Ver, begin

Ver, begin Ricardo Mena Copyright © 2015 Ricardo Mena Cuevas All rights reserved. ISBN: 1505548144 ISBN-13: 978-1505548143 To my parents, José Manuel Mena Ribera and Trinidad Cuevas García CONTENTS Foreword i Prologue 11 ACT I THE COURT POET 43 ACT II THE COURT FOOL 107 ACT III THE MASTER DRAMATIST 199 ACT IV PROSPERO, THE MAGICIAN 275 ARIEL, THE SPIRIT 475 Epilogue 541 ACT V FOREWORD The publication of Ver, begin by Ricardo Mena will be recognized as a milestone on the path toward understanding the Elizabethan age and the phenomenon of ‘Shakespeare’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. To put it bluntly, we have gotten the history very wrong. ‘History is written by the winners,’ wrote George Orwell, and in this case the winners created their own false story for succeeding generations. Now, however, the truth is catching up to the lies; and the ‘Ver’ of this book’s title must be read first and foremost in terms of both its Latin stems: spring and true. In other words, the spring-time of truth may now begin! To be sure, Mena acknowledges his debt to a century and a half of previous scholarly investigations into the authorship of the Shakespeare works –poems and plays that continue to be read, taught and performed around the world, capturing the hearts of a universal and multicultural audience. The man who created them, critic Harold Bloom tells us, ‘has taught us to understand human nature.’ Yet that same man has remained unknowable, as Bloom is eager to admit: ‘The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward them is one of awe. How he was possible, I cannot know, and after two decades of teaching little else, I find the enigma insoluble.’ In this book, however, a new window is opened upon ‘how he was possible.’ Here is the most complete, most in-depth rendering to date of the biographical and historical truths that have remained hidden beneath the Shakespeare myth. More specifically Ver, begin refers to an eccentric, misunderstood, Prince Hamlet-like figure of the Elizabethan royal court, who has been treated so badly by the guardians of history and literature that even his official dates of birth (1550) and death (1604) will have to be corrected! The original, previous breakthrough lifting the shadows from the true author was “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1920) by J. Thomas Looney, who later wrote, ‘Around the person of the Earl of Oxford hangs an extraordinary literary mystery, as great as that which has surrounded the production of the great Shakespeare dramas, and from every point of view, chronological, poetic and dramatic, these two mysteries fit into and explain one another, if Oxford was the great poet dramatist, and William Shakspere [of Stratford-upon Avon, 1564-1616] but a mask. It is the extraordinary character of each of these mysteries, along with the infinitesimal probability that two such mysteries so mutually explanatory could exist at the same time by purely accidental coincidence, which establishes our theory with almost mathematical certainty.’ i Once the true author had been identified, others led the way in trying to determine not just the where, when and how of the story, but, also, the why. This aspect of biography and history –the underlying facts and reasons, the otherwise hidden circumstances and motives– is the one with the most potential power to disturb and provoke and cause disruption. As I have often argued, in the heat of discussions on this topic, ‘If the traditional story of Shakespeare is a Big Lie, then behind it must be an equally Big Truth’ –a reality that is likely to be so different from the popular illusion, and therefore requiring a change of view so uncomfortable to so many, that predictably there will be no small effort to ridicule and obliterate it. The earliest seeker of ‘why’ the great author’s identity had to be masked was Percy Allen, who wrote in 1932: ‘Ever since beginning an intensive study of the life of Edward de Vere as ‘Shakespeare,’ it has been more and more insistently borne in upon me that, if we could fully understand them, Oxford’s personal relations with Queen Elizabeth would provide the clue to a complete understanding of his life, and particularly to his mysterious withdrawal from court…’ Allen cites The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is ‘obviously dealing with incidents closely following upon Oxford’s return from Italy in 1576, and dramatizing himself as Valentine and Silvia as Queen Elizabeth.’ In the first scene of Act Two, a conversation between Valentine and Speed includes boldly pointed references to Silvia-Elizabeth as ‘deformed’ or pregnant: Valentine Speed Valentine Speed I account of her as beauty. You never saw her since she was deformed. How long hath she been deformed? Ever since you loved her. With the above lines as an example, Allen observed that ‘it was de Vere’s persistent habit to drive home his identity, in important passages, by the insertion into his texts of such words as ‘ever’ and ‘never,’ by way of puns upon his name, E. Ver...’ Oxford was inserting far more than his name, however; he was bringing to life and recording his own personal experiences; and given his high rank of Lord Great Chamberlain, along with his closeness to Elizabeth and her chief minister, William Cecil Lord Burghley, those experiences also translate into sensitive matters of government policy. Whatever happened to her Majesty’s body also happened, in effect, to the body politic –to the entire state. Allen perceived that Oxford’s withdrawal from court at the end of the 1580s was ‘evidently done, as the plays conclusively show, at the Queen’s request, and for some profoundly secret reason … due, in part at least, to ii some change in his relations to her.’ In 1593 was published Venus and Adonis, with the Shakespeare name appearing for the first time (as the printed signature on the dedication to Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton, the so-called fair youth of the Sonnets); and in that narrative poem, Allen suggests, Oxford ‘pictures the Queen as making wanton, shameless, and unrequited love to himself as Adonis … suggesting that the cause of his withdrawal in 1589 may have been the fury of a woman scorned.’ An even more important reason for his withdrawal, recorded in the Sonnets, was the identity of Henry, Lord Southampton as the natural son of Oxford and the Queen. In 1589 the young earl, an unacknowledged royal bastard, was expected to agree to a crucial alliance-by-marriage with the Cecil family; in return, Lord Burghley would pave the way (at Court and in Parliament) for Elizabeth to name Southampton in succession as Henry IX of England –just as her own father, Henry VIII, had planned to name his bastard son Henry Fitzroy in succession. (In that event, of course, Burghley’s granddaughter would be Queen, and the chief minister would achieve royal status for his family and their descendants.) But Southampton rejected the marriage alliance, preferring to take his chances without having to be a Cecil puppet. In so doing he destroyed Elizabeth’s ability to elevate him to the throne. Consequently Oxford disappeared from public view and went “underground,” only to return as ‘Shakespeare’ –the brand-new poet of Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). He arrived in the fullness of maturity as an artist; in effect, he was shaking the spear of his pen in support of his son; and in the second epistle to Southampton, writing again as ‘Shakespeare,’ he publicly pledged: ‘The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end … What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.’ Instead of going along with the plans of his elders, Oxford’s royal son allied himself with Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex, a military hero whose popularity exceeded even that of Elizabeth herself; and those swashbuckling young earls had convinced themselves that they would prevail over the unpopular Lord Burghley and his even more unpopular son, Robert Cecil, in terms of being able to choose the next monarch and guide England’s future. So the stakes behind the appearance of ‘Shakespeare’ were as high as possible. Behind it was much more than a literary mystery. What neither Oxford nor Southampton nor Essex could have predicted, however, was that William Cecil would live five more years, until age seventy-eight in iii 1598, and that by then his cunning son, Robert Cecil, would have become Principal Secretary, enjoying the Queen’s ear as well as her trust. Nor could they have known that Elizabeth herself would live into the next century, so that all the early advantages of the brash young lords faded away. Less than six years after Lucrece was published, the power struggle between the two rival factions reached its climax. First the EssexSouthampton camp arranged a special performance of Richard II by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe, on the eve of their rebellion on Sunday February 8, 1601 —a tragic failure for the earls and a complete victory for Secretary Cecil, who made sure that both Essex and Southampton were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to die. Six days later Robert Devereux was executed while Henry Wriothesley, spared without explanation, remained in the Tower as the ‘late earl’ of Southampton, that is, dead in the eyes of the law. It was my good fortune to discover –after more than a decade of work, quite unexpectedly– that the consecutively numbered verses of SHAKESPEARES SONNETS in 1609 contain the Earl of Oxford’s record of events behind the scenes during Southampton’s imprisonment. The poetical diary continues through the death of Elizabeth on March 24, 1603, and the succession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England; it follows events to their climax with Southampton’s liberation on April 10, 1603 and, finally, it concludes upon the Queen’s funeral of April 28, 1603, when the 118-year Tudor dynasty officially ended. (Within the ‘monument’ of sonnets that Oxford constructed is ‘the living record’ of Southampton, in effect a dynastic document aimed at those of us in posterity.) Within the diary is clear testimony that Oxford agreed to a deal with Robert Cecil, an infamous bargain, as a means of gaining Southampton’s life and freedom. The imprisoned Tudor prince would not be released until James Stuart was assured of the English crown. Oxford would have to lend his support –actively, behind the scenes– for the King’s succession; if it failed to occur, Cecil would see to it that Southampton would never leave the Tower alive. Further, Oxford and Southampton would agree to sever all ties for the rest of their lives, never revealing their father-son relationship; and of course Southampton would never proclaim his Tudor blood or assert any claim to the throne. The obliteration of Oxford’s identity as the great poet-dramatist was a byproduct of the royal story that had to be covered up. When Edward de Vere had adopted the pen name ‘Shakespeare’ in 1593 to lend support for his royal son, he had reason to expect that the world would discover his authorship posthumously, at the least; but now in 1601, forced into agreeing to remain anonymous on a permanent basis, that same pseudonym had become a mask glued to his face. How supremely ironic that the warrior-like name ‘Shakespeare,’ created to communicate the iv truth of Southampton’s royal Tudor blood, was instead turned into a weapon to cover up that very same truth, while enabling the Stuart line to prevail instead! Now Ver, begin widens the framework of this story, expanding its landscape and deepening its core –adding information, evidence, insights and meaning. Who was Edward de Vere in the first place? Who was Edmund Spenser and how does he (with his friend Gabriel Harvey) fit into the picture? What about Greene and Nashe? Who was Christopher Marlowe? And what is the real story of John Donne? Well, Ricardo Mena takes us on a guided tour to the otherwise invisible heart of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras; and let it be proclaimed that no previous scholar, no researcher, no author before now has dared to travel so far beneath the surface of the recorded history and the surviving literature. No one till now has maintained the clarity of vision that is shared with us in the following pages. The result is an unprecedented synthesis of various strands of evidence, all woven into a grand sweep of narrative that spans the golden age of the English Renaissance, informing us about our own history and about the forces that have helped to shape our current civilization. Ricardo Mena has not allowed himself to be blinded by self-serving arguments and conflicting views based on personal biases or agendas; he listens to them, but then follows his own instincts and inner conceptions of what must be, after all, the truth. The debates over ‘Shakespeare’ that began in the 1800s and continued all through the twentieth century are now bearing fruit; and Ver, begin marks the first real attempt to construct (or reconstruct) the full story, integrating all its pieces so they fit together and make sense, even as each aspect sheds new light on the others. This book is about not only knowing the truth, but, in the end, about understanding it. Saluting the author for his intellect, his heart and his courage, I am grateful for this opportunity to cry out loud: Mena, begin! Hank Whittemore Nyack, NY, USA December 2013 v Love’s Labour’s Lost (V.ii.):1 Ver, begin2 Spring. When daisies pied and violets blue And lady-smocks all silver-white And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then on every tree Mocks married men, for thus sings he: ‘Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo’ –O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks; When turtles tread, and rooks and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks; The cuckoo then on every tree Mocks married men, for thus sings he: ‘Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo’ –O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! 1 Collins edition, 1994. All along this discourse, unless otherwise indicated, all of Shakespeare’s quotes will be taken from the RSC edition (2007), edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. 2 This ‘Spring’ has a dual meaning: it is spring, the season, as Ver means Spring in Latin, and it is the personification of Ver, Edward de Vere, which is pronounced ‘de Ver’, like the French word vert, green, from which it derives etymologically. 8 Phaeton to his friend Florio. Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase, How fit a rival art thou of the spring!3 For when each branch hath left his flourishing, And green-locked summer’s shady pleasures cease, She makes the winter’s storms repose in peace And spends her franchise on each living thing: The daisies spout, the little birds do sing, Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release. So when that all our English wits lay dead (Except the laurel that is evergreen) 4 Thou with thy fruits our barrenness o’erspread And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen. Such fruits, such flowerets of morality Were ne’er before brought out of Italy. 3 Again, this spring is dual: it is the season of spring and it is the personification of Ver, Edward de Vere. This anonymous poem celebrated the book Second Fruits by John Florio (1591). Florio had been the Italian language teacher of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, so closely related to Shakespeare, as we see in the epistles the latter dedicated to this nobleman in Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). 4 Evergreen. These words point to the etymology of the poet’s surname. ‘The word Vert means green in French, and the name E. Vere can be said to mean that he is E. Ver green. ’ See Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn, This Star of England, 1952, partly available online. 9 10 PROLOGUE Thomas Looney, the discoverer The first person who dared to question the myth of the uneducated writer that was able to write with a vocabulary of some 25,000 words thanks to his supernatural genius, as the man from Stratford has been and continues to be considered by Stratfordians up to the present day, was not a man. It was a woman, Delia Bacon, who in 1857 published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded and reminded critics and readers that the works of Shakespeare always speak from the point of view and the perspective of a writer who thinks and experiences life like a courtier, not like a townsman. The next person to defend the idea that Shakspere of Stratford was a front man was Mark Twain in his work Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), which was followed in importance by the book of the solicitor Sir George Greenwood, Is there a Shakespeare Problem?, published in 1916. In that work, the author commented on the enigma of how Shakespeare used legal language in his works as an expert. He focused his analysis on the Sonnets published in 1609, concluding that there was nothing in the Shake-speare’s Sonnets that could be related to Shakspere of Stratford. ‘The real problem of the Sonnets,’ he wrote, ‘is to find who was Shakespeare. That he will be found among educated Elizabethans of high station, I have no doubt.’ And Thomas Looney accepted the challenge. As he explains in his book “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1920), Looney had been teaching The Merchant of Venice to his students for many years and could not match the life of the man from Stratford with the aristocratic world vision expressed by the author of that play. Dismissing the theory that claimed Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s works, due to the esoteric nature of the evidence shown in his favour, Looney started to search for the writer that talked to him through the text, preparing for that purpose a meticulous plan. He made a list of the writer’s general and special features as they appeared in his works, and then tried to find someone of that time who matched the majority of them. His method was successful. This is the list of general features which Looney compiled after reading Shakespeare’s works and before embarking on the search for the real author: 1.- A mature man of recognised genius. 2.- Apparently eccentric and mysterious. 3.- Of intense sensitivity—a man apart. 11 4.- Unconventional. 5.- Not adequately appreciated. 6.- Of pronounced and known literary tastes. 7.- An enthusiast in the world of drama. 8.- A lyric poet of recognised talent. 9.- Of superior education—classical—the one normally associated with educated people. Next, he made another list of special characteristics: 1.- A man with feudal connections. 2.- A member of the higher aristocracy. 3.- Connected with Lancastrian supporters. 4.- An enthusiast of Italy. 5.- A follower of sports (including falconry). 6.- A lover of music. 7.- Loose and improvident in money matters. 8.- Doubtful and somewhat contradictory in his attitude towards women. 9.- Of probable Catholic leanings, but affected by skepticism. Once he had this lost shoe of the author in his possession, Looney searched through the poems of the anthologies of Elizabethan literature to see whether any of their feet fitted into Shakespeare’s shoe. Since Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, was Shakespeare’s first work (‘the first heir of my invention,’ says our poet), and as this narrative poem used stanzas of six verses rhymed ABABCC, Looney selected the poems that used this form of rhymed stanza known as heroic sextet. To Looney’s surprise, there were only a few. One of them was anonymous; the other was written by someone called Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Looney read this poem of his and saw that this foot fitted perfectly well into the Shakespeare’s mysterious lost shoe: The Mutability of Women If women could be fair and yet not fond, Or that their love were firm, not fickle still, I would not marvel that they make men bond By service long to purchase their good will; But when I see how frail those creatures are, I laugh that men forget themselves so far. 12 To mark the choice they make, and how they change, How oft from Phoebus do they flee to Pan; Unsettled still, like haggards wild they range, These gentle birds that fly from man to man; Who would not scorn and shake them from the fist, And let them fly, fair fools, which way they list? Yet for our sport we fawn, and flatter both, To pass the time when nothing else can please, And train them to our lure with subtle oath, Till, weary of their wiles, ourselves we ease; And then we say when we their fancy try, To play with fools, O what a fool was I! Then, he studied the life of Edward de Vere and discovered that every step this new poet took corresponded with his list and the contents of Shakespeare’s works. Edward de Vere’s foot fitted in perfectly well in the lost shoe of the works of the genius. Looney understood then the meaning of a statement made by Alexander B. Grosart, the Victorian editor who had published the first collection of his poems. At the end of his collection of the few extant poems written by Edward de Vere, Grosart stated: ‘An unlifted shadow somehow lies across his memory.’ This shadow was lifted, at last, by Looney in 1920. John Galsworthy, the famous writer of family chronicles, read Looney’s book and said that it was ‘the best detective story I have ever read.’ When Orson Welles was asked about the book, he answered indolently: ‘I think Edward de Vere was Shakespeare; if you don’t think so, you have some pretty coincidences to explain away.’ The discovery of Edward de Vere’s identity caused other researchers to completely re-evaluate Elizabethan literature. As a result, numerous anomalies were detected in many of the works corresponding to the decades of the 1560s, 1570s, 1580s, 1590s, and 1600s during which Edward de Vere dragged his flame, that comic, romantic, heroic and tragic flame we recognise as his ‘Muse of fire.’ The life, passion, and death of Hamlet are so eminently tragic that he ends up convincing us Horatios that our immediate duties are to tell his story. One of the most illustrative cases of these detected anomalies is offered to us by the work of a mysterious Arthur Brooke, The Tragic History of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562 and considered without discussion by the critics as the main source of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play that after the discovery of Edward de Vere could be seen not as the work of an unknown Brooke whose infantile style could have impressed an adult Shakespeare, but as an early work of the very same Shakespeare, of the very same Edward de Vere. 13 Oxfordians The first biography of our poet, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was published in 1928 by B.M. Ward. It entailed not only a confirmation of Looney’s discovery but a step forward as well: there was a lot more evidence that Edward de Vere had been the poet behind the pen name ‘William Shakespeare.’ In 1931, Eva Turner Clark and her work Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays strengthened Oxford’s case even more, opening the path to a host of passionate freelances in awe before the discovery of that cave of Ali Baba crowded with wonders and treasures yet to be revealed. The genie of the magic lamp had been liberated. After these two great books numerous discoveries were unearthed by diverse researchers, until another large-scale seism occurred. In 1952, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn published This Star of England, a work that, apart from gathering and analysing the great cluster of evidence already discovered, firmly upheld what other researchers had already defended with insistence due to the clear evidence: that Edward de Vere had had an affair with Queen Elizabeth beginning in 1571 and that in 1574 he sired a son with her, that ‘Fair Youth’ Earl of Southampton to whom the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609 are dedicated. This earthquake beneath the ranks of the Oxfordian movement blew up that tradition of thirty-two years, reducing it to two irreconcilable armies: now there were Oxfordians who thought that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare and nothing else, and those who thought that he was Shakespeare and father of the Earl of Southampton. This last theory has been known heretofore as the Prince Tudor theory I (PT I). In 1984 The Mystery of William Shakespeare, by Charlton Ogburn Jr., was published. This book had an effect similar to the impact of the asteroid that exterminated the dinosaurs sixty-five (65) million years ago, and its publication marked, obviously, a decisive turning point. Together with Looney’s, this work by Ogburn is indispensable in order to comprehend the Shakespeare Authorship Question thoroughly, as it is an excellent synthesis of both the Stratfordian and the Oxfordian traditions up to 1984. This book was so demolishing of the Stratfordian legend, that the only way to ignore the Shakespeare Authorship Question after it appeared was by looking the other way. And that was what many people did. Meanwhile, the world kept on moving, alien to all of this, for after the downfall of the Shakespeare Authorship Question in favour of Francis Bacon, whom the Baconians had defended with evidence akin to a Dan Brown novel, the town of Stratford could no longer believe that the wolf, at last, had arrived. But they were wrong: with Ogburn Jr.’s book, the wolf claimed his first victims and set the town of Stratford on fire. Since 1984, Stratfordians abandoned any attempt to refute the Oxfordian theory due to the great quantity and quality of the evidence corroborating Edward de Vere. After this book, they chose, like all 14 desperate strategies, to ignore the authorship question altogether, as it had strictly speaking ceased to exist. It was solved. Case closed. “But what does it matter who wrote Shakespeare’s works?,” they asked. “We have the works themselves.” “‘The play’s the thing,’” they added with selfsatisfaction, while repeating Prince Hamlet’s words, forgetting what the very same Hamlet, in his anguish at death’s door, says to Horatio and the reader (V.ii.292-297): O, God, Horatio, what a wounded name— Things standing thus unknown—shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. The question is that Charlton Ogburn Jr. said something many persons agree with nowadays when they read a biography of the man of Stratford: Given no relationship between the poet’s work and Shakspere’s life, a no-man is what we inevitably find in conventional biographies. Emrys Jones says in his The Origins of Shakespeare, ‘Biographies of Shakespeare all suffer from one serious defect. They are all lives which leave ‘Shakespeare’ out. What is always missing is what matters most, his mind. These lives have a void at the centre which leaves the reader finally more perplexed than enlightened.’ Since 1984 there have been new discoveries about Edward de Vere. In 2001, Paul Streitz published Oxford, Son of Queen Elizabeth I, stating that Edward de Vere was not born in 1550, as officially upheld, but in 1548, and that he was the son Princess Elizabeth had with Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. This theory, justified by certain biographical anomalies during Princess Elizabeth’s adolescence and known as the Prince Tudor theory II (PT II), seemed to explain some strange events of our poet’s life. Again, this produced a division among Oxfordians. Firstly, there were those who considered that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. Secondly, there were those who thought, according to PT I, that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare, the Queen’s lover and hence, the Third Earl of Southampton’s father, to whom the Sonnets were addressed. Finally, there were those who considered, according to PT II, that Edward de Vere was the bastard son of the Queen with whom Elizabeth I later committed incest, the resulting bastard son being the Third Earl of Southampton. 15 Undoubtedly, PT II suffers from a huge burden of proof, as the historical records we handle at present have been properly adapted to hide any information about the virgin Queen having had any children, not to speak about having a son with one of her children. In Law, this kind of burden of proof is known by the Latin expression probatio diabolica, because confirming PT II with evidence is akin to an infernal impossibility. Hamlet, who is aware of the fact that he is being erased from the historical records and that they are twisting his story, like all groups in power do and should do if they want to stay at the top, will use his art to tell us his life story. As Hamlet himself says about actors (II.ii.463-464): ‘Do ye hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.’ In one of the plays that our poet wrote during the decade of the 1580s, Endymion, The Man on the Moon, using the name of his secretary John Lyly as a front man, a man wish to see Endymion, but is forbidden by the Watch, because the Queen has so ordered (IV.ii): ‘No, we are commanded in Cynthia’s name that no man shall see him.’ The character, played by a boy actor from the company of the Children of Paul, retorts slyly: ‘No man? Why, we are but boys.’ The Master Constable then says (IV.ii.108): “You know neighbours, ’tis an old said saw, ‘Children and fools speak true’.” And all the boys reply: ‘True.’ The Latin word ‘Vere’ means ‘truth’, and it is a word to which Edward de Vere has a high and special esteem. He, as the reader will see, was no other than the sleeping Endymion who could only be awakened by the Queen’s kiss, by recognizing him as the legitimate heir. Notwithstanding the evident difficulty of PT II, this theory possesses one piece of historical evidence which stands in writing: it is the one known as the “crown signature.” This evidence proves that Edward de Vere signed in a certain way until the year 1569, the year when, if he was born in 1548 and not in 1550, as the official history tells us, he turned twenty-one (21), the age of maturity. Well and good. In 1569 Edward de Vere changed his signature as Earl of Oxford for another one in the shape of a crown with seven sticks. The “crown signature” supports PT II because in 1603, precisely when Queen Elizabeth I passed away, Edward de Vere stopped using this special signature and reverted to signing with a different and simplified signature as Earl of Oxford again: erased were the crown and the seven sticks from his signature. Given that the former King Edward had been Edward VI, it is coherent to think that he, as the Queen’s bastard son, signed with a crown and seven sticks, as a prince and future King Edward VII would have done. If what many Oxfordians say is true, namely that the “crown signature” is not a crown but a diadem proper for an earl, it does not make sense that Edward de Vere used it in 1569, for he had inherited the earldom of Oxford at his father’s death in 1562, nor that he stopped using it in 1603, when he was still in possession of the title of 16 Earl of Oxford. In 2005, Hank Whittemore published his research about Edward de Vere and Southampton in relation to the Sonnets in his work The Monument, confirming by far that Oxford and Southampton were father and son, and that Southampton was an unrecognised Tudor Prince. If this seism were not enough, five years later, Charles Beauclerk confirmed and pushed PT II further when he published his book Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom, a work that once again provoked a new seism of major proportions among Oxfordians. The theory that Shakespeare was a bastard prince who had had an incestuous relationship with his mother, as a result of which a son and brother of our poet was born, is incredible but not impossible. The book you have in your hands follows PT II proposed by Streitz and Beauclerk, because, although at the beginning I did not want to accept the incestuous and, hence, eccentric nature of its propositions, it was not until I had seen and analysed the coherence of the evidence of their supporters that everything fit in perfectly. If at the beginning I was defending the conservative side of Oxfordians, after Whittemore’s thesis I considered PT I as the best perspective from which to look at and interpret the facts shown in the Sonnets. When I happened to hear Streitz and Beauclerk’s propositions about our poet’s incestuous relationship with his mother the Queen, I was appalled, because I believed the incest proposition would damage the Oxfordian tradition elaborated over the course of more than ninety (90) years of history. However, the principle among seekers and lovers of truth (philosophers) is always the one attributed to Aristotle: ‘Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.’ And although incest could be seen as something taboo or unheard of in our current society (but not that unheard of as we might believe), incest is what explains Venus and Adonis, amongst many other anomalous facts that we shall see. Anyway, and whatever the conclusion the reader reaches on the Shakespeare Authorship question, I agree with Charles Beauclerk’s words in that Shakespeare’s self-concealment allowed him to grow as an artist, ‘free from the limiting pressures of public opinion. (It is surely significant that the greatest of writers has the ghostliest of identities.)’ Samuel Johnson knew that writers tend to use masks. Why so? Because a mask, as he said in The Rambler (nº 208, Saturday, March 14, 1752), is a very effective tool for writing: ‘A mask,’ says Castiglione, ‘confers a right of acting and speaking with less restraint, even when the wearer happens to be known.’ He that is discovered without his own consent, may claim some indulgence, and cannot be rigorously called to justify those sallies or frolicks which his disguise must prove him desirous to conceal. 17 But I have been cautious lest this offense should be frequently or grossly committed; for, as one of the philosophers directs us to live with a friend, as with one that is some time to become an enemy, I have always thought it the duty of an anonymous author to write, as if he expected to be hereafter known. Stratfordians, majority opinion The four hundred (400) years’ tradition that declares the identity of Shakespeare as being that of a legendary man who was born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon troubles the mind of those who face a battle with this issue. After all, Stratford has been turned into a new Canterbury. It is the sacred place where many pilgrims celebrate the memory of the paramount Western genius. Therefore, if he is not really the man from Stratford, where will these pilgrims go from now on? If you erase a tradition, you must replace it with another one, with its sanctuary and its place of pilgrimage included, as shown by the case of Christianity when it took the place of Roman Paganism. The problem is that Edward de Vere’s tomb, unlike the one built for the man from Stratford, does not exist and we do not know its location, for, as Ben Jonson says in the First Folio, Shakespeare is ‘a monument without a tomb.’ The monument and his tomb are his work, which can be understood much better once one knows the true life of its author. What happens then is akin to magic, for the mind of the reader experiences a Cambrian explosion of new ideas and meanings delighting the senses. When Looney published that Edward de Vere was the man behind the mask of Shakespeare, the mysteries of this Stratfordian legend evaporated for those whose main need was not to defend at all costs a consolidated tradition, but to understand the works of Shakespeare. Thanks to Ogburn we now know that Sigmund Freud, for instance, commented impressed: ‘The man from Stratford … seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.’ This was said by Freud around the 1930s. Nowadays, he would have erased that adverb of quantity from his sentence. A critic, Edwin Björkman, made a comment I agree with completely: ‘The peculiar thing is that all these problems seem to fall into place and form a consistent picture the moment you accept the theory of Oxford’s connection with the Shakespearean plays.’ William McFee, an Anglo-American novelist and essayist, rightly wrote: There is nothing sensational in Looney’s methods of presentation, nothing smacking of the Sunday supplement. It resembles in general tenor The Origen of Species. In my opinion, after several readings, “Shakespeare” Identified is destined to occupy in modern Shakespeare studies the place Darwin’s great work occupies in 18 evolutionary theory … All modern discussion of the plays and poems will stem from it, and owe the author an inestimable debt. But in the same way as many people refuse at present to pay attention to the scientific veracity of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection contained in The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin,5 believing instead in such nonsense as Creationism or Intelligent Design, some people have been and are against the theory proposed by Looney in “Shakespeare” Identified because of the weight of that Stratfordian tradition and the faith bequeathed by their parents and reigning in their social group, offering as a counterpart for the former’s strong evidence, the nonsense of the life of the man from Stratford who came, saw, and prevailed the moment he arrived in London around 1588 (assumed date, as we do not know), to simply return to Stratford in 1597 to attend to his dealings with malt. The fact that Shakspere lived from 1597 to 1616 in the same house with his two illiterate daughters, without even teaching them to read and write, informs us of what kind of genius we are dealing with when we talk about Shakspere of Stratford. At least, John Milton taught his daughters to read and write: thanks to them today we have Paradise Lost. In respect to Shakspere’s two illiterate daughters, by the way, we know that the elder, Susan, married a doctor, John Hall, and we know that he wrote some notes on his patients and the eminent men he treated in his area, such as the poet Michael Drayton who was born and raised in Warwickshire, only twenty miles from Stratford. In John Hall’s notes there is not a single reference to his father-in-law Shakspere. 6 There are silences, like these, which cry havoc. 7 Many different authors such as Bacon, Marlowe, Derby or Mary Sidney have been thought to have explained Shakespeare’s real identity. Nevertheless, nowadays, as Charlton Ogburn says, Looney’s research and that of his followers have narrowed the ground of the controversy to two 5 At present Darwinism is being confirmed and developed by Neo-Darwinism with astounding philosophical implications, as illustrated by the Copernican work of Bill Hamilton in 1964, George C. Williams in 1966 and Robert Trivers in 1972, all of it easily explained by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982). As Charles Darwin declared in The Descent of Man, nowadays Evolutionary Psychology is at last permitting us to understand our human mind and psychology from a biological and evolutionary point of view. David Buss’ Evolutionary Psychology. The New Science of the Mind (Pearson Education Limited, Fourth edition, 2014) is a clear sign of this new scientific revolution. 6 Ramón L. Jiménez offers up to 10 examples like Doctor Hall’s, illustrating the contemporary silence about the Stratford genius. See polificworm site (2009/04). 7 Oxfordians Edward Nix and Geoffrey Green informed me that Hall made one note on his father-in-law’s death in 1616: ‘My father-in-law died on Thursday.’ London, by the way, ignored the death of the man from Stratford. 19 main candidates claiming Shakespeare’s honours: Shakspere and Oxford. Edward de Vere, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica informs on its website, “became in the 20th century, the strongest candidate proposed (next to [Shakspere] himself) for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.” Thomas Paine wrote some words in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense published in 1776 that I believe Thomas Looney would have agreed with: Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing is wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.8 But the mere passing of time is not enough. In an article entitled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities,” published online in the Physical Review on July 22, 2011, Professor Boleslaw Szymanski and his associates carried out an experiment that throws some light on the mechanism that a minority opinion, like the Oxfordian’s, follows in order to progress further: When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority … In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models … To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief. As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change … People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that 8 The work, which Paine published anonymously, exalted the pro-independent spirits of the American colonies and aided them in their victory against the British Empire, just what Henry V or King John by Shakespeare had done with the English spirits before the Gran Armada’s imminent attack. Payne’s Common Sense has been described by the association A Covenanted People as follows: ‘By far the most influential tract of the American Revolution … it remains one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language.’ 20 wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10. The percentage of Oxfordians has not yet reached 10%, and the number of Oxfordians that defend PT I or II is still lower than that. And yet, the number of convinced people does not stop growing. The film by Roland Emmerich, Anonymous, will help, like Internet has been doing since its creation, to let people know these facts that Stratfordians have been, and still are, hiding from common opinion. The paradigm of the man from Stratford is the majority opinion, it is ‘the larger system’, but after Looney, Ogburn and ninety years of studies and discoveries by an indefatigable army of sans-culottes (an army to which I would like to belong), this orthodox system is being increasingly discussed and questioned. Edward the Forth The essence of theater is political, as one writes a play in order to be acted in front of an audience for, after all, ‘a theater without contact with the public is not theater,’ as Brecht said. Walter Savage Landor wrote on Shakespeare in his Imaginary Conversations, “The Abbé Delille and Walter Landor”: [H]e presents more shades and peculiarities of character than all other poets of antiquity put together. Yet in several scenes he appears to have written principally for the purpose of inculcating his political and moral axioms: almost every character introduces them, and in almost every place. These political and moral axioms that Landor remarks are the result of what Dr. Roger Stritmatter has called our poet’s ‘David complex,’ which for Jan Kott is his obsession with the theme of the King who has lost his inheritance. G.K. Chesterton, our ‘jolly journalist’, is surprised by Shakespeare’s mentality (that is, Shakspere of Stratford’s mentality) as expressed in his historical play Richard II. And it is a sound surprise, for in that play the bourgeois Shakspere did forget King Richard’s historical assistance to the people of England. In other words, Shakespeare the author of this play favored Henry Bolingbroke’s case (later on King Henry IV) against Richard II’s so much so that Chesterton and any expert do not have to look too much to recognise that Shakespeare was a Lancastrian. That is, a defender of the lineage from which the Tudors came to the throne with Henry VII. Considering the social class Shakspere of Stratford came from, this comes as a surprise. Chesterton, in his work Chaucer (1932), says: 21 [In] Richard the Second … Shakespeare, in the time of the Tudors, saw it as an opportunity for exalting a sort of Divine Right … What is much more curious is the fact that [he] never noticed that the unfortunate Richard did not by any means merely stand for Divine Right; that in his earliest days he stood for what we are accustomed to consider much later rights, and for some which were, at least relatively speaking, the rights of democracy … He was very far from being a faultless sovereign; he did various things which permit modern Parliamentarians to represent him as a despotic sovereign; but he was, by comparison with many contemporaries and most successors, a democratic sovereign. He did definitely attempt to help the democratic movement of his day, and he was definitely restrained from doing so … [Shakespeare] does not even mention the fact that the prince, whom he represents as bewailing the insult to his crown, and appealing to the sacred immunity of his chrism, had in his youth faced a rabble of roaring insurgent serfs, had declared that he himself would be their leader, the true demagogue of their new democracy, had promised to grant their demands, had disputed desperately with his nobles to get those demands granted, and had finally been overruled and forced to abandon the popular cause by that very baronial insolence which soon forced him to abandon the throne … Therefore Shakespeare, great and human as he was, sees in Richard only the insulted king; and seems to think almost as little about the subjects of Richard as about the subjects of Lear. Coming from Shakspere of Stratford, this historical adaptation of King Richard II is indeed a surprise, but coming from a Lancastrian Earl of Oxford, the case Chesterton is talking about is readily explained away. Chesterton ends: But Richard had thought about the subjects of Richard. He had, in his early days and in his own way, tried to be a popular king in the sense of a popular leader. And though the popular ideas failed, and in some cases were bound to fail, they would have been much more present to the mind of a great writer of that time, than they were to the mind of one of the Queen’s Servants under the last of the Tudors [i.e. Edward de Vere, Lord Great Chamberlain of England and Sword of State, aka Shakespeare] … Therefore the greatest of all the great sons of the Renaissance, rolling out thousands of thunderous and intoxicant lines upon the single subject of the reign of King Richard the Second, does not trouble himself about The Peasant’s War. In the book Introducción a Brecht, which is a Spanish edition I have of the one directed by Peter Thompson and Glendyr Sacks for The 22 Cambridge Companion to Bertolt Brecht, Michael Patterson writes (my translation): One of the main repercussions in the practice of directing is found in the new treatment of the texts in which the emphasis is put on the ‘social being’ instead of on the individual ‘conscience.’ This change of point of view … has affected literary criticism as well … Nowadays … the interest focuses, not so much in the characterisation of the altered psychology of Hamlet, but in the situation of a reasonably normal and illustrated young man who reacts with understandable passion before the duplicity of the Court and some stale codes of revenge which he has to follow. In fact, a rediscovery has been made … that ‘Shakespeare is a political author.’ Nowadays, it seems strange that a director deals with Shakespeare with the intention of showing ‘the human condition’ or ‘universal truths,’ without pausing to consider the historical situation, both the one represented in the play and the one lived by Shakespeare which obviously influenced his writing. And in Frederic Ewen’s Bertolt Brecht, His Life, His Art, His Times, I found these words by the director of the Berliner Ensemble: ‘To think, or write, or produce a play also means: to transform society, to transform the state, to subject ideologies to close scrutiny.’ Ewen closes these words of Brecht with the following thoughts: Brecht viewed theatre as an entity, not the least important element of which was constituted by the audience. He believed it necessary to develop the art of the spectator, no less than that of the writer or actor. He regarded the audience as a “producer,” and its share in the theatre as of great importance. To transform the theatre, therefore, meant also to transform the audience. That Shakespeare ‘regarded the audience as a “producer”’ and that he was a political author is confirmed, among many of his works, by King John, Henry IV, Henry V and Richard II. All of them, except the last one, were performed with the aim of exalting the patriotic spirits of the English people before Philip II invaded the island in 1588. The last one, Richard II, is a surprising case of politics on stage, and it will be examined in the following paragraphs. In 1601 Queen Elizabeth, who was then sixty-eight (68) years old at a time when reaching the age of forty (40) was considered the first step into old age, had not yet designated her successor to the throne of England. The next monarch’s identity was the matter of a power struggle between the secretary of State Robert Cecil, who supported James of 23 Scotland, and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who pretended to the throne himself. The struggle between both factions intensified until the so called Essex Rebellion erupted. On the eve of the rebellion, February 7, 1601, the so-called ‘Shakespeare company,’ the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, performed the play Richard II at The Globe Theater. The playwright included a scene in Act Four (Scene One, verses 154318) that showed the historical abdication of the throne of England by King Richard II in favor of Henry Bolingbroke, later known as Henry IV. Hank Whittemore informs us that the members of the Essex faction acclaimed the scene of a monarch being devoid of his crown on a stage. The next day, February 8, 1601, Essex and his followers, among whom was the Earl of Southampton, galloped to London while Essex shouted at the Londoners who had gathered in the streets to see what was happening: ‘For the Queen! For the Queen! There is a plot against my life!’ Betrayed by the sheriff of London Sir Thomas Smith, Essex and Southampton and the other rebels were imprisoned. The actors who had intervened in the performance of the play on the eve of the rebellion were immediately interrogated. It was not necessary to investigate too much about the intentions of the playwright who had written the play performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for in London everyone referred to the aged Queen Elizabeth with the alias ‘Richard II.’ ‘I am Richard II,’ the Queen said months later to William Lambard, ‘know ye not that?’ The fact is that the playwright Shakespeare was not called to account for anything. Stratfordians call this luck; the rest of humans who know how the mechanism of absolute power subsequently smashed its enemies, with practices ranging from torture on the rack to amputation of hands, nose and ears for crimes less grave than treason, think that luck is not the proper word to describe this extraordinary fact. The word is strange. Of course, it would have been strange for a man like Shakspere if he had been the playwright. But if the playwright was a powerful man and of royal status, then the mind starts to understand and see that the word strange is not so strange after all. This is what a good theory means. On the political use of the play Richard II on the eve of the Essex Rebellion, we have Shakespeare’s own self-confession in his Sonnets. In sonnet 35 he addresses Southampton, who was imprisoned since 1601 to 1603 in the Tower of London, with these words: No more be grieved at that which thou hast done … All men make faults, and even I in this, Authorising thy trespass with compare … That I an accessory needs must be. 24 The fact that Shakespeare could write and see his plays of high political content performed without censorship, coercion or any other punitive action of the State taking place; or also, the fact that he knew the duplicity of the Court of Elizabeth I as one of them from inside; or that this environment came to influence his writing force historians, critics and theater directors (and all those who desire to know, as Aristotle says in his Metaphysics) to ask, as Thomas Looney did: “What do we know about the poet and playwright from his works?” These works say that he was a courtier tired of the lies of the Court of his times, as we see in Hamlet, the most personal of his tragedies, or in King Lear, the most tragic of his tragedies, or in As You Like It, the most elegiac and poetic of his comedies. They say that he considered himself above the most celebrated nobles of his times, as we see in his dedicatory epistle to Southampton in Venus and Adonis if we relate it with his critical comments to this young promise of the Court in his first sonnets, where he reproaches the latter’s egotism and orders him to have descendants ‘for the love of me,’ which is what a father desirous of being a grandfather would say, as C.S. Lewis remarked. The very same author tells us his name in sonnet 76: Why write I still all one, ever the same … That every word that almost tell my name, Showing their birth and where they did proceed? That Edward de Vere (i.e. E.Ver), 17th Earl of Oxford, was the best poet of his time is admitted by contemporary writers like William Webbe, who in his Discourse of English Poetry, published in 1586, said: I may not omit the deserved commendations of many honourable and noble Lords and Gentlemen in Her Majesty’s Court, which, in the rare devices of poetry, have been and yet are the most skilful; among whom the Right Honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of most excellent among the rest. And via Ogburn, I quote the anonymous writer who wrote The Art of English Poesie (1589), who makes full disclosure of the fact that noblemen could not put their names in front of their published works as that was considered infra dignitatem: And in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of Courtly makers [i.e. poets], Noblemen and Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would 25 appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentlemen Edward Earl of Oxford. The reader must be told the story of the Sonnets because that is where lies the Achilles’ heel of the defenders of the Stratfordian legend. One of them, Peter Ackroyd, says speaking for all of them in his book Shakespeare, the biography (2006): In the first publication of 1609 the sonnets were followed by a longer poem, “A Lover’s Complaint” … The question that has exercised scholars for many generations–are these ventures in dramatic rhetoric or are they impassioned messages to a lover?–becomes therefore unanswerable. And that is perhaps what is most significant. Wherever we look in Shakespeare’s work, we see the impossibility of assigning purpose or unassailable meaning. We must leave the worshippers of esotericism with their legendary hero behind if what we desire is to know. On May 20, 1609, Thomas Thorpe published the Shake-speare’s Sonnets. The Folger Library has the picture of the title page which you can check on the Internet. It was the editors’ custom in those times to put the name of the author inside the two parallel lines of the title page. However, in the case of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets these two parallel lines do not contain any name: they are blank. Look up, for instance, the title page of the play Bartholmew Fair by Ben Jonson published in 1614, and you will see that it includes the name of the author inside them. In the case of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets, moreover, the surname of the poet appearing on the title page is separated with a hyphen, as it appeared in almost half of his works. ‘Shake-speare’ leaves no room for doubts: this is the Shaker of Spears, the nom de guerre of an occult writer, that is to say, a pseudonym, not a real name. Other literary pseudonyms of the times, which were written with a hyphen in the middle of the surname to claim their nature as literary masks, were the writers Martin Mar-prelate, Simon Smel-knave or Martin Merry-mate. Martin Mar-prelate, like William Shake-speare, was often written without a hyphen. If we now go to Thomas Thorpe’s dedicatory, we shall see these words: TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. THESE.INSVING.SONNETS. MR.W.H.ALL.HAPPINESS. AND.THAT.ETERNITIE. 26 PROMISSED. BY. OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET. WISHETH. THE.WELL-WISHING. ADVENTVRER.IN. SETTING. FORTH. T.T. ‘Our ever-living poet’ only applies to persons who are deceased and are no longer with us, who are not alive, and that excludes that the man from Stratford is the poet of the Sonnets we are going to read, as in 1609 he was still alive and enjoying rural life in Stratford. For instance, the character Lucy in Henry VI, Part I comments on the memory of the deceased Henry V (IV.iv): ‘That ever-living man of memory,/ Henry the Fifth.’ ‘Ever-living poet’ also informs us that the poet is E.Ver, an easy anagram of Edward de Vere. The content of the Sonnets is important in order to understand Shakespeare, as it is through them that Shakespeare ‘unlocked [us] his heart,’ as William Wordsworth said. Let us study the meaning of the codified (for every word as a unit is separated by dots and two hyphens) dedicatory. As we have the authentic author behind the mask of Shakespeare, in our case, Edward de Vere, we can apply a simple code to Thomas Thorpe’s cryptic dedicatory. Given that ‘Edward de Vere’ contains 6-2-4 letters, we apply the code 6-2-4 to the words separated with dots and hyphens and we arrive at this possible alternative message: TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. THESE (6).INSVING.SONNETS.(2) MR.W.H.ALL.(4)HAPPINESSE. AND.THAT.ETERNITIE. PROMISED. BY.(6) OVR.EVER(2)-LIVING.POET. WISHED. THE(4).WELL-WISHING. ADVENTVRER.IN. SETTING. FORTH.(6) T.T. 27 Hence, after applying the code the message is: “These Sonnets All By Ever The Forth.” ‘Ever’ points to the author of the Sonnets and it is an anagram of our poet’s surname: ‘E. Ver’. And if you count the letter T. as the next second step of the code, it would go to confirm (apart from being the letter of the surname of the editor of this work, Thomas Thorpe) that the poet is dead, for the earliest crosses in History were simply marked as T. What is revealing is that T.T. had worked so hard to fit the three words ending in the number six (6). In other words, the apparent confusion of the superficial message proves to be intentional under the surface. This is what a codified message is all about. Note as well that the dedicatory is structured in three inverted pyramids of six, two and four lines each, as the mathematician John Rollett saw in 1997. The impact comes with that “By Ever The Forth,” because this is the expression people tend to use to name a monarch: with his name and a descriptive and qualifying word, as is the case with Alfonso the Wise or Alexander the Great. If we know that ‘Vere’ was called Edward, you will see that ‘The Forth’ refers to his number as King Edward of England. And since the last King Edward of England, Edward VI, was the only son of Henry VIII, “Vere The Forth” points to Edward de Vere as the next King Edward: Edward VII. Which is what Oxford’s signature (from 1569 to 1603) shows. This is sheer madness. But it is justified by the absolute impunity of the author of Richard II the eve of the Essex Rebellion; and it is also justified when we see that in 1569 Edward de Vere started to sign with a signature in the form of a crown and seven sticks. Interestingly enough, this “crown signature” was abandoned when Elizabeth I passed away in 1603 and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland. Edward de Vere stopped signing that way when the Queen passed away and the Tudor dynasty disappeared for ever in favor of the Stuart dynasty. This explanation is powerful because it is a simple explanation of facts that until now made no sense: Edward de Vere was a Prince Tudor that signed with that “crown signature” because he was called upon to be the next, the forth Edward VII. After all, bastard princes are not an impossibility or eccentricity for History, as we see in the case of Don John of Austria, the victorious leader of Lepanto and the model for all courtiers of his time until he died in 1578. He was the bastard son of Charles V. In the case of Don John, moreover, the date of his birth ranges from 1545 to 1547, something anomalous in a member of the Spanish Royal Family. Like Don John, Oxford’s age ranges between two dates separated by an interval of two years: between 1548 or 1550. Tit for tat. There are Oxfordians who do not accept the “crown signature” as evidence that Edward de Vere was a bastard prince. For example, Dr. Roger Stritmatter, an Oxfordian of recognised prestige and profound intuition, refuses to accept the royal nature of Edward de Vere in spite of the “crown signature” that our poet used starting in 1569 and abandoned 28 in 1603. Yet, knowing the marked royal character of Shakespeare’s mind that inhabits all his work, Dr. Stritmatter has coined what he terms “the [King] David complex” that our poet suffered from. In other words, according to Dr. Stritmatter, Edward de Vere believed himself to be a King when he was not, and nobody in power took him seriously or punished his audacity in any way because they knew that it was just a sheer fantasy in Oxford’s mind, Lord Great Chamberlain of England and bearer of the Sword of State. Too many entities. Everything is much simpler. If this “David complex” that Dr. Stritmatter defends were confirmed by facts, no matter how complex the explanation, then one would have to accept it as the more correct theory. It so happens that it is not true; a posteriori, there is evidence that other writers treated him as if he were a Prince, as we see in the dedicatory Arthur Golding wrote to him when he published his translation of Calvin’s comments on the Psalms of David in 1571. At that time Golding wrote to Edward de Vere (I quote from Beauclerk’s book): I assure your Lordship I write not these things as though I suspected you to be digressed from that soundness and sincerity wherein you were continually trained and traded under that vigilant Ulysses of our commonwealth [i.e. the Protestant Burghley] … I beseech your Lordship consider how God hath placed you upon a high stage in the eyes of all men, as a guide, pattern, example, and leader unto others. ‘This is the language used to address monarchs,’ Beauclerk says; and he adds: ‘When Elizabeth was being pressured by Parliament into executing Mary Queen of Scots, she indignantly reminded members that princes cannot act lightly, for they stand upon a stage in sight of all the world.’ As we can see, it was not a personal complex, but an external reality. Diana Price shows us in her essay “Rough Winds Do Shake: A Fresh Look at the Tudor Theory,” that the signature does not have a crown, but a ‘coronet’ proper of an earl, like Edward de Vere was. And it is true, the “crown signature,” as Price demonstrates, does not show a true, exact “crown,” although you will have to study hard to see the difference. Nevertheless, there are multiple examples of the ‘coronet’ as a synonym for ‘crown’ in the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights’. For instance, to take one example among many, in King Lear we hear the king talking about giving away his crown in this way (I.i.129-133): ‘[O]nly we shall retain/ The name, and all th’ addition to a king: the sway,/ Revenue, execution of the rest,/ Belovèd sons, be yours, which to confirm,/ This coronet part between you.’ Let us look at this matter from another angle: Price’s demonstration does not explain why he changed his signature as Earl of Oxford to the new “coronet earl signature” in 1569, if he had obtained the earldom of 29 Oxford in 1562, when his father passed away. Nor does Price explain how and why he changed his old signature and adopted a new “coronet earl signature” in 1569, when, officially, he reached adulthood in 1571. Furthermore, Price’s hypothesis does not explain why, if this was a “coronet earl signature,” Oxford stopped using it in 1603, coinciding with the death of Queen Elizabeth I, since our poet was in possession of his title of Earl of Oxford and would use it until 1604, when he disappeared or passed away. Nina Green seems to have an explanation for this surprising change of signature in 1603. When asked about this matter, she replied the following (personal communication): It’s not known why Oxford dropped the signature in 1603, although it seems not unreasonable to surmise that it was a diplomatic move on his part considering that King James had brought many “new” men with him from Scotland who were not members of the nobility, and who might have been antagonized by displays of rank by members of the English nobility. Oxford’s rank that Green is talking about refers to his title as Lord Great Chamberlain of England, the person who bore the Sword of State before the Queen in processions and special commemorations of great events. Considered from every angle, this ‘diplomatic move’ by Oxford that Green describes does not sustain itself. He was favoured by King James I since the latter became King of England in 1603, and, if we wonder for a moment if it is plausible, it does not explain how this change of signature could have had an effect on those new Scottish noblemen, when Oxford’s signature appeared at the bottom of some personal letters he sent Robert Cecil and King James I. The “crown signature” changed in 1603 to the “pre-1569 signature” did not have any public effect; for it was used in private, personal letters. And its function was personal and inviolable, like every signature is ultimately. Signatures identify their users; they reveal the identity the user wants to convey to the recipient. In his book Shakespeare, our contemporary, Jan Kott tells us that the two themes that are obsessively repeated in the works of Shakespeare are the exile of the legitimate monarch and the loss of his legitimate inheritance, and, indeed, we can see the truth of Kott’s intuition from Timon to The Tempest. The fact that the 1604 edition of Hamlet, the same year Oxford died or disappeared, had the Tudor coat of arms impressed on the title page, is coherent, as Hamlet’s alter ego was a Prince Tudor in real life. The words written by Samuel Johnson in his edition of Shakespeare’s works declare the common knowledge that ‘to be able to read and write was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity’ in the times of our poet, 30 an accomplishment much beyond the grasp of the man from Stratford, as confirmed by the lack of grammar school records and the lack of letters or books in his possession after he passed away: The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity. The philology of Italy had been transplanted hither in the reign of Henry the Eighth; and the learned languages had been successfully cultivated by Lilly and More; by Pole, Cheke, and Gardiner; and afterwards by Smith, Clerk, Haddon, and Ascham. Greek was now taught to boys in the principal schools; and those who united elegance with learning, read, with great diligence, the Italian and Spanish poets. But literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women of high rank. The public was gross and dark; and to be able to read and write, was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity … Nature gives no man knowledge, and when images are collected by study and experience, can only assist in combining or applying them. Shakespeare, however favored by nature, could impart only what he had learned; and as he must increase his ideas, like other mortals, by gradual acquisition, he, like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could display life better, as he knew it more, and instruct with more efficacy, as he was himself more amply instructed. This is all very good, but when the “complete” works of Shakespeare were published in 1623, Edward de Vere did not appear anywhere, in spite of the fact that this expensive edition, the First Folio of his works, was financed and, therefore, directed, by two noblemen related to the Earl of Oxford, namely the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery. In the case of the Earl of Pembroke, he was engaged to our poet’s second daughter, Bridget de Vere. In the case of the Earl of Montgomery, in 1604 he married the youngest, Susan de Vere. The question is that the first thing we see in this first edition of the works of Shakespeare is the face of the genius, the only official portrait of Shakespeare staring at us. This official portrait of the genius is known as the Droeshout portrait. Take your time to look at it with minute detail on the Web. This is him, Hamlet the Dane! If the reader is not much impressed by this portrait of the noble and immortal Hamlet, do not worry. It is understandable. Everyone looks at this portrait and rapidly follows Ben Jonson’s advice: ‘This figure … reader, look/ Not on his picture, but on his book.’ Let us translate it into these clearer words: if you want to know what the genius looked like, do not look here, at this figure, at this mask; look on his works. The portrayed figure has two left arms and this has been confirmed by experts on the question. That he is wearing a mask can be seen by the 31 drawing of that line below the left ear. Nabokov knew it when he made one of his characters in Bend Sinister say: ‘Who is he? William X cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask.’ More than a great poet, here he is portrayed as a Harlequin from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, as Beauclerk very intuitively notes. The verses Ben Jonson addressed to this Droeshout portrait declare (my emphasis): This figure that thou here see’st put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; Wherein the graver had a strife With Nature to outdo the life: O, could he but have drawn his wit As well in brass as he hath hit His face The verb ‘hit’ is key here, for it should be translated as “to engrave” the face of the author in the brass plate; but now, when we know that Edward de Vere is the author behind the mask of Shakespeare, we discover that we have a paranomasia here, a simple pun, for this verb ‘hit’ suggests the verb ‘hid’, both sharing almost the same exact pronunciation. Precisely for this reason, Ben Jonson, who knew the secret and had been employed by the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, so close to Oxford, chose the verb ‘hit’, among many others at his disposal in his ample vocabulary as a professional writer: ‘hit’ suggests ‘hid’. This is a literary device, not a very difficult one, to be honest, but a trick after all. This is what in those days, and today, is called ‘wit’, something that Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne had in bulk. The question, then, is this: that this witty pun is in accordance with what Jonson himself is saying and it is the only interpretation possible that solves the contradiction of his own words; for he tells the reader to look on his book if the reader wants to know how the author looked like, for the engraver has not portrayed the real face of the author, but has hid his face very well. Also, I may add here, as the truth is hid right at the start of the First Folio, Ben Jonson seems to be pointing to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most autobiographical work, for in that play Polonius’ words about prince Hamlet’s madness are these (II.ii.160-164): Polonius Take this from this, if this be otherwise: If circumstances lead me, I will find Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed Within the centre. 32 Such is the evident aberration of the Droeshout portrait printed in the First Folio of 1623 that other more idealised and real portraits have been discovered with the passing of time and received with great expectation. All of them, as you can imagine, idealise and retouch the Droeshout portrait so that the ugliness and unreality that appears in the First Folio disappears. Apart from this portrait and Jonson’s words on ‘the sweet swan of Avon,’ the man from Stratford has nothing else in his favour except the ulterior construction of his monument in Stratford. That the cushion where Shakspere is holding his pen today was a sack of grain before his monument was remodelled has been thoroughly demonstrated and I will not linger more on this man from Stratford until we get to 1597. After all, this book is about Shakespeare’s life, not about his official front man who did not have a single book, nor a single manuscript, nor a written letter to anyone or from anyone in his possession when he wrote his testament. As Looney said, paraphrasing David Hume, it is not in accord with experience that the man from Stratford could be Shakespeare, considering the extant evidence; but it is possible, for experience teaches us so, that Jonson and those who published the First Folio in 1623 lied. Scepticism In Scepticism and Animal Faith George Santayana wrote that scepticism ‘is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.’ Scepticism is a point of departure, not of arrival; it is ‘a suspicion of error.’ Everyone that doubts the advertisements on television is a sceptic in this sense; it is not necessary to have studied Philosophy nor have a bachelor’s degree in that branch of human knowledge to be a good sceptic. Advertisements always exaggerate, we know it; they always sell us the idea that their products are perfect. But we do not believe it; we know that ‘the more secure the dogmatism, the more insecure are its propositions.’ Transfer this television and advertisement example to this book and everything else you read about this or any other question. My book does not sell perfection. In spite of its powerful and accurate arguments based on an Oxfordian tradition of more than ninety (90) years of continuous and arduous discoveries (which are increasing each year), error is possible. Bertrand Russell once wrote an essay, simple and easy, establishing certain rules about how to form our opinions on a particular and concrete theme; he confesses himself to be a sceptic of middle position. Russell tells us with his characteristic wit: 9 9 See http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell4.htm. 33 I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it. I am also aware (what is more serious) that it would tend to diminish the incomes of clairvoyants, bookmakers, bishops, and others who live on the irrational hopes of those who have done nothing to deserve good fortune here or hereafter. In spite of these grave arguments, I maintain that a case can be made out of my paradox, and I shall try to set it forth … Now I do not advocate such heroic scepticism as that [i.e. Pyrrhonist scepticism, the scepticism that doubts everything]. I am prepared to admit the ordinary beliefs of common sense, in practice if not in theory. I am prepared to admit any well-established result of science, not as certainly true, but as sufficiently probable to afford a basis for rational action. If it is announced that there is to be an eclipse of the moon on such-andsuch a date, I think it worthwhile to look and see whether it is taking place. Pyrrhus would have thought otherwise. On this ground, I feel justified in claiming that I advocate a middle position … There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed; the dates of eclipses may serve as an illustration. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein’s view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by nonexperts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment. These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionise human life. Option (2) applies to the arguments and hypothesis of this book. The reader is recommended, therefore, once he or she has finished this book, to continue his or her preparation and to become an expert in his or her own right. Failing this, I strongly recommend the reader to follow Russell’s rule (2): as the majority of experts do not coincide with the propositions and evidence of this book, the reader should not, as a nonexpert, take my propositions as certain: the reader should wait until 34 experts, in their majority, coincide. As this, it seems to me, will not happen in the next few centuries I, at least, would choose the more expedited strategy. Charles Beauclerk gave us a great present in 2010 with his book Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: a new characteristic of our poet, one that Looney could not see: his attraction to the myth of Actaeon. Ovid tells us in his Metamorphoses that Actaeon was hunting with his dogs when he discovered the goddess Diana bathing naked in the woods. As a punishment for his boldness, the goddess transformed him into a stag: with horns in his head and unable to speak. Transformed into a deer, Actaeon will not be able to tell anyone who he is or what he has seen. In fact, this impediment, this impossibility to tell who he really is, will cause his death, dismembered by his own dogs unaware that they are tearing their master’s flesh apart. In 1582 the poet will write that, after Actaeon, his best friend is Oedipus. The theme of the myth of Actaeon in connection with Shakespeare discovered by Charles Beauclerk is commented by Dr. Michael Delahoyde in the following way: 10 ‘The myth that pierces to the heart of Shakespeare’s relationship with Elizabeth is the tale of Actaeon, the hunter who stumbled upon the virgin goddess Diana bathing nude in a woodland pond’ (183). This insight alone is transformative to our reading of Shakespeare. I have studied four plays with students in class since reading Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom, and I have found in each one partial glimpses of the Actaeon myth where I had not noticed it before. Such a result certifies Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom as representing the very best kind of scholarship. This book is divided into five Acts as an homage to Oxford and in order to convey to the reader the idea that our own world today is nothing but what the Renaissance mind thought of it back then: a Theatrum mundi full of masks and lies. As Nabokov wrote in Lolita: ‘Is “mask” the keyword?’ Yes, ‘mask’ is the keyword, and no one would have answered this question more affirmatively than Oxford. At the end of each act I have put a list of the works that the poet could have written during his life with the purpose and aim of letting the reader have an idea of his progression as a writer. These dates and those works, of course, are a guide, for, after all, in the majority of cases, our poet had the sane and intelligent custom of revising and publishing his works continually to adapt them to the moment and circumstances in which they were performed. Moreover, works written a long time ago seem to have been published much later on, permitting with this procedure to 10 The review can be consulted in the brief chronicles site (articles, 55/116). 35 better conceal his identity and the identity of the recipient of his message before the public view. It falls within my expectations that time takes some of them out of the list that I have included by error and adds others that I have not seen. In his magnum opus The Realms of Being, Santayana said that ‘openness,’ the open space of nature we live in, ‘is [also] a form of architecture.’ John Donne, his pseudonyms The thesis of this book about the pseudonyms of John Donne may, in the future, encourage others with greater capacity and means than mine to investigate with much more detail the fact at which I point my finger. That John Donne could have been the one who wrote with the masks of Immerito, Thomas Nashe, Marlowe and Spenser is a theory upheld in this book for which I count myself as the sole defender. I have called it DINS theory. The biography of John Donne contains an important gap; from his birth in 1572 until he entered the Church of England in 1615: a fortythree (43) year void. We know that he was intelligent, precociously intelligent; that he went to the University of Oxford and probably to Cambridge; that he studied with his brother at Lincoln’s Inn, but we have almost nothing about his activities during those years of his life. In short, as his biographer Edmund Gosse said, it is ‘exasperating to the biographer’ of Donne that this is so. My intuition about Donne and his pseudonyms from 1579 onwards came to me when I translated into Spanish the poem “The Bait” from his Songs and Sonnets, a work published in 1633, two years after his death. Knowing already from my research on Edward de Vere that Marlowe was a brand of his school of writers, the fact that a profound Christian thinker like Donne would have liked to side with the atheist and sodomite Marlowe that legend has transmitted to us, put me on guard, just like what happened to me when George Chapman, a strict moralist, sided with Marlowe in Hero and Leander. Donne knew that Marlowe the poet and playwright was a different person from that other Marlowe who was a spy and informant under Walsingham and William Cecil. Marlowe the informant spy knew too much in 1593 and everything indicates that he had a big mouth, as Thomas Kyd, and as the character Lussurioso, one of the Duke’s sons in the play The Revenger’s Tragedy published in 1608, says (IV.ii.65-66): He that knows great men’s secrets and proves slight, That man ne’er lives to see his beard turn white. 36 As I say, after reading “The Bait” by Donne, a poem that versioned that other poem which began “Come live with me and be my love” attributed to ‘Chr. Marlow.’ in the anthology of pastoral poems England’s Helicon of 1600, I knew that Donne, although belonging (as we were told) in great measure to 17 th century Jacobean literature, had met the real author behind the brand Marlowe. That poem led me to Thomas Nashe. I had already read some of Thomas Nashe’s works thanks to Nina Green’s site and realised that his style was very Baroque and complex. As I knew that Green had very good arguments on the question that Thomas Nashe was a pseudonym, I had the intuition, after reading Donne’s poem, that Nashe could be his pseudonym. In order to confirm whether my intuition was simply nonsense or a good idea, I searched for the opinion of an authority. Then I found this opinion of C.S. Lewis on the style of Nashe in his work Pierce Penniless (1592): The opening words of the epistle, ‘Faith, I am verie sorie, Sir,’ establish at once an intimacy between the performer and the audience: it is the same technique that Donne often uses in verse. It was a good confirmation then; now, after four years of studying Marlowe, Nashe, Spenser and Donne side by side, I think the theory has strengthened and improved. It seems that DINS theory is a good theory to work with. The reason why this void of Donne during his first fortythree years has not been investigated before by anyone in relation to Marlowe, Nashe and Spenser has to do with the lack of documents about those early years of his life, coupled with what Philip Daniel Knauss explains in his doctoral thesis of 1998, Love’s Refinement: Metaphysical Expressions of Desire in Philip Sidney and John Donne:11 Contrary to critics who assert that Elizabethan and Jacobean poets can be categorically differentiated from each other according to their philosophical outlook and style, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets indicate that strong continuity exists between them. Finally, every Elizabethan scholar should read the following words carefully: There are more mistakes prevalent about Donne as a poet than about any one of even approximately equal rank. The first is the notion that 11 This doctoral thesis can be read online. 37 Donne was a late Jacobean or Caroline writer, contemporary as a poet with Cowley. This error arises from the accident that the earliest extant edition of Donne’s poetry is posthumous and dates 1633. Cowley’s Poetical Blossoms, the appropriately named budding poetry of a precocious boy of thirteen, appeared in the same year. Donne would have been sixty, if alive. Without entering into the clear evidences which are at hand for all to use, Donne is an Elizabethan in his poetry in the strictest acceptation of that term, the forerunner of a remarkable movement, not soon assimilated or even imitated by his immediate contemporaries. … Orthodoxy—or rather a restoration of orthodoxy—as to John Donne demands that we recognise him in his poetry as an Elizabethan, as strictly such as Shakespeare, far more so than Jonson; that while we grant Donne to be a concettist he was such from the originality and natural bias of his mind, not from affected singularity or a striving after effect; that his strange and fascinating poetry, so caviare to the general, yields a true and rich reward to him who will seek with labour and true faith; and, lastly, that Donne, next to Spenser and Jonson, exercised the most potent influence of his time on English poetry. 12 Donne will belong to our Winter. Now let us live the life, passion and death of the Spring. Ver, begin. Ricardo Mena Cuevas Málaga, October 15, 2011 (Spanish edition). The Hague, May 8, 2014 (English Kindle edition). Málaga, January 16, 2015 (English Print edition). My gratitude to Deborah Portman-Pope for her kind assistance, to Hank Whittemore for his Preface and for having spotted one inaccuracy I made concerning A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, to William J. Ray for his corrections on the “Sweet Chytherea” poem and the list of typos he sent me to improve this work. I also wish to thank Catherine Germann Briest for her great work with the final proofreading of these pages, and Paulino Cuevas and Euromedia Consulting for all the help they have given me. 12 Felix E. Schelling, English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare, 1910, pp. 36471 in The John Donne Critical Heritage, Vol. 2, pp. 290 ff. 38 39 40 INSCRIPTION In Henry V, the Chorus of the Prologue introduces the play with these words that function, here as well, as a presentation before the curtain is about to rise: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! 41 42 ACT I THE COURT POET 43 44 Scene I. Vna13 Queen Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. There were rumors that said that Anne Boleyn was not only his second spouse, but his daughter as well. When a courtesan said to Henry VIII that he had slept with the mother and sister of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII replied: ‘Never with the mother.’ The rumor of incest between her parents, real or not, struck Princess Elizabeth. In 1544, being eleven (11) years old, she translated Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s book L’Âme Pécheresse (Glass of the Sinful Soul) and gave it to her step-mother Queen Catherine Parr as a New Year’s gift. As Charles Beauclerk writes, this book was the expression of self-loath of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who ‘was believed to have had an incestuous relationship with her adored brother Francis I, King of France.’ It is no doubt weird that an eleven-year-old girl like Elizabeth would have liked to choose and translate this scandalous work whose first 1533 edition was prohibited in France by the Sorbonne. It was, in the end, not weird, but an homage the daughter paid to her dear mother: the poetic link that united their souls in a single, material book on perfect, transcending, incestuous love. Henry VIII, seeking to get rid of his second wife, accused Anne Boleyn of having maintained sexual relationships with her own brother. True or not, this accusation showed, as Beauclerk very pointedly says, that the King transferred his own feeling of guilt unto his second wife. Anne Boleyn was executed and after King Henry’s death, Elizabeth, being then thirteen (13) years old, went to live with Queen Dowager Catherine Parr at Chelsea. Two months after the death of the King, Beauclerk informs us, Catherine married the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. He does not seem to have been in his right mind, as he started to flirt with his stepdaughter Princess Elizabeth. The erotic foreplay between Thomas Seymour and the girl became notorious. As Beauclerk informs us, ‘Seymour took the teenage princess down the Thames on his barge at night, and made it his habit to creep into her chamber in the mornings.’ He also ‘would tickle her, slap her jovially on the buttocks, and make as if to leap into her bed. ’ In a certain occasion, this passionate ménage à trois occurred: while the stepfather tore her stepdaughter’s dress, the stepmother Catherine Parr gripped the girl. The maid that witnessed this could not believe it, as it happens to me or may happen to the reader. One day, Seymour was surprised in the arms of young Elizabeth when Catherine Parr came into her room by surprise. ‘Whether they were 13 Vna is one of the feminine names in The Faerie Queene that represents, among many other feminine names in the work, Queen Elizabeth I, whose motto was Semper Eadem, Always the Same; in this instance, she is Una or the Head of the Church of England. 45 making love or just kissing,’ Beauclerk tells us, ‘the sight was sufficiently shocking for Catherine to raise the house with her cries.’ The worst thing was that Catherine was pregnant. As to Elizabeth, we know that she left her stepmother and went to Cheshunt where some relatives of her deceased mother lived. Catherine Parr gave birth to a girl and as it usually happened at that time, after the delivery and its corresponding puerperal fever, she died. Elizabeth herself had been as sick as Catherine Parr was during the same time. Paul Streitz writes: It was indeed strange that the second in line to the throne should be sick for such a period and yet there would be no record of any doctor visiting her until the Lord Protector sends one long after the supposed illness. While there is a detailed record of Elizabeth’s health throughout her reign, there is only speculation about this sickness. Whatever it was, it had to be serious enough to incapacitate her so she could not be with her stepmother’s lying-in childbirth, a lifethreatening situation for any Elizabethan woman. William Cecil was then the secretary of Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector and brother of that Thomas Seymour who had been surprised in bed with young Elizabeth. Streitz asks himself why William Cecil could have become, during 1548, a special friend of Princess Elizabeth: On August 2, 1548, Kat Ashley wrote to William Cecil to intervene with Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, to obtain the exchange of an English prisoner in Scotland. Elizabeth added a postscript that began ‘I pray you further this poor man’s suit,’ and signed it ‘your frende Elizabeth.’ This was the first recorded connection between Elizabeth and William Cecil. There seem to be no prior meetings or correspondence between Elizabeth and William Cecil before this note, though it was, of course, possible that she had met him on one of her infrequent visits to her brother at court. Many historians have commented that this letter was the beginning of a lifelong relationship between William Cecil and Elizabeth, which is true, but none have considered what might have started this friendship. Nor has anyone questioned the extraordinary closing. This letter implies that a level of admiration and mutual trust had developed between them, but what did William Cecil do that encouraged such familiarity and gratitude on the part of the future queen? Elizabeth was going beyond all bounds of Elizabethan formality, putting their relationship on a very personal basis with ‘your frende Elizabeth.’ How did William Cecil all of a sudden become a ‘frende’? 46 Rumors were heard in London that Elizabeth had had a child with Thomas Seymour, her stepfather; these rumors were so extended and notorious that in January 1549, young Elizabeth wrote to the Lord Protector complaining: ‘My Lord, these are shameful slanders.’ Everything seems to point out that William Cecil might have helped Elizabeth to locate the child the Princess had with Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour in another family. The fact that the father of our poet, Thomas Seymour, attempted against the life of young King Edward VI without success (he was executed at once), put Elizabeth, and her child, in a great risk. All this is speculation, no doubt, and the reader is advised to treat it with great scepticism, but the relationship between Princess Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour as well as her long and not diagnosed sickness will be explained later with the development of certain events. On this “strange” summer of 1548 we are offered this conclusion by Streitz: Elizabeth was inexplicably absent from her stepmother’s lying-in and not present when she died from complications from childbirth. Ostensibly, the reason was that she was sick, although she was not visited by a doctor, nor was the sickness ever defined. The depositions of Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry [her servants] revealed that there was some inappropriate behaviour between her and her stepfather. Scene II. Prince Arthur In January 1548, the spouse of John de Vere, Dorothy Neville, died. John de Vere and Dorothy Neville had had a daughter named Katherine. We know that William Cecil and Edward Seymour had been monitoring the movements of this noble John de Vere since Princess Elizabeth secluded herself to cure her long and never diagnosed sickness: John de Vere was free to marry in January of 1548, and he set his sights on Dorothy Fosser, who was formerly the governess of John’s daughter … In June of 1548, Edward Seymour and William Cecil took a great deal of interest in the romantic affairs of the 16 th Earl of Oxford. This was shortly after Elizabeth moved to Cheshunt. Streitz continues: Despite the opposition of the Lord Protector, he continued to pursue Dorothy Fosser and succeeded in getting her away from the house of Sir Edward Greene, with the intent of marrying her. Yet, after his successful effort and having had the banns of marriage announced, there was the most inexplicable twist to the story. John de Vere departed for his marriage, but instead of going to Sampford and 47 Dorothy Fosser, he went in the opposite direction to Belchamp—there he married Margery Golding?! And he adds: Margery Golding was a very unlikely bride for the Earl of Oxford. She was the sister of Arthur and Thomas Golding, who had witnessed the will forced on him by the Lord Protector. Either Margery Golding had overwhelming feminine charms that overpowered John de Vere or the Lord Protector coerced de Vere into marrying her. It is hard to imagine that de Vere would voluntarily marry into a family (the Goldings) that was not aristocratic and was firmly allied with the Lord Protector, his arch-tormentor. The marriage was witnessed on August 1, 1548. Beauclerk agrees that the weeding between the Earl of Oxford and Margery Golding did not happen in normal conditions: There is no record of Edward’s birth in the registers of the time. Instead, we owe the date of his appearance in the world to his future father-in-law, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who made a note of it more than a quarter century later, as if he needed to remind himself of the official truth … What we do know is that John de Vere and Margery Golding were married quite suddenly on August 1, 1548, and some people would later challenge their children’s legitimacy, arguing that the parents were unlawfully wed. John de Vere had a daughter, Katherine, by his first wife, Lady Dorothy Neville (d. 1547); while still wedded to Dorothy, he contracted a bigamous marriage with Joan Jockey … Various other amours followed. At the time of his wedding to Margery Golding he was engaged to be married the very next day to another woman, Dorothy Fosser, who was a servant of the earl’s nineyear-old daughter Katherine. The banns for their marriage had already been called twice when he abandoned her—seemingly under duress—in favour of a hasty union with Margery. John de Vere was being manipulated by this protestant faction, mainly due to the immense patrimony the 16 th Earl of Oxford had, but it is possible that there was something else beneath. Beauclerk’s analysis offers a plausible explanation: Lord Protector Somerset, intent on forcing a match between Oxford’s daughter Katherine and his own son Henry Seymour, had been blackmailing the earl for some time. Though it is not known what he 48 had on him, Somerset managed to extort de Vere’s ancestral lands under two separate fines dated February and April 1548. According to eighteenth-century historian, the Reverend Philip Morant: Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Protector of the Realm, out of his extreme avarice and greedy appetite did, under color of justice, convent himself for certain criminal causes John Earl of Oxford and so terrify him that, to save his life, [he] was obliged to alienate to the said Duke by deed all his states, lordships, manors etc. What might these undivulged crimes have been, and did they involve the earl’s extramarital affairs? Whatever the answer, from that moment until his death John de Vere fell into line, becoming little more than a puppet of Somerset’s private secretary, Sir William Cecil. Under the ‘recognizance’ signed between the men, Somerset even removed Oxford’s control over his own household, denying him the basic power to dismiss servants. Moreover, he used Thomas Golding, the brother of Oxford’s future bride Margery, and Thomas Darcy, the earl’s brother-in-law, to spy on the hapless nobleman and report back to Somerset’s office. This pinioning of John de Vere may have been in preparation for the arrival of a royal changeling. If so, the timing fits with the rumored birth of a child to the king’s sister, Princess Elizabeth—later Queen Elizabeth—in the autumn of 1548; and if this child was Edward de Vere, then a birth date of September or October 1548 would make sense of many subsequent anomalies in the biographical record. This surprising marriage was so irregular, indeed, that Katherine, the daughter of John de Vere with his first wife, claimed against it in 1563. There was another lawsuit concerning this marriage that raises interesting questions. We read in Streitz: It was a later lawsuit, in 1585, thirty-seven years after the marriage of John de Vere and Margery Golding that gives an intimate glimpse of the personal history of the 16 th Earl of Oxford and his marriage to Margery Golding. Neither lawsuit challenged the paternity-maternity of Oxford as the son of John de Vere; instead, each lawsuit questioned whether John de Vere had been legally married to Margery Golding. If he had contracted to marry someone else, or if he were married to someone else after the death of Dorothy Neville, then Oxford would not have been the legal heir. Streitz considers these facts and asks himself very naturally: 49 The legal action in 1585 was over a property that had belonged to the 16th Earl of Oxford and leased to Hugh Key. Richard Masterson had entered onto the property before the expiration of the lease. In the course of the lawsuit, there were a number of interrogatories conducted concerning the marriages of the 16 th Earl of Oxford. If John de Vere had been married to a certain Joan Jockey after the death of his first wife, it would be a valid marriage and the marriage to Margery Golding would be invalid. The interrogations in 1585 are by John Popham, the Queen’s Attorney General, and Thomas Egerton, her Solicitor General. This high-level involvement of the Queen’s legal staff in what was a routine legal matter over a piece of property of John de Vere’s indicates the Queen had a direct interest in the outcome of the events. That is, the depositions might reveal something to the Queen’s detriment that went beyond the issues under consideration. It was extraordinary that the Queen or her representatives would become involved in such a petty matter, unless the fundamental question of John de Vere’s marriage and Oxford’s paternity-maternity was very important to her. As John de Vere and Margery Golding are said to have produced two children, Edward de Vere and Mary de Vere, the latter could have been the child Catherine Parr had with Thomas Seymour. In a few years, Mary de Vere will be separated from Edward de Vere’s side, and no letters between them have survived. It is as if our poet had had no sister at all. Scene III. In the Academy Another fact increases our suspicions: the very name of our poet: Edward. In the lineage of the Earls of Oxford this name is nowhere to be found. Beauclerk writes: Whether Seymour-Tudor or de Vere, Edward was clearly named for the boy king, Edward VI, Elizabeth’s brother, who was on the throne at the time of his birth, and who reigned at first under the regency of Seymour’s brother, Edward, Duke of Somerset … The name Edward sticks out like a sore thumb in the list of Aubreys, Johns, and Roberts that constitute the long line of Oxford earls, marking him as an outsider from the start. We know nothing of the first years of our poet and there is no record that registers the date of his birth. Beauclerk writes: 50 There is no record of Edward’s birth in the registers of the time. Instead, we owe the date of his appearance in the world to his future father-in-law, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who made a note of it more than a quarter century later, as if he needed to remind himself of the official truth. On April 17, 1550, however, the Privy Council, under the leadership of Lord Protector Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, authorized the gift of a baptismal cup for the christening of ‘our very good Lord the Earl of Oxford’s son.’ This is not proof of a birthdate in April 1550, for if Oxford was a changeling, as some have claimed, born up to eighteen months earlier, an official baptism could have been arranged at any time. On December 1554, Edward de Vere started to be educated by Sir Thomas Smith, the greatest scholar of the times. Beauclerk has this insight to offer: Smith would later describe Oxford as ‘brought up in my house.’ If Oxford was the bona fide child of John de Vere, he would have been only four when this crucial move took place—too young, even for those precocious times. If, however, he was the child of Elizabeth and Seymour, then he would be leaving home at six, an age better conforming to the standard of the time. (His namesake, Edward VI, had begun his formal education at age six.) In his book Shakespeare by Another Name, Mark Anderson informs us of the existence of two letters: Two letters point unquestionably to Smith’s extended tenure as de Vere’s tutor: On April 25, 1576, Smith wrote William Cecil, extending his best wishes to young Edward ‘for the love I beare hym, bicause he was brought up in my howse.’ On August 3, 1574, Cecil wrote to Sir Thomas Walsingham, ‘I dout not but Mr. Secretary Smith will remembre his old love towardes the Erle whan he was his scollar.’… However, by process of elimination, one concludes that Smith must have ‘brought vp’ de Vere ‘in my howse’ for some extended period during the years 1554-62. Between 1562 and ’66, Smith was living in Paris as ambassador and envoy to the French court. Sir Thomas Smith was known as the flower of Cambridge University and the Plato of England; intellectually, the tutor of our poet seems not to have had limits. His biographer Mary Dewar writes that ‘[h]is students and colleagues were always dazzled by his wide range of interests and impressed by his capacity to discuss any topic and pronounce learnedly 51 in almost any field of study.’ Smith’s library was monumental for his times (a collection of more than four hundred titles, many of them divided in volumes), and the reader who could access it could learn history, theology, philosophy, Civil Law, mathematics, medicine, literature, horticulture, etc. The changeling boy Edward de Vere was being raised by a tutor whose library contained books by Ovid, Plato, Homer, Sophocles, Plautus, Virgil, Plutarch, Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio, all of them authors whose influence we can perceive in the works of our poet. The main study of Sir Thomas Smith was, above all, Law, the knowledge of which can be seen clearly in the rhetoric of Shakespeare’s plays. We know that Sir Thomas Smith was as well, during a time, the secretary of Edward Seymour, and that he was among those who interrogated Kat Ashley, one of the personal maids of Princess Elizabeth during the scandal with Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. Streitz informs us: Smith and Cecil had a long relationship that began when Cecil was a student of Smith’s at Cambridge. Sir Thomas was the Principal Secretary during the Protectorship of Edward Seymour, and Smith fell from influence upon Seymour’s fall from power and execution. At that point, his former pupil William Cecil was able to align himself with the new Protectorship, and Cecil eclipsed Sir Thomas forevermore. Smith later became a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, along with Sir William Cecil, but he never regained his former influential position. The early participation of Sir Thomas Smith in Oxford’s education confirms the involvement of William Cecil in the young earl’s education and the fact that Oxford’s education was overseen by people in very high places. William Cecil was a consummate politician and master strategist. He would not have wasted his time on the son of an earl of the old aristocracy unless there were greater implications. In addition, John de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford, had no intellectual accomplishments and few political or religious connections to the Protestant university scholars. He would seem an unlikely person to so educate Oxford. Beauclerk makes this interesting observation: We don’t know who made the decision to place Oxford with Smith, but it was likely to have been William Cecil. John de Vere was reported to be an unstable character, of unsettled beliefs—what today we might describe as a loose cannon … If Cecil was in charge of Oxford’s overall upbringing, then he would be at pains to ensure that 52 the boy was in safe hands, and with a family who would keep his royal origins in complete confidence. Smith and his wife Philipa, who were themselves childless, fit the bill to a T. In October 1558, a month before Queen Mary died, the ten-year-old Edward was enrolled at Smith’s alma mater, Queen’s College, Cambridge, and then at St. John’s the following January. How long he remained at the university is uncertain, but Smith, it seems, continued to be responsible for his all-around education. William Cecil could have visited the young Prince while he lived in the house of his tutor Thomas Smith, as we can read in The Faerie Queene. In this scene, Prince Arthur tells virgin Una that he does not know who he is, but that he has very clear memories on certain things (Book I, Canto IX, 2-5): ….....................Vna faire besought That straunger knight his name and nation tell; … 3 Faire virgin (said the Prince) yee me require A thing without the compas of my witt: For both the lignage and the certein Sire, From which I sprong, from mee are hidden yitt. For all so soone as life did me admitt Into this world, and shewed heauens light, From mothers pap I taken was vnfitt: And streight deliuered to a Fairy knight, To be vpbrought in gentle thewes and martiall might. 4 Vnto old Timon14 he me brought byliue, Old Timon... His dwelling is low in a valley greene, Vnder the foot of Rauran mossy hore, From whence the riuer Dee as siluer cleene His tombling billowes rolls with gentle rore: There all my daies he traind me vp in vertuous lore. 14 Sir Thomas Smith, his first tutor. Timon is related to Oxford-Shakespeare, not only to honour, as Upton thought: ‘I have often observed that Spenser varies his names from history, mythology, or romance, agreeable to his own scheme; and here, by saying that Arthur was nurtured by Timon, allegorically he means that he was brought up in the ways of honour, for so his tutor’s name signifies. In the romance history of Prince Arthur (1.3) Uther Pendragon by the counsel of Merlin delivers the young prince to be nurtured by Sir Ector.’ (Variorum, Vol. 1, p. 264). 53 5 Thether the great magicien Merlin15came, As was his vse, ofttimes to visitt me: For he had charge my discipline to frame, And Tutors16 nouriture to ouersee. Him oft and oft I askt in priuity, Of what loines and what lignage I did spring: Whose aunswere bad me still assured bee, That I was sonne and heire vnto a king, As time in her iust terme the truth to light should bring. If the reader smiles, do not doubt that I smile with the reader as well. I have just quoted some verses of fiction, poetical, as if they were a declaration of Edmund Spenser on the occult infancy of Edward de Vere. Notwithstanding the former, bear in mind what the same Spenser tells the reader at the beginning of Book II, in relation with what he has written in Book I (II. Proem, 1-5): 1 Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th’aboundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, … 5 The which O pardon me thus to enfold In couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light As it is the truth, the poet prays to be excused. What the poet Spenser says to the Queen here is directly related to what Spenser is saying to Oxford and to the reader in his dedicatory poem: To the right Honourable the Earle of Oxenford, Lord high Chamberlayne of England. &c. Recieue most Noble Lord in gentle gree, The vnripe fruit of an vnready wit: Which by thy countenaunce doth craue to bee 15 William Cecil, the administrator of his guardianship, on behalf of the Queen. 16 Tutors is alluding to Tudors, the dynasty to which the poet and prince Arthur belongs. Merlin directs the Tutors as the secretary of State Cecil did England. Such was the power of Cecil in the realm, that England was contemptuously called as regnum Cecilianum. 54 Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit. Which so to doe may thee right well besit, Sith th’antique glory of thine auncestry Vnder a shady vele is therein writ, And eke thine owne long liuing memory, Succeeding them in true nobility Beauclerk is very intuitive when he explains what kind of evidence is transmitted by literature as a historical document: It is not enough to study the historical records as they’ve been handed down to us by the Poloniuses of this world, for they represent a skewed perspective—if not of a single man, then of a powerful family or faction. As George Orwell commented wryly, ‘History is written by the winners.’ Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister and self-appointed historiographer, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who is widely recognised as the original of Polonius, and his son Robert Cecil … are the men according to whose word Elizabethan history has been, and continues to be, shaped. The official records, which are often little more than propaganda, have to be studied in conjunction with the literature of the time. Together they are the warp and weft of the nation’s story. It would be impossible to understand the history of the Soviet Union, to take a more recent example, by confining oneself to a study of the Kremlin records. A deeply distorted picture would emerge. To gain a less biased view of the age, one would have to read the dissident poets and novelists, such as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Zabolotsky, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn, for, like Shakespeare, their works reveal the hidden or missing story: history as written by the losers. If autocratic regimes have taught us one thing, it is that fiction is simply a deeper, more elaborate way of telling the truth. My interpretation that, in one plane, the historical plane, Prince Arthur may be Oxford is not a far-fetched one; he has been usually thought to be Leicester’s artistic mirror by the majority of Spenserians. Considering who ‘Edmund Spenser’ was, and who was his real mirror of those times, Leicester is out of the question for Prince Arthur. These years are important in the history of English Poetry given that Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had married the daughter of the 15 th Earl of Oxford, published two foundational works: in 1554 and 1557 he translated in blank verse for the first time in England books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid of Virgil. 1557 was the year Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, and other was published by Richard Tottel. This monumental book of sonnets and songs was known as the Tottel’s Miscellany. 55 This official uncle of our poet, the Earl of Surrey, discovered two great things which will be developed by Shakespeare: the blank verse and the Surreyan form, later known as the Shakespearian form, of the sonnet. When in The Merry Wives of Windsor (I.i.140) Slender says that ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here,’ the young poet is making reference to the work of Surrey. Tottel’s Miscellany was the most influential miscellany of all Elizabethan Literature, although, in fact, it was published in 1557, one year before Elizabeth was crowned as Queen Elizabeth I of England. Scene IV. Edward de Vere, 17 th Earl of O—xford According to historian J. H. Elliot in his work The Divided Europe 15591598, the Europe of Cateau-Cambrésis ‘was born in bankruptcy and heresy and never escaped from those strong influences which marked its birth.’17 The cost of the continuous wars forced Philip II to declare the Crown bankrupt in 1557. Shortly after, the French would do the same. ‘After this, peace between the Austrias and Valois was only a question of time.’ The international scene was tense. England and Spain believed that the French influence in Scotland ‘was extremely strong, as its young Queen Mary [Stuart] had just recently become the political sister of Henry II of France,’ when she married on April 24, 1558, Francis, Dauphin of France. Elliot writes about the imminent peace between France and Spain: In October, 1558, discussions were opened, but any immediate perspective of arriving to an agreement was destroyed by an event of the greatest importance for the monarchies of Western Europe—the death of Mary Tudor, Queen of England and spouse of Philip II of Spain, occurred on November 17. The Anglo-Spanish union had been one of the cornerstones of Charles V’s politics during the final years of his reign … Nobody knew the politics that the new Queen, Elizabeth, would adopt, in questions of doctrine and foreign affairs, although the envoy of Philip in London expressed the prophetic fear that ‘in religion she won’t conduct rightly.’ In November of 1558 Elizabeth I was crowned Queen of England. She was twenty-five years old and the worst that could have happened to her seemed to have passed already: she had solved the scandal of her amorous relation with Thomas Seymour with the help of William Cecil and had escaped from her stepsister Queen Mary, thanks to Philip II, as he did not give his support to Queen Mary I in her decision to execute 17 My translation from the Spanish edition. 56 her. Queen Mary always distrusted Elizabeth and said that she was the bastard daughter Anne Boleyn had had with her lover Mark Smeaton. In fact, after the Wyatt’s rebellion of 1554, Elizabeth was jailed for two months in the Tower, suspected of having been involved in treason against the Crown. In Beauclerk’s words: Elizabeth spent two months as a prisoner in the Tower, never knowing when she might be called to the block. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life … For ten years from 1549 to her accession in 1558 Elizabeth had played a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the authorities, often swallowing pride and principles for the sake of survival. She became an unrivaled equivocator—or worse— as when her sister, Mary, on finally nominating her as her heir, sent a messenger to Hatfield to seek assurance from the princess that she would maintain the Catholic religion, to which Elizabeth ‘prayed God that the earth might open and swallow her up alive, if she were not a true Roman Catholic.’ When news finally reached her of Mary’s death in November 1558, Elizabeth already had her government in place. Her transition to power, thanks to Cecil, was smooth and efficient, and the fairy-tale glamour that her sufferings under Mary had bestowed upon her ensured that the people were ready to take her to their hearts. On the terms of the treaty of peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 between the European powers, Elliot writes: The first treaty, between England and France, gave Elizabeth an apparent successful formula whereby the French kept Calais during eight years, or they gave it back, or—as this was very unlikely—they would pay compensations for its retention. In the future years, the sour memories of Calais would hurt the Anglo-French relations, but in practice the question was settled, and England had lost his last possession in the European continent. The second and more important treaty was signed between France and Spain on April 3 … In this case, the peace confirmed what had been already decided by the course of a couple of wars: the almost absolute exclusion of France from the Italian peninsula, for the benefit of Spain and her allies. The French army received the orders to abandon Piamonte, which was invaded in 1536, with bitterness and disappointment. Western Europe seemed to be in peace since the spring of 1559. However, the death of Henry II during the tournament which celebrated 57 that peace, left France with ‘one widow, Catherine de’ Medici, and a bunch of sick children, the eldest of whom was crown King, with the name of Francis II, at the age of fifteen.’ But Francis II died and left his young Queen Mary Stuart as a widow in a foreign country. She had to return to Scotland at last, where she ruled (for a short time) as Queen of the Scots. John Knox, a cleric whose antagonism against papal corruption was manifest, started to incense the feelings of the people, promoting as one of his goals the expulsion of the papist Mary Stuart from Scotland. Queen Elizabeth and William Cecil had much work to do at this time. Elliot writes: In virtue of the terms of Cateau-Cambrésis, Elizabeth had promised not to take part in Scotland, and, anyway, she did not give her support to a rebellion against a legitimate queen. However, what was at stake in Scotland was too important for her not to try anything and leave her Northern neighbor to fall on the hands of the French due to her absence. Pushed by her secretary, William Cecil, she was determined to offer her help to the rebels in general and to John Knox in particular, to the extent that she sent a fleet to Firth (bay) of Forth in January, 1560. Then, considering attentively the possible international repercussions, she sent an army to the frontier, at the end of March, in order to lay siege to the French forces at Leith. Although the English army performed badly, their faults were less important than the political and religious dissensions of the French. The Guisa’s regime, shaken by the discovery of the Amboise’s conspiracy by the Huguenots on February, lost its former enthusiasm on the foreign adventure, and French delegates were sent to Scotland to negotiate a peace. It was established by the treaty of Edinburgh of July 6 1560 that all French troops would abandon Scotland and Mary Stuart would no longer attempt the English throne. Francis II and Mary rejected to sign the treaty, but Francis died on December 5, and the interests of the new Queen Regent of France, Florentine Catherine de’ Medici, did not extend to the remote and boundless regions of the North. Therefore, Mary Stuart was abandoned to her luck and when she arrived to Scotland in August 1561, she found herself without the French military assistance which could have supported her pretensions of sovereignty over England. Elizabeth and Cecil’s success on Scotland in 1559-1560 was of the utmost importance for Europe, as nothing else could have destabilized more the balance of forces in the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis than the consolidation of the French power in the North of England. Elizabeth, in establishing herself as the effective protector of the new Protestant Scotland, had reinforced immeasurably her own position and had ensured her independence versus the more important continental powers. At the same time, she had contributed as well in giving 58 certain permanence to the agreement of the continental Europe of 1559. The Geneva Bible was published in 1560, an event which is considered fundamental to the mask of Shakespeare, for a copy of this Protestant Bible contains passages underlined by our poet that show clear correspondences with the works of Shakespeare, as the study of Roger Stritmatter on Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible proves. A Stratfordian, Edgar I. Fripp, offers us some words that Louis P. Benezet comments for us in the following way:18 ‘We have mistaken Alderman Shakespeare if he had not a copy of the Geneva Bible in his house. His son shows such familiarity with the opening chapters that we may believe he spelled them out and almost learned them by heart.’ But the Stratfordian Countess de Chambrun has proved that John Shacksper, as the clerk spells his name, was a Catholic who would never have permitted his son to see a Geneva Bible. All through his book Fripp is dropping little hints that bolster up the Oxford cause. He points out that Shakespeare, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, uses the name of the Frenchman, La Mothe, who came to England in 1572 as a special envoy to plead the suit of the Duc d’Alencon for the hand of Elizabeth. This man Oxford knew personally. But how would the Stratford youth, which was barely eight years old at the time, ever hear of him, and who in London theatrical society would recall his name twenty years afterwards, when Shakspere is supposed, in Stratfordian circles, to have produced the play? In this same year, I read from Beauclerk, is published a work that seems to fit with the facts we have seen about his occult life: he is twelve (12) years old. Beauclerk comments: Edward may have come to suspect the true story of his birth around this time. A work that appeared in 1560, the first translation of Ovid to be published in English, seems to provide a clue. The anonymous work, consisting of 192 lines of verse, preceded by an ‘argument’ in prose, renders the story of Narcissus and Echo from Book III of the Metamorphoses. The title of the work, “The Fable of Ovid Treating of 18 Shine Forth: Evidence Grows Rapidly in Favor of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare, eds. Paul Altrocchi, Hank Whittemore, iUniverse, Inc., New York Bloomington, 2009, p. 85. The five volumes of this series by Altrocchi and Whittemore were precious for my apprenticeship in the Oxfordian lore. In 2013 have appeared five more. 59 Narcissus,” was arranged so that the top line read simply, “The Fable of O” in bold type. Though he hadn’t inherited the Oxford earldom yet, might this have been Edward’s way of announcing not only that he was telling his own story through the myth of Narcissus, but that he knew his Oxford lineage was a fable, and he himself a nobody? A premonition perhaps of the Fool’s words to Lear after the loss of his kingdom, ‘Now thou art an O without a figure.’ In August 1561, the Queen went to East Anglia and stayed five days at Castle Hedingham as the guest of the Earl and Countess of Oxford. It is possible that ‘Elizabeth had chosen Hedingham,’ Beauclerk tells us, ‘so that she could spend some private time with her son, who was almost thirteen.’ And this is very possible, for Edmund Spenser again seems to deal with something akin to this event in The Faerie Queene. Prince Arthur recalls these infancy memories to Una (Book I, Canto IX, 13-15): 13 For wearied with my sportes, I did alight From loftie steed, and downe to sleep me layd; The verdant gras my couch did goodly dight, And pillow was my helmett fayre displayd: Whiles euery sence the humour sweet embayd, And slombring soft my hart did steale away Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay: So fayre a creature yet saw neuer sunny day. 14 Most goodly glee and louely blandishment She to me made, and badd me loue her deare; For dearely sure her loue was to me bent, As when iust time expired should appeare. But whether dreames delude, or true it were, Was neuer hart so rauisht with delight, Ne liuing man like wordes did euer heare, As she to me deliuered all that night; And at her parting said, She Queene of Faeries hight. 15 When I awoke, and found her place deuoyd And nought but pressed gras, where she had lyen, I sorrowed all so much, as earst I ioyd, And washed all her place with watry eyen. From that day forth I lou’d that face diuyne; From that day forth I cast in carefull mind, To seeke her out with labor, and long tyne, 60 And neuer vowd to rest, till her I fynd, Nyne monethes I seek in vain yet ni’ll that vow vnbind. But the separation from his mother would not last. After visiting his son, the Queen went to Ipswich, where John Bale performed his play King Johan for her Majesty. Mark Anderson comments on this play by Bale: Bale’s King Johan was a work of Protestant propaganda that had debuted before the court of Elizabeth’s father twenty-five years before. Scholars have long noted Bale’s likely influence on the Shake-speare play King John, even though Bale’s King Johan was available only in manuscript and never, so far as is known, staged anytime after the early 1560s. If the young de Vere were not in the audience that night in Ipswich, he would at least have had access to Bale’s manuscript, since Earl John had been one of Bale’s longtime patrons … King Johan was in fact a groundbreaking piece of drama for its time. It departed from the traditional morality plays by dramatizing contemporary politics, drawing upon English history—not just biblical tales or folklore—as the playwright’s polemical tool. It was also the first English play to cast a historical English king as a character onstage and to portray a tragic hero as a man of essential virtues, not just vice. Also in 1561 a seminal work for the English culture of that time was published: the English translation carried out by Thomas Hoby of Il Cortegiano, written by Baltasar Castiglione. The work of Castiglione determined the ideal of the instructed courtier, a man well versed in arms, sports and knowledge. The courtier should be gallant at Court and act with the virtues of a knight. Years later, Edward de Vere would finance the Latin translation of this fundamental work. The paramount example of the courtier can be seen in the monumental poem The Faerie Queene published in 1590 by Edmund Spenser, who said that the object of his book was ‘the institution of a Knight’ or in his own words: ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.’ In Thomas Hoby’s edition of The Courtier carried out by Walter Raleigh in 1900 we are given the key why Shakspere of Stratford could have never been ‘Shake-speare,’ while Edward de Vere could: 19 The Courtly Civilization.- That the vogue of the book in England should have coincided exactly with the Elizabethan Age is something other than an accident. The literature of that age was a literature of 19 Work available at archive.org. 61 the Court … The way to political influence, to social advancement, to power and consideration and fame, lay through the Court, in England as in Italy … It was the centre, not of government alone, but of the fine arts: the example of culture and civilisation … The Courtier was the embodiment and type of the civilisation of the Renaissance, as the Orator was the typical product of the civilisation of ancient Rome. And the treatises of Cicero and Quintilian, wherein is set forth the character of the perfect orator, have their exact counterpart in the books written by the Italians of the Sixteenth Century for the instruction of the Perfect Courtier … The domination of the idea of the Court is attested also by those numerous ballads, poems, and treatises [such as] Spenser’s “Mother Hubbard,” which rail on Court life … ‘The Court [wrote Sir Francis Bryant in 1548] is a perpetuall dreame, a bottomlesse whorlepole, an inchaunted phantasy, and a mase…’. The railers were all courtiers just as most of those inveigh against modern commercialism industrialism are … parasites of the industrial and commerical community. The last word on the controversy Court versus Country is said by Touchstone in As You Like It. Hamlet is the courtier of Elizabethan literature, as it was also the author who wrote it, of course. On August 3 1562, the (official) father of our poet died suddenly. The causes of his death are unknown. His widow, Margery Golding, the step-mother of our poet, married rapidly again, an event that will be included in Hamlet and will explain her appearance in The Jew of Malta as ‘Margery March-Beer.’ Our poet, being a minor, fell now under the administration of the Royal Court of Wards. There were two men who profited from John de Vere’s death: the first one was Robert Dudley, given that he obtained all of de Vere’s lands, as he was the Queen’s “favourite” (there were rumors that he had had a son with her in 1559); and, of course, the second one was William Cecil. The separation between mother and son, as we see, did not last long. Edward de Vere was, now, the royal ward of Queen Elizabeth I. Regarding the sentimental relation between the Queen and Robert Dudley, we quote these words by historian Beauclerk: Determined to maintain the good opinion of the people, Elizabeth needed a screen of chastity behind which to indulge her licentious will. When her old governess Kat Ashley begged her to show restraint in her relations with Robert Dudley in order to curb the scandalous rumors dogging her early reign, she replied that if she were inclined to compromise her honor in the manner that wagging tongues suggested she had compromised it, then ‘she did not know of anyone who could forbid her.’ Thus spake the daughter of Henry VIII. The monarch possessed two distinct bodies, and with them two 62 distinct wills: the body natural was the physical body, incorporating the personal will, with its capacity for error; the body politic, on the other hand, was the kingdom he or she embodied, and with it came an impersonal, political will, which was incorruptible. It was fortunate for Elizabeth’s sanity that she had these two bodies and two wills, so that while her private will and body natural yielded to Dudley, her public will and body politic remained chaste. Or, as David Starkey put it, ‘Dudley had sex with her but she did not have it with him.’ Margery Golding did not communicate nor meet with our poet after John de Vere’s death. Her letters to William Cecil never express attention or love towards her son. In one of them, Beauclerk informs us, she seems to say to the secretary of State that she ignored, when she married, that Edward de Vere was the son of the Queen: ‘I confess,’ she said, ‘that a great trust hath been committed to me, of those things which in my Lord’s lifetime was kept most secret from me.’ While in 1562 John Bale published his moral piece Three Laws, an unknown author adapted the comedy of Plautus Amphitryon and titled it Jack Jugler, a comic and eccentric interlude that today some critics attribute to George Gascoigne. This play seems to be the first dramatic attempt of our poet. This would not be strange to consider as this little episode consists in Jack convincing a servant, Jenkin Careawaie, that he is not himself, but Jack. The servant ends up being convinced but also confused. When his master arrives, the servant is punished for thinking that he is not himself, that is, a servant, but Jack. This first dramatic episode is less than an adaptation of the comedy of Plautus Amphitryon. George Nichols informs us in his book for the Harvard College Library Four Old Plays:20 Jack Jugler can hardly be called an imitation of the comedy of Plautus. It is the play of Amphitryon without the part of Amphitryon … In fact, Jack Jugler is a caricature even of the comic parts. All dignity is stripped from the characters, every ridiculous feature is much exaggerated, and the language and incidents are ingeniously vulgarized to reduce everything to the grotesque, the quaintness of the expressions greatly heightening the effect to a modern reader. The amiable Alcmena becomes a ‘verie cursed shrew’ … There is no proper plot to the piece; the whole action consisting in getting Jenkin Careawaie into as much trouble as possible, when he is left to go to bed with aching bones, and wishing bad luck to his second self … Those who are acquainted with the tedious performances of those times will recognise with pleasure an uncommon raciness and spirit in this little interlude. The lines are rude, but sharp and bold, and 20 Available at archive.org. 63 Dame Coye may even be called a well-drawn and original character. It is not bad considering that it was one of his first dramatic creations, if not the first dramatic creation. This play should not be considered only a plagiarism, given that it was the first occasion our poet played with his dual identity. His father John de Vere had died, but he was not a de Vere, but a Tudor. Therefore, if his father was not his father, who was he and why was he going to London in mourning? He knew he was a Tudor, hence the necessity to copy Plautus and play with his real identity, as he will do years later when he write A History of Error (later revised as The Comedy of Errors). As the Fool says to King Lear: ‘Now thou art an O without a figure.’ He was, officially, the Earl of O—xford, a great O, but, at the same time, as he was not, he was the zero Earl of O—xford. In France, meanwhile, the sudden death of Francis II deprived the Guisas of their power. Elliot writes: If the Guisas had been able to dominate Francis II, they could not do the same with his younger brother who was now crowned king Charles IV. Therefore, the death of his elder son gave Catalina the opportunity to release the handle of the Guisas from the Crown. Taking advantage of the opportunity, she assumed the powers and duties of Queen Regent of the new King, and proceeded to associate herself with the elder brother of de Condé, Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre. The departure of the Guisas made it possible that she and her counselors returned to a moderate policy that culminated in the famous edict of January 1562. By virtue of the clauses of the edict, the Huguenots were guaranteed complete freedom of cult outside of cities, and the right to celebrate private cults inside them … The edict was a triumph … but it came too late. The Guisas were determined to resist moderation. On March 1, 1562, the Duke of Guisa, during his march in arms towards Paris, allowed his followers to attack a group of Protestants in Vassy, Champagne. Seventy-four were killed, and over one hundred were wounded. Guisa had shown what he thought about the edict, and civil war was now inevitable. Elizabeth and Cecil did not sit tight, but took an active and clear position: they financed the Huguenots. Elliot again: The financing of the Huguenots, then, turned out to be an international operation that England, afraid of the consequences of a victory of the Guisas, was ready to accept, at a certain price. By the treatise of Hampton Court, of September 1562, Elizabeth offered a substantial loan in exchange of the immediate transfer of Le Havre 64 which should have been exchanged for Calais at the end of the war. Scene V. Ward of the Queen The entrance of our poet in London was something remarkable even for a person of such noble ancestry as he was. Charlton Ogburn asks the reader to handle these facts with caution because it is not understandable if only an earl was entering the capital. These words were written in 1984: A contemporary diarist records that On the 3rd day of September came riding out of Essex from the funeral of the Earl of Oxford his father, the young Earl of Oxford, with seven score horse all in black, through London and Chepe and Ludgate, and so to Temple Bar … between 5 and 6 of the afternoon. The report that the twelve-year-old was accompanied by 140 horses of any colour is one I think we might treat with reserve. Streitz cannot stop wondering about this new extraordinary event: Was this the entrance of an earl’s son or was it the entrance of a Prince of the Realm? One hundred and forty men was a sizeable number considering only a small number of palace guards protected the Queen. When Elizabeth entered the city of London as a princess to become Queen, 200 men accompanied her. By any standard of the day, Londoners knew that a person of considerable importance had entered. His final destination in London was the large house with the imposing gardens of Sir William Cecil, where he would live as a ward of the Crown. Mark Anderson registers it without reserves in 2005: On Thursday, September 3, 1562, The London diarist Henry Machyn recorded that between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, the twelve-year-old earl of Oxford came riding out of Essex ‘with sevenscore horse all in black through London and Cheap and Ludgate and so to Temple Bar.’ The child’s parade was hundreds of feet long as it progressed over the drawbridge and through the arches of London’s Aldgate, on the Eastern side of the city. With 140 horsemen riding behind the youth bearing the colorless cast of mourning, de Vere took his entrance onto the worldly stage as the boy in black … Cecil House, Sir William Cecil’s estate at the edge of Covent Garden, was to be de Vere’s new home. 65 And Beauclerk in 2010: According to diarist Henry Machyn, Oxford rode into London after his father’s funeral ‘with seven score horse all in black’; in other words, he entered the capital like a Prince of Wales, with no fewer than 140 retainers (the Elizabethan historian John Stow puts the number at 180). He was accompanied by the soldier-poet and future laureate George Gascoigne. His new home was Sir William Cecil’s palatial residence on the north side of the Strand And Streitz writes: In 1561, William Cecil was made Master of the Wards. The wards were aristocratic males whose fathers had died before their sons reached their majority of twenty-one years. The Master of the Wards and the Queen thus gained financial control over their estates, and most important, they gained the right to arrange the marriage of the underage wards. The wardship system allowed the Crown to manage the affairs of the ward in ways that would be favourable only to the guardian and leave the ward with virtually nothing … The orphaned heir of an aristocrat rarely stayed a royal ward except in name for very long. The Crown soon sold the rights to his guardianship, sometimes to his mother but more often to a complete stranger. The Crown then made an immediate profit on the transaction (an inheritance tax, if you wish), and the administration of the wardship passed into other hands. The purchaser of the wardship then made a profit by exploiting the lands of the youthful heir and selling the marriage rights. With his guardianship would go the right to manage the lands, and the heir was obligated to marry whomever the guardian chose or be forced to pay an often enormous fine to the guardian … The young Earl was now a ward of the Crown. In the normal course of events, his wardship would have been sold by the Crown for cash. However, one of the peculiarities of Oxford’s wardship was that the Queen never sold it. In a more strict sense, it was not William Cecil but the Queen who was the guardian of Oxford with William Cecil as the administrator, and the Queen had the right to determine whom Oxford would marry. The analysis of Beauclerk is meritorious for its profundity and for asking a question no investigator has asked until the present day: Here Oxford’s continuing education was overseen by the master of the queen’s wards, Cecil himself, who would have been glad finally to have 66 the queen’s son under his vigilant eye … If Cecil thought of Oxford as a potential king, then marrying him one day to his daughter Anne, who in 1562 was only six years old, was an enticing prospect. That way, Cecil blood would flow in the veins of a future monarch, and William himself would be the founder of a royal dynasty. The crux, as ever, was how to reveal Oxford to the world in his true colors without bringing the whole Seymour affair to light and disgracing the queen. In October 1562, at the age of twenty-nine, Elizabeth almost died of smallpox. In her delirium, with her councillors crowded round her bed, she named Robert Dudley as lord protector, an office that would have made sense only if the heir to the throne was a minor … If Elizabeth had died, the meaning of her extraordinary appointment would doubtless have been called into question; but as she survived, no one, even today, seems to have thought to ask for whom Dudley was supposed to be protector. Among the new tutors that William Cecil provided for the education of our poet was Laurence Nowell, who that same year obtained, thanks to William Cecil, some manuscripts which revealed themselves to be an unheard discovery. It was Beowulf, the most ancient poem in all AngloSaxon literature. The argument of this epic poem describes the fight between the hero Beowulf (that has come to help the Geants) and the dragon Grendel. When Grendel attacks the palace of the Geants, Beowulf comes to fight against the monster, who can only free from Beowulf by losing an arm that the hero has refused to release. On the next night, the mother of the monster comes back for vengeance. This poem was an important source for the elaboration of Hamlet. Anderson informs us that the enigma of how Shakspere could have had access to it can be found in the fact that Edward de Vere was living at Cecil House under the tutorship of Laurence Nowell when the latter acquired it: Beowulf was as inaccessible as the crown jewels to anyone outside of Cecil House. With an author whose childhood education would have exposed him to Beowulf, the ancient poem’s influence on Shakespeare becomes not inexplicable but rather expected. Scholars have already ferreted out a few initial connections between the Beowulf saga and Hamlet. One may reasonably expect this trend to continue. Beowulf and the original Hamlet myth (‘Amleth’) are cousins from the same family of Scandinavian folklore. Shake-speare uses both as sources for Hamlet. Once Hamlet kills his uncle Claudius, Shakespeare stops following ‘Amleth’ and starts following Beowulf. It is Beowulf who fights the mortal duel with poison and sword; it is Beowulf who turns to his loyal comrade (Wiglaf in Beowulf; Horatio in Hamlet) to recite a dying appeal to carry his name and cause forward; and it is Beowulf that carries on after its hero’s death to dramatize a 67 succession struggle for the throne brought on by an invading nation. The young Edward de Vere was not the only one to be attracted to this ancient epic poem written in an unique manuscript, for that other giant poet of the court, Edmund Spenser, also seems to have read it. In The Faerie Queene Spenser recreates this poem. In this scene there are details of the severed arm and the intention of revenge by the mother who comes to help the monster (Book I, Canto VIII, 5-12): 5 The same before the Geaunts gate he blew, That all the castle quaked from the grownd ... The Gyaunt selfe dismaied with that sownd, ... In hast came rushing forth from inner bowre, … 6 And after him the proud Duessa came, High mounted on her many headed beast, And euery head with fyrie tongue did flame, And euery head was crowned on his creast, And bloody mouthed with late cruell feast. That when the knight beheld, his mightie shild Vpon his manly arme he soone addrest, And at him fiersly flew, with corage fild, And eger greedinesse through euery member thrild. … 10 His boystrous club, so buried in the grownd, He could not rearen vp againe so light, But that the knight him at aduantage fownd, And whiles he stroue his combred clubbe to quight Out of the earth, with blade all burning bright He smott off his left arme, which like a block Did fall to ground, depriu’d of natiue might; Large streames of blood out of the truncked stock Forth gushed, like fresh water streame from riuen rocke. 11 Dismayed with so desperate deadly wound, And eke impatient of vnwonted paine, He lowdly brayd with beastly yelling sownd … 68 As great a noyse, as when in Cymbrian plaine An heard of Bulles, whom kindly rage doth sting, Doe for the milky mothers want complaine, … 12 That when his deare Duessa heard, and saw The euill stownd, that daungerd her state, Vnto his aide she hastily did draw It is difficult to understand how Shakspere of Stratford could ever have accessed this unique manuscript of private property, Anderson notes. In the same way we are entitled to ask about Spenser, who lived in Ireland and, so we are said, took the scarce moments of peace the Irish rebels allowed him to write the monumental poem The Faire Queene. How could that man have had access to this private manuscript? The fact is that the tutor of our poet, Nowell, wrote to the secretary of State William Cecil: ‘I clearly see that my work for the Earl of Oxford is no longer required.’ The pupil was amply prepared, as we see. He was fourteen years old. In 1562 we find the publication of a poem entitled The Tragedy of Romeus and Juliet, by one Arthur Brooke. Charlton Ogburn writes: In that year … there came off the press a poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by one Arthur Brooke. Clearly it had its roots in an Italian romance that had evolved into two versions published in the previous decade, and no less clearly it was to give rise to Shakespeare’s play. It was, says E.K. Chambers, ‘substantially his source,’ and A.L. Rowse calls it an example of ‘the borrowing characteristic of Shakespeare’ and ‘the basis of Romeo and Juliet.’ … If the latter alternative seems to be reaching very far [i.e. to attribute the authorship to the young de Vere], it is nonetheless my choice. In its defense let me quote Marchette Chute: It is no easy thing to read Brooke’s version seriously … Shakespeare could read this sort of thing and believe in the story wholeheartedly without being affected in the least by the childish narrator. Brooke’s stupidity as a poet did not irritate him in the least, as it might very well irritate a lesser man. Shakespeare’s spirit accepted the whole of Brooke’s If the narrator of Romeus and Juliet seems childish, he does so, I submit, for the best possible reason: he was little more than a child … But what about Arthur Brooke? Apart from his writing the poem, the only thing he seems to have done in life is die. George Turberville, in 1567, wrote An epitaph on the death of Master Arthur Brooke 69 drounde in passing to New Haven. It is the only report we have of him. The reason, I suggest, is that he had never existed. I think that, having served his purpose, he was disposed of as an unwanted kitten may be, as a favour to de Vere by Turberville, a poetical disciple of de Vere’s uncle, the Earl of Surrey. It is, however, what the epitaphist says in his brief valedictory to Brooke that strikes the reader, for it seems to clinch the impression one has of the author of Romeus and Juliet as a boy poet: ...for sure his virtues were As many as his years in number few. The Muses him in learned laps did bear And Pallas’ dug this dainty Bab did chew. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (II.i.152), the character Ford tells the Host that he has no complain against Falstaff, but that he wants to see him: ‘Tell him my name is Brook, only for a jest,’ says Ford, to what the Host replies: ‘Thy name shall be Brook. It is a merry knight.’ That the character Ford, that is, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wanted to be called Brook as a jest, is reasonable because ‘brook’ and ‘ford’ are synonyms for ‘creek’. Brook is a merry name, a ‘merry knight’ for Ford, because we are being said that Ford, indeed, had used that pseudonym ‘Brooke’ before, when he published Romeus and Juliet. Such is the evidence between ‘Ford’ and ‘Brook’ that the latter will be changed in the First Folio for ‘Broom’.21 In June 1563, the stepsister of our poet tried to get the annulation of the marriage between John de Vere and Margery Golding. Katherine accused his step-brother of being a bastard and illegitimate heir of her father John de Vere. Arthur Golding, who was the brother of our poet’s stepmother Margery Golding, successfully defended Edward the Vere in this trial. The case was closed rapidly. Beauclerk echoes what Queen Elizabeth said at that time. He reflects: Also in 1563, Oxford’s legitimacy was challenged by his half-sister Katherine, and his name was made a common recreation at court. Even the queen was said to have called him ‘her little bastard,’ which goes to prove that many a true word is spoken in jest. Most Oxfordian experts remark that this case provoked a great outbreak of fury and pain in our poet, and for this reason they place the 21 Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen comment about this change: “The Quarto calls into question two significant details in the Folio. First, the name by which Ford calls himself when disguised: this is ‘Brooke’ in Quarto but ‘Broom’ in Folio. ‘Brooke’ was clearly Shakespeare’s original intention, being an aquatic variation on ‘Ford’”. 70 creation of the poem “His Good Name Being Blemished, He Bewaileth” at this moment, but I differ. Contrary to what will happen during 1569 and 1570, this pain of our poet in 1563 did not last more than two months, for we see him absolutely sure of himself in the letter he wrote to William Cecil in August 1563. This letter, which Richard Malim argues was written in French because the boy was in France, 22 shows that he was not devastated nor oppressed for the calumny, and the reason why Edward de Vere did not suffer a prolonged grief was that he knew he was not a legitimate de Vere. In the letter sent to Cecil on August 23, 1563, the young de Vere confirms his good state of mind, notwithstanding the fact that he had been denounced as being born from an illegitimate marriage and, hence, to be an illegitimate Earl of Oxford. The reference to the love Cecil gives him as a son ‘duly procreated of such a mother’ is a delightful jest of what had happened to him two months ago. The letter is full of sarcasm: Sir, I have received your letters, full of humanity and courtesy, and strongly resembling your great love and singular affection towards me, like true children duly procreated of such a mother, for whom I find myself from day to day more bound to Your [Lordship]. Your good admonishments for the observance of good order according to your appointed rules, I am resolved (God abiding) to keep with all diligence, as a thing that I may know and consider to tend specially to my own good and profit, using therein the advice and authority of those who are near me, whose discretion I steem so great (if it suits me to say something to their advantage) that not only will they comport themselves according as a given time requires it, but will as well do what is more, as long as I govern myself as you have ordered and commanded. As to my curriculum, because it requires a long discourse to explain it in detail, and the time is short at the moment, I pray you affectionately to excuse me therefore for the present, assuring you that by the first passerby I shall make it known to you at full length. In the meantime, I pray to God to give you health. After Nowell left his post, Arthur Golding became his new tutor. Beauclerk informs us that ‘describing Oxford as a ‘jewel’ in the eyes of his Queen and country, he refers to his ‘great forwardness’ and the hope and expectation that his contemporaries have of him.’ In his English translation of Justin’s Histories of Trogus Pompeius of 1564, Golding wrote to our poet: 22 The Earl of Oxford and the Making of “Shakespeare”, McFarland & Company, 2012. 71 For … it is not unknown to others, and I have had experience thereof myself, how earnest a desire Your Honour hath naturally graffed in you to read, peruse, and communicate with others, as well as the histories of ancient times in our days, and that not without a certain pregnancy of wit and ripeness of understanding. The which do not only now rejoice the hearts of all such as bear faithful affection to th’honourable house of your ancestors, but also stir up a great hope and expectation of such wisdom and experience in you in time to come. In August 5 1564, our poet lodged at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, in order to receive, along with other noblemen, the Master of Arts degree. The Queen participated in that special event, and she praised former Carmelite monk Thomas Preston for his performance in the play Dido by Thomas Haliwell. By the way, the play Cambises is attributed to Thomas Preston; written in rugged fourteen couplets, as Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, the play has raised doubts about its authorship, due to the fact that its puerility is notorious. While Preston was thirty-two years old and a religious man, our poet was sixteen-years old and liked to mix the tragic with the comical themes in his literary productions, just like Ovid did, as the play Cambises shows. In fact, both works Cambises and Romeus and Juliet were paradoxically puerile for the simple reason that the author was still a child. The first tragicomedy in English, Damon and Pythias, played by the company of children known as the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel, appeared in the Christmas season of 1564. The play has a brilliant speed and it focuses on the question of true friendship. Hamlet will call his dear friend Horatio ‘Damon dear’. Michael Delahoyde from Washington State University notes:23 The importance of male friendship, though prominent in plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, is an Elizabethan-era commonplace but one that would have impressed itself on a young (officially) 14-year-old de Vere … More interesting is Aristippus’ reference to a dramatic mood alteration in Dionisius as ‘a sodayne chaunge in deede, a strange Metamorphosis’ (646)—metamorphosis being an obsession of Shakespeare’s (see Two Gentlemen I.i.66, The Taming of the Shrew, etc.) and the obvious theme of Ovid’s famous anthology of classical legends translated into English by Oxford’s uncle Arthur Golding, or by Oxford under his uncle’s tutelage. An exchange between Eubulus—‘A cruell kyng the people hateth’—and 23 See Shakespeare-Oxford Fellowship website (2013, 08). 72 Dionisius—‘Let them hate me, so they feare mee’ (728-729)—indicates that the playwright knows his basic Machiavelli, something Shakespeare will explore with more sophistication in the History plays and works such as Macbeth. Most noticeable, though, is the following musing by Damon: ‘Pithagoras said, that this world was like a Stage,/ Wheron many play their partes’ (348-349). Shakespeare editors assure us that the famous conceit was well-worn by the time Shakespeare trotted it out for As You Like It. Beauclerk offers us these words: Attributed to Richard Edwards, it is a raw, fledgling piece, more likely to have been written by a sixteen year old prince as a pledge of devotion to his vulnerable queen. Punning repeatedly on ‘true’ and ‘truly’ (i.e., ‘Vere’), the poet addresses Elizabeth directly in the epilogue: The strongest guard that Kings can have Are constant friends their state to serve. True friends are constant both in word and deed; True friends are present, and help at each need; True friends talk truly, they glose for no gain; When treasure consumeth, true friends will remain; True friends for their Prince refuseth not their death. The Lord grant her such friends, most noble Queen Elizabeth! During 1565 our poet will deliver the first four books of his translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid; we will talk of it when we come to the year 1567, when the book was published in its entirety, although we will now quote Anderson: “In favour of this theory [i.e. his authorship] one might add the enigmatic note by Edward Dowden that de Vere ‘was said by Coxeter to have translated Ovid … but no one has ever seen his Ovid’.” In 1565 the play Gorboduc was published, and it was the first play in blank verse in Elizabethan literature, written by Thomas Suckville with great sobriety. Also, during this same year of 1565, we see that the anonymous play King Darius was registered and published, according to E.K. Chambers in his Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 4. This play shows the humorous style of our poet and, as with Damon and Pythias, it repeats the importance of good King’s counselors. The play criticizes the sycophants and hypocrites, and it contains numerous songs such as the one at the end of the play which actually makes a moral out of our poet’s surname: 73 Let it truth, let the truth, Be in every man’s mouth; Both young and old, Let him be bold With truth to hold, Lest they perish Like hogs swinish And utterly decay. Then he shall be sure Long to endure Abroad in earth; And from the dearth God will keep his heart, Also from punishment And from cruel judgment For ever and for aye. Meanwhile, regarding international politics, many great things were about to happen. Elliot informs us: [I]t was in the central Mediterranean, where Philip [II] was still at a disadvantage, where the Turks were then preparing their next great campaign. It was known, since some months before, in the capitals of Europe, that a great fleet was being prepared in Constantinople, but it was ignored whether their objective will be the Venetian island of Cyprus or Malta, the last fortress of the Knights of St. John. The mystery was solved when suddenly they appeared in front of the Maltese coast on the 18th May of 1565. The Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Jean de Valette, had made everything that had been possible to reinforce the defenses of the island with the help of Don García de Toledo, then Viceroy of Sicily. But La Valette had less than 9.000 mean at his disposal, and on the 18 th and 19th of May 23.000 Turks landed on the island … It could only be expected an effective help on behalf of the Spanish, and this was long in coming … Therefore, until the 26th August no relief expedition sailed from Sicily … [T]he fleet reached at last Malta on the 7th of September, in the moment where both siegers and sieged were approaching exhaustion … The arrival, long waited for, of these reinforcements ended the siege. Piali Pasha gave orders to his troops to embark, and on the 12 nd of September the last Turkish ship had disappeared on the horizon. The lifting of the siege was celebrated in all Europe as a great triumph of the Christian arms … All in all, the fact was that it had been the Spanish fleet that had saved Malta and the central Mediterranean against the Turks, and that the naval Spanish power was the only effective obstacle against the Ottoman advance. 74 On this event of European significance there is a play, The Jew of Malta, performed in 1594, although the text dates from the 1633 edition, in which Thomas Heywood attributes the play to Christopher Marlowe. J.B. Steane comments in the Penguin edition of The Jew of Malta that ‘there is no single source for the tale, though various episodes have their origins in English and Italian popular literature.’ But there is one historical source, and it dates from 1565, as Elliot shows. This play is attributed to Marlowe as late as 1633, and treats a theme that dates from 1565, that is, when Marlowe was only one-year old. To ask what could have interested Marlowe about this historical and Christian victory over the Turks, the historical impact of which he did not known in his infancy, is interesting, for in the year 1587, when he started his career as a playwright with the play Tamburlaine (of such a quality that it would have required years of practice), Philip II was on the point of invading England and any show of praise on the feat of the Spanish in Malta would have been utterly absurd and out of place. We have to go back, to the year of the event, therefore, in order to ask if this Spanish and Christian feat, that impressed all Europe, could have impressed our poet: and the answer is very plausible. The first verses of the play are: Machevill Albeit the world think Machevill is dead, Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps; And, now the Guise is dead, is come from France, To view this land, and frolic with his friends. We already know who was this Francis, Duke of Guisa, and how he reacted to Catherine de’ Medici’s edict on the question of maintaining the peace with the French Huguenots. Guisa hated the Protestants and was shot dead in 1563. The Jew of Malta, therefore, mentions a recent event, as it is the feat of the defense of Malta by the Spanish in 1565, when these were not in war with England, and also mentions a happy event for the Protestants which took place two years before, as it was the Duke of Guisa’s death in 1563. The correspondences between real people and fictitious characters in the play does not leave too much room for doubt: the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Jean de Valette, is transformed in the play into ‘Ferneze’, while the Chief Spanish Captain of the seas Don García de Toledo, then Viceroy of Sicily, is converted into the ‘Viceadmiral of Spain Martín del Bosco’; on his behalf, the son of the Great Sultan Solimán, Selim II, becomes ‘Selim Calymath, son to the Grand Seignior’. The question is that in this play the jew Barabas holds a staff, as the secretary of State William Cecil bore the staff of the State with which he can be seen portrayed in the painting made by Arnold Bronckorst around 1571. Like Barabas, Cecil’s only interest was money and he treated his 75 daughter like another commodity. Hamlet will call him Jephta, the Biblical character who sacrificed his own daughter. As Queen Elizabeth had the right to decide with whom was his “royal ward” Edward to marry, it is not surprising that Cecil was created Lord Burghley and then granted permission to marry his daughter Anne with our poet. Cecil was receiving his reward for all his efforts done in 1548. This scene of The Jew of Malta describes Anne Cecil as a young lady of fourteen years old, the age when she was engaged to our poet in 1571, and the age Juliet is when she pledges herself to Romeo (I.ii.391-395): Mathias A fair young maid, scarce fourteen years of age, The sweetest flower in Cytherea’s field, Cropt from the pleasures of the fruitful earth, And strangely metamorphos’d nun. Ludovick But say, what was she? Mathias Why, the rich Jew’s daughter. ‘Nun’ is the nickname our poet used for Anne Cecil, as can be seen in Hamlet and in the anonymous play Thomas Woodstock, also known as Richard II, Part One. Ithamore and Bellamira talk in this scene of 1565, six years before their marriage took place in 1571 (IV.ii.105-118): Bellamira I have no husband, sweet; I’ll marry thee. Ithamore Content: but we will leave this paltry land, And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece. I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece... I’ll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love’s Queen Marlowe’s style in this play seems infantile. The descriptions are poetic, classic, Ovidian, but the characters do not talk yet with a full conscience of who they are: there is no spiritual profundity in them. It could not be otherwise, for The Jew of Malta was commenced when our poet was seventeen years old. There is a passage in this play where music is praised. The passage must be quoted because the young Ithamore calls Bellamira his ‘violet’. In Hamlet, Ophelia is related repeatedly to violets. When his brother Laertes is burying her, for instance, he orders that some violets be thrown into her grave. These verses of The Jew of Malta say (IV.iv.53-74): Bellamira Love me little, love me long: let music rumble, Whilst I in thy incony lap do tumble. Enter Barabas, disguised as a French musician, with a lute... 76 Bellamira A French musician! –Come, let’s hear your skill. Barabas Must tuna my lute for sound, twang twang first... Bellamira How sweet, my Ithamore, the flowers smell! Ithamore Like thy breath, sweetheart; no violet like ’em... Pilia-Borza Methinks he fingers very well... How sweetly he runs! Barabas, a character based on the secretary of State William Cecil, will be transformed years later in Shylock when our poet writes The Merchant of Venice. Harold Bloom, who rejects all evidence in favor of Edward de Vere as being Shakespeare with insults, comments in The Anxiety of Influence why Shakspere has not left us his early poetry and plays with which to follow and study his evolution (my translation from my Spanish edition): More than any other drama by Shakespeare (or by anyone else), Hamlet is an infinite provocation to the world, because the play contains an unsolved mystery … I can only imagine one plausible explanation for the lack of traces about Shakespeare: his long refuge in the image of Marlowe … There is hardly any change in Marlowe: all his boasters are one boaster, his victims one victim, his Machiavelli a Nick. Tamburlain, Barabas, Guise, even Faust share the same rhetoric, confused with the same desires. Shakespeare, in abandoning Marlowe, created different characters. The ‘unsolved mystery’ is not anymore an infinite provocation to the world: it is solved when we know that ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Marlowe’ stand for two masks which cover the same author, Edward de Vere. 24 Regarding his ‘long refuge in the image of Marlowe’ and that ‘Shakespeare, in abandoning’ him, ‘created different characters,’ that is due to simple experience and a continued practice as a writer. The Jew of Malta and the historical rescue of Malta in 1565 by the Spanish celebrated all around Europe do not leave much room for doubt. We will see further evidence that Marlowe is another mask for our poet and his school of university wits, but I will add this now before continuing with our story. 24 We have to read this as Edward de Vere and his school of poets. Marlowe’s plays, like The Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus and Dido, Queen of Carthage show that they are filled by Donne from Edward de Vere’s interludes. In some cases, Donne is the sole author of some of Marlowe’s works, like his translations of Ovid's Amores or Hero and Leander. We should remember that Marlowe the literary London atheist brand is the product of a collaboration between Oxford and his school of ‘university wits’. Donne is here, with Oxford, the main mind behind Marlowe. As Marlovians show, the Shakespearean traces of Marlowe’s plays confirm that the mastermind of Elizabethan literature put his hand on them. 77 The Marlowe legend that tells us that he was an atheist and sodomite does not match, as J.B. Steane informs us, with the love the author of this play shows towards the beauty and delicacy of music and the arts, hobbies which were proper of a courtier in love with Il Cortegiano of Castiglione. On the killing of Marlowe as agent and spy, there exists a hypothesis presented by Bronson Feldman, which I take from Anderson: I believe Marlowe was slain to prevent him from telling the Privy Council … about Robert Poley’s transactions with the court of the Scots. Marlowe knew too much, and could not be trusted to stay mute about Poley’s journeys to the north, made in obedience to his employers who looked to Edinburgh for preferment … Poley’s main master was Sir Robert Cecil. In September 1566, our poet and William Cecil, along with other courtiers and diplomats, visited Oxford University in order to receive their Master of Arts degree. Beauclerk tells us about this particular: When Oxford received his degree from Oxford University in 1566, the queen was again present; this was the second such graduation, out of a total of three, that she would attend during her reign. The play put on for her amusement and instruction was Palamon and Arcyte, an early version of Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen. Both plays are dramatizations of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” and tell the story of the cousins Palamon and Arcite, devoted friends who, because they love the same woman, become deadly foes. Oxford-Shakespeare was fascinated by the themes of twinship and the rival brothers, and seems to have split himself instinctively into opposing characters (such as Edgar and Edmund in King Lear) as a way to exploring the pronounced contradictions of his own nature. In 1566, Richard Edwards passed away. Doctor Peter Zacharias informs us in his essay for the Winter 2005/6 volume of Shakespeare Matters, that our young poet had been learning and collaborating during his residence at Cecil House with ‘a man who introduced him to yet other outlets for his creative urges, and that man was named Richard Edwards’: He was Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal from 1561 until his death in 1566. It would be wonderful if more could be learned about their relationship because in The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham writes ‘Th’ Earle of Oxford and Maister Edwardes of Her Majesty’s Chappell’ were named as deserving ‘the hyest price … for Comedy and 78 Enterlude.’ Edwards introduced him to music as well as drama, neither of which was looked upon as a serious pursuit by the schoolmaster humanists. After Edwards’ death in 1566 eight poems signed by Oxford were found in Edwards’ collection of poems, and all were later published under the title, The Paradise of Dainty Devices. This collection was very popular in its day, going through some ten editions. The man who printed the book, Henry Disle, enticed prospective buyers by saying that all the poems ‘are so aptly made to be set to any song in .5. parts, or song to instrument.’ Winnifred Maynard believes that it owed its popularity to ‘the fact that it offered a collection of lyrics for the new five part consort song.’ So Oxford’s earliest poems were song lyrics, which he probably sang to lute or virginal accompaniment. His musical training, which started during these years and continued while he was at Gray’s Inn, became an important part of his creative life. We have to look no farther than Plato to see why this should be. Plato believed in the superior role of music in the education of the whole man. When music entered Edward de Vere’s soul it created a world of harmony and grace and beauty, which produced pleasure and delight in both the performer and listener. The Paradise of Dainty Devices made it to ten editions from 1576 to 1606, and during this period some poems were erased and some others added. As we are aware of the fact that Queen Elizabeth enjoyed playing the virginal along with these lyrics, we can easily come to the conclusion that they could have been sung while she played. As this work was published in 1576, I will devote some words to this work when that year arrive. Scene VI. Ovid’s young lover In 1567, Edward de Vere registered in Gray’s Inn. The Inns of Court were considered the third University of England at that time, a kind of “Campus University,” Ogburn reports, where sport competitions were made and plays were performed. Also in 1567 the work that has given Arthur Golding the immortality was published. Ogburn writes: [A] work famous to this day, the only one for which Golding is remembered ... Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding ... Now, if there is anything that all Shakespearean commentators are agreed upon, it is the strong influence of Publius Ovidius Naso upon the poet. ‘People,’ says A.L. Rowse, referring to Shakespeare’s contemporaries, ‘spoke of his poetry as that of an English Ovid.’ In a valuable introduction to a 79 reprinting of the Golding translation by Macmillan in 1965, John Frederick Nims, of the University of Ilinois at Chicago, writes: L.P. Wilkinson, in the best book we have on Ovid, reminds us that Shakespeare echoes him about four times as often as he echoes Vergil, that he draws on every book of the Metamorphoses, and that there is scarcely a play untouched by his influence. Golding’s translation, through the many editions published during Shakespeare’s lifetime, was the standard Ovid in English. If Shakespeare read Ovid so, he read Golding. What is most interesting is that the tutor of our poet was a Puritan who spent all his time translating the sermons and comments of John Calvin or the Bible. Ogburn already saw that something did not fit in this equation: Of the “collaboration” between Ovid and Golding–between the sophisticated darling of a dissolute society, the author of a scandalous book of seduction, and the respectable country gentleman and convinced Puritan who spent much of his life translating the sermons and commentaries of John Calvin”– Professor Nims finds it ‘odd’; ‘Strange,’ the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it … If we find it odd and strange that the staunch and sober Puritan should have gone to the immense and surely uncongenial labour of rendering into English heptameter couplets the 12,000-line Latin work—longer than Paradise Lost—of a poet, whose salacity contributed to his exile from Rome (no less!), we shall, if we read much of the English version, find it much odder and stranger still that such a man as Golding could have produced it. That a translator whose evidently sole literary interest was in the moral improvement of mankind would have been drawn to Ovid to begin with would be next to incomprehensible. Professor Nims compares the wordiness, ostentatious parade of adjectives, and outlandish inversions of language in the translation with a passage in the straight-forward ‘patterns of English speech’ of Golding’s Discourses—and the contrast could hardly be greater. The Illinois professor can only marvel at it. Should we feed the language of the two into a computer set up to discriminate styles and ask if the works had the same author, the electronic reply would only be, “Are you kidding?” If the faults in the translation are most unrepresentative of Golding, so too are its merits. And these it has, even if Ezra Pound was stretching them in calling it ‘the most beautiful book in the language,’ adding: ‘my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s.’ Professor Nims considers it ‘still more enjoyable, more plain fun to read, than 80 any other Metamorphoses in English.’ Where a professional Latinist and translator like Golding would surely have aimed at fidelity to the original, the author of the translation breezily dismisses all that. He has, says Professor Nims, ‘something very engaging of his own to give us. He begins by metamorphosing Ovid: by turning the sophisticated Roman into a ruddy country gentleman with tremendous gusto, a sharp eye on the life around him, an ear for racy speech, and a gift for energetic doggerel.’ He goes on to show how the author infallibly ‘Englishes’ the stories, ‘modernizes military equipment, frankly turning an ancient siege engine into a gun,’ often gives ‘even proper names … their English equivalent’ ... the Aegean Sea becomes ‘Goat Sea’ … The translator liberally made up words, which he explained in footnotes on the first several occurrences. Professor Nims writes: ‘Sometimes with Golding’s weird and piquant vocabulary, we feel we are in Lewis Carroll country...’ The conclusion for Ogburn cannot be more evident considering these contradictions: [T]he XV Books … was the product of just that period when Golding and Edward de Vere were in proximity. That ‘racy and vivid language … so often cramped and attenuated … to the meter’ would have been as alien to the didactic moralist as it would be native to a teen-aged Berowne, Benedick, or Mercutio still serving his awkward apprenticeship as a poet. I agree with D.S. Ogburn that in the circumstances it would have come only from the hand of the boy ‘Shakespeare’. Beauclerk also has a great comment to offer: The full fifteen books appeared in 1567, constituting a work that scholars have described as Shakespeare’s favorite book. To say that this bubbling, effusive translation of Ovid’s masterpiece with its exuberant and juvenile turns of phrase consorts oddly with the rest of Golding’s published canon (which in its earnestness and gravity includes The Psalms of David with Calvin’s commentary, Calvin’s Sermons, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and other improving works of ancient history and philosophy) would be a considerable understatement. Rather, it sticks out like a sore thumb. There is nothing in Golding’s life or philosophy to suggest even remotely that he would or could bridge the gulf in style and outlook between Calvin and Ovid. Even the Renaissance mind could not imagine two such strange bedfellows. In its tales of the transforming power of love in the lives of gods and mortals, underpinned throughout by the Pythagorean philosophy of 81 reincarnation, Metamorphoses is a tremendous exploration of that quintessentially Shakespearean theme, trespass. Venus’s son Cupid is the presiding deity, his love arrows passing all pales. George Gascoigne, who had accompanied our poet in his triumphal entrance into London in 1562, was already in Gray’s Inn in 1567. Just at this time, Gascoigne wrote the adaptation of the first English drama in prose The Supposes, a work that deals with the confusion of identities, the same personal theme that was treated by our poet in Jack Jugler. Also Gascoigne is supposed to have written the tragedy Jocasta, the first Greek tragedy to be performed in an English theater. Jocasta was the mother and wife of his son Oedipus, so we see here that the son of Elizabeth translated at eighteen what his mother did at eleven. Like mother, like son. Doubts about Gascoigne being the author of the play Jocasta or The Supposes are shared by C.F. Tucker Brooke in his work The Tudor drama.25 Gascoigne wrote The Glass of Government nine years later and this is Tucker’s response to this last work: Essentially a reactionary and unreasoned production, it gives one leave to doubt whether any higher power than lucky accident had inspired Gascoigne when, nine years before, he inaugurated a new era in English comedy by the translation of The Supposes. It was at Gray’s Inn where our young poet started to be surrounded by his equals, men of letters with the same desire to conquer the world as he had, and we can see that he was exceeding himself in his love for letters, when we read what Thomas Underdowne wrote in his dedication to his translation of An Aethiopian History by Heliodorus of 1569: ‘I do not deny but that in many matters, I mean matters of learning, a nobleman ought to have a sight; but to be too much addicted that way, I think it is not good.’ Hank Whittemore comments that in the course of this year we know, from the correspondence between William Cecil and the young de Vere, that the ‘19-year-old Oxford ordered a Geneva Bible gilt, a Chaucer, Plutarch’s works in French, with other books and papers,’ as well as ‘Tully’s and Plato’s works in folio, with other books.’ Sounds indeed like a young man ‘addicted’ to learning. In addition, in 1567 the young poet and courtier was already interested in international politics. Ogburn reports: Thomas Churchyard … first appears briefly in our story when Philip II of Spain was launching his lifelong drive to extirpate heresy in the 25 Available at archive.org. 82 Low Countries. After serving the Protestant champion, Prince William of Orange, Churchward had returned and entered the employ of Edward de Vere. In 1567, he reports in a Discourse, he was sent back by de Vere to join William … [T]hat the young Edward should have been as much involved in the intelligence mission as he must have argues a remarkably precocious interest in events abroad. This shows that this Prince was interested, naturally, in knowing the condition and helping another Protestant Prince as was William of Orange. In July of this year, while practicing fence with an opponent in the back gardens of the Cecil House, he killed a servant. The jury that heard the case decided that the servant was drunk and had thrown himself against the sword of Edward de Vere. Cecil later on wrote that he had tried to convince the jury that Edward de Vere had acted in selfdefense. In the anonymous play Mucedorus we see that Segasto’s hitman had tried to kill Mucedorus, a king disguised as a shepherd at the Court of the King of Aragon; when Mucedorus kills Segasto’s hitman, the former defends himself from the accusations of the latter by saying that he has killed him in self-defense. Segasto orders his servant Mouse to take away the body (II.ii): Segasto Come, help; away with my friend. Mouse Why, is he drunk? cannot he stand on his feet? Segasto No, he is not drunk, he is slain. In this year Mary Stuart was dethroned in Scotland and one play, Horestes, which was published in 1567, tried to reflect on the political and moral consequences that decision had for the English Tudors. Historians of English drama agreed as to the importance of this play in the development of Elizabethan tragedy. ‘Tucker Brook,’ James E. Phillips writes (Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3), believes that this 1567 adaptation of Orestes legend stands ‘at the hightest point attained by the transitional interlude in the development of dramatic unity and tragic purpose.’ And Phillips adds: [T]he playwright of Horestes was not attempting to allegorize the actual events taking place in Scotland ... it seems to me that Horestes might be considered as a classical “history play” in the sense that Professor Lily B. Campbell has recently shown Shakespeare’s English history plays to be—that is a “mirror” serving a ‘special purpose in elucidating a political problem in Elizabeth’s day and ... bringing to bear upon this problem the accepted political philosophy of the Tudors.’ 83 At the end of the play, ‘Truth’ appears again like in King Darius, and sings: For as Truth sayth, nothinges wryten be But for our learninge, in anye kynde of wyse. As Phillips writes, this play could have been represented in a playhouse or privately, inclining himself for the latter case: “As Rossiter says of the play in relation to its numerous classical references, this is no ‘mere popular stage hack stuff.’” In 1568, Queen Elizabeth observed two grave events for her kingdom: the Duke of Alba’s arrival to the Low Countries to repress the Protestant rebellions, and Mary Stuart of Scotland’s flight into England caused by the Calvinist revolt directed by John Knox, whom Elizabeth and Cecil had supported. Elliot informs us: The arrival of Alba to the Low Countries had alarmed England, in the same way that had alarmed all Protestant countries, and the English fears increased due to the events of 1568. The flight of Mary, Queen of the Scots, into England, in May, gave place to the dangerous possibility of a rebellion by the Catholics in England in accord with a foreign militar intervention with the prospect of putting Mary in the English throne. The successes of Alba in the Low Countries during the summer and autumn increased naturally this danger and helped to persuade the English government to agree to various skirmishes well applied against the Spanish. The presence of Mary Stuart in England (confined in the Tutbury Castle, in Stratfordshire) was a problem for Elizabeth. Mary Stuart had given birth to a son in 1566 and now she was in her country, England, where a great part of its people were Catholic; no doubt about it, Catholics saw Mary as the chance to return with the Pope and to ingratiate with the empire of Philip II. Just to have a clear picture of the pressure that existed around 1568, Ogburn notes: Events were set in motion in 1568 by the arrival of a new and aggressive Spanish ambassador. De Spes brought with him a plan for reclaiming England for Rome. A marriage was then being bruited between Mary and Thomas Howard, 4 th Duke of Norfolk, head of a powerful Howard clan, sole duke of the realm … The marriage was promoted, the northern Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, both adherents of the old Church, would rise, as would also their fellow Roman Catholics as they marched southward, while in their 84 support the Duke of Alba, then embattled in the Low Countries, would throw an army across the Channel. Thus would Elizabeth and Cecil be disposed of and Mary and her councilors be established in their place. Mary herself wrote to de Spes to ‘tell your master that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months and mass shall be said all over my kingdom’... Norfolk made the stupid mistake of lying to the Queen when she asked point-blank if he intended to wed her cousin. And naturally he was found out … Norfolk was clapped into the Tower three days later [October, 9, 1569]. Before the year ended, the (official) mother of Edward de Vere, Margery Golding, died. It was on December 2, 1568. Anderson is surprised that [e]ven after settling down with her second husband, Countess Margery had remained distant. She politely passed along her greetings to her son in letters addressed to William Cecil, but these were gestures no more loving than what one might expect of casual acquaintances. In 1568 the play Appius and Virginia was registered according to E.K. Chambers, although it was published much later, in the year 1575. This play tells the vicissitudes of a virgin who in the play, like Lucrece, ends dying and maintaining her honor; its language and themes are proper for a young Edward de Vere. In the villain character of Haphazard we have one of the first sketches of Iago. Like Iago, Haphazard opens his heart to us and it is full of evil. The judge Appius, in love with the virgin Virginia, laments that he loves her, for he is already married. This judge Appius is no other than Robert Dudley, the favourite and lover of the Queen, for, as happens with the character Appius of the play, Dudley was married when he started his relationship with Elizabeth. The play Appius and Virginia contains some exuberant language and numerous songs, while at certain times it is tragic and at other times it becomes very comical, even farcical. Judge Appius, helped by Haphazard and Claudius, delights in the future rape of Virginia by making reference to Tarquin and Lucrece: ‘For look! How Tarquin Lucrece fair by force did once oppress,/ Even so will I Virginia use.’ In an atrocious act, Virginius, as years later the author will write for Titus Andronicus, kills his own daughter to prevent that her good name is stained by the rape. The father of this Virginia is no other than the representation of his bastard son, our poet, who, we should think, preferred to see his mother dead rather than having all at Court talk about his relationship with Dudley, especially after his wife was found dead. When at last Judge Appius and Haphazard are punished by Justice and Reward, the play ends by praising Virginia’s 85 chastity, a martyr of virtue, an artistic reflection of the Queen’s image from her son’s most idealistic perspective. In 1568 the anonymous play Jacob and Esau was published. Here we can read how Jacob is disguised by his mother Rebecca so that his husband Isaac recognises his son Jacob as the firstborn and legitimate heir. When Isaac informs Esau that he has been robbed of his primogeniture, Esau cries wishing the same death of Actaeon (V.iv): Esau Alas! Then I am the unhappiest that ever was, I would the savage beasts had my body torn. At the end, when the Poet appears as a character, he talks about the unknown ways that God has to choose his adoptive sons, saying that he hopes that many could enjoy Jacob’s happiness, that is, to be God’s chosen ones (as the kings were considered then). What is really interesting about this play is that Jacob was chosen as the heir thanks to his mother, a question that links it with our poet’s particular circumstances. What this play is telling us is that Edward de Vere was communicating to his mother that, in the same way that Rebecca did for Jacob, she could do for him: to recognise him as the legitimate heir. Otherwise, if we reject this interpretation, the message would be that Queen Elizabeth had won the throne by deception, like Jacob did, a message that would not have given the anonymous author of this play many chances to enjoy a happy life, we may infer. Also, note how in this play we already see the theme that, as Jan Kott declared, will be Shakespeare’s obsession: the lost inheritance. Scene VII. ‘Earth, give me roots’ In 1569, as Queen Elizabeth had no official children, the pressure on her must have been immense, especially when Mary Stuart came to England escaping from Scotland. Elizabeth was surrounded. Catholics would not lose the opportunity to contact with Mary Stuart and get rid of the Protestants if they were given the chance. We know that in 1569 the Queen was with Edward de Vere at Windsor and that, later on, he suffered a nervous collapse that left him convalescent during entire months. Had Elizabeth told his son that, in spite of him having reached now the age of majority, she could not recognise him as Prince of Wales? We might as well not forget that she denied to have begotten a child from the traitor Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. If that was the case, and it seems very much so, the fact that Edward de Vere hoped to be recognised as a legitimate son (as Jacob achieved), only to see how he was denied his access to the throne in 1569, when our 86 poet had achieved his majority of age (not officially) with twenty-one (21) years old, would have provoked him, indeed, a deep anguish and depression. Like Actaeon, he had been condemned not to tell who he really was. But Elizabeth, considering her circumstances, did not have any other option, considering what Thomas Seymour did; also, to appear as a virgin would not provoke Catholics, as they would see her as a kind of Virgin Mary in substitution for their divine Virgin Mary. Let us not forget that Catholics had been deprived in 1533 of their myth of the Virgin Mary, so that the political strategy of Elizabeth was very intelligent and effective. Looking at those events from our historical perspective, what is surprising is that England had not burned itself to ashes due to dissensions or civil wars, something that was mainly due to the good propaganda of Elizabeth, ‘the Virgin Queen’, and her ‘spirit’ Cecil. Regarding our poet and his hidden (taboo) identity, the fact that he could not say what made him suffer related him with that poor Lavinia we see in Titus Andronicus. When we see Lavinia with her hands and tongue cut pointing with a stick in the mouth to the pages of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, trying to tell others what had happened to her, fit perfectly well with our poet, who was a hidden prince. Lavinia, muted like Actaeon, points with her stick to the myth of Philomena, who was raped by his sister’s husband while she visited his reign. Like her character, the author was seeing how his royal rights were being raped and, most tragically of all, he had been muted. Beauclerk writes about the consequences of these encounters between Elizabeth and our poet in 1569: This, it seems, was followed by a nervous collapse, which resulted in a period of prolonged sickness, lasting on and off until the spring of 1570. For part of his illness he lay in rented rooms in the town of Windsor, and it was here, no doubt, that he discovered the legend of Herne the Hunter, a former keeper of Windsor Forest who prowled about an ancient oak at night, wearing a pair of ‘great ragged horns.’ Herne, whom Falstaff impersonates in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is a sort of resurrected Actaeon, and the appearance of this myth in Oxford’s life would have been a fitting symbol of the life-changing truth he had stumbled upon. He had seen the queen “naked,” and from now on until the end of his life he would be the hunted stag, whose only refuge was the theater. In the play Dr. Faustus, attributed to Marlowe in 1604, we find the myth of Actaeon in the character of the student Benvolio, the same name that will appear in Romeo and Juliet.26 This play Dr. Faustus seems to be 26 The source of the name of Benvolio comes, as it happens with Shakespeare, from ‘bene voglio di E.O.,’ or ‘good will to E.O.’ 87 a first draft our poet wrote in his student years at Gray’s Inn, as we infer by the themes on the futility and absurdity of studying so many useless subjects. We read that the allegorical character Gluttony says at one moment (II.ii.151-157.): ‘I come of a royal pedigree … My godmother … her name was Margery March-beer.’ The official mother of our poet was Margery Golding, and the fact that she married rapidly after the death of John de Vere, the stepfather of our poet, could have caused this association with this grotesque name. That Gluttony says that he comes from a royal pedigree points to the Fool and bastard prince Edward de Vere: our Jack Jugler. In Act Four, Scene Second of Dr. Faustus, we see how Benvolio’s head is the object of a singular metamorphoses. When Benvolio hears of Faust’ magical powers, this is what happens (Q2, 1616, IV.ii.43-75; note that Charles V of Spain is the emperor): Faust I’ll make you feel something anon, if my art fail me not... Emperor Be it as Faustus please, we are content. Benvolio Ay, ay, and I am content too. And thou bring Alexander and his paramour before the Emperor, I’ll be Actaeon and turn myself to a stag. Faust And I’ll play Diana, and send you the horns presently... Emperor Oh, wondrous sight!... Two spreading horns most strangely fastened Upon the head of young Benvolio! Duke of Saxony What, is he asleep? Or dead? Faust He sleeps, my lord: but dreams not of his horns. As he will write years later in Endymion, attributed to his secretary John Lyly, our poet dreams of something that is on his head: not his horns, but the crown that has been taken from him. Prince Arthur in The Faerie Queene dreams the same thing. Next Benvolio swears revenge and retires to a castle, which could be that of Windsor, where he had his nervous breakdown after he had been denied his access to the throne (IV.iv.8-30): Frederick Martino, see Benvolio’s horns again! Martino Oh misery! How now, Benvolio? Benvolio Defend me, heaven! Shall I be haunted still? Martino Nay, fear not, man; we have no power to kill. Benvolio My friends transformed thus! Oh hellish spite! Your heads are all set with horns! 88 Frederick You hit it right: It is your own you mean. Feel your head. Benvolio Zounds, horns again!.. Martino What shall we then do, dear Benvolio? Benvolio I have a castle joining near these woods, And thither we’ll repair and live obscure, Till time shall alter these our brutish shapes. Sith back disgrace hath thus eclipsed our fame, We’ll rather die with grief, than live with shame. The play known as Dr. Faustus is not a tragedy but a tragicomedy where the humorous and tragical elements are mixed in a radical way. The end of the play is a special one, for Faust is desperate and blames his birth like Esau did and Timon will do. The importance of time at the end of Dr. Faustus is in accordance with the importance of time for its author, who knew that his time to be nominated Prince of Wales had passed away. The religious spirit and character of Faust’s last soliloquy, the fact that he talks about Christ whose blood can be seen in the firmament, points to the existence, possibly, of another hand, that of John Donne, to whom Marlowe, as R.C Bald informs us, was the poet who influenced him most.27 27 This intuition written in the Spanish version got stronger afterwards. In vol. 28 (2009) of the John Donne Journal, Chanitta Goodblat also saw the same relation (p. 90): ‘After considering all this evidence of the deep impression made on Donne’s mind by his early play-going, is it fanciful to detect a reminiscence of the final tragic scene of Marlowe ’s Dr. Faustus in the macabre picture with which Donne closes the sermon, which he preached before King Charles (1 April 1627)?’ And she compares Donne’s words there, ‘then when thou shalt see, or seem to see his hand turning the streame of thy Saviours bloud into another channel,’ with Dr. Faustus final words, ‘See where Christ bloud streams in the firmament,/ One drop of bloud will save me: Oh my Christ,/ Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ,/ Yet will I call on him: Oh spare me Lucifer.’ This anguish, fear and spiritual morbidity of Dr. Faustus’ final scene is studied by Kathleen Quiring in the same vol. 28 (p. 32): “Donne’s experiences of religious grief [equates] with what modern psychiatry understands as a form of ‘affective disorder.’” And she continues: ‘[Donne’s] religion is in part responsible for—and even encourages—his feelings of fear and sorrow. Donne often associates his fear and sorrow with his religious devotion.’ Recently, I have read these words by Ramie Targoff (John Donne, Body and Soul, 2009): “With a characteristic mixture of exuberance and idiosyncrasy, Donne begins a verse epistle to his friend Sir Henry Wotton: ‘Sir, more then kisses, letteres mingle Soules.’ In making so extravagant a claim for the power of letters, he draws upon the ancient understanding that the soul resides in the breath, so that a kiss between two people would naturally involve an exchange of the two parties’ souls. This image of kissing as a transference of souls can be traced back to an ancient Greek fragment … In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe revived this ancient idea with Faustus’ desperate plea to Helen: ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. / Her lips suck forth my soul!’” The relations between Dr. Faustus and Donne multiply, as I have been studying this matter further. In 2015, the Marlowe mystery is perfectly explained at last. 89 There is in the Shakespearean canon another early play that seems to fit into this moment of his life. It is Timon of Athens. In this play, goddess Fortune (Elizabeth I), who had helped Timon get to the top, suddenly denies him her favors and makes him fall in utter misery. In the play we are informed that Timon has no money. His madness, however, has nothing to do strictly with money, for the sign, the word ‘gold’, seems to point to the loss of his social value, his royal identity as an individual, and the value of the life that surrounds him, a world that has lost all sense to him; the sign and word ‘gold’ seems to point as well to the material of which the crown is made: to the golden crown of a King. Indeed, this will be mentioned when the senators try to convince him to return to Athens and rule there as head or ‘Captain’, and they even add: ‘with absolute powers.’ Acts Four and Five represent the vivid picture of the depression of a royal prince who has been denied his future and his roots. In Act Four, Scene First, we listen to this Faustic Timon: Enter Timon. Timon Let me look back upon thee. O thou wall That girdles in those wolves, dive in the earth And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent. Obedience, fail in children! Slaves and fools, Pluck the grave wrinkled Senate from the bench And minister in their steads. To general filths Convert, o’ th’ instant, green virginity. Do’t in your parents’ eyes! Bankrupts, hold fast Rather than render back; out with your knives And cut your trusters’ throats! Bound servants, steal! ...Maid, to thy master’s bed, Thy mistress is o’ th’ brothel! Son of sixteen, Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire, With it beat out his brains! Piety and fear, Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood, Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades, Degrees, observances, customs and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries, And let confusion live! Plagues incident to men, Your potent and infectious fevers heap On Athens, ripe for stroke!... ...Lust and liberty, Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth, That gainst the stream of virtue they may strive And drown themselves in riot! Itches, blains, So all th’ Athenian bosoms, and their crop 90 Be general leprosy! Breath infect breath, That their society, as their friendship, may Be merely poison! Nothing I’ll bear from thee But nakedness, thou detestable town... Timon will to the woods, where he shall find Th’ unkindest beast more kinder than mankind. The gods confound –hear me, you good gods all— The Athenians both within and out that wall, And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow To the whole race of mankind, high and low! Amen. [Exit. In Act Four, Scene Three, we see Timon in his cave near the sea and the woods, possibly that wood of Windsor where Herne the Hunter wanders at night with his horns on his head, a place from which he can see the city of Athens (London) in the distance: Enter Timon in the woods. Timon O blessèd breeding sun, draw from the earth Rotten humidity:28 below thy sister’s orb Infect the air!... ...All’s oblique: There’s nothing level in our cursèd natures But direct villainy. Therefore be abhorred All feasts, societies, and throngs of men! His semblance, yea, himself, Timon disdains. Destruction fang mankind. Earth, yield me roots. [Digs. ...Roots, you clear heavens... …Come, damnèd earth, Thou common whoe of mankind, that puts odds 28 One the good things of translating and editing The Faerie Queene into Spanish is knowing the precise meaning of these verses; for what gives moisture to the earth is Venus, according to neo-Platonic philosophy. So, what is Timon saying exactly with that ‘rotten humidity’? Or, in other words, why humidity is rotten? Alastair Fowler tells us how life was understood in the neo-Platonic tradition as giving life to earth (Spenser and the Numbers of Time). He writes on the Garden of Adonis’ allegory in The Faerie Queene: “We are therefore inclined to envisage not only mythological and cosmological couples but a generative triad: sun, moon, and Venus. This notion gains support from Ellrodt’s demonstration ... that Spenser derived many suggestions for the core canto of Book III from the Sympose of Le Roy, a work that describes ‘the birth of living beings as the result of a love-relationship between heaven (meaning the sun) and earth.’ For, behind Le Roy’s philosophy there lies the fundamental Orphic triad, Heaven, Earth, and Love ... The structural inferences to be drawn from the above seem to me of the greatest interest. First, consider Ficino’s statement that through the moisture of Venus the sun generabilium formas absolvit...” It is the rotten Venus, the Faerie Queene, Elizabeth I the one who is rotten, according to Timon here. 91 Among the rout of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature... Alcibiades What art thou there? Speak. Timon A beast, as thou art. The canker gnaw thy heart For showing me again the eyes of man! Alcibiades What is thy name? Timon I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind. For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog, That I might love thee something... Timandra Is this th’ Athenian minion whom the world Voic’d so regardfully? Timon Art thou Timandra? Timandra Yes. Timon Be a whore still; they love thee not that use thee: Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust. This hatred towards Timandra seems to relate her to Timon as mother and son. Apart from the fact that both names share the same root ‘Tim-’, Timon seems to know her well when he calls her a whore, and that those who flatter her have ulterior motives to do so, as courtiers used to do with Queen Elizabeth. Then, the two women ask young Timon for some gold as if he, like a Prince, had all the gold in the world to give among his subjects (IV.iii.141-157): Frynia and Timandra Give us some gold, good Timon. Hast thou more? Timon Enough to make a whore forswear her trade, And to make whores, a bawd. Hold up, you sluts, Your aprons mountant. …You are not oathable, Although I know you’ll swear, terrible swear, Into strong shudders and to heavenly agues Th’ immortal gods that hear you. Spare your oaths: I’ll trust to your conditions. Be whores still, And he whose pious breath seeks to convert you, Be strong in whore, allure him, burn him up... No matter. Weare them, betray with them, whore still, Paint till a horse may mire upon your face. A pox of wrinkles! ‘A pox of wrinkles!’ Let us pause on this phrase. 92 We know that in 1562 Queen Elizabeth suffered from pox and that her face was marked by scars; in order to hide them, she started to cover her face with abundant makeup. The phrase in itself is strange: ‘Paint till a horse may mire upon your face.’ The fact that the horse is named may point to the Queen’s favorite and lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whom the Queen had appointed Master of the Horse in 1558. He was enraged to see that the Queen had lowered him, while promoting her lover instead. There is not too much doubt now from whence comes that hatred against women and virginity in Shakespeare. Lines later, when Timon is alone, he starts digging in the earth again (IV.iii.187-203): Timon That nature, being sick of man’s unkindness, [Digs. Should get hungry! Common mother, thou. Whose womb unmeasurable and infinite breast Teems and feeds all, whose selfsame mettle, Whereof thy proud child, arrogant man, is puff’d, Engenders the black toad and adder blue, The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm, With all th’ abhorrèd births below crisp heaven Whereon Hyperion’s quick’ning fire doth shine— Yield him, who all thy humans sons doth hate, From forth thy plenteous bosom, one poor root... ...O, a root. Dear thanks! The fact that his crown and his future as the legitimate Prince of the realm has been stolen when he was twenty-one (21) years old in 1569, causes that Timon be in need of seeking for a root, an ancestor, some parents to whom he can relate to and be recognised as their son. Some thieves talk with him then. This monologue indicates that he has hit bottom. As his legitimacy to the throne has been stolen, everything and everyone is a thief (IV.iii.441-454): The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea: the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun: The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt teares: the earth’s a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen From gen’ral excrement: each thing’s a thief. The law’s, your curb and whip, in their rough power Has unchecked theft. Love not yourselves, away, Rob one another: there’s more gold. Cut throats: All that you meet are thieves. To Athens go, Break open shops: nothing can you steal 93 But thieves do lose it. Steal less for this I give you, And gold confound you howsoe’er. Amen. When the senators are finally able to speak with Timon near his cave, they offer him the captainship of Athens, that is, to be the King with absolute power, something that our poet dreamed of before 1569, but that now, both Timon and he know they will never possess. Note how Timon mentions his long sickness, unknown to us readers until now. The fact that we know that Edward de Vere suffered from a long sickness from 1569 until 1570, helps the interpretation of this strange and surprising sickness of Timon (V.i.161-193): First Senator Therefore so please thee to return with us, And of our Athens, thine and ours, to take The captainship, thou shalt be met with thanks, Allow’d with absolute power, and thy good name Live with authority... Timon Why, I was writing of my epitaph: It will be seen tomorrow. My long sickness Of health and living now begins to mend, And nothing brings me all things. We also have an allusion that Timon has been dispossessed of his kingdom as prince when we read that he cries at one point (V.i.222-231): Come not to me again, but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood... Sun, hide thy beams. Timon hath done his reign. The loss of the ‘good name’ of Timon, as the First Senator says, is the subject of one of his most powerful poems, that I locate in 1569 called “His Good Name Being Blemished, He Bewaileth.” His force, his pain and his sanguine are as strong as those of Benvolio or Timon or Esau. It is signed ‘E.O.’ Now let us listen to his cry of grief. Timon, begin: Loss of Good Name Fram’d in the front of forlorn hope past all recovery, I stayless stand, to abide the shock of shame and infamy. My life, through ling’ring long, is lodg’d in lair of loathsome ways; My death delay’d to keep from life the harm of hapless days. My sprites, my heart, my wit and force, in deep distress are drown’d; 94 The only loss of my good name is of these griefs the ground. And since my mind, my wit, my head, my voice and tongue are weak, To utter, move, devise, conceive, sound forth, declare and speak, Such piercing plaints as answer might, or would my woeful case, Help crave I must, and crave I will, with tears upon my face, Of all that may in heaven or hell, in earth or air be found, To wail with me this loss of mine, as of these griefs the ground. Help Gods, help saints, help sprites and powers that in heaven do dwell, Help ye that are aye wont to wail, ye howling hounds of hell; Help man, help beasts, help birds and worms, that on the earth do toil; Help fish, help fowl, that flock and feed upon the salt sea soil, Help echo that in air doth flee, shrill voices to resound, To wail this loss of my good name, as of these griefs the ground. We have this same desperate voice in that Philip the Bastard of The Troublesome Reign of King John, where we read: Philip [Aside] Philippus, atavis edite Regibus. What say’st thou; ‘Philip, sprung of ancient Kings?’ … Methinks I hear a hollow echo sound, That Philip is the son unto a King: … The bubbling murmur of the water’s fall, Records Philippus Regis Jilius; Birds in their flight make music with their wings, Filling the air with glory of my birth; Birds, bubbles, leaves and mountains, echo, all Ring in my ears, that I am Richard’s son. It is interesting to see that during 1569 and 1570 Edward de Vere had been sick for a very long period of time, without anyone knowing of his sickness; and it is also interesting to see that critics agreed that Timon was written in a mental state of utmost depression. E.K. Chambers believed that Shakespeare wrote it ‘under conditions of mental and perhaps physical stress, which led to a breakdown.’ And he adds: Timon is too raw, too real for comfort. It was begun too close to the catastrophe, which prompted it. That must be why it was left artistically undigested, incomplete. 95 Interestingly enough, Timon is a play where ‘health’ is mentioned many times in relation to this young courtier Timon. Let’s see this scene (III.1): Lucullus ...And how does that honourable, complete, free-hearted gentleman … of Athens, thy very bountiful good Lord and master? Flaminius His health is well sir. Lucullus I am right glad that his health is well, sir. And in this other scene (III.4): Servilius If I might beseech you, gentlemen, to repair some other hour, I should derive much from’t, for, take’t of my soul, my lord leans wondrously to discontent: his comfortable temper has forsook him; he’s much out of health, and keeps his chamber. Lucious’ Servant Many do keep their chambers are not sick, And if it be so far beyond his health, Methinks he should the sooner pay his debts And make a clear way to the gods. In this same year a work entitled A Theater for Worldlings was published, the title page of which said that its author was some Jan van der Nott, a refugee from the Low Countries who had escaped from the Duke of Alba’s government. The book contains some epigrams, most of them translations from Petrarch and Joaquim du Bellay, ‘the Ovid of France,’ that are today attributed to Edmund Spenser. The editor of the 1999 Penguin edition, Richard A. McCabe, says about this work of 1569 (that had an introductory epistle to the Queen) something we share: if Spenser had been born around 1552 (we ignore when he actually was born) and was seventeen (17) years old when he translated these epigrams, ‘[h]ow Spenser became involved in the enterprise remains unknown.’ Carl J. Rasmussen, an expert on Edmund Spenser, writes these words in his article for the Spenser Studies of 1980, “Quitenesse of Minde: A Theater of Worldlings a Protestant Poetics”: The Theater of Wordling of Jan Van Der Noot (1569), the poems for which were translated by an adolescent Edmund Spenser, has been generally ignored by Spenserians. However, the prose commentary that accompanies this work is a remarkable piece of rhetoric that teaches us how to read the poems of A Theatre and in so doing suggests the lineaments of a poetics rooted in Van Der Noot’s Reformed Protestantism. Van Der Noot states that his intention is to move the reader from vanity to spiritual knowledge. This concern with dispositions of the will encourages the reader to consider the speakers of the poems in the Theatre. In other words, the poems are dramatic 96 monologues which explore spiritual states. The speakers of the Petrarch ‘Epigrams’ and the Du Bellay ‘Sonets’ (the first two groups of poems) are worldlings ensnared in illusion. The speaker of the four apocalyptic ‘Sonets’ on the other hand, is the Christian visionary, St. John, whose visions are an allegory of conversion. Van Der Noot’s extensive commentary on these final four sonnets is notorious for its virulent antipapal polemic, but this polemic has been misunderstood. For Van Der Noot, Rome is a metonymy for a spiritual condition: Rome is his allegory of vanity, and vanity is overcome not with violence (though Van Der Noot does not necessarily eschew violence) but with the Word, which engenders faith and ‘quietnesse of minde’ in the faithful.29 This ‘quietness of mind’ or ‘content’ is something our poet will be in search for all his life. Knowing the crisis that he had just suffered, A Theater for Worldlings could not be more revealing and be more in accord with his state of mind. It is not Rome, but his vanity as a prince what he has to sublimate spiritually. There is the same contemptus mundi as in Timon of Athens, as in Dr. Faustus, only this time the poet is trying to find a solution to his grief of mind in the Ecclesiastes and the adagio vanitas vanitatum. Knowing that white and black are Queen Elizabeth’s favourite colours,30 the poet will translate in Epigram 1, we must suppose from Windsor Castle, what he feels in this moment: Being one day at my window all alone, So many strange things hapned me to see, As much it grieueth me to thinke thereon. At my right hand, a Hinde appearde to me, So faire as mought the greatest God delite: Two egre Dogs dyd hir pursue in chace, Of whiche the one was black, the other white. With deadly force so in their cruel race They pinchte the haunches of this gentle beast, That at the last, and in shorte time, I spied, Vnder a rocke, where she (alas) opprest, Fell to the grounde, and there vntimely dide. Cruel death vanquishing so noble beautie, Oft makes me waile so harde a destinie. As we see in this poem clearly related to the myth of Actaeon, the 29 See http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/voli/rasmussen.htm. 30 “Black and white were the heraldic colours of virginity and called ‘my colours’ by the Queen,” Ogburn informs us. They were the colours of the moon. 97 white and black dogs (i.e. the Queen) have killed the Hinde, have killed Actaeon. In Epigram 3 we listen to the same grief that had been expressed by Timon and the same black clouds that obscure the sky that belong to the Dark Lady of the Sonnets: Then heauenly branches did I see arise, Out of a fresh and lusty Laurell tree... The Skie gan euery where to ouercast, And darkned was the welkin all aboute, When sodaine flash of heauens fire outbrast, And rent this royall tree quite by the roote. Which makes me much and euer to complaine The ‘royal tree’ is rent ‘[w]hich makes me much and euer to complaine,’ can be paraphrased thus: which makes me (much and) E.Ver to complain. Note that here is the same image as in Timon: the roots. And note that this theme points to the loss of a personal identity, to the lack of parents and ancestors. In Epigram V we witness, as Richard A. McCabe says, an ‘ironic reversal of the more usual use of the Phoenix as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection.’ Note that, as in Venus and Adonis, this Phoenix is purple, i.e., royal: I saw a Phoenix in the wood alone, With purple wings and crest of golden hew, Straunge birde he was, wherby I thought anone, That of some heauenly wight I had the vew: Vntill he came vnto the broken tree And to the spring that late deuoured was. What I say more? Eche thing at length we see Doth passe away: the Phoenix there, alas, Spying the tree destroyde, the water dride, Himselfe smote with his beake, as in disdaine, And so forthwith in great despite he dide. For pitie and loue my heart yet burns in paine. All these poems lament over the decadence, death, passing of time, mutability and metamorphoses of everything. McCabe concludes: ‘[T]here can be no doubt as to the importance of A Theatre to any study of Spenser’s literary development. His preoccupation with the image of the theatrum mundi ... begins here.’ Yet, how Spenser became involved in the enterprise remains unknown. If the reader wonders how came Spenser to publish this translation of high poetry in 1569 and why did he disappear without publishing 98 anything else until 1579 with The Shepheard’s Calendar, that he wrote with pseudonym, Immeritô, I could answer this: because this work of 1569 was written by Timon, by that purple Phoenix who had lost his roots and had seen his family tree broken. If that Spenser boy would have felt all this personal tragedy here in 1569, how can he be a merry boy in 1579, when E.K. says that Hobbinol has a paederast relationship with Immerito’s soul? McCabe says about A Theater: ‘Far more successful in this respect were the translations from Du Bellay, the earliest instance of a blank-verse sonnet sequence in English.’ The Cambridge History of English and American Literature informs us that it was Spenser (anonymously) who, by translating some sonnets of Du Bellay, ‘the Ovid of France,’ proved to be the father of the Elizabethan sonnet. 31 A connection of A Theater can be done with Shakespeare. In As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques is described in this way (II.i.27-50): First Lord ...The melancholy Jaques grieves... Under an oak whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this wood, To the which place a poor sequestered stag That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt, Did come to languish; and indeed, my lord, The wretched animal heaved forth such groans That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat Almost to bursting, and the big round tears Coursed one another down his innocent nose In piteous chase... ‘Poor deer,’ quoth he, ’thou mak’st a testament As worldlings do We have powerful reasons for attributing this poem to Oxford, but we can quote now James A. Knapp (Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, Macmillan, NY, 2011) and read this: Ten years after the appearance of his translations for the Theatre, Spenser inaugurated his own poetic career with another illustrated book. Unlike the Theatre with its overt iconoclasm and obvious hierarchy of word over image, the poetry and illustrations to The Shepheardes Calendar display a characteristically Spenserian allusiveness. At points the images directly illustrate an eclogue’s subject while at others they serve to draw out formal or atmospheric elements of the poetry. And though antipapal themes resurface in the Calendar, notably in the May, July, and September eclogues, the 31 See Bartleby.com site. 99 relationship between the poems and the illustrations does not reflect an attempt to establish a hierarchy of word over image as in the Theatre. Before ending this decade, the play Cambises was published. Attributed to Thomas Preston, although many experts cannot accept such attribution and award it to some ‘itinerant’ poet at Court, the fact that our poet decided to publish it in 1569 gives some biographical dramatism to the cry of mercy of the character Small Hability (ll. 326-329): Small Hability I beseech you heer... condemne me not in wrongful! wise that never was offender. You know right well my right it is. I have not for to give. You take away from me my due In lines 550 to 563 we see how King Cambises shoots a boy, the son of a courtier that has just come to help his father. Cambises orders his heart to be taken, a metaphor that coincides with how Edward de Vere felt in these moments. Cambises’ words on having shot the boy ‘as right as a line’ seems to be an allusion to the right for “line,” for ascendancy, for inheritance, for linage, that he has just taken from the innocent boy: King Before me as a mark now let him stand! I will shoot at him my minde to fulfill. Yong Childe ...doo not shoot at me; my mother loves me best of all. Shoot. King I have dispatched him! Down he doth fall! As right as a line his hart I have hit... ...with speed his hart cut out and give it unto me. [The knight presents the child’s heart to the king.] Knight Heere is the heart... King ...O, how well the same was hit! This scene is grotesque, but full of autobiographical symbolism in case the author was actually our hidden prince. When the brother of Cambises, Smirdis, talks after this scene, he seems to talk with the mind and mouth of our poet and as melancholic as Esau, Timon, Benvolio, Jaques or later on Hamlet (ll. 705-709): Smirdis I am wandring alone... The Court is so unquiet, in it I take no ioy. 100 Solitary to my-selfe now I may talke. If I could rule, I wist what to say. The fact that Bishop Bonner is mentioned in the play, point to the death of this bishop in September 1569. Bonner was the bishop who supervised the killing of numerous Protestants during the reign of Queen Mary. The fool Ambidexter comments on King Cambises’ behaviour after the carnage he had done to his family (ll. 1146-1158): What a king was he that hath used such tiranny! He was akin to Bishop Bonner, I think verily! For both their delights was to shed blood, But never intended to doo any good. Cambises put a iudge to death,–that was a good deed, But to kill the yong childe was worse to proceed, To murder his brother, and then his own wife,— So help me God and holidom, it is pitie of his life! Heare ye? I will lay twenty thousand pound That the king himselfe dooth dye by some wound; He hath shed so much blood that his will be shed. If it come to passe, in faith, then he is sped. After these words by the fool Ambidexter the king appears; he has hurt himself by accident with his own sword, and he is dying. Ambidexter says to him (ll. 1173-1178): Ambidexter How now, noble king? Pluck up your hart! What! will you dye, and from us depart? Speake to me and ye be alive! He cannot speak. But beholde, how with Death he doth strive. [The King dies.] Alas, good king! Alas, he is gone! The devil! take me if for him I make any mone. The king could not talk like Actaeon could not before being quartered by his own dogs; as neither could Lavinia who had been cut her tongue and hands. We see, then, that our poet modulates the representation of this character of King Cambises as his mother, the Queen, during all the play, or as himself, Actaeon, at the end of the play, in his dying moment. The fact that Ambidexter tells us that ‘he cannot speak’ does not make any sense (does not have any ‘objective correlative’) in the play and in the person of the king, who has talked and killed as much as he wanted. So that this new fact, the fact that the King cannot speak, is pointing to the 101 author and his real life: the one who cannot speak is the poet-playwright, the fallen prince Timon, Edward de Vere. The play and the villain were very well known, for Thomas Nashe referred to this character as a typical example of evil. In Nashe’s Pierce Penniless (1592) we read: ‘Mass, that’s true; they say the lawyers have the devil and all; and it is like enough he is playing Ambodexter amongst them.’ J.B. Steane, editor of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works for Penguin, makes this note on Nashe’s reference to Ambidexter: ‘Vice in the play Cambyses, 1569.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature we can see what personal situation the author of this play was in at the time: The laments shared between Sisamnes and his son make it far less easy to answer Cambises’ question ‘Have not I done a gracious deed?’... This qualification of sympathy is intensified as this pitiable scene moves immediately into the king’s sadistic killing of his counsellor Praxaspes’ son and the cutting out of his heart. This gruesome action is again accompanied by striking passages of public mourning and lament; these disclose the human devastation caused by the king’s insensate will. Praxaspes’ ‘sweet child’ and ‘only joy’ (517) is killed because of his father’s wise advice concerning the king’s drunkenness, and the atrocity that results from this shatters the conciliar system, revealing Cambises to be completely lawless … It is this tragic sympathy that provokes Cambises to commit his final outrage: the killing of the queen as she sings a psalm while being surrounded by Cruelty and Murder. This is one of the most powerful ways of perceiving and judging sovereign power in Cambises: from the viewpoint of the suffering body it has ostracized and condemned... What kind of political lesson is to be drawn from the play? Its own conclusion is an unremarkable one that returns us to the simple polarities of gratitude for Tudor beneficence in contrast to ‘oriental’ tyranny. No resistance is ever countenanced against this monstrous tyrant, whom, it appears, providence disposes of in a suitably arbitrary manner … The neoclassical decorum of the play [i.e. of Gorboduc] can also be seen to reinforce its message, and, in this, it contrasts strikingly with Cambises. Gorboduc uses blank verse for the first time as its principal dramatic medium and it adopts Senecan conventions throughout. Well, Cambises was written by Timon in full rage, what can we expect? Nice, beautified words? The following is the exact explanation for Edward de Vere’s dedication of his life to drama and art. The reader should pay attention to them all along this discourse: 102 If Gorboduc teaches a lesson about sovereignty, it also considers questions about its nature. In this respect, Stephen Alford is right to note how the play addresses ‘the controversial issue of the location of power in the English polity in the 1560s’ (1998: 103). Cambises too opens up onto a speculative situation where the premisses and limits of allegiance are tested during a crisis. Lament is the principal way in which this situation is addressed, experienced, and challenged, and it constitutes a place where some of the play’s most exacting thinking is done on political problems. This identifies one crucial point of contact between earlier and later instances of Elizabethan tragic theatre. Robert Y. Turner has suggested that the creation of pathos was the common motivation of tragedians from the 1560s until the 1590s. Understanding the experience of tragedy involves grasping ‘the playwrights’ practical concern for expressing sorrow and suffering and for moving their audiences’, especially on the part of ‘those who have been deprived of some loved one’. Anderson, answering the question why the doctor who appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor is called Caius, informs us of who could have helped him during his illness: John Caius … was … a notorious figure about court, serving as the queen’s physician until he was dismissed in 1568 on charges of Catholicism. He was almost certainly the inspiration for the Dr. Caius of Merry Wives of Windsor … Caius may also have treated de Vere when he was sick and laid up in a Windsor inn in early 1570. Still convalescent, he wrote a letter to his guardian William Cecil in November 1569. In that letter he told him that he wanted to fight against the English Catholics of the North that had rebelled following the Duke of Norfolk’s imprisonment in the Tower of London for pretending to marry Mary Queen of Scots and take the throne of England. At the end of this letter, for the first time, and showing to the secretary of State William Cecil that he considered himself the Prince, for he was now an adult (he had been born in 1548, not in 1550), young Edward de Vere signed with an spectacular signature. He did not care what the Queen, his mother, thought about him. He knew who he was. Let us listen to Beauclerk’s own words: In November 1569, still not fully recovered, Oxford wrote to his guardian William Cecil requesting that he be given employment in her majesty’s forces, then engaged in putting down the northern rebellion … At the bottom of the letter he used a new and wholly remarkable 103 signature, which sported a coronet or crown above the name ‘Edward Oxenford,’ and a line with seven dashes beneath it. Moreover, the whole signature, which is unique in the annals of the Elizabethan age, was shaped like a crown. To those who did not suspect the secret of de Vere’s birth, it did no more than signify his status as the 17 th Earl of Oxford; but to those who were in the known, like William Cecil, it proclaimed a royal title, that of ‘King Edward VII.’ … It is worth remembering that Oxford’s uncle the Earl of Surrey had been executed for treason in 1547 for surmounting his coat of arms with a crown rather than the earl’s coronet. Unless Oxford was secure in the knowledge of his royal birth, he was treading on very dangerous ground indeed. Oxford would use this signature on all his letters to the Cecils, William and Robert, for as long as the Queen was alive. Only on her death in 1603 and the accession of James of Scotland did he finally drop it and, with it, any claim to the throne. 104 Works by our poet written during the decade of 1560s 1.- The Fable of Ovid Treating of Narcissus, 1560, translation of Ovid, anonymous. 2.- The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, 1562, translation, as Arthur Brooke: http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/romeo/BrookeIndex.html. 3.- Jack Juggler, 1562, anonymous; some attribute it to George Gascoigne: https://archive.org/details/anonymousplays00farmuoft. 4.- Damon and Pythias, 1564, as Richard Edwards: http://archive.org/details/damonandpithias100edwauoft. 5.- The Jew of Malta, 1565, based on an interlude of his and then reworked as a play, attributed to Marlowe (Donne wrote this play) in 1633: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/901/901-h/901-h.htm. 6.- King Darius, anonymous, registered in 1565: http://archive.org/stream/anonymousplays3r00farmuoft#page/n3/mod e/2up. 7.- Palamon and Arcite, 1566, as Richard Edwards, later on reworked for The Two Noble Kingsmen, published in 1634. John Fletcher fill in the interlude of Edward de Vere: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1542/pg1542.html. 8.- Jocasta, 1566, adaptation and translation of Euripides, as George Gascoigne. 9.- The Supposes, 1566, adaptation and translation of Ariosto, as George Gascoigne. Both 9 and 10 at: https://archive.org/details/supposesjocasta00gasc. 10.- Metamorphoses, translation of Ovid, 1567, as Arthur Golding: http://archive.org/details/shakespearesovi00goldgoog. 11.- Horestes, 1567, as John Pickering: http://archive.org/details/historyofhoreste00pikeuoft. 12.- Appius and Virginia, anonymous, registered in 1568, published in 1575: http://ia700404.us.archive.org/20/items/anonymousplays04farmuoft/a nonymousplays04farmuoft.pdf. 13.- Jacob and Esau, 1568, anonymous: http://www.archive.org/details/sixanonymousplay00farmuoft. 14.- Dr. Faustus, 1604, same as nº 5, as Marlowe: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/779/779-h/779-h.htm. Quarto of 1616 more extensive: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/811/811-h/811-h.htm. 105 15.- Timon of Athens, 1569, as William Shakespeare, published in the First Folio of 1623: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index39.html. 16.- Cambises, 1564, published in 1569, anonymous, attributed by some to Thomas Preston: http://www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/drama/cambises.txt. 17.- A Theater for Wordlings, 1569, translations of Petrarch and Du Bellay, anonymous poems, later on attributed to Edmund Spenser. 106 ACT II THE COURT FOOL 107 108 Scene I. In the war of the North In October 1569, the Duke of Norfolk was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Although he had informed the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland that the rebellion should be postponed, they, however, went ahead and took the city of Durham, marching south with 4,000 men with the intention of liberating Queen Mary Stuart and meeting the Duke of Alba. Queen Elizabeth and Cecil were already prepared and ordered the Earl of Sussex, whose campaigns in Ireland had consecrated him as a very competent military leader, to fight against the rebels. Edward de Vere, in the letter in which he signed for the first time with the “crown signature,” had asked William Cecil to let him go with Sussex. His letter says, without any sarcasm, the following: Sir. Although my hap hath been so hard that it hath visited me of late with sickness, yet thanks be to God, through the looking to which I have had by your care had over me, I find my health restored and myself double beholding unto you, both for that and many good turns which I have received before of your part; for the which, although I have found you to not account of late of me as in time tofore, yet notwithstanding that strangeness, you shall see at last in me that I will acknowledge and not be ungrateful unto you for them, and not to deserve so ill a thought in you that they were ill bestowed in me, but at this present desiring you, if I have done anything amiss that I have merited your offence, impute to my young years and lack of experience to know my friends. And at this time I am bold to desire your favour and friendship, that you will suffer me to be employed by your means and help in this service that now is in hand, whereby I shall think myself the most bound unto you of any man in this court, and hereafter ye shall command me as any of your own. Having no other means whereby to speak with you myself, I am bold to impart my mind in paper, earnestly desiring your Lordship that, at this instant, as heretofore you have given me your good word to have me see the wars and services in strange and foreign places, sith you could not then obtain me licence of the Queen’s Majesty, now you will do me so much honour as that, by your purchase of my licence, I may be called to the service of my prince and country, as at this present troublous time a number are. Thus leaving to importunate you with my earnest suit, I commit you to the hands of the Almighty. By your assured friend this 24th of November. Edward Oxenford. In the spring of 1570, our poet was already recovered and willing to ‘see the wars and services in strange and foreign places.’ On March 30, 109 Elizabeth agreed to let his son go to the North, to serve as an official in the military campaign then in course. His orders were to remain close to Lord Sussex. Nina Green and Ramón Jiménez place the composition of the historical play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth in these years. The action in this play is still clumsy and infantile, as it occurs in The Jew of Malta, and it also shows that this historical play, that he will divide into three parts (Henry IV, Part I and II, and Henry V) during the decade of the 1580s, comes from these years of the decade of the 1570s, when he saw the war in the North under the Earl of Sussex’s command. Ramón Jiménez writes: [I]n The Famous Victories the eleventh Earl of Oxford is everywhere. He is one of the main characters in the play, and speaks eighteen times in seven scenes, more than any other historical character except Lord Chief Justice and the two Henrys. He is the first historical character to speak, except for Prince Hal, and he speaks only to Henry IV or to Prince Hal, who is crowned King between the eighth and ninth scenes. More than that, in the anonymous play Richard de Vere has been elevated to the place of Henry IV’s principal counselor, even though the chronicles record that the King’s counselors were the Earls of Exeter and Westmoreland, and the Duke of York … On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, Oxford asks the King for command of the vanguard, but it has been promised to the Duke of York. On the morning of the battle, Oxford brings information to the King about the number of French facing him, and a few moments later volunteers to take charge of the archers whom the King has ordered to plant sharpened stakes in the ground to break the French cavalry charge. (The English were badly outnumbered, and military historians agree that this stratagem was the key to their victory.) To this request, Henry V replies, ‘With all my heart, my good Lord of Oxford. And go and provide quickly.’ Whoever wrote the play was a good friend of the House of de Vere.32 As it seems, if he could not have the official roots of the Tudors, he was determined to put his official name of Oxford and the House of de Vere very clearly, even against what the historical records told. The Famous Victories of Henry V, a play written after the personal breakdown of the young poet, was the result of his experiences in the war of the North and his mother’s decision of leaving him out of the succession line for the crown. In this anonymous play that he will rewrite during the 1580s to encourage the spirits of the English people to defend 32 See Shakespeare-Oxford Fellowship website, virtual classroom. 110 the island from the attack of Philip II, the young poet sees himself as young Prince Henry V who pacifies an upheaval while living the bohemian life of London, as its author will do from now on and until 1589. Henry V says in this first version to his comrades while they go to a tavern in Eastcheap, something that our poet felt inside and he will put in Tamburlaine’s lips: Henry 5 ...we will go altogither, We are all fellowes, I tell you sirs, and the King My father were dead, we would be all Kings, Therefore come away. When a citizen asks another one what is happening with the young prince, the answer is as clear as its author could have written it: Lawrence …..I heare say he is as liuely A young Prince as euer was. J. Cobler I, and I heare say, if he vse it long, His father will cut him off from the Crowne: But neighbour, say nothing of that. Which is what had happened in 1569. The young prince asks the Justice, who does not want to let one of his friend go, for he has committed a robbery, if the Justice does not know who he is. The question is being asked by the author to himself: Henry 5 …...I pray ye, who am I? Justice And please your Grace, you are my Lord the yong Prince, our King that shall be after the decease of our soueraigne Lord, King Henry the fourth. The play mixes humorous and tragic scenes radically. A tragic moment occurs when King Henry IV talks to his son and rebukes him for not being worthy of the Crown. When the Prince hears this, the character reverts to the voice of Hamlet, Timon, and that Benvolio who took refuge in the castle of Windsor in Dr. Faustus. The remembrance of the grief experienced after Elizabeth I decided not to recognise him in 1569 is shown here again (ll. 570-573): Ah Harry, now thrice unhappie Harry! But what shal I do? I wil go take me into some solitarie place, 111 and there lament my sinfull life, and when I haue done, I wil laie me downe and die. And more lamentations of grief of this young prince disinherited in these words that reminds us that Esau, Timon and Benvolio are reunited in Prince Henry (ll. 620-623): Oh my dying father, curst be the day wherin I was borne, and accursed be the houre wherin I was begotten, but what shal I do? if weeping teares which come too late, may suffice the negligence neglected too soone, I wil weepe day and night until the fountaine be drie with weeping. The wound of the past still aches, for the author cannot refrain from making young Prince Henry take the crown of his father while he is ill in bed, something that, not being historical, is added by the imagination of the poet. This free adaptation of English history, as the reader will understand, can be explained easily when one knows what the playwright was going through in these moments. Henry IV misses his crown (ll. 640 ff.): Henry 4 The Crowne taken away, Good my Lord of Oxford, go see who hath done this deed: No doubt tis some vilde traitor that hath done it, To depriue my sonne, they that would do it now, Would seeke to scrape and scrawle for it after my death. Enter Lord of Oxford with the Prince. Oxford Here and please your Grace, Is my Lord the yong Prince with the Crowne. Henry 4 Why how now my sonne?... Why tel me my sonne, Doest thou thinke the time so long, that thou wouldest haue it before the Breath be out of my mouth? Henry 5 …......welbeloued father... I came into your Chamber to comfort the melancholy Soule of your bodie, and finding you at that time Past all recouerie, and dead to my thinking, God is my witnesse, and what should I doo, But with weeping tears lament the death of you my father, And after that, seeing the Crowne, I tooke it: And tel me my father, who might better take it then I, After your death? but seeing you liue, 112 I most humbly render it into your Maiesties hands, And the happiest man aliue, that my father liue... And liue my Lord and Father, for euer. Coronated as Henry V after his father’s death, the young King will fight against the French, as he had done in the Northern rebellion under the Earl of Sussex. Anderson informs us of the consequences of our poet’s experiences in the rebellion of the north of 1570: Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts I and 2 (staged in the 1590s, if not earlier) would immortalize this view of the Scots uprising. The focal point of both these Shake-speare histories is the squelching of a fifteenth-century rebellion that didn’t quite happen the way Shakespeare tells it. Shake-speare’s mishmash of the history of the reign of King Henry IV, however, presents a compelling allegorical retelling of the civil war that Queen Elizabeth almost faced in 1569... The nineteenth-century historian Richard Simpson concluded that the Henry IV plays depict the context of the Northern Rebellion so accurately that the author must have consulted with a firsthand observer. In fact, Simpson was half right. The author was a firsthand observer. We repeat it, for it is important. The Famous Histories of Henry V was written, as its chaotic style shows us, in the early seventies, but it was published as later as 1598, its author being then anonymous. The reader is encouraged not to forget this fact, for it will be repeated with other plays by our poet; the play Locrinus, for instance, that belongs to these years as one can verify by its style still in formation, will be published in 1594, its author being named ‘W.S.’ Another play of these years is The English King Edmund Ironside. In the character Endricus we can anticipate the arrival of Aaron the Moor, Richard III or Iago (I.ii.300306): He that heard my story from the end how many treasons I have practiced how many vild things I have brought to pass and what great wonders have been compassed by this deep-reaching pate would think I wis I had been bound apprentice to deceit and from my birthday studied villainy. Ramón Jiménez informs us about the impact that this play caused in 113 the critics: The play’s first modern editor called it the ‘most important extant dramatization of Anglo-Saxon history’ (Boswell xii). In Edricus, who delivers nearly a third of his 561 lines in seven soliloquies and four asides, the playwright has created the first believable English villain. As Boas says, the author ‘shows a true psychological instinct, a realization that personality moulds events.’ Based on this body of evidence, I conclude that Edmond Ironside was Edward de Vere’s second history play, probably written soon after he returned to London from Scotland in 1570. Before going there, he had written The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and his next effort would be Titus Andronicus or one of the Henry VI plays. Eric Sams acknowledged the precedence of The Famous Victories, but he called Ironside ‘the very first chronicle history and hence in its own right a work of seminal significance in the history of English and world drama’ … And so it is. There is one other striking similarity of language between Edmond Ironside and a Shakespeare play that merits mention. We are all familiar with the dying John of Gaunt’s speech about England in the second act of Richard II, one of the most moving expressions of patriotism in the English language. Its jewel-like phrases recite a wistful love of country that is unparalleled in any other drama of any other period: ‘this sceptered isle,’ ‘demi-paradise,’ ‘this fortress,’ ‘this little world,’ ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea,’ ‘this realm, this England.’ In the anonymous Edmond Ironside, five different characters speak the following phrases in different parts of play: ‘this noble isle,’ ‘my pleasure’s paradise,’ ‘the fortress of my crown,’ ‘this little world,’ ‘this little isle,’ ‘this solitary isle,’ ‘this realm of England.’ To the cumulative evidence set forth by rational argument must be added the evidence of the ear, and the ear tells us this is Shakespeare. This is Edward de Vere. 33 The Tragical History of Edward III can also be traced to these years. Nina Green observes that this play reproduces the same Northern Rebellion where our poet was under Sussex. As some paragraphs show when they talk about the Armada of Philip II, the play was revised during the critical years of the decade of 1580s. The play starts with the French nobility not recognising Edward III as the King of France due to the fact that his mother, because of Salic Law, could not transmit him that right to the French throne, something that is directly related with what had 33 See Shakespeare-Oxford Fellowship website (articles). 114 happened to our poet. Note how the mother of King Edward III bears the name of Isabel too. The scene is this (I.i.10-41): King Edward But was my mother sister unto those? Artois She was, my Lord; and only Isabel Was all the daughters that this Phillip had, Whom afterward your father took to wife; And from the fragrant garden of her womb Your gracious self, the flower of Europe’s hope, Derived is inheritor to France. But note the rancor of rebellious minds: When thus the lineage of le Bew was out, The French obscured your mother’s Privilege, And, though she were the next of blood, proclaimed John, of the house of Valois, now their king: The reason was, they say, the Realm of France, Replete with Princes of great parentage, Ought not admit a governor to rule, Except he be descended of the male; And that’s the special ground of their contempt, Wherewith they study to exclude your grace: King Edward should be ‘the next of blood’ to the French crown as the ‘Fair Youth’ Southampton was at the end of Venus and Adonis to the English one. In this play King Edward III falls in love with the Countess of Salisbury. It is not strange that, as we will see right now, we relate the love of Edward III for this countess with the same countess who said goodbye to his son Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well in the following way: ‘In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.’ King Edward III will compare himself and her countess with Caesar and Cleopatra, with Leander and Hero: Fairer thou art by far than Hero was, Beardless Leander not so strong as I: He swom an easy current for his love, But I will through a Hellespont of blood, To arrive at Cestus where my Hero lies. Today, the anonymous Edward III is included in the Shakespeare’s canon by many editors and critics. 115 Scene II. The Queen’s new “favourite” In May 1571, a tournament took place in Westminster, possibly in commemoration for the (official) age of majority of our poet, who, as the chronicles note, competed as the Red Knight, and behaved with a bravery ‘far above the expectation of the world,’ so much so, that the Queen gave him as a prize a tablet of diamonds. As Beauclerk informs us, this set of diamonds that decorated the book or ‘tablets’, as Hamlet calls it, was ‘a significant gift to one who had given early notice of his devotion to letters.’ Beauclerk continues: In Sonnet 122, Shakespeare writes of a precious set of tables that he has given away, and justifies his deed by claiming that the gift is impressed upon his heart ‘with lasting memory’... The fact that Oxford rode out as the Red Knight must have sent a powerful message to the queen. In the Grail legends the Red Knight is the mortal foe of King Arthur … Oxford may have worn the red armor as a means of advertising the martial persona that would one day inspire his enduring literary identity. This tablet of diamonds also appears in The Faerie Queene. In this work, Prince Arthur gives a ‘box of diamonds’ as a gift to the Knight of the Redcross, who corresponds with the gift of a book. Spenser writes (Book I, Canto IX, 19): Prince Arthur gaue a boxe of Diamond sure... Which to requite, the Redcrosse knight him gaue A booke, wherein his Saveours testament Was writt with golden letters rich and braue; A worke of wondrous grace As we will see later, Redcross is the representation of the author; therefore, here Prince Arthur is clearly Oxford. 34 In the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock, a play in which critics have found a style and a way of treating historical themes and a language so similar as the ones used by Shakespeare, that is known with the alternative title of Richard II, Part I, Beauclerk chooses a passage that the author created without any historical reference. In this passage, 34 “Fradubio’s name suggests that he was caught among doubts. Like Donne in the sonnet ‘Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear,’ Fradubio could not choose between the true church and the false … Fradubio’s plight is really Redcross’s of a canto earlier.” Humphrey Tonking, The Faerie Queene, Routledge Revivals, 2015, Kindle edition, pos. 1279. See Act IV. 116 Richard is told that his actual date of birth was a lie, which causes him an outburst of wrath: In Thomas of Woodstock, or Richard II, Part I as it is often called, which many scholars now attribute to Shakespeare, Richard’s birth date becomes a matter of contention. His uncles have led him to believe that he is younger than he actually is. When Richard learns the truth through Sir John Bushy, who has been combing through the English Chronicles, he exclaims: O treacherous men that have deluded us! We might have claimed our right a twelve month since. As far as I have been able to discover, this discrepancy over Richard’s age is Shakespeare’s innovation rather than a matter of historical record. Giles Fletcher, a contemporary of Edward de Vere, described this victory of our poet in the 1571 tournament at Westminster in the following terms: But if at any time with fiery energy he should call up mimicry of war, he controls his foaming steed with a light rein, and armed with a long spear rides to encounter. Fearlessly he settles himself in the saddle, gracefully bending his body this way and that. Now he circles round: now with spurred heel he rouses his charger. Bravo, valiant youth! ’Tis thus that martial spirits pass through their apprenticeship in war … The country sees in thee both a leader preeminent in war, and a skillful man-at-arms. Thy valor puts forth leaves, and begins to bear early fruit, and glory already ripens in the earliest deed. Beauclerk reports that in this same year of 1571, Arthur Golding dedicated these words to our poet: In his 1571 dedication to Oxford of his translation of The Psalms of David (with Calvin’s commentaries), Arthur Golding writes … ‘I assure your Lordship I write not these things as though I suspected you to be digressed from the soundness and sincerity wherein you were continually trained and traded under that vigilant Ulysses of our commonwealth [i.e., the secretary of state William Cecil] … I beseech your Lordship consider how God hath placed you upon a high stage in the eyes of all men, as a guide, pattern, example, and leader unto others.’ This is the language used to address monarchs. When 117 Elizabeth was being pressured by Parliament into executing Mary Queen of Scots, she indignantly reminded members that princes cannot act lightly, for they stand upon a stage in sight of all the world. Being recognised as the star of the Court, William Cecil, our Polonius, did not waste the occasion to inform the Queen of his desire to make his daughter Anne marry the young prince. The Queen, as the “guardian” of her ward Edward de Vere, consented. Cecil, now duly raised as Lord Burghley, who had agreed to defend Princess Elizabeth in 1548, saw his efforts rewarded. As the gossip at Court said, ‘the earl of Oxford hath gotten him a wife—or at least a wife hath caught him; this is Mistress Anne Cecil.’ The wedding took place in Westminster Abbey in December. Interestingly enough, Shakespeare writes in As You Like It (IV.i.130): ‘[M]en are April when they woo, December when they wed.’ Some references to a ward’s wedding can be found in the anonymous play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. In Act I, Scene I, we see a tutor marrying his ward: Lord Faulconbridge ...I must speak That I am his guardian, would I had a son Might merit … him I’ll tell you what he is, he is a youth, A noble branch, increasing in blessed fruit, Where caterpillar vice dare not to touch. He is himself with so much gravity... He is one whom elders look upon, as one does a book... For them to rule their lives by. Indeed he is one that All emulate his virtues, hate him none... And yet, Sir William, being as he is, Young, and unsettled, though of virtuous thoughts By genuine disposition... Being trusted in the world with their own will, Divert the good is looked from them to ill... With company they keep such reveling With panders, parasites, prodigies of knaves, That they sell all, even their old father’s graves. Which to prevent, we’ll match him to a wife; Marriage restrains the scope of single life... And I have found him... A niece of mine. 118 The ward Scarborrow cannot accept the marriage, for, as he himself says, he is already engaged to another woman. As Faulconbridge threatens him with ruining his life, for he possesses his wardship, Scarborrow answers (I.iv.118): ‘World, now you see what it is to be a ward.’ In this same year of 1571, Don John of Austria, the bastard prince of Charles V, commanded the Christian victory against the Turks in the legendary battle of Lepanto. That a bastard prince were ‘the mirror of Europe,’ the reference to all noblemen of that time, gives us a clue to understand the fact that another bastard prince, our poet Edward de Vere, asked the Queen permission to be admitted in the ranks of Don John of Austria, a permission which was denied, as Beauclerk tells us that occurred in 1578. The words J.H. Elliot uses to describe the life of Don John of Austria could be used to describe the life of our poet: This Prince was very insecure but also desperate due to the fact that he was doomed to see himself deprived of the rank and the respectability of his illegitimate birth, dedicated his life to chase a rainbow which took him to a fake golden crown. Lepanto, Tunis and the Crown of the conquered Africa belonged to the past. To the past also belonged the Netherlands, England and the captive hand of Mary, Queen of Scots. Every dream was bigger than the last one, and each disappointment, bitterer … Disappointed and embittered, his confidence destroyed, Don John saw how his fragile imaginary world disappeared. On October 1, 1578, he died at the age of thirthy-three … He had given his confessor his own bitter epitaph: ‘For all my life I have not possessed not even a piece of land that were mine. Naked I left my mother’s bosom, and naked I will return to it.’ This is the vivid image of Timon and King Lear. Nakedness, disappointment and the feeling of personal failure, these words of Helliot will aptly describe the following years of Edward de Vere. The incoming events show that our poet did not love Anne Cecil, for months later, there were rumours at Court that he had rejected her and did not want to consummate the marriage. ‘Oxford was, it seems, saving himself for an altogether more complex and sophisticated woman, one with the gifts of mind and independence of spirit to inspire his budding genius,’ writes Beauclerk. In the sonnet (Shakespearean in form) “Love Thy Choice,” the poet is declaring whom he loves: Love thy Choice Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, my heart? Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint? Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart? Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint? 119 Who first did paint with colours pale thy face? Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest? Above the rest in court who gave thee grace? Who made thee strive in honour to be best? In constant truth to bide so firm and sure, To scorn the world regarding but thy friends? With patient mind each passion to endure, In one desire to settle to the end? Love then thy choice wherein such choice thou bind, As nought but death may ever change thy mind. Earle of Oxenforde. Nobody but the Queen could give him grace at Court. Our poet will write this beautiful lyric about her: What Cunning can Express? What cunning can express The favour of her face? To whom in this distress, I do appeal for grace. A thousand Cupids fly About her gentle eye. From which each throws a dart, That kindleth soft sweet fire: Within my sighing heart, Possessed by Desire. No sweeter life I try, Than in her love to die. The lily in the field, That glories in his white, For pureness now must yield, And render up his right; Heaven pictured in her face, Doth promise joy and grace. Fair Cynthia’s silver light, That beats on running streams, Compares not with her white, Whose hairs are all sun-beams; So bright my Nymph doth shine, As day unto my eyne. With this there is a red, Exceeds the Damask-Rose; Which in her cheeks is spread, 120 Whence every favour grows. In sky there is no star, But she surmounts it far. When Phoebus from the bed Of Thetis doth arise, The morning blushing red, In fair carnation wise; He shows in my Nymph’s face, As Queen of every grace. This pleasant lily white, This taint of roseate red; This Cynthia’s silver light, This sweet fair Dea spread; These sunbeams in mine eye, These beauties make me die. In the anonymous play The Marriage of Wit and Science, a moral drama with allegorical characters, mother Nature asks his son Wit, who is in love, the same question that our poet was making himself in his poem “Love thy Choice,” but with a small variation. Mother Nature asks his son Wit: ‘Who taught thee her to love...?’ Wit is determined to climb Mount Parnassus in order to be a great poet, to which his mother answers by blessing him and introducing him to another son of hers, Will. Then Wit asks Will if he would serve him in his goal of becoming a great poet. When Will answers him affirmatively, Wit says at the end of Act I: ‘Nature is on my side, and Will my boy is fast.’ This Will is no other than the allegorical character that we see in the final couplet of sonnet 136 by Shakespeare: Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lov’st me for my name is Will. In the anonymous play The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, Wit asks Idleness his name, and this dialogue ensues (I.ii): Wit What … art thou? What is thy name? Idleness In faith I am Ipse, he, even the very same! A man of great estimation in mine own country. In As You Like It (V.i.30-36), the fool Touchstone says to an unlearned William: 121 Touchstone Give me your hand. Art thou learnèd? William No, sir. Touchstone Then learn this of me: to have is to have; for it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being pour’d out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your writers do consent that ipse is he; now, you are not ipse, for I am he. William Which he, sir? ‘To have is to have’ translated into Italian is written ‘avere é avere’: a Vere is a Vere. William (Shakspere of Stratford) could not be Ipse, for Ipse is Vere, as ‘all your writers do consent’; Ipse is a man of great estimation in his own country like Vere, the ‘very same.’ When Idleness says that he must be hidden, we listen to our hidden poet speaking about his continuous changes of colour and identity each time he published his works (II.v): When Wit and Wisdom is joined together, then I am rejected. Well it can shift elsewhere so long as I am not detected. Detected I cannot well be; I am of that condition That I can turn into all colours like the chameleon. As the bastard Philip (later on ‘Richard Plantagenet’) says to Queen Elenor in King John (I.i.): Bastard Madam, by chance, but not by truth, what though? Something about a little from the right, In at the window, or else o’er the hatch: Who dares not stir by day must walk by night, And have is have, well won is still well shot, And I am I, howe’er I was begot. These two anonymous plays, The Marriage of Wit and Science and The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, are full of songs which were certainly performed at Court before the Queen, for they are courtly interludes. This fusion of drama and music was to be developed with more ornamentation during the decade of 1580s in the works attributed to John Lyly, one of our poet’s secretaries. The chameleon could not be detected: if it had not been for Shakspere of Stratford’s bad disguise, we would have never been able to identify him in his multiple metamorphoses. In 1572, the Queen visited the castle of Kenilworth as the Earl of Leicester’s guest; our poet and many other noblemen went with her. The 122 Langham Letter is a manuscript that describes the visit of the Queen to the castle of Kenilworth. Written by some Langham (an unreal and nonexistent person at Court), the author describes, as an insider who knows all her private movements, the activities of the Queen during this visit. The narrator is no other than our Jack Juggler, the voice of our poet in his most comical aspect. Nina Green has investigated this manuscript, which claims to describe the Queen’s visit to the Kenilworth Castle in 1575, but which could describe another visit of the Queen in 1572, because there were three early, separate editions of The Langham Letter: “These consist of the original edition published before September 10, 1575, which was ‘suppressed’,” says Green; ‘a second edition published circa 1577; and a third edition published after 1580’ or ‘circa 1590.’ Green informs us about the Queen’s visit described in The Langham Letter: The Langham Letter is a brilliant tour de force which describes Leicester’s entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth … Its purported author is a bumptious court official, one ‘Robert Langham or Lanham.’ However, scholarly consensus now rejects the notion that the Letter was written by the fictitious Langham. Penny McCarthy, in Pseudonymous Shakespeare, has recently proposed Shakespeare as the author. In fact, the vocabulary of the Langham Letter is indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s, as has been established in a comparison of the Letter’s vocabulary to over 2,100 lines from Shakespeare’s plays, in each of which a vocabulary word used in the Letter is used in the same sense, and as the same part of speech, as it is used in Shakespeare’s plays. And Green adds:35 In summary, then, the new facts which have been uncovered by recent scholarship cast the Langham Letter in an entirely new light. William Patten’s letter of September 10, 1575 confirms what might have been inferred from the fact that the Letter was privately printed, namely that the Letter’s intended audience was the court, and that its distribution was confined to a small number of individuals within the court circle. The suppression of the first edition suggests that the Letter is not entirely what it appears to be on the surface, and that there are, indeed, aspects of it which could be perceived as turning ‘the honorable enterteinment’ into a ‘jest’. The reappearance of the Letter in a second and third edition suggests that its author was someone with influence at court; otherwise, all printed copies of the Letter, as well as the original manuscript, would have been destroyed 35 See Nina Green valuable website on Nashe, Greene and Harvey. 123 in accordance with the royal directive in September, 1575. Jack, the Fool, the Juggler, will continue to write books in which he will give details on the Queen’s hobbies and her private activities, despite the fact that this could endanger the writer’s career. The author of The Langham Letter signed the work as ‘El principe negro’, referring to the ‘Black Prince,’ son of King Edward III. Nina Green tells us that the reference to the ‘Black Prince’ as ‘Edward Plantagenet (1330-1376), Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, the eldest son of King Edward III,’ was not generally known at that time until the appearance of an anonymous play. Green informs us: [T]he vehicle by which ‘the Black Prince’ became known to the Elizabethans prior to 1575 was the anonymous play, The Reign of King Edward the Third … [T]he first version of this play was written circa 1569 by Edward de Vere, 17 th Earl of Oxford … In 1569, as a young man … Edward de Vere gained first hand experience of Scotland when he accompanied the Earl of Sussex on his Scottish campaign during the Northern Rebellion. The first two acts of The Reign of King Edward III are set in Scotland, and depict the king’s attempt to seduce the Countess of Salisbury while he was campaigning in that country. More importantly, with respect to explaining the allusion in the Langham Letter, the latter part of The Reign of King Edward III features the young Black Prince in a stirring role at the Battle of Crecy. If The Reign of King Edward the Third was first written by Edward de Vere, as suggested, circa 1569, the familiarity with ‘the Black Prince’ which the author of the Letter takes for granted in his readers can be accounted for: readers of the Letter would have been familiar with ‘the Black Prince’ through the play … [I]t is significant that the author of the Letter also takes it for granted that his readers will agree with his assessment of the Black Prince as one ‘never stained with disloyaltee of ingratitude toward ony.’ This description accords with the portrayal of the Black Prince in The Reign of King Edward the Third, where he is depicted as the embodiment of chivalric ideals. In this Letter, apart from revealing certain private events of the Queen, a certain Captain Cox is mentioned; ‘an odd man’ who had an immense library. Of course, this Captain Cox is no other than Oxford. In another passage, we find out what happened to a ‘savage man’ who talks with Echo and almost makes the Queen fall from her horse. It reads: 124 The savage man. For about nine o’clock at the hither part of the chase wheer torch-light attended, out of the woods in her Majesty’s return roughly came there forth hombre salvaje with an oaken plant plucked up by the roots in his hand, himself forgrown all in moss and ivy who, for personage, gesture and utterance beside, countenanced the matter to very good liking and had speech to effect that, continuing so long in these wild wastes wherein oft had he fared both far and near, yet happed he never to see so glorious an assembly afore, and now cast into great grief of mind for that neither by himself could he guess nor knew where else to be taught what they should be or who have estate. Reports some had he heard of many strange things, but broiled thereby so much the more in desire of knowledge. Thus in great pangs bethought he and called he upon all his familiars and companions— the fauns, the satyrs, the nymphs, the dryads and the hamadryads— but none making answer, whereby his care the more increasing, in utter grief and extreme refuge called he aloud at last after his old friend Echo—Echo that he wist would hide nothing from him, but tell him all if she were here. Here, quoth Echo. Here, Echo and art thou there? says he. Ah, how much hast thou relieved my careful spirits with thy courtesy onward. Ah, my good Echo, here is a marvellous presence of dignity. What are they, I pray thee? Who is sovereign? Tell me, I beseech thee, or else how might I know? I know, quoth she. Knowest thou? says he. Marry, that is exceedingly well. Why, then, I desire thee heartily, show me what majesty (for no mean degree is it) have we here—a king or a queen? A queen, quoth Echo. A queen? says he, pausing and wisely viewing awhile, now full certainly seems thy tale to be true. And proceeding by this manner of dialogue with an earnest beholding her Highness awhile, recounts he first how justly that former reports agree with his present sight touching the beautiful lineaments of countenance, the comely proportion of body, the princely grace of presence, the gracious gifts of nature, with the rare and singular qualities of both body and mind in her Majesty conjoined and so apparent a eye. Then, shortly rehearsing Saturday’s acts—of Sibyl’s salutation, of the porter’s proposition, of his trumpeters’ music, of the lake-lady’s oration, of the seven gods’ seven presents, he reporteth the incredible joy that all estates in the land have always of her Highness wheresoever it comes, endeth with presage and prayer of perpetual felicity and with humble subjection of him and his and all that they may do. After this sort the matter went, with little difference, I guess, saving only in this point, that the thing which here I report in unpolished prose was there pronounced in good metre and matter, very well indited in rime, Echo finely framed most aptly by answers thus to utter all. But shall I tell you, Master Martin, by the mass, of a mad adventure? As this savage for the more submission brake his tree asunder, cast the top from him, it had 125 almost light upon her Highness’ horse’s head, whereat he startled, and the gentleman much dismayed. See the benignity of the prince: as the footmen looked well to the horse, and he of generosity soon calmed of himself, No hurt, no hurt, quoth her Highness, which words, I promise you, we were all glad to hear, and took them to be the best part of the play. Who else could publish the secret activities of the Queen from inside without being executed for doing so? Who could laugh at the Queen and describe how she had almost fallen from her horse with a tree’s root? No other but Timon. Note that the determining symbol of Edward de Vere and Shakespeare appears again: roots. And it is with those roots that the savage man causes the Queen’s horse to be stricken (a symbol of her favourite, Robert Dudley) and almost makes her fall to the ground. In May 1573 one Gilbert Talbot wrote to his father telling him the latest news from London and explaining that, if it were not for his changes of humour and his fiddle head, Oxford, having achieved the favour of the Queen, could become more powerful at Court. Talbot writes to his father: ‘Oxford is lately grown into great credit, for the Queen’s Majesty delighted more in his personage and his dancing and valiantness than any other. I think Sussex doth back him all he can. If it were not for his fickle head he would pass any of them shortly.’ As Beauclerk informs us, from a French ambassador we know that [n]ot only was Oxford supreme in the Queen’s regard but … he had ‘more followers and [was] the object of greater expectations than any other in the realm.’ The Spanish ambassador Mendoza concurred; in his dispatches to Madrid he described Oxford as ‘a lad who has a great following in the country.’ In Hamlet, Claudius refuses to make a direct move against the prince because ‘he’s lov’d of the distracted multitude.’ But why should Oxford have been so popular, unless it was at least suspected that he was the queen’s son? … (Ophelia is told that ‘Hamlet is a prince out of thy star,’ and Helena uses identical imagery to express her inferiority to Bertram—that ‘bright particular star’ What was happening was so anomalous that I leave the explanation to historian Beauclerk: It is possible that Oxford and the queen were playing a complex, esoteric game, and had devised a secret scheme to secure the Tudor monarchy through a child of their own. If so, Oxford was most likely refusing to sleep with Anne so that in time he could sue for divorce on 126 the grounds of non-consummation. Even so, Elizabeth, who hated to be tied down to a determined course of action, could have been playing her customary double game, using the promise of a child to keep Oxford quiet about his own royal claim … Royal incest was nothing new; it had been practiced openly by the ancient Egyptian monarchy. The pharaohs, following the example of the gods, regularly contracted incestuous marriages to keep the royal blood pure, the practice being said to have begun with Isis and Osiris, whose myth inspires the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s last great tragedy. And Isis and Osiris is what we find written by the poet Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene. Note that Spenser knows perfectly well what happened between de Vere and the Queen when he wrote these verses, wherein Isis is connected with queen Britomart when the latter enters the temple of the goddess seeking refuge and an answer to her future. As soon as you see the crocodile under her feet, you will know who is seeking her grace and her love (Book V, Canto VII, 2-3 and 15-23): That Iustice was a God of soueraine grace... Calling him great Osyris, of the race Of th’old Aegyptian Kings... For that Osyris, whilest he liued here, The iuestest man alive, and truest did appeare. 3 His wife was Isis... A Goddesse of great powre and souerainty, And in her person cunningly did shade That part of Iustice, which is Equity, Whereof I haue to treat here presently. 36 Vnto whose temple when as Britomart Arriued, shee with great humility Did enter in... 15 With that the Crocodile, which sleeping lay Vnder the Idols feete in fearlesse bowre, Seem’d to awake in horrible dismay, As being troubled with that stormy stowre... 16 Tho turning all his pride to humblesse meeke, 36 Hamilton (2007) glosses: ‘presently: now. The word serves to mark the unique absence in the poem of a formal approach to a major house, castle, or church. Britomart ’s departure in the middle of stanza 24 is equally sudden.’ 127 Him selfe before her feete he lowly threw, And gan for grace and loue of her to seeke: Which shee accepting, he so neare her drew, That of his game she soone enwombed grew, And forth did bring a Lion of great might; That shortly did all other beasts subdew... 17 So thereuppon long while she musing lay, With thousand thoughts feeding her fantasie, Vntill she spide the lampe of lightsome day, Vp-lifted in the porch of heauen hie. Then vp she rose fraught with melancholy, And forth into the lower parts did pas; Whereas the Priestes she found full busily About their holy things for morrow Mas: Whom she saluting faire, faire resaluted was. 18 But by the change of her vnchearefull looke, They might perceive, she was not well in plight; Or that some pensiuenesse to heart she tooke. Therefore thus one of them, who seem’d in sight To be the greatest, and the grauest wight, To her bespake; Sir Knight it seemes to me, That thorough euill rest of this last night, Or ill apayd, or much dismayd ye be, That by your change of cheare is easie for to see. 19 Certes (said she) sith ye so well haue spide The troublous passion of my pensiue mind, I will not seeke the same from you to hide, But will my cares vnfolde, in hope to find Your aide, to guide me out of errour blind. Say on (quoth he) the secret of your hart: For by the holy vow, which me doth bind, I am adiur’d, best counsell to impart To all, that shall require my comfort in their smart. 20 Then gan she to declare the whole discourse Of all that vision, which to her appeard, As well as to her minde it had recourse. All which when he vnto the end had heard, Like to a weake faint-hearted man he fared, Through great astonishment of that strange sight; And with long locks vp-standing, stiffly stared Like one adawed with some dreadful spright. 128 So fild with heauenly fury, thus he her behight. 21 Magnificke Virgin, that in queint disguise Of British armes doest maske thy royall blood, So to pursue a perillious emprize, How coulst thou weene, through that disguised hood, To hide thy state from being understood? Can from th’immortal Gods ought hidden bee? They doe thy linage, and thy Lordly brood; They doe thy sire, lamenting sore for thee; They doe thy loue, forlorne in womens thraldome see. 22 The end whereof, and all the long event, They do to thee in this same dream discouer. For that same Crocodile doth represent The righteous Knight, that is thy faithfull louer, Like to Osyris in all iust endeuer. For that same Crocodile Osyris is, That vnder Isis feete doth sleepe for euer: To shew that clemence oft in things amis, Restraines those sterne behests, and cruell doomes of his. 23 That Knight shall all the troublous stormes asswage, And raging flames, that many foes shall reare, To hinder thee from the iust heritage Of thy sires Crowne, and from thy countrey deare. Then shalt thou take him to thy loued fere, And ioyne in equall portion of thy realme: And afterwards a sonne to him shalt beare, That Lion-like shall shew his powre extreame. So blesse thee God, and giue thee ioyance of thy dreame. This ‘Lion-like’ boy is no other than Southampton. What Spenser is telling the Queen in 1596, when these verses were published, is nothing else but a petition, a request to the Queen not to hide her lineage, not to hide her motherhood from her subjects, for her children were her ‘lineage and Lordly brood.’ Kent Lehnhoff tries to explain the incest theme of Britomart-Elizabeth I in this way: 37 37 Kent R. Lehnhof, “Britomart and the Birth of the British Empire in Edmund Spenser ’s The Faerie Queene,” in (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories Through the Maternal Body, ed. Lisa Bernstein (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 12-22. 129 As the mother of the eventual English nation, much is at stake in the representation of Britomart’s maternity, yet Spenser characterizes it in oddly incestuous terms. By way of allusions to Myrrha, Byblis, Pasiphae, and Isis, Spenser subtly yet insistently link Britomart to mythological mothers who procreate with their own fathers, brothers, or sons. This essay accounts for the unconventional commingling of chastity, maternity, and incest in The Faerie Queene by situating the poem within the colonial context in which it was written. I assert that Spenser’s experiences as an Elizabethan administrator in Ireland produce within him an intense fear of miscegenation that, in turn, prompts him to imaginatively embrace incest as a means of warding off foreign invasion and contamination. In Spenser’s allegory, the endogamous mother comes to embody national and racial purity. Although an ingenious interpretation, what Lehnhoff writes later on is better: The significance that Firth and Pitt-Rivers attribute to incest, however, depends upon its illicitness. Such an approach seems to fall short of its multivalent meaning in The Faerie Queene, for incest in Spenser’s epic is not always a perversion in need of excuse. Frequently, maternal incest is associated with divinity. The goddess Isis, for instance, is enthroned in a sacred temple where a steady stream of disciples do her devotion. Similarly, the figure presiding over the seminary of life in Spenser’s Book 3 cosmogony is none other than Adonis, the son of the incestuous Myrrha. Seemingly, Adonis’s illicit origins do not impair but actually augment his ability to oversee the birth of all being as ‘the Father of all formes’ (3.6.47). Given the honor allotted to incest here and elsewhere in the epic, it would appear that Britomart’s confused motherhood is more than an abomination allowable only because her social status exempts her from near-universal injunctions against coupling with blood relations. This is what we see as well in Venus and Adonis. The work starts when the purple sun is being chased by young Adonis. The young prince, who is riding to hunt, is halted by Venus, the ‘sick-thoughted’ Venus, who tells him to govern his horse and to stay with her, for if he does ‘a thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.’ But the prince does not fall in the trap of the secrets he is promised if he stops his horse, so the goddess of love, not used to be denied anything, in an attack of desire, jumps on him, brings him down to the ground and hugs him violently, forcing him to stay still or, otherwise, Venus threatens him, ‘thy lips shall never open.’ She has tried to bribe him before; now she threatens him with death if he leaves her alone. This is the opening of the poem and it cannot be more 130 satirical and baleful. The boy sheds some powerless tears for this humiliation, kicks, tells her that ‘she is immodest, blames her miss/ What follows more she murders with a kiss.’ Next the poet gives us a simile for the sexual harassment that happens rapidly (ll. 55-60): Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast, Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone, Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste, Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone; Even so she kiss’d his brow, his cheek, his chin, And where she ends she doth anew begin. He is crying and kicking under her, and she tells him that everything will be over if he gives her a kiss. The boy raises his head, but he hides it again disgusted. She tells him that she is not old, nor ugly, that she does not have wrinkles, that the god Mars desired her with passion, so why doesn’t he? She tells him that he does not have to worry about anyone seeing them playing like that (ll. 124-6): Be bold to play, our sport is not in sight: These blue-vein’d violets whereon we lean Never can blab, nor know not what we mean. The blue veins refer to both characters’ blue blood. Do not worry, Venus seems to tell him, we are of blue blood and no one nor any courtier that sees us lying here playing as we do, would say anything about this. She continues with her rhetoric to convince him to give her his virginity for although he is an adolescent, he is already sufficiently prepared to make love to her (ll. 127-32): ‘The tender spring upon thy tempting lip Shows thee unripe, yet mayst thou well be tasted: Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not be wasted: Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime Rot and consume themselves in little time. The next resource she uses consists of explaining the best reasons that are given to princes of royal families in danger of disappearing, for Venus tells the young lad that he must give himself to her because that is the law, using the same verb ‘increase’ that the poet will use to convince his 131 son Southampton in his Sonnets of 1609 to procreate and have descendants so that the ‘Beauty’s Rose’ (capitalized and in italics in Q 1609), the Rose of the House of Tudor, ‘might never die.’ Venus says to the young Adonis (ll. 171-4): Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed, Unless the earth with thy increase be fed? By law of nature thou art bound to breed, That thine may live when thou thyself art dead; And so in spite of death thou dost survive, In that thy likeness still is left alive.’ Adonis says no. She appeals then to his piety, to have pity for her; the young prince pushes her away from him and tries to run, but his horse has seen a mare and runs away to copulate with it, which he does in a description of animal desire that functions as an erotic comparison for Venus’ sexual passion (depredation, violation) with Adonis that occurs afterwards. When he is running away, she makes believe she is fainting. He is frightened and tries to revive her; he kisses her. She then wakes up and asks for more, much more than that kiss. He begs her as a son would beg his maddened mother (ll. 523-5): ‘Fair queen,’ quoth he, ‘if any love you owe me, Measure my strangeness with my unripe years: Before I know myself, seek not to know me The night falls, the sun has disappeared and Adonis does not have his horse to run away, therefore she embraces him again, and tells him to kiss her goodbye, to give her a goodnight kiss. Adonis has no other choice and kisses her. The rape of Adonis happens now. She breaches his confidence and his youth (ll. 559-63): Hot, faint, and weary, with her hard embracing, Like a wild bird being tam’d with too much handling... He now obeys, and now no more resisteth, While she takes all she can, not all she listeth. Satisfied at last, she lets Adonis go, but as he departs she asks him when they will see each other again. The young prince says that the following day he is going boar hunting. Venus is horrified and tells him how dangerous that can be. Adonis tells her to let him go, that she, the queen of love, does not have to talk to him about love, nor give him any 132 advice, for she does not know what love means, for she only knows about lust. The young Adonis departs only to be killed later by a boar in the woods of Diana (the public, virgin image of Queen Elizabeth), this fact alluding (as Beauclerk revealed in 2010) to the myth of Actaeon. Surprisingly, though, Adonis’ blood is transformed into a purple flower, which Venus will take with her far away so that nobody sees her or her baby. Britomart and Venus are the same woman, hiding her pregnancy and her children, her lineage, from her country: she is the virgin Queen, the false Cressida, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I. At the end of the poem we see an incredibly political and subversive emblem: the poet describes how Venus puts her flower on her breast and says these thunderous words, while she runs away so as not to be seen and give birth in secret (ll. 1183-1194): Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast; Thou art the next of blood, and ’tis thy right... Thus weary of the world, away she hies, And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid Their mistress, mounted, through the empty skies In her light chariot quickly is convey’d; Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen Means to immure herself and not be seen. This incestuous relationship will be recreated again by our poet years later. Changing colour like a chameleon, our poet will sign the work Planetomachia as Robert Greene and will dedicate it to the Earl of Leicester, his archenemy Robert Dudley, the first and great lover of the Queen, king Claudius in Hamlet. Why would he dedicate precisely that work to his enemy? If we read it, we will see that the first story that Greene describes is about Saturnine spirits, who are evil and vile. Dudley’s fame already preceded him in 1585, the year this work was published: his favourite modus operandi was poisoning; it was a secret and effective method, as suffered by our poet’s official father. Planetomachia is very important for our issue because it describes the same incest between mother and son that we have seen in Venus and Adonis. In “Saturn’s Tragedy”, the book’s second story, Robert Greene mask describes how a king married a courtesan named Rhodope, and how this courtesan ends up falling in love with the king’s son. Greene writes: In the city of Memphis … dwelled an infamous strumpet called Rhodope, descended of good parentage … but her outward hue was so spotted with inward vice … This Rhodope, racking her honesty to maintain her pomp and pride, forgetting shame and conscience (two 133 virtues long since exiled from Venus’ court), set her body to sale, and in the prime of her years became a professed courtesan. The king, in love with his Rhodope, says that ‘Rhodope is worthy to be a queen, and I say that none in Egypt dare gainsay: she shall be a queen.’ Then the king’s son Philarkes (which literally means the one who loves the lark, that is, poetry and music) attracts the Queen’s attention. We read from Robert Greene’s euphuistic, courtly and Ovidian prose: It fortuned that on a day as Rhodope looked out of her chamberwindow she espied young Philarkes playing at the barriers with diverse noblemen his companions, wherein he behaved himself so valiantly as he showed that he was far superior to them all in courage and valour. Rhodope, commending in her mind both his prowess and perfection, began to be tickled with a more than accustomed affection towards him … Further, the impossibility of obtaining such incestuous love was a means to persuade her from such lascivious thoughts. But she whom Venus had blinded with shameless affection cared not for these considerations, but followed her own forward will, seeking not to repress her lust, but how to enjoy her love, so that she began to show Philarkes more than accustomed favours, painting her beauty out with fresh colours, & seeking to entrap the young prince with alluring flatteries and amorous glances. Philarkes, whose young years were apt for love, began more narrowly to mark the beauty of Rhodope than he had done before, seeing her singular perfection to be such, and her beauty to be so rare, that she stained not only all the ladies in Egypt, but as he thought in all the world, resembling rather a heavenly nymph than a mortal creature … These sparks of affections grew by time to a great flame, so that he began not only to like but to lust after Rhodope, which he sought to repress with these reasons. First he persuaded himself that incestuous adultery was a sin so repugnant to nature as the very brute beasts did abhor the committing of such a fact, and that it was so odious both to the gods and men as it were better to commit either sacrilege or murder, but these thoughts could not quench that which injurious Venus had once set on fire, for he felt his mind so passionate with the beauty of his mother-in-law as no counsel might appease his malady, yet nature and virtue so much prevailed that he chose rather to die than to consent unto such unnatural disloyalty; his grief so increased by concealing his disordinate fancies that he fell into a dangerous sickness, having his head so weakened with continual care and irksome passions that he was almost brought into a frenzy. [The King] seeing his son thus perplexed, sent for the most learned physicians in all Egypt, but neither could they conjecture his disease, nor redress his malady 134 One day Queen Rhodope enters the chambers of her stepson Philarkes: Philarkes no sooner saw Rhodope but he start up in his bed … sitting therefore down upon his bed, taking him by the hand, she entreated him with sugared speech & amorous persuasions to unfold the cause of his sickness, promising not only to conceal it, were it never so secret, but to redress it if it lay in her power, were it never so dangerous. Philarkes hearing Rhodope utter these unfeigned protestations hoped that he might have some success in his suit, but shame of his unlawful request enjoined him a long time to silence, till at last, affections banishing fear, with bashful face and blubbering tears he revealed unto her the cause of his sorrow, how her beauty had so enchanted his mind and bewitched his senses that unless her consent were a conserve to cure his care, there were no means to free him from his passions but death … she agreed as soon as place and time would serve to fulfil his request. Philarkes, sealing up the bargain with a few sweet kisses, rested content with this desired consent, and in short time recovered his former health … The King, being gone on progress, left the queen at home, as he thought, half sick (for what cannot women feign to fulfil their fancies), and commanded his son Philarkes to bear her company until his returning, not thinking to repair to Memphis till a month were fully expired. [The King] being gone, the two lovers floated in bliss, having such fit opportunities for the fruition of their loves as they could wish or imagine. But the king, doting on the beauty of his young wife, had not been absent ten days but that he took post-horse and rode very secretly and speedily to Memphis, where being arrived, passing in at the postern gate only accompanied with Zorastes his chamberlain, he found Rhodope and Philarkes in bed together fast on sleep. Which strange & unnatural sight so daunted the old king as, a quaking cold possessing his limbs, he stood trembling for the horror of such a brutish fact till his chilling fear turning into a flaming choler, he fell almost into a raging frenzy, yet he somewhat appeased his fury till he had sent for two or three of his noblemen which he had left at the court to be attendant in his absence upon the queen, that they might be witnesses of this unnatural incest. They were no sooner come but with raging threats he wakened the two hapless lovers out of their sweet slumber, who, seeing [the King] and the noblemen standing by as beholders of their villainous adultery, were so amazed as they could not utter one word. The king, disdaining to debate of the matter with these vild wretches, pulling forth his armingsword, at two strokes dispatched them both, a punishment too good for such a heinous offence, and a death not sharp enough for such incestuous traitors. [The King] had no sooner finished this tragical stratagem, but 135 ashamed at his own doting folly, and sorrowful that his son had so far transgressed the law of nature, went presently into his study, and there finding a vial of poison to release himself from ensuing miseries, ended his days with that deadly confection. The reader should have realised that this author describes the real events between de Vere and his mother the Queen exactly as they seemed to have happened after her son’s spectacular performance in the tournament of 1571. If we have any doubts, and it is natural that we do have this doubt, we read in Henry VI, part I that the virgin St. Joan of Arc, like the virgin Queen, is addressed in these terms (I.vi): Charles Divinest creature, Astrea’s daughter... Thy promises are like Adonis’ garden... ’Tis Joan, not we, by whom the day is won... A statelier pyramid to her I’ll rear Than Rhodope’s of Memphis’ ever was... No longer on Saint Denis will we cry, But Joan la Pucelle shall be France’s saint. Come in, and let us banquet royally, After this golden day of victory. That the virgin Joan of Arc is the representation of Queen Elizabeth I is confirmed when, at the end of Henry VI, part I, we read from Joan of Arc’s lips (V.iv): ‘It was Alençon that enjoyed my love,’ which points to the Queen’s famous flirtation with the Duke of Alençon during the late 1570s and early 1580s. Regarding Venus’ last words in Venus and Adonis, to return to that great poem, when the queen of love Venus ends the poem taking the flower (her son) with her to Paphos to hide him and not be seen, Beauclerk comments that ‘the idea of the virgin queen giving birth incognito would not have been lost on Shakespeare’s court readers, who would have interpreted the poem as the revelation of a dynastic secret.’38 And he adds: 38 As Georgia Brown writes in Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 176, note 18): ‘The association between the epyllion and elitism is established by Shakespeare. Compared to the mixed audiences of the plays, Venus and Adonis offered a very different mode of address, one which could access exclusive social and intellectual circles. The poem was also, of course, dedicated to an earl. According to the university wits, in The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, ed. Leishman, ll. 1030–3, Shakespeare succeeded in climbing the social ladder through Venus and Adonis, a text which the wits consistently identify with the court. 136 Some historians have suggested that Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Oxford, at the height of their amorous involvement, pledged themselves to each other before the most senior priest in the land, Elizabeth’s old friend and mentor Archbishop Matthew Parker … Indeed, the queen made three visits to Parker at Lambeth Palace and Croydon between January 1573 and March 1574, and she was accompanied by Oxford on each occasion. Parker had been chaplain to Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, who had entrusted her infant daughter to his spiritual care before being arrested in 1536. If anyone knew the origins and secret life of Elizabeth, it was the queen’s confessor … Surprisingly little is known of the queen’s movements from autumn 1573 to the end of her summer progress in 1574, but it sounds as though she was in something of a funk from May 1574, when she deferred yet another visit to Archbishop Parker, going instead to stay with Oxford at Havering-atte-Bower, a royal demesne since the time of Edward the Confessor, for whom it had served as a favorite retreat. A beautiful wooded sanctuary high above the Thames, Havering and its royal palace appear to have been leased or granted to Edward de Vere during the 1570s, possibly as a private getaway for the royal lovers. Even today it remains a deer-haunted oasis of green high above the suburban turmoil of Greater London. On this occasion we are told that the queen was ‘melancholy,’ perhaps on account of ‘some weighty causes of state’ (which are not named), and that she intended to remain at Havering until her summer progress to Bristol began … Her depression had not lifted, and it was reported that she and Oxford had been involved in a spat over a suit brought to her. Beauclerk continues: At the end of June she moved to Richmond in preparation for her progress to the West Country, which began on July 7. Just as she was departing, the court was rocked by the news that Oxford had fled to the Continent … It could be that the queen had given birth to Oxford’s child at Havering in late May or early June, and that in a sudden panic about the possible repercussions for her political security had gone back on her promise to acknowledge the child, deciding instead to place it with foster parents, whereupon Oxford had flown into a rage (hence the reported spat). Shakespeare’s Sonnet 33 refers to the birth of the child, and Elizabeth’s change of mind: Even so my Sun one early morn did shine With all-triumphant splendour on my brow; But, out, alack, he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath masked him from me now. 137 ‘Sun’ and ‘son’, as well as ‘region’ and ‘regina’ do not leave room for much doubt. About our poet’s ‘masked Sun’ Beauclerk says: As it happened, Oxford lost out—at least to begin with—and the child was placed with the Southamptons … Southampton’s indefatigable biographer Charlotte Stopes confessed that she had been able to find ‘only two manuscript references to the Wriothesley baby (i.e., the 3 rd Earl) during his whole childhood.’ Just as the 16th Earl of Oxford had conveniently died in his early forties in 1562, so that Burghley could take control of the royal changeling, the 2nd Earl of Southampton suffered the same fate in 1581, aged thirty-six. The death of fathers was indeed a ‘common theme,’ as Claudius reminds Hamlet with perfect sangfroid. In the poem “Verses Ascribed to Queen Elizabeth,” we read: Verses Ascribed to Queen Elizabeth When I was fair and young then favour graced me; Of many was I sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all, and answered them therefore, Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere, Importune me no more... Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy, And said, you dainty dame, since that you be so coy, I will so pluck your plumes that you shall say no more Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere, Importune me no more. When he had spake these words such change grew in my breast, That neither night nor day I could take any rest Then lo! I did repent, that I had said before Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere, Importune me no more. E. of O. The Ogburns give us this valuable insight: In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Silvia-Elizabeth says to Proteus, who represents the unruly side of Oxford (which made him forsake his wife): Therefore be gone, solicit me no more (V.4.40.) Now, it will be noted that the poem quoted above is entitled, Verses 138 Ascribed to Queen Elizabeth; yet it is signed with the initials, E. of O. And here we have an exact duplicate of an incident in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (II. 1.108 et seq.), where Valentine-Oxford has written a love-letter for Silvia-Elizabeth to a ‘secret nameless friend of yours,’ not realizing that she had intended the letter for himself. She thanks him, saying it is ‘very clerkly done.’ And Speed, Valentine’s servant, cries: O excellent device! was there ever heard a better? adding presently (150): Why, she woos you by a figure. Valentine What figure? Speed By a letter, I should say. Since the only ‘figure’ in Arabic numerals which is also a ‘letter’ is O, the implication is plain enough, even without the many Vere clues scattered throughout the scene. Valentin Why, she hath not write to me? Speed What need she, when she hath made you write to yourself? precisely as the flirtatious the Queen had made Oxford do in the verses just quoted … This play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, has enormous significance for the present question … It is in fact so pointed and so personal that it was never published until the First Folio appeared. The affair between Oxford and the Queen was so evident that Mary Stuart Queen of Scots wrote to her cousin Elizabeth in reproach: ‘Even the Earl of Oxford dared not reconcile himself with his wife scared of losing the favour which he hoped to receive by courting you.’ The Ogburns continue informing us: The record shows that in her progress of July 1572, the Queen visited Lord Oxford at Havering of the Bowre … The ancient seat is described as follows: ‘This charming spot … commands a beautiful and extensive prospect over a great part of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey, with a view of the Thames, and ships continually passing … Havering Bowre was an ancient retiring place of our Saxon kings, particularly … Edward the Confessor ... When Queen Elizabeth was here in 1572 it was the property of her Lord High Chamberlain, Edward de Vere, whose first lady was Anne, daughter of the great Burghley...’ The Rev. Severne A. Majendie, in his Account of the Family of the de Veres … speaks of Elizabeth’s visit in 1572 to Havering Bowre, the 139 property of the Earl of Oxford, ‘who doubtless entertained his Queen magnificently.’ During this same year, Gilbert Talbot wrote his father, the Earl of Shrewsbury: ‘My Lord of Oxford is lately grown into great credit, for the Queen’s Majesty delighteth more in his personage and his dancing and his valiantness than any other … My Lady Burghley unwisely hath declared herself, as it were, jealous, which hath come to the Queen’s ear, whereat she hath been not a little offended with her.’ Poole, of Newgate, remarked that ‘The Queen made love to the Earl of Oxford.’ In January 1573, when Oxford accompanied the Queen in a visit to the Archbishop at Lambeth, they stayed there all night. The Ogburns go on: Another visit by Nichols in the summer of 1573, during the progress to Kent, but who was with her at this time is not stated. Ward notes that, in March 1574, the Earl of Oxford accompanied the Queen on a visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nichols records this visit she paid the Archbishop on March 2, 1574, attended by members of the court, but he says nothing about the Earl of Oxford’s being with her. It is glaringly evident that the documents which provide Nichols’ sources have been edited, with Burghley played up and Oxford blotted, if not blotted out. This is, of course, an event which Burghely would have wished deleted from the record. In May 1574, elaborate preparations were made for a second visit by the Queen to Archbishop Parker, but it was deferred. Nevertheless, in May 1574, the Queen paid another visit to the Earl of Oxford at Havering. Gilbert Talbot writes his father, Lord Shrewsbury, on May 10: ‘The Queen’s Matie goeth Saturday cum se’night to Havering of the Bower, and there remaineth tyle she begins her Progress to Bristo[l]; the gets be not drauen, but she is determined for certain to go to Bristo[l].’ In Nichols’ Progresses the following notation appears for May 1574: ‘But the Queen was now melancholy and so had been for many days; occasioned by some weighty causes of state; and how to interpret the same was uncertain.’ On the 24th of this same month, Gilbert Talbot again writes to Lord Shrewsbury: ‘There is some talk of a Progress to Bristol; but by reason of the unseasonableness of the yeare, there is great means for her not going 140 on so long a Progress; but her Majesty’s great desire is to go to Bristol...’ The Ogburns continue: There is no mention of when the Queen left Havering. Lord Talbot writes again, before the end of May, that she ‘passed six days in retirement at Havering, and was meditating a longer progress.’ But we have no further information as to where she was between the latter part of May and the 28th of June. Since the Queen was ‘determined for certain to go to Bristol’ in May 1574, she may have gone there. She had been there before and would go soon again. Bristol is not far from Bath. Also it is in the ‘west.’ In A [Midsummer Night’s] Dream, Cupid took a certain aim At a fair vestal throned by the west. And they quote these verses from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.i.157-68): But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon; And the imperial vot’ress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell. It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, And maidens call it Love-in-idleness. As the Ogburns point out, this ‘western flower’ is the one born from Adonis’ blood that we see in Venus and Adonis. It was Henry Wriothesley (pronounced ‘Roseley’), the ‘beauty’s Rose’ (or Tudor Rose) of the Sonnets. As Whittemore remarks, sonnets 153 and 154 are related to the visit Oxford paid the Queen at Bath. As we see in the last sonnet, number 154, ‘the fairest votary’ is, of course, the ‘imperial votaress’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Ogburns do not stop here. They tell us more: On June 28, 1574, young Talbot wrote his mother, Lady Shrewsbury: ‘Her Matie styrred litell abrode, and since the stay of the Navy to sea, here hath been all things very quieat.’ Upon this mention of ‘the sea,’ and recalling the description of the 141 view from Havering of ‘the Thames and ships continually passing,’ we return to the passage from The Dream in which Titania—originally called ‘the Queen’—speaks of the little changeling boy as the child of ‘a votaress of my order,’ whom we take to be the personal aspect of the sovereign Elizabeth Now the Ogburns offer us some revealing parallels between what occurred that summer and the works of Shakespeare; in particular, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the first play we read these words of Titania, or ‘the Queen’ (II.i.122-37): The fairy land buys not the child of me. His mother was a vot’ress of my order; And, in the spiced Indian air, by night, Full often hath she gossip’d by my side; And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood; When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive, And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Following -her womb then rich with my young squire Would imitate, and sail upon the land... But she, being mortal, of that boy did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake I will not part with him. And from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, they select this passage (II.i. 43 ff.): Valentine But tell me, dost thou know my lady Silvia? Speed She that you gaze on so, as she sits at supper?... Valentine How esteem’st thou me? I account of her beauty. Speed You never saw her since she was deform’d. Valentine How long hath she been deform’d? Speed Ever since you lov’d her. Valentine I have lov’d her ever since I saw her, and still I see her beautiful. Speed If you love her, you cannot see her. Valentine Why? Speed Because Love is blind. O that you had mine eyes; or your own eyes had the lights they were wont to have 142 when you chid at Sir Proteus for going ungarter’d! Valentine What should I see then? Speed Your own present folly and her passing deformity As the Ogburns say, ‘there is no explanation in the play of any ‘deformity’ on the part of Silvia.’ And they add: So we have Elizabeth at Havering, with a view of ‘ships continually passing,’ at the close of May 1574, and Talbot later writing that ‘since the stay of the Navy to sea, here hath been all thinges very quieat.’ Then Talbot writes Lord Shrewsbury, June 28, 1574: ‘The Queen remaineth sad and pensive in the month of June ... [It seemed] she was so troubled for some important matters then before her. It was thought she would go to Bristow [Bristol] … Mr. Hatton (not well in health) took his opportunity to get leave to go to the Spa, and Dr. Julio [the Queen’s court-physician] with him, whereat the Queen shewed herself very pensive, and very unwilling to grant him leave, for he was her favorite.’ Since this information came from Lord Talbot, the Queen’s apparent unwillingness to allow Hatton to go was … court gossip perhaps. No doubt Elizabeth, past-mistress of the art of dissimulation, feigned this very convincingly. But the fatuous Hatton would certainly never have left her side, had she really wished him to remain. Talbot’s letter to his father continues significantly: ‘As also that the Lord Treasurer Burghley intending to wait upon the Queen when she came to Woodstock, as she had appointed him, Secretary Walsingham signified to him, that he, with the Lord Keeper, should tarry at London; the cause whereof was unknown to the Lord Treasurer, but seemed to surprise him; but he said he would do as he was commanded. The Queen seemed apprehensive of some danger in her absence (which might give occasion to her melancholy), and therefore thought it advisable for these staid counsellors to remain behind.’ We believe the Queen’s child was born in June. The Queen had been ‘apprehensive’ and ‘melancholy’; she had sent both Hatton and the great court-physician, Dr. Julio, to the Continent; and she refused to see her chief ministers. Of course, one can scarcely expect to find a more definite record than this. The Queen’s visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury in March, 1574, with Lord Oxford, seems highly significant. She planned to go again in May but changed her mind. In those days a betrothal ceremony with an exchange of rings was as binding as a marriage. There is much 143 emphasis given in the plays to an exchange of rings between lovers, and a very clear statement made in certain unsigned poems which we take to be de Vere’s. Not to be overlooked are a pair of scenes from Twelfth Night which concern Olivia-Elizabeth and Sebastian. Naturally the dramatist was compelled to be indirect, but he has said that he and his son are one, and thus we read Oxford himself here for Sebastian, the time alluded to being the early 1570’s. The Ogburns quote these verses from Twelfth Night (IV.iii. 22-35 and V.i. 146-61): Enter Olivia and a Priest. Olivia Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well, Now go with me and with this holy man Into the chantry by; there, before him And underneath that consecrated roof, Plight me the fun assurance of your faith, That my most jealous and too doubtful soul May live at peace. He shall conceal it Whiles you are willing it shall come to note, What time we will our celebration keep According to my birth. What do you say? Sebastian I’ll follow this good man, and go with you; And, having sworn truth, ever will be true. Olivia Then lead the way, good father; and heavens so shine that they may fairly note this act of mine!... ….................….....O, welcome, father! Father, I charge thee, by thy reverence, Here to unfold –though lately we intended To keep in darkness what occasion now Reveals before ’tis ripe— what thou dost know Hath newly pass’d between this youth and me. Priest A contract of eternal bond of love, Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands, Attested by the holy close of lips, Strength’ned by interchangement of your rings; And all the ceremony of this compact Seal’d in my function, by my testimony. As the Ogburns tell us, it is very possible that this private marriage with an exchange of rings between the Queen and Oxford took place in 1571, as that would explain why our poet ran away the day of his wedding to Anne Cecil. The fact is that in 1574 Oxford ran away again, but this 144 time not to avoid marrying again: In his letter of June 28, 1574, Gilbert Talbot wrote his mother: ‘The young Earl of Oxford, of that ancient and Very family of the Veres, had a cause or suit, that now before the Queen; which she did not answer so favorably as was expected, checking him, it seems, for his unthriftiness. And hereupon his behaviours before her gave her some offence.’ Young Talbot is merely relaying court gossip. We do not know what the ‘cause or suit’ may have been about, if indeed there were any such matter. A notation in the State Papers dated July 8 (18?), 1574, says: ‘The Earl of Oxford departed into Flanders without the Q Licence, and was revoqued by the Q. sending the Gent. Pensioner for hym.’ Ambassador Killigrew at Edinburgh wrote Walsingham July 18: ‘My Lord of Oxford and Lord Seymour are fled out of England, and passed by Bruges to Brussels’ … (It is of special interest in this connection to recall that Leicester ran away in 1561, the year his son was said to have been born to the Queen … In less than two weeks Lord Oxford was at home again). For the Ogburns, as for Streitz, Beauclerk and Whittemore, among many others now, everything is pointing in a single direction: [T]he cause of the tempest would have been the ‘little changeling boy’ whom Oxford yearned to have her acknowledge and whom she had decided to bestow upon the Second Earl of Southampton, to pass for his child … She had resolved not to recognise the boy as her own, but calmly to pass on, ‘in maiden meditation, fancy free,’ maintaining the legend of her chastity. This is what Edmund Spenser says in Canto VII, Book V of The Faerie Queene. We will have ample time to see how Southampton draws closer to Shakespeare in the future, but we will end this section with a quote that shows how eager Oxford was to be given the shared custody of his son Southampton; and as this was denied to him, vengeance through Art became his personal goal, his literary weapon. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oxford asks the Queen to let him educate his son Southampton, as we read in these words (II.i.120-182): Oberon ...Why should Titania cross her Oberon? 145 I do but beg a little changeling boy To be my henchman... Give me that boy I will go with thee. Titania Not for thy fairy kingdom. Fairies, away... Oberon Well, go thy way; thou shalt not from this grove Till I torment thee for this injury... Having once this juice, I’ll watch Titania when she is asleep, And drop the liquor of it in her eyes Scene III. De Consolatione of the Courtier Let us go back in time now. The year 1572 is a very important one for Shakespeare’s mask because Edward de Vere financed and ordered the publication of the Latin translation of Baltasar Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (The Courtier). However, not happy with breaking the social norms by putting all his titles in the introductory letter, which meant mixing aristocracy with books, he also saw fit to say that the norms of The Courtier described, as no one had done until that time, how princes should behave. On top of that, he even stated, as written by a bastard prince to his mother the Queen, that the The Courtier ‘has been able to lay down principles for the guidance of the very Monarch himself.’ I quote from Ogburn this excellent passage: In an introductory note to the Everyman edition of The Courtier, Drayton Henderson goes so far as to venture to say, if a trifle hyperbolically, that without Castiglione we should not have Hamlet. The ideal of the courtier, scholar, soldier developed first in Italy, and perfected in the narrative of Il Cortegiano, was Castiglione’s gift to the world … Hamlet is the high exemplar of it in our literature. Hamlet, Mr Henderson goes on to say, was ‘the Courtier, he was the Prince’. He shows, one by one, how Hamlet fulfilled Castiglione’s qualifications, concluding with that ‘certain recklessness’ or nonchalance which is Castiglione’s hallmark of gentility. But it is not only Shakespeare’s Hamlet that seems to follow Castiglione. Shakespeare himself does. On The Courtier by Baltasar Castiglione, Hank Whittemore writes: 146 ‘Shakespeare may have read Castiglione in Italian,’ Charles Boyce writes in Shakespeare A to Z (1990)—a fairly amazing statement from one who supposedly believes the author was William Shakspere of Stratford upon Avon, who was unlikely to have been able to read works in Italian … Drayton Henderson wrote a book in 1934 with a title that directly declared its theme: Hamlet as a Castiglionean Courtier The introductory letter to The Courtier written by Edward de Vere in Latin says:39 Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain of England, Viscount Bulbeck and Baron Scales and Badlesmere to the Reader— Greeting A frequent and earnest consideration of the translation of Castiglione’s Italian work, which has now for a long time been undertaken and finally carried out by my friend Clerke, has caused me to waver between two opinions: debating in my mind whether I should preface it by some writing and letter of my own, or whether I should do no more than study it with a mind full of gratitude. The first course seemed to demand greater skill and art than I can lay claim to, the second to be a work of no less good-will and application. To do both, however, seemed to combine a task of delightful industry with an indication of special good-will. I have therefore undertaken the work, and I do so the more willingly in order that I may lay a laurel wreath of my own on the translation in which I have studied this book, and also to ensure that neither my good-will (which is very great) should remain unexpressed, nor that my skill (which is small) should seem to fear to face the light and the eyes of men. It is no more than its due that praises of every kind should be rendered to this work descriptive of a Courtier. It is indeed every way right, and one may say almost inevitable, that with the highest and greatest praises I should address both the author and the translator, and even more the great patroness of so great a work, whose name alone on the title-page gives it a right majestic and honorable introduction. For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for us the figure and model of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we 39 I use the translation of http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/vere106.htm. 147 shall recognise as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so, although nature herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet the manners of men exceed in dignity that with which nature has endowed them; and he who surpasses others has here surpassed himself and has even out-done nature, which by no one has ever been surpassed. Nay more: however elaborate the ceremonial, whatever the magnificence of the court, the splendor of the courtiers, and the multitude of spectators, he has been able to lay down principles for the guidance of the very Monarch himself. Again, Castiglione has vividly depicted more and even greater things than these. For who has spoken of princes with greater gravity? Who has discoursed of illustrious women with a more ample dignity? No one has written of military affairs more eloquently, more aptly about horse-racing, and more clearly and admirably about encounters under arms on the field of battle. I will say nothing of the fitness and the excellence with which he has depicted the beauty of chivalry in the noblest persons. Nor will I refer to his delineations in the case of those persons who cannot be courtiers, when he alludes to some notable defect or to some ridiculous character, or to some deformity of appearance. Whatever is heard in the mouths of men in casual talk and in society, whether apt and candid or villainous and shameful, that he has set down in so natural a manner that it seems to be acted before our very eyes. Again, to the credit of the translator of so great a work, a writer too who is no mean orator, must be added a new glory of language. For although Latin has come down to us from the ancient city of Rome, a city in which the study of eloquence flourished exceedingly, it has now given back its features for use in modern courts as a polished language of an excellent temper, fitted out with royal pomp and possessing admirable dignity. All this my good friend Clerke has done, combining exceptional genius with wonderful eloquence. For he has resuscitated that dormant quality of fluent discourse. He has recalled those ornaments and lights which he had laid aside, for use in connection with subjects most worthy of them. For this reason he deserves all the more honor, because that to great subjects –and they are indeed great– he has applied the greatest lights and ornaments. For who is clearer in his use of words? Or richer in the dignity of his sentences? Or who can conform to the variety of circumstances with greater art? If weighty matters are under consideration, he unfolds his theme in a solemn and majestic rhythm; if the subject is familiar and facetious, he makes use of words that are witty and amusing. When therefore he writes with precise and well-chosen words, with skillfully constructed and crystal-clear sentences, and with every art of dignified rhetoric, it cannot be but that some noble quality should be felt to proceed from his work. To me indeed it seems, when I read this 148 courtly Latin, that I am listening to Crassus, Antonius and Hortensius, discoursing on this very theme. And, great as all these qualities are, our translator has wisely added one single surpassing title of distinction to recommend his work. For indeed, what more effective action could he have taken to make his work fruitful of good results than to dedicate his Courtier to our most illustrious and noble Queen, in whom all courtly qualities are personified, together with those diviner and truly celestial virtues? For there is no pen so skillful or powerful, no kind of speech so clear, that is not left behind by her own surpassing virtue. It was therefore an excellent display of wisdom on the part of our translator to seek out as a patroness of his work one who was of surpassing virtue, of wisest mind, of soundest religion, and cultivated in the highest degree in learning and literary studies. Lastly, if the noblest attributes of the wisest princes, the safest protection of a flourishing commonwealth, the greatest qualities of the best citizens, by her own merit and in the opinion of all, continually encompass her around; surely to obtain the protection of that authority, to strengthen it with gifts, and to mark it with the superscription of her name, is a work which, while worthy of all monarchs, is most worthy of our own Queen, to whom alone is due all the praise of all the muses and all the glory of literature. Given at the Royal Court on the 5th of January 1571 [1572, modern calendar]. In 1573 our poet financed another English translation, this time it was De Consolatione or Cardanus Comforte, written by the Italian physician, mathematician, philosopher and astrologer Gerolamo Cardano. The introductory letter written in English by our poet says: To my loving friend Thomas Bedingfield Esquire, one of Her Majesty’s gentlemen pensioners. After I had perused your letters, good Master Bedingfield, finding in them your request far differing from the desert of your labour, I could not choose but greatly doubt whether it were better for me to yield you your desire, or excuse mine own intention towards the publishing of your book. For I do confess the affections that I have always borne towards you could not move me not a little. But when I had thoroughly considered in my mind of sundry and divers arguments, whether it were best to obey mine affections or the merits of your studies, at the length I determined it better to deny your unlawful request than to grant or condescend to the concealment of so worthy a work. Whereby as you have been profited in the translating, so many 149 may reap knowledge by the reading of the same, that shall comfort the afflicted, confirm the doubtful, encourage the coward, and lift up the base-minded man, to achieve to any true sum or grade, whereto ought only the noble thoughts of men to be inclined. And because next to the sacred letters of divinity, nothing doth persuade the same more than philosophy, of which your book is plentifully stored, I thought myself to commit an unpardonable error, to have murdered the same in the waste bottoms of my chests; and better I thought it were to displease one, than to displease many: further considering so little a trifle cannot procure so great a breach of our amity, as may not with a little persuasion of reason be repaired again. And herein I am forced like a good and politic captain oftentimes to spoil and burn the corn of his own country, lest his enemies thereof do take advantage. For rather than so many of your countrymen should be deluded through my sinister means of your industry in studies (whereof you are bound in conscience to yield them an account) I am content to make spoil and havoc of your request, and that, that might have wrought greatly in me in this former respect, utterly to be of no effect or operation: and when you examine yourself what doth avail a mass of gold to be continually imprisoned in your bags, and never to be employed to your use? I do not doubt even so you think of your studies and delightful Muses. What do they avail, if you do not participate them to others? Wherefore we have this Latin proverb: Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter.40 What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit unto another? What doth avail the vine unless another delighteth in the grape? What doth avail the rose unless another took pleasure in the smell? Why should this tree be accounted better than that tree, but for the goodness of his fruit? Why should this vine be better than that vine, unless it brought forth a better grape than the other? Why should this rose be better esteemed than that rose, unless in pleasantness of smell it far surpassed the other rose? 41 And so it is in all other things as well as in man. Why should this man be more esteemed than that man, but for his virtue, through which every man desireth to be accounted of? Then you amongst men I do not doubt, but will aspire to follow that virtuous path, to illuster yourself with the ornaments of virtue. And in mine opinion as it beautifieth a fair woman to be decked with pearls and precious stones, so much more it ornifieth a gentleman to be furnished in mind with glittering virtues. Wherefore considering the small harm I do to you, the great good I do 40 Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter: ‘Your knowledge is nothing, if nobody knows you have it.’ These words will be repeated in Measure for Measure by Antonio. 41 This example of Euphuism will be given in bulk in 1578 with Euphues and in 1580 with its sequel. 150 to others, I prefer mine own intention to discover your volume before your request to secret the same; wherein I may seem to you to play the part of the cunning and expert mediciner or physician, who, although his patient in the extremity of his burning fever is desirious of cold liquor or drink to qualify his sore thirst, or rather kill his languishing body, yet for the danger he doth evidently know by his science to ensue, denieth him the same. So you being sick of too much doubt in your own proceedings, through which infirmity you are desirous to bury and insevill your works in the grave of oblivion, yet I, knowing the discommodities that shall redound to yourself thereby (and which is more, unto your countrymen) as one that is willing to salve so great an inconvenience, am nothing dainty to deny your request. Again, we see if our friends be dead, we cannot show or declare our affection more than by erecting them of tombs; whereby when they be dead indeed, yet make we them live as it were again through their monument; but with me, behold, it happeneth far better, for in your lifetime I shall erect you such a monument, that as I say [in] your lifetime you shall see how noble a shadow of your virtuous life shall hereafter remain when you are dead and gone. And in your lifetime, again I say, I shall give you that monument and remembrance of your life, whereby I may declare my good will, though with your ill will as yet that I do bear you in your life. Thus earnestly desiring you in this one request of mine (as I would yield to you in a great many) not to repugn the setting forth of your own proper studies, I bid you farewell. From my new country muses at Wivenghole, wishing you as you have begun, to proceed in these virtuous actions. For when all things shall else forsake us, virtue yet will ever abide with us, and when our bodies fall into the bowels of the earth, yet that shall mount with our minds into the highest heavens. By your loving and assured friend, E. Oxenford. Edward de Vere, our Hamlet, wrote a poem at the end of this letter in which he expressed his complaint for what had been happening and would happen to him until his death: So he that takes the pain to pen the book Reaps not the gift of golden goodly muse But those gain that, who on the work shall look And from the sour, the sweet by skill doth choose. For he that beats the bush, the bird not gets, But who sits still—and holdeth fast the nets. 151 We must linger with this book by Cardano because many critics consider it Hamlet’s book. W.J. Ray writes:42 Hamlet also was De Vere the philosopher who corresponded with and visited Sturmius, one of the greats of that era. In Hamlet he asked all the right questions: what is death?; what is the physical realm?; what is the basis for the human soul?; when knowledge means nothing, is there anything more? Doubt thou the stars are fire? Doubt that the sun doth move? Doubt truth to be a liar? But never doubt I love (Hamlet, II, 2, 115-) His summing-up, much of it made available to England by his own sponsorship, starts with “Hamlet’s Book”, Cardanus Comforte, a key to understanding the play: ‘But if thou compare death to long travel … there is nothing that doth better or more truly prophecy the end of life, than when a man dreameth that he doth travel and wander into far countries and chiefly if he imagineth himself to ride upon a white horse that is swift, and that he traveleth in countries unknown without hope of return, in such sort naturally divining that [this] shortly will come to pass in deed.’ (Girolamo Cardano, Cardanus Comforte, Da Capa Press, Amsterdam/NY, 1969, p.27-;) ‘We are assured not only to sleep, but also to die.’ (Girolamo Cardano, Cardanus Comforte, Da Capa Press, Amsterdam/NY, 1969, p.27-;) ‘[It is the] dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns, [that] puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of.’ (Hamlet, III, 1, 79-) And Ray adds this comparison of Hamlet and De Consolatione: Similarly, where Cardanus says: ‘A man is nothing but his mind: if the mind be discontented the man be all disquiet though all the rest be well.’ Hamlet says: ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so … 42 See http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/hamlet.htm. 152 Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprise of great pitch and moment … turn awry and lose the name of action.’ (Hamlet: II, 2) Another Oxfordian, Roger Stritmatter, informs us: That a book of such profound imprint on Shakespeare should have been patronized to the extent that it was by Edward de Vere can only be regarded by orthodox critics as one of those unfortunate accidents that keep happening, almost on cue, to the tradition of the Stratford straw man. Alongside evidence such as Oxford’s role in the introduction of Bedingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comforte, the tautological premises sustaining the Stratford icon start to shake. Accordingly, Oxford’s role in introducing Cardanus Comforte into English culture is one of those great secrets routinely and conveniently overlooked by English professors dedicated to the Stratfordian world-view. The fact that a noble of such a high rank (no less, officially, than the Lord Great Chamberlain of England and bearer of the Sword of State) should have dared to break the social norms by putting his name in the heading of two books in 1572 and 1573 had repercussions for his honour. As the poet will say in the Sonnets, his hands were stained like the dyer’s, for he was a writer but should have behaved like other noblemen did: staying at Court and playing the sycophant for the Queen’s favors. For this reason, Edward de Vere’s nobility was marked and criticized by the other members of his class. In 1573, here was Shakespeare talking at the age of twenty-five (25). Now let us compare his words, as Thomas Looney suggested, with the ones he wrote to Southampton in 1593, when he was forty-five (45) years old. In the dedicatory epistle of Venus and Adonis we read: To the right Honourable Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, and Baron Tichfield. Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden: only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be 153 sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content; which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world’s hopeful expectation. Your honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare. You have the same courtesan sprezzatura (‘unpolished lines’, ‘idle hours’, ‘invention … deformed’) and the same euphuistic style, although tempered by time and age (‘so strong a prop to support so weak a burden’, ‘never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest’), with a final declaration of Southampton’s hopeful future as the next English monarch (‘the world’s hopeful expectation’). We are now in 1575, and the young prince poet wants to discover the world, leave the island, see, feel Italy in situ, the country where he had lived and travelled so many times in his books. He had studied with the best learned men in his country, translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated Euripides’ Greek tragedies into English, and defeated the best and more expert men in a tournament. He had been compared by some to David, observed by all and imitated by many, dethroned, hidden, had succumbed to the image of his own mother the Queen. Moreover, he had gone to war in the North, had a son, who was hidden, with his mother the Queen, as she had hidden him before, had escaped from the country, was ordered to come back, had laughed at the Queen and had criticized her “favourite” the vile Robert Dudley very harshly. Eager to go far away and escape from Cecil’s control, he wanted to go to Italy, to feel and experience the Renaissance. After asking the Queen’s authorisation for this trip on numerous occasions, at last he got the permission he wanted so badly from her. The Queen, seeing her son departing and going far away, could have said goodbye to him with these words the Countess pronounces at the start of All’s Well that Ends Well: ‘In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.’ Or perhaps the Queen could have reacted like the mother of Corolianus, the cold Volumnia who says to her daughter-in-law in relation with Corolianus’ absence from Rome (I.iii.2-4): Volumnia ...if my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour than in the embracements of his bed The reader should note that in Plutarch’s original story of Corolianus, Volumnia is not Corolianus’ mother, but his wife. This strange adaptation by Shakespeare should not be considered a flagrant error on the part of 154 the author. In February 1575, he left England and entered the Continent. Scene IV. Trip to the Continent and exile Thomas Looney remarks that ‘[t]he records give no indication as to how his time was spent in Italy. This could only be learnt accurately from himself, and as a large reserve and secretiveness in respect to his doings seem to have been characteristic of him throughout, we can only surmise what his occupation would be during the six months of his stay.’ Since Looney broke the hull of the Shakspere legend, the vessel has been doing nothing but sinking. Today we know much more about Edward de Vere’s itinerary through the Continent. One of the greatest blows to the Stratford legend has come from a recent book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, written by Richard Paul Roe. Stratfordians must have felt embarrassed and wished to hide it from public view, but the truth is already out and very much alive. From Dover, Edward de Vere went to Paris, where he received news that his wife, Anne, was pregnant. In a letter he sent from Europe in 1575 to his father-in-law, Lord Burghley, he wrote: ‘My Lord, your letters have made me a glad man … for now it hath pleased God to give me a son of my own (as I hope it is).’ The Ogburns remark: Is not this a rather curious expression, ‘a son of my own’? Would not most prospective young fathers merely say, “to give me a son”? The explanation might be that he already had a son who was not his own. Lord Oxford was not careless in his use of words. During his stay in Paris he had time to pose for a portrait, which he sent to his wife. Later on, from Paris he went to Strasbourg and from there, passing through Milan, to Venice, the city he made his operational centre, hence the reason for that detailed description of Venice in Othello that has shocked, for its accurate details, so many Stratfordian critics and so many people who think that if the man from Stratford did not travel further than London, his imagination was as exact and pointed as personal experience. Afterwards, our poet travelled along the Adriatic coast in a boat bound for Turkey. Anderson writes: Upon leaving Venetian waters, within its first forty-eight hours under sail, the galley would have passed along a thirty-five-mile stretch of Hungarian coastline, the seafaring end of a kingdom then ruled by Rudolf II, king of Bohemia. This Bohemian corridor was a mere finger of land squeezed between the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires. 155 And yet, between 1575 and 1609, the king of Bohemia and Hungary did in fact command a small parcel of seacoast. The Winter’s Tale acknowledges this little-known fact of Central European history by setting several scenes on the ‘seacoast of Bohemia’ (Critics dating back to the seventeenth-century dramatist Ben Jonson have harped on The Winter’s Tale’s Bohemian seacoast scenes as proof of Shake-speare’s general ignorance of continental Europe. But the critics are in error.) Anderson remarks that, notwithstanding the foregoing, we should not forget the possibility that in the play The Winter’s Tale Bohemia represents the Kingdom of England, which has, naturally, a coast. The fact is that the Venetian ships which went south and passed along the coast of Illyria ‘regularly restocked in Ragusa and gave their passengers and crew a few days of rest and relaxation.’ At that time Ragusa was considered ‘the mirror of Illyria and its greatest glory.’ Anderson continues: Unlike any other city on the Illyrian shores, in Ragusa de Vere would certainly have been safe to ‘beguile the time and feed his knowledge with viewing of the town...,’ seeing sights that ‘satisfied [the] eyes with the memorials and the things of fame that do renown this city’ and enjoying music that is the very ‘food of love.’ These quotes come from Twelfth Night, a play set in an unnamed Illyrian city … Two forgotten Croatian studies, published in 1957 and ’64, recognized Ragusa as the setting for this Shake-spearean comedy of families lost and fables untold. On his way back from on his diplomatic mission to Greece or Turkey (most probably to counteract Spain’s domination in the Mediterranean), de Vere reached Sicily. B.M. Ward points out that the scene of a ferry in John Lyly’s play Sapho and Phao (I.i) gives a detailed reference of the local geography of Sicily. Lyly, however, had never been in Sicily, but he could easily have inserted as much Sicilian local colour as he wanted thanks to his Master de Vere. Something unheard of happened in Palermo, by the way. Anderson informs us: Once in Palermo, ruled by a prince who loved the equestrian sport [i.e. Carlos of Aragón and Tagliavia], de Vere organized an impromptu tournament in the city to joust for the honor of Her Highness Queen Elizabeth. According to an undated English eyewitness testimony from Palermo: One thing did greatly comfort me which I saw long since in Sicily, in the city of Palermo, a thing worthy of memory: Where the right 156 honorable the earl of Oxenford—a famous man for chivalry at what time he travelled into foreign countries—being then personally present, made a challenge against all manner of persons whatsoever and at all manner of weapons as tournaments [and] barriers with horse and armor, to fight a combat with any whatsoever in the defence of his prince [Queen Elizabeth] and his country. For which he was very highly commended. And yet no man durst be so hardy to encounter with him, so that all Italy over, he is acknowledged the only chevalier and nobleman of England. This title they give unto him as worthily defended. Yes, this is Prince Arthur, the knight of England and the Tudors in The Faerie Queene. We know that during his travels through the Continent, our poet had been writing to William Cecil asking him to send him money to pay for his expenses, which involved the sale of great portions of his lands. Rosalind in As You Like It tells a melancholic Jaques (IV.i.15-18): Rosaline A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s; then, to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands. Jaques Yes, I have gained my experience. Oxford began his return to Paris and everything indicates that he passed through the Count of Roussillon’s castle. In the play All’s Well that Ends Well, ‘Shake-speare’s description of Roussillon is accurate—so long as he’s describing the castle, not the French province of the same name,’ Anderson writes; and he adds: ‘In Act 5 of All’s Well, for instance, the audience learns that Roussillon is ‘four or five’ overnight stops from the city of Marseilles—a fact that is true for the château but incorrect about the province.’ In 1576 Oxford returned to Paris and there he was informed by one of his servants of the exact date of the birth of his wife’s child, which showed that he could not be the real father. Beauclerk reports: Oxford left Paris for England in a rage.43 While he was crossing the Channel in mid-April, his ship was captured by pirates 44 and his goods 43 I do not understand yet why Oxford, if he had not slept with his wife, as he said himself, did not react like this when he knew of her pregnancy in Paris instead of writing that he hoped to have a ‘son of his own’. Was he pretending in his letter? Did he sleep with his wife after all? 44 The Dutch ‘Sea Beggars’ that were doing war against Spain in Flanders by controlling and blocking the Channel. 157 plundered. He was stripped to his shirt and ‘left naked’ on the shore … Hamlet, too, is overtaken by pirates on his way to England, and in his letter to Claudius refers to himself as having been ‘set naked on your kingdom.’ Hell-bent on a course that would separate him from his wife and baby daughter, and would leave him dangerously exposed at court, Oxford, in crossing the Channel, changed the course and tenor of his life, or at least experienced the nightmare that marked his entrance into a new, more intense phase of inner struggle. Claudius repeats the words ‘naked’ and ‘alone’ from Hamlet’s letter, and it was essentially naked and alone that Oxford was returning to the English court … Betrayed by Elizabeth, intrigued against by Burghley and his ilk, divorced in effect from his young wife, mistrusted by his contemporaries, heavily in debt, and with no political office or sinecure to sustain him, Oxford had only literature between himself and despair … When Hamlet returns to Elsinore after the pirates’ attack, he comes upon the funeral of Ophelia … The full significance of his jumping into her grave, it seems to me, has been missed, and can best be understood through this brief dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius in Act II: Polonius Will you walk out of the air, my lord? Hamlet Into my grave? Polonius Indeed, that’s out of the air. The pun on ‘air’ and ‘heir’ was common in Elizabethan literature. Walking “out of the heir” (i.e., surrendering his position as royal heir) is clearly a kind of death for Hamlet; hence the reference to his grave. Conversely, leaping into Ophelia’s grave marks his acknowledgement, deep down, that he can no longer succeed to the throne of Denmark. The odds are against him. He is, as it were, no longer in the air-heir, but a king of the underworld like his ghostly father. Oxford knew on his return from the Continent that whatever deal he and Elizabeth had made of was off. He too was out of the heir. Why? Read Polonius’ next words. The imagery is that of childbirth. Getting the queen pregnant may have been felicitous, but it was also madness. When Claudius asks Hamlet, ‘How is it that clouds still hang on you?’ the prince replies with a bawdy pun that would have set Elizabeth’s temples throbbing, ‘Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun,’ ‘sun’ being a common trope for the monarch. We know that George Chapman, the famous translator of The Iliad which John Keats so highly praised in his poem “On reading Chapman’s Homer,” met our poet returning from Italy, and such was his impression, that Chapman left these words written in his Hamletian play of 1613 The Revenge of Bussy d’ Ambois (III.i). See Timon’s aspect on his return from Italy: 158 I overtook coming, from Italy, In Germany, a great and famous Earl Of England, the most goodly fashion’d man I ever saw; from head to foot in form Rare and most absolute; he had a face Like one of the most ancient, honour’d Romans, From whence his noblest family was deriv’d; He was besides of spirit passing great, Valiant, and learn’d, and liberal as the sun, Spoke and writ sweetly, or of learned subjects, Or of the discipline of public weals; And ’twas the Earl of Oxford. When Chapman says that Oxford was ‘liberal as the sun,’ something tells us that this expression refers to monarchs or royal persons. Note how Chapman describes Edward de Vere’s external demeanor, his bearing, his way of acting, as ‘most absolute,’ that is, princely; in addition, when Chapman tells us that Oxford ‘spoke and writ sweetly,’ that expression fits with the description made by Francis Meres in 1598: ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.’ Rumours about his wife’s pregnancy at his arrival at the Court had transformed him into an object of mockery: he was the ‘cuckold’, the Othello of the kingdom. In January 1576 while he was checking the latest news on his daughter’s pregnancy, the Secretary of State William Cecil took advantage of this strange event to figure out his son-in-law’s, Oxford’s, age. Roger Stritmatter informs us: The document is Lord Burghley’s memorandum (January 3, 1576), taken on the instruction of the Queen’s own physician Richard Master … who requested that ‘there may a note be taken from the day of her [Anne Cecil’s] first day of quickening, for thereof somewhat may be known noteworthy.’ It is curious that in the midst of all this sound and fury about Anne’s own pregnancy, while trying to remember and make note of every time during the past six months when his daughter and her husband were lodged in the same household, to see if he could pin a paternity button on the husband, the Master of the Court of Wards should pause to recalculate the husband’s birthday. Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn tell us about Anne Cecil’s pregnancy: One of the features of the affair which had especially galled the Earl was the publicity it had received. He was a man of great personal 159 dignity. To have the courtiers, among whom he had for so long held first place, laughing at him as soon as his back was turned, calling him a cuckold, making the Elizabethan jest about his ‘wearing the horns’ of a deceived husband—this put him into a passion of fury … It becomes apparent in his letters and elsewhere that this was a humiliating, an intolerable, an unforgivable thing … He was the first earl of the realm, virtually a prince, and he would not suffer bungling fools or slanderous knaves to play fast and loose with his wife’s chastity and the Vere name. There was more than one ‘imperfection’ that ‘discontented’ him, he says. He felt he had put up with quite enough Cecilian deviousness. He was bitter, he was outraged, he was rebellious, and above all, young. In 1576 the work attributed to George Gascoigne, The Posies of George Gascoigne, was published, but in August of the same year ‘the Queen’s ministers called in all unsold copies of The Posies of George Gascoigne, putting an end to its future distribution.’ Ogburn adds here: ‘This would be but further evidence against the orthodox stand that the Posies was the authentic version and that Gascoigne was the author of the whole of [it].’ As we know thanks to Ward, Ogburn and others, Posies of 1576 was a corrected and augmented version of the work by our poet called A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, published in 1573. The work is full of love poems, and it contains what is considered to be the first novel in English literature, “The Adventures of Master F.J.,” and two plays attributed to Gascoigne known as Jocasta and The Supposes. For many critics there is no doubt that “The Adventures of Master F.J.” relates the stormy and passionate relationship between our poet and the Queen, who is constantly called Cressida. There are references like this one when a woman cries for the love of Ver: The lustie Ver which whilom might exchange My grief of joy, and then my joys increase, Springs now elsewhere Ogburn also points to this verse: ‘What plant can spring that feels no force of Ver?’ This is the same Ver that sings at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Posies opens with two poems; in the first one, the author explains that the book is full of pleasures and ditties; in the second one, he says this in the last two verses: I vow my verse, Apocrypha shalbe, In silence shutte, that none (but you) may see. 160 In addition to the many poems that are signed ‘Ever or Never’ (E.ver or N.E.ver) and point to our poet and his relationship to the false Cressida, the Queen, there are also poems of his student years in Gray’s Inn, as well as praise to Don John for the victory in Lepanto. ‘Don John of Austrye,’ we read, ‘held in his triumphant hand … the boldest Bassa then, that dyd in life remain,/ Gan tremble at the sight hereof, for privy grief and paine.’ Here you have the same interest as that of the author of The Jew of Malta back in the late 1560s. Every Shakespeare fan must read and underline the numerous passages of value in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (or Posies attributed to Gascoigne). It is Shakespeare in construction, in ascendant progress, forming his voice: the voice of a furious, hurt and disappointed poet for what had happened to him in 1569 and what had occurred in 1574 with his changeling son Henry, raised as the third Earl of Southampton; it is the voice of an energetic, bohemian, courtier and Petrarchan poet, fascinated by his own poetic power. In “The Adventures of Master F.J.”, considered the first novel of English literature, we have an example of how he used his heteronyms. When we open the book the first thing we can read are the printer’s words. He says that H.W. has done very well in declaring that he takes no responsibility for the narration of what is going to take place. On the first page the same printer tells us that another person, called G.T., also declares that he takes no responsibility for the content of the work and that he has even tried to prevent its publication. Even though we as readers, like the printer himself says, are aware that both H.W. and G.T. wanted to publish the book from the start, the important thing with this technique is that this kind of presentation increases the reader’s interest for the apparently “dangerous” or “scandalous” subject matter offered to us. Shana Marie Hirsh tells us that its ‘non-traditional style is one of the reasons for the success of the work.’45 Hirsh informs us about this introductory technique: The structure of this fictional narrative is unique-by both Renaissance and contemporary standards. The story is told through a series of correspondence in the forms of letters and poems from F.J. and responses from the narrator, G.T. Paul Salzman sheds light on the more complicated facets, which compose this unusual exchange of letters: [The author] skillfully uses the character of G.T. as a narrator. G.T’s role is emphasized, before the narrative proper starts, through the exchange with H.W. This exchange is in part a product of the Elizabethan courtly author’s desire to seem unwilling to appear in print, but it also prepares the reader for the recessed 45 This essay is available at http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/hirsch.htm. 161 nature of this narrative, with its rationale disingenuously claimed by G.T. to be merely a provision of the background to F.J.’s poems. Salzman’s assessment illustrates that this is a unique narrative in itself. To further this originality, Gascoigne mixes genres in his work— the composition of correspondence is a mixture of prose and poetry— the prose explains the story line and the poetry is a device used to showcase F. J.’s feelings for the lady he loves. This format allows the reader a more personal outlook on F.J.’s feelings, a clearer account of his desires. It is more effective than using a third person narrator … F.J. has been described as: ‘a hero who launches himself into the courtly love pose, writing an elegant letter declaring his passion to Elinor, while G.T. seeks to draw the reader’s attention to the sexual opportunism and hypocrisy behind the poses’ (Salzman xiv). This ‘sexual opportunism’ is apparent in a love poem he writes to Elinor, as he makes his carnal desires and intentions obvious: I first beheld that heavenly hue of thine, Thy stately stature of thy comely grace, I must confess these dazzled eyes of mine Did wink for fear when I first viewed thy face. The bold desire did open them again And bad me look, till I had look too long. I pitied them that did procure my pain And loved the looks that wrought me all the wrong. A noteworthy example of F.J.’s poetry, since this poem, coupled with G.T.’s proceeding commentary, sets up the forthcoming passion between the lovers. The strong use of imagery paints the scene of passion fire, hot and steamy, simmering and building in them both. The imagery used in the narrative form is also prominent in the scene in which the lovers consummate their relationship. The buildup to this figurative and literal climax has F.J. waiting anxiously for his encounter with Madame Elinor. G.T. comments on the situation: Hereby F.J. passed the rest of that day in hope awaiting the happy time when his mistress should send for him. Supper time came and passed over, and not long after came the handmaid of the Lady Elinor into the great chamber, desiring F.J. to repair unto their mistress, the which he willingly accomplished. And being now entered into her chamber, he might perceive his mistress in her night’s attire, preparing herself towards bed, to whom F.J. said ‘Why how now mistress? I had thought this night to have seen you dance, at least or at last, amongst us.’ ‘By my troth good servant,’ quod she, ‘[I] adventured so soon into the great chamber yesternight that I find somewhat sickly disposed, and therefore do strain courtesy, as you see, to go the sooner to my bed this night. But before I sleep,’ quod she, ‘I am to charge you with a matter of weight,’ and taking him apart from rest, declared that at that 162 present night she would talk with him more at large in the gallery near adjoining to her chamber. With this delivery of information by G.T., the narrator, the reader is afforded the freedom of personal visual clarity which may not have been possible in a typical third person narrative. Through F.J. and G.T.’s relationship and the personal appeal which is enhanced by their correspondence, the reader feels more closely tied to the feelings and emotions of the characters. This “pull” of sentimentality would not be wrenched from the reader without the literary catalyst. In juxtaposing the letters of F.J. with the commentary of G.T., a comprehensive reading is easier to attain and the importance of this form of narration is easier to infer. Since the narrative structure is the singular tool, which concretizes this work, the reader is on a more intimate level with F.J. This is primarily because he is reading from his personal letters which disclose his innermost thoughts, and because the commentary from the narrator (G.T.) allows for an objective opinion of F.J.’s situation. The poetry that is interspersed throughout the prose acts as an anchor to F.J.’s letters as it refuels his passionate expose, adding both conviction and belief to his love for Elinor. This work would not have been as enjoyable or appreciable if it had followed the [traditional, third person] model and neglected the more forthright narrative approach. In this same annus horribilis of 1576, an anthology of songs was published but the editor explained that these were papers that had been taken from Richard Edwards after his death in 1566. The anthology was called The Paradise of Dainty Devices. But the work is more than that: reading the book one discovers that the poems signed by one ‘L. Vaux’ (a writer who died in 1556) bear some strange similitude with Edward de Vere’s feelings and expressions. For instance, in the poem “In his Extreame Sickness” (poem 8) we find a vertiginous speed full of Heraclitean contraries so dear to our poet and so unlike the two poems by Lord Vaux in Tottel’s anthology of 1557. This ‘L. Vaux’ is another mask used by our poet in The Paradise of Dainty Devices for, in another poem signed with this same name (‘L: Vaux’, poem 16), we see Narcissus in action lamenting that others get the benefits while he takes the pain, ‘watch the net, and others haue the pray’: He desyreth exchange of lyfe. ...Tweene these extreames, thus doo I rome the race, Of my poore life, this certaynely I knowe... As Spider drawes her line in vayne all day, I watch the net, and others haue the pray... 163 Narcissus brought vnto the water brinke, So aye thirst I, the more that I doo drinke. Trayned in trust, for no reward assignd, The more I haste, the more I come behinde. With hurt to heale, in frozen yse to frye... The dayes be long... The life is irke of ioyes that be delayed: The time is short, for to requite the smart, That dooth proceed of promise long vnpaid, That to the last of this my fainting breath, I wishe exchange of life, for happy death. Likewise, in poem 24 he complains that the higher he climbs the tree, bigger is the prohibition to eat its fruits, and after mentioning the ‘hagard Haukes’, he ends up complaining about Fortune, from whom he will never ever solicit her favours. As we have already seen, poem 30, which deals with the loss of his good name, possesses a velocity as masterly as the one in poem 8 signed as ‘L. Vaux’. Poem 31, signed as ‘M. Edwardes’, is his; not only is it his style, his tone, and his swing, but Fortune (the Queen) ‘Geue me good Fortune all men sayes, and throw me in the seas,’ which is what the poet had written in Timon of Athens. Poem 42 is not signed, and this is important because it is a continuation of the poems he wrote for A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres or Poesies. Entitled “Oppressed with sorowe, he wysheth death,” it continues with the themes of lack of hope, Fortune abandoning him, his grief and miserable state of mind, the ‘pinching payne’, someone whom Fortune (the Queen) has forgotten, the desire not to have been born, and the lack of luck. Poem 71 is signed again as ‘L. Vaux’ and it was written by our poet; the grief he feels due to the separation from his son is mentioned. It merits quotation for its thematic correspondences with sonnet 153 commented before and because it has an elegiac tone similar to sonnet 64. Note the mention of ‘Sonne’ and how he alludes to the Dark Lady when we see those dark clouds covering the ‘Sonne’: How can the tree but wast, and wither awaie, That hath not sometyme comfort of the Sonne: How can that flower but fade, and sone decaie, That alwaies is with darke clouds ouer ronne. Is this a life, naie death you maie it call, That feeles eche paine, and knoweth no ioye at all. What foodles beast can liue long in good plight, Or is it life, where sences there be none: 164 Or what auaileth eyes without their light? Is this a life? Naie death you maie it call, That feeles eche paine, and knowes no ioye at all. Whereto serue eares, if that there be no sounde, Or suche a head, where no deuise doeth growe: But all of plaints, since sorrowe is the grounde, Whereby the harte doeth pine in deadly woe. Is this a life, naie death you maie it call, That feeles eche paine, and knows no ioye at all. As one can see, ‘since sorrow is the ground’ modulates that expression in the line ‘this griefs the ground’ written around 1569 in the poem about the loss of his good name, also published in this anthology. The flower and the ‘sun-son’, as well as the dark clouds, are the same expressions that we will see in 1609 when the Shake-speare’s Sonnets are published. This poem 71 of A Paradise of Dainty Devices seems a first version of sonnet 33. Moreover, the roots and the torn tree are linked to Timon of Athens and A Theater for Worldlings. It is his obsession, the Shakespearean obsession: the loss of his inheritance, the loss of his identity and that of his sun-son. Poems 74, 76 and 78 (the two last ones signed with his official initials E.O.) bear his mark. 79 has his swing and mentions, again, ‘Fortune false I crie.’ 80, 81 and 82 (‘Endymion’ and ‘Pallas’) are his; 83 mentions the ‘trickling tears’, ‘the present pains perforce’ and the ‘haggerd hauke’, while 84, like the former, is signed with his initials, as is 85: ‘And he that beats the bushe, the wished birde not getts./ But suche I see as sitteth still, and holds the foulyng netts’; ‘So I the pleasaunt grape haue pulled from the Vine,/ And yet I languish in greate thirst, while others drinke the wine,’ which ends: To entertaine my thoughts, and there my happe to mone, That neuer am lesse idle loe, then when I am alone. This justifies the large number of works he has already written and the many more that will come. Like with Picasso, de Vere filled himself rapidly and emptied himself in literary works with the same vertiginous speed. And like Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca or John Donne, Edward de Vere was a very prolific artist. Poem 86 bears his initials, and 87 is signed as ‘L. Vaux’, while in poem 88 he writes about the ‘griefs of mind’ and signs it as ‘L.V.’; with poem 89 he signs as ‘L. Vaux’ again and he resigns himself to his fate, as Hamlet will do: 165 Wherefore for vertues sake, I can be well content, The swetest tyme of all my life, to deme in thinkyng spent. Lord Vaux died in 1556 and only two poems of his were published (possible poems of his, as far as I have been able to see) one year later in The Totell’s Miscellany, published in 1557: and neither of these two poems has this new rhythm, nor the easiness, force, passion or imagery of the poems signed as ‘L. Vaux’ or ‘L.V.’ in The Paradise of Dainty Devices of 1576. Interestingly enough, Lord Vaux’s fame is precisely based on these poems of 1576. Many critics have already said that de Vere was highly influenced by Lord Vaux’s poetry, based on this evidence in The Paradise of Dainty Devices. I think they are half right: for this Lord Vaux is Edward de Vere using another mask. By concealing his name he could express his pain and hate for the Queen in the public view, which was and will be his mother’s only condition to allow her son to write what he wanted. I do not think there could be a better reason to conceal his authorship: thanks to this concealment today we have these powerful and passionate poems of his. Furthermore, as Dr. Johnson said in The Rambler, bearing a mask gives a writer, a courtier, more freedom to express his feelings. We should not forget, moreover, that wearing literary masks was the advice given to courtiers in Castiglione’s famous book. The thing is that as ‘L. Vaux’ had died in 1556, twenty years before this work, the public would never relate them to their true author nor to the Queen, which was the key issue to avoid. If the poems were written by Lord Vaux, why were they not published in the Totell’s Miscellany one year after his death? Because if the editor had found two poems by the deceased Lord Vaux among his papers and published them one year later, how could it be that a large number were found by “someone” and published twenty years later in The Paradise of Dainty Devices? The mystery is solved when these poems are read in relation to our poet’s life until 1576, not to the deceased (and muted) Lord Vaux. The poems then talk high and clear. They make perfect sense. The fact is that poem 91 is signed, again, as ‘L. Vaux’, who talks about burning himself like the Phoenix who rises again from his ashes, as he had written in A Theater for Worldlings in 1569. Poem 92 is his, like 95 which is signed ‘I. H.’ In it he declares this new determination: And to my hope I reape no other hire, But burne my self, and I to blowe the fire. He will use the figure of the Phoenix again in 1593 when he publishes The Phoenix and the turtle, but on that occasion the Phoenix will be the sublimated and deified image of his mother, Queen Elizabeth I. 166 Reunited, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (later on renamed as Posies) and The Paradise of Dainty Devices conform a couple ultimately filled with pain, anguish, imprisonment, lack of hope, isolation, exile, grief, only to end with a coda of purifying fire, with the Phoenix again as a metaphor, as a consolatione. These two works bear the mark of the genius with the wound of concealment, like that of his sun-son, wide open and bleeding. That is the reason why he financed the publication of Cardano’s De Consolatione, the book of Hamlet. Read these works because in them the poet cries out loud. We are witnessing the masterly synthesis that explains Shakespeare’s genius: stark sincerity fictionalized through great Art. This explains Picasso’s well-known sentence: ‘Art is a lie.’ One work that describes our poet’s disgrace when his wife gave birth to a child while he was traveling through the Continent is The Merry Wives of Windsor. Although it is true that this play talks about 1569 when he fell sick in Windsor, as we have seen, the play centres on the infidelity of the spouse of some Lord Ford. This character says that there is a conspiracy against him and that the instigator is Falstaff, who is punished by the Faerie Queen for having tried to deceive Lord Ford. This Faerie Queene will appear again in 1590 in The Faerie Queene, and she is obviously the Queen. The Merry Wives of Windsor is full of words about infidelity, the cuckold, the horns and the deer; so much so that Falstaff, after being punished by the Faerie Queen and treated like a fool before everyone’s eyes, responds to Mistress Ford as follows (V.v.104-107): Mistress Ford Sir John, we have had ill luck; we could never meet. I will never take you for my love again; but I will always count you my deer. Falstaff I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass. Ford Ay, and an ox too Falstaff, transformed into an ass, resembles Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But there is more: he is an ‘ox’ because he bears the yoke and punishment. In this expression used by Ford, it is not difficult to see that ‘Ox-ford’ is identifying himself with both characters at the same time. With Falstaff, the one beaten in the play, because he is that Actaeon the Queen of faeries punishes for having seen more than he should; and with Ford, because he is the cuckold that everyone is laughing at. At the end of the play, Doctor Caius, who pretends to marry Mistress Page, asks with his French accent (V.v.170-173): Caius Vere is Mistress Page?... Mistress Page Why, did you take her in green? 167 Caius mispronounces the word ‘Where’ and ends up saying ‘Vere’, the name of his patient, our poet, in 1569-1570. We should suppose that he did not like the treatment he had been prescribed by this doctor given the way he imagines him in this play; but the pun continues, for Mistress Page asks, after having listened to the word ‘Vere’ instead of ‘Where’, if doctor Caius refers to ‘green’, which is what ‘Vere’ or ‘Ver(t)’ means in French. This play of words between ‘Where’ and ‘Vere’ due to the “bad” pronunciation of the French doctor Caius is consigned by the author at four different moments, so that there should be no doubts about his authorship. The Queen, who would most certainly be amongst the audience (legend has it that she really liked the play), should have enjoyed the fun of it. Her son was able to laugh at himself and his problems, and even at her and her whole Court of sycophants. The references to Oxford’s horns are clear. Until Beauclerk’s book appeared, we thought they were only a reference to the cuckold side of this character: today, we know that Actaeon and his horns also symbolize the fact that he has been muted; it also points to the concealment of his true royal identity. His return from Italy in 1576 marks the third crisis of his life, after the ones he had in 1569 and 1574. The fact is that when he ‘laughes’, as he himself says in one poem, he cries inside. The Queen had not recognised him as Prince of Wales; she convinced him to have sex only to ignore him later, permitting the Court to laugh at him for his wife’s pregnancy while he was away traveling through the Continent. She had not recognised the son they had had together, and now he discovered that everyone at Court laughed at him. The fall from supreme courtier at the top of the pyramid to the beaten cuckold mocked by everyone at court determined that Phaeton and Icarus became his literary references from then on; he would even use the Phaeton pseudonym to sign one introductory sonnet to John Florio’s work Second Fruits published in 1591. Robert Greene’s works from 1582 to 1592 will talk clearly about all this. It makes sense; it makes sense that he created Othello to exorcise the trauma digested during these years. The year 1576 marks his fall, the year he hit bottom. He was the cuckold and the beaten Falstaff-Ford the Court and the Queen had taken as their fool. But they were wrong if they thought that he was going to keep silent. In the poem “I am not as I seem to be,” in fact a song to be sang, not read, we see the Shakespearean duality of appearance-reality, shadow-substance. Look at this crown of thorns published in The Paradise of Dainty Devices of 1576. Timon begins: 168 I am not as I seem to be. I am not as I seem to be, For when I smile I am not glad; A thrall, although you count me free, I, most in mirth, most pensive sad, I smile to shade my bitter spite As Hannibal that saw in sight His country soil with Carthage town, By Roman force defaced down. And Caesar that presented was, With noble Pompey’s princely head; As ’twere some judge to rule the case, A flood of tears he seemed to shed; Although indeed it sprung of joy; Yet others thought it was annoy. Thus contraries be used I find, Of wise to cloak the covert mind. I, Hannibal that smile for grief; And let you Caesar’s tears suffice; The one that laughs at his mischief; The other all for joy that cries. I smile to see me scorned so, You weep for joy to see me woe; And I, a heart by Love slain dead, Present in place of Pompey s head. O cruel hap and hard estate, That forceth me to love my foe; Accursed be so foul a fate, My choice for to prefix it so. So long to fight with secret sore And find no secret salve therefore; Some purge their pain by plaint I find, But I in vain do breathe my wind. E. O. The disgraced poet will focus on what he can do best. People would have to listen to his complaints; with other names as authors, but they will listen to his works, for they were written in a euphuistic style so potent, so fresh, so revolutionary, so powerful, so impassioned and energetic that no one had seen anything like it before. He will become the leader of a literary revolution. The Great Tamburlaine was in rage. 169 Scene V. ‘A kingdom for a stage’ Ogburn informs us that this was a decisive moment for our poet: Seeing the Continent had widened the fissure between Oxford and conventional Court society … The local colour of Italian cities woven through his plays shows how they had stirred his invention. From him we also know that the construction by James Burbage of the first playhouse in England began in 1576 in Shoredith, a mile north from the Vere House in Oxford Court, the very same year of Oxford’s return. At the year’s end, the playhouse was known as the Theater, the first time the use of this word in English was registered. Ogburn writes: Another rose a few hundred yards away and almost as early on a plot of ground The Curten, from which it took its name: the Curtain. These were followed by others. Together they gave the acting companies accommodations superior to the taverns for rehearsing plays before their performance at Court. The period of the Elizabethan theatre and that of Oxford’s dramatic career would appear to have coincided down to the very year, at start and finish. ‘Around this time,’ Beauclerk tells us, ‘Oxford took rooms in the Savoy, a former royal palace.’ In the Savoy ‘he rented rooms for his literary cronies, and found for himself a congenial place to write and rehearse when he was in the capital.’ Beauclerk continues: At Vere House, near London Stone … one can picture the Earl of Oxford, the architect of the English literary Renaissance, part Hal, part Timon, presiding over a bohemian school, as rowdy as it was cultured. In the play The London Prodigal, a father who has just arrived in London to surprise his son, as Antipholus of Syracusa will do in The Comedy of Errors, says: Father Brother, from Venice, being thus disguised, I come to prove the humours of my son. How hath he borne himself since my departure, I leaving you his patron and his guide? 170 His son Flowerdale misbehaves and lives like a bohemian in the great city. Lucy, to whom Flowerdale is engaged, says these words which our poet might have heard from Anne’s mouth: Lucy O Master Flowerdale, if too much grief Have not stopped up the organs of your voice, Then speak to her that is thy faithful wife: Or doth contempt of me thus tie thy tongue? Turn not away, I am no Aethiope, No wanton Cressida, nor a changing Helen: But rather one made wretched by thy loss. In 1577 Court Revels registered a play that ‘was shown at Hampton Court on New Year’s Day at night, enacted by the Children of Paul’s.’ The play is no other than The Historie of Error, which Ogburn naturally thinks sounds like a first version of The Comedy of Errors: [M]odelled on the Menaechmi of Plautus (but with two servants added to twin masters) is certainly one of the earliest of the Shakespearean plays; its ‘doggerel verse’ (Edward Dowden) and rhymes that ‘rattle like bleached bones’ (Mark Van Doren) are almost a literary lifetime away from the verbal music of the Sonnets … At the tournament of 1571 at which Oxford received the chief honour and a tablet of diamonds from the Queen, Christopher Hatton’s prize was a gold bell and chain. ‘An affected fribble,’ as Martin Hume calls him in The Great Lord Burghley, Hatton was probably prone to go tinkling about the Court in it. In Act II, Scene I, there is an incessant repetition of ‘the chain,’ which Mark van Doren complains of as failing of effect; but the playwright’s object … was to prime the audience at Hampton Court for a jibe at the Captain of the Body-Guard in the form of a tiein with a bell. And two scenes later it comes. On the flimsiest excuse Adriana exclaims A chain, a chain! Do you not hear it ring? Whereupon her interlocutor asks What, the chain? and receives the answer No, no, the bell! This sounds like someone who knows the life of the Court from inside and is taking his vengeance on those who had laughed at him when he returned from Italy. That year the Spanish tercios, who had not been paid his wages, ravaged the city of Antwerp, behaving like a horde of drugged 171 barbarians. This was a message to the rest of Europe: the Empire of Philip II had a very unstable economy and an army that consisted basically of bloody mercenaries who only sought their pay. The carnage of Antwerp had nothing to do with religion, as we see through History, nor with a true God against other false gods. It was, simply and tragically, a question of power and money. ‘A month and a half after Errors was put on at Hampton Court, The History of the Solitarie Knight was performed at another of the Queen’s palaces, Whitehall, on the Thames.’ Eva Turner Clark thought this was a first version of the play Timon of Athens. Anderson notes that on February 19, 1577, the books of the Court register the fact that the play The Historie of Titus and Gissipus was performed, a bad transcription, says Clark, of the tragedy Titus Andronicus. Michael Delahoyde interprets this play as follows: Thus, accepting an earlier composition date than orthodoxy will allow, we may find significance in the fact that the French courtier Simier used the name Saturn in reference to Philip of Spain in letters to Queen Elizabeth. The sketchy Oxfordian consensus is that the playwright wrote an early version of Titus Andronicus after the “Spanish Fury” against the Dutch Protestants in November 1576, in order to warn that Spain and its horrors presented a real danger. In this view, Saturninus represents Philip of Spain, Tamora is Mary Stuart, and Lavinia is partly Queen Elizabeth and partly the city of Antwerp, ravished ‘within its walls and in its low-lying situation’ by the Spanish Fury. Antwerp did get its name —Hand-werpen, or handthrowing– from a legend concerning amputation as a tariff [that the city of Antwerp charged on ships]. This is the allegorical and historical side, but, as Beauclerk has very well shown, the author’s knowledge helps us understand the personal side, the one underneath, hiding beneath these textual signs that we read about the mutilations of the characters’ hands; particularly those of young Lavinia and Titus. Delahoyde comments: 46 One critic seems accidentally to have nearly struck upon the Oxfordian explanation to the mystery of Lavinia: ‘she comes closest to standing in the situation of the author of the work. After her mutilation, she is not forbidden to write; in fact, she must write.’ But this same critic also claims of Lavinia, Titus’ offspring, “She is the text for their and our interpretation, a ‘map of woe’ whom, like a map we must learn to read.” This critic apprehends further, ‘the central image, Lavinia, seems to 46 See http://www.briefchronicles.com/ojs/index.php/bc/article/view/11/29. 172 enfold a further secret, not just the secret of her rapists names’ … In a play so concerned with themes of authorship and text, as both the Aaron and Lavinia plots demonstrate, Titus’ horror is a literal manifestation of the playwright’s own horror. His creation – offspring/text— has been taken and mutilated. His hand —the symbol of his agency and authorship— has been severed. Figuratively speaking, this is what was done to Oxford. In the last revision of Titus Andronicus (as in the Sonnets and elsewhere), it is clear that Oxford knew he would not be given credit for his works. Their proximity to the centers of power caused both Titus Andronicus and Edward de Vere to suffer persecutions unjust enough to drive them each to excruciating emotional states probably approaching madness. If we think creatively and artistically, moving freely between the realms of the figurative and the physicalized –sensitive, in experiencing this play, to ‘the prophetic literalness of its metaphors’– we can understand that each was forced to, or at least cornered into, amputating his own hand. Each had his creation, or offspring, mutilated and rendered almost entirely incapable of communicating its own truth. If it is an unbearably brutal play, it is because Titus Andronicus literalizes the brutality of what was done to Edward de Vere. But as close to complete despair and nihilism as this play comes, it also demonstrates the fact that the “raped” (or stolen) and mutilated text can still, however faintly and telegraphically, convey its truth. It can still speak indirectly at least in “scrowls.” And, as in the bizarre scene of Lavinia transporting her father’s hand in her muted mouth, it can still be seen carrying the presence of its creator’s hand, even though that hand has been severed from its unfortunate possessor, the 17 th Earl of Oxford, to whom we can offer the same encouragement that is given during the key scene of Lavinia’s scrowling: Heaven guide thy pen to print thy sorrows plain, That we may know the traitors and the truth! (4.1.75-76). In 1577 the play Pericles was performed, as Eva Turner Clark and the Ogburns think according to the Court registers and the contents of the play. The Ogburns’ comment about Pericles: Pericles is simply the work of the artist as a young man … Now we come to the important, and the difficult, part. We are told that the editors of the First Folio, and those of the Second as well, failed to include Pericles, ‘probably because they did not regard as within the Shakespeare canon a play known—as we may conjecture—at the time to be in large part the work of another hand.’ Here the 173 authorities have made an erroneous “conjecture.” For it was precisely because the editors of the First Folio—and of the Second as well—did know this play to be the work of ‘Shakespeare’ that they left it out. (By the time the Third Folio was issued, in 1664, it seemed safe to include it. The play had been acted in 1608 and printed in quarto in 1609, but certainly without the sanction of the author’s family.) They understood the terrible revelation that is made in Pericles, and they could not afford to publish it for the world to take note. In 1578 the Queen made a summer trip to Audley End in Essex. As it was near Cambridge University, many writers and scholars used this opportunity to make their appearance in their best clothes before the Queen and her courtiers. One of them, Gabriel Harvey, a friend of our poet since his student years at Christ’s College in Cambridge, was then employed by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. As Nina Green informs us, the work Harvey wrote for that occasion was entitled Gratulationes Valdinenses, written around 1578-1579. Harvey, being employed by Leicester then, was naturally called to mock Oxford as a war hero and he even added these satirical comments on him: A dialogue on the picture of the most noble Earl of Oxford and on his most elegant motto, Naught verier than Vere. Spectator. Painter. Sp. Is it a picture of Vere? P. Verily. S. Nothing is verier. Pa. Nothing’s verier than this. S. That’s its merit and yours. Sp. Whence his name? P. Because he embraces verity and hates what’s false, verily loving his king and his God. Sp. Very is the love of a Vere, who holds in esteem Verity, king, God, country, and the very honor of his country. Pa. Go now, tell the Earl Vere that nothing’s verier than he, not the goddess who is held the child of father Time! Blue, says the herald, is the veriest color of them all; how well does he now agree with his boar! Let others have their eagles, their bears, and their lions; what will best suit Vere is the figure of a blue boar. Another dialogue on the much desired coming of the same. Guest. Courtier. Gu. Is it verity that Vere has come here with the sovereign? Co. Verily; there’s nothing verier than that same verity. Gu. But that can’t be; it can’t be verier than Vere himself; this same Vere is more verily very than your Verity is. Co. That is his name and always has been, just as if it were his essence; thus Vere was a veracious conqueror. Gu. This is a very subject, and was verily a conqueror, yet each was equally a very cultivator of his country. Co. Who is not pleased with this omen, may he be not pleased either with the name or the veracious glory of his 174 land! Gu. Long live, noble Earl Vere, may Verity herself favor you, and the daughter of Verity, a veracious goddess! May she often, may she often offer you her honeyed lips; O how precious, how great a goddess is Veraciousness! Her alone revere, her, most veracious Vere, carry ever in your mind, in your eyes, your heart and your mouth! To her not Juno, not Pallas, not any single Grace, nor mother Venus is equal; Themis is not to be so venerated. What wonder, if so great a Hero should serve so great a Heroide? What wonder if you, too, a goddess cherishes? Go in that strength, Earl; plant everywhere the tracks of Veracious deeds; nothing is more very, nor will it be! Now hail, and if there is naught verier than the Veres, surpass them and you will surpass others of equal rank. And next to these satirical comments on Oxford, Harvey addressed this laudatory speech to him given in public (I quote the paragraphs selected by Anderson): Thy splendid fame, great earl, demands even more than in the case of others the services of a poet possessing lofty eloquence. Thy merit doth not creep along the ground, nor can it be confined within the limits of a song. It is a wonder that reaches as far as the heavenly orbs … For a long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated thy mind in the arts. English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough. Let that curtly epistle—more polished than even the writings of Castiglione himself— [de Vere’s 1573 Latin Preface to Castiglione’s Courtier] witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters. I have seen many Latin verses of thine; yea, even more English verses are extant … Our whole country knows it. In thy breast is noble blood. Courage animates thy brow, Mars lives in thy tongue, Minerva strengthens thy right hand, Bellona reigns in thy body, within thee burns the fire of Mars. Thine eyes flash fire, thy will shakes spears. Who would not swear that Achilles had come to life again? Here is another sign that points to and explains the ulterior facts. His ‘will shakes speares’ is as clear as ‘Will-I-am Shake-speare.’ John Lyly, as one of Oxford’s secretary, had not given signs of having written anything at all before working as secretary for our poet, as he did not write anything of value after he left his post as Oxford’s clerk, even though Lyly lived for many years more and needed the money badly; but during the years he was under Oxford’s guidance, Lyly wrote two huge novels and numerous courtly plays that dealt with the Queen and her personal and political circumstances. Our doubts about Lyly being the author of the plays that will later bear his name on them are legitimate because we have the precedents of Arthur Golding and his translation of Ovid’s 175 Metamorphoses in 1567, and also the case of George Gascoigne and his miraculous translations and adaptations of Jocasta and The Supposes or his Posies in which the first English novel was created—and banned from public view. John Lyly was another front man, for once Oxford separated from him, Lyly’s literature evidenced its mediocrity. It is sad to say this, but it is the truth. Lyly’s first work appeared in 1578. Against all expectations, Lyly’s opera prima was not bad or insecure. On the contrary, this work was a masterpiece and raised enormous enthusiasm in England: it was an authentic cultural revolution. It was Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, introduced by the editor of the work The Dramatic Works of John Lyly, F.W. Fairholt, in the following way:47 His Euphues gave the tone to the conversation of the court of Queen Elizabeth; and the gallants and wits that frequented it formed their language upon the model of that once-famed book. ‘The chief characteristic of his style, besides its smoothness, is the employment of a species of fabulous or unnatural natural philosophy, in which the existence of certain animals, vegetables and minerals with peculiar properties is presumed, in order to afford similes and illustrations.’ It was scarcely to be expected that such laborious trifling, found on the mistakes and inventions of the fabulous writers who flourished in the Middle Ages, would be revived among the learned men of the Elizabethan court, and almost enforced upon such as would wish to pass for polished scholars there … Anthony-à-Wood … also notes: ‘In these books of Euphues ’tis said that our nation is indebted for a new English in them, which the flower of the youth thereof learned.’ The influences of this revolutionary work stem from Plutarch’s works, Petrarquism, Castiglione’s work Il Cortegiano and Fray Antonio de Guevara’s work through his Marco Aurelio and his Reloj de Príncipes, as I learned from José María de Cossío’s analysis. 48 Euphues, a mysterious character whose melancholy is notorious, is the personification of our poet because, among many of the various examples all along the text, the author describes him as a man of Athens that knows how to discern the music of Apollo from the flute of Pan and that, having met a man who asks him who he is just at the start of the novel, Euphues replies: ‘What countryman am I not?’ And he adds next: ‘If thou ask whose son am I also, I ask thee whose son am I not.’ The one who is talking through Euphues is our Timon. If we have some doubts, a little bit later he says: 47 These comments are at http://www.archive.org/details/dramaticworksofj01lylyiala. 48 The work of George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie his pleasure (1576) is also a precedent, and could be the work of our poet as some scholars have said, but my ears tell me that this music is not his. In archive.org is the whole work for free. 176 ‘Who more envious than Timon, denouncing all human society?’ Thus felt this English Don John of Austria his personal tragedy. According to Ogburn, Tucker Brooke wrote that “one of the ‘allurements’ of Euphues that the ‘fashionable public of the day found irresistible’ was that ‘it was all transparently about themselves, the scene being London, the characters the highest of society’,” and such was the enthusiasm the novel ignited that Queen Elizabeth was turned into ‘one of the most ardent practitioners’ of this new language heretofore known as Euphuism. Ogburn recalls that John Lyly, the supposed author of this revolutionary work in English, was at that time our poet’s secretary. He writes: Lyly presents, like Arthur Golding, the case of a writer who, entering Oxford’s ambience, glows with a refulgence unprecedented in his past and deserting him when once he is on his own again. We recall how he wrote of that ‘highest circle of society’ as a familiar. Lyly confessed to having written nothing before Euphues … R.W. Bond … presents nine pages in small type of parallels in thought and language between Euphues and Shakespeare as examples of all that the former ‘fathered’ in the latter, as he would have us believe, telling us en passant that ‘Jaques in As You Like It ... is simply Euphues Redivivus.’ He calls Lyly the first regular English dramatist, the true inventor and introducer of dramatic style, conduct and dialogue. And he says There is no play before Lyly. He wrote eight; and immediately thereafter England produced some hundreds –produced that marvel and pride of the greatest literature in the world, the Elizabethan Drama. What the long infancy of her stage had lacked was an example of form, of art: Lyly gave it. He does not remark that, having written nothing before his association with Oxford, Lyly after its end wrote no more plays or anything else of the merit though he desperately needed the kind of income his writing had brought. Dr Bond does recognise that ‘From the Earl, probably, it was that Lyly first received the dramatic impulse’; but he misses the clue and asserts: In tragedy Shakespeare learned from Marlowe … In comedy Lyly is Shakespeare’s only model: the evidence of the latter’s study and imitation of him is abundant. This is what happens when a great genius uses different frontmen to publish his works. There is no doubt about it: he beats the bush but others get the birds. Because of the cultural revolution of Euphues, the 177 Anatomy of Wit, and due to the plays he showed at Court for the Queen’s entertainment, Elizabeth accepted to give him, on July, 1578, the property of some lands which had belonged to the Duke of Norfolk. And Ogburn says, ‘unlike other recipients of such grants, Oxford had been appointed to no office under the Crown.’ Which was only natural, for his post was extra-official: he was the jester of the Queen, her entertainer, her exclusive Will, as we read the poet complaining in the Sonnets. In 1578 the second edition of The Paradise of Dainty Devices appeared, with thirteen (13) new poems, all of them, as it seems to me for their rhythm, swing and vocabulary, written by our poet. Their themes are already familiar to us: the fake fortune, his grief, his pain, Damon and his dear Phintias, virtue as a way of life, the nymph Eco, the Phoenix, Pallas, the true friends, to be happy in spite of the sick love that Cupid has caused him with his darts, the references to Gray’s Inn, the vanity of life, the death that chases princes as well as pages, Icarus and Phaeton’s falls, etc. The Shepheard’s Caldendar, written by some Immeritô, was published in late 1579. That the poetic debut of this ‘new Poet’ and author of The Shepheard’s Calendar was not signed with its author’s real name, Edmund Spenser, is intriguing. The poems were preceded by some commentaries by a mysterious friend of his who signed as E.K. This work was dedicated to Philip Sidney. Scene VI. The ‘most early wit’ of John Donne The author Immerito is introduced by the critic and glosser E.K. as a young poet, a ‘new Poet.’ Imitation and close imitation are words that appear when the critics deal with this poem. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature tells us: Again, in the complaint of Colin in December, the essential motive is distinctly literary: it lies much less in the lover’s pain than in the recollections of his untroubled youth, that is to say, in a passage of this character in Marot’s Eglogue au Roy, which Spenser has very closely imitated. E. K. T. Warton is more direct when he informs us: This, which is one of his most finished and elegant pastorals, is literally translated from old Clement Marot; which is not observed by the commentator. 178 In other words, Immerito did not invent or create it, but translated and stole it. For a boy this seems fine, but for a 27 year-old poet as the Spenser of tradition is taken to be, it is shameful. Thomas Looney already saw that the young poet had printed verses from other poets like Oxford and Sidney (i.e. Willie and Perigot, and the young Immerito as Cuddie and arbiter in ‘Aegloga octaua, August’). Furthermore, the foregoing shows us that E.K. and Immerito are different persons. To start with, E.K. comments that he doubts the French poet Marot could be considered a poet at all, which is contrary to what Immerito has done when translating Marot’s eclogue. The scholar Todd confirms that Immerito is a boy when he writes: It cannot be denied that Spenser, in the Shepherd’s Calendar, has most ably exhibited delightful scenes of rural simplicity, although indeed with no new imagery. The best images, Mr. Warton observes, are in those Eclogues which he has translated or imitated from Marot. It is an absurdity, says the same critick, to make shepherds deliver learned truths in rustick dialect. However, the English Pastoral of modern times has derived much of its success from an attention to Spenser’s liveliness of description and to the innocence of his characters. ‘The innocence of his characters’ is what we expect in a boy, but there is more: This imitativeness, the eagerness to appropriate interesting or otherwise attractive themes by which to give his work variety, to experiment in various acknowledged styles, is, indeed, the most distinguishing characteristic of the Calendar. It is one manifestation of what may be called the voracity of taste in youth. Spenser was doing what Stevenson, in a well-known essay, has told us that he, in his time, did, and that every active young follower of letters must inevitably do, what, in the various performances of his early period, Pope did himself. If we understand that Immerito is a boy, then Rosalind his love is nothing else but his poetic ideal, not a real woman, as we read in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser: Berger … offer[s] a thoughtful meditation on what he terms the ‘Young Men’s Pastoral Association’ wherein women may be figured as muses, monarchs, beloveds, trophies, or adversaries but are always poetically instrumental rather than persons in their own right. 179 One year later, in 1580, Harvey published five letters between him and Immerito. Needless to say, as Harvey himself recognised in 1592, these letters are written ‘in jest.’ A third party and friend of both authors (that is, Harvey himself), says: The first [the first letter, the one by Immerito] ... sure liked me very well, and give some hope of good metal in the Author, in whom I know myself to be very good parts otherwise As we know that the poet Immerito is a boy, so we may guess who E.K. can be by looking at who the person that comes at the front of The Shepheard’s Calendar is. Contrary to what could be expected, there is no letter by Immerito to the reader, but a letter of a third party to Harvey himself. E.K. dedicates the work to him. Pay attention to this: the author Immerito has been deprived of this right, and it is Harvey who is coming to the frontline. E.K. Writes: To the most excellent and learned both/ Orator and Poete, Mayster Gabriell Haruey, his/ verie special and singular good friend E.K. commen-/ deth the good lyking of this his labour,/ and the patronage of the/ new Poete. E.K. is the new poets’ tutor and patron. The only person who can be the patron and tutor of the boy Immerito is no other than Gabriel Harvey himself. E.K. writes on Hobbinol, another mask for Harvey: Hobbinol) is a fained country name, whereby, it being so commune and vsuall, seemeth to be hidden the person of some his very speciall and most familiar freend, whom he entirely and extraordinarily beloued, as peraduenture shall be more largely declared hereafter. In thys place seemeth to be some sauour of disorderly loue, which the learned call paederastice: but it is gathered beside his meaning. For who that hath red Plato his dialogue called Alcibiades, Xenophon and Maximus Tyrius of Socrates opinions, may easily perceiue, that such loue is muche to be alowed and liked of, specially so meant, as Socrates vsed it: who sayth, that in deede he loued Alcybiades extremely, yet not Alcybiades person, but hys soule, which is Alcibiades owne selfe. And so is pederastice much to be praeferred before gynerastice, that is the loue whiche enflameth men with lust toward woman kind. But yet let no man thinke, that herein I stand with Lucian or hys deuelish disciple Vnico Aretino, in defence of execrable and horrible sinnes of forbidden and vnlawful fleshlinesse. Whose abominable errour is fully confuted of Perionius, and others. 180 This is, indeed, the critical and pedantic voice of Harvey. E.K. gloss on Colin Clout: Colin Clout) is a name not greatly used, and yet have I seen a Poesy of M. Skelton under that title. But indeed the word Colin is French, and used of the French poet Marot (if he be worthy of the name of a Poet) in a certain Aeglogue. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature confirms that E.K. uses the same rhetoric as Harvey’s: E. K., who is conjectured, with every probability, to have been Spenser’s fellow-collegian and contemporary, Edward Kirke. E. K.’s preface, addressed to Gabriel Harvey, and written in the contorted style approved by him. The current majority opinion among scholars is that E.K. was Harvey, or Spenser in collaboration with Harvey. As we know that Immerito has translated Marot and made him his, we may surmise that the possibility that Harvey wrote E.K.’s words alone by himself is the safest choice. This relation between tutor and pupil is attested years later. And one more thing: all the Greek verses and commentaries are typical of a pedant like Harvey, as we see in his letters written in jest, just like E.K.’s glosses are made in jest and making fun of the reader. For as we are told, E.K.’s chief advertizing strategy is to behave as an ideal audience. The Calender thus presents both its advertizing and its desired results simultaneously. In addition to the tactic of praising the poet, another good advertizing procedure is to elucidate the “obscurities” of the poem in a pretense of scholarship, which is the tactic E.K. follows primarily in his glosses … These contradictions and superfluities suggest that E.K’s material is by and large irrelevant as criticism, and that its real purpose is public relations. His own “extraordinary discourses of unnecessary matter” (p. 10) ... do serve to “sound” Spenser’s worthiness in the “tromp of fame” and give the impression of a learned commentary on an “old famous poete.” The conclusion of E.K.’s glosses in the study above are this: 49 E.K’s value and reliability as a critic, in the modern sense, can be seen 49 See http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5943. 181 from the glosses to be slight. His glosses fall into two categories enveloping those already discussed: (1) those glosses which are pure padding, glossing things either unnecessarily or irrelevantly, and (2) those glosses which are inaccurate, either by misdefinitions, incorrect mythology, careless references, or misrepresentations. The former “type” of glosses, although trivial as criticism, do serve the important function of being there filling up the page. For the most important thing about the glosses is that a gloss is needed for the poem as an advertising tactic and, for this purpose, exactly what goes into it is not nearly so important as how much of it can be produced. The fact that E.K. could make a large number of factual which could be easily rectified and the fact that they never were in Spenser’s lifetime, suggests that they were probably intended more to be seen than to be read. As we have said, in 1580 Gabriel Harvey published some letters between him and Immerito in a work entitled Three Proper and Familiar Letters. Immerito’s first letter shows that he is a pupil and is learning under the guide of tutors: Trust me, you will hardly believe what great good-liking and estimation Master Dyer had of your satirical verses, and I, since the view thereof, having before of myself had special liking of English versifying, am even now about to give you some token what and how well therein I am able to do, for to tell you truth, I mind shortly at convenient leisure to set forth a book in this kind which I entitle Epithalamion Thamesis, which book I dare undertake will be very profitable for the knowledge, and rare for the invention and manner of handling. For in setting forth the marriage of the Thames, I show his first beginning and offspring, and all the country that he passeth through, and also describe all the rivers throughout England which came to this wedding, and their right names and right passage etc., a work, believe me, of much labour, wherein notwithstanding Master Holinshed hath much furthered and advantaged me, who therein hath bestowed singular pains in searching out their first heads and courses, and also in tracing and dogging out all their course till they fall into the sea This Immerito, as we see, is no other than a pupil in Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Holinshed’s hands: he is still learning; his prose ‘giveth some hope of good metal in the author.’ Now, the traditional Edmund Spenser transmitted by critics and Spenserians is said to have been born around 1552. Could this voice of Immerito here be the voice of a twenty-six yearsold poet? Not for me by any means. 182 We know that John Donne’s father died in 1576, but we do not know who educated him. As Donne’s mother married a doctor with connections at Court when he was only four (4) years old, it seems that the connection with Immerito exists here. Dennis Flynn’s words in John Donne & the Ancient Catholic Nobility are these: “Probably we should long ago have appreciated the testimony of Donne’s Dutch friend Constantine Huygens, who, without Walton’s limited outlook, wrote in 1630 that Donne had been ‘educated early at Court in the service of the great.’” Keep this in mind and let us follow events. If now we want to connect Nashe with Donne and Immerito, we must infer that Donne, in order to be Immerito in 1578, could have written the poems (imitations and literal translations of other French and Italian poems) like The Shepheard’s Calendar when he was only six (6) years old. Montaigne at six was fluent in Latin and Donne’s extreme precocity is remarked by Ben Jonson, who wrote an Epigram in 1616 on Donne confirming his awe in this way (my emphasis): Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse; Whose every work of thy most early wit Came forth example, and remains so yet; Longer a-knowing than most wits do live; And which no affection praise enough can give! To it, thy language, letters, arts, best life, Which might with half mankind maintain a strife. All which I meant to praise, and yet I would; But leave, because I cannot as I should! Donne was said to have been a new Pico della Mirandola, because he was said to have been born wise rather than made wise by study. The very same Donne, in his own epitaph, declared of himself: JOHN DONNE a Professor and Doctor of Divinity, After several Studies from his Child-hood, Which He pursued with no less industry, than good Success, By the instinct, and impulsive motion of the Holy Ghost If the real Edmund Spenser was the author and was born around 1552, he does not fit in a paederast relation with Hobbinol; only a child, someone underage, could. Dealing with The Shepheard’s Calendar as an experimental book, George Saintsbury comments in A History of English Prosody concerning Aegloga septima:50 50 See archive.org. 183 It is probable that most modern readers will think ‘July’ a considerable falling off. It is in the divided fourteneer or common measure … The astonishing “soar” which Jonson or Donne was shortly to give it … was yet unthought of. As the Spenserian webpage Spenser and the Tradition says, “‘September,’ written in the west-country dialect, is the most rustic of all the pastorals.” Considering that Donne had Welsh ancestry, the words of James Montgomery ring true of Donne: ‘Surely this is neither Welsh nor English; nothing in Chaucer is more uncouth.’51 Edward George Harman, who saw that Spenser was a flimsy cover for another poet, writes: 52 It is surprising that the first published work of so facile and prolific a genius should have not appeared till Spenser was about twenty-eight years old, and still more surprising, in view of the evidence we have of his poverty, that it should have appeared anonymously. The work was, indeed, attributed by a contemporary poet (George Whetstone), as late as 1587, to Sidney. And he goes on: The self-steem shown by the author … is evidence of youth and inexperience … A strange and quite abnormal personality is behind these utterances … A word may be said about the antique and irregular language adopted53, or invented, by the author in this collection of poems. It is partly a deliberate affectation, of a rude style of speech under which the writer might express his opinions on various topics with less risks than he could in current language, and partly due to the pleasure he finds in the words themselves, as explained in E.K.’s introductory letter. This is characteristic of youth. The case of Chatterton (who did not live to complete eighteen years) is similar, and lends support to the view which I have expressed that the writer of the Calendar was very young54 We are told by scholars, the Immerito’s ‘Old English is exceedingly incorrect.’55 In other words, his antique English is invented on purpose. 51 See http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=23. 52 See archive.org. 53 Ben Jonson, in his epigram to Donne, praises Donne’s wit, life and ‘language’. 54 By the way, Bacon, who was born in 1561, was seventeen (17) years old in 1578: he could not be that Immerito who had a paederast relation with his dear Hobbinol. 55 See http://archive.org/stream/specimensenglis03skeagoog#page/n508/mode/2up. 184 Commenting the antique word ‘astert’, we are told: Astert evidently intended to mean ‘befall unawares,’ as E.K. says. This is a good instance of the peril a poet incurs when using archaic terms which he does not well understand. The true meaning of the word astarte is to scape from, to start or get away... Thus Spenser’s line, literally translated, means ‘The shepherd can there escape from no danger,’ which is just the opposite of what is intended. The fact is that Spenser, in using archaic words, frequently made mistakes The fact is that with the publication of the letter of Immerito by Harvey in 1580, the latter published a poem mocking our poet Edward de Vere. The poem, entitled Speculum Tuscanismi, laughs at Oxford (without naming him) for his clothes and Italian literary tastes and Italian plays he was writing. ‘Since Galateo came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,/ Vanity above all,’ so wrote Harvey, who would have gone to prison for this if the Earl of Leicester had not interceded on his behalf. This treason against Oxford was unknown to Immerito, as we will see when we come to the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel: that the 1580 letters of Harvey-Immerito were written by Harvey-E.K. in jest is confirmed and accepted by The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, in the chapter “Letters” (1580) written by Joseph Campana: For the student of Spenser … the letters tease and tantalize with suggestive possibilities … Already it is apparent that along with their suggestive content these letters are riddled with ambiguity … Spenser did not sign the letters with his own name … For a poet toying with anonymity, what might he and Harvey have wanted the readers to know? We can assess this partly by virtue of the titles … the letters are not without distinct marketing hooks. This is precisely what E.K. did in 1578, which is another reason for Harvey being behind E.K. Joseph Campana continues his study of the 1580 letters: To approach the surface of the letters—their mix of strategic anonymity; their attempt to combine the exclusivity of private, elite exchange characteristic of literary coteries with the mass appeal of publication; and their elusive and simultaneous address to both a singular friend and a reading public—is to be faced with contradiction not to mention a certain hybridity. [Note 7: Jon Quitslund, in perhaps the best account of the sheer ambiguity of the letters, argues that they 185 ‘are as heterogeneous in style and contents as any postmodern text’ (1996:88)] This ‘hybridity’ explains Harvey’s jokes when he wrote them, as he himself confesses to Nashe in 1592. Campana’s incredulity is just what Harvey intended when he published ‘in jest’ these mocking letters, as he did when he created E.K., the buffoon and salesman of the ‘new’ (based on old, very old invented archaism) English poetry: To read Spenser’s Letters is to confront the difficulty of reading them. What kind of information comes from these letters and what use might they be to students of Spenser? Do they tell us about Spenser’s life, his poetry, or both and in what ratio? How do we understand the highly wrought rhetoric and affect of the early modern letter? How do classical and early modern notions of friendship intersect with emerging formations of sexuality and emerging notions of the literary author? How are students of Spenser understand the literary debates within the letters? What do these sorties in the intertwining arenas of letter and friendship tell us about the poet of The Shepheardes Calender and his progress as a writer, especially since the poetics of Spenser’s letters seem to contradict the poetics of The Faerie Queene? Are the poems included within the letter mere exercises or real evidence of larger concerns at this early moment of England’s wouldbe laureate? Obstacles to the extraction of personal, political, or poetic certainties from the letters are myriad. Two more things now before we proceed. The political and theological concerns of The Shepheardes Calender were inserted by E.K. in line with the ones his patron Leicester had, for The Faerie Queene is less aggressive. This is what Harvey will say when he asks Nashe to forgive him in 1592. The last thing. The Shepheard of Aegloga Septima seems to be the personification of no other than Oxford, for E.K. says of him: The Shepheard) is Endymion, whom the Poets fayne, to haue bene so beloued of Phoebe .s. the Moone, that he was by her kept a sleepe in a caue by the space of xxx. yeares, for to enioye his companye. Endymion in a cave is no other than Timon, and E.K. says that he has been kept asleep thirty years, that is, from 1548 to 1578, when these words of The Shepheard’s Calendar were written. E.K. is relating Endymion to Oxford, as our poet will also do with Endymion some years later. 186 Scene VII. Tuscanism has invaded England Before the decade end, our poet writes the interludes (not plays, note) The Tame of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Arden of Fevershaw, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice and Anthony and Cleopatra, all of them performed at Court and recorded in the Court registers with different titles. If this seems an exaggeration, and it is natural that the reader should think so, Clark remarks: It will be objected that eleven plays in the brief period of three years is too great an output for an author. The answer is that internal evidence shows that a considerable part of several of these plays was written while the Earl was in Italy, and that, furthermore, the plays were probably not produced at first in the finished state in which we have them today. The titles of the eleven plays mentioned as having been given at Court during the three years between 1576-7 and 1579-1580, together with their equivalent Shakespearean titles are as follows, according to Clark: 1. The historie of Error = The Comedy of Errors. 2. The historie of the Solitarie Knight = Timon of Athens. 3. The historye of Titus and Gissipus (mistranscribed) = Titus Andronicus. 4. An history of the creweltie of A Stepmother = Cymbeline. 5. A Morrall of the marryage of Mynde and Measure = The Taming of the Shrew. 6. The historie of the Rape of the second Helene = All’s Well that Ends Well. 7. A double maske—A Maske of Amasones and an other Maske of knightes = Love’s Labour’s Lost. 8. The history of murderous mychaell = Arden de Fevershaw (apocryphal). 9. The history of the Duke of Millayn and the Marques of Mantua = Two Gentlemen of Verona. 10. The history of Portio and Demorantes = The Merchant of Venice. 11. The history of Serpedon (mistranscribed for ‘Cleopatra’) = Antony and Cleopatra. 187 What Clark is saying seems very true. These plays were interludes which were shorter than the plays we have nowadays. With the passing of time these interludes were revised and augmented opportunely, becoming what will be known as Shakespeare’s larger and more complex plays. The length of the interlude of the decade of the 1560’s The Two Noble Kingsmen, for instance, supports this assertion. Act I and five scenes are his, while the rest of it was filled in by John Fletcher later on. This is accepted by orthodoxy, take note. This is what happens with several Marlowe’s plays. We know from Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn that on ‘January 5, 1579, the French envoy Simier arrived at the English Court to carry on negotiations for the marriage of Elizabeth and the Duke of Alençon.’ After this, there was ‘an entertainment in imitation of a tournament between six ladies and a like number of gentlemen who surrendered to them’: This would have been the Double Maske—A Maske of Amasones and A Maske of knightes—which was ‘shewen before her maiestie the french Imbassador being present the sonday night after Twelfdaie.’ Love’s Labour’s Lost, as it is known today, is a pure expression of Euphuism, a literary movement concerned with verbal expression, metaphor, rhetoric, juggling of words and sentences—including punning, anagrams, acrostics—which so fascinated the Elizabethans. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, was published at this time, with its author, John Lyly, after an association already covering some six years, now becoming Lord Oxford’s secretary and chief factotum, an office he held until the 1590’s. Regarding Two Gentlemen of Verona, I agree with Harold Bloom when he criticises the poor, incredible ending, where Valentine forgives Proteus for his fault, although Proteus’ fault was unforgivable, having tried to rape Valentine’s lady. Valentine’s attitude towards Proteus makes sense when we realise that both characters are the two faces of the author, the courtier and the sexual side, the good and the bad, the ideal and the aggressive side, hence the title of the play: Two Gentlemen of Ver-ona, that is: Two Gentlemen of One Ver. In Arden de Fevershaw, written around these years, Tom Lockwood comments for the New Mermaids edition of this play that it ‘anticipates the technical solution employed in Hamlet in the ongoing commentary of its characters on Arden’s increasingly unlikely survival.’ In addition, the play shows a domestic tragedy like the one our poet was going through 188 with his wife Anne, of whom he was separated at this time. Martín de Riquer and José María Valverde, in their Historia de la literatura universal, can recognise our poet when he is playing his instrument alone, but because they had Shakespere of Stratford in mind, they are forced to remove their intuition from the paper. Riquer and Valverde write about this play (my translation): Arden de Fevershaw … The plot could not be simpler: the crime of an adulterer, who kills her husband with the help of a seducer, followed immediately by the discovery of the crime. But there is also a chain of unsuccessful attempts, up to the point of the homicide, when more persons become involved in the crime —among whom we can find a couple of hired bullies—, and it is understandable that this took the audience’s breath away: the situations and the stress of the danger, imminent and avoided almost by chance, could have been passed to a film script without the need of adapting them through any other technique. And, although it is too soon to talk about “character” and personalities, the Alice-Arden-Mosbie triangle and its passional intensity achieve a contrast of voices of an intensity and beauty never reached in an English theater … [I]f it were not for chronological reasons, we would feel tempted to attribute some of its pages to the very same Shakespeare. There is a scene in Antony and Cleopatra that is worthwhile to comment now. When Cleopatra is close to committing suicide, the author introduces the Fool, that is, Jack Juggler, or in the words of Richard F. Whalen: The clown, or fool, or jester in Shakespeare is most often the truthteller, the character who can tell painful truths to the monarch with impunity. He also seems to be the voice of the dramatist commenting on the action. When he speaks the audience should pay particular attention to what he says. As far as can be determined, scholars have not given the clown’s scene in Antony and Cleopatra the attention it deserves. The words in the final scene of the clown and the death of Cleopatra, Whalen informs us, ‘also deserve attention because they do not occur in Plutarch’s Lives, which Shakespeare otherwise follows closely. Plutarch merely says that Cleopatra’s use of a poisonous asp brought to her in a basket was one of several different ways she was supposed to have killed herself.’ Whalen’s words are interesting:56 56 Richard F. Whalen’s essay is at http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=59. 189 There is, of course, no clown in Plutarch. The scene with the clown and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s invention. All the more reason to examine what they say to each other. Throughout the scene the poisonous asp is referred to not as an asp, or a snake, or a serpent. Shakespeare refers to it repeatedly as a ‘worm.’ That is an unusual word for a serpent … More surprising is that the word ‘worm’ appears nine times in just thirty-six lines in the clown scene–far more than in any other play. It occurs only once or twice in about half of the other plays, sometimes to mean a serpent, usually to mean an earthworm or maggot, as in ‘the worm of conscience’ (Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing). This unusual frequency in thirty-six lines in Antony and Cleopatra bears examination. The significance may well lie in the fact that ‘worm’ in French is ‘ver’– and, of course, the Earl of Oxford’s family name was de Vere. The plays are full of puns and wordplay, some of it multi-lingual. The English ‘worm’ thus can be seen here as a pun on the French ‘ver’, standing for de Vere, the English dramatist with the French surname. Moreover, ‘Vere’ was probably pronounced “vair” in English as well as in French, the same pronunciation as for the French word for worm. With this in mind, analysis of the passage suggests some interesting interpretations that seem to have gone unnoticed. Any one of the interpretations taken by itself may not have the strength of validity. Taken together, however, they may be persuasive that Edward de Vere in the person of the clown is talking about himself, the worm, to Queen Elizabeth in the person of Cleopatra. Cleopatra is the first to refer to the asp as a worm. She calls it ‘the pretty worm of Nilus that kills and pains not.’ This might be taken as the queen’s recognition that de Vere’s plays kill false notions but without intending to cause pain to the holder of them, especially if she is the queen. In his answer the clown mis-speaks (a natural blunder for a clown) and says the worm’s bite is ‘immortal’; people die of it. But the blunder can be seen as deliberate, one that conveys a truth. The worm’s bite–that is, de Vere’s play–will indeed make Cleopatra immortal. And, by extension, his plays will make Queen Elizabeth immortal. Many commentators over the years have taken Cleopatra to stand for Queen Elizabeth. Here there is an explanation on the question of why it is important to know the real author of the works of Shakespeare. Whalen continues: The clown wishes her ‘all joy of the worm.’ –a strange benediction, 190 unless de Vere is asking her to enjoy and appreciate him and his plays. Then he lectures her, just as the court jesters in Shakespeare, the ‘allowed fools,’ are permitted to lecture the monarch. She must understand that ‘the worm will do his kind’–that is, that de Vere will do his thing. He will write plays. He will critique court affairs. Again, he lectures her: –‘The worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people.’ That is, de Vere’s plays are only for the wise who will understand them and their advice. ‘There is no goodness in the worm,’ confesses de Vere’s drive to bring painful truths to the stage, truths that will not have goodness for anyone but the wise. The non-wise will find no goodness in the worm de Vere, only painful satire. The queen assures him that his advice will be heeded, and the clown, pleased, again drops into mock humility and says, in effect, that the worm–de Vere–is not worth the feeding. He is not worth being taken care of. This scene is pure gold. Whalen goes on: Suddenly Cleopatra asks, ‘Will it eat me?’ A strange question. This might be seen as a sudden switch in meaning of ‘worm,’ that is: Will the earthworms eat me when I’m dead? The clown gives her a strange reply that seems to reassure her: Of course not, he may be saying, ‘a woman is a dish for the gods’ unless the devil gets hold of her. Perhaps this implies that de Vere recognises the queen as a favourite of the gods, a queen who is unmarred by the devil and who will be immortal. Leaving, the clown repeats, ‘I wish you joy of the worm.’ Perhaps de Vere is saying again that his writings, with their criticism of the court and society, are not meant to bring sorrow and pain to the queen, but only entertainment and wisdom, that is, “Joy.” Just as Cleopatra in the play will find joy in her death by the bite of the worm. Twenty lines later, Cleopatra clasps the asp to her breast. At this moment, the worm and the fool or court jester–that is, de Vere–all come together. She calls the worm her fool: ‘Come thou mortal wretch … poor venomous fool…’ Then, in a change of pace, Cleopatra finds peace. Her attendant is wild with grief, but Cleopatra in an astonishing metaphor says to her: ‘Peace, peace, dost thou not see my baby [the worm, the serpent, de Vere?] at my breast, that sucks the nurse asleep?’ Usually the baby falls asleep at the breast. Here the nursing woman, Cleopatra, with the asp at her breast, falls into the everlasting sleep of death. The guards and Caesar arrive, but the asp, the worm, the fool, de Vere–all one–have disappeared, leaving, however, a trail. Oxfordian 191 scholars apparently have not remarked on the unusual clown scene– except for Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Sr. in This Star of England ... They warn that the scene is ‘not to be taken at face value.’ They describe the clown as a truth-teller, and although they mention the significance of ‘worm,’ they do not explain its significance. They simply call the passage “a lucid word to those of us who are ‘wise.’” They may well have read ‘worm’ as ‘de Vere’ in Antony and Cleopatra, but they do not say so. Ruth Loyd Miller mentions the French word for worm in her edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (92). She notes how Edward de Vere punned on his name in several languages, particularly on the Latin word for truth in his motto, ‘Vero Nihil Veritas.’ She leads off a list of such puns with ‘ver’ for worm, or for spring, but she doesn’t mention the clown scene in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare scholars generally say little or nothing about the odd scene even though it comes at the climax of the play. It may contain too many puzzlements for them. Let us read this scene now as Whalen recommends. I quote Antony and Cleopatra’s final scene from him (V.ii. 241-79, 305-11, Riverside edition): Enter Guardsman and Clown [with a basket] Guard This is the man. Cleopatra Avoid, and leave him. (exit Guardsman) Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there, That kills and pains not? Clown Truly, I have him; but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or never recover. Cleopatra Remember’st thou any that have died on’t? Clown Very many, men and women, too. I heard of one of them no longer than yesterday, a very honest woman–but something given to lie, as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty–how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt. Truly, she makes a very good report of the worm; but he that will believe all that they say, shall never be saved by half that they do. But this is most falliable, the worm’s an odd worm. Cleopatra Get thee hence, farewell. Clown I wish you all joy of the worm. Cleopatra Farewell. Clown You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind. 192 Cleopatra Ay, ay, farewell. Clown Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people; for indeed, there is no goodness in the worm. Cleopatra Take thou no care, it shall be heeded. Clown Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth the feeding. Cleopatra Will it eat me? Clown You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself will not eat a woman. I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not. But truly, these same whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women; for in every ten that they make, the devils mar five. Cleopatra Well, get thee gone, farewell. Clown Yes, forsooth; I wish you joy o’ th’ worm [exits]… Cleopatra [to an asp, which she applies to her breast] …Come, thou mortal wretch… Poor venomous fool, Be angry and dispatch… …Peace, peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep? This babe of Cleopatra, like ‘thy babe’ our poet confesses to be for the Dark Lady in Sonnet 143, is no other than the worm, Ver, the son of Elizabeth I, the playwright and poet who, having been turned into a hidden royal bastard, made the stage his kingdom, as the Chorus says in the opening verses of Henry V. In short, all these plays had their first version during these last years of the decade of the 1570s, and all of them constitute Galateo’s ‘Tuscanism’ that Harvey is talking about in 1580. Apart from Lyly, Oxford also employed the writer Anthony Munday as one of his secretaries. On November 18, 1577, Munday published The Mirrour of Mutabilitie, or Principall Part of the Mirrour for Magistrates: Describing the Fall of Diuers Famous Princes, and Other Memorable Personages. Selected Out of the Sacred Scriptures by Antony Munday, and Dedicated to the Right Honorable the Earle of Oxenford, a theme that fits perfectly well with our poet’s state of mind. In 1579, Munday published Galien of France and dedicated it to his Lordship. The narrative poem “The Paine of Pleasure,” published anonymously in 1578 and again in 1580, is attributed today to Anthony Munday, but 193 Dr. Sara Smith thinks otherwise:57 After the first abstractions (beauty, riches, honor, love), the poet’s toys are a surprisingly specific mix of sports and learning. His sports are riding and horse-training, hawks, dogs, music, dancing, wrestling, climbing, fencing, tennis, archery, bowling, fishing, and fowling– many of them sports of the upper classes. His studies are physic, law, astronomy, physiognomy, cosmography, philosophy, arithmetic, logic, rhetoric, and, the only lasting pleasure, the study of divinity: the mental and physical training of a very well-educated man … From internal evidence, “The Paine of Pleasure” seems to have been tossed off very quickly. (Music is written about twice; the pleasures of ‘Dogs’ are promised but not performed.) The poem was not extensively copyedited before printing; several lines are garbled. It may have been set from a manuscript in secretary hand, since one possible misprint (‘stands upon no ground’ for ‘stamps upon the ground’) would have been easy to make in secretary hand … Approach to rhythmic style also differentiates Munday from the author of “The Paine of Pleasure.” Munday writes “rocker” verse, the regularly stressed verse popular in the midcentury. Writing regularly stressed verse was a skill much admired at the time, and Munday is good at it; still, given a choice between meter and sense, he is inclined to choose meter … In contrast, one of the great strengths of “The Paine of Pleasure” is its modern use of rhythm. Rhythm serves sense; rhythm is graceful and varied; rhythm even successfully mimics the cadence of the ordinary speaking voice: Lie here, lie there, strike out your blow at length, Strike and thrust with him, look to your dagger hand, Believe me sir, you bear a gallant strength, But choose your ground, at vantage where to stand. And keep aloof for catching too much harm. Beware the button of your Buckler arm. The poet often uses irregular stresses and half-stresses. He has a showman’s sense of rhythm, and rhythm is gracefully married to meaning … The Elizabethan age produced many, many vanitas vanitatum poems; there is and can be no proof that the author of “The Paine of Pleasure” was specifically imitating any one of them. However, an almost contemporary poem, George Gascoigne’s “The Grief of Joy,” is strikingly similar in title, in content, and–most important for a poet–in rhythmic sophistication and voice. George Gascoigne presented “The Grief of Joy,” his last major work, to Queen Elizabeth on New Year’s Day 1576/7 … The content of “The Grief of Joy” overlaps to a significant degree that of “The Paine of Pleasure.” 57 See Shakespeare-Oxford Fellowship website (articles , Smith-Reattribution). 194 Both poets talk about beauty, riches, fencing, leaping, riding, and other activities, seldom seen together in vanitas poetry. Both use (indeed overuse) the words joy and toy … In summary, Oxford’s identified poems show strong similarities to “The Paine of Pleasure.” Stylistically it resembles his work. The circumstances of his life match what can be inferred of the author’s circumstances. Though “The Paine of Pleasure” is longer and more accomplished than any of his previously identified poems, nothing in it is startlingly different from his previous work. Oxford is known to have been acquainted with both George Gascoigne, whose work may have inspired “The Paine of Pleasure,” and with Anthony Munday. Finally, alone among identified Court poets at this period, Oxford had previously allowed his work to be published in a book with “commoner poets,” as was “The Paine of Pleasure.” No other identified poet is as likely to have written the poem as Oxford. We may reasonably conclude that the poem is his. We have some information from Hubert H. Holland about the date of All’s Well that Ends Well: The wars in the Netherlands between Spain and the Dutch give the clue to the date of this play. In 1577 there had been a cessation of hostilities, but in January, 1578, they recommenced … While secretly desiring to assist them against Spain, the political situation prevented Queen Elizabeth from doing so officially, and when envoys approached her on the subject she refused to send an English army. At the same time she had no objection to Englishmen going over as volunteers and allowed Coronel Norris and several thousand volunteers to do so. This was the situation when the play under discussion begins … The relations, therefore, are precisely similar, and attention must be drawn to the names of the countries at war, Florence and Siena— Flanders and Spain; the initials of the countries are the same, and Florence for Flanders is particularly interesting as it will be found to be not the only occasion when Florence is used to represent Flanders. Continuing the history of the war—Don John of Austria, brother to the King of Spain, was leader of the Spanish forces in the Netherlands, and died on October 1st, 1578. There were many stories connected with his death, one being that he was poisoned by two Englishmen at the instigation of Sir Francis Walsingham, one of Queen’s Elizabeth ministers. In the play, Bertram takes service with the Duke of Florence, and in Act III, Scene 5, a widow of Florence says: ‘It is reported that he has taken their greatest commander; and that with his own hand he slew the duke’s brother.’ 195 As this must obviously refer to the hostile duke, we have a palpable allusion to Don John’s death. In May of 1579 peace negotiations were commenced at Cologne between the two countries, and in Act IV, Scene 3, we have it as follows: First Lord In the meantime, what hear you of these wars? Second Lord I hear there is an overture of peace. First Lord Nay, I assure you, a peace concluded. It is suggested therefore that in May, 1579, the play was nearing completion. There is one more topical allusion. In February, 1579, England experienced the heaviest fall of snow in years—five feet of snow lay in London, sufficient to have been noted by historians. Now the only reference to snow in all the works of Shakespeare is to be found in All’s Well that Ends Well. Parolles, remarking on the strength of the Florentine army, says that half of them dare not shake the snow from off their cassocks lest they shake themselves to pieces (Act IV, Scene 3). Holland makes note of another allusion to these years of the life of Edward de Vere in the play Richard II. In Act III, Scene 1, we read that Bolingbroke says something to the characters Bushy and Green that Holland interprets as follows: ‘There is again no historical authority for this, but is precisely what occurred to the Earl of Oxford with regard to his wife, Anne Cecil,’ because of the rumours and the strange way William Cecil, Polonius, had of dealing with that situation: You have misled a prince, a royal King, A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments, By you unhappied and disfigured clean; You have in manner with your sinful hours Made a divorce betwist his queen and him Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain, like that Tamburlaine the Great, will fight for his rights and burn everything around him before falling into the abyss of oblivion, just like Phaeton and Icarus. 196 Works by our poet written during the decade of 1570s 1.- The Famous Victories of Henry V, ca. 1571-1573, anonymous: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/famvic101.htm. 2.- Edmund Ironside, ca. 1571, anonymous: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/iron1.htm. 3.- Edward III, ca. 1571-73, anonymous: http://william-shakespeare.classic-literature.co.uk/king-edward-thethird/. 4.- The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, ca. 1571, anonymous: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/renplays/miseries.htm. 5.- Henry VI, Part Three, ca. later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index32.htmlhttp://www.bartleby.com/70 /index32.html. 6.- The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, ca. 1568-1571, anonymous: 7.- The Marriage of Wit and Science, ca. 1568-1571, anonymous. Both 6 and 7 at: http://ia600404.us.archive.org/20/items/anonymousplays04farmuoft/ anonymousplays04farmuoft.pdf. 8.- Introductory Epistle to The Courtier, 1572, as Edward de Vere: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/vere106.htm. 9.- The Langham Letter, as Langham, 1572: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Langham/Langham_Letter.pdf. 10.- Introductory Epistle to De Consolatione, 1573, as Edward de Vere: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/vere107.htm. 11.- A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 1573-1576, as George Gascoigne: http://ia700200.us.archive.org/15/items/thecompleteworks01gascuoft/t hecompleteworks01gascuoft.pdf. Here, separated, what is considered the first English novel, “The Adventures of Master F.J.,” 1573, before censorship did its job in 1576: http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/gascoigne/index.html. 12.- The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576, anthology, several songs are his: http://www.archive.org/details/paradiseofdainty027377mbp. 13.- The London Prodigal, ca. 1572-1577, anonymous: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4031/pg4031.html. 14.- The History of Error, ca. 1576, anonymous, later adapted as The Comedy of Errors of Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index15.html. 15.- The Merry Wives of Windsor, ca. 1576, later as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index13.html. 16.- The History of Titus and Gissipus, ca. 1576, later adapted as 197 Titus Andronicus of Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index37.html. 17.- Pericles, prince of Tyre, ca. 1576, later as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index47.html. 18.- Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, 1578, as John Lyly: http://ia600508.us.archive.org/0/items/cu31924013122084/cu3192401 3122084.pdf. 19.- The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1578 edition, poems 100 to 104, 106, and 107 to 113: http://www.archive.org/details/paradiseofdainty027377mbp. 20.- The history of the Duke of Milan and the Marques of Mantua, later adapted as Two Gentlemen of Verona, ca. 1577, later as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index12.html. 21.- A history of the cruelty of a Stepmother, ca. 1576, later adapted as Cymbeline of Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index46.html. 22.- A Morrall of the marriage of Mind and Measure, ca. 1576, later adapted as The Taming of the Shrew of Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index21.html. 23.- Arden of Fevershaw, ca. 1576, anonymous: http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/arden.html. 24.- The history of Serpedon (mistranscribed for “Cleopatra”), ca. 1576, anonymous, later adapted as Antony and Cleopatra of Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index45.html. 25.- A Double Maske—A Maske of Amazones and another Maske of Knights, 1579, later adapted as Love’s Labour’s Lost of Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index17.html. 26.- The Paine of Pleasure, 1578, anonymous, attributed to Anthony Munday: http://www.sarahsmith.com/books/chasingshakespeares/poem/pop/in dex.html?printable_versions.htm. 27.- The History of the Rape of the Second Hellene, 1579, anonymous, later adapted as All’s Well that Ends Well as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index22.html. 198 ACT III THE MASTER DRAMATIST 199 200 Scene I. The Knight of the Tree of the Sun In 1580 John Lyly published the second part of his famous novel and entitled it Euphues and his England; in it he shows how Euphues and Philautus arrive in England and visit the Court and country. This second part is a panegyric in praise of the country and its culture, its education, women, nobility and, obviously, its Queen. Euphues departs from the island with the same melancholic spirit caused by that mysterious woman who, without any doubt, could be no other but the one that could legitimise him and make him king or, if not him now, his son. This second part was dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, who was behind the novels, for, apart from their stylistic contents, the very same Lyly confesses that he had never written before the production of his first novel and that a nobleman had taken care of it; that care was such that Lyly says that the book’s foreword carried the mark of his protector: To the Right Honourable my very good Lorde and Maister, Edward de Vere, Earle of Oxenforde, Vicount Bulbeck, Lorde of Escales and Badlesmere, and Lorde great Chamberlaine of England, John Lyly wisheth long lyfe, with encrease of Honour. The first picture that Phydias the first Paynter shadowed, was the protraiture of his owne person, saying thus: ‘If it be well, I will paint many besides Phydias, if ill, it shall offend none but Phydias.’ In the like manner fareth it with me (Right Honourable) who never before handling the pensill, did for my fyrst counterfaite, coulour mine owne Euphues, being of this minde, that if it wer lyked, I would draw more besides Euphues, if loathed, grieve none but Euphues. …I have brought into the worlde two children, of the first I was delivered, before my friendes thought mee conceived, of the second I went a whole yeare big, and yet when everye one thought me ready to lye downe, I did then quicken … My first burthen comming before his time, must needes be a blind whelp, the second brought forth after his time must needes be a monster. The one I sent to a noble man to nurse, who with great love brought him up, for a yeare: so that wheresoever he wander, he hath his Nurses name in his forhead, wher sucking his first milke, he can-not forget his first Master. The other (right Honourable) being but yet in his swathe cloutes, I commit most humbly to your Lordships protection, that in his infancie he may be kepte by your good care from fals, and in his youth by your great countenaunce shielded from blowes, and in his age by your gracious continuaunce, defended from contempt. He is my youngest and my last, and the paine that I sustained for him in travell, hath made me past teeming, yet doe I thinke my self very fertile, in that I was not 201 altogether barren … Twinnes they are not, but yet Brothers, the one nothing resemblyng the other, and yet (as all children are now a dayes) both like the father … This Pamphlet right honorable, conteining the estate of England, I know none more fit to defend it, then one of the Nobilitie of England, nor any of the Nobilitie, more auntient or more honorable then your Lordship, besides that, describing the condition of the English court, & the majestie of our dread Sovereigne, I could not finde one more noble in court, your Honor, who is or should be under hir Majestie chiefest in court, by birth borne to the greatest Office, & therfore me thought by right to be placed in great authoritie: for who so compareth the honor of your L. noble house, with the fidelitie of your auncestours, may wel say, which no other can truly gainsay, Vero nihil verius. So that I commit the ende of al my pains unto your most honorable protection, assuring my self that … Euphues shal be without daunger by your L. Patronage, otherwise, I cannot see, wher I might finde succour in any noble personage. Thus praying continually for the encrease of your Lordships honour, with all other things that either you woulde wish, or God will graunt, I ende. Your Lordships most dutifully to commaund, John Lyly. Our poet, who had lost three thousand pounds in a commercial maritime exploration led by someone called Lock (hence, Antonio owes that same amount to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and that 3,000 are the pains that Lucio says he has bought from Madam Mitigation in Measure for Measure), commenced an affair with one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting named Anne Vavasour, about whom he wrote the poem “Echo verses,” where the poet makes Anne cry: ‘May I requite his birth with faith?,’ a cry that Hellen repeated in All’s Well that Ends Well. Our poet was aware that the blood that ran through his veins caused him to be someone above the expectations of any noble woman of the Court, as we see in this poem “Echo verses”: Sitting alone upon my thought in melancholy mood, In sight of sea, and at my back an ancient hoary wood, I saw a fair young lady come, her secret fears to wail, Clad all in color of a nun, and covered with a veil; Yet (for the day was calm and clear) I might discern her face, As one might see a damask rose hid under crystal glass. Three times, with her soft hand, full hard on her left side she knocks, And sigh’d so sore as might have mov’d some pity in the rocks; From sighs and shedding amber tears into sweet song she brake, When thus the echo answered her to every word she spake: 202 [Anne Vavasour’s Echo] Oh heavens! who was the first that bred in me this fever? Vere Who was the first that gave the wound whose fear I wear for ever? Vere. What tyrant, Cupid, to my harm usurps thy golden quiver? Vere. What sight first caught this heart and can from bondage it deliver? Vere. Yet who doth most adore this sight, oh hollow caves tell true? You. What nymph deserves his liking best, yet doth in sorrow rue? You. What makes him not reward good will with some reward or ruth? Youth. What makes him show besides his birth, such pride and such untruth? Youth. May I his favour match with love, if he my love will try? Ay. May I requite his birth with faith? Then faithful will I die? Ay. And I, that knew this lady well, Said, Lord how great a miracle, To her how Echo told the truth, As true as Phoebus’ oracle. The Earle of Oxforde. These words express the same note that can be found in “A Lover’s Complaint,” the narrative poem that was attached to the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609. On her behalf, Hellen complains in the same way as the poet had made Vavasour speak when he writes in All’s Well that Ends Well (I.i.68-71): I am undone. There’s no living, none, If Bertram be away. ’Twere all one That I should love a bright particular star And think to wed it, he is so above me. Ogburn writes: A first stepping-stone to Love’s Labour’s Lost may have been laid shortly before or after Anne Vavasour entered Oxford’s life. On 11 January 1579 A Double Mask was ‘shown before her Majesty, the French Ambassador being present.’ It is recorded as A Maske of Amasones and A Maske of Knights and described as ‘an entertainment in imitation of a tournament between six ladies and a like number of gentlemen who surrendered to them’ … Later on that same year there appeared a book entitled Schools of Abuse, by Stephen Gosson, a graduate of Oxford and a satirist. Soon to take holy 203 orders, Gosson wrote attacking poets and players as ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ … He made exceptions, however. ‘As some of the players are far from abuse, so some of their plays are without rebuke’ … Two of these were ‘the Jew and Ptolome, shown at the Bull,’ the former ‘representing the greediness of worldly chusers, and bloody minds of usurers’ … It appears likely that Gosson having seen it in the inn yard of the Bull tavern in a try-out before its presentation at Court, and that the play was a first version of The Merchant of Venice Obgurn reproduces Samuel Johnson’s opinion on the allusions to real persons in The Merchant of Venice, and offers a possible answer to the more plausible models for Portia, Antonio and Bassanio. He interprets, following Johnson, that behind ‘Portia’s suitors, there may be some covert allusion to those of Elizabeth’: It would certainly appear so. The foreign princes we see aspiring to Portia’s hand put us in mind of those aspiring to Elizabeth’s, ranging from ‘far-off Ivan the Terrible,’ Martin Hume says, ‘to the youngest of the Valois.’ And E.T. Clark suggests that Portia’s ruminations on choosing a husband … may be just such as Oxford had heard from Elizabeth. Specifically, the Queen would have had cause to lament as Portia does that I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father; for Henry VIII had provided in his will that ‘our said daughter Elizabeth after our decease, shall not marry, nor take any person to be her husband without the assent and consent of the PrivyCouncillors...’ Portia, by the terms of her father’s will, is to be won by the suitor who, given the choice of three caskets, picks the one that will be found to contain her picture. The Prince of Morocco chooses the one of gold, the Prince of Aragon the one of silver, and are both disappointed. Portia’s fellow countryman, Bassanio, who loves her for herself, and whom she loves, is not moved by ‘the greed of wordly choosers,’ as Gosson put it … There was in this, I take it, a moral for Elizabeth, that her happiness and her subjects’ rested in her being won not by a foreign prince, like Alençon, with an eye to the material advantage, but by her own people, whose heart went out to her for herself alone. This woman that Antonio is thinking about is no other than Cressida of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and ‘Fortuna’ of the poems our poet wrote about in The Paradise of Dainty Devices. The play’s first words are Antonio’s, who says something that we can clearly interpret; the one who 204 talks is Euphues: Antonio In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. It weares me, you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn: And such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself. Bassanio is a portrait of Southampton, of course, and that is why Antonio is convinced that he should give not only his money but his own flesh in case he cannot pay his debt to Shylock. As Beauclerk writes: The relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal, no less than that between Antonio and Bassanio, seems to speak eloquently of this touching friendship between a fallen man and his prodigal son, one that is both highly idealistic—platonic even—and at the same time fraught with feelings of shame and rejection. That they cannot acknowledge each other openly is a constant source of sorrow, as is the poet’s shame at his compromised status, which he feels could harm the Fair Youth’s chances of succeeding to the throne … Falstaff is the playwright … Yet, beneath the unconquerable, some would say implacable, wit lies the fear that the prince will spurn him. Why, then, does Prince Hal have such power over old Jack Falstaff? Harold Bloom has the answer: Hal’s displaced paternal love is Falstaff’s vulnerability, his one weakness, and the origin of his destruction. Time annihilates other Shakespearean protagonists, but not Falstaff, who dies for love … The greatest of all fictive wits dies the death of a rejected fathersubstitute, and also of a dishonored mentor. Ogburn explains to us what was happening to Oxford’s patrimony: [T]he great bulk of his sales of land took place between 1576, when his European trip had to be paid for … But the principal drain on his finances is likely to have been the company of actors he acquired. I hardly doubt that, close as he was to the Earl of Sussex, who as Lord Chamberlain was primarily responsible for theatrical performances at Court, he had all along been active in managing the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s servants.’ During the early months of 1580, however, he took over the Earl of Warwick’s company … Oxford was not on the road with his company. Just at this time he was planting a bomb for 205 himself on a nine-month fuse: he was getting Mistress Vavasour with child. During these years he writes his comedy Twelfth Night, which contains the same argument of the novel “The Adventures of Master F.J.” included in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. A suitor to the hand of a Lady is turned into a fool (Malvolio),58 like what happened with the mature Jack Juggler and Falstaff. Ogburn proves himself to be very intuitive with the interpretation he offers us: I cannot think of any reason why Olivia is called ‘Cataian’ other than that Elizabeth was a prime investor in the Cathay Company. Both ladies, by the way, were courted by a Duke, Alençon in one case, Orsino in the other, and became smitten by his emissary, Jehan de Simier in real life, Viola disguised as a youth in the play. In 1580 some poems are added again to a new edition, the third, of The Paradise of Dainty Devices: the new ones that go from poem 114 to 120. The poems (songs) 115 to 120 are written in heroic sextets (ABABCC), the same rhymed form that is adopted in the poem Venus and Adonis. Although these new poems all sound like his, songs 116, sung by Troilus against Cressida, and 117, where she replies to his accusations, are especially Deverian. In January 1581, after having been involved with some Catholics in a conspiracy, Oxford denounced some of them (such as Charles Arundel) as conspirators before the Queen. Charles Arundel will defend himself in writing saying that Oxford was an atheist and a sodomite (here we have now, very possibly, the origin of that legend about Marlowe’s being an atheist and a sodomite). After this embarrassing mess in which Oxford became entangled, a tournament was held in Whitehall Palace. Beauclerk informs us: Oxford was one of three challengers in the tournament held at Whitehall to celebrate Philip Howard’s elevation to the earldom of Arundel (Howard was the eldest son of the executed Duke of Norfolk.) Competing as the Knight of the Tree of the Sun, Oxford was once again victorious. He wrote a speech for the occasion, which was delivered to the queen by his page, possibly the seven-year-old Henry Wriothesley, and later published. 58 Malvolio, like Benvolio, comes from the Italian language and the official initials of the Earl of Oxford: ‘Malvolio’ is ‘Bad Will to E.O,’ while ‘Benvolio’ is ‘Good Will to E.O.’ 206 The ceremony that brought Oxford before the Queen was something quite extraordinary. Beauclerk writes: A tournament was a chance for the monarch to present herself to the people in a magnificent display of power and prestige. It was also a theater for her nobility, in which they could vie with each other in demonstrations of loyalty. Oxford, an accomplished actor, took full advantage of these opportunities, spending huge sums on props and playing his role to the hilt. On this occasion he put on the sort of show reserved for royalty. Pavilions, for instance, were used by the monarch or his sons for privacy and to make a dramatic appearance “in the field,” and had hardly been seen since Henry VIII himself took to the lists half a century earlier. As for the soaring golden tree and gilded staves, what a defiant assertion of privilege for a man who was still officially in disgrace [for the Catholic conspiracy in which he was involved and accused of atheism and sodomy]! This was a drama in miniature—a “device” or masque—written, directed, and acted by the Earl of Oxford. And he continues: The speech presented by Oxford’s page tells of a knight who, finding the grove he inhabits blasted, wanders out onto the open plain, where he finds no respite from his sufferings until he spies ‘a tree so beautiful, that his eyes are dazzled with the brightness.’ Approaching it, he meets a hermit who explains to him the nature of the unique tree, which provides relief and nourishment to those who seek its aid. The knight’s solemn vow on experiencing the marvellous comfort and protection of the sun tree sounds like Shakespeare explaining the meaning of his assumed name (emphasis mine): At the last, resting under the shadow, he [the Knight] felt such content, as nothing could be more comfortable. The days he spent in virtuous delights, the night slipped away in golden dreams, he was never annoyed with venomous enemies, nor disquieted with idel cogitations. In so much, that finding all felicity in that shade, and all security in that Sun: he made a solemn vow, to incorporate his harte into that Tree, and engraft his thoughts upon those virtues, swearing that as there is but one Sun to shine over it, one root to give life unto it, one top to maintain Majesty: so there should be but one Knight either to live or die for the defence thereof. Whereupon, he swore himself only to be the Knight of the Tree of 207 the Sun, whose life should end before his loyalty. Yes, Prince Arthur is the representation of Oxford. Beauclerk adds: What follows is a clear allegory of Oxford’s predicament at the time of the libels: Thus cloyed with content, he fell into a sweet slumber, whose smiling countenance showed him void of all care. But his eyes were scarce closed, when he seemed to see diggers undermining the Tree behind him, that Sun-Tree suspecting the Knight to give the diggers aid, might have punished him in her prison, but failing of their pretence, and seeing every blow they struck to light upon their own brains, they threatened him by violence, whom they could not match in virtue. But he clasping the Tree, as the only anchor of his trust, they could not so much as move him from his cause, whom they determined to martyr without color. Whereupon, they made a challenge to win the Tree by right, and to make it good by arms. At which saying, the Knight being glad to have his truth tried with his valor, for joy awaked. This is why Oxford was taking part in the tournament: to try his truth with valor and, if necessary, his blood. The bay tree erected outside his pavilion was a common symbol of constancy in marriage in the portraits of the time. Here it also represents the tree of the laureate, whose leaves were worn by the chief poet; this suggest that the knight is also competing as a poet of great renown, who can match the violence of his opponents with his exquisitely pointed wit. The oration ends with this vow of loyalty: And now (most virtuous and excellent Princess) seeing such tumults for his Tree, such an honorable presence to judge, such worthy knights to joust: I cannot tell whether his perplexity or his pleasure be the greater. But this he will avouch at all assays, himself to be the most loyal Knight of the Sun-Tree, which who so gainsayeth, he is here pressed, either to make him recant it before he run, or repent it after. Offering rather to die upon the points of a thousand lances, than to yield a jot in constant loyalty. The end of Beauclerk’s analysis is the best part: The tree of the sun for Queen Elizabeth, the diggers for Howard, Arundel, Southwell, and their cynical abettors in the Puritan party, who saw an opportunity to put the knife in when their adversary was down. The Knight himself is Oxford, the spear-shaker, who pledges 208 his life to the true spirit of sovereignty embodied by his queen, entering the tournament to prove his love for his mistress. (There are predictable puns on Vere: the knight is ‘always ripe, yet ever green’ and ‘continueth all the year as it were Ver [i.e., the spring].’) The fact that Elizabeth did not live up to this lofty image is neither here nor there; Oxford would continue to speak to the higher truth in her as long as his quill had ink to bathe its point in. Oxford was going to great lengths to reassure the queen of his loyalty. But he was more than just a loyal subject and lover to his sovereign; he was her son, hence the appellation ‘Knight of the Tree of the Sun,’ which meant the knight of the genealogical tree of the son—he who represented the royal line of his mistress-mother. Significantly, the sun tree is a potent symbol in alchemy for the “greater work” of transformation, and it appears from poems such as Venus and Adonis, “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and the Sonnets that OxfordShakespeare saw his relationship with Elizabeth in alchemical terms. Purged in the flames of their transgressive love, they had produced a new prince (the Fair Youth) with a new vision stamped in his brow. In his oration, Oxford created an allegory of great pith and beauty out of his immediate life circumstances and addressed it to the queen: Shakespeare’s exact modus operandi in his plays. In a coda to the oration, we are told that the knight performed ‘with great honor’ and ‘valiantly brake all the twelve staves.’ When the tournament was over, the spectators tore the gilt bay tree outside Oxford’s tent, as well as the richly embroidered tent itself, into countless fragments, which they carried out off as souvenirs. One is reminded of the treatment meted out to Henry VIII after one of his more extravagant entertainments. It was a way for everyone to share in the sovereignty of the king. Our poet, having got Vavasour pregnant, was the subject of the Queen’s wrath and jealousy, as a result of which he was sent to the Tower, where he was confined for two months and a half. E.T. Clark supports the view that during this confinement in the Tower, our poet wrote Richard III, while Ogburn thinks that it was Henry VI, Part Three. The conflict that is shown in these two historical plays –the war between Lancastrians and Yorkists–, offers an evident historical parallel with the conflict between Catholics and Protestants during those years. Moreover, many Oxfordians have supported the view that the play Sir Thomas More was originated during his fourth personal crisis; as well as Measure for Measure, for both of them are full of unjust imprisonments. This last play, in particular, describes what happened to Edward de Vere and Anne Vavasour and uses the same plot found in the play Cambyses, where someone receives the royal and absolute power from the king only to administer it during the latter’s absence in a poor and tyrannical way. It 209 is in Measure for Measure where we are told that Claudio has been arrested for getting a woman called Juliet pregnant. Claudio can only avoid the death penalty if his sister, who is in a convent, intercedes on his behalf in front of Angelo, the person who has received from the king the power to administer the government of the city of Vienna. No wonder, as we now see, that the only person in the play who can save Claudio is named Isabella, the Italian variant of the Queen’s name. When he finally got out of the Tower, the streets of London became the streets of Verona that we read of in Romeo and Juliet or in Sir Thomas More. This last play is written by one of Oxford’s secretaries, Anthony Munday, but the content shows a connection to Shakespeare’s vocabulary, providing more evidence that our poet dictated many of his thoughts and characteristic expressions to his secretaries. Anne Vavasour’s uncle avenged the wrong committed by Edward de Vere by killing many of his servants in street fights. The fight between these Montescos and Capuletos lasted for some years more and caused Oxford to suffer in his own flesh a dangerous wound. This may have been, Ogburn informs us, the cause of the weakness we see in the Sonnets, as well as the reason why our poet claimed he was injured by the abandonment of Fortune (i.e. the Queen). It was Anne Vavasour’s uncle, Thomas Knyvet, who was allied to the powerful Howards, who had hurt him. Sonnet 37 says this same thing very clearly: As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth; Ogburn makes an accurate analysis of Romeo and Juliet: That Burghley would call Anne Vavasour ‘the drab,’ the strumpet, in a letter to Hatton does not sound altogether as if she were regarded at Court as an innocent country maid corrupted by a wicked Lord. One other point: in speaking of Oxford as having ‘forgotten his duty to God,’ Burghley may be supposed to have referred to his backsliding into the Old Religion without having, upon renouncing it, returned to the new, as I judge the case. And so, many years later, following the Essex rebellion, when it came out that the rebels had bribed the Lord Chamberlain’s company to perform King Richard the Second because of the precedent it afforded for the deposition of the monarch, Elizabeth would say, clearly speaking of the author of the play … ‘He that will forget God will also forget his benefactor; this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses’ … Oxford never had more cause than now to ‘weep my outcast state.’ But he was mastering the 210 means of turning the tables triumphantly upon adversity and those who took advantage of him. He had the drama … Long since, it seems, Oxford had bethought himself of the childish poem Romeus and Juliet and seen what might be made of it. The commencement of the action in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet ... is dated by the Nurse’s remark that ‘’Tis since the earthquake now 11 years.’ She can hardly be referring to any other than the earthquake that struck in the neighbourhood of Verona in 1570 and nearly destroyed Ferrara. In other words, the time is 1581. Oxford, as he often did, split in two for the play. His comic-fantastical side became Mercutio, his poeticmelancholy side Romeo, in whom Hamlet is already being born. The murderous swordsman Knyvet, Anne Vavasor’s vengeful uncle, became the murderous swordsman Tybalt … Juliet … is probably to be regarded as the idealization of young girlhood abstracted from a number of models and perhaps made the age of Anne Cecil when she and Oxford were exchanging vows as an affectionate offering by Oxford to his wife upon their reconciliation, a gesture of amends … Elizabeth is plainly the ‘fair Rosaline’ … the name perhaps signifying the Tudor rose … Rosaline does not appear in the play but at the beginning Romeo is ‘in love but out of favour’ with her, and in what he says of her can be talking only of Elizabeth; for She hath Dian’s wit, And, in strong proof of chastity well arm’d From love’s weak childish bow she lives unharm’d... Romeo soliloquizes [II.ii] But, soft, what light through yonder windows breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she: Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green, And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. Percy Allen says, “The references here are unmistakable; for when it is remembered that the Tudor livery was green and white, the envious moon, or Diana as she was so frequently called, whose ‘vestal livery is sick and green,’ can be none other than Elizabeth’s”; the Queen was conventionally represented as the moon, Sidney Lee writes. To accuse the Vestal Moon of envy was a malicious cut at Elizabeth’s notorious resentment toward the love affairs of those around her. In enjoining Juliet to ‘Be not her maid,’ Oxford could have been addressing either or both of his Annes, both of whom had been the Queen’s maids 211 Scene II. Euphues and his school: Thomas Watson To maintain a school of writers under his direction was only possible with money. Our poet acquired an immense house in the centre of London whose maintenance was so expensive that it had led the former owner, Fisher, to bankruptcy. By the time our poet acquired it in 1584, the house was already known as Fisher’s Folly. Because of the activities that took place in Oxford’s mansion, writers that visited it referred to it as Mount Silexedra, in reference to Mount Parnassus, the mythical place where great poets dwell. Ogburn writes: Mr Barrell’s idea is that Oxford acquired the mansion ‘as headquarters for the school of poets and dramatists who openly acknowledged his patronage and leadership.’ He may equally have sought a dwelling suitable for visits by the Queen. The circle of writers began to form around Oxford when he was in the forefront of the euphuist movement. With John Lyly there was Anthony Munday, who in 1579 had dedicated The Mirror of Mutability to Oxford with a euphuistic opening wishing the Earl ‘after this life a crown of everlasting felicity in the eternal hierarchy’ … In the next year Munday dedicated to Oxford his Zelauto [which title read]: ‘Zelauto. The Fountain of Fame … Given for a friendly entertainment to Euphues, at his late arrival in England. By A.M. Servant to the Right Honourable the Earle of Oxenforde, 1580’ … The provocative figure of Euphues, whom we recall today in the language we speak and in our taste for novels, stalks forth again with the next adherent to Oxford’s circle. This was Robert Greene, who took his place with Lyly, Munday, and Thomas Watson at about the time Oxford was acquiring Fisher’s Folly. In a work by Barnabe Riche written in 1584, Anderson informs us, the former describes his meeting with Euphues after he had ‘come from Mount Silexedra into the city.’ According to Riche, Silexedra was a place where Euphues could ‘muse...on [his] studies.’ Due to a comment Lyly wrote in Euphues and his England, ‘Bottom of the mount of Silexedra,’ Anderson informs us that in Latin, exedra means ‘a hall for conversing or disputing in.’ Mount Silexedra (also known as Mount Fisher) was the school where the ‘university wits’ produced their works and met: Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Watson, Peele, Lodge, Munday, Chettle and Nashe, among many others. Dominating the school, writing or directing, polishing or correcting parts of their works, was Euphues, Master Apis Lapis, the Sacred Ox, as he was called in 1592 by Thomas Nashe. Spenser will refer to this school and its director in his dedicatory poem to Oxford in the first part of The Faerie Queene published in 1590. 212 We know that the companies of boy actors like the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul turned professional around this time and that they competed with other companies. Through Ogburn we are made privy of the fact that Oxford got the lease of an indoor theater, Blackfriars, and transferred the lease to his secretary Lyly, ‘and at the same time probably gave him direct supervision of the new boys’ acting there: the Oxford’s Boys. Around 1581 the play The Arraingement of Paris was performed by the Children of the Chapel before her Majesty. Published anonymously in 1584, its euphuistic style is full of references to Pallas Athena and imbued with Ovid’s influence; it has the same shepherds playing their flutes as in Immerito’s work The Shepheard's Calendar. Our poet seems to have put his hand to this play, for when the nymph Aenone says to Paris ‘love thy choice,’ something reminds us that these very same words had been said by E.O. in 1571. We read in Act I, Scene Five, of The Arraingement of Paris: Aenone Sweet Shepherd, for Aenone’s sake be cunning in this song, And keep thy love, and love thy choice, or else thou dost her wrong. Paris My vow is made and witnessed... And I will have a lover’s fee; they say, unkiss’d, unkind. Such is the influence that this play receives from Immerito’s The Shepheard’s Calendar that the same shepherd Colin appears. The shepherds Hobbinol, Thenot and Digon appear at one point, and Hobbinol says that poor Colin has an ‘uncouth’ sickness, the same that Antonio has in The Merchant of Venice. Then he says that Colin is wounded like the deer and that in order to cure his wound he must look in those woods for the herb dictamum. Robert Greene, another pseudonym used by our poet (it will be used by other university wits), will write in Gwydonius, the Card of Fancy (1584), that ‘the deer, being stricken though never so deep, feedeth on the herb dictamum and forthwith is healed.’59 In 1582 the poem Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Love was published by Thomas Watson, one writer under Oxford’s patronage of whom we do not know when he was born or when he supposedly died: these dates are presumed. Thomas Watson fulfills all the prerequisites to be a pseudonym. The poem, which was dedicated to the director of Mount Silexedra, the Earl of Oxford, contains one hundred sonnets of eighteen verses each which are preceded by some critical introductory comments full of Latin and Greek quotations. By the way, the person who wrote these quotes and commentaries mentions the Pactolus, a river 59 I say this is evidence that he had a hand, not that he wrote the whole play. 213 flooded with gold belonging to King Cressus. Thomas Nashe also mentions the Pactolus in 1589 on his work The Anatomy of Absurditie. Since ‘Watson’ means ‘twins’, as Beauclerks informs us, it could very well hide the tandem Edward de Vere—John Donne, who was only ten years old back then. The erudite commentaries seem to be his, even though my mind, and surely the reader’s, shouts at me that this is preposterous. Anderson writes: The breath of mastery and depth of knowledge in these introductory comments is truly Shake-spearean. To bolster his literary arguments, Watson’s unnamed critic offhandedly excerpts Seneca, Sophocles, Lucan, Theocritus, Horace, Martial, Xenophon, Pliny, Ronsard, Virgil, Homer, Petrarch, and Ovid. Obscure French, Italian, and Latin poets (Forcatulus, Fiorenzuola, Strozza, Tibullus, and Parabosco) are also quoted as matter-of-factly as someone might detail what he ate for supper last night. As C.S. Lewis observed about the Hekatompathia, ‘These notes are the most interesting part of the book.’ Even some orthodox scholarship has pointed to de Vere as the likely author of these glosses—which, if they were from de Vere’s pen, would be Shake-speare’s only known work of literary criticism. Interestingly enough, the influence of Watson over Shakespeare has been widely recognised by critics. If we know that this sequence of 100 sonnets of the Hekatompathia is an evident precedent for the sequence of 100 sonnets that lies at the center of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets, as Hank Whittemore informs us, we will not be surprised to know, through Beauclerk, that C.S. Lewis thought that ‘Watson is perhaps closer to Shakespeare than to any other sonneteer in his conception of the sonnet.’ And Beauclerk adds, as well, that, as it should be expected, the poet of the Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Love identifies himself with Actaeon, and that he cannot reveal the name of the goddess who he is in love with. In sonnet 8 we read: Actaeon for espying Diana as she bathed her naked, was transformed into a Hart, and soon after torn in pieces by his own hounds, as Ovid describeth at large lib. 3. Metamorph. And Silius Italicus libr.12.de bello Punico glanceth at it in this manner. Fama est, cum laceris Actaeon stebile membris Supplicium lueret fpectatae in sonte Dianae, Attonitum nouitate mala fugisse parentem Per freta Aristeum, etc. The Author alluding in all this Passion unto the fault of Actaeon, and to the hurt which he sustained, setteth down his own amorous 214 infelicity; as Ovid did after his banishment, when in another sense he applied this fiction unto himself, being exiled (as it should seem) for having at unawares taken Caesar in some great fault: for thus he writeth. Cur aliquid vidi, cur noxia lumina feci? etc. Inscius Actaeon vidit fine veste Dianam, Praeda suit canibus nec minus ille suis. Acteon lost in middle of his sport Both shape and life, for looking but awry, Diana was afraid he would report What secrets he had seen in passing by: To tell but truth, the self same hurt have By viewing her, for whom I daily die; I leese my wonted shape, in that my mind Doth suffer wrack upon the stony rock Of her disdain, who contrary to kind Doth bear a breast more hard than any stock; And former form of limbs is changed quite By cares in love, and want of due delight. I leese my life in that each secret thought, Which I conceive through wanton fond regard, Doth make me say that life availeth nought Where service cannot have a due reward: I dare not name the Nymph that works my smart, Though love hath grav’n her name within my heart. As one can see, the fact that the passage of book II of Ovid’s Tristes is quoted next to the myth of Actaeon and his exile implies, as Beauclerk says, that ‘Watson, also, whoever he may be, is suffering some form of exile.’ Beauclerk tells us: In Sonnet X the poet is blinded for gazing on Minerva’s ‘naked side,’ and in Sonnet 49 of The Tears of Fancy or Love Disdained, published anonymously in 1593, the author—long thought to be Watson—again treats of Actaeon, punning throughout on hart and heart, and lamenting the fact that he ‘would speak but could not, so did sigh and died.’ In Sonnet 31, as Anderson informs us, there is a surprising declaration: [O]n the other hand Eric Lewin Altschuler and William Jansen (“Poet describes stars in Milky Way before Galileo,” Nature 428 …) point out 215 that Watson’s Sonnet 31 is the first known description of the Milky Way as discrete stars—even predating Galileo’s discovery of same. All of Donne’s biographers and critics characterize Donne with extensive knowledge of the science of his time, of his readings and understanding of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Take a look at these comments on Sonnet 31, as follows: There needeth no annotation at all before this Passion, it is of itself so plain and easily conveyed. Yet the unlearned may have this help given them by the way to know what Galaxia is, or Pactolus, which perchance they have not read of often in our vulgar Rhymes. Galaxia (to omit both the Etymology and what the Philosophers do write thereof) is a white way or milky Circle in the heavens, which Ovid mentioneth in this manner. Est via sublimis coelo manifesta sereno, . . . . . . . . Metamorph. Lactea nomen habet, candore notabilis ipso. . . . . lib. I. And Cicero thus in somnio Scipionis; Erat autem is splendidissimo candore inter flammas circulus elucens, quem vos (ut a Graijs accepistis) orbem lacteum nuncupatis. Pactolus is a river in Lydia, which hath golden sands under it, as Tibullus witnesseth in this verse, Nec me regna juvant, nec Lydias auriser amnis. . Tibul. Lib. 3 Who can recount the virtues of my dear, Or say how far her fame hath taken flight, That can not tell how many stars appear In part of heav’n, which Galaxia height, Or number all the motes in Phoebus rays, Or golden sands, whereon Pactolus plays? And yet my hurts enforce me to confess, In crystal breast she shrouds a bloody heart, Which heart in time will make her merits less, Unless betimes she cure my deadly smart: For now my life is double dying still, And she defam’d by suff’rance of such ill; And till the time she helps me as she may, Let no man undertake to tell my toil, But only such, as can distinctly say, What Monsters Nilus breeds, or Affricke soil: For if he do, his labor is but lost, Whil’st I both fry and freeze twixt flame and frost. 216 In sonnet 35 we find something that is already familiar to us with regards to our poet. His complex, shattered identity as Oedipus, and his relationship with the myth of Actaeon: In this Passion the Author, as being blinded with Love, first compareth himself with Tyresias the old Soothsayer of Thebes, whom Juno deprived of sight; but Jove rewarded him with the spirit of prophecy. Then he alludeth unto Actaeon: And lastly he showeth why he is in worse case than those, which by viewing Medusa’s head were turned into stones, leesing both life and light at once; and so concludeth that old accursed Oedipus of all other best befitteth him for a companion. When first mine eyes were blinded with Desire, They had new seen a Second Sun, whose face, Though clear as beaten snow, yet kindled fire Within my breast, and moult my heart apace: Thus learned I by proof what others write, That Sun and fire, and snow offend the sight. O ten-times-happy blinded Theban wight, Whose loss of sight did make him half divine, Where I (alas) have lost both life and light, Like him, whose horns did plague his heedless eyen; And yet was he in better case than I, Which neither live, nor can obtain to die. All Perseus’ foes that saw Medusa’s head, By leesing shape and sense were quit from thrall; But I feel pains, though blind and double-dead, And was myself efficient cause of all: Wherefore, of all that ere did cease to see Old Oedipus were meetest mate for me. [1] [1] Vide Sophocl. and Seneca in tragediis suis de Oedipi miseriis. While in sonnet 47 a woman is described as ‘haggard’, in sonnet 84, which seemed to be a conclusion to the poem Venus and Adonis that Shakespeare published ten years later, we read: MY LOVE IS PAST The Author in this Sonnet expresseth his malice towards Venus and her Son Cupid, by currying favor with Diana, and by suing to have the self same office in her walks and forest, which sometimes her chaste and best-beloved Hippolytus enjoyed. Which Hippolytus (as Servius witnesseth) died by the false deceit of his Step-mother Phaedra, for 217 not yielding over himself unto her incestuous love: whereupon Seneca writeth thus, Iuuenisque castus crimine incesta iacet, Pudicus, infons. Diana, since Hippolytus is dead, Let me enjoy thy favor, and his place: My might through will shall stand thee in some stead, To drive blind Love and Venus from thy chase: For where they lately wrought me mickle woe, I vow me now to be their mortal foe. And do thou not mistrust my chastity When I shall range amid’st thy virgin train: My rains are chasten’d so through misery, That Love with me can nere prevail again: [That] The child whose finger once hath felt the fire, [That] To play therewith will have but small desire. Besides, I vow to bear a watchful eye, Discov’ring such as pass along thy groan If Jupiter himself come loit’ring by, I’ll call thy crew and bid them fly from Jove; For if they stay, he will obtain at last, What now I loathe, because my love is past. Thomas Watson’s poem sings with the voice of our poet and expresses the same traumas and obsessions; however, its commentaries seem to belong to a mind of a very different environment, but as genial as his. This mind seems to be that of a ten-year-old John Donne. If this was the case, here again what was said of the young Donne is justified: that he was, like Pico della Mirandola, ‘born wise rather than made wise by study.’ Ben Jonson and the very same Donne in his own epitaph remark this precocity of knowledge. Moving on to another work, it seems that at the end of 1583 Sapho and Phao had already been written. Attributed to John Lyly but at first published anonymously, as all plays by Lyly were, Ogburn reports: In it, R. Warwick Bond writes, a medley of classical suggestion is made to serve the author’s main purpose of flattering the Queen by an allegorical representation of the relations between herself and her suitor, the Duc d’Alençon … It is to this underlaying allegory, clearly alluded to in the Prologue at the Court and the Epilogue … that the changes made in the classical myth of Sappho are chiefly due … hence the invitation of Phao to her Court, her struggle against her passion and final conquest of it … The distress and perplexities of Phao, and his 218 departure from Sicily at the call of other destinies, are quite in keeping with the facts of Alençon’s courtship. Bond would hardly have stopped to think that in his ‘courtly poet’ he was describing Lyly’s employer more than Lyly. He does wonder, however, that ‘this classical tale … manipulated with supreme address to serve the purposes of royal flattery … though it deals with no less a matter than the proposed French match … does not seem to have called down the veto of the Master of Revels nor the displeasure of the Queen’– as, he might have added, it certainly would have if presented by a man of Lyly’s station. ‘How could one admit,’ Albert Feuillerat asks, ‘that a dramatist could be so audacious as to put on the stage the most intimate and secret sentiments of the Queen?’ Only one close to her and of equal birth could have done so, surely. Lyly’s part in it could hardly have been more than as ‘the fiddlestick of Oxford’,60 whose guiding hand and sponsorship, I take it, Sapho and Phao enjoyed … I should not be surprised if the Earl intended it as an overture to help restore him to the Queen’s favour. On February 12, 1583, A historie of Ariodante and Genevora was performed before the Queen on Shrove Tuesday night. Ogburns interprets that this play is possibly a first version of the play Much Ado About Nothing. As our poet was already out of the Tower, Claudio’s feelings towards Hero, Edward de Vere’s towards his spouse Anne Cecil are explained simply and beautifully: everything points to a reconciliation between them. In the spring of 1584, two works by Lyly came off the press: Campaspe and the aforementioned Sapho and Phao. In both it was said that they were performed before her Majesty by the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul. Ogburn reports that according to Chambers, on the 27th of December 1583 Harry Evans, who was also associated with this adventure, published a play called Agamemnon and Ulysses. On all three occasions, Ogburn continues, ‘the official patron of the company —and much more, it seems— was the Earl of Oxford.’ Ogburn comments: Moreover, R. W. Bond points out, all but one of Lyly’s plays ‘are described on their title-pages as presented by these children’— that is, by the troupe in which Paul’s and Oxford’s boys were amalgamated, under Lyly as director and Oxford as patron … It seems in tracing Oxford’s life that from the time of his return from the Continent things generally went wrong for him, except in literature and the theatre. Very likely it was this that turned him—to the world’s infinite gain— increasingly to those twin pursuits; as equally it could be argued that the more he gave himself to them the worse he was bound 60 This expression was written by Harvey years later against Lyly’s fame. 219 to fare in other spheres of his life This ‘giving himself away’ to theater implied its own risks, as one did not earn money with it and, on the other hand, one lost other opportunities of earning money with other posts where money flowed in large quantities. Thomas Nashe refers to this fact when he says that Master Apis Lapis had gone bankrupt by helping other writers. By getting involved with the theatre, Oxford lost his nobility, which therefore remained stained, like ‘the dyer’s hand,’ so the Sonnets tell us. We know that thanks to the mediation of Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford regained the Queen’s favour, as can be seen in the letter that Roger Manners wrote to his brother on June 2, 1583. Scene III. Euphues and his school: Robert Greene It is a recognised fact that the English novel had its origin in “The Adventures of Master F.J.,” contained in Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), its revolution in Lyly’s two prose works of Euphues (1578, 1580), and its development in the romances of Robert Greene (1583-1592). The first work published by Greene in 1583, Mamillia, had a euphuistic style so proper to our poet that it could only have been written by him. A curious and exceptional detail is that the Robert Greene mask is recognised today as the first professional and independent author of all English literature, something that could only have been done if Greene had had sufficient financial resources to devote his body and soul to his art. As far as we know, Robert Greene, as he himself writes in his works, was poor. This detail and many others that we come across will convince the reader that the commercial name or brand of Robert Greene was an idea of Euphues, like Watson or Marlowe and Shakespeare were. Greene is a courtier, a noble, not a poor beggar of London. In Mamillia, Roger Portington writes some introductory verses to this “new” author Robert Greene, as if he were already a recognised author of prestige. Only if we read these verses of Portington from the perspective that this work of Greene is another of Oxford’s masks do they make any sense, for Mamillia was published in 1583, and was his first book published. Let us read this laudatory poem written by Roger Portington to the Mamillia written by the green Robert Greene: If Grecia soil may vaunt her hap and lucky chance, As nurse of Clio’s clerkly crew, her state t’ advance, Or Smyrna boast of Homer’s skill for hope of fame, If royal Rome may reap renown by Tully’s name, Or Virgil’s country village vaunt that she excel, 220 Dan Ovid’s native land may strive to bear the bell, Then Britain soil may bravely boast her state in fine That she a new Parnassus is, the Muses’ shrine... Our author beautifies this Britain soil. For why? His stately style in English prose doth climb the sky; His filed phrase deserves in learning’s throne to sit, And his Mamilia darkens quite the Frenchman’s wit; Yea, if that any have been crowned with laurel green, This Greene deserves a laurel-branch, I ween. Not a bad criticism indeed, considering that Greene was a new author and this was his first work. In this euphuistic romance, or treatise about courtier love, the author speaks of love and lust, of Ovid, Prince Tamburlaine and Dido, of thinking like the snail does, with ‘deliberation,’ all of its action located in the loving Venice where our poet lived in 1575 (not thus the ghostly Robert Greene). And here ideas like the inconstancy of women appear, and also Cressida, Helena, Portia and the theme of the golden box that contains nothing (‘rotten bones’) which will also appear in The Merchant of Venice; and also Leander and Aeneas, only to get to the end when we read this paragraph that mentions the dynastic legitimacy of our poet in an Ovidian key (my emphasis): I will now put all fear aside, for a faint heart was never favoured of fortune. The coward that feareth ye crack of the cannon will never prove a courageous captain, nor vaunt himself of victory. The dastard that dreadeth the noise of the drum will never come in the skirmish, nor wear ye flag of triumph. The lover that beareth such a calm conscience as for fear of his credit dare not match under the dissembling standard of Cupid’s camp shall never be proclaimed heir apparent to Venus’ kingdom. Therefore sith I have settled & decreed, I will make no delay for fear the grass be cut from under my feet, but either by words or writing send an answer to my new mistress. In 1584, Robert Greene reappears. In the work Gwydonious, which Robert Greene dedicates to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in other words, which the commercial name Greene dedicates to his own creator, we see a laudatory poem in Latin to the writer where he is clearly associated with his name. In allusion to this green Greene the poem says: Pvllulat en stirpi similis speciosa propago Aureolusq. nouo reuirescit ramus amoris Vere: (tuo vere iam V E R E dicandus honori) 221 The verses translated from Latin to English by Tom Holland mean the following: ‘Behold, a beauteous shoot, resembling its stock, is sprouting, and a gilded branch of love once more grows green in early spring: (now in SPRING it must be truly consecrated to your honor).’ In Gwydonious, there are many elements which are already familiar to us: Timon, Cressida, Lucrece, Narcissus, the haggard hawk, Troilus, Aeneas, Leander, Athenea, the metamorphoses, the sufferings of Actaeon, Dido, the one that holds fast the nets while others take the birds, the exiled and solitary life, Timon’s strange state of mind and identity, Gwydonius’ complaint concerning his secret sickness, his complaint that the protagonist and his lover have married in love, and that his lady is his spouse even though the legal sanction is still missing, which points to what happened between de Vere and the Queen. Also in 1584, Greene’s mask does not restrain himself from flooding the London market with his euphuistic and aristocratic treatises on courtier love and virtuous ideals. Greene publishes The Debate between Folly and Love, where he mentions Damon and Phyntias, Titus and Gissipus, and asks himself: ‘Who caused comedies, shows, tragedies, and masques to be invented, but Love?’ His book is about Antony and Cleopatra, of Narcissus falling in love with his own image reflected on the water, and the author asks the reader: ‘now tell me if these strange metamorphoses be not mere points of folly?’ Not content with this, that same year he floods the market with a third work, The Mirror of Modesty, followed by a fourth, Arbasto, wherein Pallas Athena, Venus and Adonis, the prince of Denmark Arbasto, Narcissus and Echo, Cupid, Dido and Aeneas are mentioned again, and for the first time in his work he writes a poem (a song) about desire and love in the middle of the narrative. Arbasto will end his narrative of broken love with something that sounds like what our poet was feeling at this moment: But I, alas, leading still a loathsome life, was more cruelly crossed by fortune, for Egerio conspiring with the peers of my realm, in short time by civil wars dispossessed me of my crown and kingdom. Forced then to flee by mine own subjects, after some travel I arrived at this place, where considering with myself the fickle inconstancy of unjust fortune, I have ever since lived content in this cell to despite fortune, one while sorrowing for the mishap of Myrania, and another while joying at the misery of Doralicia, but always smiling that by contemning fortune I learn to lead her in triumph. Thus thou hast heard why in mean estate I pass my days content. Rest therefore satisfied, that thus I have lived, and thus I mean to die. 222 In 1585 Greene publishes the work Planetomaquia, which we have already commented, and An Oration or Funeral Sermon, wherein little can be commented that has not already been said by Greene except the theme of the vanity of life and this tragic and autobiographical sentence: ‘O ye inhabitants of Rome, we see your great bishop and mine is dead; behold, our crown is fallen, our lodestar vanished away, and our light extinguished.’ In 1587, Greene publishes Euphues, His Censure to Philautus. Dedicating the work to the earl of Essex for his feats in the war of the Netherlands, we can read many references to Pallas and sentences such as ‘counted that head as glorious that was crowned with a laurel-garland as that which was impaled with a diadem, thinking as great dignity to come from the pen as the sceptre,’ or ‘useth as well a pen as a spear,’ or ‘[b]ut time, the perfect herald of truth’; and there also appear Troilus and Cressida, virtue as a greater value for a knight than courage, the haggard hawk and hawking, Venus, ‘patience perforce’, ‘time, the mother of mutability,’ the myth of Actaeon, the imperfect made perfect by wisdom, the crown that everyone desires, the metamorphoses, Endymion and Minerva who, like Pallas, ‘hath as well a spear as a pen.’ Finally, the changeling child is mentioned. In Penelope’s Web, also published in 1587, Greene again deals with Narcissus, Phaeton and Icarus, as well as with Ovid, the metamorphoses, Lucrece and Tarquine, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra. In Penelope’s Web our poet tells us that ‘it was the office of a prince as well to study with Pallas as to hue and cry with Mars, that as great honour did depend on the scepter as on the sword, that the green laurel in the senate-house was as pleasing an object to the eye as glittering armour in the field.’ Once again, Ovid, Dido and Aeneas, Lucrece and Tarquine, Antony and Cleopatra are mentioned, amongst others. There is one sentence that arrests our attention for its sheer autobiographical nature. Knowing the miserable life our poet felt he was living since 1569 when he was left out of the succession to the crown, this sentence makes real tragic sense: ‘that man is most happy (quoth Dionysius) that from his youth hath learned to be unhappy.’ This sentence itself is a lapidary epigram for all his life and bears a great resemblance with the life of that other bastard prince of the Spaniards who lived during the same period as our poet: Don John of Austria, the victorious prince of Lepanto. If we ask for the exact interpretation of that sentence, Greene explains it himself: ‘Sith then (Barmenissa) the fall from a crown ought to be no foil to content, grieve not at fortune lest thy sorrow make her triumph the greater, but bear adversity with an honourable mind, that the world may judge thou art as well a Princess in poverty as in prosperity, for kings are not called gods for that they wear crowns, but that they are lords over fame and fortune.’ In Henry VI, Part Three, we hear the king, who has escaped from his persecutors who have taken his kingdom from him, 223 speaking in the same spirit that we have just heard Greene expressing. Let us listen to our Prometheus bound (III.i.28-65): King Henry VI My queen and son are gone... Second Keeper Say, what art thou that talk’st of kings and queens King Henry VI More than I seem, and less than I was born to: A man at least, for less I should not be. And men may talk of kings, and why not I? Second Keeper Ay, but thou talk’st as if thou wert a king. King Henry VI Why, so I am, in mind, and that’s enough. Second Keeper But, if thou be a king, where is thy crown? King Henry VI My crown is in my heart, not on my head, Not decked with diamonds nor Indian stones, Nor to be seen: my crown is called content: A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy. In the first and second part of Morando, Greene distills once again all his Ovidian prose while he speaks of love and beauty and names Actaeon, Narcissus, Pallas, etc. In 1588, Greene publishes Pandosto, The Triumph of Time, where he puts this motto on the title-page: Temporis filia veritas, ‘truth is the daughter of Time.’ This is what Lucrece will cry after having been raped by Tarquinus. This Pandosto is the exact story of The Winter Tale which years later our poet will adapt with the Shakespeare’s mask. Since his spouse, Anne Cecil, passed away this same year of 1588, it is not strange to see that in Pandosto Greene writes about some Bellaria who was accused by her husband of infidelity. The autobiographical content of this quote cannot escape us now, for our poet, via Greene, tells us what he felt when he came back from Italy in 1576: [He thought] by computation of time that Egistus, and not he, was father to the child. This suspicious thought galled afresh this halfhealed sore, insomuch as he could take no rest until he might mitigate his choler with a just revenge, which happened presently after. For Bellaria was brought to bed of a fair and beautiful daughter, which no sooner Pandosto heard but he determined that both Bellaria and the young infant should be burnt with fire. The epitaph that Greene writes in this work when Bellaria dies reveals the same sense of shame and blame our poet felt when his spouse Anne Cecil passed away in 1588, and it is the same feeling as the one expressed by Claudio to Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1588 Greene writes: 224 The Epitaph. Here lies entombed Bellaria fair, Falsely accused to be unchaste; Cleared by Apollo’s sacred doom, Yet slain by jealousy at last. Whate’er thou be that passest by, Curse him that caused this queen to die. Furthermore, in Pandosto a theme as obsessive to our poet as the incest between a king and his daughter (a changeling herself) appears. One does not write like Shakespeare because one is inspired that day: there has been a great, tremendous creative output before that. The Shakespeare’s drama is so human and impressive because he practiced it to the point of exhaustion. Scene IV. Euphues and his school: Lyly and Munday Let us deal now with John Lyly. In Endymion, his most celebrated play, we read that the main character has abandoned the Court and the company of men, for he ‘hath chosen in a solitarie cell to live’ (II.i.). In Act Two, Scene Three of Endymion, the main character says that he is unhappy and cannot rest. ‘No more, Endymion,’ he says to himself, ‘sleepe or die; nay, die, for sleepe it is impossible...’ In Act Three, Scene IV, Eumenides, Endymion’s bestfriend, tells a father who has gone to the place where Endymion sleeps ‘for ever’ what he can read in the tomb: ‘Father, I plainly see the bottome, and there in white marble engraven these words, Ask one for all, and but one thing at all.’ We must recall that Southampton’s motto was ‘One for all, and all for one.’ Yes, Endymion, like king Oberon, is asking for one thing: his son, his changeling, and his throne. Endymion is a Timon who dreams, he is Prince Arthur dreaming, he is that Benvolio of Dr Faustus who dreams of something he has on his head, and not precisely his horns, but his crown. Endymion speaks of love and of true friends, of Ovid, of writing sonnets to his loved Cynthia which are useless. In Act III, Scene IV, Eumenides, having found the place where Endymion rests, says: Geron Doest thou see any thing? Eumenides I see in the same piller, these words: When she whose figure of all is the perfectest, and never to be measured: alwayes one, yet never the same: still inconstant, yet never wavering: shall come and kisse Endymion in his sleepe, he shall then rise, else never. This is strange. 225 The puzzle is easy if we know that Edward de Vere is the one sleeping, for an allusion is made to the Queen and her motto ‘Semper Eadem,’ ‘Always the Same,’ when Eumenides talks about that person who is ‘alwayes one,’ only to criticize her, ‘yet never the same.’ If Lyly had been the author of this mockery against the Queen, he would have been put to prison at once, to say the least. If the Queen only gave him that kiss, says our playwright, if she recognised him or his son, he would stop sleeping and would wake up. But until that moment came, ‘never,’ which is the anagram we already know for his surname and is repeated four times in the six lines of Eumenides’ comment. It is clear that Edward de Vere was sleeping because he was being denied his royal identity. Like in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in Endymion, when Queen Cynthia kisses Endymion and wakes him up, she asks him to start telling his story. If in Love’s Labour’s Lost Ver is asked to begin, in Endymion the queen says: ‘Well Endymion begin.’ In Lyly’s play Campaspe, we read in Act II, Scene 2: Alexander What doest thou want? Diogenes Nothing that you have. Alexander I have the world at command. Diogenes And I in contempt. Alexander Thou shalt live no longer than I will. Diogenes But I shall die whether you will or no. Alexander How should one learne to bee content? Diogenes Unlearne to covet. This is Timon’s voice, as the reader must have recognised at once. The quantity of writings that our poet was publishing was so big, that the character in the play Sapho and Phao asks for the luggage he has to fetch for his master in order to carry it to the court of the incomparable Sapho (Act I, Scene 2): Pandi I follow. And you sir boye, go to Syracusa about by land, where you shall meete my stuffe; pay for the cariage, and convay it to my lodging. Trachi I thinke all your stuffe are bundles of paper, but now must you learne to turne your library to a wardrope, and see whether your rapier hang better by your side, than the penne did in your eare. Trachi is no other than Lyly, while Oxford is his master Pandi. No doubt our poet was exceeding himself in this way. Occulted and 226 unrecognised as Tudor Prince, our poet abandons himself to literature with all his energy. When Phao says that he is in love with Sapho, Sibilla gives him this advice, which our poet had already been following for a long time with the Queen (Act II, Scene 4): ‘Chuse such words as may (as many may) melt her mind.’ And after this advice, she tells him: ‘Write, and persist in writing.’ In Act Three, Scene One of Lyly’s play Midas, we hear King Midas grieving for his sufferings in this vein: Midas My Lords, I faint both for lack of food, and want of grace. I will to the riuer, where if I be rid of this intolerable disease of gold I will next shake off that vntemperate desire of gouernment, and measure my Territories, not by the greatnesse of my minde, but the right of my Succession ... Euery little King is a King, and the title consisteth not in the compasse of ground, but in the right of inheritance. When Pan and Apollo argue about who is the greater god of Art, Midas, ‘the unfortunate king of Frygia’, arrives, and they name him arbitrator. When Midas finally chooses Pan as the greater god of Art, Apollo punishes him by transforming him into a deer. The myth of Actaeon is evident here. We read (IV.i.): Apollo Doth Pan talke of the passions of Loue? ... I feare his breath will blast the faire Greene … Breake thy Pipe, or with my sweete Lute will I breake thy heart ... Wretched, vnworthie to bee a King, thou shalt know what it is to displease Apollo. I will leaue thee but the two last letters of thy name, to bee thy whole name; which if thou canst not gesse, touch thine cares, they shall tell thee. Midas What hast thou done Apollo? The eares of an Asse vpon the head of a King? Apollo And well worthy, when the dulnes of an asse is in the eares of a King. Midas Help Pan, or Mydas perisheth. Pan I cannot vndoe what Apollo hath done, nor giue any amends, vnlesse to those eares thou wilt haue added these hornes. 1 Nimph It were very well, that it might bee hard to iudge whether hee were more Ox or Asse. The ‘Ox’ indicates again that Midas is our ‘Ox-ford’. The nymph’s statement that Midas seems to be an ox or an ass relates Midas to Falstaff, who appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor, to Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and to Benvolio in Dr. Faustus. Midas, ashamed, does the same thing that Timon or Benvolio do in Dr Faustus: 227 he goes hiding in the woods so as not to be seen. At the end of this first scene of Act IV, we see Midas complaining like Euphues and Timon and Benvolio and Bottom. Midas says: Midas ...But I must seeke to couer my shame by arte, least beeing once discouered to these pettie Kings of Mysia, Pisidia and Galatia, they all ioyne to adde to mine Asses eares, of all the beasts the dullest, a sheepes heart, of all the beasts the fearfullest: and so cast lots for those Kingdomes, that I haue won with so manie Hues, & kept with so manie enuies. What Midas (our poet) is saying is: I will cover my complaints with literary works, so that by being hidden (behind many pseudonyms and heteronyms) the whole world shall not add to my sense of shame, caused by my bastard Tudor identity. And he complains like Timon: Midas Ah Mydas, why was not the whole body metamorphosed … Where shall I shrowd this shame? ... If I returne to Phrygia, I shall be pointed at; if liue in these woods, sauage beasts must be my companions: and what other companions should Mydas hope for than beasts, being of all beasts himselfe the dullest? … is Mydas that sought to be a Monarch of the world, become the mocke of the world? ... But I must seeke to couer my shame by arte ‘Monarch’ and ‘lost reign’ reappear as our poet’s two great themes, as Jan Kott noted. Next, Licio and Petulus are talking about King Midas’ ears when the character Motto enters. On being asked why he feels melancholy, we hear this (V.ii.): Petulus How now Motto, what all amort? Motto I am as melancholy as a Cat. Licio Melancholy? ... Melancholy is the Creast of Courtiers Armes... Dello My Master could tickle you with diseases, and that olde ones, that haue continued in his Ancestors bones these three hundred yeares. Hee is the last of the Family that is left vneaten. Motto What mean’st thou Dello? Petulus Hee meanes you are the last of the Stocke aliue, the rest the Wormes haue eaten. Dello A pox of those sawcie Wormes, that eate men before they be dead. Petulus But tell vs Motto, why art thou sad? 228 Motto Because all the Court is sad. Licio Why are they sad in Court? Motto Because the King hath a pain in his eares. The mention of Midas as the ‘last one of the worms’ is clear: Midas is the last of de Veres. The ‘pain in his ears’ is the ass’ ears that Apollo has put on King Midas, that is, a monstrous crown laughed at by everyone at court. The play ends when Midas recognises that he cannot take the kingdom of Lesbos by force, nor can he force the kingdom where the queen reigns (i.e. Elizabeth I) to permit him to reign over it, or his son Southampton, who in this play is characterized as Midas’ daughter. Midas, in short, accepts that it is time for peace. At that moment, his ass ears fall and everyone chants songs of praise to Apollo, the god protector of Art. This is, without any doubt, an allegory of what Edward de Vere thought about himself and his son Southampton as far as the crown of England was concerned. At the end of the play we read: Midas It may bee Sophronia, that neither you, nor any else, vnderstand Apollo, because none of you haue the heart of a King: but my thoughts expound my fortunes, and my fortunes hang vpon my thoughts … Apollo in the depth of his darke answere, is to me the glistering of a bright Sunne. I perceiue (and yet not too late) that Lesbos will not be touched by gold, by force it cannot … There is no way to naile the Crowne of Phrygia fast to my daughters head, but in letting the crownes of others sit in quiet on theirs … I here before thee vow to shake off all enuies abroad, and at home all tyrannie. [The eares fall off] Sophronia Honored be Apollo, Mydas is restored. The remedy he is talking about is that he will stop being sick about the crown when he learns that he is, as Henry VI says, ‘content’. But it will not be as easy as that, as we shall see. As for Anthony Munday, Oxford’s other secretary, we can quote the following words by Ogburn: Like Greene, Munday contributed much to the newly popular prose fiction and reaped much advantage from it. ‘Labours which mainly commended Munday to his generation,’ says the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘were doubtless his voluminous translations of popular romances.’ At least fifteen of these were in a cycle called The Romances of Chivalry, from French, Italian, and Spanish originals … The first edition of at least five … bore dedications to Oxford. In the only one of these surviving, one of 1588, Munday speaks of Oxford’s 229 ‘special knowledge’ of the ‘other languages’ from which he has made a ‘bad translation’ … Now … comes Thomas Merrian of Basingstoke, England, with evidence that would show Munday to have been a link directly associating Oxford with the composition of Shakespeare’s plays. The evidence arises from that much mulled-over play, The Book of Sir Thomas More. Although the manuscript of the play (which was not published until 1844) contains revisions or interpolations in five different hands, ‘the original matter is written throughout in a single hand’ … Armed with a microprocessor using ‘41 non-positional tests’ reinforced by ‘an adaptation of Dr Eliot Slater’s rare-word-link method,’ Mr Merriam compared the stylistic characteristics of Sir Thomas More with those of Julius Cesar, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles and found that More was altogether by Shakespeare, ‘although a third act had a few eccentricities.’ Of course it is hardly conceivable that a play written by the conventional Shakespeare would be found in Munday’s handwritting. Orthodoxy could have none of such an idea. The editors of two British scholarly journals refused to publish Merriam’s exposition of his findings … Unless a much better basis can be found for refuting it, Thomas Merriam’s finding that Shakespeare was the original and virtually sole author of Sir Thomas More will stand. In addition to the play added by Hand A (Chettle) referring to the scene where More is talking to his wife, we read this monologue against the Court and in favour of exile. Timon, begin: More Now will I speak like More in melancholy, For if grief’s power could with her sharpest darts Pierce my firm bosom, here’s sufficient cause To take my farewell of mirth’s hurtless laws. Poor humbled lady, thou that wert of late Placed with the noblest woman of the land, Invited to their angel companies, Seeming a bright star in the courtly sphere, Why shouldst thou like a widow sit thus low, And all thy fair consorts move from the clouds That overdreep thy beauty and thy worth? I’ll tell thee the true cause: the court like heaven Examines not the anger of the prince, And being more frail, composed of gilded earth, Shines upon them on whom the king doth shine, Smiles if he smile, declines if he decline. Yet seeing both are mortal, court and king, 230 Shed not one tear for any earthly thing, For so God pardon me in my saddest hour, Thou hast no more occasion to lament (Nor these, nor those) my exile from the court... O happy banishment from worldly pride, When souls by private life are sanctified. Scene V. Euphues and his school: Soothern and Pandora Already reconciled with his wife Anne Cecil in 1583, the couple suffered a new setback: their newborn male child died. This spiritual torment had literary consequences. Both Beauclerk and Anderson argue that Hamlet was written around 1583. Anderson explains that the ‘outlines of Hamlet are so pronounced within de Vere’s life that one invariably illuminates the other. De Vere appears to have begun work on his masterpiece by 1583.’ As orthodoxy does not recognise de Vere, the fact that Thomas Nashe considers that this play was already written and famously played in London by 1589 caused Stratfordian critics to attribute its authorship (without any credible foundation whatsoever) to such a university wit as was Thomas Kyd. In 1584 a book of poems entitled Pandora was published, written by John Soowthern. W. Von Hess starts explaining what our poet was doing in England around these years of the 1580s: 61 Oxford’s somewhat subversive efforts at literary and educational reform contributed to a broad reform of the English language, as had happened in France. But, his literary circle went through a “phase” called ‘Euphuism,’ lavishly overdoing some aspects: a] liberally coining words with Latin, Italian, or French roots (perhaps 25% of Elizabethan entries in the OED are from Shakespeare, and if Oxford’s circle is added in, the total may exceed 50%); b] often using classical mythology and allusion (mostly from Ovid); and c] often forsaking plot to celebrate ingenious but sometimes tiresome wordiness. This ‘new English’ was dubbed ‘Euphuism’ because of Euphues the Anatomy of Wit, the 1578-79 novel by Oxford’s servant John Lyly, followed in 1579-80 by Euphues and His England (this one dedicated to Oxford). Then, in the 1580 dedication to Oxford of Zelauto, another of Oxford’s servants Anthony Munday made a direct identification of Oxford: ‘Given for a friendly entertainment to Euphues,’ or to Munday’s patron. Thus, Oxford was equated to the knight-errant “Euphues” (Hess II Sect. C.3.9 shows that the travels and activities of ‘Euphues’ mirrored those of Oxford). The ‘Euphuist’ style demanded a great deal 61 See http://www.deveresociety.co.uk/articles/essay-SonnetsEuphuism.pdf. 231 from both the authors and their readers. Still, it was marvellous how their poetry and prose maintained a dynamic, intricate tension, offering open poetic messages on the surface while artfully concealing sly sub-messages, often via mythical elements or Latinate contractions that the ‘old English’ of Chaucer to Surrey and Sackville had not been well equipped to use. Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses made ‘Euphuism’ possible, because it was his Ovid that most of ‘Euphuism’s’ classical allusions adopted. And Golding was Oxford’s uncle, living under the same roof with teenaged Oxford while preparing his translations, while his Ovid was later one of Shakespeare’s greatest sources of allusions. Then he deals with this work of 1584 that had been ignored by critics: [I]n 1938 George B. Parks helped resurrect a 1584 ‘chapbook’ of poetry called Pandora: The Musyque of the beautie, of his Mistresse Diana, printed by John Charlewood, lavishly dedicated to Oxford by ‘John Soowthern, Gent.’ … Pandora had sonnets attributed to Oxford’s wife and Queen Elizabeth, plus poetry credited to a mysterious ‘Soothern’ ... ‘Soothern’ is not too hard to identify with Oxford himself (English ‘Sooth’ = Truth, thus ‘Soothern’ = ‘of Truth’ = de Vere = Oxford’s name). Since only two Pandora copies now exist (at the Huntingdon and British Libs), most analysts agree it was ‘suppressed’ On his behalf, C.W. Barrell informs us: 62 It seems hardly possible that any poet or anthologist who wished to profit by his labors would assume these liberties without some sort of permission. On the other hand, the rarity of ‘Soothern’s’ book might indicate that the edition had been suppressed by order of the Queen or members of the Vere or Cecil families who considered the publication of such personal poems in questionable taste. Who was ‘John Soothern’? Although an important contemporary witness to Lord Oxford’s preeminence in scholarship and the arts, and the pioneer exponent of the ode as a poetic form in English literature, an impenetrable mystery has always surrounded his identity. On the title-page of his volume the name appears as ‘John Soowthern,’ but in a sonnet on page 7 he refers to himself as ‘Soothern,’ repeating this same spelling twice in an epode on page 19, and finally in an elegy to Diana on page 24 states: 62 See http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/etexts/pandora/intro1.htm. 232 My name, quoth I, is Soothern, and Madame, let that suffice: That Soothern which will rayse the Englishe language to the Skies. On the title-page Soothern dedicates the volume to the ‘ryght honourable Earle of Oxenford.’ In the laudatory ode to ‘Deuer,’ Soothern writes in page 4: Of our vertues Dever the name. Dever, that had given him in parte: The Love, the Warre, Honour, and Arte, And with them an eternall Fame. Only to add next: Amongst our well renowned men, Dever merits a sylver pen After this there are some sonnets dedicated to Diana (Queen Elizabeth) which say she is the greatest and most beautiful and, also, the most cruel with him. In sonnet 7 the writer says that he is not Jupiter nor Prometheus nor Oedipus, but Actaeon: But yet I know wherefore I have all my wounds. I am none of these which I have sayd (Dian) But I am that verie miserable man, Who for regarding thee, was eaten of Houndes. After some epitaphs of the countess of Oxford (Anne Cecil) to her dead son, written in an Ovidian and Euphuistic language so proper of our poet, there is another epitaph that the poet Soothern says he has taken from the chambers of Queen Elizabeth. At the end, we read: Hymnes, and Elegies: all dedicated or sent to his Mistresle Diana. In which you ask’t my name (confesse your selfe, if’t be not so) And whether I before, had ever beene in love or no. My name, quoth I, is Soothern, and Madame, let that suffice: That Soothern which will rayse the Englishe language to the Skies. The wanton of the Muses, and Whose well composed ryme, Will live in despite of the hevens, And Triumph over tyme. &c. 233 I agree with Hess that [O]ur new paradigm links us back to the 1584 Pandora, making that undeniably Oxford-related work into virtually a “missing link” to Shakespeare’s identity, predicting all themes later found in the Sonnets and other Shakespeare poetry, and capitalizing on Pandora’s peculiar fascination with and blatant borrowing from Ovid and Ronsard (among others). Best of all, it links forward to the ‘Shakespeare’ of 1599, 1609, and 1640, the fruits of Oxford’s begetting of his ‘new English language’ or ‘Euphuism.’ This was literally ‘Shakespeare’ in 1583-93, at great personal cost already having completed much of the process for his romancing, fathering, and ‘raysing to the skies’ the most magnificent creation imaginable: what was to become the best aspects of our language! Ogburn says very pointedly: The Oxford of 1584, the dramatist and keeper of players, the friend, counsellor, and patron of writers, whom he depleted his means to support and whose company … a reckless investor far more interested in creating the English novel than in managing his finances … such a man would have been the bafflement and despair of Anne Cecil and incomprehensible to her father. In fact, Burghley was spying on him, trying to bribe Oxford’s servants so as to know about his occult writings at Mount Silexedra. Burghley, known at Court with the sobriquet of ‘Pondus’, apparently due to the fact that he talked with excessive circumlocutions, had the irritating obsession of spying on everyone around him. Oxford saw that he was being spied on and sent him a letter dated October 30, 1584, which I quote from Ogburn, as well as his following comments on it: ‘My Lord, This other day your man, Stainner, told me that you sent for Amis, my man, and if he were absent that Lyly should come unto you. I sent Amis, for he was in the way. And I think [it] very strange that your Lordship should enter into that course towards me; whereby I must learn that which I knew not before, both of your opinion and good will towards me. But I pray, my Lord, leave that course, for I mean not to be your ward nor your child. I serve Her Majesty, and I am that I am;’ … The phrase ‘I am that I am’ we shall meet again in Sonnet 121; Oxford would have got it from his Geneva Bible (Exodus 3:14), in which it stands out in capital letters … Then there is the reminder, ‘I serve Her 234 Majesty.’ … The inference to be drawn is that his theatrical services — I should say most of all as a writer of plays — had an official if undeclared status. We see him, it appears likely, in both capacities —as writer and producer— in one of the last plays shown at Court in 1584. ‘The history of Agamemnon and Ulysses [was] presented and enacted before her majesty by the Earl of Oxenford his boys on St John’s Day [December 27] at night at Greenwich.’ It seems to me at least a fair bet that J.T. Looney is right in taking the play to be one ‘forming the original ground-work for the ‘Shakespeare’ play of Troilus and Cressida.’ In 1584 the play Fidele and Fortunio was published anonymously. This play was fashionable in those days because Thomas Nashe alludes to one of the characters, Captain Crackstone, in his pamphlet of 1596 Have With You To Saffron Walden. As The Cambridge History of English and American literature informs us in the website Bartleby.com, ‘Victoria’s song at her window and Fedele’s in answer are of real poetic charm.’ And the article adds: ‘Fedele’s denunciation of woman’s fickleness is exactly in the strain, as it is in the metre, of the rhyming rhetoric of Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Captain Crackstone, a sort of tough Falstaff whose company everyone enjoys, says in this play something that is familiar to us thanks to the ending scene of Antony and Cleopatra: ‘I have such a wild worm in my head as makes them all merry.’ This Captain Crak-stone is no other than Master Apis Lapis, the castrated bull, Ox-ford. This play, a translation into English of an Italian original of the same title, is presently attributed to Edward de Vere’s secretary Anthony Munday. Georgio Melchiori says:63 Munday’s translation was not in fact such, but a complete revision of the Italian text, all censurable moral parts censured from the original arguments, so that Fedele and Fortunio or The Two Italian Gentlemen turned into the first example and model for the English Romantic comedy, a model that was soon imitated by Shakespeare in his Two Gentlemen of Verona. Munday kept the Italian names for all the characters except with the brave Frangipietra, whom he baptized as Captain Crackstone and gave him the second longer role of the play, creating an absolutely round character, based on the daily English contemporary experiences: Crackstone is a dishonest private that pretends to be a Captain, boasting of false military feasts. Munday invented for him a highly personal language, mixing military boastings, new versatile words of his own invention, adapting original proverbial expressions and long soliloquies which reveal an 63 My translation. See http://www.uv.es/~fores/MelchioriGiorgio.es.html. 235 inclination towards making fun of himself —a language that does not prevent one to think in the soliloquies and the attitude of the fat knight of Shakespeare. Munday, as he transformed the common boasting of the comedy of Paqualigo into the eloquent and vain Crackstone, created the prototype of the English character that Shakespeare enriched, making him more mature in age and ampler in hight in comparison with the Italian brave model. Furthermore, the language that Munday invented, gave Shakespeare a number of suggestions for the irregular comedians who surrounded Prince Hal in both parts of Henry IV. Crackstone suggested not only the main design of the character of Falstaff, but also gave him Pistol with his coarse and vigorous verses and his poor quotes, and Mistress Quickly with her ability to transform pretentious and linguistic nonsense into new polysemic creations. Melchiori makes a mistake: it was not Munday who influenced Shakespeare, but Oxford who influenced his secretary Munday, if the play was his, by the way. The fact is that Prince William of Orange was assassinated on July 10, 1584, and Elizabeth finally decided to take part in the Lowlands. The military forces would be lead by Leicester, her favourite. Edward de Vere also wanted to go. In the play Troilus and Cressida performed on December 27, 1584, we see that the historical background is rooted in this moment of our poet’s life. Anderson writes: Agamemnon and Ulysses, as portrayed in Troilus and Cressida, use language and rhetorical tricks such as Euphuism that were fashionable in the early 1580s. The Agamemnon and Ulysses scenes in Troilus and Cressida suggest a 1584 context: Agamemnon notes that the Greek campaign against Troy has been going on for seven years; William the Silent’s campaign against Spain had lasted since 1577 … If Agamemnon and Ulysses was indeed an early draft of the Agamemnon and Ulysses scenes from Troilus and Cressida, de Vere would have been arguing not only for military intervention but also for his leadership of the English forces—portraying himself as Ulysses, a paragon of aristocratic and military ideals. As literary critic F. Quinland Daniels notes about Shake-speare’s Ulysses: Here we have a man of vigor and reason, and an exponent of order in all the Renaissance sense of the term, for these are Elizabethan men, for all their Greek names and the Trojan situation which is their vehicle. …Leicester/Agamemnon, Shake-speare argues, would be a foolish and simple-minded campaigner and a stale and predictable strategist. 236 In the end, de Vere got his appointment as Commander of the Horse and on July 10, 1585 the Queen appointed Sir John Norris in temporary command of the seven thousand Englishmen that marched towards Antwerp to fight against the Spaniards. Anderson continues: In October, the inevitable came to pass. De Vere was recalled home from the Lowlands—as Othello would be from his wars—and Leicester and Sidney captured the key roles in the campaign … Sidney would die from wounds received on the battlefield in 1586, while Leicester’s disastrous two-year campaign would end in ruin, leaving the ailing Agamemnon drained and exhausted. Leicester would die a year after returning home. The Lowlands wars would drag on for more than sixty years, claiming the lives of thousands more soldiers. Had de Vere actually stayed on in the Lowlands in 1585, he might well have died there too. And England would have been robbed of the man who gave it language. Having been recalled to England, our poet is in a state akin to that of Othello, as Ogburn helps us see: I think there can be but little doubt about “what humour” the Earl was in, specially after he heard that Sidney was to replace him in command of the Horse. It can hardly have been other than a bitter disappointment, his feelings no less regretful than those of Othello would voice, perhaps within a year [III.iii.396-401]: Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars That make ambition virtue! O, farewell, Farewell the neighing steed... The spirit-stirring drum... The royal banner and all quality, Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! Othello, too, was replaced in command by one he resented: Cassio … The effect on Oxford of the frustration of his own martial ambitions, for whatever reasons, while his relatives [Francis and Horatio Vere] achieved such distinction in the field for him to measure himself and be measured against, may be imagined. Othello then says something significant, for it shows that Henry VI’s words have not lasted very long in his mind (III.iii.385-6): ‘O, now, for ever/ Farewell the tranquil mind; farewell content.’ Through Ogburn, we know that Oxford was challenged to a duel by Anne Vavasour’s brother, that lover whom he had got pregnant in 1581. The letter of January 19, 1585, written to him by Anne Vavasour’s brother reads as follows: 237 If thy body had been as deformed as thy mind is dishonourable, my house had been yet unspotted, and thyself remained with thy cowardice unknown. I speak this that I fear thou art so much wedded to that shadow of thine, that nothing can force to awake thy base and sleepy spirits … but if there be yet any spark of honour left in thee, or iota of regard of thy decayed reputation, use not thy birth for an excuse, for I am a gentleman, but meet me thyself alone and thy lackey to hold thy horse. For the weapons I leave them to thy choice for that I challenge, and the place to be appointed by us both at our meeting, which I think may conveniently be at Nunnington or elsewhere. Thyself shall send me word by this bearer, by whom I expect an answer. Tho. Vavasour. The comment of ‘that shadow of thine’ confirms his double life. Ogburn makes these interesting remarks: But if the letter failed to provoke its target, it is provocative to us today, with its accusation that Oxford was ‘too much wedded to that shadow of thine.’ What can the writer have meant? What shadow did Oxford have to which he was wedded, to which even the slanderous Thomas Vavasour held back from giving definition? May it not have been his literary-theatrical alter ego, which in the next decade would acquire the identity of a mysterious William Shakespeare? “To ‘live by verses’ was a disgrace,” Phoebe A.B. Sheavyn writes in The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age. ‘The gentleman regarded it as degrading to sell the products of one’s labour.’ Although ‘poetry was a major art necessary to Courtly culture,’ she goes on, ‘the leading Court poets genuinely avoided print: Sidney, Dyer, Raleigh, the Earl of Oxford, Wotten.’ She recalls Ben Jonson’s protest: ‘Thou call’st me Poet, as term of shame.’ Moreover … ‘the dramatist was in even worse case than [the] poet.’ That literary works of Oxford’s quite beyond a mere sprinkling of poems signed E.O. were known to contemporaries of his, and known to be of his pen, is plain. In 1586, William Webbe wrote in A Discourse of English Poetry: I may not omit the deserved commendations of many honourable and noble Lords and Gentlemen in Her Majesty’s Court, which, in the rare devices of poetry, have been and yet are most skillful; among whom the right honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of most excellent among the rest. …In 1586, the year of Webbe’s tribute, a writer with the quaint name of Angel Day dedicated his first, and very successful work, The English Secretary, to Oxford, ‘whose infancy from the beginning,’ he states arrestingly, ‘was ever sacred to the Muses.’ … Three years later 238 in The Art of English Poesie (1589), generally attributed to George Puttenham, almost identical tribute would be paid to Oxford, preceded by a remainder of the reason noblemen kept their names off their literary works...: But in these days (although some learned princes may take delight in them) yet universally it is not so. For as well poets as poesie are despised & the name become of honourable infamous, subject to scorn and derision, and rather a reproach than a praise to any that useth it … Among the nobility or gentry as may be very well seen in many laudable sciences and especially in making poesie, it is to come to pass that they have no courage to write & if they have are loath to be known of their skill. So as I know very many notable gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it: as if it were a discredit for a gentlemen, to seem learned. …After reviewing notable English writers of the past, he reverts to the theme: And in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of Courtly makers [poets], Noblemen and Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford. The same year Oxford was recalled from the Lowlands he added some poems to the anthology The Paradise of Dainty Devices again. This new edition of 1585 contains seven new poems, from 121 to 127, four of them unsigned. The anonymous poems 122 and 123 are his, which is also confirmed by Richard M. Waugaman after having investigated the subject. On poem 122, “In prayse of the Snayle,” Waugaman reports: 64 This anonymous poem … first published in the 1585 edition of Paradise of Daintie Devises, was written by de Vere/Shakespeare … Charlotte Spurgeon, in her marvelous, path-breaking book on Shakespeare’s use of imagery, singles out the unusual range of Shakespeare’s sympathy, which extends not only to humans, but to a wide variety of animals. She observes that most of us think of the snail primarily as being slow, so that comparisons of a person to a snail are derogatory. She argues that Shakespeare was primarily impressed by the snail’s emotional sensitivity. She supports her thesis with quotations from two plays and from a long poem: 64 See Shakespeare-Oxford Fellowship website. 239 The snail seems to him an example of one of the most delicately sensitive organisms in nature; it is ‘love’s feeling’ only that ‘is more soft and sensible/ Than are the tender horns of cockled snails’ (LLL IV.iii.336). In Venus and Adonis (l. 1033), he writes of the feelings of the ‘snail, whose tender horns being hit,/ Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,/ And there all smother’d up in shade doth sit,/ Long after fearing to creep forth again.’ [Spurgeon asks us to] notice ‘how he emphasises the greater poignancy of mental than physical pain, even in a snail.’ And in Coriolanus, Aufidius ‘Thrusts forth his horns again into the world;/ Which were inshell’d when Marcius stood for Rome,/ And durst not once peep out.’ …Our poem has a misleading simplicity if we stop at its surface. What could be simpler than a harmless snail? Yet more disturbing allusions abound. In particular, many words in the poem allude to mental disturbances of various sorts … Examining the poem a bit more closely, we see that the hapless snail keeps veering toward the precipice of mental instability … It is also in the fourth stanza that the poet openly identifies himself with the snail for the first time ‘I … will seem slow as Snayle.’ With that identification explicit, he now advises the snail to ‘be still,’ to wrap itself up, reassuring it that it will now be relatively safe from harm. Scene VI. Euphues and his school: Peele, Marlowe, Kyd From 1583 to 1586 the company of players known as the Queen’s Men had been directed without success; but in 1586 the company was taken over by Oxford. Beauclerk reports: Working with the Queen’s Men, Oxford was commandeered as the poet-playwright of the fledgling British Empire, producing a series of history-plays that, on the surface at least, extolled the virtues of national unity and foreign conquest. In 1586 Elizabeth recognised Oxford’s service to the state by granting him an annuity of £ 1,000 [some $270.000 today, as Anderson informs us], which continued for life. It was also by way of compensating him for all he had spent on court theatricals over the previous two decades. Given that the government’s average annual expenditure on civil and court affairs at that time was just over £100,000, this was a very large stipend (or bribe), part of which was no doubt earmarked for combating the Puritan pamphleteers. In return, Oxford probably had to promise the queen that he would not break cover as the author of the plays; hence Hamlet’s cry of ‘I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound,’ i.e., he will become a ghostwriter for £1,000 a year (the very sum Falstaff seeks in Henry IV, Part 2). 240 Among many of the rumours that orbit around the man of Stratford, we hear that he spent one thousand (1,000) pounds a year. This enormous sum is considered to be a legend, as there is no record showing that Shakspere received such money in all his life. Seen from the perspective of Edward de Vere, the rumour of 1,000 pounds a year proves to be one with a historical background. In The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Syracusa orders his servant to get him a rope. The servant answers: ‘I buy a thousand pound a year: I buy a rope!’. ‘Most scholars today,’ Anderson informs us, ‘assume that the anonymous Queen’s Men’s plays King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and The Troublesome Reign of King John—all of which were later published—served as sources for their respective Shakespearean counterparts.’ Anderson adds: But source is too timid a word for these texts. They are more likely to have been de Vere’s first drafts, probably written in collaboration with secretaries and associates such as John Lyly and Anthony Munday. In re-creating English history on the public stage as a means of popularizing Queen Elizabeth’s church and state, de Vere was taking part in what the Elizabethan satirist and de Vere confidant Thomas Nashe later called ‘the policy of plays’—plays as political action and Tudor evangelism. Writing in 1592, Nashe in his pamphlet Pierce Penniless stood behind the use of the English stage as a propaganda tool in the ongoing war against Spain: There is a certain waste of the people for whom there is no use but war, and these men must have some employment still to cut them off … If they have no service abroad, they will make mutinies at home. Or if the affairs of state be such as cannot exhale these corrupts excrements [rowdy Londoners], it is very expedient they have some light toys to busy their heads withal, cast before them as bones to gnaw on, which may keep them from having leisure to intermeddle with higher matters. To this effect, the Policy of Plays is very necessary—howsoever some shallow-brained censors (not the deepest searchers into the secrets of government) mightily oppugn them Around 1586, the war between England and Spain was in the air. Ogburn writes: Less than a month after the grant was made to Oxford, the Venetian ambassador in Spain was reporting to the Signory: But what has enraged him [King Philip II] much more than all else, and has caused him to show a resentment such as he has never 241 displayed in all his life, is the account of the masquerades and comedies which the Queen of England orders to be acted at his expense. …It appears to be probable that the Queen had put Oxford to work directly upon his return from the Low Countries … promoting the composition and production of the plays that would hold her mortal foe up to scorn. If Othello had been presented at Court by this time, as is likely, it would have been outstanding as a ‘masquerade’ enraging Philip, for the reports of it reaching him could have given a very different impression of the play from ours. ‘Moor’, it may be repeated, was an English term of contempt for a Spaniard, and Othello, slayer of Brabantio’s daughter, could have seemed to Philip a scurrilous composite of his half-brother, John of Austria, and himself. Don John had, like Othello, won a great fame defending Venice from the Turks, then become the murderer –in English eyes— of Brabantia’s daughter-city, Antwerp, while Philip, quite apart from the carnage of war he had waged, was rumoured to have arranged the murders of Elizabeth of Valois (his third wife) and of the Princes of Eboli, said to have been his mistress. During these years Spain tried conspiring rather than direct invasion as a strategy. Tensions were in the air and state propaganda was made visible through theater. It is at this time that we place Shakespeare’s historical plays. The first version of King John, entitled The Troublesome Reign of King John, is a paradigmatic example of patriotic exaltation from the outside; but inside we may be blinded by some flashes concerning the obsession of the leader playwright at the school of Silexedra with his royal identity. As happened with the anonymous Edward III, King John is not recognised in France because his title comes from a woman; moreover, when it has been already decided to go to France to claim the territories of the French King Arthur, Philip, the bastard son of King Richard the Lionheart, enters because of a dispute with his younger brother Robert, who says that his elder brother Philip is not the legitimate heir of the Falconbridges. In this play, Philip, who is the very image of his father King Richard the Lionheart, as King John says, acknowledges that he is not a legitimate Falconbridge, and accepts to lose the lands of his adoptive family rather than lie about his royal blood. Here is the key point of what our poet felt about his own personal origins when Katherine denounced him in 1563 with the claim that their father’s parents did not marry legally and, therefore, the lands of the earldom should be hers rather than his. We read in the play The Troublesome Reign of King John (I.i): 242 Essex Philip! Speak, I say; who was thy father? King John Young man, how now? what!, art thou in a trance? Queen Elinor Philip, awake! The man is in a dream. Philip [Aside] Philippus, atavis edite Regibus. What say’st thou; ‘Philip, sprung of ancient Kings?’ Quo me rapit tempestas? ‘What wind of honour blows this fury forth,’ Or whence proceed these fumes of majesty? Methinks I hear a hollow echo sound, That Philip is the son unto a King: The whistling leaves upon the trembling trees, Whistle in concert I am Richard’s son; The bubbling murmur of the water’s fall, Records Philippus Regis Jilius; Birds in their flight make music with their wings, Filling the air with glory of my birth; Birds, bubbles, leaves and mountains, echo, all Ring in mine ears, that I am Richard’s son. Here we see that Philip, King Richard’s bastard son, considered by everyone as the firstborn son of the noble family of the Falconbridges, has fallen into a dreamlike state or has gone into a trance on being asked about his real birth or identity. This very oneiric state of mind is the same in which Endymion falls, and the only way to rescue him from this state is with Cynthia’s kiss; in other words, to legitimize him before all of England. Another play published anonymously and that later on was attributed to George Peele is Edward I. In this play the blame of England’s problems is attributed to King Edward’s spouse, Spanish Queen Leonor, because she is considered proud and vain. When King Edward appoints John Baliol as King of Scotland, the Spanish Queen Leonor says: Leonor Now brave John Baliol, Lord of Galloway, And King of Scots, shine with thy golden head; Shake thy spears, in honor of his name The play Edward I orbits mainly around farce; at one of the most tremendous moments, when the Queen has asked King Edward that men at Court should cut their beards and women their breasts, the King responds she should do that herself first before ordering such a thing on his subjects. This tyrannical character of the Spanish Queen Leonor is repeated when she tells the King not to scream at her because he is going to wake the young prince sleeping in the cradle; the nursemaid, to our 243 amazement, associates Queen Leonor’s words to prince Edward who ‘sleeps’ (like Endymion) in the cradle, with the ‘proud incest’ of her character. This sounds like a clear allusion to Queen Elizabeth, his mother outside the play: Queen Leonor Nay, and you preach, I pray, my lord, begone: The child will cry and trouble you anon. [The Nurse closeth the tent] Lady Mayoress Proud incest in the cradle of disdain, Bred up in court of pride, brought up in Spain, Dost thou command him coyly from thy sight, That is the star, the glory of thy light? Sussex, whom Edward de Vere had had as father figure since he accompanied him to the war of the North in 1571, appears often in this play. Especially significant is the scene where Sussex introduces Prince Edward to his parents the King and Queen of England, for until that moment he had been in the cradle inside a tent, watched by Lady Mayoress. Everyone shouted then ‘God save Edward of Carnarvon, Prince of Wales!’ As in the last scene of Antony and Cleopatra, the nurse, bound by orders of Queen Leonor to the chair, dies while she breastfeeds the baby, whose sucking is compared to the bite of a serpent. This surprising scene would be incomprehensible if we did not have the association with Cleopatra and her worm on our side. The Queen tells her lady in waiting Katherina to bind the nurse Mayoress to the chair and ‘to draw forth her breast,’ so that ‘the serpent is applied to her breast.’ And she adds next: ‘Why, so; now she is a nurse.—Suck on, sweet babe.’ What follows is the death of the nurse at the hands of Prince Edward, whose sucking is associated with the bite of a serpent (Scene XVI, 30): Lady Mayoress Ah, queen, sweet queen, seek not my blood to spill, For I shall die before this adder have his fill... Farewell, proud queen, the author of my death, The scourge of England and to English dames! Ah, husband... Didst thou know how Mary is perplex’d, Soon would’st thou come to Wales, and rid me of this pain. But O! I die. My wish is all in vain [Here she dies] We know that the nurse is being punished for having talked against the queen about something forbidden: her incestuous behaviour. The fact 244 that Lady Mayoress is called Mary is an allusion to Mary Queen of Scots’ execution by Queen Elizabeth in 1587. Queen Leonor finally hears that London knows that she has killed Lady Mayoress (as Elizabeth has ordered the death of Mary Queen of Scots) and is blaming her, to which she replies denying the fact that she had done such a thing, that she is innocent, and she asks for forgiveness. Beauclerk writes: When Elizabeth learned of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in February 1587 (having signed the death warrant with great heaviness of heart), she suffered prolonged attacks of hysteria, lashing out at her councillors in her desperation to deflect the intolerable burden of guilt. The specter of her executed mother rose before her. Anne, like Mary, accused of treason and denounced as an adulteress, had been condemned to death by a prejudiced jury of English peers. Now Elizabeth was an accomplice to murder, and she had, in a sense, destroyed the sanctity of her office. The execution had also exposed the Achilles’ heel of Elizabeth’s governments—its failure to settle the succession. It was a weak spot that Oxford-Shakespeare preyed upon remorselessly in his history plays. Until the question was settled, the country would remain vulnerable to rebellion, as the 1590s and early 1600s were to prove. Queen Elizabeth is the model for this terrible Queen Leonor of because, as we know from History, the authentic and real Leonor of Castile (stepsister of Alfonso X of Castile) was the virtuous and faithful spouse of King Edward I. History tells us that their marriage was as happy as it was rare among the monarchs of the time. The fact that the author describes her as incestuous for having had relations with Edmund, her husband’s brother, points to the incest being the author’s invention. On the other hand, the fact that Leonor was Spanish only confirms that Oxford, following orders from Elizabeth I, was using theater as state propaganda against the imminent Spanish invasion, in order to raise the spirits of her subjects. Anderson tells us that this moment of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 gave place to the most obscure and nihilist of Shakespeare’s works: Macbeth would serve as the author’s private answer … De Vere probably began it sometime in the heat of the Mary Stuart crisis and, as he did with most of the Shake-speare canon, would spend the rest of his life revising and reworking it. The Scots queen’s ultimate face haunts Macbeth, a tragedy that begins and ends with an offstage beheading and the ritual display of the severed head. Queen Elizabeth is the leading candidate for Lady Macbeth, the regicidal vixen who had bathed her country in the blood of an 245 anointed Scots monarch. As one of Macbeth’s nobles, Macduff, laments when he first sees the body of the slain Scots king: Macduff Confusion now hath made this masterpiece: Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence The life o’ th’ building. …The Stuart queen had been a royal guest in England; according to Scots law, Mary had been in England under what was technically called ‘double trust.’ Naturally, Macbeth outlines this important but abstruse point of Scottish law: Macbeth He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Macbeth, with its nihilism and criticism of both Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary Stuart, was no propaganda piece of the Queen’s Men to enact on the public stage. In fact, no evidence exists of any performance of Macbeth during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, or even King Charles I—save for one mention of a staging at the Globe Theater on April 20, 1611. The Scots tragedy was probably written to excise the author’s own personal demons. Once a monarch has been murdered, says Macbeth, what gives anyone or anything else a greater right to life? Macbeth Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had liv’d a blessed time; for from this instant There’s nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn The Queen’s Men directed by our poet enacted the plays Richard II, Part I (also known as Thomas Woodstock), Edward III and Edmund Ironside. Edward de Vere, at the head of state propaganda, writes and enacts The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine the Great, the first one published anonymously and attributed in 1612 by Thomas Heywood to Thomas Kyd. Tamburlaine was published in 1590 and its title-page reads: ‘Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and wonderful Conquests, became a most puissant and mighty Monarque, and (for his Tyranny, and terror in Warre) was termed, The Scourge of God.’ Behind Tamburlaine’s propaganda is Chamburlaine, the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, Edward de Vere. It is strange that this propaganda play centres on the historical character of Tamerlane or Timur, ‘the lame,’ because, leaving aside the fact that our poet was lame, the author of this play (later on attributed to Christopher Marlowe) had changed the historical name of Tamerlane (or Timur) to Tamburlaine. If we know that Edward de Vere held the title of Lord Great 246 Chamberlain of England, we will easily understand why the original name of Tamerlane or Timur was changed in the play to Tamburlaine. It expresses almost the same name and sound: Chamberlain—Tamburlaine. I do not personally know of any reason for this modification, except the one that relates ‘the lame’ Tamburlaine the Great with ‘the lame’ Great Chamberlain of England. Furthermore, the Scythian shepherd is called a Lord, making him a very special shepherd for sure. Cosroe says in the first part (II.v.38-40): ‘And now, Lord Tamburlaine, my brother’s camp/ I leave to thee and Theridamas,/ To follow me to fair Persepolis.’ Marlowe, like Shakespeare, could only think in terms of nobility: even a shepherd is addressed as ‘Lord’! Considering that Tamburlaine is a representation of the literary empire that our poet was creating around him, the theatrical figure of this Lord Tamburlaine-Lord Chamberlain works as the symbol of that solitary England in its fight against Persians, Moors, and Spaniards, who allied together against the lonely Scythian shepherd of the play. In the first part of Tamburlaine (IV.i.17-26) we see again that pseudonym, which will appear in 1593: Soldan ...Tamburlaine... But speak, what power hath he? Messenger ... five hundred thousand footmen... shaking their swords, their spears Tamburlaine, like our poet, is related to Actaeon and the deer killed by his dogs. The fact that the island of Ida is mentioned indicates Venus’ wood, so that Tamburlaine is identified as well with Adonis (III.ii.4-7, Part 2): Messenger Renowned emperor, mighty Callapine God’s great lieutenant over all the world, Here at Aleppo, with an host of men, Lies Tamburlaine, this king of Persia, In number more than are the quivering leaves Of Ida’s forest, where your highness’ hounds With open cry pursue the wounded stag Tamburlaine is pure political propaganda from the outside, full of bombastic threats against the Spaniards and their Empire in a very depurated and very Ovidian euphuistic style: charming to read. Tamburlaine is a shepherd warrior who feels, above all, that he is a king. In Tamburlaine, Part I, King Mycetes is informed that Tamburlaine is ‘hoping (misled by dreaming prophecies)/ to reign in Asia,’ just what 247 happens with Endymion and his dreams, his trance, that same trance Philip the bastard experienced in The Troublesome Reign of King John. Considering this information, King Mycetes says to his counsellor Meander that he has spoken well, and for his love towards him he ‘may term a Damon for thy love.’ This is the symbol our poet used for authentic friendship, as we already know. As happened with Edward de Vere who was surrounded by his university wits in his school of Mount Silexedra, Tamburlaine promises his men that they will be crowned kings of the world and that he values their friendship above all (I.ii.240-246): Tamburlaine These are my friends, in whom I more rejoice Than doth the king of Persia in his crown; And, by the love of Pylades and Orestes, Whose statues we adore in Scythia, Thyself and them shall never part from me Before I crow you kings in Asia. This declaration of brotherhood is the same that Henry V expresses to his soldiers when he tells them they are all ‘a band of brothers.’ Today we can see, actually, that Tamburlaine-Chamberlain has achieved crowning them as kings along with him, just like what happens with Lyly, Munday, Peele, Greene, Kyd and Marlowe. And if they are already recognised as kings, it is high time for us to recognise Euphues, Edward de Vere, as their Caesar and Emperor. Thus thinks Tamburlaine on life and the crown of a king (II.v.50-64): Tamburlaine And ride in triumph through Persepolis!— Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles! Usumcasane and Theridamas, Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in triumph through Persepolis? Thechelles O, my Lord, ’tis sweet and full of pomp! Usumcasane To be a king, is half to be a god. Theridamas A god is not so glorious as a king: I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven, Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth;— To wear a crown enchas’d with pearl and gold, Whose virtues carry with it life and death; To ask and have, command and be obey’d; When looks breed love, with looks to gain the prize, Such power attractive shines in prince’s eyes. Tamburlaine Why, say, Theridamas, wilt thou be a king? 248 Theridamas Nay, though I praise it, I can live without it. This obsession with the pleasure of the ‘crown enchas’d with pearl and gold’ does not fit the atheist and anarchic Marlowe that legend has bequeathed to us, but corresponds to a bastard prince obsessed with the throne of England and the crown of a King. Tamburlaine is described in Part I as Edward de Vere could have been described by his enemies (II.ii.20): ‘Thirsting with sovereignty and love of arms.’ Lord Tamburlaine-Chamberlain recognises this same thirst in himself when he says (II.vii.12-29): Tamburlaine The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown... Mov’d me to manage arms against thy state... Nature, that fram’d us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. Our souls... Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving at the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. Lord Tamburlaine is described by the Egyptian Princess Zenocrate like Francis Meres does in 1598 in reference to Shakespeare. Zenocrate says (III.ii.49-50): ‘So looks my lordly love, fair Tamburlaine;/ His talk much sweeter than the Muses’ son.’ When we hear that Tamburlaine is described as ‘fair’, something is pointing to that fair/ver Chamberlain of England who has raised the English language to the skies. Zenocrate’s description is very strange for a bloody Scythian warrior, but correct if we attribute it to our poet and his Euphuistic language and his literary genius for, as Angel Day wrote of him around that time in The English Secretary (1586), Edward de Vere’s infancy and life ‘was from the beginning ever sacred to the Muses.’ This play, which in order to fit the characteristics of a tragedy should have ended with the fall of that Phaeton the Lord Great ChamberlainTamburlaine, concludes showing us how the shepherd is crowed as king and celebrating his wedding to his Egyptian Queen Zenocrate. As many critics have commented, this is the first time that the tragedy of a hero does not end with his fall and death. Considering that this is a propaganda play, it is not strange that the hero ended up beating his enemies, for the question was to cheer up Londoners’ spirits before the 249 Spanish invasion took place. The political function of this first part of the play is not exceptional, for art, from Tyrtaeus to Thomas Paine, has been used by the State as a powerful propaganda tool. It will be in Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, written some years later, where we see how the hero cries the death of his queen (Anne Cecil died in 1588). This mythical Marlowe has an empty biography, like that of Shakspere; that he could publish his first play with such intensity, or have received such a high responsibility on behalf of the Queen and Cecil (for the play was political propaganda against the Spanish invasion) is not credible. The editor of Marlowe’s works for Penguin Books, J.B. Steane, reports: Tamburlaine is the play in which Marlowe shows most consistent intensity, most sustained imaginative power and most generously expended poetic resources. It is a quite extraordinary strong and individual creation, and much of the energy of creativeness is concentrated upon the person of the protagonist. Tamburlaine was the famous Timur … In Marlowe’s play he is the Scythian shepherd who rose to greatness by force of character, followed by courageous and strong-spirited men and loved by a beautiful and good woman, and always winning … Tamburlaine is qualitatively established as the superior of all the men around him. He is a allowed a great dignity, power and beauty of speech: his speech is the characteristic language of the play but the language is most magnificently itself when Tamburlaine speaks it. The title of the second part of Tamburlaine the Great matches the fact that, in 1588, Edward de Vere’s wife had died and he had been left with three daughters. The title says: ‘Tamburlaine the Great, with his impassionate fury, for the death of his lady and love Zenocrate: his forme of exhortation and discipline to his three Sonnes, and the manner of his own death.’ At the end of this Second Part we witness our poet pointing to one of his dearest myths during this phase of his life: the fall of Phaeton. We read how Phaeton-Tamburlaine-Chamberlain says goodbye to his audience (V.iii.244-251): The nature of thy chariot will not bear A guide of baser temper than myself, More than heaven’s coach the pride of Phaeton. Farewell, my boys! my dearest friends, farewell! My body feels, my soul doth weep to see Your sweet desires depriv’d my company, For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die. [Dies.] 250 John Donne, as a university wit, is behind these plays too, as Gabriel Harvey will say in 1593. The Spanish Tragedy is a play as well, evidently, about Spaniards. Next to Hamlet, this play was the most famous of the revenge tragedies of Elizabethan drama. This time Hieronimo, a father, seeks to revenge the homicide of his son Horatio. The fact that Don Andrea’s ghost and the allegorical character Revenge appear at the beginning of the play, and that Don Andrea is described as a poisoned courtier, seems to relate this Don Andrea to Don John of Austria, as it was rumoured that he had been poisoned by his brother-in-law Philip II because of the jealousy the King felt for the victorious warrior of Lepanto. As can be seen, the propaganda against Spain and the insult against Philip II explain his extraordinary anger the ambassador talked about. We are witnessing art in its function as a tool of war. The Spanish Tragedy was published anonymously and attributed years later (in 1612) to Thomas Kyd by that enigmatic Thomas Heywood. C.W. Barrell comments: 65 Printed anonymously in all of its many editions. Although attributed to Thomas Kyd on a reference made by Thomas Heywood in 1612, considerable doubt militates against this ascription. The Spanish Tragedy is a play that goes back on various scores, including Ben Jonson’s satirical remarks, to 1585 or earlier. Heywood, on the other hand, was born between 1575 and 80. Obviously a mere child when it was produced, he is not likely to have had unquestionable knowledge of its authorship. Kyd died in 1594, whereas Heywood does not appear in London theatrical circles until 1598. Moreover, Thomas Kyd is one author of the period who seems to have put his name on every work to which his right is clear-cut. His play Cornelia (an unsuccessful translation of Garnier’s French original) bears Kyd’s name on the title-page and also at the end, while his initials are signed to the dedication to the Countess of Sussex. Furthermore, Kyd’s name is given as the author of Cornelia in the Stationers’ records. We also find the initials ‘T.K.’ no less than three times on the printed version of The Housholders Philosophie, Kyd’s translation from Tasso. He even took pains to sign the two-penny chapbook shocker entitled The Trueth of the most wicked and secret murthering of John Brewen, Goldsmith of London, committed by his owne wife &c., which was printed in 1592 for John Kid and Edward White. Under the circumstances, and with no more direct evidence than Heywood’s casual attribution—made twenty-five or more years after the play was written—it is impossible to believe that a professional writer who liked to see his own name in print as much as Thomas Kyd did would not openly have claimed The Spanish Tragedy had he possessed 65 See http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/library/barrell/21-40/31pirate.htm. 251 legitimate right to such fame. In The Spanish Tragedy we read the following (II.i.3-4): In time the savage bull sustains the yoke, In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure, In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak, In time the flint is pierced with softest shower, In the work Hekatompathia, sonnet 47, published in 1582, we read: In time the Bull is brought to wear the yoke; In time all haggard Hawks will stoop the Lures; In time small wedge will cleave the sturdiest Oak; In time the Marble wears with weakest showers: Another finding that points to The Spanish Tragedy as a creation by our poet and his school occurs here (II.ii.124-129): Now in his mouth he carries pleasing words, Which pleasing words do harbour sweet conceits, Which sweet conceits are limed with sly deceits, Which sly deceits smooth Bel-imperia’s ears, And through her ears dive down into her heart, And in her heart set him where I should stand. In The Tame of the Shrew (I.ii.47-52) written around 1576, we read: She is so hot because the meat is cold; The meat is cold because you come not home; You come not home because you have no stomach; You have no stomach having broke your fast; But we that know what ’tis to fast and pray Are penitent for your default to-day. When Horatio and Bel-imperia are flirting, Lorenzo and Baltasar come and kill him by hanging him from a tree. We know that the titlepage of the 1615 edition of The Spanish Tragedy showed a very high tree intended to be a clear representation of the one from which Horatio is hung in the play. This scene, therefore, seems to be fundamental in the play. As we will see, its signification in the life of Edward de Vere was, as 252 well, fundamental. When Horatio’s father verifies that his son is dead, he expresses his grief with these words in Latin: ‘O aliquis mihi quas pulchrum ver educat herbas misceat,’ which means: ‘That someone mix for me herbs that the beautiful spring [i.e. Ver] offers.’ Next, he adds: ‘et nostro detur medicina dolori,’ which means: ‘and a medicine be given for our pain.’ These sentences in Latin will appear in the Persian Portrait, painted with a sonnet written in the Shakespearian form; the portrait shows Queen Elizabeth pregnant next to a crying deer, which is no other than Actaeon metamorphosed. The theme of the Persian Portrait will be seen in due time and it will be crucial and clear evidence that Queen Elizabeth had been pregnant. More evidence that our poet was behind this work has been found by Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn: The Spanish Tragedy, attributed to Kyd—who may have had a hand in the revision, though it would have been a miracle for the son of a scrivener, educated in the Merchant Taylors school, to have written so courtly a drama, showing special knowledge of nobles in battle, actors in Italy, and other matters requiring unusual sophistication … Kyd worked for several years under the patronage of the Earl of Oxford and spoke of him almost reverentially. It ought to be evident to students that the author of Hamlet, to say nothing of Henry V and Macbeth, was the principal author, the originator, of The Spanish Tragedy. In our opinion, Oxford, after having written an early version of the play, had needed an alibi for certain personal allusions and had turned it over to an apprentice to fill in, under his own careful supervision, and to complete. According to Andrew Lang, Kyd was identified as the author only by sarcastic hints from Nashe. Nothing is surer than that Nashe knew who the true author was. That Marlowe and Kyd, as university wits, were under the direction of Edward de Vere is a question that is clear once we read and understand the content and themes of their works. Ogburn reports Kyd’s betrayal of his friend Marlowe under pressure by the Star Chamber of the reign: In May 1593 ... when the Star Chamber took action upon certain ‘lewd libels’ and ‘blasphemies’ of Marlowe’s and papers of Thomas Kyd’s were found among them, Kyd as well as Marlowe was arrested. Testifying under torture to Marlowe’s atheism, he protested that ‘My first acquaintance with this Marlowe, rose upon his bearing name to serve my Lord, although his Lordship never knew his service, but in writing for his players.’ Dr Boas comments: ‘It is one of the most tantalizing problems in Marlovian biography that Kyd omits to give a clue to the identification of this lord of whose household he had been a member in some capacity for nearly six years.’ That would put the 253 enlistment of Kyd in the mysterious lord’s service back to the end of 1587. The Spanish Tragedy, attributed to Kyd on the strength of a single reference many years later, is believed to have been produced, according to Edmund Gosse, ‘between 1584 and 1586’. That is interesting, since Hamlet, to which it bears curious similarities, was being written probably in 1585; and as Gosse says, ‘John Lyly had a more marked influence on his [Kyd’s] manner than any of his contemporaries’ Scene VII. Euphues and the end of his school The defeat of the Great Armada by Philip II in 1588 was seen in England as a miracle, a providential event granted by God to the country. In the year 1589 we know that our poet sold Fisher’s Folly. The reason was that, once his wife Anne Cecil had passed away, her father, the Secretary of State William Cecil, started to claim the debt that his son-in-law had with him. Our poet sold that house secretly, as Ogburn informs us, hiding the sale from his father-in-law, the mighty Lord Burghley: Despite the large sums coming to him quarterly from the Exchequer, Oxford appears now to have come to the end of his financial resources. Probably he had paid dearly to equip his ship for battle with the Spanish. Within a month of the thanksgiving procession he sold Fisher’s Folly. This he did hurriedly and evidently surreptitiously. The reason lay in his indebtedness to the Court of Wards, of which Burghley was Master. As professor Joel Hurtsfield puts it in The Queen’s Wards: The Earl had entered into obligations to purchase his marriage from the Court of Wards, a necessary procedure before he could be free to marry Anne Cecil. The full price of his marriage had never been paid and this, and other debts, had long hung over him in the Court of Wards. Then early in 1589, shortly after the death of Anne, Burghley instituted procedures against the Earl for his debt, and some of his lands were seized and held for payment. The buyer of Fisher’s Folly, Sir Thomas Cornwallis’ son, ignored that the powerful Burghley was a victim of that commercial operation; Thomas Cornwallis’ father defended him before Lord Burghley when he wrote him a letter and told him that ‘think me not so doting and foolish in my age that for the attaining of Fisher’s Folly, I would once put in adventure to lose the goodwill and favour which I have ever found towards me.’ The really important fact for us is that some of Edward de Vere’s poems remained at Fisher’s Folly, being discovered in 1852, in the mid-19th century. This evidence is so strong that we can rest assured that 254 Shakespeare had lived at Mount Silexedra and was no other than Oxford. The volume discovered included some poems copied by hand by Anne Cornwallis, the daughter of William Cornwallis, the buyer to whom Oxford sold the house in 1589. Let us quote Charles Wisner Barrell’s words of 1945:66 Some sixty years before J. Thomas Looney began work on his revolutionary identification of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as ‘Shakespeare,’ James Orchard Halliwell (later Halliwell-Phillips) one of the greatest collectors of Shakespeareana and most painstaking students of the Stratford native’s career that has ever lived, brought out the fact that the names of the mysterious Bard and the mysterious poet Earl have actually been linked together in unmistakable significance since the 1590’s at least. The evidence is contained in a small volume of poems copied in the handwriting of one Anne Cornwallis. And Halliwell-Phillips dates the transcription of this unique collection between the years 1585 and 1595. He published the first account of his acquisition of the russia leather-bound quarto bearing the large feminine signature, ‘Anne Cornwaleys her booke,’ in a volume entitled, Catalogue of Shakespeare Reliques In the Possession of James Orchard Halliwell, Esq., F.R.S. in the year 1852. Only seventy copies of the Catalogue were printed and it has now become so rare that comparatively few students of the authorship question even know of its existence. Through the courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, I have been able to consult a copy and will now give a digest of Halliwell-Phillips’ remarks on the Cornwallis manuscript together with some subsequent findings regarding the identity of the Elizabethan lady who made this contemporary collection of poems in her quaint and priceless little ‘commonplace book.’ Halliwell-Phillips purchased the item from the Russell family of Enfield, following its acquisition by Dr. Russell at the sale of the Bright manuscript collection at Sotheby’s auction rooms in London in June 1844. The description of the Cornwallis collection is given thus in Sotheby’s sale catalogue: SHAKESPEARE. A POETICAL MISCELLANY OF THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH, containing verses by Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, Vavasor, G. M., Sir P. Sidney, and Shakespeare; russia, 4 to. The lines by Shakespeare are an elegant little poem which appeared first in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599…: 66 See http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/library/barrell/21-40/26earliest.htm. 255 Manuscript Now hoe, inoughe, too much I fear; For if my ladye heare this songe, She will not sticke to ringe my eare, To teache my tongue to be so longe; Yet would she blushe, here be it saide, To heare her secrets thus bewrayede. Printed Text (Poem XIX, The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599) But soft; enough, too much I fear, Lest that my mistress hear my song; She’ll not stick to round me i’ the ear, To teach my tongue to be so long: Yet will she blush, here be said, To hear her secrets so bewray’d. Barrell cannot help observing ironically: Here we have the eminent Halliwell-Phillips—seemingly unbeknownst to Mr. Looney—pausing nearly a hundred years ago on the very threshold of a great discovery … The association of the names ‘Vere, Earl of Oxford’ and ‘Shakespeare’ seems important to him—though not quite important enough to call for a little extra research and deduction! How ironical this will seem to present day students of the vast quantity of Oxford-Shakespeare testimony now available—that the otherwise insatiably curious and realistically-minded HalliwellPhillips did not pursue at this time the clues that lay within his hands! Poe’s reasoning in regard to the invisibility of The Purloined Letter is again proven basically sound. The thing best hidden is often that which lies most openly in view. After William (later Sir William) Cornwallis took the place over in 1588, he is known to have provided a situation in his household as ‘reader’ for Thomas Watson, one of Oxford’s literary protégés. Cornwallis tells a strange tale of his relations with Watson—whom he describes as a prolific popular playwright—in letters to Sir Thomas Heneage. The Cornwallis statements regarding Watson’s playwriting activities deserve … further investigation elsewhere. The point to be emphasized here is that it is abundantly apparent that the acquisition of Oxford’s house by the Cornwallis family in 1588 provided the perfect opportunity for a member of that family to secure the copies of personal poems which are transcribed in the anthology bearing the signature of ‘Anne Cornwaleys.’ From some overlooked corner of the 256 Earl’s library at Fisher’s Folly these verses could have been retrieved, the anonymous ‘Shakespeare’ poem among the others. This certainly bears every evidence of being one of Oxford’s early commentaries upon his affair with Anne Vavasor. The True Chronicle History of King Leir was enacted during these final years of the 1580s, when our poet had already lost the economic means to maintain his art and his theatre production. Like King Leir, our poet had three daughters, and after the death of their mother Anne Cecil in 1588, they realized that their father could not maintain them economically; with Cecil persecuting his credit against him, Edward de Vere was forced to sell many of his lands and properties. In fact, he had to cede to his daughters castle Hedingham, where he spent his first years of childhood with his adoptive father. Leir’s anguish is the clear expression of that progressive annihilation our poet was then suffering from, a fact that can be verified when we hear Leir denying five times his own name: “Never, never, never, never, never!” (V.iii.365). The change from Leir to Lear is, moreover, a witty anagram by its author that Nabokov would have loved: King Lear-Earl. Finally, Mucedorus, the anonymous comedy of Elizabethan times most often reprinted (it went through seventeen editions in Quarto), seems to proceed from these years according to critics. Something sounds like our poet when King Mucedorus, who has abandoned his reign and is disguised as a shepherd, says (II.ii): Mucedorus Behold the fickle state of man, always mutable, Never at one. Sometimes we feed on fancies With the sweet of our desires; sometimes again We feel the heat of extreme misery. Now am I in favour about the court and country. To morrow those favours will turn to frowns: To day I live revenged on my foe, To morrow I die, my foe revenged on me. It is interesting to read that the anonymous author of this play treats Mucedorus as a bastard royal prince (V.ii): Mucedorus I do deserve the daughter of a king. King Oh, impudent! a shepherd and so insolent! Mucedorus No shepherd I, but a worthy prince. King In fair conceit, not princely born. 257 As our poet had said through his mask of Soothern in Pandora, he had created a cultural revolution, a literary explosion never seen before: he had uplifted the English language to the skies. It was something magnificent and it worked, moreover, not only to make people enjoy their free afternoons at the theatre, but also for Queen Elizabeth to perpetuate herself in power. His art was the weapon with which to attack the enemy. Spaniards would not try to invade the island again; that ‘sceptered isle,’ that ‘precious jewel surrounded by a silver sea,’ England, had been saved in a providential way. Someone who had helped to a great extent to instill, like Tyrtaeus, Pindar and Plato did, the values of the ideal man, a courageous and virtuous one that defends his homeland above all else, was our poet. Edward de Vere would have felt like Aeschylus after the battle of Marathon when the Persian army was defeated. Like Greece then, England had been saved from the biggest of empires. Unlike Aeschylus, however, our poet could not inscribe on his gravestone (we ignore its exact location or if it even exists) the verses which the playwright Aeschylus ordered to be inscribed on his: This tomb the dust of Aeschylus doth hide, Euphorion’s son and fruitful Gela’s pride; How tried his valor Marathon may tell, And long-haired Medes, who knew it all too well. We must now consider the entrance in the arena of that other genius named John Donne. As critics said of Donne and his poetry, he was the greatest of innovators, the ‘Copernicus in poetry.’ A.S. Kline writes:67 He was nominally a Catholic, sensitive and unsure of his reception in a hostile society. He was a poet, with deep feelings, alert to rejection by an unknown public. He became a wearer of masks. In his Satires and Elegies, in an attempt to act out identity, he adopted witty, apparently insensitive roles, but in his poems addressed to friends, and in the Epithalamion of 1595, he broke through to deeper feelings. Then in the Songs and Sonnets he made that inward turn towards intimacy, with love as the great subversive theme, which seems essentially ‘modern’ because it is, for us, essentially serious … Shakespeare’s deepest note is his inner sweetness and tenderness; Marlowe’s his restless desire for something beyond, for the extreme … Donne’s is intimacy, his focus on the individual life, on the self. He is the first truly autobiographical poet in English, the first in whom the emotions and events of the life are vitally presented in the content of the verse, though often indirectly and elusively. 