used on many of her courtiers.
So what was he up to?
Leaving the historical evidence for another essay, let’s look at his plays. Here’s a writer whose protagonists, when stressed, tend to take off into the woods where they starve (Timon and Orlando), join up with bandits (Proteus and Valentine), take up with banished dukes (Orlando, Touchstone, and Jaques)––or, in happier times, chase girls (Lysander and Demetrius), pin valentines on trees (Orlando), get pinched by fairies (Falstaff) or control the inhabitants through their magic (Prospero and Oberon).
In Shakespeare, as in Oxford’s childhood, the forest, the wildwood, is never very far away. In the history plays and most of the wedding plays, it lies just outside the circle of light on the indoor stage. Although in Oxford’s time the great Forest of Essex that once blanketed all England was giving way to cottages and sheep farms, it happened that, of the largest portions that were left, Oxford spent his early childhood just across the Thames from the Forest of Windsor, and his later childhood at the northern edge of the Forest of Waltham. Who approaching the end of life doesn’t yearn to return to the summer scenes of childhood? Who wouldn’t do it if they could?
For Shakespeare, the Forest is the matrix, the ancient and still-living heart of the long history of his homeland that was the canvas of his art. In a world of change it remains the one place untouched by time. It’s where, as a child, stuffed by his tutor with classical learning and Reformation rhetoric, he discovered that there were books in running brooks and sermons in stones. The anger expressed in his January 1604 letter to King James about how Lord Grey was misusing the forest shows genuine anguish. His plans for it show no sign of an approaching death.
Where did he live in the forest?
My guess, drawn largely from evidence provided by Chris Paul’s extremely important article on the subject, is that he was living somewhere in or near Hainault Chapell Walk (6), roughly ten miles east of Hackney and a stone’s throw from Havering-atte-Bower. According to Paul’s research there was an old hunting lodge there, although it sounds a little too small and in too poor condition for a peer, even one whose only concern was peace and quiet (51). But as is clear from William Addison’s book on Epping Forest, there were plenty of hunting lodges in that area built by and for various members of the Court over the years. King James would have spent a good deal of time there since it was filled with homes of his courtiers, with opportunities for hunting a mere 14 miles from Greenwich Palace.
King James, Oxford’s patron
It’s obvious that King James had a more forgiving attitude towards Oxford than had the old Queen. Where she stalled him for years on his request for the Forest, James gave it to him as soon as he got to England, later referring to him as “great Oxford,” not a phrase that would ever have been heard from Elizabeth. This can be explained as simply another instance of the new King’s excessive largesse on taking the throne and Oxford’s exalted status as 17th in his ancient line, but it can also be seen as a desire to provide security to a great artist not sufficiently appreciated by the English (who are rarely good to their great artists).
Possibly in grateful response we see an outpouring of revised plays, eight alone (that we know of) for the winter holidays of 1604-05, and more to come in the months to follow. Would the King’s Men have dared to produce eight old plays for the first holiday season for their new patron, the first new English monarch in over forty years? Old plays might have pleased the royal newcomers, but there were also several hundred important courtiers, most of whom would have been well acquainted with earlier versions of all eight of these plays. From a theater entertainer’s point of view, that all of the plays presented to the Court that winter were produced without revisions or additions is unlikely.
Oxford’s other patrons
James was good to Oxford, but he could not have been acquainted with him at the time that he assigned him his forest rights, so there had to have been someone close to the King and with him on a regular basis who could present his case so persuasively that the royal ear would be impervious to contradictory reports from Oxford’s enemies.
Wm Herbert, Earl of Pembroke
Luck was finally coming Oxford’s way, for on his side now were not just one but two of the most influential men near James. These were the Herbert brothers, William, the 24-year-old Earl of Pembroke and his 18-year-old brother, Philip, sons of Mary Sidney, whose boyish charms had won the gay king’s heart.
Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery
William Herbert’s actions from this point on suggest that he was already considering how he was going to get his hands on the Court Stage. In fact, with his interest in the theater (doubtless engendered by his mother while he was in his impressionable teens) he may well have been the chief factor in persuading the King to give London’s top three acting companies the kind of royal support they could never count on from Elizabeth. With Shakespeare’s company well-set with the King, their playwright too had to be made secure.
The Devil and his Dam
Oxford had made a lot of enemies over the years, but two were now particularly dangerous. Most obvious was his cousin, Lord Henry Howard, termed by his wikipedia biographer “one of the most unscrupulous and treacherous characters of his age.” Oxford had plenty of reasons to loathe Howard whose libels (carefully saved by the Cecils) are still the major cause of the permanent blackening of his reputation with historians. While Elizabeth was alive, her dislike of Howard kept him from causing any real trouble, but by writing at length to James as she approached her final days, he succeeded in making himself indispensable to the insecure new King. Now, loaded with honors and powers, the new Earl of Northampton was a real threat, not only to Oxford but to any playwright who might dare to satirize him on the public stage. He could haul Ben Jonson into Star Chamber with impunity, but the Earl of Oxford required more subtlety.
Shakespeare’s most typical villain is a smooth-talker who takes pleasure in wooing then betraying his victims, the perfect image of Henry Howard. It was he who had been the most likely source of the rumors that broke up Oxford’s marriage in 1576. It was partly with his encouragment that his brother, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, embarked on the insane plan to marry the Queen of Scots that cost him his head in 1572. Eight years later Howard almost succeeded in doing the same thing to Oxford. In another ten years his interference would be the direct cause of a heinous murder that would surely have destroyed him and his reputation forever, as it did a dozen others at Court, had he not conveniently died before the poisoned tarts hit the fan.
That Henry Howard was the inspiration for characters like Edricus (Ironside), Ateukin (James IV), Iachimo (Cymbeline), and finally, two of Shakespeare’s greatest villains, Iago in Othello, based on Howard’s destruction of Oxford’s marriage, and Lady Macbeth, based on the downfall of his brother, the Duke of Norfolk. Can we imagine that Howard, so paranoid about how he thought Jonson might have portrayed him, couldn’t see himself in these characters, and so wouldn’t have done everything he could to prevent the publication of Oxford’s plays?
Even more dangerous to Oxford was his own brother-in-law, Robert Cecil. Having played the same game with James as did Howard over the months before Elizabeth’s passing, and now equally loaded with offices, honors, and powers, it seems that Cecil gradually lost all moral restraint (Handover) . By 1604, with Marlowe dead (or transported), Lord Strange dead, and his brother-in-law Henry Cobham and the great Sir Walter Raleigh locked up tight under charges of treason, he’d managed to rid himself of all his major enemies. Freed from fear, and with the ugly network of spies and agents creating by Francis Walsingham at his disposal, his lower nature took over. By 1604 he was well on his way to becoming the most feared and hated man in the nation.
Oxford's enemies, Howard and Cecil
Oxford could not have had Cecil in mind when he wrote the original version of Richard III (The True Tragedy of Richard the Third) in (at least) the early 1580s, when Robert was still too young to be of any concern. (Ramon Jiménez has reason to believe the first version was written as early as the 1560s; Cecil was born in 1563.) But with his rise to power in 1603-04, that Shake-speare’s wicked, power-hungry hunchback was modelled on himself, or even more distressing, that everyone thought he was, could not help but heap his envious heart with coals of fire.
The enmity of one of these nasty characters would have been bad enough, but to have them working in partnership must have caused the aging playwright some concern. He pondered how to protect himself. And his papers.
But why fake his own death?
Oxford must have been tired of the rigamarole of life as an earl, something he had never been very fond of anyway. In a 1601 letter to Robert Cecil he refers to himself as a “hater of ceremonies” (=33). There was always something that had to be done, somewhere he had to put in an appearance.; someone was always after him, to pay a bill, to forward a suit, to ask his opinion; and to what end? He was in discomfort, possibly pain. He knew he didn’t have a whole lot longer to live. How was he to get the time he needed? And now this deadly duo had to be dealt with.
Plague struck the summer of 1603, just as King James was on his way south to take over the throne. It kept him away from London, at Pembroke’s in Wiltshire and other country estates until the winter. Plague mortality rates in Hackney were 88 percent, suggesting that if Oxford did decide to move to the Forest of Waltham, the plague of 1603 may have had something to do with it. Houses like King’s Place, made of wood beams and stone or brick, were not so likely to be infected as they did not have the kind of daub and wattle walls or thatched roofs that could so easily become infested with house rats, but of course at that time, no one knew that rats were to blame. Oxford was probably never very happy at Hackney. It was too close to the City to be peaceful and not close enough to the theaters to make up for the noise and congestion. In addition it was located in the kind of swampy area that anyone who suffered from recurring malaria would fear.
Oxford would have been aware of the long tradition offered by the medieval Church that had allowed his ancestor, Aubrey de Vere, to “die to the world.” By taking holy vows, a person gave up all worldly desires, contacts, and duties; from then on they were regarded by everyone, including their own families and friends, as legally dead. Unfortunately this tradition was no longer open to the 17th Earl; Henry VIII and Edward VI had brought it to a halt when they closed the monasteries and nunneries.
But with the help of the Earl of Pembroke and the King, like Measure for Measure’s “old fantastical duke of dark corners,” he could simply disappear, if not for good then at least long enough to get something finished. With so many doors now closed to him, guarded by his enemies, he still had one thing left that he could control––his exit.