67 See http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Stormdonne.htm. 258 Donne was interested in the self’s changeability and inconstancy, in the instability that was part of his character and temperament. Loyalty, constancy, disloyalty, betrayal, pledges and oaths are of the scenery of love, but also vital elements of his life. A man brave in words, who found it difficult to sustain that courage in actions. A man who could stand firm in his loyalty to a woman, but relinquish his religious allegiance. Who could write verse about faithlessness and spend the second half of his life in the embrace of faith. This centring on the volatile self makes Donne an innovator in literature, ‘Copernicus in poetry’, someone who changed the line of sight from man moving in orbit around the world and society, to the world and society reflected and centred on man. ‘The monarch of wit’, as Thomas Carew described John Donne in 1633, was now, in 1589, entering with another mask–the mask of Thomas Nashe who became famous for his devastating wit. Scene VIII. The Harvey-Nashe Quarrel From 1579 to 1589 Immerito was away from the London literary public. In 1589 he appeared in the guise of Thomas Nashe. Gabriel Harvey “desired to be ‘epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter’, and was the prime mover in the literary clique that desired to impose on English verse the Latin rules of quantity” (Encyclopaedia Britannia, 11th Edition). Thomas Nashe’s Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, his first work under that mask of 1589, one year before the publication of The Faerie Queene, shows us the author of that epic poem justifying his choice of poetical taste: his aesthetics on English poetry. The justification is not printed in a work of his own, but as a preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, showing Harvey that his former pupil was now on the side of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, or William Monox, Master Apis Lapis, the future author of the mask ‘William Shake-speare.’ Harvey not only had lost his former pupil for his Aeropagus, but was seeing that he had gone to the school of Euphues and the ‘University Wits’, where Watson, Kyd, Marlowe, Lodge, Nashe and Greene were. This is what Harvey tells his former pupil to convince him to return to him in his Four Letters (1592): Be a musician and poet unto thyself, that art both, and a ringleader of both unto other; be a man, be a gentleman, be a philosopher, be a divine, be thy resolute self, not the slave of Fortune [i.e. Oxford], that for every flea-biting crieth out, Alas, and for a few hungry meals, like a Greek parasite, misuseth the tragedy of Hecuba [i.e. Oxford as author of Hamlet], but the friend of virtue [i.e. Harvey himself], that is richest in poverty, freest in bondage, bravest in jeopardy, cheerfullest 259 in calamity. Be rather wise and unfortunate, with the silver swan [i.e. Harvey himself] than fortunate and unwise with the golden ass [i.e. Oxford]. Remember thine own marginal emblem, Fortuna favet fatuis. O solace thy miraculous self, and cheer the muses in cheering thy dainty soul, sweetly drunken with their delicious Helicon and the restorative nectar of the gods [i.e. epic, heroic poetry: The Faerie Queene]. What can I say more? That cordial liquor and that heavenly restorative be thy sovereign comfort, and scorn the baseness of every crazed or fainting thought that may argue a degenerate mind [i.e. Oxford]. And so much briefly touching thy dear self, whom I hope never to find so pathetically distressed, or so tragically disguised, again. [i.e. as writer of tragedies and plays] Now a word or two concerning him who in charity kisseth thy hand, and in pity wisheth thee better luck. May it please gentle [i.e. noble, a courtier] Pierce, in the divine fury of his ravished spirit, to be graciously good unto his poor friends [i.e. Harvey and his Aeropagus], who would be somewhat loath to be silly sheep for the wolf or other sheep-biter [i.e. Euphues]. In other words, be with me and my school, not in his. John Donne thought otherwise, as we read from R.C. Bald (1986:47): At this time [i.e. 1588] Cambridge may have been more interesting than Oxford to a young writer ambitious of contributing to English letters … The three Harvey brothers were still at the University, and in 1592 became involved in a quarrel with Greene and then with Nashe that caused a considerable stir in educated society … At Cambridge Donne is likely first to have come upon some of the writings of Marlowe, who had already translated Ovid’s Amores (the main models of Donne’s love elegies) … Marlowe, indeed, made a deeper impression on Donne than any other English contemporary. Something of Donne’s feelings for Cambridge is revealed in the sonnet ‘To Mr. S.B.’ This was young Samuel Brooke, who, probably in 1592, entered Trinity as a Westminster scholar. In spite of all temptations to absorb himself wholly in study, Donne advises him not to neglect the Muses but ‘wisely take / Fresh water at the Heliconian spring’. The reference to those Scismatiques with you, Which draw all wits of good hope to their crew; seems clearly to refer to the Harvey brothers, but whether they were schismatics because of Harvey’s advocacy of classical metres in English poetry or because Donne sided with Greene and Nashe in the Harvey-Nashe quarrel must be left in doubt. Nashe’s preface is addressed not to readers but to students. To the 260 ‘courteous and wise’ students of Oxford and Cambridge, asking them to ‘vouchsafe to welcome your scholarlike shepherd.’ ‘Shepherd’ here means ‘poet,’ not a real shepherd who lives by taking care of his lambs with the sweat of his brow. But Nashe was not a poet. How can this be? The young ‘Gorgon’ (as Harvey will call him in 1593) Thomas Nashe is saying he is a poet anyway and commences his speech: To you he appeals that knew him ab extrema pueritia, whose placet he accounts the plaudite of his pains, thinking his day-labour was not altogether lavished sine linea if there be anything at all in it that doth olere Atticum in your estimate. I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age is grown of late ‘He’ that is appealing the students is the young shepherd-poet, and he tells his audience that he knew him ab extrema pueritia. This ‘him’ is Robert Greene, whom he knew since extreme childhood. The young poet knows Greene since he was very, very young. For, as Ben Jonson said to John Donne in 1616, Donne had written works produced from his ‘most early wit.’ The young Gorgon now complains about the present situation of the English language. In special, those that have left university knowing nothing: But herein I cannot so fully bequeath them to folly as their idiot artmasters, that intrude themselves to our ears as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse. And more on these men: ’Mongst this kind of men that repose eternity in the mouth of a player, I can but engross some deep-read schoolmen or grammarians, who, having no more learning in their skull than will serve to take up a commodity, nor art in their brain than was nourished in a servingman’s idleness, will take upon them to be the ironical censors of all, when God and poetry doth know they are the simplest of all. Gorgon continues blaming this kind of men: What is he among students so simple that cannot bring forth (tandem aliquando) some or other thing singular, sleeping betwixt every sentence? … Indeed, I must needs say the descending years from the philosophers’ Athens have not been supplied with such present 261 orators as were able in any English vein to be eloquent of their own, but either they must borrow invention of Ariosto & his countrymen, take up choice of words by exchange in Tully’s Tusculans & the Latin historiographers’ storehouses (similitudes, nay, whole sheets & tractates verbatim from the plenty of Plutarch and Pliny), and, to conclude, their whole method of writing from the liberty of comical fictions that have succeeded to our rhetoricians by a second imitation, so that well may the adage Nil dictum quod non dictum prius be the most judicial estimate of our latter writers. Nashe is angered with something personal: Oft have I observed what I now set down: a secular wit that hath lived all days of his life by What do you lack? to be more judicial in matters of conceit that our quadrant crepundios, that spit ergo in the mouth of everyone they meet; yet those and these are so affectionate to dogged detracting, as the most poisonous pasquil any dirty-mouthed Martin or Momus ever composed is gathered up with greediness before it fall to the ground, and bought at the dearest, though they smell of the fripler’s lavender half a year after, for, I know not how, the mind of the meanest is fed with this folly, that they impute singularity to him that slanders privily, and count it a great piece of art in an ink-horn man, in any tapsterly terms whatsoever, to expose his superiors to envy. This kind of poor writers even insults other better ones: I will not deny but in scholarlike matters of controversy a quicker style may pass as commendable, and that a quip to an ass is as good as a goad to an ox, but when the irregular idiot that was up to the ears in divinity before ever he met with probabile in the university shall leave pro & contra before he can scarcely pronounce it, and come to correct commonweals that never heard of the name of magistrate before he came to Cambridge, it is no marvel if every ale-house vaunt the table of the world turned upside down, since the child beateth his father and the ass whippeth his master. These men are idiots, and was a friend and copy-cat of Euphues: But lest I might seem, with these night-crows, Nimis curiosus in aliena republica, I will turn back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk a little in friendship with a few of our trivial translators … It is a common practice now-a-days amongst a sort of shifting 262 companions, that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neckverse if they should have need; yet English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as Blood is a beggar, and so forth, and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But O grief! Tempus edax rerum, what’s that will last always? The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be dry, and Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage, which makes his famished followers to imitate the kid in Aesop, who, enamoured with the fox’s newfangles, forsook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation, and these men, renouncing all possibilities of credit or estimation, to intermeddle with Italian translations, wherein how poorly they have plodded (as those that are neither Provencal men, nor are able to distinguish of articles), let all indifferent gentlemen that have travailed in that tongue discern by their twopenny pamphlets. This man, this idiot who took many lines from master Euphues and author of Hamlet (now dry and the school gone in 1589) is Thomas Kyd. But now he is not writing more plays but translating poorly from Latin poetry: And no marvel though their home-born mediocrity be such in this matter, for what can be hoped of those that thrust Elysium into hell, and have not learned the just measure of the horizon with an hexameter? Sufficeth them to bodge up a blank verse with ifs and ands, and otherwhile, for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the City, and spend two or three hours in turning over French dowdy, where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all days of their life by conversing with any authors of like argument. But lest in this declamatory vein I should condemn all and commend none, I will propound to your learned imitation those men of import that have laboured with credit in this laudable kind of translation Kyd is mediocre, drinks and go to brothels, copying others to get his work paid. As Thomas Kyd wrote with Christopher Marlowe, Nashe is telling us that Kyd, although he was a friend, now belongs to those ‘amongst a sort of shifting companions.’ Nashe’s words 263 contains a ‘satirical anger’ which ‘acquires the value of a biographical document’ against Thomas Kyd ... Even if we had not the punning reference to the ‘Kidde in Aesop’ (a reminiscence of the “May” eclogue of The Shepheards Calender). Cambridge History of English and American Literature. This anger is personal, and is based on Kyd’s insulting Nashe: The earliest known dated work ascribed to Kyd is The Householders Philosophie, a version of Tasso’s Padre di Famiglia. This volume, by ‘T. K.,’ printed in 1588, probably represents the ‘twopenny pamphlet’ work from the Italian to which Nashe refers towards the close of his depreciation. (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature). This friend is now over. Nashe praises a different translation: But Fortune, the mistress of change, with a pitying compassion respecting Master Stanyhurst’s praise, would that Phaer should fall that he might rise, whose heroical poetry, enfired, I should say inspired, with an hexameter fury, recalled to life whatever hissed barbarism hath been buried this C. year, and revived by his ragged quill such carterly variety as no hodge plowman in a country but would have held as the extremity of clownery, a pattern whereof I will propound to your judgements, as near as I can, being part of one of his descriptions of a tempest, which is thus: Then did he make heaven’s vault to rebound with rounce robble hobble Of ruff-raff roaring with thwick-thwack thurlery bouncing. Which strange language of the firmament, never subject before to our common phrase, makes us that are not used to terminate heaven’s moving in the accents of any voice, esteem of their triobolar interpreter as of some thrasonical huff-snuff, for so terrible was his style to all mild ears as would have affrighted our peaceable poets from intermeddling hereafter with that quarrelling kind of verse, had not sweet Master Fraunce, by his excellent translation of Master Thomas Watson’s sugared Amintas, animated their dulled spirits to such high-witted endeavours. ‘C.M.,’ considered to be ‘Christopher Marlowe,’ wrote the ‘cryptic’ dedication in Fraunce’s English translation of Thomas Watson’s Latin poem Amyntas. That dedication was addressed to Mary Sidney, the 264 Countess of Pembroke, the sister of Philip Sidney, the bard of Apollo for C.M. The same passion for Philip Sidney exists between Nashe and C.M.: and with Kyd in between. Other Latin poets exists in the country worth mentioning: But, I know not how, their over-timorous cowardice hath stood in awe of envy, that no man since him durst imitate any of the worst of these Roman wonders in English, which makes me think that either the lovers of mediocrity are very many, or that the number of good poets are very small, and, in truth (Master Watson except, whom I mentioned before), I know not almost any of late days that hath showed himself singular in any special Latin poem, whose Amyntas, and translated Antigone, may march in equipage of honour with any of our ancient poets. But Thomas Newton with his Leland, and Gabriel Harvey, with two or three other, is almost all the store that is left us at this hour. Epitaphers and position poets we have more than a good many, that swarm like crows to a dead carcass, but fly, like swallows in the winter, from any continuate subject of wit. As Gabriel Harvey “desired to be ‘epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter,’” we can see here the satire. In fact, Nashe will laugh at this openly in Strange News (1592): He [Harvey] goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another … But ah! what news do you hear of that good Gabriel Huff-Snuff, Known to the world for a fool,and clapped in the Fleet for a rhymer? No. Harvey’s taste on poetry is rubbish. Only poets-scholars count, says Thomas Nashe: The efficient whereof I imagine to issue from the upstart discipline of our reformatory churchmen, who account wit vanity, and poetry impiety, whose error, although the necessity of philosophy might confute, which lies couched most closely under dark fables’ profundity, yet I had rather refer it as a disputative plea to divines than set it down as a determinate position in my unexperienced opinion. But however their dissentious judgements should decree in their afternoon sessions of an sit, the private truth of my discovered creed in this controversy is this, that as that beast was thought scarce worthy to be sacrificed to the Egyptian Epaphus who had not some or other black spot on his skin, so I deem him far unworthy the name of 265 a scholar, and so, consequently, to sacrifice his endeavours to art, that is not a poet either in whole or in part. For poets only can appreciate poetry, continues Thomas Nashe: Let frugal scholars and fine-fingered novices take their drink by the ounce and their wine by the halfpennyworths, but it is for a poet to examine the pottle-pots, and gauge the bottom of whole gallon … Pardon me (gentlemen) though somewhat merrily I glance at their immoderate folly who affirm that no man writes with conceit except he take counsel of the cup And Nashe’s taste is for ‘well of English vndefyled’ (as in The Faerie Queene, IV. ii. 32.8 and Roger Tisdale recognised to Donne in his dedication of his work in 1622)68: Tush, say our English Italians, the finest wits our climate sends forth are but dry-brained dolts in comparison of other countries, whom, if you interrupt with redde rationem, they will tell you of Petrarch, Tasso, Celiano, with an infinite number of others, to whom, if should oppose Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, with suchlike that lived under the tyranny of ignorance, I do think their best lovers would be much discontented with the collation of contraries, if I should write over all their heads, Hail fellow well met. One thing I am sure of, that these three have vaunted their metres with as much admiration in English as ever the proudest Ariosto did his verse in Italian. The best poetry is here but, alas, the author is sadly abroad: But as for pastoral poems, I will not make the comparison, lest our countrymen’s credit should be discountenanced by the contention, who, although they cannot fare with such inferior facility, yet I know would carry the bucklers full easily from all foreign bravers if their subiectum circa quod should savour of anything haughty. And should the challenge of deep conceit be intruded by any foreigner to bring our English wits to the touchstone of art, I would prefer divine Master Spenser, the miracle of wit, to bandy line by line for my life in the 68 Of Nashe’s style, Katherine Wilson (Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia, 2006) says this: ‘Nashe’s prose is dense, convoluted, full of twisted logic (and a Latin tag from Quintillian).’ Now, the same thing is said of Donne’s Satire III: ‘In this respect Donne[’s Satire III] is closer to the classical definition of satire taken from the likes of Quintillian.’ 266 honour of England against Spain, France, Italy and all the world. Neither is he the only swallow of our summer (although Apollo, if his tripos were up again, would pronounce him his Socrates), but he being forborne, there are extant about London many most able men to revive poetry. Also in 1589, Thomas Nashe publishes his first work The Anatomy of Absurdity, where he writes, among other things, on his love for the courtier Philip Sidney killed in 1586, a love that Edmund Spenser and Donne also shared. Talking about Castiglione’s Courtier, Nashe comments: One would have one thing preferred because some one man was thereby advanced; another, another thing because some nobleman loves it; every man shot his bolt, but this was the upshot, that England afforded many mediocrities, but never saw anything more singular than worthy Sir Philip Sidney, of whom it might truly be said, Arma virumque cano … But lest I should be mistaken as an enemy to poetry, or at least not taken as a friend to that study, I have thought good to make them privy to my mind by expressing my meaning. I account of poetry as of a more hidden & divine kind of philosophy, enwrapped in blind fables and dark stories, 69 wherein the principles of more excellent arts and moral precepts of manners, illustrated with divers examples of other kingdoms and countries, are contained, for amongst the Grecians there were poets before there were any philosophers, who embraced entirely the study of wisdom, as Cicero testifieth in his Tusculans, whereas he saith that of all sorts of men, poets are most ancient, who, to the intent they might allure men with a greater longing to learning, have followed two things, sweetness of verse and variety of invention, knowing that delight doth prick men forward to the attaining of knowledge, and that true things are rather admired if they be included in some witty fiction, like to pearls that delight more if they be deeper set in gold. Wherefore, seeing poetry is the very same with philosophy, the fables of poets must of necessity be fraught with wisdom & knowledge, as framed of those men which have spent all their time and studies in the one and in the other. For even as, in vines, the grapes that are fairest and sweetest are couched under the branches that are broadest and biggest, even so, in poems, the thing that are most profitable are shrouded under the fables that are most obscure; neither is there almost any poetical figment wherein there is not something comprehended taken out 69 This is the lesson Donne-Nashe learned from St. Augustine’s Confessions, and it is the aesthetic foundation to The Faerie Queene. The numerology that fills that work is also due to Augustin, the master and main influence of Donne. 267 either of histories, or out of the physics or ethics, whereupon Erasmus Rotterdamus very wittily terms poetry a dainty dish seasoned with delights of every kind of discipline. Now whether riming be poetry, I refer to the judgement of the learned; yea, let the indifferent reader divine what deep mystery can be placed under plodding metre. These are the principles of Nashe and Donne’s aesthetics: dark, obscure, complex poetry. Nashe writes: As these men offend in the impudent publishing of witles vanity, so others overshoot themselves as much another way, in senseless stoical austerity, accounting poetry impiety, and wit, folly. It is an old question, and it hath been often propounded, whether it were better to have moderate affections, or no affections. The Stoics said, None. The Peripatetians answered, To have temperate affections, and in this respect I am a professed Peripatetian, mixing profit with pleasure, and precepts of doctrine with delightful invention. Yet these men condemn them of lasciviousness, vanity and curiosity, who, under feigned stories, include many profitable moral precepts describing the outrage of unbridled youth having the rein in their own hands, the fruits of idleness, the offspring of lust, and how available good educations are unto virtue. In which their preciser censure they resemble them that cast away the nut for mislike of the shell, & are like to those which loathe the fruit for the leaves, accounting the one sour because the other is bitter. It may be some dreaming dunce, whose bald affected eloquence making his function odious, better beseeming a privy than a pulpit, a misterming clown in a comedy than a chosen man in the ministry, will cry out that it breeds a scab to the conscience to peruse such pamphlets, being indeed the display of their duncery, and breeding a mislike of such tedious dolts’ barbarism by the view of their rhetorical invention. Such trifling studies, say they, infect the mind and corrupt the manners, as though the mind were only conversant in such toys, or should continually stay where the thoughts by chance do stray. The sunbeams touching the earth remain still from whence they came; so a wise man’s mind, although sometimes by chance it wandereth here and there, yet it hath recourse in stayed years to that it ought. But grant the matter to be fabulous, is it therefore frivolous? Is there not under fables, even as under the shadow of green and flourishing leaves, most pleasant fruit hidden in secret, and a further meaning closely comprised? Did not Virgil, under the covert of a fable, express that divine mystery which is the subject of his sixth Eclogue. ‘Most pleasant fruit hidden in secret.’ Here you have the essence of The Faerie Queene in a nutshell. We know that Nashe is not what he says 268 to be because, although he says he is poor and living in the street seeking for the devil to get some money, he uses sprezzatura, that is, he says that his works are trifles and not worthy of the time he devotes to them, which is what Shakespeare says to Southampton in his dedication in Venus and Adonis. Nashe writes in Pierce Penniless (1592): Faith, I am very sorry, sir, I am thus unawares betrayed to infamy. You write to me my book is hasting to the second impression: he that hath once broke the ice of impudence need not care how deep he wade in discredit. I confess it to be a mere toy, not deserving any judicial man’s view. This last sentence could never have been written by Ben Jonson. In other words, John Donne, like Shakespeare, always moved inside the high circles at Court, and their poetry uses the courtesan (the code of Castiglione) language as prescribed in The Courtier. One book that understands this fact perfectly well is Peter DeSa Wiggins’, Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness (Indiana University Press, 2000). We will have ample time to deal again later on with the pseudonym ‘Thomas Nashe’ and relate him with his creator Donne, but here two good quotes from The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature could be inserted before we move on: John Carey, likewise, commented on the ‘testing collision’ of literary stereotype and ‘exuberantly documented reality’ that we find in Nashe’s prose, likening its effects to Eliot’s famous remarks on the metaphysical wit of Donne’s poetry, which involves a ‘recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible’ (1970: 364). If we know that John Donne had a very good knowledge of medicine, these words will ring in our ears: Bullein was a popular physician and author whose epitaph read ‘he always had medicines which he gave to rich and poor alike’ ... Moreover, he publicized his second dialogue, Bullein’s Bulwark, by including his own name in the title, which suggests he actively sought to engender authorial recognition and repute. Certainly Thomas Nashe, the great experimentalist and self-publicist of late Tudor literature, took inspiration from Bullein. Nashe acknowledged that Have With You to Saffron Walden was written ‘in the nature of a Dialogue, much like Bullen’ (1596: Dr); Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599) used the same type of self-advertising title as Bullein’s Bulwark; and 269 (as we shall see) the experiments in pastiche and elusiveness for which Nashe is now credited can also be found in Bullein’s later work … Gabriel Harvey’s satirical writing was provoked by his clash with Thomas Nashe, a writer of astonishing originality. Though this squabble is not especially flattering to either party, it is Harvey who is left looking staid and cumbersome in contrast to his vivacious antagonist. Finally, towards 1588 we know that Shakspere abandoned his wife and his two daughters in Stratford and went to London. Legend tells us he started working at the entrance to theatres, taking care of the theatregoers’ horses, and it seems that legend, this time, is telling the truth. 270 Works by our poet written during the decade of 1580s 1.- Galathea, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://ia700508.us.archive.org/14/items/dramaticworksofj01lylyiala/dr amaticworksofj01lylyiala.pdf. 2.- Euphues and his England, 1580, as Lyly: http://ia600508.us.archive.org/0/items/cu31924013122084/cu3192401 3122084.pdf. 3.- The History of Portio and Demorantes, 1580, anonymous, later on adapted as The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index19.html. 4.- Twelfth Night, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index23.html. 5.- The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1580, Third Edition, songs 114120: http://www.archive.org/details/paradiseofdainty027377mbp. 6.- Measure for Measure, 1581, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index14.html. 7.- Sir Thomas More, 1581, anonymous, attributed to Anthony Munday and others: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1547/pg1547.html. 8.- Romeo and Juliet, 1581, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index38.html. 9.- The Arraingment of Paris, 1581, anonymous, attributed to George Peele: http://ia600208.us.archive.org/13/items/worksofgeorgepee01peel/work sofgeorgepee01peel.pdf. 10.- Hekatompathia, 1582, as Thomas Watson: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/hek00.htm. 11.- Endymion, circa 1580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/endmod1.htm. 12.- Campaspe, circa 1580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://ia700508.us.archive.org/14/items/dramaticworksofj01lylyiala/dr amaticworksofj01lylyiala.pdf. 13.- Sapho and Phao, circa 1580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/sapho1.htm. 14.- Midas, circa 1580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://ia700505.us.archive.org/2/items/dramaticworksofj02lyly/dramat icworksofj02lyly.pdf. 15.- Mother Bombie, 1580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://ia700505.us.archive.org/2/items/dramaticworksofj02lyly/dramat icworksofj02lyly.pdf. 271 16.- The Woman in the Moon, 11580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://ia700505.us.archive.org/2/items/dramaticworksofj02lyly/dramat icworksofj02lyly.pdf. 17.- Love’s Metamorphoses, 1580-1590, anonymous, later on as Lyly: http://ia700505.us.archive.org/2/items/dramaticworksofj02lyly/dramat icworksofj02lyly.pdf. 18.- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, circa 1580-1590, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index18.html. 19.- A History of Ariodante and Genevora, 1583, anonymous, adapted later on as Much Ado About Nothing, by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index16.html. 20.- Mamillia, 1583, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Mamillia_1583.pdf. 21.- Pandora, 1584, as John Soowthern: http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/etexts/pandora/01.htm. 22.- The History of Agammemnon and Ulyses, 1584, anonymous, later on adapted as Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index35.html. 23.- Gwydonious, 1584, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Gwydonius.pdf. 24.- A Debate between Folly and Love, 1584, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxfordshakespeare.com/Greene/Debate_Between_Folly.pdf. 25.- The Mirror of Modesty, 1584, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Mirror_Modesty %20(1584).pdf. 26.- Arbasto, 1584, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Arbasto.pdf. 27.- A Funeral Sermon, 1585, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxfordshakespeare.com/Greene/Oration_Funeral_Sermon.pdf. 28.- Planetomachia, 1585, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Planetomachia.pdf. 29.- The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1585, fourth edition, songs 121 a 123: http://www.archive.org/details/paradiseofdainty027377mbp. 30.- The Troublesome Reign of King John, 1586, anonymous: http://ia600304.us.archive.org/17/items/thetroublesomere00furniala/t hetroublesomere00furniala.pdf. Later on adapted as King John by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index25.html. 272 31.- Othello, 1586, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index44.html. 32.- The True Tragedy of Richard III, 1586, anonymous: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/truetragedy01.htm. Later on adapted as Richard III by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index33.html. 33.- Richard II, Part I, also known as Thomas Woodstock, anonymous: http://www.american-shakespeare.com/scripts/Richard2-WoodstockASR-Script.pdf. 34.- Richard II, [Part II], 1586, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index26.html. 35.- Henry IV, Part I and II, 1586, anonymous, later on as Shakespeare: Part I, http://www.bartleby.com/70/index27.html; Part II, http://www.bartleby.com/70/index28.html. 36.- Henry V, 1586, anonymous, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index29.html. 37.- The first part of the contention between the two famous houses of York and Lancaster, 1586, anonymous: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/2H6/Q1/default/. Later on adapted as Henry VI, Part II by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index31.html. 38.- Henry VI, Part I, later as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index30.html. 39.- Macbeth, 1587, later on as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index41.html. 40.- Edward I, 1587, anonymous, attributed to George Peele: http://ia600208.us.archive.org/13/items/worksofgeorgepee01peel/work sofgeorgepee01peel.pdf. 41.- Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, circa 1587, anonymous, attributed to Marlowe: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1094/1094-h/1094-h.htm. 42.- The Spanish Tragedy, anonymous, 1587, attributed to Thomas Kyd: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6043/6043-h/6043-h.htm. 43.- Euphues his Censure to Philautus, 1587, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Euphues_Censure.pdf. 44.- Penelope’s Web, 1587, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Penelopes_Web.pdf. 45.- Morando, 1587, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Morando_1587.pdf. 273 46.- Morando, Part Second, 1587, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxfordshakespeare.com/Greene/Morando_Second_Part.pdf. 47.- Tamburlaine the Great, Part II, circa 1588, anonymous, attributed to Marlowe: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1589/1589-h/1589-h.htm. 48.- The True Chronicle History of King Leir, circa 1588, anonymous: http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/king-leir-1605-1-16.htm. Later on adapted as King Lear by Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index43.html. 49.- Hamlet, circa 1583-6, anonymous, later on as Shakespeare in 1603 and 1604: http://www.archive.org/stream/hamletbywilliam00shakgoog#page/n22 /mode/2up. 50.-Pandosto, 1588, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Pandosto.pdf. 51.- Perimedes, the Smith, 1588, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Perimedes.pdf. 52.- Menaphon, 1589, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Menaphon.pdf. 53.- Ciceronis Amor, 1589, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Ciceronis_Amor.pdf. 54.- The Spanish Masquarado, 1589, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Spanish_Masquerado.pdf. 55.- Mucedorus, anonymous: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1548/pg1548.html. 274 ACT IV PROSPERO, THE MAGICIAN 275 276 Scene I. The Faerie Queene Having sold Fisher’s Folly and gone to live in the country, our poet, like that melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, could very well have felt himself what his character says at the end of this play. We quote Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: La Invención de lo Humano (my translation): Whereas everyone marries or returns from pastoral exile, Jaques says goodbye with an exquisite gesture instead: ‘So, to your pleasures:/ I am for other than dancing measures.’ … He will go … and once again we ask ourselves whether or not he is talking on behalf of Shakespeare, the man rather than the poet-playwright. The year 1590 starts with the publication of the monumental poem The Faerie Queene written, surprisingly, by an unknown poet: Edmund Spenser. He was supposed to be in Ireland: exiled, surrounded by rebels, away from London and its events. But the poem proves that Spenser knows perfectly well what is happening in London and to its aristocracy. In fact, the poem is the celebration, the paramount propaganda that commemorates the victorious Queen who in 1588, two years earlier, had defeated the Great Armada. The poem was preceded by some laudatory poems written by writers that we can identify as Harvey, Walter Raleigh and Oxford, who signed with the name ‘Ignoto’. Ignoto’s laudatory poem in praise of Spenser’s poem reads: Thus then to shew my iudgement to be such As can discern of colours blacke, and white, As alls to free my minde from enuies tuch, That neuer giues to any man his right, I here pronounce this workmanship is such, As that no pen can set it forth too much. Ignoto can discern the colours black and white as he did in 1569 with A Theater for Worldlings, which are the Queen’s favourite colours. After the dedicatory poems to The Faerie Queene, the poet himself dedicates some poems to the great nobility of the realm: to the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Oxford, among many others. In his dedicatory poem to Oxford, Spenser declares that he is still a minor, which is logical given that Donne was seventeen (17) or eighteen (18) years-old when he wrote this, while the Spenser of tradition was at this point thirty eight (38). How an almost (at that time) old poet of thirtyeight years of age could be an ‘vnripe fruit of an vnready wit’ is a question that is solved with DINS theory. Also, note that Spenser is declaring to 277 the world that Oxford had been helping poets until recently: To the right Honourable the Earle of Oxenford, Lord high Chamberlayne of England. &c. Receiue most Noble Lord in gentle gree, The vnripe fruit of an vnready wit: Which by thy countenaunce doth craue to bee Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit. Which so to doe may thee right well befit, Sith th’antique glory of thine auncestry Vnder a shady vele is therein writ, And eke thine owne long liuing memory, Succeeding them in true nobility: And also for the loue, which thou doest beare To th’Heliconian ymps, and they to thee, They vnto thee, and thou to them most deare: Deare as thou art unto thy selfe, so loue That loues & honours thee, as doth behoue. We don’t know when Spenser was born; tradition says that he was born around 1552. Now, could a poet of about 38 years of age say that his wit is ‘vnready’ and his fruit is ‘vnripe’? Considering this plain fact, it is understandable that the best edition of the poem (A.C. Hamilton, 2007) ignores this expression and comments the verse relating it to another that appears in another dedication: “2. vnripe fruit: cf. ‘wilde fruit’.” But unripe is not wilde: it could have been if the word had been ‘ungentle’ or ‘rustic fruit,’ but this is not the case. It is ‘vnripe’ and it is related with age, maturity of age. Now, Donne was 17 or 18 years old in 1590, under the age of majority and, hence, fulfilling the poet’s expression of being ‘vnready’ and his fruit being ‘vnripe’. For, after all, ‘vnripe’ is not related to ‘wilde’ but to ‘vnready’. A good theory explains things: that is what a good theory does. Also, if John Donne is the man behind the Spenser mask, then the first verse in stanza 52 of Book I, Canto X acquires a new dimension: for it becomes a pun. In that Canto Redcrosse is contemplating the new Hierusalem. The words of the old, religious man to Redcrosse are these: Yet since thou bidst, thy pleasure shall be donne. Then come thou man of earth, and see the way, That neuer yet was seene of Faeries sonne, That neuer leads the traueiler astray 278 Also, if Donne is the man behind this great poem, then another pun is brought to light. In Book II, Canto I, stanza 32, the Palmer of Gyon praises the Redcrosse Knight for his achievements described in Book I: 32 Ioy may you haue, and euerlasting fame, Of late most hard atchieu’ment by you donne, For which enrolled is your glorious name In heauenly Regesterse aboue the Sunne, Where you a Saint with Saints your seat haue wonne In his sermon on Paradise or Heaven preached at St. Paul’s on Easter Day (1628), Donne wrote: ‘in that place, where there are more Suns in the Firmament, (For all the Saints are Suns)’. Now, in the verses above Donne seems to be showing off and boasting about his poetical powers. If this is the case, then the response by the Redcrosse Knight that follows is understandable: 33 Palmer, him answered the Redcrosse knight, His be the praise, that this atchieu’ment wrought, Who made my hand the organ of his might; More then goodwill to me attribute nought: For all I did, I did but as I ought Hamilton comments on these verses: Stanza 33: 1-5 The knight corrects the Palmer’s claim that he has ‘wonne’ (32.5) his seat in heaven: the dragon was slain by God’s might, not his own … Hence organ refers to his spiritual armour, specifically the sword or lance that he wielded. Meaning remains indeterminate, however, because [the poet] is negotiating a theological controversy on whether, or if, and if how much, goodwill may cooperate with God’s grace. D. Audell Shelburne comments about Donne’s “Valediction of a Booke” where the words ‘eloyne,’ ‘esloyne,’ and ‘essoyne’ occur in several manuscripts of the poem (The John Donne Journal, vol. 28): I admit the words ‘esloyne,’ ‘eloyne,’ and ‘essoyne’ were not familiar to me. I located ‘essoin’/‘essoign’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (but none of the variants of ‘esloyne’ or ‘eloyne’) and both ‘esloyne’ and 279 ‘essoyne’ within a three-line span in The Faerie Queene. An interesting dialogue in Henry V, published in Quarto in 1600, offers us further evidence (the more I studied the theory, the more I found). Seen from the perspective that John Donne could have been the man behind the pseudonym of the exiled Irishman ‘Edmund Spenser,’ these words ring true and witty. (In the 1623 Folio edition, the speaker’s name in the speech heading was not MacMorris, but simply described as ‘Irish’: see RSC edition by Bate and Rasmussen, p. 1097. Act III, Scene ii; my emphasis): Gover The Duke of Gloucester, to whom the order of the siege is given, is altogether directed by an Irishman, a very valiant gentleman, i’faith. Fuellen It is Captain MacMorris, is it not? … MacMorris By Christ, la, tish ill done: the work ish give over, the trompet sound the retreat. By my hand, I swear, and my father’s soul, the work ish ill done, it ish give over. I would have blowed up the town, so Christ save me, la, in an hour. O, tish ill done, tish ill done. By my hand, tish ill done! Fuellen Captain MacMorris, I beseech you now, will you voutsafe me, look you, a few disputations [i.e. theological disputations] with you, as partly touching or concerning the disciplines of the war, the Roman wars [i.e. the theological wars between the Reformation and Rome], in the way of argument [i.e. based on Logic and syllogism], look you, and friendly communication [i.e. the theological communications between theologians and schools of different parts of Christianity] –partly to satisfy my opinion, and partly for the satisfaction, look you, of my mind [i.e. his soul and its eternity in Heaven], as touching the direction [i.e. the true guidance] of the military discipline, that is the point [i.e. theological point]. … MacMorris It is not time to discourse, so Christ save me … And there is throats to be cut, and works to be done, and there ish nothing done, so Christ sa’ me, la! … MacMorris I do not know you so good a man as myself. So Christ save me. I will cut off your head. The references to ‘done’ (7 times in 18 lines) and ‘Christ save me’ (4 times) point as well to Thomas Nashe and his theological pamphlet of 280 1593 Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem. Finally, the ‘Irish’ character MacMorris will not appear again in the play, making the question of what the purpose of this particular and unique scene might be more intriguing. After this interpretation of ‘mind’ for ‘soul’, I found these remarks by Ramie Targoff (John Donne, Body and Soul, 2009): ‘The question how body and soul relate to each other had plagued philosophers and theologians since ancient times. If we substitute—as Donne himself often does—the word ‘mind’ for ‘soul’ it is a question that continues to plague us today.’ But there is more. Book I of The Faerie Queene shows us how this Knight had the sign of the blood of Christ on his armour (which is spiritual armour, as Hamilton says). The fact that Redcrosse almost commits suicide in Book I is explained by the fact that Donne was obsessed with that theme himself: he even wrote a treatise about it entitled Biathanatos. And as Oxfordians and all authors know, artists cannot avoid putting themselves and their obsessions in their own creations. Yes, ‘Art is a lie,’ Picasso said; if you recognise that lie, if you see the trick behind it yourself, then you will see the truth of Art. In Stephen Greenblatt’s General Introduction contained in the second Norton edition of Shakespeare’s works, I found out the following: The Feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, helped give the play cycles [i.e. mystery plays] their extraordinary cultural resonance, but it also contributed to their downfall. For along with these specifically liturgical plays traditionally performed by religious confraternities and the ‘saints’ plays,’ which depicted miraculous events in the lives of individual holy men and women, the mystery cycles were closely identified with the Catholic Church … [Around 1576, t]owns that continued to perform the mysteries were under increasing pressure to abandon them … The local officials in the city of Norwich, proud of their St. George and the Dragon play, asked if they could at least parade the dragon costume through the streets, but even this modest request was refused. Donne-Spenser was proud of this Catholic parade of St. George and the Dragon. As A.C. Hamilton says (2007:156): The image of St George killing the dragon is the only woodcut in the 1590 and 1596 editions. As reproduced here, it appears on a page by itself, the verso side of the last page of Bk I facing the opening of Bk II. As James W. Broaddus writes in “Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight and the Order of Salvation”: 281 Redcrosse’s adventures take place in a specifically pre-Reformation faeryland rather than in a merely olden times faeryland. Consideration of Redcrosse’s adventures will begin at the beginning with the ‘Gentle Knight … pricking on the plaine’ (1.1). And, given the pre-Reformation faeryland setting, I am predisposed to find not a Protestant or an ahistorical Christian knight, newly clad in the ‘armour of a Christian man,’ but a pre-Reformation Christian and consequently Catholic knight newly clad in those arms. Carol V. Kaske replies that ‘Romanist’ instead of the anachronistic ‘Catholic’ could serve better in order to identify characters and practices associated with the pre-Reformation church (Spenser and Biblical Poetics). And Broaddus answers her: ‘Romanist,’ however, seems, at least to me, to be as anachronistic a term as ‘Catholic’ for identifying a pre-Reformation Christian or preReformation Christian doctrine. In any event, I am more comfortable with ‘Catholic’ than I would be with ‘Romanist.’ Broaddus comments that there is no logic behind Redcrosse’s sad feelings on Christ and faith unless he is a Catholic Knight: The cross ‘scor’d’ on Redcrosse’s shield ‘For soueraine hope, which in … [his savior’s] helpe he had’ also provides a Protestant look at Catholic belief. Redcrosse’s faith is expressed as moral rectitude: ‘Right faithfull true he was in deede and word.’ Yet something is amiss: ‘But of his cheere [he] did seeme too solemne sad; / Yet nothing did he dread but euer was ydrad’ (1.2). Why would one who has love for his savior and hope in his help and who lives an exemplary life be ‘too solemne sad’? … Besides, Redcrosse has done nothing that would have caused him to be dreaded by anyone, much less ever dreaded. But why should such a young and brave religious knight be sad and ever fearful? For the same reason, I suggest, that the young and pious monk, Martin Luther, was anxious, fearful, and self-involved prior to his illumination about God’s justice. Both Redcrosse and the young monk possess what Protestants saw as a dead faith, lacking the assurance generated by Luther’s later illumination. As the second generation Lutheran divine, Martin Chemnitz, said of Catholics in his review of the Council of Trent, hope ‘is always connected and coupled with fear and doubt.’ 282 Adam Potkay writes70 that ‘connecting Spenser’s epic romance and Donne’s sermons is a shared perception of the threat of joylessness to the life of the universal church in England.’ And he adds: The flexibility Donne demonstrates in his theology of joy carries over into his ecclesiology as well. Like Spenser (and the Gospel of John) Donne claims that real joy abides only in the true church or body of believers—Donne even invokes ‘the Catholique [i.e. universal] Church’ and its ‘unamine consent’–yet Donne speaks not of the ‘one true Church’ but of ‘a true Church,’ broaching the grammatical possibility of a plurality of true churches (presumably including the continental Protestant churches) whose confederacy would form ‘the Catholique Church’ ... (Indeed, one wonders if Spenser could have intended the same ambiguity in his use of the Italian Una –‘one’ or ‘a’ –for a character who represents some version of church and truth.) As we now have what seems to be a good theory, we will not be surprised that all pieces fit perfectly into place. Maurice Evans (Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism, Cambridge University Press, 1970) writes: Recent Spenserean criticism, although doing ample justice to myths, the verbal techniques and the rhetoric of the poem, has tended to play down what once seemed the element of most importance, namely its didacticism. The object of this book is to place the emphasis once more upon Spenser’s didactic intention, to analyse the rhetorical techniques by means of which he manipulates the reactions of the reader, and to redefine the logic which underlies the sequence of his six virtues. The famous phrase ‘to fashion a gentleman’ will be at the centre of the discussion, although it is in fact a misleading phrase; for Spenser’s explicit concern is to fashion heroes … For Spenser wears his didacticism with a difference. His moral theme is more subtle than is generally recognised, and his language has much of the paradox and complexity associated with the Metaphysical poets but usually denied to The Faerie Queene. A surprising number of Spenser’s lines, as we shall see, have a controlled ambiguity which lends itself to simultaneous and diametrically opposed interpretations. And he writes later: [T]he debt which both medieval iconography and renaissance emblem 70 Spenser, Donne, and the Theology of Joy, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 46, No. 1, The English Renaissance, Winter, 2006. 283 owe to the art of memory and the sort of striking image which it fostered … For the art of memory offered more than just a set of techniques for memorising: it also conditioned the ordering of knowledge into patterns which lent themselves most readily to the techniques of artificial memory; and it influenced the ways in which writers organised the knowledge which they wished to imprint firmly in the memories of their audience. This is most clearly illustrated in the techniques of sermon, homily and didactic poetry. Evans, concerning a homily such as Jacob’s Well where images like the mud of sin are not ‘so much metaphors of the Christian virtues as mnemonics to remind the listener of them,’ tells us: The techniques of the sermon show the same tendency and for the same reason. God himself is visualized as a divine rhetorician, imparting his revelations through the memorable parables and images of the Bible, and the human rhetorician, therefore, may use the same techniques … The distinction between mnemonic and metaphor is always a very fine one, and the special skill of Donne or Herbert is to convert one to the other by establishing logical connections between two sets of terms which appear initially to have little in common. The striking memory-image slips easily into the far-fetched metaphor and in doing so becomes all the more effective as an aid to memory. And he continues: The art of memory was inevitably of special importance to the preacher … It is against a background of such practice that we must consider the image sequence of The Faerie Queene. As a didactic poet, Spenser was concerned to impress his message in terms which would remain in the memory of the reader and be available for application whenever the relevant circumstances occurred. His basic instrument, therefore, is the familiar, the striking, or the monstruous image which springs to consciousness and illuminates our daily experience by providing a touchstone of moral values: the reader will carry round with him forever a set of archetypes offering guidance in every moral or intellectual dilemma. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature states the following about Donne: [F]or purposes of illustration, his range is much wider—classical 284 poets, history sacred and secular, saints’ legendaries, popular Spanish devotional writers, Jesuit controversialists and casuists, natural science, the discoveries of voyagers and, of course, the whole range of Scripture, canonical and apocryphal. It is strange to find, at times, a conceit or allusion which had done service in the love poems reappearing in the texture of a pious and exalted meditation. In the sermons, as in the poems (where it has led to occasional corruptions of the text), he uses words that, if not obsolete, were growing rare —‘bezar,’ ‘defaulk,’ ‘triacle,’ ‘lation’—but, more often, he coins or adopts already coined ‘inkhorn’ terms—‘omnisufficiency,’ ‘nullifidians,’ ‘longanimity,’ ‘exinanition’ … But Donne is most eloquent when, escaping from dogmatic minutiae and controversial ‘points,’ he appeals directly to the heart and conscience. A reader may care little for the details of seventeenth century theology and yet enjoy without qualification Donne’s fervid and original thinking, and the figurative richness and splendid harmonies of his prose in passages of argument, of exhortation and of exalted meditation. It is Donne the poet who transcends every disadvantage of theme and method, and an outworn fashion in wit and learning. There are sentences in the sermons which, in beauty of imagery and cadence, are not surpassed by anything he wrote in verse, or by any prose of the century from Hooker’s to Sir Thomas Browne’s If Spenser was a pseudonym of John Donne, Milton’s declaration that Spenser was ‘a better teacher than Aquinas’ would make sense. After all, the man Spenser from Ireland was a clerk, not a preacher or writer of sermons. And let us not forget this: he is a ghost with no biography in 400 years. As The Edmund Spenser webpage highlights about the poet: ‘generations of readers, students, and scholars have admired him for his subtle use of language, his unbounded imagination, his immense classical and religious learning, his keen understanding of moral and political philosophy, and his unerring ability to synthesize and, ultimately, to delight.’ In her great work on Donne, Ramie Targoff writes: ‘In his elegy appended to the 1633 edition of Donne’s Poems, the poet and clergyman Jasper Mayne describes Donne the preacher as above all a consummate performer’: Who with thy words could charme thy audience, That at thy sermons, eare was all ours sense; Yet have I seene thee in the pulpit stand, Where wee might take notes, from thy looke, and hand; And from thy speaking action beare away More Sermon, then some teachers use to say. 285 Such was thy carriage, and thy gesture such As could divide the heart, and conscience touch. Thy motion did confute, and wee might see An errour vanquish’d by delivery. Concerning The Faerie Queene’s style and rhetorical techniques, the editor’s synopsis of Maurice Evans’ Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism says: It is his [Maurice Evans] contention that Spenser completed his poem, and that The Faerie Queene presents an organic unity so firmly controlled that it is unprofitable to consider any book, canto or even a single verse in isolation from the poem as a whole. The complexity of the poetry which his study reveals suggests that Spenser has much in common with the metaphysicals, while the subtle dissection of human motive and behaviour within the poem would place him in closer relationship to the drama than is normally recognised. As to the drama in poetry, we read these words on Donne’s peculiar poetic style (Dennis Donoghue, from his Introduction to The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, The Modern Library, NY, 2001): Donne’s peculiar force in English poetry consists in his developing ... a style that is at one with the verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare devised for the theater. Not himself a playwright, Donne realized that the English language of his time had achieved its destiny in the service of the theater, an institution that required not only audible but auditory language: it must release the minds of the audience from the penury of the visible stage and incite them to imagine in freedom what they could not see before their eyes … [Donne’s poetic] style is familiar with the Elizabethan theater and it anticipates the styles of opera. Monteverdi and Donne were contemporaries; Orfeo, the first masterpiece of the new genre, was performed in 1607. Maurice Evans’ study tells us: Spenser’s debt to Camillo’s Memory Theater, however, is another matter. The little wooden Theatre with its seven gangways and gates seems to have been designed as a location for memory images based on the seven planets and the seven cabbalistic Sepiroth which formed their Intelligences; and the orator, therefore, who organized his material around these places and expressed them by means of the 286 seven forms of good oratory could harness the force of the stars to his pleading and speak with magic tongue. Such a conception is a long way from Spenser’s mode of thought; and yet Alastair Fowler has produced strong evidence to suggest that Spenser organised his poem around the seven planetary deities, and that each book is permeated with the symbolism of its patron planet. There is a real affinity of method between the Memory Theatre and The Faerie Queene Furthermore, let us consider these words by C.S. Lewis (Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler, Cambridge University Press, 1967) on the passage of Redcrosse’s contemplation at the end of Book I, Canto X, in relation to the mixture of the Christian and pagan themes in The Faerie Queene: Or take the description of the Mount of Contemplation ascended by the Red Cross Knight, which is compared first to the Mount of Olives and then to Parnassus … At first it may seem to speak of Christ’ inspiration and the poet’s in the one stanza. But to those who thought in the tradition I have been describing [the tradition of iconographical art and its pageants] it would not have seemed so. For they regarded poetry, and specially ancient poetry, as a veiled form of theology. Boccaccio put it most extremely … when he wrote in his Vita di Dante that ‘the ancient poets, so far as it is possible to human capacity, followed in the footsteps of the Holy Spirit … theology and poetry are in agreement as to their form of working … not merely is poetry theology but theology is poetry.’71 But we have no reason to suspect the motives of Pico [della Mirandola] when he proposed to write a book about poetic theology to explain how the ancients covered divine knowledge ‘with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation.’ As Thomas Nashe writes in Pierce Penniless, ‘[p]oetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.’ Anne Lake Prescott (“Menippean Donne,” The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, 2011) tells us that Menippean satire is a genre that ‘commanded his [Donne’s] attention and imagination.’ This genre, which is basically ‘given to laughter at pretentious erudition (Blanchard),’ is well represented by Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. In England, of course, the ultimate examples of Menippean satire were Thomas Nashe’s pamphlets ‘such as Lenten Stuffe.’ Prescott writes: 71 This last thought was George Santayana’s as well. Religion is poetry, and poetry a kind of religion for the human spirit and our contemplative side. See Interpretations on Poetry and Religion (1900). 287 The ‘anatomy’ was itself a Menippean mode … If Donne never wrote a fully Menippean satire, the genre commanded his attention and his imagination. Even some texts by Donne [superficially serious such as] Pseudo-Martyr, Biathanatos, some Letters … show traces of its style. In 1601, Donne wrote a poem called Metempsychosis or The Progress of the Soul. This poem was not published and only circulated in manuscript: The poem’s [Metempsychosis] first words, ‘I sing’, recall Virgil’s ‘Arma virumque cano’ even as the topic and title recall Ovid … Unusually for Donne, it has a date: 16 August 1601, the poet claiming a few lines later that he had lived nearly six ‘lustres’—almost thirty years. … Why 16 August? In the Catholic calendar that is St Roch’s day, retaining that designation in many English almanacs even after the Reformation. St Roch ... was said to help cure the plague and skin diseases (later including the pox), perhaps because tradition reported that he was born at Montpellier with a red cross on his breast … Is St Roch here because he is a mischievous parallel to Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight—a Redcrosse Saint? And she adds: On the other hand, the poem’s structure—fifty-two quasi-Spenserian stanzas of nine pentameter lines and one alexandrine that describe what seem like twelve incarnations—is so neat, so patterned, that it can feel complete, even if there is no full consensus on how to count the twelve … Metem relates the ‘soul’ to the body as it makes its brutal and rapacious way from appeal onward … For Harvey, Donne’s nearSpenserian stanza points to the ‘Castle of Alma’ in Faerie Queene 2 … and a sonnet from the ‘Visions of the Worldes Vanitie’ (Complaints, 1591) in which, as in Donne, a tiny creature fells an elephant. If we link Donne with Nashe and Spenser, we will clearly understand Dennis Flynn’s wonder (John Donne, and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, 1995): The problem of Donne’s heritage for Donne studies is then to appreciate the fact that, as a member of a group directly afflicted by enormous and penetrating social developments, Donne wrote out of an experience that his contemporaries could not ignore, that therefore never ceased to dominate his outlook, and that may appear as an 288 element in anything he wrote. We should no more separate study of Donne’s life and writings from his and his family’s religious persecution and exile than we would separate study of the writings of Solzhenitsyn or Wiesel from theirs … One such puzzle is Donne’s name on the list of processioners mourning Sir Thomas Egerton the younger at Chester in 1599. In the funeral procession Donne ‘occupied a position of considerable honour’ … and ‘bearing the sword of his dead friend.’ How did Donne come to occupy such a position of honor among scions of Lancashire and Cheshire Catholic gentry (followers of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby), many of whom attended Egerton’s funeral? In Lord Egerton’s words we have our Spenser secretary in full view (John Stubbs, John Donne, the Reformed Soul, 2006): Egerton, it seems, was delighted with Donne’s work. Although Donne was technically just one of his gentleman servants, the Lord Keeper insisted that his secretary sit with him and his family at dinner. According to Walton, Egerton saw Donne as a friend and declared he was ‘Such a Secretary as was fitter to serve a King than a subject.’ These words of Alastair Fowler are interesting to fathom the mind of Spenser the poet and theologian. He writes (Spenser and the Numbers of Time, Barnes & Noble, NY, 1964, p. 19): Book III is primarily devoted, however, to somewhat different metaphysical associations with the triad. An important doctrine of this number concerned its generative capacity. From the union of the opposite principles it contains—odd and even, male and female, limited and unlimited—new life is generated … This generative union of sundered opposites in the triad was often referred to as a marriage … In the Orphic cosmogony, for example, the marriage of Heaven and Earth is mediated by a third principle, Eros. It is in keeping with a recognizable metaphysical sequence, therefore, that the third book of the Faerie Queene should be concerned with love … the first three books form philosophical triads of the order: Divinity: Matter : Ideal Form or, in Orphic terms, Heaven: Earth : Eros. ...there is reason to suppose that in the articulation of the books of the Faerie Queene such large-scale triadic arrangements play an important part. The Veritas [Book I]–Virtus [Book II]–Amor [Book 289 III] triad … may be mentioned as perhaps the most immediately obvious of those composing the thematic structure of Books I-III... Every reader must have noticed, indeed, how frequently trios of characters occur throughout the poem. But may not we see, in this indiscriminate profusion of triple arrangements, the very reason why such grouping is without emphasis in Book III? A modification of the pattern we are tracing may have been forced upon Spenser at this point, simply because his content was everywhere so thoroughly trinitarian, his style so replete with triadic progressions circularly unfolded after the manner of Ficino. Shifting now to Donne, David Nichols writes on Donne’s idea of the Trinity:72 Karl Rahner has lamented the way in which the doctrine of the Trinity has had remarkably little impact on the religious experience and thinking of Christians. ‘Christians,’ he writes, for all their orthodox profession of faith in the Trinity, are almost just ‘monotheist’ in their actual religious existence.’ It would, he asserts, make very little real difference to the theology of most Christians if the doctrine of the Trinity were abolished. In the religious works of John Donne, however, we find an attempt to take Trinitarianism seriously as the central Christian doctrine in the light of which other aspects of the faith must be interpreted. The Trinity is, for Donne, the hub from which radiate the beliefs of the Church, finding in it their unity and coherence. It is central both to theology and to Christian devotion—in his own words, ‘Bones to philosophy, but milk to faith.’ Donne’s Trinitarian vision of God is both supported by and itself supports a social and political theology based upon that political analogy and that social image referred to in the opening paragraph of this article. The doctrines of creation, sin, incarnation, atonement, ecclesiology, as well as the sacramental and devotional life of the Church, are held together by a conception of God as plurality in unity, illustrated by Donne’s experience of living in what he called ‘a monarchy composed of monarchies.’ And he adds: In the first place, Donne insisted that each ‘person’ of the Trinity has a different role in the economy of human salvation. With Augustine, Donne saw the image of the Trinity reflected in the three faculties of the human soul ... but more significantly it is mirrored in the structure 72 See http://www.ts.mu.edu/readers/content/pdf/49/49.1/49.1.3.pdf. 290 of the Christian commonwealth. The power of the Father, the wisdom of the Son, and the goodness of the Holy Spirit ought to be found respectively in the magistrate, the council, and the clergy. Spenser’s Pirocles cries while the water of the river cannot quench his ‘inly’ fire in Book II, Canto vi, stanzas 43: ‘I burne, I burne, I burne ... O how I burne ... Yet nought can quench mine inly flaming syde ... And dying dayly, dayly yet reuiue.’ This is a metaphysical paradox. Now, in Donne’s Holy Sonnet: V (1635 edition) we can read this: Powre new seas in mine eyes, that so I might Drowne my world with my weeping earnestly, Or wash it if it must be drown’d no more: But oh it must be burnt, alas the fire Of lust and envie burnt it heretofore, And made it fouler, Let their flames retire, And burn me ô Lord, with a fiery zeale. Maurice Evans’ dictum on the metaphysical and paradoxical substance ‘usually denied to’ The Faerie Queene is confirmed in one of the most famous chapters of the poem. A.R. Cirillo writes: 73 The image of the hermaphrodite, used to describe the joyful reunion of Amoret and Scudamour in the original (1590) ending of Book III of The Faerie Queene, has its basis in the standard Renaissance philosophy of love. It is, in fact, a topos which includes a generic and metaphysical concept of love as a union of two loves in one. Through mutual love, two lovers achieve that perfect fusion of souls that make them one—neither he nor she, but both he and she in one spiritual union. This theory is propounded in the writings of Ficino, Ebreo, Speroni, Dolce, and the trattati d’amore; and it suggests that the moment of union is preceded by the moment of ecstasy, or a lovedeath in which the two lovers are said to be dead, to die to life that they may live to love. The symbol of such a union was the image of the hermaphrodite. Thus, Amoret and Scudamour are described as in a state of ecstasy as they embrace; and the emphasis in the description is not really on the union of their bodies, but on that union as a sign of a higher union of their souls. This concept of union may be seen as the basis of many of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, particularly “The Extasie” and “Valedition: Forbidding Mourning.” It suggests a return 73 The Fair Hermaphrodite: Love-Union in the Poetry of Donne and Spenser, Donne and Spenser, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 9, No. 1, The English Renaissance, Winter, 1969. 291 to the kind of perfection enjoyed by Adam (who was supposed to have been originally hermaphroditic) in Paradise, recoverable now only in a spiritual way through a perfect, virtuous love. The Sidney-Donne connection will explain Spenser and Nashe’s idealization of the poet of Astrophel and Stella. Richard Hillyer tells us:74 As in the case of other writers he discusses, however, much of Jonson’s concern with Sidney involves not particular works but the overall value of an oeuvre as fostering good writing habits. In his commonplace book, Timber: or, Discoveries (ca. 1623–35), he thus generalizes that ‘as it is fit to reade the best Authors to youth first, so let them be of the openest, and clearest. As Livy before Salust, Sydney before Donne’ (8: 618). And let us listen to this: What Sidney achieves in Astrophil and Stella is passionate verse of an entirely different kind. It would be good poetry if it were only the convincing representation of emotion; but it also introduces, in Aristotelian terms, a far more coherent characterization than had been seen before (ethos) and the compelling representation of intellect (dianoia), of thought. Like ... Donne ... Sidney builds many of his poems on the appearance of argument, employing his mastery of logic and rhetoric to ‘argufy’. But because he so thoroughly dramatizes his persona, this, often specious, argufying is made not an uneasy yoke-fellow of the lover’s passion but another symptom of the emotional and intellectual strain Astrophil suffers. Sidney quite brilliantly combines conceit and passion: he moves and he delights ... Donne (whose poem on the Sidney Psalms, first printed in the revised 1635 edition of his poems, is one of the most intelligent responses to the translation one can imagine) On Spenser’s Catholic aesthetics we read: 75 Writing at the beginning of this long history, Spenser offers a unique perspective on the problem. Although an advocate of the word (and the Word), Spenser was acutely aware of the need to engage with the visible world rather than hide from it. For Spenser the relationship 74 Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010. 75 James A. Knapp, Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, Macmillan, NY, 2011. 292 between seeing and knowing was complicated in part because of the unique reliance of the one upon the other. In this we find perhaps the most convincing evidence of a residual Catholic aesthetic in Spenser’s poetics, one that he would continue to integrate with his more obvious Protestant beliefs. Spenser’s fascination with the problem is less a matter of doctrine and more a product of his struggle to represent the religious life. His failure to abandon key experiential elements of Catholic sensuality while railing against the corruption of Catholic devotion can be reconciled by viewing his approach as fundamentally philosophical and religious rather than political or doctrinal. Siobhán Collins writes on Donne’s faith:76 For Donne, ‘[a]ll love is wonder’ [“The Anagram”], and wonder is the ‘first step to faith’ rather than an end in itself (Sermons 6:265) ... Anna K. Nardo observes that: “‘Donne may not have intended to lead men all the way to faith; other more holy men might do that. But by this play, he could lead them so far as ‘wonder’ ... In requesting his readers to ‘wonder with me’ in Metempsychosis, Donne does not ask them to forsake passion, for wonder, like memory, inhabits the confines of both sense and reason. Wonder is love, contemplation and ... ‘a kind of feare’.” A little bit of research on Spenser, and voilà. A perfect match: And he himself, long gazing thereupon, At last fell humbly down upon his Knee, And of his Wonder made Religion, [!] Weening some heavenly Goddess he did see, Or else unweeting what it else might be; And Pardon her besought his Error frail, That had done Outrage in so high degree: Whilst trembling Horrour did his Sense assail, And made each Member quake, and manly Heart to quail. [!] (FQ 1596, IV.vi.22; Arthegal when seeing Britomart). On the Castle of Alma Thomas P. Roche writes for the Penguin edition: Her castle is an allegory of the body, the mortal part of man. This 76 Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne’s Metempsychosis, Ashgate, 2013. 293 episode has often been severely criticized, but Spenser is using the techniques of ‘metaphysical’ poetry in treating the human body as a construct (cf. Donne’s comparison of love to ‘stiff, twin compasses’ in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”). The artificiality of the comparison is intended. The theory of bodily functions is based on Galen, a famous Greek physician [cf. Donne’s knowledge of medicine]. While translating the Anniversaries I got this (Second Anniversary, vv. 121-43): Thinke these things cheerefully: and if thou bee Drowsie or slacke, remember then that shee, Shee whose Complexion was so euen made, That which of her Ingredients should inuade The other three, no Feare, no Art could guesse: So far were all remou’d from more or lesse. But as in Mithridate, or iust perfumes, Where all good things being met, no one presumes To gouerne, or to triumph on the rest, Onely because all were, no part was best. And as, though all doe know, that quantities Are made of lines, and lines from Points arise, None can these lines or quantites vnioynt, And say this is a line, or this a point, So though the Elements and Humors were In her, one could not say, this gouerne there. Whose euen constitution might haue wonne Any disease to venter on the Sunne, Rather than her: and make a spirit feare That he to disuniting subiect were. To whose proportions if we could compare Cubes, th’are vnstable; Circles, Angulare; She who was such a Chaine VARIORUM: vv. 131-34 FAUSSET (1924): a ‘geometrical analogy ... illustrative of the unity existing behind all diversity’ (192). RUGOFF (1939): Donne ‘embarks entirely upon the technical terminology of the geometer’ and is the only poet of his time who would have drawn on such terminology ‘so thoroughly and uncompromisingly.’ Indeed, this is very true. 294 VARIORUM: vv. 128-42 WIGGINS (1945): Donne draws on concepts from logic (‘lines,’ ‘quantities,’ ‘Cubes,’ and ‘Circles’), suggesting that the ‘mathematical representation of the incorruptible by the unbroken unity of the linear quantity is carried out here in terms of at least semi-logical import’ (51). vv. 131-42 JORDAN (1989): the geometrical imagery reintroduces Pythagorean geometric order from FirAn and ‘enables the reader to see her life as an example of the abstract idea of order manifesting itself in the flesh’ (98-99). vv. 141-42 COFFIN (1937): ...reveals Donne’s interest in using ‘mathematical abstractions to convey the vaster abstractions of Divinity’ (107). RUGOFF (1939) reads the lines to mean that, compared to the girl, the ‘paragons of proportion are sadly disproportionate’ and adds that even if Donne was writing of the ‘Idea of a Woman,’ he ‘overreached himself’ in using such imagery. Indeed, he did, he ‘overreached himself’ in using it years before too. The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto IX, stanza 22: The Frame thereof seem’d partly circular, And part triangular: O Work Divine! Those two the first and last Proportions are, The one imperfect, mortal, feminine; Th’ other immortal, perfect, masculine: And ’twixt them both a Quadrate was the Base, Proportion’d equally by seven and nine; Nine was the Circle set in Heaven’s Place; All which compacted, made a goodly Diapase. FOWLER (1964): One of the intentions of Spenser’s stanza, in fact, is to draw attention to the incommensurateness of mind (circle) and body (triangle), and the difficulty of establishing proportion between them: a fact with painfully real psychological and moral consequences … Hopper is right in his general contention that the stanza expresses the capacity of man (especially, we may add, man’s soul) to act as ‘the Neo-Platonic copula mundi, joining heaven and earth, circle and triangle, 9 and 7, spirit and body’; and that this unique function depends on the fact that the ‘operation of this ethical golden mean is found only in man, who, in his ideal state, is a mean between excess and defect, between reason and concupiscence, between heaven and earth.’ The human anima could only act as the vinculum, it was believed, if it was itself in harmony. 295 At the end of the Second Anniversary, Donne identifies himself as the poet-prophet of the Lord (vv. 511-528): Here in a place, where mis-devotion frames A thousand praiers to saints, whose very names The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knows not yet, And where, what lawes of poetry admit, Lawes of religion, have at least the same, Immortal Maid, I might invoke thy name. … Since his will is, that to posteritee, Thou shouldest for life, and death a patterne bee, And that the world should notice have of this, The purpose, and th’Autority is his; Thou art the Proclamation; and I ame The Trumpet, at whose voice the people came. MANLEY (1964): the trumpet is a ‘common figure of the prophet, blasted by inspiration,’ and Donne, like the trumpet that will ‘sound eternity,’ calls his readers ‘to a general resurrection.’ Cf. Ezek. 33.1-7 (200). COLIE (1964): the ‘miraculous lady, alive and revivifying even in her death,’ is identified with the poem itself and is judged the ‘pattern for and the image of the life to come.’ She is thus ‘its whole idea,’ exemplifying for the audience that ‘preparation for that life is best achieved in ‘reading’ her, or in listening to her proclamation—in reading, then, the poet’s poem’ (168). JORDAN (1989): Comments … that the purpose of Donne’s music is both Christian and PlatonicPythagorean and that the ecstasies of SecAn are both Platonic Pythagorean ‘catharsis’ and Christian ‘prophetic visions’ (111). Jordan’s opinion is what The Faerie Queene is all about. Alastair Fowler’s Spenser and the Numbers of Time reads concerning Book I and Vna as Elizabeth I in her role as Sol iustitiae: According to Pythagorean doctrine, all numbers flow from the monad, the originative principle; which is accordingly good, or even above goodness ... It is further associated with truth, the light and guiding principle of both of the cosmic and the individual mens ... Through the offices of Chalcidius, Macrobius, and other digesters of antique thought, this symbolism was assimilated into medieval arithmology. Pythagorean and medieval number symbolism are hardly to be distinguished, as far as the opposition of monad and dyad is concerned. 296 Let us quote a Holy Sonnet now which critics have said anticipates John Milton. HSRound: At the round Earths imagind corners blow Your trumpets Angels, and Arise Arise From Death you numberles infinities Of Soules and to your scattered bodyes go, All whom the Flood did and fyre shall overthrow All whom Warr, dearth, age, agues, tyrannyes, Dispayre, Law, Chance, hath slayne, and you whose eyes Shall behold God, and never tast deaths wo. But let them sleepe, Lord, and me mourne a space, For if above all these my Sins abound Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace When we are there: Here on this lowly ground Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good As if thou hadst Seald my pardon with thy blood. TURNELL (1950, 273) identifies HSRound as one of Donne’s ‘greatest poems and one of the greatest sonnets in the language.’ BUSH (1945, 134) cites the poem as an example of Donne’s ‘medieval learning.’ ELIOT (1930, 552-53) … quotes HSRound in full as an example of Donne’s best ‘religious poetry.’ GRANSDEN (1954, 135) cites HSRound as a ‘fine example’ of Donne’s use of ‘traditional medieval material.’ Some matches between Spenser and Donne. First Anniversary, ll. 103-4: They were to good ends, and they are so still, But accessory, and principal in ill And this from The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto X, stanza 1: If any strength we haue, it is to ill, But all the good is Gods, both power and eke will. First Anniversay, ll. 317-22: Shee, who if those great Doctors truely said That th’Arke to mans proportions was made, 297 Had been a type for that, as that might be A type of her for that................................. .................who caused all civil war to cease. VARIORUM: vv. 317-19: NORTON Augustine was the ‘most famous of the great doctors who propounded this notion. See Civitate Dei, xv, 26" (264).’ ALLEN (1949b) cites Ambrose and other commentators as the source for Donne’s view of the Ark built to human proportions (147). MANLEY (1963): Donne probably refers to Ambrose ... and Augustine ... both of whom ‘make generally the same point,’ though they ‘differ in their mathematical equations and the applications of their discussions.’ Ambrose ‘presents an extensive allegory similar to Spenser’s House of Alma: man is an isolated figure surrounded and almost overwhelmed by a flood of cupidity.’ v. 322: MENASCÈ (1965) the line has more impact if read as alluding to Elizabeth Tudor, who had brought an end to wars provoked by religious fanaticism. Maurice Evans writes: There has been much discussion about the location of the Garden of Adonis ... It seems clear to me he is describing the terrestrial level of creation ... Spenser is describing the experience which Donne expresses in “The Sunne Rising”, for example, where, in each other’s arms, the lovers seem to escape from the ‘houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time’; or that of the happy world of “The Good Morrow.” That John Donne was the author of the poem and the personification of the Redcrosse Knight is also confirmed by these commentaries on the childish mind of the poet who elaborated the allegories of the Castle of Alma (Variorum): ‘Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us, as of children who play that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation.’ (Lowell). ‘We may take for example his House of Temperance, one of the most elaborate allegorical structures erected by him in the Land of Fairy ... All the description is quaint, touched with the naïve and even childish ... But the foundation of the whole edifice is strangely mediaeval. It really belongs to the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, before Chaucer. It seems almost incredible that it should 298 have been thus patiently built up in the age of Marlowe, 77 Shakespeare and Bacon.’ (E. Legouis). ‘And even the allegorical form is least spontaneous and most nearly dead, Spenser’s imagination breathes life into what seems doomed to be formal and mechanic. The ingenious symbolism of the Castle of Alma might well have been borrowed from the dryest scholasticism...’ (E. de Selincourt). A note by Hamilton may be contested here. The poet writes (II.ix.24.13): 24 Of hewen stone the porch was fayrely wrought, Stone more of valew, and more smooth and fine, Then Iett or Marble far from Ireland brought The ‘Iett’ stands for ‘black marble’. Now, the hewen stone of the Castle of Alma is ‘more of valew … then Iett or Marble far from Ireland brought.’ The stones are not coming from China or Peru, but from Ireland, that far away place. As the book of The Faerie Queene was to be read in London by Londoners (educated, clergymen, noblemen, at both Universities, at Court, or at the Inns of Court), for in Ireland there were no readers, just soldiers and rebellion, they would have read this passage and recognised that the poet was referring to the famous black marble of Ireland, like the one of the ‘Marble City’ called Kilkenny. It was a famous city from which marble was brought to England. And at that time Kilkenny was famously known precisely for its black marble, and remained so for centuries. Hamilton accepts that the poet is considering the Castle of Alma to be located outside Ireland: in England. He comments: ‘far from Ireland associates Alma’s castle with English country houses.’ But it is much more than that. The poet is considering not only that the Castle of Alma is in England, but that Ireland is far and away, which is what Donne and any London writer would have thought and written indeed, but not what a poet writing in Ireland would have written. In fact, Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (The Kindly Flame) is of the opinion that Faeryland represents The City of London, the realm of politics and art. That the poet was said to be living in Ireland at the time, however, is what a London writer would have wanted to be if he desired to be considered a dignified Courtier, just like what happens with Shakespeare and Stratford. The stigma of print: no more, no less. In David Scott Wilson-Okamura Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge University Press, 2013) we witness the author’s wonder and amazement in this way: 77 This critic has not considered the medievalism of Dr. Faustus. 299 Spenser had many opportunities to observe war at first hand. When he was nominated for sheriff of Cork in 1598, he was described as ‘a man endowed with good knowledge in learning and not unskillful as without experience in the service of the wars.’ Yet Spenser’s descriptions of warfare are notoriously unrealistic. Unlike Chaucer, Tasso, and Ariosto, Spenser is sloppy about distinguishing types of armor. Compared with Sidney, he does not seem to understand the proper use of a stirrup, ‘which enables a knight to couch his lance underarm and brace to absorb an enemy’s impact.’ For, in fact, The Faerie Queene lacks one paramount element of all epic: a description of the war. Wilson-Okamura, like Alpers, like Fowler, is clear about this: The century in which Spenser lived was not a peaceful one, and in the first stanza of The Faerie Queene he announces that ‘Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song’ (FQ 1. prop. 1). So where are the wars? Alastair Fowler has noticed that, on several occasions, Spenser uses the term war to describe a psychomachia … Spenser … was probably an eyewitness at the siege of Smerwick in 1580. But as Michael West has pointed out, the siege of Alma’s castle ‘is conceived with grotesque inconsistency.’ At one point, Maleger and his army seem to be Irish guerillas. Then a few stanzas later they are using artillery (which the Irish never had). Today, both forms of combat are ‘equally exotic.’ But for a Renaissance reader, the inconsistency would have been manifest: the equivalent, argues West, of a Hollywood western in which ‘the hero … appear[s] in a plumed helmet and chaps.’ The combination is absurd. Kate Gardner Frost writes on Spenser’s Biblical poetics as dealt with by Carol Kaske (The John Donne Journal, 2010, vol. 29): Carol Kaske has explored the implications of this practice of verbal forecasting and although she focuses particularly on Spenser’s connective tissue of word and Biblical typology, she might be speaking of Donne. She points to the presence of themes developed in pieces scattered throughout a work and related with ‘hook-words.’ ‘Spenser [read ‘Donne’ (Gardner Frost’s note; not mine)] could count on readers to read his work in the same way, provided he dropped enough hints.’ 300 And this is what Carol Kaske writes (Spenser and Biblical Poetics) concerning Spenser’s rhetoric of showing the same images in opposite circumstances, in bono et in malo, throughout the text of The Faerie Queene, following here the same rhetoric of the Bible, recommended by St. Augustine, known as distinctiones: True, Spenser was a (moderate) Protestant, and in his time all distinctiones (either imagistic or thematic) were either medieval or Counter-Reformation Catholic … [N]aturally, therefore, the distinctiones could not have contributed his anti-Catholic meanings. But his religious sentiments are often quite medieval and on the whole (if, indeed, they are coherent enough to summarize) less rabidly antiCatholic than is currently imagined. Spenser was a moderate Protestant because the author who created his mask was a moderate Protestant. In John Donne and the Protestant Reformation (2003), Mary Arshagouni Papazian writes: These essays also reveal a Donne who cared much for the idea of moderation. Donne viewed the world as a practical, pastoral preacher and poet, not a systematic theologian. Thus, although much debate over the years has centered on Donne’s relationship to Calvinism and Calvinist predestinarian thinking, Donne seems clearly to have embraced the moderate Calvinism that defined the English church, while at the same time moderating the negative effects of a harsh Calvinism for the benefit of his listeners. In Spenser, Donne, and the Theology of Joy, Adam Potkay writes:78 What distinguishes the Protestant discourse of joy from medieval or Continental Catholic theology and literature is not only its emphasis on joy and rejoicing but also, and more strikingly, its anxiety over joylessness … In order to illustrate the Protestant dynamic of joy and joylessness … a more detailed examination of two milestones of English literary and church history, the first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Donne’s collected Sermons. Potkay continues as follows: The specter of joylessness looms in The Faerie Queene … A generation 78 Studies in English Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1, The English Renaissance, Winter, 2006. 301 after Spenser, John Donne addressed joylessness as an explicit problem in the Sermons … Connecting Spenser’s epic romance and Donne’s sermons is a shared perception of the threat of joylessness to the life of the universal church and the church in England William Empson, dealing with John Donne, uses a striking combination of poets at the start of Chapter 2 of his work Essays on Renaissance Literature. Volume 1. Donne and the New Philosophy: CHAPTER 2 Donne the space man Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is, but that which he hath seene? What if within the Moones faire shining spheare? What if in every other starre unseene Of other worldes he happily should heare? He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare. (Proem to Book II, The Faerie Queene) Present-day writers on Donne, I have recently come to realise, have never heard of a belief about him which, twenty or thirty years ago, I thought was being taken for granted. I can’t believe I invented it; it was part of the atmosphere in which I grew up as an undergraduate at Cambridge ... Donne, then, from a fairly early age, was interested in getting to another planet much as the kids are nowadays; he brought the idea into practically all his best love-poems, with the sentiment which it still carries of adventurous freedom. And Elizabeth Heale, commenting book III of The Faerie Queene, quotes this piece of juvenelia of John Donne (ca. 1580s): ‘I call not that Virginity a vertue, which resideth only in the Bodies integrity … But I call that Virginity a vertue which is willing and desirous to yeeld it selfe upon honest and lawfull terms, when just reason requireth; and until then, is kept with a modest chastity of Body and Mind.’ (John Donne, Paradoxes and Problemes xii). Spenser’s celebration of chastity in Book 3 should be put in the same context of Protestant praise for married love that informs Donne’s apparent paradox. Chastity in this view is as much an aspect of marriage as it is of virginity In John Carey’s John Donne. Life, Mind and Art we read: 302 Donne’s fondness for the word ‘suck’ in both poetry and prose is worth noting. Men ‘sucke the sweet of the Earth and the sweet of other Men’; the Commonwealth suckes up money by trade ... God sucks souls, the flea sucks the lover’s blood. Sucking is the primal assimilative act, its end, like that of ‘all digestions and concoctions being that meate may become our body’. Hence its prominence in Donne’s universe, where assimilation is one of the aims of being. And in another place he writes: Flowing and sucking had, as processes, a similar appeal to melting. It is noticeable that Donne, though he professes to believe, like other orthodox Christians, in the immateriality of the soul, habitually talks about it flowing or being sucked, as it were fluid. ‘Soule into the soule may flow’, says the soul in “The Extasie”; and when the soul leaves the body at death, Donne tells his congregation, ‘God will suck it up into glory’. Indeed, the whole created universe will be ‘sucked and swallowed into God’ in the end. And this is what we see in The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto I, stanzas 15 and 25: 15 And as she lay upon the durtie ground, Her huge long taile her den all overspred, Yet was in knots and many boughtes upwound, Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, Sucking upon her poisnous dugs, eachone Of sundry shapes, yet all ill favored: Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone, Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone. … 25 Her scattred brood, soone as their Parent deare They saw so rudely falling to the ground, Groning full deadly, all with troublous feare, Gathred themselves about her body round, Weening their wonted entrance to have found At her wide mouth: but being there withstood They flocked all about her bleeding wound, And sucked up their dying mothers blood, 303 Making her death their life, and eke her hurt their good. This feature is not one among many for, according to Carey, ‘Donne’s passion for fusion and interpenetration … if there is a single, essential quality which makes Donne Donne, this is it.’ This statement in Book I, Canto IX, stanza 42 is dealing with the seven ‘Bead-men’ (‘men who respond to the prayers of others through works of mercy’)79 in the house of Holiness, where Redcross is restoring himself (he has almost committed suicide) thanks to Una. This sixth man is in charge of the dead. And it reads (my emphasis): 42 The sixt had charge of them now being dead, In seemely sort their corses to engrave, And deck with dainty flowres their brydall bed, That to their heavenly spouse both sweet and brave They might appeare, when he their soules shall save. The wondrous workmanship of Gods owne mould, Whose face he made, all beastes to feare, and gave All in his hand, even dead we honour should. Ah dearest God me graunt, I dead be not defould. This fear, the fear that death may ‘defould’ or corrupt the body without remedy, as declared here, was the most personal obsession of John Donne, as John Carey saw perfectly well. Ramie Targoff has seen it too: [O]ne reason that Donne preaches so fervently on the doctrine of bodily resurrection is that he knows how difficult a doctrine it is to believe—he declares … that it is the ‘hardest Article’ of the entire Creed to teach, and that it was for this reason that Christ performed his miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead. If we consider the 160 extant sermons as a whole, we see how persistently Donne attempts to convince his listeners that however decayed and scattered the posthumous body may be, it will return intact on the last day. Donne’s habit of rehearsing the anxieties that surround the prospect of mortality in order to offer a vision of eventual reconstitution, of sharing with his audience the horrors of bodily corruption and disintegration in the grave in order to take pleasure in the miracle of that body’s perfection in heaven, lies at the very heart of his preaching style. 