Well-versed in property law, Oxford would have known how to fix it so his wife and son couldn’t be touched by the creditors that were e’en at him. Pembroke and Bacon would take care of the legal details. They could see to it that he was registered as buried at Hackney. It would be easy enough to have his name taken off the rolls at Parliament. The various legal procedures were simply pro forma, those in charge operating on whatever information was given them. His wife wouldn’t like it, but if she was to see her dynastic dreams bear fruit she would simply have to go along with it.
What a relief, simply to go off into the dark, silent forest with a bundle of paper, a pot of ink, a secretary to take dictation, a cook to provide simple meals, and a lutenist music meant he could look forward to the kind of uninterrupted peace and quiet that a writer needs more than food or drink. With the King, his friend, the sovereign of the Liberty of Havering, and a couple of “tall men” to ensure his safety, what a relief it must have been to be free to write and think from dawn to sundown, every day, with breaks for food and sleep and visits from only those he chose to see; no creditors to hide from, no suits to pursue, no begging letters to write to men whose guts he hated.
Who doth ambition shun, and loves to live i’ the sun,
Seeking the food he eats, and pleased with what he gets;
Come hither, come hither, come hither;
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
As they liked it
As Chris Paul tells us, Havering Park was unique in that it was a Liberty, “entirely independent of the ecclesiastical or civil jurisdiction of the county [of Essex],” having been so declared by Edward IV in the 15th century. No inhabitant could “be compelled or forced or bound to answer before any other justices, judges, or commissioners, but only in the Court of the said Manor” (18). The steward––Oxford in this case––had “full power and authority to hear and determine pleas, debts, accounts, covenants, trespasses.” Any interference by the Sheriff of Essex or JPs was “specifically forbidden.”
As if this weren’t sufficient, on April 4, 1604, King James reconfirmed the Havering charter, “including the provision that the tenants ‘shall have one fair every year at the village of Havering, the same to last three days, that is to say in the eve of the nativity of St. John the Baptist and two days then next and immediately following . . .’” (ERO Q/AX 1/1/2). Paul asks, “Could it have been, at least in part, because of these unique protections that the Earl of Oxford was determined to acquire the stewardship of Havering-atte-Bower?” (19). I would add, “protection from what”? The answer wasn’t long in coming.
What could have been the reason why someone felt called upon at that particular time, April 1604, to get the King to sign the charter stating that any celebration that took place in the Liberty of Havering on the 23rd of June would be legal and must not be disturbed? I suggest that, with Midsummer’s Eve parties taking place all over England, a special celebration took place that night in the Forest. There, surrounded by good company, entertained by the very best actors and musicians, Oxford, his patrons and close friends, without fear of disturbance, could gather around the traditional bonfire to toast the end of the Festival Year––and also, although most of them probably didn’t know it yet, the end of a great era in English letters.
The next day the word went out: the Earl of Oxford was dead.
Less than 24 hours later, government agents would collar Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth,” the Earl of Southampton, and five others, placing them under house arrest “at the King’s request.” Mark Anderson quotes the Venetian Ambassador in a letter sent back to Venice on June 26: “On Sunday night [June 24], by order of the King and Council, the earl of Southampton, Baron Danvers, and five others were arrested and each one confined in a separate house. Yesterday morning [June 25], after undergoing several examinations, they were set at liberty . . . .” (359). The reasons given were that charges had been made by unidentified persons that these former supporters of the Earl of Essex were plotting to slay several of the King’s Scottish attendants. A later historian of James’s reign (attributed to Sir Anthony Weldon c. 1650) blamed it on Robert Cecil, who had “put some jealousies into the King’s head.” (Anderson 360).
No further explanation was ever forthcoming, either from the no doubt embarrased King or anyone else. But dates don’t lie, and sometimes they reveal greater truths than on first glance. Like Hamlet, flushing out his uncle’s guilt with a play about the murder of a king, Oxford reveals––to himself and probably also to the King––what he’s suspected but needs to have proven, the dark nature of his brother-in-law’s intentions.
Why would Cecil have Southampton arrested on a trumped up charge (the other men were simply window dressing) the very day he learns his playwright brother-in-law is dead? Why, if not to dig through the Fair Youth’s papers in search of something––exactly what is anyone’s guess––but, with Oxford gone, something he suspects is now in Southampton’s possession? What else could it be than something that relates to the Earl of Oxford? How many coincidences does it take to make an educated guess?
Dates may not tell the whole story, but sometimes they can suggest its general outlines.
When did Oxford really die?
How long would Oxford have continued to live on out there in the woods, working on the final versions of his favorite plays, before death finally caught up with him? The best guess at this point is at least four more years, possibly five. Several things happen in 1609 that probably wouldn’t have were he still alive:, among them: his wife’s sale of King’s Place, and two of Shakespeare’s most personal and the publication of two of his potentially most damaging works, the Sonnets and Pericles.
How would his patrons, his family, and the actors react, once they know he’s gone for good?
My suggestion: led by the Earl of Pembroke, a core group of his supporters formed an ad hoc committee to see to it that both he and his works were treated with appropriate––if private––love and respect. He was buried without fanfare, possibly in the forest, but it’s accepted from the beginning that his final resting place will be somewhere in Westminster Abbey and that, as soon as is feasible, his collected works will be properly published.
Time drags on, but Pembroke can’t act until he’s secure in the office he seeks, which doesn’t happen until the end of 1615, by which time both Cecil and Howard are dead and he’s now, finally, Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, with authority over the King’s Men, their plays, and to a large extent, the London Stage as well.
An Abbey funeral could not have occured before the internment of Francis Beaumont in 1616 since Beaumont’s tomb is mentioned by Ben Jonson in the dedicatory Ode to the 1623 Folio. That it was no later than 1619 seems likely from his cousin Percival Golding’s tract on the Vere family wherein it states that the 17th earl was buried in the Abbey, written (according to Robert Brazil) during or before 1619.
What about his papers?
The burning question of what happened to the holograph versions of Shakespeare’s plays is one more of those things that remain a mystery. With his daughter married into the Pembroke family, it’s most likely that Oxford’s papers went to the Pembrokes, who were responsible for having them edited, for getting the best copies from whoever might be holding them, and for obtaining the rights to publish from the various publishers currently holding rights to their publication. As anyone knows who has followed the process of getting a controversial author’s papers published, this can take a very long time.
It’s most likely that Mary Sidney was the chief editor. Having spent years editing and publishing her brother’s works and her own as well, she had the credentials. Not just any scrivener would be allowed to tamper with the great man’s words, not even Ben Jonson. She also had an insider’s awareness of what would have to be cut or changed to satisfy her community’s anxieties about the possible revelation of family secrets. Most likely she had help in this from Francis Bacon, who would have stepped in to finish the job following Mary’s death. Both of their biographies fit well with the timetable of First Folio production. Ben Jonson was probably involved only in writing the front material.
As for the fate of the holograph versions of the plays, what makes the most sense is that, once the First Folio was finished and published, they were burned. To satisfy the many individuals who had been satirized in the plays, or whose parents had been satirized, there would have to have been some such agreement. Unfortunately for us, the rest, as Hamlet put it, has been silence.
There’s a great deal more to be said on the subject of Oxford’s death. For some of it, click here.
In Act IV Scene 3, when pressed by the King to tell where he’s left the body of Polonius, Hamlet responds with seemingly pointless wordplay: The King deplores Hamlet’s criminal lunacy, but is Hamlet really nuts?Or is he only faking?His responses may be inappropriate, but maybe they have a meaning that he’s hoping the audiencesees, even if the King can’t.By worms he means the maggots who are “e’en at” Polonius, but why politic? Why convocation?
Most critics accept that Polonius was based on England’s Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, who was known to boast that he was born in 1521, the year the convocation of clerics and politicians known as the Diet of Worms collected in the little German town of the same name, where they proceeded to condemn Martin Luther for heresy, the moment in time often marked as the true beginning of the Reformation.
But why on earth does Shakespeare take the time to have his frantic hero make arcane jokes about the Reformation?Why, as numerous scholars have shown, is the whole play steeped in Reformation language and concerns?Why does Shakespeare choose for Hamlet’s university, Wittenberg, where Luther kick-started the Reformation when he nailed his 95 complaints to the door of the local church?
Although the Reformation began as a religious movement, the establishment of an English government based on Reformation policies was Burghley-Polonius’s lifelong goal.Does the author mean that as Burghley’s body is being dissected by maggots, his life is being dissected by historians and the politicans who will gobble up his wealth and his offices once he’s gone?Or is the play on the word worms simply one of those “quibbles” (puns) for which, as Samuel Johnson noted, Shakespeare was always willing “to stoop from his elevation.” Surely, as is so oftten true with Shakespeare, the answer is “both.”
Today, Authorship scholars like us are the politic worms who are “e’en at” Polonius-Burghley and all of Shakespeare’s characters, plots, and sources, dissecting the records so we can lay bare the bones of truth about the man who really wrote the Shakespeare canon, and why he and his constitutents thought it so necessary to hide his identity.
The King deplores Hamlet’s criminal lunacy, but is Hamlet really nuts?
politicworm 