79 Hamilton, 2007 304 … Donne’s preoccupation with the material continuity of the self is unusual for a seventeenth-century Protestant minister, whose church did not emphasize in either doctrine or liturgy the significance of bodily resurrection. … Paul unambiguously rejects the idea that our human flesh … will be resurrected, proposing instead that we will assume the form of heavenly bodies … Writing around 200 AD, Tertullian denounces the idea that we might be reborn in a body other than our earthly one … Nearly two hundred years later, Augustine defends the idea of bodily resurrection against continued attacks from nonbelievers … In the first Constitution of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the church unambiguously affirms the identity of the resurrected body with the earthly … By the early fourteenth century, however, this emphasis began to give way to a new conception of the soul as the determining feature of the resurrected self, and the commitment to bodily integrity lost some of its force. … It is tempting to conclude that he resembles neither an early modern Protestant nor an early modern Catholic so much as a medieval church father … It seems closer to the truth, however, to say that Donne found in the Latin fathers a source of comfort for his anxieties about his posthumous identity, and that he excavated from these materials a vocabulary for formulating his own beliefs. … After imagining his body and soul effortlessly reunited on the day of resurrection, Donne proceeds to the day of judgment, which is ‘truly, and most literally, the Critical, the Decretory day.’ It is on this day, he asserts, ‘that Judgment shall declare to me, and possesse mee of my Seventh day, my Everlasting Saboth in thy rest, thy glory, thy joy, thy sight, thy self.’ Which is what this stanza 42 desires and what the ending of The Faerie Queene hopes, indeed. The Variorum of Greenlaw is silent about this stanza and its importance for the author (for he is speaking with his own voice and about his own desire here, and it is his own personal, authorial prayer). But they have these good words for us, anyway: This canto is a poem so complete in itself that no extracts could do it justice. It is one in which Plato, could he have returned to earth, would have found the realization of his loftiest dreams; in which St. Thomas Aquinas would have discovered no fault; and in which St. 305 Augustine would have rejoiced as though he had felt once more that evening breeze which played upon him as he stood at the window on the seaside at Ostia, beside his mother Monica... (Aubrey De Vere, Grosart 1. 298-300). In Book II, Canto VIII, stanzas 1-9, we read the famous scene of the angel: 1 And is there care in heaven? and is their love In heavenly spirits to these creatures bace, That may compassion of their evilles move? There is: else much more wretched were the cace Of men then beasts. But O th’exceeding grace Of highest God, that loves his creatures so, And all his workes with mercy doth embrace, That blessed Angels, he sends to and fro, To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe. 2 How oft do they, their silver bowers leave, To come to succour us, that succour want, How oft do they with golden pineons, cleave The flitting skyes, like flying Pursuivant, Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant: They for us fight, they watch and dewly ward, And their bright Squadrons round about us plant, And all for love, and nothing for reward: O why should hevenly God to men have such regard? Variorum 2: JORTIN These are fine lines, and would not suffer by being compared with any thing that Milton has said upon this subject. KITCHIN This is perhaps the best-known and most beautiful passage in the Faerie Queene. W.J. COURTHOPE His ideas dwell in a kind of Limbo between the medieval and the modern world … A sense of beauty, rarely equalled, enabled him to reconcile, as far as mere form is concerned, Catholic doctrine with Pagan philosophy, mediaeval romance with classical mythology … If Spenser were to be regarded, in the first place, as a moral and religious teacher, this description would be a mistake; for who could believe in the reality of such an angel? TODD The guardianship of angels is a favourite theme of Spenser and of Milton. GRAY A paraphrase of Ps. 8.4 and 144.3, and of Job 7.17. The biblical language is apt: these two famous stanzas and the subsequent appearance of the angel mark ‘the only moment in the poem when God intervenes directly into the narrative’ (Hamilton). 306 CAREY Donne was always passionately interested in angels … No subject in this theological reading touched his imagination more, and he derived his angelology almost wholly from Aquinas. TARGOFF It is tempting to conclude that he [i.e. Donne] resembles neither an early modern Protestant nor an early modern Catholic so much as a medieval church father … It seems closer to the truth, however, to say that Donne found in the Latin fathers a source of comfort for his anxieties about his posthumous identity, and that he excavated from these materials a vocabulary for formulating his own beliefs. 3 During the while, that Guyon did abide In Mamons house, the Palmer, whom whyleare That wanton Mayd of passage had denide, By further search had passage found elsewhere, And being on his way, approched neare, Where Guyon lay in traunce, when suddeinly He heard a voyce, that called lowd and cleare, Come hether, come hether, O come hastily; That all the fields resounded with the ruefull cry. 4 The Palmer lent his eare unto the noyce, To weet, who called so importunely: Againe he heard a more efforced voyce, That bad him come in haste. He by and by His feeble feet directed to the cry; Which to that shady delve him brought at last, Where Mammon earst did sunne his threasury: There the good Guyon he found slumbring fast In senceles dreame; which sight at first him sore aghast. 5 Beside his head there satt a faire young man, Of wondrous beauty, and of freshest yeares, Whose tender bud to blossome new began, And florish faire above his equall peares; His snowy front curled with golden heares, Like Phoebus face adornd with sunny rayes, Divinely shone, and two sharpe winged sheares, Decked with diverse plumes, like painted Jayes, Were fixed at his backe, to cut his ayery wayes. Variorum 2 E. DE SELINCOURT The guardian angel who watches over the prostrate Sir Guyon after his fierce struggle with the temptations of Mammon, and evokes the superb expression of 307 Christian humility and gratitude … appears to Spenser as a fair young man … like to Phoebus, or ‘to Cupido on Idaean hill.’ The pedant finds the comparison ludicrous, the more prosaic pietist finds it profane. To Spenser it was natural, almost inevitable. As Truth appealed to him in terms of beauty, so all beauty, whatever its source, could be brought to serve and to illuminate the highest truth. CAREY But here [in “Aire and Angels”] he is not pondering the angels for their own sake. He uses their divine mysteriousness to adumbrate mysteries in human love 6 Like as Cupido on Idaean hill, When having laid his cruell bow away, And mortall arrowes, wherewith he doth fill The world with murdrous spoiles and bloody pray, With his faire mother he him dights to play, And with his goodly sisters, Graces three; The Goddesse pleased with his wanton play, Suffers her selfe through sleepe beguild to bee, The whiles the other Ladies mind theyr mery glee. 7 Whom when the Palmer saw, abasht he was Through fear and wonder, that he nought could say, Till him the childe bespoke, Long lackt, alas, Hath bene thy faithfull aide in hard assay, Whiles deadly fitt thy pupill doth dismay; Behold this heavy sight, thou reverend Sire, But dread of death and dolor doe away; For life ere long shall to her home retire, And he that breathlesse seems, shal corage bold respire. 8 The charge, which God doth unto me arrett, Of his deare safety, I to thee commend; Yet will I not forgoe, ne yet forgett The care thereof my selfe unto the end, But evermore him succour, and defend Against his foe and mine: watch thou I pray; For evill is at hand him to offend. So having said, eftsoones he gan display His painted nimble wings, and vanisht quite away. 9 The Palmer seeing his lefte empty place, And his slow eies beguiled of their sight, 308 Woxe sore affraid, and standing still a space, Gaz’d after him, as fowle escapt by flight TARGOFF [On The Second Anniversary] The very last lines of the poem affirm Donne’s role as vates: ‘Thou art the Proclamation; and I am/ The Trumpet, at whose voyce the people came’ (527-28). This is the prophecy he wants to proclaim—the day described in I Corinthians, when ‘the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’ (15:52). For Donne to imagine himself as God’s trumpet—the embodied instrument of a heavenly spirit—is his most exalted vision of what it means to be a poet. Finally, we should not forget that if we ignore that author’s identity we will be on the dark side of many of his allegories. For instance, Carol Kaske wonders herself: Another pair of images reveals the ecclesiastical principle underlying several of these shifts in evaluation. In Book I, the images of beads are employed in a particularly contradictory way as attributes of both bad and good characters. As with fasting, the primary statement comes in the first canto, the reversal in the tenth. The reversal is sharp; it is not debated or even commented on. In the primary statement, beads are satirized even more clearly than is fasting: Archimago the hypocritical hermit … and Corceca … In the House of Holiness, however … we find to our surprise that beads are now good. Dame Coelia, the mistress, spends ‘All night … in bidding of her bedes’ (I.x.3.8-9); in fact, until she finishes bidding them, she keeps her guests waiting (I.x.8.3-4)... We cannot, however, use this gloss to allegorize away the good beads of Dame Coelia: Corceca’s beads were clearly material ones; and if a word had wished to avoid such popish overtones, he would have found a word for Coelia’s prayer that did not remind us ‘too much of Roman Catholic ignorance and ascetism as symbolized by Spenser’s own Dame Corceca.’ It is on the model of the Bible as portrayed by the distinctiones that Spenser went out of his way to portray a good use reprehensible and popish things as temporizing and the rosary. Distinctiones account for the process of writing and reading, though not, in these cases, for the Protestant content. When Dame Coelia uses beads, then, Spenser first shocks the reader with the contradiction of his own previous portrayal. The reversal is not of symbolism, as it is with shields, as it usually is when a biblical image (e.g., the lion) changes value, for beads mean rosaries in both episodes, but one of evaluation alone. The most the reader could say of Coelia’s beads to cushion the shock 309 of the contradiction is that, by being in complementary distribution with good deeds, they have become a synecdoche for the entire contemplative life, a life that Protestants endorsed so long as it alternates with good works. In any case, Spenser leads the puzzled reader to smooth down the contradiction into a fine distinction. She might say, for example, “Beads are evil when the bidder thinks her action is meritorious and devotes all her time to them, but good when she alternates them with good works.” This distributio between use and abuse of the same thing is chiefly one of timing... In giving beads even this endorsement qualified by previous condemnation, Spenser became so reactionary that he risked not only shocking the reader but incurring accusations of papistry as well … If we look to Elizabethan actuality, we find that rosaries were universally rejected as among the filthiest rags of popery … But the fact that this favorable image defies the culture is no reason to explain it away, for example, by denying its physicality. Rather than impose a change of meaning, we should explain it by resistant elements in the culture and/or relate it to the culture in a way other than by straightforward didacticism. We should relate this enigma to one resistant element only: the real author of the poem. Scene II. Exiled and waiting for his son to marry In 1590 Robert Greene publishes The Royal Exchange and he describes it thus: ‘Containing sundry aphorisms of philosophy and golden principles of moral and natural quadruplicities … First written in Italian and dedicated to the Signory of Venice; now translated into English and offered to the City of London.’ For all we know, Robert Greene never went to Venice in Italy as he was poor, but the reader does not need to worry: Edward de Vere was in Italy and chose Venice as his headquarters. In this work by Greene there appear characters like Timon of Athens, Damon and Phyntias, Titus and Gisippus. Greene defines what a courtier is: Cortigiano. A courtier. Four things do appertain to a courtier: 1. To hear with sapience. 2. To answer with prudence. 3. To be offensive to no man. 4. And to profit the citizen. Baldessar in his Courtier hath the like principles, for Gonzaga, setting down certain precepts, wisheth that he be every way wise, both in 310 hearing and speaking, that he listen not to frivolous prattle nor at any time utter talk of no importance, that he be courteous and willing to please all, and especially ready to please the citizen, for from him riseth either his praise or infamy. Four things procure a man to be a courtier: 1. Abundance of riches. 2. Ambition and desire of honour. 3. Integrity and quickness of wit. 4. And the hope of reward by service. Edward de Vere chose ‘Vero nihil verius’ as his motto, or “Nothing truer than Vere,” and with a slight modification this is the motto we find written by Greene under the term ‘Leggierezza apparente. Lightness, so seeming.’ It reads: ‘Things which seem easy to be done, and yet in performance are of great weight, for as Socrates saith, alluding to that spoken in Esdras: There is nothing greater than the truth.’ Greene’s Mourning Garment, Greene’s Never Too Late and Francesco’s Fortunes are Greene’s other works of 1590, all of them flooded with Shakespearean themes. As Edward de Vere had left London a year before, when reading Greene’s Mourning Garment and Greene’s Never Too Late we find that Ovid’s exile is mentioned. In the first of these three works we find all the characters who always accompany Greene in his similes and metaphors about love: Endymion, Pallas, Narcissus, Adonis, etc. The introductory poem to the work by Richard Hake in Greek80 shows us that Greene is compared, above all, to Ovid, whom he even surpasses. In Nina Green website we find the translation of it thus: If Horace satires merit mickle praise For taunting such as lived in Paphos’ isle If wise Propertius was in elder days Laureate for figuring out fond Venus’ wile, If Rome applauded Ovid’s pleasing verse... Then, English gentles, stoop and gather bays, Make coronets of Flora’s proudest flowers, As gifts for Greene, for he must have the praise, And taste the dews that high Parnassus showers, As having leapt beyond old Horace’s strain... His Nunquam sera more conceits combines Than wanton Ovid in his art did paint 80 Robert Greene had scholars and university men as friends, as we see when they use, like here, Greek as language. To know Greek at that time, and even more to be able to write Greek, was something unheard of. Robert Greene, in other words, is not a London beggar. 311 In Francesco’s Fortunes, Greene complains that a famous actor, whom he calls Roscius (in reference to the famous Roman actor), is wearing another person’s feathers, meaning he is taking credit for something he has not done. We must bear in mind that this comment was made in 1590, when the famous actor Edward Alleyn became successful at the expense of playwrights, thus making him the obvious target of Greene’s words. Alleyn was the greatest tragic actor of those times, for he performed Tamburlaine and Hieronimo. The year 1590 is too soon for Shakspere to be the target, for he had just arrived (so it seems although nobody knows it) in London and could not have reached the Olympus of fame as an actor in such short a time. When Stratfordians tell us that Greene had Shakspere in mind as the actor he attacked in 1592 with his work Groatsworth of Wit when he used the expression ‘the only Shake-scene in the country,’ the same argument is valid here. Shakspere is not the one targeted. In 1591 Spenser returns with something new. Nobody sees him in London, but he publishes as if he were physically there, for he dedicates his works to the most excellent aristocracy of the Court. His new work is called Complaints and contains nine different poems. In the poem “The Tears of the Muses,” Spenser seems to know perfectly well the state of a hidden poet, a poet who stays in his cell not to be seen. Everyone who had read enough Elizabethan literature would identify this ‘Will’ with William Shakespeare, according to the description Spenser gives of him, but as Shakspere had just come to London around 1588, Stratfordians deny this ‘Will’ any identity whatsoever. For them, it is just another, different poet. Spenser writes (205-222): And he the man, whom Nature selfe had made To mock her selfe, and Truth to imitate, With kindly counter vnder Mimick shade, Our pleasant Willy, ah is dead of late: With whom all ioy and iolly meriment Is also deaded, and in dolour drent... But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen Large streams of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe, Scorning the boldness of such base-borne men, Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe; Doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell, Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell. The fact that Spenser relates ‘Will’ to ‘Truth’ is a reference to the Latin word Vere and Edward de Vere. Now, how could Spenser know about ‘Will’ being hidden in a cell if he was in Ireland? Well, because he was not in Ireland. Another poem included in Complaints is “Prosopopoia or 312 Mother Hubberds Tale.” Critics seem to agree with the fact that this poem, where a fox and an ape are depicted, is a satire against William and Robert Cecil. This is evidenced by the fact that the poem was not included in the collected works of Spenser of 1611. Donne’s satirical vein here (under the mask of Spenser) was criticized by Harvey in 1592. Thomas Nashe will defend this satirical work against Harvey’s attack very personally. At the same time, the play The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon by Robert Greene seems to voice some of the complaints of our poet Edward de Vere, and although published in 1599, it seems to have been written around the final years of the 1580s. The character Prince Alphonsus is sad, for he has been deprived of the crown. His father tells him (I.i.141-145): Cartinus Ah, my Alphonsus, neuer thinke on that, In vain it is to striue against the streame; The Crowne is lost, and now in hucksters hands, And all our hope is cast into the dust: Bridle these thoughts, and learne the same of me, A quiet life doth passe an Emperie. In this play, the trauma of his royal and occult bastard son is expressed when a character speaks to Queen Fausta, related as much to Faust as Timon is related to Timandra (III.iii.1053-1058): Oh foolish Queene, what meant you by this talke? Those pratling speeches haue vndone you all. Do you disdaine to haue that mightie Prince, I meane Alphonsus, counted for your sonne? I tell you, Fausta, he is borne to be The ruler of a mightie Monarchie. Next, another character, the duke of Milan, which is exactly the same title that Prospero has in The Tempest, complains against Fortune (i.e. Queen Elizabeth) because she has rejected and abandoned him. This duke of Milan appears disguised as a pilgrim, something that we can relate to our poet’s continental travels in 1575, which was a year of Jubilee (IV.ii.1270-1287): This is the chance of fickle Fortunes wheele; A Prince at morne, a Pilgrim ere it be night: I, which erewhile did daine for to possesse The proudest pallace of the westerne world, Would now be glad a cottage for to finde 313 To hide my head; so Fortune hath assignde... Thus I, which erst had all things at my will, A life more hard then death do follow still. When he tells his life is harder than death, he establishes a connection between himself and Lord Vaux and his poem (song) 71 of The Paradise of Dainty Devices. Regarding the comparison made by this duke of Milan of having lost a palace and wishing now to live at least in a cottage, this relates him to Edward de Vere’s poem entitled “Were I a King,” which reads: Were I a king I might command content; Were I obscure unknown would be my cares, And were I dead no thoughts should me torment, Nor words, nor wrongs, nor love, nor hate, nor fears; A doubtful choice of these things which to crave, A kingdom or a cottage or a grave. Finally, in this play Greene mentions the ‘mighty Tamberlaine’ (IV.iii.1.444); since he has varied Tamburlaine for Tamberlaine, the similarity with Chamberlain, our poet’s title, could not be closer or more evident: Chamberlain-Tamberlaine. In this same year of 1591, our poet publishes another poem with the Robert Greene mask. It is A Maiden’s Dream, a narrative poem on the death of one of the Queen’s favourites, Christopher Hatton. Greene’s poem, however, does not seem to have anything to do with Hatton, for the dream of the virgin maiden that is depicted contains the symbols of Endymion and Actaeon: Methought in slumber as I lay and dreamt, I saw a silent spring... About this spring in mourning robes of black Were sundry nymphs or goddesses... They filled the air with such laments and groans That Echo sighed out their heart-breaking moans. …........... so sat these ladies all, …............whereon did stand A golden crown... A knight lie dead... A crown of olives on his helm he had... A golden hind was placed at his feet, Whose vailed ears bewrayed her inward greet... Just at this head there sat a sumptuous queen, 314 I guessed her so, for why, she wore a crown, Yet were her garments parted white and green In another work by Greene written in 1591, Greene’s Farewell to Folly, the occult poet points again to the fact that he is a courtier in hiding, for the subtitle reads: ‘Sent to courtiers and scholars as a precedent to warn them from the vain delights that draws youth on to repentance.’ The title of Greene’s Farewell to Folly possesses a double meaning: it refers to the fact that Greene has said goodbye to his folly and, at the same time, to his school of poets at Fisher’s Folly. The work is a treatise against pride, specially the pride of kings, as Greene writes that kings are not so because they wear a crown on their heads, but because they are virtuous persons. The references to Phaeton and Ovid are repeated here. This work could have been written by our poet with his son Southampton in mind, for in 1591, Southampton was already being told by Cecil, the Queen and Shakespeare (as we see in his first 17 sonnets) to marry, so that ‘the beauty’s Rose might never die,’ as sonnet 1 of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets reads in the 1609 Quarto. In the first story, Greene tells us of a king who had a companion, an Earl (which Oxford was officially), to whom the king asks what it means to be a king. The Earl replies: [I]n a crown is hidden far more care than content, for one moment of perfect ease a whole month of disquiet thoughts, that were the perils apparent that are hid in a diadem, hardly would ambition boast in such triumphs. Then, the Earl ends his reply as follows: Kings’ heads are not impaled with fame for that they are kings, but because they are virtuous … So, my Lord, to your question, I think your Majesty a king indeed, with large dominions, and honoured with royal titles of dignity, and it fitteth not a subject to mislike of his prince’s government. Only this I conclude, and this heartily I wish, that your Highness may live favoured of the gods, and loved and honoured of men. He that bruiseth the olive-tree with hard iron fetcheth out no oil, but water, and he that pricketh a proud heart with persuasion draweth out only hate and envy. For this sincerity, for telling the truth, the king exiles him. Once the Earl is in exile, the King’s daughter is also rejected, so she leaves the court in disguise. In her flight she muses upon her misery and how fortune has enraged his father the king, commenting that ‘the gods slew the brats of Jocasta, but spared Oedipus.’ This reference to royal incest 315 does not seem to have any relation to the story, but Greene seems unable to restrain himself from writing it when one of his characters, like this woman here, wants to understand her exile, to find a reason. The author then mentions Tarquin and his injustices, only to write that the noblemen of the kingdom ask the king for the exiled Earl to return. All of them put pressure on the King to make the Earl come back, with this warning: if the King rejects them, they agree on making the Earl the ‘sole monarch of Buda.’ This sounds like the Timon story, which is actually mentioned in the third story of the book. In that story the Earl returns and is crowned king, while the former King ‘metamorphosed from a king to a beggar, was now disdained of those whom before he did scorn, and laughed at by such as before he did envy.’ The beggar king encounters his rejected daughter disguised as a shepherdess. The girl sings a song that recalls the grief of Henry VI in the woods when he was found by the guardians. She sings: ‘Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content,/ The quiet mind is richer than a crown.’ The beggar king asks the shepherdess princess a question that we would like to ask Greene ourselves: [T]ell me, is this country cottage thy father’s house, and if it be thy birth is so base & thy bringing up so bad, how hap thou hast found disquiet with dignity, and care contained in a crown? Hast thou seen the court, and so speakest by experience, or learned this ditty as a song of course, and so hittest the crow by hap? Before 1591 ends, Greene publishes two more works, but these two works have nothing to do with the previous ones. They are written in a very different style, and they deal with London and the robberies carried out with cards and games and traps designed by rogues and rascals of the city. For me, therefore, A Notable Discovery of Cozenage and The Second Part of Cony-Catching are not written by our poet, but by one of the ‘university wits’. As we will see later with Groatsworth of Wit, published in 1592, Chettle could be the one who wrote these stories about the life of London’s rogues. That same year Thomas Nashe also published a Preface to Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, showing the same love for this courtier as Spenser did, and as Donne did in his poem “Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, his sister.” Anderson informs us that around the spring of 1591 our poet was courting Elizabeth Trentham, one of the ladies in waiting of the Queen, for in May a lyric appeared published in a work of poetry entitled Brittons Bowre of Delights: Time made a stay when highest powers wrought 316 Regard of love where virtue had her grace, Excellence rare of every beauty sought Notes of the heart where honor had her place; Tried by the touch of most approved truth, A worthy saint to serve a heavenly queen, More fair than she that was the fame of youth, Except but one, the like was never seen. The first letter of each line of the lyric forms the surname ‘Trentame’, a variation of the surname of Elizabeth Trentham. De Vere and Trentham married towards the end of 1591. The sonnet “Phaeton to his friend Florio” appeared that year as well. It was the dedicatory poem to John Florio’s work Second Fruits. Until that time Florio had been the Italian teacher of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton. This sonnet is Shakespearian in its rhythm and swing. On the question of whether this sonnet is Edward de Vere’s or not, Joe Sobran, who had the rare mania of collecting the complete works of Shakespeare in every possible edition and could not understand those who were happy with just one, said: 81 To my mind the question is not whether Shakespeare-Oxford wrote it, but how many other such poems he wrote, anonymously or pseudonymously, which are now lost to us–or perhaps awaiting rediscovery. Now we are going to deal with a very important issue, which is a portrait. The one of the young Donne: the very first portrait of him that we have. Scene III. Donne’s Puzzling Portrait of 1591 The portrait of the eighteen-year-old John Donne is a puzzle, as Dennis Flynn says. Fine. Let us first deal with the enigma of the motto: ‘Antes muerto que mudado.’ Written in Spanish, it is a reference to the original Spanish words of Diana, the shepherdess of Jorge de Montemayor’s homonymous famous pastoral book (published ca. 1559). The argument of Montemayor’s Diana tells the sad love story of the shepherd Sireno. He and Diana loved each other profoundly and faithfully, but he had to go abroad for some time. The thing is that when he finally returns to the city of León, he discovers, rather shockingly, that Diana has married another man. The first page of the book begins with Sireno leaving the city and going to the banks of a river, where he used to sing and write verses to his Diana; he is there again, but this time the 81 See http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=80. 317 happiness of yore has changed into a mournful and elegiac tone: it is the time of the Complaint of Sireno, his first Aria. Sireno moans and cries against the memory of his ill and unfaithful Diana. And he starts singing. The song ends with these verses: Sobre el arena sentada de aquel río la vi yo, do con el dedo escribió: «Antes muerta que mudada». ¡Mira el amor lo que ordena, que os viene a hacer creer cosas dichas por mujer y escritas en el arena! These verses could be translated thus: On the sand seated Of that river saw her I, where with the finger wrote: «Rather dead than changed». Look love what it bids, that it does make you believe things said by a woman and written in the sand! First of all, we have the symbol of the river, which is a changeful thing, as Heraclitus said; and we have the symbol of writing something in the sand near a river, which is a very changeful thing all around as well; finally, we have the symbol of passionate love, which is a tragic and changeful thing in itself, for love is blind. The scenario of the motto is this: Diana vowed in writing that she would love him forever, but, naturally, she changed her mind when he left her. The conclusion is clear: Donne is showing us the words of Diana in 1591 and they only mean one thing, and one thing only: that he has changed his vows, his beliefs. Just like the unfaithful Diana did. Now, what Donne has changed must be related to the cross of his earring and the figure of the cross (as Dennis Flynn points out) of his isolated bearing. Let us now take the other symbols of this portrait of 1591, which are, by the way, related to Christian iconography. We all know what the cross means: the synthesis of both opposites, the positive (vertical) and the negative (horizontal), life vs. death, good vs. evil, the thesis and antithesis into the new synthesis: resurrection or salvation. Now, we need to go down to the other element connected with it, which is the sword. Linked 318 with the cross above it symbolizes faith and the new law: the Gospels. Here we have a free man, a man with a goal and a public post, as evidenced by the portrait (an element of marketing or social publicity). And with the cross, this man holds the sword of evangelism, ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.’ (KJV, Eph. 6.17). We have here the representation of a Knight of Christ, or a Knight of the Cross. And he is sure of the rightful grounds he is defending, for he is looking to the right (his right) with his open eyes and clear forehead. Defiantly. Let us focus on the hilt of the sword now. If we read about it a little bit we will see that the sword symbolizes fortitude (the sword as a whole), wisdom (the grip of the sword), courage and constancy (the pommel of the sword) and temperance (the guard of the sword). Below the hilt there appears another cross figure, the one of the cross-guard, hardly perceptible. This is a young man with a temperate and courageous mind. If you add the long hair to the cross-sword symbol you will see that here Donne is facing us like a genius (wild, natural, free) and defender of Christ, as, shall we say, a Knight or Defender of the Faith. But this is not a warrior or a religious man, but a poet. Why? Because the motto presiding the portrait is a pastoral, lyrical, Virgilian one. For this is the portrait of the artist as a young man. A warlike thinker, wild and heroic. A mind of temperance, a mind of fortitude, a Knight of the Order of Salvation. Since The Faerie Queene was published one year before by an underage poet, we can now trace all these elements and face the disguised and puzzling truth: Donne is portrayed here for some important reason. Mary Arshagouni Papazian writes (John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives): ‘While no scholar has as yet identified conclusively the exact moment of Donne’s conversion from Catholic youth to Protestant adult, there is no doubt that such a conversion did take place.’ And Jonathan F.S. Post speculates (The Cambridge Companion to John Donne): [T]he reporting is a biographical conundrum centering on the problem of evaluating Donne’s theological leanings. When did Donne ‘convert’ to Anglicanism? And at what psychological cost, to borrow the darker terminology put into use by John Carey, who prefers to characterize Donne’s ‘conversion’ as his ‘apostasy’ from Catholicism? And here one is concerned not just with determining dates involving matters of outward conformity–Donne could not have been in Egerton’s service by the end of the decade if he was not, in some sense, subscribing to the Church of England ... In the absence of personal testimony from Donne during these years, much can only be hypothesized about his state of mind in the 1590s. Well, we have it here, with this important occasion for Donne worth 319 having an engraving: it took place in 1591, and with a witty motto: Antes muerto que mudado. For if Diana had said those same words and she married another man later, Donne was saying the same ironic thing. He had promised to be a Catholic, but now he was married to another Church: the Reformed Church. We know that Redcrosse is ‘too solemn sad’ because even though he has Christ on his side, at the start of the poem he is a Catholic Knight. But at the end of Book I he has reconciled with Una. Alastair Fowler tells us this: Una is associated with another lion, however, who proves in the end more virtuous [than the wild animal lion]—the Red Cross Knight. Red Cross, whom she calls ‘my Lyon, and my noble Lord’ (I. iii. 7) is her proper companion. Only because he has abandoned his faith in her, does she need the support of the other, revengeful, lion. Later, the Red Cross Knight re-enters the service of Una; though not before he has undergone an amendment, penance, remorse, and repentance so painful ‘that like a Lyon he would cry and rore’. At the House of Holiness the miles christianus puts on the armour of Christ more decisively than before. His three-day battle [proper for a Trinitarian mind like Donne’s was] with the dragon, and the subsequent release of Una’s parents, reenact Christ’s victory over sin and death and his harrowing of hell; while his betrothal to Una [like the betrothal of Diana with another man shown in the motto] in the last canto alludes analogically to the marriage of the Church with the Heavenly Bridegroom. In these final cantos the Red Cross Knight’s role seems often to be specifically that of Sol ijustitiæ. Redcrosse, like his author Donne, ‘undergoes a conversion experience in which he sees a vision of the New Hierusalem and the community of saints who are to dwell in it,’ as Andrew D. Weiner says.82 Both Donne and the Red Cross Knight are defenders of the Reformed faith now, and that is why Redcrosse is baptized, not at his birth, but at the end of Book I. He not only receives communion from the sacred tree of Christ, but also his new baptism in the Reformed (Una’s) faith. For Redcrosse is the literary portrait of Donne, his creator. Now, let us put some Aristotelian recollection of doxa on this mysterious portrait. Izaak Walton (1675) wrote: I have seen one picture of him, drawn by a curious hand, at his age of eighteen, with his sword, and what other adornments might then suit with the present fashions of youth and the giddy gaities, of that age; 82 Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1, Nov., 1973, pp. 33-57. 320 and his motto then was– How much shall I be changed, Before I am changed! R.C. Bald (1986) said: The earliest portrait of Donne to survive belongs to the beginning of this period. It bears the date 1591, and is known only from the engraving by William Marshall prefixed to the Poems of 1635. The original was clearly a miniature, and so authoritative an expert as Lawrence Binyon has ventured the opinion that it was in all probability painted by Nicholas Hilliard. From an early age Donne possessed the instincts of a connoisseur, and esteemed Hilliard highly: a hand, or eye By Hilliard drawne, is worth an history, By a worse painter made; and he would scarcely have been satisfied with the work of any lesser artist. The miniature probably shows Donne just before he entered Thavies Inn. The Inns of Court and of Chancery had various sumptuary regulations, such as those forbidding the wearing of long hair and of swords … but the young man of the portrait is wearing clothes which, though simple, are of highly fashionable cut … His hair is worn long, and there are ear-rings in his ears; a delicate hand grasps the hilt of his sword. His doublet, close buttoned down in front, is exaggeratedly wide at the shoulders 83 and is cut to form a peak at the waist; the sleeves of the doublet are slit to reveal under-sleeves of some contrasting material. His face, though not handsome, is arresting. His forehead is broad; his eyes, set widely apart, look out intensely and eagerly; his cheek-bones are high and prominent; his nose is large, and without any pretensions to gracefulness; the beginning of a moustache fringes his upper lip. Such was Donne in the spring of 1591. Dennis Flynn (1995) argued: The original portrait was the work of Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver, artists patronized by the Elizabethan Court. Like other Tudor portrait miniatures, it was artfully contrived to express a mute but poetic and intimate message about its courtly subject … Apart from William 83 For me, this is a symbol of Donne’s Neoplatonism as shown in The Faerie Queene. For Aristocles was called ‘Plato’ for his broad shoulders. 321 Marshall’s frontispiece engraving of the lost miniature … Walton’s interpretation is our only eye-witness account of the original. However, Donne’s appearance in the engraved portrait diverges considerably from Walton’s description. For one thing, the sword does not seem to be worn merely as an adornment of gay fashion; rather as an emblem of honor, it is held up by its hilt in the foreground of the picture. Donne wears a long-breasted doublet in an Italian style that was not yet out of fashion but hardly the latest thing in England by 1591; moreover, doublets were often cut from much less plain cloth than so often this. Around the neck, Donne does not wear the highly fashionable ruff so often worn by the elegant subjects of miniaturists, but a plain band. And his earring, like the other features of his dress and bearing, does not fit the “giddy” fashions of the time, cast or carved as it is in the singular form of a cross. Most significantly, Walton has mistranslated Donne’s Spanish motto—Antes muerto que mudado—which actually means ‘Rather dead than changed,’ an unwaveringly stoic asseveration far in spirit from Walton’s lines of elegiac wonderment. Donne’s rigid motto is pathetic and ironical, not in Watson’s sense of a contrast between youth and age, but in that its histrionic defiance suggests a rueful, cynical premonition of inconstancy. The line of verse is regendered from Montemayor’s Diana (a romance much read at European courts in the late 1580s), where it appears as the oath of a shepherd’s mistress, ironically quoted by the shepherd after her marriage to someone else. So the eager swordsman holding up his sword swears an oath of steadfastness. But the viewer should remember what Donne knew: Diana was not faithful. Originally a woman’s words, the motto thus suggests a self-conscious comment on the swordsman’s pose, implying that it is only a pose, albeit one that Donne had held for some time and was to hold for several years after 1591. Clearly the portrait suggests some things that Walton does not mention. Most obviously there is the martial flavor of the whole ensemble. The sword and the motto both contribute to this effect. Is Donne here dressed in a soldier’s uniform? Is there a militant intensity, even an arrogance in his facial expression? In any case there can be little doubt that at the time when clothes and manners were consciously chosen as ritualistic emblems, Donne meant to convey a definite message through the symbolism of his portrait. This message is certainly not the message Walton gives us—that the young Donne was a fop. Far from giddiness or gayety, and despite Walton’s inclination to misinterpret and dismiss the pose as mere vanity, the portrait makes purposeful reference to Donne’s Catholic and Welsh ancestry in two features that not only add to a generally martial impression but also 322 seem intended to symbolize Donne’s descent from both his father’s and his mother’s families. In harmony with the warlike flavor of the whole is the coat-of-arms, precisely designating John Donne an eldest son descended on his father’s side from the Welsh Dwns of Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire. From the time of King Arthur this family had borne swordsmen... The ultimate effect Walton missed in the portrait—especially in the sword, the motto, and earring—is the intimation of old-fashioned violence: a ‘language of the sword’ … But as Donne’s first portrait suggests (and as Huygens seems to have known) [Huygens said that Donne had been educated at Court by great persons since his infant years], his involvement with the Court was of longer duration and deeper significance than has been thought. John Stubbs (2007) writes: [O]ur first image of Donne. The portrait shows a skinny youngster, with long hair, brushed back; his forehead is high, his eyebrows arched, and a misty moustache is just appearing. He has dangly crucifix earrings and a big nose. The eyes are quite apart, and not quite straight; but the expression is level, assured. The neck and jawline are fleshless, making his smart padded doublet, and perhaps his own shoulders, seem a little too big for him. A fragile, effeminate hand rests on the hilt of a rapier at his side. A crest is on display: azure a wolf salient, with a crest of snakes bound up in a sheath … Donne chose a Spanish motto –suggesting Roman Catholic, perhaps even seditious affinities: ‘Antes muerto que mudado’–‘Sooner dead than changed.’ Like almost every other feature of the portrait, the phrase doesn’t quite fit; it seems wrong for a changing, maturing boy, but also for the mutable man he would become. And Albert C. Labriola (2011) thinks: The lost portrait miniature of 1591 was engraved by William Marshall for the 1635 edition of Poems, by J. D. The portrait shows Donne with his right hand holding the hilt of a sword pointed downward. His earring resembles a cross. And in Spanish, the motto of the portrait reads Antes muerto que mudado (‘Rather dead than changed’), an affirmation of militant and military honour (Flynn 1995:2). Perhaps Donne is pledging himself as a swordsman to uphold the honour of England against Spain. Now, our Aristotelian comment on all the doxa: 323 While Walton ignores the portrait and its symbols, Bald does not resolve the mystery of the portrait: a young man who was entering ‘the Inns of Court and of Chancery which had various sumptuary regulations ... forbidding the wearing of long hair and of swords,’ who was all the same wearing long hair and holding a sword. Flynn is on the right track when he says that this is a warlike figure of a young man who has been living around the court, but he takes his whole analysis to the ground when he says that the ironic motto converts the portrait into ‘a pose,’ a fake or a joke–just an appearance. Stubbs admits that he is lost when he says that like ‘almost every other feature of the portrait, the phrase [the motto] doesn’t quite fit; it seems wrong,’ while Labriola gets the matter right: ‘Donne is pledging himself as a swordsman to uphold the honour of England against Spain.’ But what kind of swordsman is this young Donne? A swordsman of the Faith, a defender of the Faith, a heroic poet, theologian and thinker. For this sword is the word of God, the ‘sword of the Spirit.’ Scene IV. The battle between Harvey and Nashe We have said already that Harvey laughed at Oxford in 1578 when he described that his eyes ‘shake speares.’ Now, Nina Green writes: The next provocative action against Oxford on Harvey’s part occurred in 1580 when, in an attempt at self-promotion, Harvey publicized some of his private correspondence with the poet Edmund Spenser, including his (Harvey’s) disquisition on the earthquake of April 6, 1580, in Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters. The volume was prefaced by a dedicatory essay by an anonymous ‘well-willer of the two authors’. Harvey always maintained that Three Letters had been published without his consent. However, in Strange News, Nashe ... accused Harvey of being solely responsible for the publication of Three Letters, stating flatly that he recognised Harvey as the anonymous ‘well-willer’ by his writing style. Included in Three Letters were English hexameter verses entitled Speculum Tuscanismi in which Harvey mocked Oxford as an Italianate Englishman, although without expressly naming him. In 1580 Harvey invented the anonymous ‘well-willer’ in the same way that he invented the E.K. persona. Green continues: In Three Letters itself, these verses are termed by Harvey ‘a bold satirical libel’, and in his private letter-book, which is still extant, Harvey confirmed that the verses were aimed at Oxford, and directly linked them to his Gratulationes Valdinenses speech to Oxford in 324 1578. Leicester had long since ‘shaken off’ Harvey as an employee and follower, but it would seem that Harvey still thought of himself as a partisan in the Leicester camp. The question is that in 1592 Robert Greene (Oxford or, what seems most certain, a ‘university wit’ using this mask) published a pamphlet called Quip for an Upstart Courtier ‘which contained the insult that pushed Gabriel Harvey over the edge,’ and he and his brother Richard Harvey replied with The Lamb of God. Nashe felt aggrieved, and reacted with force against the Harveys in Pierce Penniless. Harvey then replied, surprisingly for the London public, by apologising to his pupil Nashe in his Four Letters of 1592, which contents we can now quote: Pierce Penilesse (although the devil’s orator by profession, and his dame’s poet by practice), in such a flush of notable good-fellows cannot possibly want many to read him, enough to excuse him, a few to commend him, some to believe him, or to credit any that tickleth the right vein and feedeth the riotous humour of their licentious vanity. The fact that Harvey writes that Nashe is ‘his Dame’s poet by practice’ makes us pause, for at that time Nashe had not written any poetry at all to a Lady. Here, I guess, DINS theory may be of help: Harvey is commenting what Donne did in 1591 with the Spenser mask, because in 1591 he published two volumes of poetry, Complaints and Daphanaïda, and dedicated some poems of the former and the one of Daphanaïda to ‘Ladie Marie, Countesses of Pembrooke,’ to ‘Ladie Strange,’ to ‘Ladie Compton and Mountegle,’ to ‘Ladie Carey,’ and to ‘Ladie Helena Marquesse of North-hampton.’ In Complaints, “The Printer to the Gentle Reader” reads: To which effect I vnderstand that he besides wrote sundrie others, namelie Ecclesiastes, & Canticum canticorum translated, A senights slumber, The hell of louers, his Purgatorie, being all dedicated to Ladies; so as it may seem he ment them all to one volume. Also, we should not ignore the possibility that here Harvey is alluding, with ‘dame’s poet,’ to the Italian meaning of ‘donne,’ which is ‘dames’ or ‘women.’ The exception to this is the poem dedicated to Leicester, Virgil’s Gnat. As incest and reproach is what the poet is commenting in his dedication to Leicester-King Claudius, I think we may presume that this poem in particular was written by Oxford-Hamlet. A good study of this question will decide. Harvey continues his reply to Nashe: 325 To stop the beginning is no bad purpose where the end may prove pernicious or perilous. Venom is venom, and will infect; when the dragon’s head spitteth poison, what mischief may lurk in the dragon’s tail? If any distress be miserable, defamation is intolerable, especially to minds that would rather deserve just commendation than be any way blemished with unjust slander. Harvey deserved commendation for he was E.K., who commended Immerito’s poetry in 1578. He goes on: They that use to speak well of others, and endeavour to do well themselves (the defects of disability are not to be imputed to endeavour), would be sorry to hear amiss without cause of complaint or suspicion, and he that like a Lacedaemonian or Roman accounteth infamy worse than death would be loath to improve his courage or to employ his patience in digesting the pestilent bane of his life. That is done cannot de facto be undone, but I appeal to wisdom, how discreetly, and to justice, how deservedly, it is done, and request the one to do us reason in shame of impudency, and beseech the other to do us right in reproach of calumny. Harvey reminds Nashe-Immerito that he used to speak well of him and, note this, plays with these key words: ‘That is done … undonne … deservedly, it is done.’ As ‘Immerito’ means ‘undeservedly,’ the clues are unmistakable: ‘how deservedly, it is done.’ Harvey asks Donne-Nashe to stop writing pamphlets and to return to his Heliconian and heroic verse as Donne-Spenser: Be a musician and poet unto thyself, that art both, and a ringleader of both unto other; be a man, be a gentleman, be a philosopher, be a divine, be thy resolute self, not the slave of Fortune, that for every flea-biting crieth out, Alas, and for a few hungry meals, like a Greek parasite, misuseth the tragedy of Hecuba, but the friend of virtue, that is richest in poverty, freest in bondage, bravest in jeopardy, cheerfullest in calamity. Be rather wise and unfortunate, with the silver swan than fortunate and unwise with the golden ass. Remember thine own marginal emblem, Fortuna favet fatuis. O solace thy miraculous self, and cheer the muses in cheering thy dainty soul, sweetly drunken with their delicious Helicon and the restorative nectar of the gods. What can I say more? Not much, really. Harvey, nevertheless, needed to say more: 326 That cordial liquor [heroic verse] and that heavenly restorative [Heliconian nectar] be thy sovereign comfort, and scorn the baseness of every crazed or fainting thought that may argue a degenerate mind. And so much briefly touching thy dear self, whom I hope never to find so pathetically distressed, or so tragically disguised [as NasheMarlowe], again. Now a word or two concerning him who in charity kisseth thy hand, and in pity wisheth thee better luck. May it please gentle [i.e. a courtier, a noble] Pierce, in the divine fury [read Hobbinol’s sonnet to Spenser in The Faerie Queene] of his ravished spirit, to be graciously good unto his poor friends [Harvey-E.K.], who would be somewhat loath to be silly sheep for the wolf or other sheepbiter. Harvey now rebukes Donne-Immerito and recalls the times when he praised Churchyard: I dare undertake, the abused author of the Astrological Discourse (every page thereof, under correction of inspired and supernatural conceits, discovereth more art and judgment than the whole Supplication of the parturient mountain), notwithstanding the notorious diabolical discourse of the said Pierce, a man better acquainted with the devils of hell than with the stars of heaven, shall unfeignedly pray for him, and only pray him to report the known truth of his approved learning and living without favour. Otherwise, it were not greatly amiss a little to consider that he which in the ruff of his freshest jollity was fain to cry Master Churchyard a-mercy in print, may be orderly driven to cry more peccavis than one. I would think the Counter, Master Churchyard, his hostess Penia, and such other sensible lessons might sufficiently have taught him that Penilesse is not lawless, and that a poet’s or painter’s licence is a poor security to privilege debt or defamation. I would wish the burned child not to forget the hot element, and would advise overweening youths to remember themselves, and the good ancient oracle of sage Apollo. There is a certain thing called modesty, if they could light upon it, and by my young master’s leave, some pretty smack of discretion would relish well. Of Churchyard it can be said that he was rebuked by another poet, namely Thomas Camel, for his ‘uncouth speeche,’ which is the connection with Immerito-Donne’s ‘uncouth’ language. Nashe adored Churchyard and wrote in praise of his memory: 84 84 See http://gradworks.umi.com/3406047.pdf. The reference to ‘old Palemon’ in Spenser’s Colin Clout Come Home Again (1592) is said to be the representation of Churchyard in a degrading way. If DINS theory is sound, this identification is an error. 327 Thomas Nashe tells Churchyard, ‘I love you unfainedly, and admire your aged Muse, that may well be grand-mother to our grandeloquentest Poets at this present […] Shores wife is yong, though you be stept in yeares, in her shall you live when you are dead.’ Harvey continues his discourse: O brave Tarleton, thou wert he, when all is done. Had not Aretine been Aretine when he was, undoubtedly thou hadst been Aretine, gramercy capricious and transcendent wit, the only high pole Arctic and deep mineral of an incomparable style. Yet Tarleton’s jests not sufficient, but Roscius must have his stale to make him more admirable Harvey apologises for his jokes and sins of the decade of 1570: If in some terms I have used a little plain dealing, albeit not without respect (but everyone seeth not into another’s considerations, & divers circumstances alter the case), I crave pardon for the least oversight, and will be as ready to commend any little good, even in an adversary, as I was unwilling, but enforced, to touch some palpable bad, which I would wish amended where it may be redressed, and quite forgotten where it ought to be buried. My meaning was not to displeasure or discredit any, but only to satisfy the pleasure and maintain the credit of those unto whom I owe many duties, as well in special consideration as in natural affection. His duties were then bound to Leicester, he tells us. Harvey, again, recommends that Donne-Nashe-Spenser listen to his true identity, writing the name of Spenser to put the public off the trail: Good sweet orator, be a divine poet indeed, and use heavenly eloquence indeed, and employ thy golden talent with amounting usance indeed, and with heroical cantos honour right virtue & brave valour indeed, as noble Sir Philip Sidney and gentle Master Spenser have done with immortal fame, and I will bestow more compliments of rare amplifications upon thee than ever any bestowed upon them, or this tongue ever afforded, or any Aretinish mountain of huge exaggerations can bring forth. Right at the end, and before the sonnets, Harvey writes to Nashe that he is sorry for the attack on Oxford of 1580 while playing with Nashe real 328 surname: I love not to solicit them greatly that love to importune all other excessively. That little I have done, I have done compelled, and would wish undone rather than any storm of debate or the least fit of malice should ensue thereof. In Sonnet IX, with the title “His revival of a former motion, added at the instance of an especial friend,” he writes: Were I as meet, as willing, to advise, I would in amicable terms entreat Some forward wits to change their headlong guise... There is a time to speak, a time to write, But blessed be the time that sees and hears; Let petty stars suppress their twinkling light, And glorious sun advance his beamy peers. O you of golden mould that shine like sun, Display your heavenly gifts, and I have done. And the next sonnet X, “A more particular declaration of his intention,” reads: Yet let affection interpret self; Arcadia brave and doughty Faerie Queen Cannot be stained by Ghibelline or Guelph... Other fair wits I cordially embrace, And that sweet muse of azure dye admire, And must in every sonnet interlace The earthly sovereign of heavenly fire. A fitter place remaineth to implore Of deepest artists the profoundest lore. Finally, we should quote these words of Harvey before going to his pupil Nashe’s reply, for they are important: Even Tully and Horace otherwhiles overreached, and I must needs say Mother Hubbard, in heat of choler, forgetting the pure sanguine of her sweet Faerie Queen, wilfully overshot her malcontented self, as elsewhere I have specified at large 329 Now, Strange News was published just after Harvey’s pamphlet, in 1592, and the fire of the young genius, after defending “Mother Hubbard” poem of Spenser as if were his (which it was), explains what happened in 1580 with Harvey’s letters and his poem against the Tuscanism of Oxford: Needs he must cast up certain crude humours of English hexameter verses that lay upon his stomach; a nobleman stood in his way as he was vomiting, and from top to toe he all-to-bewrayed him with Tuscanism … Signor Immerito (so called because he was and is his friend undeservedly) was counterfeitly brought in to play a part in that his interlude of epistles that was hissed at, thinking his very name (as the name of Ned Alleyn on the common stage) was able to make an ill matter good … I durst on my credit undertake Spenser was no way privy to the committing of them to the print. Committing I may well call it, for in my opinion G.H. should not have reaped so much discredit by being committed to Newgate [i.e. the jail] as by committing that misbelieving prose to the press. Nashe is telling us two things: one, that Harvey stole Immerito’s letters from him and published them without his consent; and two, that without he being privy to it, he decided (with Leicester’s consent) to insult Oxford’s Tuscanism along the way. The most important thing is not only to see that Nashe knows all this and feel personally insulted, but a paramount silence. For if Edmund Spenser was a real poet living in Ireland (as the tale said), we might as well have expected that he could have sided with Harvey against Thomas Nashe, a thing that he did not. But why? Simple: because there was no poet in Ireland with that name. Is it not telling to see that Nashe and Harvey disputed for so long during the 1590s without Spenser intervening in the quarrel? If you link all this with the fact that the Irish exile never explained why he chose Immeritô as a pseudonym, together with the fact that the only one who explains the meaning of the pseudonym is Nashe, who seems to know Harvey from the very same publication of Immeritô’s letter the year of the earthquake in 1580, you will have enough clues to convince you that Nashe is Spenser, and Spenser is Donne, according to the evidence presented here, and according to the words of Donne’s first sermons of 1615, the very first year he was ordained. In here, John Donne links Christ the redeemer of our sins with the fact that we are saved ‘immerito’ before him, or saved ‘undeservedly’. It is Christ’s love for us, and not our own worth, what saves us. Donne writes: And in another place, Frustra, to no purpose; for it is a void bargain, because we had no title, no interest in our selves, when we sold our 330 selves; and it signifies, temere, rashly without consideration of our own value, upon whom God had stamped his image; And then again it signifies, Immerito, undeservedly, before God, in whose jurisdiction we were by many titles, had forsaken us, or done any thing to make us forsake him. One question now I asked myself: why did Donne choose the pseudonym ‘Immerito’ in relation to Oxford? Well, as far as I can see, I think he chose it because he had been accepted by Oxford as a friend undeservedly, as Donne-Nashe writes. The boy Donne had not title to merits Oxford’s help and guidance, but nevertheless the Prince protected him; because Oxford was the Tudor Prince, a royal person who, invested with Christ’s power on earth, was someone chosen by God to rule and govern over the people of England, and over Donne in particular. This is what Donne writes again and again in his Sermons when defending the policies of King James. That this six-year-old Donne could have written The Shepheard’s Calendar is unbelievable, but also think the same thing every time I listen to Mozart’s minuets and early symphonies. As in the case of Mozart, whose father guided and helped him, somebody must have helped the young Donne. Spenserians themselves declare, and I agree with them here, that the young Spenser wrote the work with the help of others, including among them Harvey, of course. Consider this: The Shepheard’s Calendar is full of attacks against Catholics and Rome. Now, go to The Faerie Queene, in which Harvey did not collaborate, and you will see that Spenser’s Protestant moderation is conspicuous. Moreover, Ben Jonson’s wonder at Donne’s utmost precocity in his epigram of 1616 should be sufficient to make us believe how Donne could have been said to have been ‘born wise rather than made born wise by study.’ He was, indeed, a new Pico della Mirandola. Oxford got his Schiller and with him by his side in London, like Goethe would do in Weimar centuries later, he created the revolution and miracle of Elizabethan’s Golden Age. There is another question I asked myself: if Oxford is the reason why the boy Donne chose the Immeritô pseudonym, why did he dedicate the poem to Philip Sidney? The answer seems to me to be this: Oxford was the Prince, but Sidney was his ideal Courtier, the one who taught Donne how to write metaphysical poetry, Neo-platonic poetry, something Oxford-Shakespeare could not. Donne, however, will move from Ovid to Virgil equally well, as his poem “Aire and Angels” from his Songs and Sonnets attests.85 As Donne-Nashe says in his Preface to Astrophel and Stella (1591) just from the start and opening with a thunder: ‘Tempus adest plausus, aurea pompa venit, so ends the scene of idiots, and enter 85 See Peter Desa Wiggins's brilliant study of this poem in his Donne, Castiglione and the Poetry of Courtliness, Indiana University Press, 2000. 331 Astrophel in pomp.’ Scene V. Samuel Daniel, sonnets to Delia Time has reserved a special place for Samuel Daniel and his cycle of sonnets Delia, published in 1592. Delia was the first model for a cycle of sonnets divided into three parts: sonnets, lyrical interlude, and narrative poem of complaint. This tripartite structure was copied, among many others, by Spenser with his Amoretti and by Shakespeare in his Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The moment we read Delia we sense that we are reading our poet’s laments and grief. For instance, in sonnet 5 we have the myth of Actaeon, so pervasive in Edward de Vere: Whilst youth and error led my wandring mind And set my thoughts in heedeles waies to range: All vnawares a Goddesse chaste I finde, Diana-like, to worke my suddaine change. For her no sooner had my view bewrayd, But with disdaine to see me in that place: With fairest hand, the sweete vnkindest maide, Castes water-cold disdaine vpon my face. Which turn’d my sport into a Harts dispaire, Which still is chac’d, whilst I have any breath, By mine owne thoughts: set on me by my faire, My thoughts like houndes, pursue me to my death. Those that I fostred of mine owne accord, Are made by her to murther thus their Lord. There have been critics who consider Daniel’s Delia the prototype of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets. It seems that it is the same voice singing one year before Venus and Adonis. In sonnet 21 we read: These sorrowing sighes, the smokes of mine annoy; These teares, which heate of sacred flame distils; Are these due tributes that my faith dooth pay Vnto the tyrant; whose vnkindnes kils. I sacrifize my youth, and blooming yeares, At her proud feete, and she respects not it: My flowre vntimely’s withred with my teares, And winter woes, for spring of youth vnfit. She thinkes a looke may recompence my care, And so with lookes prolongs my long-lookt ease: As short that blisse, so is the comfort rare, 332 Yet must that blisse my hungry thoughts appease. Thus she returnes my hopes so fruitlesse euer, Once let her loue indeede, or eye me neuer. The youth sacrificed by the lover-tyrant Queen is surprisingly accurate in the case of Edward de Vere and Elizabeth I. In sonnet 23 we read these impressive lines: Looke in my griefes, and blame me not to morne, From care to care that leades a life so bad; Th’Orphan of fortune, borne to be her scorne, Whose clouded brow dooth make my daies so sad. The expression ‘[t]h’Orphan of fortune, borne to be her scorne’ seems to be a confession of our poet, the bastard son of Elizabeth I. In sonnet 29 a reference is made to Narcissus and how he is turned into a flower when he learns who he is. In sonnet 31 the Rose (of the Tudor) is mentioned, and also the Time (that is left for him or his son to be recognised as legitimate); in sonnet 33 Time is mentioned again, as well as vengeance and her scorn; in sonnet 34 the monument that his verses create is mentioned together with the eternity they confer; and finally in sonnet 40 Cynthia and everlasting truth are also mentioned: My Cynthia hath the waters of mine eyes, The ready handmaides on her grace attending: That neuer fall to ebbe, nor euer dryes, For to their flowe she neuer graunts an ending. Th’Ocean neuer did attende more duely, Vppon his Soueraignes course, the nights pale Queene: Nor paide the impost of his waues more truely, Then mine to her in truth haue euer beene. Yet nought the rocke of that hard hart can moue, Where beate these teares with zeale, and fury driueth: And yet I rather languish in her loue Then I would ioy the fayrest she that liueth. I doubt to finde such pleasure in my gayning, As now I taste in compas of complayning. The play between ‘ever’ and ‘truth’ is our poet’s mark of identity, as Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn write: He certainly does not spare himself; for Isabella calls Angelo ‘A 333 hypocrite, a virgin-violator’ (V.i.41), adding, with enough name-clues to leave no possible doubt of the identity: It is not truer he is Angelo Than this is all as true as it is strange; Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth To the end of reckoning. This is the very essence of Oxford. (As Troilus, he will pun similarly on ‘truth’.) In sonnet 50 he will again mention ‘the Rose’ and in sonnet 48 he addresses Delia, his new lover who lives near the river Avon. It seems that this new love for Delia is none other than Elizabeth Trentham: None other fame myne vnambitious Muse, Affected euer but t’eternize thee: All other honours doe my hopes refuse, Which meaner priz’d and momentarie bee. For God forbid I should my papers blot, With mercynary lines, with seruile pen: Praising vertues in them that haue them not, Basely attending on the hopes of men. No no my verse respects nor Thames nor Theaters, Nor seekes it to be knowne vnto the Great: But Auon rich in fame, though poore in waters, Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seate. Auon shall be my Thames, and she my Song; Ile sound her name the Ryuer all along. Charles Wisner Barrel wrote an essay commenting on Ben Jonson’s phrase in the First Folio of 1623, ‘sweet swan of Avon.’ For Barrel, that epithet is a reference to the last country house our poet possessed until the end of his life, after having sold many others. That country house was the one at Bilton, in Warwickshire, from which one could enjoy the panorama over the prairies along the Avon. The town of Shakspere, Stratford-upon-Avon, is thirty (30) kilometers southwest. In the final sonnet number 60, the poet thus complains in the last verses: Wherein I thus do live cast down from mirth, Pensive alone, none but despair about me; My joys abortive, perish’d at their birth, My cares long liv’d and will not die without me. This is my state, and Delia’s heart is such; 334 I say no more; I fear I said too much. This ending couplet is the same one ‘Ignoto’ had written in praise of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene of 1590. Next to this cycle of sonnets there are two odes that function as a lyrical interlude, as a transition between the previous sonnets and the final narrative poem of complaint: “The Complaint of Rosamond.” Rosamond was, historically, a maid who lived in the country when King Edward II fell in love with, courted, enjoyed, and as legend has it, imprisoned her in a castle surrounded by a garden in the form of a labyrinth so that the queen could not see her. Rosamond would never escape from it. In this poem of complaint we feel the maid’s tragedy, suspense and horror. Her final death and the deep blame the poet places on himself reminds us of Romeo and Juliet, for Rosamond, abandoned by her king and lover, occult to all eyes, will end up poisoning herself. The king and poet will cry and sourly blame himself for his fault. It is interesting to see how the poet says that Rosamond has appeared to him like a ghost to tell him to write about her disgrace so that Delia and all mortals may learn from her mistakes. Her mistake, her sin, was to fall in love and abandon the countryside to come to Court. Delia, Rosamond’s ghost tells the poet, your Delia has done the right thing, for she lives happily in the country, in the West. Near the end of the narrative poem, when Rosamond’s ghost has disappeared, we read these beautiful lines: Then when confusion in her course shall bring, Sad desolation on the times to come: When myrth-lesse Thames shall haue no Swan to sing, All Musique silent, and the Muses dombe. And yet euen then it must be known to some, That once they florisht, though not cherisht so, And Thames had Swannes as well as ever Po. After reading the poem it seemed to me that the tragedy was pointing to Anne Cecil and Edward de Vere. Anne married a person high above her station; as Rosamond, Anne was the lover of a royal person, a Tudor Prince; like Rosamond, Anne could not aspire to be loved by that star to which Helena refers in All’s Well that Ends Well. The marriage turned into a nightmare and Anne, like Ophelia, fell into such an intense depression that it only could end with the tranquillity of death. The ghost of his first wife seems to be telling our poet that he must be happy with Delia, his new wife, Elizabeth Trentham, because she had not been happy, since he, her Prince, her Bretram, her Hamlet, had abandoned her. The ghost of Rosamond is the ghost of Ophelia. The sense of shame and guilt that our poet feels now is written in order to exorcise it, as a 335 kind of liberation. However, the wound will remain open, for the poem closes with these thoughts: So vanisht shee, and left me to returne, To prosecute the tenor of my woes: Eternall matter for my Muse to mourne, But ah the worlde hath heard too much of those, My youth such errors must no more disclose. Ile hide the rest, and greeue for what hath beene, Who made me knowne, must make me liue vnseene. This last couplet is revealing: he cannot be seen, he has to hide from the audience. If the reader wonders whether Daniel himself could not have been the true poet, Joe Sobran offers this valuable information: Samuel Daniel wrote loads of poetry after the exquisite sonnet cycle Delia, but none of it was anything like Delia: his major work was a verse history, so prosaic it’s almost doggerel. Here I found an interesting clue: Ben Jonson, who knew practically every writer in London, said that Daniel was ‘an honest man … but no poet.’ He could hardly have said that if he thought Daniel wrote Delia. An eminent expert in Elizabethan literature, C.S. Lewis, says about Daniel: In 1591 we reach a sonneteer who matters. In that year Newman’s edition of Sidney’s Astrophel included twenty-eight sonnets by Samuel Daniel (1563-1631). In the following year Daniel published his sequence Delia which omitted a few of those printed by Newman and added many others, bringing the total up to fifty-five. Delia stands in a different class from the rest of Daniel’s work; if he had written nothing else we might hear less of Daniel but we should certainly hear less of ‘the prosaic Daniel’. For assuredly those who like their poetry ‘not too darn poetical’ should avoid Delia. It offers no ideas, no psychology, and of course no story: it is simply a masterpiece of phrasing and melody … In him, as in Shakespeare, the most ordinary statement turns liquid and delicious. On the epic poem Daniel published with the title The First Four Books of his Civil wars between Lancaster and York in 1595, C.S. Lewis comments: 336 He does not expect his work to be judged as ‘pure’ literature. We must not therefore be surprised if it is often prosaic ... or if what would have been excellent prose ... makes very tame verse. What is less pardonable is the clumsiness with which some sentences are forced into the metre as in And so become more popular by this; Which he feares, too much he already is (I. 63). Regarding Daniel’s last works, C.S. Lewis tells us: ‘Daniel’s Senecan closet dramas hardly concern us. His lyrical gifts were small.’ Daniel’s strange poetical evolution is explained when we see that Delia was written by that chameleon that always changed colours because he could not be detected. And when he gave this poem to Daniel, we understand that the community of poets considered him to be a great Maecenas. He was crowning all of them kings of England, as ‘Lord Tamburlaine’ said. In 1592 Thomas Nashe published his satirical pamphlet Pierce Penniless. That Nashe is the mask of a young John Donne is confirmed again when he praises the most eminent preacher of Elizabethan times, Henry Smith: Silver-tongued Smith, whose well-tuned style hath made thy death the general tears of the Muses … Hence alone did it proceed, that thou wert such a plausible pulpit man, that before entereds into the rough ways of theology, thou refinedst, preparedst, and purifidest thy mind with sweet poetry. One year later, in 1593, Nashe the satirist will publish his theological pamphlet Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem. This was the beginning of a career devoted to the writing of sermons and divine thoughts and dreaming of ideals in an eternal paradise. Donne was on the move towards his natural ordination of 1615. He seems to be following Harvey’s advice. He was going to ‘be a man … a gentleman … a philosopher … a divine.’ Scene VI. ‘The most portentous miracle of Ninety Three’ Nashe’s dedication of 1592 in Strange News deserves a full quote and further comments. As Charles Wisner Barrell writes, what Nashe is trying to do is to have Oxford join him in his battle against Harvey. Nashe writes to the Epistle Dedicatory of Strange News (the numbers in brackets are Barrell’s): 337 To the most copious Carminist of our time, (1) and famous persecutor of Priscian, (2) his very friend (3) Master Apis Lapis, (4) Tho. Nashe wisheth new strings to his old tawny purse, (5) and all honourable increase of acquaintance in the cellar. (6) Gentle M William, (7) that learned writer, Rhenish wine & sugar, in the first book of his comment upon red-noses, hath this saying, Veterem ferendo iniuriam inuitas nouam, which is as much in English as, One cup of nippitate pulls on another. In moist consideration whereof, as also in zealous regard of that high countenance you show unto scholars, (8) I am bold, instead of new wine, to carouse to you a cup of news, which, if your Worship (according to your wonted Chaucerism) (9) shall accept in good part, I’ll be your daily orator to pray that that pure sanguine complexion of yours may never be famished with pot-luck, that you may taste till your last gasp, and live to see the confusion of both your special enemies, small beer and grammar rules. (10) It is not unknown to report what a famous pottle-pot patron you have been to old poets in your days & how many pounds you have spent (and, as it were, thrown into the fire) upon the dirt of wisdom called alchemy. Yea, you have been such an infinite Maecenas to learned men that not any that belong to them (as sumners, and who not) but have tasted of the cool streams of your liberality. I would speak in commendation of your hospitality likewise, but that it is chronicled in the archdeacon’s court, and the fruits it brought forth (as I guess) are of age to speak for themselves. Why should virtue be smothered by blind circumstance? An honest man of Saffron Walden kept three sons at the university together a long time, and you kept three maids together in your house a long time. A charitable deed, & worthy to be registered in red letters … Proceed to cherish thy surpassing carminical art of memory with full cups (as thou dost); let Chaucer be new scoured against the day of battle, and Terence come but in now and then with the snuff of a sentence, and Dictum puta, we’ll strike it as dead as a door-nail; Haud teruntii estimo, we have cat’s-meat and dog’s-meat enough for these mongrels. However I write merrily, I love and admire thy pleasant witty humour, which no care or cross can make unconversable. Still be constant to thy content, love poetry, hate pedantism... Thine entirely, Tho. Nashe Barrell glosses this epistle of Nashe in his article “Contemporary Proof that the Poet Earl of Oxford’s Literary Nickname Was ‘Gentle Master William’” (The Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 4, 338 Oct. 1944): 1.- ‘To the most copious Carminist of our time’: To the most productive poet of the years immediately preceding 1593; one who must have written more poetry than the great and industrious Spenser himself to call forth this statement … Nashe anticipates John Webster, a later contemporary of Lord Oxford, who speaks of ‘the right happy and copious industrie of Master Shakespeare.’ 2.- ‘and famous persecutor of Priscian’: [M]eans a writer who will not be bound by scholastic rules of grammar. Priscian, the great Latin grammarian, was the recognised standard of the universities. Those who through ignorance or wilfulness violated the polite usage were said to ‘break Priscian’s head.’ … Oxford was no finical priscian, as his signed writings bear witness; and Shakespeare frequently invents his own grammar rules. He certainly pokes all manner of fun at the precise grammarian, Holofernes, who expresses himself [in Love’s Labour’s Lost] very much in the style of Gabriel Harvey. 3.- ‘his very friend’: [I]s his true friend, the word ‘verie’ being a characteristic Nashe pun upon Oxford’s family name of Vere which the Earl himself puns upon extensively in a letter to his wife. In fact, Lord Oxford’s armorial motto–now known to have been invented by himself— is a pun. Vero nihil verius is usually translated as Nothing truer than truth. But experts in the College of Heralds read it as No greater verity than in Vere. The persistent way in which the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets applies the word truth and its derivatives to himself cannot be overlooked—‘No shape so true, no truth of such account,’ &c. 4.- ‘Master Apis Lapis’: This classically derived allegorical pun appears to have stumped every editor of Strange News up to the present day. Grosart and Prof. McKerrow both read it as ‘Master Bee Stone’ and conclude that The Epistle Dedicatorie is addressed to a certain shadowy William Beeston, a person unaccounted for beyond the uncorroborated statement that he was a brother of Christopher Beeston, an actor in the company of Lord Strange who later is styled ‘servant’ or valet to the Shakespearean player, Augustine Phillips. John Payne Collier seems to be responsible for the statement that William Beeston was ‘a man of some authority on matters of poetry.’ But as verification of this claim is lacking, it can be ignored as one of Collier’s many fictions [i.e. Collier was caught committing fraud in documents to support the Shakspere myth as the famous poet and 339 playwright]. I endorse (and amplify) Gerald W. Phillips’ 1936 definition of Apis Lapis as a punning reference to Oxford in the following analysis: Apis here means the sacred bull of Egypt, frequently mentioned by Greek and Roman writers. Lapis can be nothing else but stone or stoned. And as a stoned or castrated bull becomes an ox, so Master Apis Lapis in Nashe’s ribald pun becomes Master Sacred Ox, or the disabled and frustrated Earl of Oxford in professional mufti. 5.- ‘Tho. Nashe wisheth new strings to his old tawnie Purse’: [E]xpresses a desire to see the nobleman recover some of the material prosperity he once enjoyed. Reading tawny and Oxford blue are the historic colors of the House of Vere. 6.- ‘and all honourable increase of acquaintance in the Cellar’: Nashe hopes that Oxford will either come out of retirement … This phrase is an echo or sequel to some of the lines that Spenser in 1591 devoted to ‘our pleasant Willy’ in The Tears of the Muses [one year before this pamphlet of Nashe]. 7.- ‘Gentle M(aster) William’: Nashe’s familiar salutation to his ‘verie friend’ and patron must be considered testimony of outstanding importance in definitely settling the matter of Lord Oxford’s Shakespearean nickname. For if this ‘most excellent’ of the Elizabethan Court poets and foremost comic playwright listed by Francis Meres was familiarly known to the London literati of the 1590’s as ‘Gentle M(aster) William’–as this contemporary document proves—as well as the voluminous writer of ‘English measures’ whose ‘countenance shakes a spear’ in Harvey’s oration, he is unquestionably the long-sought genius who belongs to the ages! 8.- ‘in zealous regard of that high countenance you shew unto scholars’: [F]its the Earl of Oxford so realistically that it is unnecessary to labor the point. Ward reproduces the testimony of such Elizabethan scholars as Lawrence Nowell, Thomas Underdoun, Arthur Golding, Thomas Twyne, Thomas Bedingfield, John Lyly, Anthony Munday, Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Watson, Robert Greene, George Chapman, Edmund Spenser and others in various fields of learning. Oxford was more than generous to creative scholars. As Sir Sidney Lee admits, the Earl was so prodigal in his patronage of writers that he strained his own resources to do them honor. 9.- ‘according to your wonted Chaucerism’: [C]haracterizes Oxford in his own person as an admirer of Chaucer and a follower of his artistic aims. Proof of the Earl’s special interest in Chaucer appears in an old account book, itemizing purchases made 340 for him when Oxford was a Royal Ward during 1569-1570 … As for the mature Shakespeare, he is universally known for his ‘wonted Chaucerism.’ The Bard not only dramatized Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Cressida, his reflections from the early master are too numerous to list. ‘Chaucer … is our only author preceding Shakespeare with whom we feel thoroughly at home,’ writes W.J. Long in his textbook English Literature. And Leigh Hunt’s essay on Chaucer states: ‘His nature is the greatest poet’s nature, omitting nothing in its sympathy, in which respects he is nearer to Shakespeare than either of their two illustrious brethren.’ Regarding William of Stratford—his proponents sadly admit there is no extant record to show that he ever possessed a single book; not a Chaucer, nor even one of the many volumes so generously credited to his ‘authorship.’ 10.- ‘both your special enemies, Small Beer and Grammar rules’: Reemphasizing and amplifying Nashe’s earlier references to OxfordShakespeare as a ‘famous persecutor of Priscian,’ these comments prove the irrepressible Tom’s keen understanding of his patron’s creative idiosyncrasies. It has been pointed out that Lord Oxford hardly ranks as a grammarian purist in his private writings. And when experts examine those issued under his professional mask, they never cease marveling at the grammatical licence which the Bard allows himself. Dr. Schmidt devotes about ten large pages of doublecolumned fine print in his monumental Shakespeare-Lexicon to the recording of the great man’s struggle with ‘grammar rules.’ Not only is the relationship of the noun and its adjective frequently inverted and seemingly confounded; adverbs are used for adjectives; the usually active gerund takes on a passive sense; the abstract is used for the concrete and the concrete for the abstract; prefixes and suffixes are both royally ignored; the whole is issued for a part and vice versa; with the transposition of words sometimes resulting in nothing so much as glorious verbal music. All admirers of Julius Caesar will recall the poet’s slashing double superlatives, such as ‘most unkindest cut’; but not so many may recall the unusual triple negative, ‘nor never none,’ spoken by Viola at the end of Scene 1, Act II, Twelfth Night. Who can doubt the relish with which Nashe’s patron wrote the scene in Henry VI where Jack Cade condemns Lord Say to death for having ‘most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school’? Donne-Nashe is telling Oxford to come out of his cell and join him in the literary fight. In 1593 Thomas Nashe, or our young John Donne, published a theological pamphlet called Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem. In this work Donne-Nashe talks about the atoms of the Sun and St. 341 Agustin, or physics and theology, a clear sign of Donne’s varied knowledge. This pamphlet by Nashe can be read as one of John Donne’s early sermons. Nashe writes: O Augustine, now I call to mind the tale of thy conversion, in the sixth chapter of thy sixth book of Confessions, where describing thyself to be a young man puffed up with the ambition of that time, thou wert chosen to make an oration before the emperor, in which (having toiled thy wits to their highest wrest) thou thought’st to have purchased heaven and immortality … To this scope (reverend Augustine) tended thy plaintive speech, though I have not expressed it in the same words, but the operation in thee it brought forth was, that from the meditation of beggarly content, thou waded’st (by degrees) into the depth of the true heavenly content. O singular work contrived by weak means. O rarely honoured beggary, to be the instrument of recalling so rich a soul. O faithless and perverse generation (saith Christ unto us, as he said to the Jews), how long shall I be with you, how long shall I suffer you, ere my miracles work in you the like meditation? All of you are ambitious of much prosperity, long life and many days for your bodies; none of you have care of the prosperity of your souls … There is a place in the isle of Paphos where there never fell rain; there is a place within you called your hearts, where no drops of the dew of grace can have access. Our days are as swift as a post, yea, swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they fly, and see no good thing, yet fly you swifter to hell than they. Veniunt anni ut eant (saith Augustine), non veniunt tu stant, Years come that they may travel on, and not stand still; passing by us, they spoil us, and lay us open to the tyranny of a crueler enemy, death. O, if we love so this miserable and finite life, how ought we to love that celestial and infinite life where we shall enjoy all pleasures so plentiful that ambition shall have nothing overplus to work on! Donne’s hero, as scholars recognise, was Augustine. ‘I am loath to part from this father, and he is loath to be parted from,’ Donne says in one of his sermons.86 The fact is that in the spring of 1593, Harvey replied to Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem in a very distinct and clear manner. Harvey’s pamphlet Gorgon, or the Wonderful Year (1593) starts like this: Lord have mercy upon thee, O little little Turk. Pride may exalt his haughty presumptions, and prowess advance his terrible bravery, but 86 See See Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (2001). 342 there is a God in heaven, and they cannot laugh long that make the devil laugh and Christ weep. The ‘little little Turk’ is Nashe. But Nashe as Turk. Why? We do not know yet. The argument of Harvey here is his young enemy’s repentance: ‘Some have repented them no less than four and twenty hours in a day and a night for one froward word.’ Harvey continues: Every exchange for the better doth well, and it is a good sign when puddle waters grow clear, if they grow clear, and disordered wits become tractable, if they become tractable … When the sweet youth haunted Aretine and Rabelais, the two monstrous wits of their languages, who so shaken with the furious fevers of the one, or so attainted with the French pox of the other? Now he hath a little mused upon the Funeral Tears of Mary Magdalen, and is egged on to try the suppleness of his pathetical vein in weeping the compassionatest and divinest tears that ever heavenly eye rained upon earth; Jesu, what a new work of supererogation have they achieved! … I was saying, What say you to a spring of rankest villainy in February, and a harvest of ripest divinity in May? This is the only point then: the conversion and repentance of the young wit. Let us listen: But what should we hereafter talk any more of paradoxes or impossibilities, when he that penned the most desperate and abominable pamphlet of Strange News, and disgorged his stomach of as poisonous rancour as ever was vomited in print, within few months is won, or charmed, or enchanted (or what metamorphosis should I term it) to astonish carnal minds with spiritual meditations upon one of the most sacred and Godful arguments that the holiest devotion could admire in the profoundest trance of rapt seraphical zeal? Now Harvey declares that his young adversary used to be his friend, and he his Socrates: Socrates professed nothing, and I profess less than Socrates, yet this I profess. He that neither cockereth himself, nor loveth to be lulled or smoothed up of friends, can lightly put up the heaviest load of an enemy, and he can hardly be daunted with nipping words that is not easily dismayed with pinching deeds. 343 ‘He’ is Harvey-Socrates (as in the Hobbinol gloss in The Shepheard’s Calender, ‘January’; note the paederast relationship between them), here declaring himself the teacher or tutor (‘profess’) of his once former pupil, now young adversary, whose attacks cannot hurt him, because Harvey is guarded by a ‘gentlewoman rare’ whose identity is allegorical, for ‘she is a personal humanity, a mere courtesy, and a clemency incorporate.’ She is like Socrate’s Diotima. She is Eros, love, courtesy and clemency. He makes her tell Nashe all this: I could be content a drunken prose and a mad rime were thy deadliest sins. But they are sweet youths that tipple their wits with quaffing of knavery, and carousing of atheism. If there be no other jollities at home, or braveries abroad, it is happy for them that were born with those prizes in their throats. And welfare a frolic courage that will needs be the Tower of Babylonian conceit, and with a mighty bulwark of supererogation gloriously confound itself. Harvey’s Diotima is telling Nashe’s Gorgon what his ‘five wits’ are: they are full of atheism, ‘Babylonian conceit’, and glorious, proud mightiness confounding itself. Gorgon is Harvey’s reply to the confession of Nashe in Strange News: ‘I have written in all sorts of humours privately, I am persuaded, more than any young man of my age in England.’ This statement full of bravado should prepare us for new discoveries in the future concerning his Gorgonian wits or masks: for the young man is telling the simple truth. The young man has written a lot, as Harvey said in his Four Letters (1592): ‘Be a musician and poet unto thyself, that art both, and a ringleader of both unto other; be a man, be a gentleman, be a philosopher, be a divine, be thy resolute self.’ As Harvey said in 1592, ‘a famous deviser in folio’ cannot be trusted. In Pierce’s Supererogation (1593) Harvey is telling the same thing. Nashe is a Gorgon, a monster, the proud wit of the land: But what approved man of learning, wisdom, or judgement ever deigned him any honour of importance, or commendation of note, but the young darling of St. Fame, Thomas Nashe, alias Pierce Penilesse, the second leviathan of prose, and another behemoth of rime? He it is that is born to glorify Aretine Let us continue reading his Gorgon against his former pupil and now monstrous adversary: The only reason of my demurrer is my assurance, which consisteth rather in diffidence than in credulity, and cannot warrantise itself 344 what will be done until it is done. He were very simple that, having so heavy causes of diffidence, and so light causes of credulity, would run hastily into the trap, or suffer himself to be presently entangled in the snare. This will only be understood when you read Harvey’s The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, for in there he, at last, told the truth and shaved Nashe of his Gorgonian disguise. Harvey will not accept Nashe’s repentance until ‘what will be done … it is done.’ In other words: until the real author says so himself to him in person, not through print and using a mask. This is what Harvey says after those words above: Parley is a subtle sophister, flattery a tickling solicitor, and persuasion an enchanting witch. I cannot but listen unto them with an itching ear, and conceive as it were a tang of pleasure in mine own displeasure, but without legem pone, words are wind, and without actual performance, all nothing. Apologies won’t be accepted unless Nashe take out his masks: Truce was ever a redoubtable friend, & suspicion hath cause to look upon reconciliation with a jealous eye. Reconciliation is a sweet word, but entire reconciliation a rare thing, & a strange restorative, whose sweetness lieth not in the tip of the tongue or in the neb of the pen, but in the bottom of the heart & in the bowels of the mind; the mind that daily improveth itself the only deep politician & inscrutable hypocrite. Whose inwardest secrets, notwithstanding, are not so profound or close, especially in the shallow breast of inconsiderate youth, but they may in sort be sounded & discovered by a cunning observation of circumstances. No reconciliation until the masks (‘interposed persons’) are out, that is the point: I have earnestly and instantly craved personal conference, but that should seem to make little for his purpose, or might have been granted with less suit. All must be done by the mediation of a third, and a fourth, and such an intercourse as I may probably have in some jealousy, though I conceive well of the interposed persons. This literary masks Harvey knows them, for he can ‘conceive well … the interposed persons.’ Until that time, war goes on in print: 345 They that know the danger of truces and the covin of treaties, ut supra, must beg leave to ground their repose upon more cautels than one, and to proceed in terms of suspense or pause till they may be resolved with infallible assurance [i.e. without masks interposed: in person]. For mine own determination, I see no credible hope of peace but in war, and could I not command that I desire, I am persuaded I should hardly obtain that I wish. I love osculum pacis, but hate osculum Judae, and reverence the tears of Christ, but fear the tears of the crocodile. The following words are dangerous for his young adversary: Were I not content, in some little hope of his final recovery either in deed or in show, to do him a meritorious favour by concealing his utter discredit, I could easily, and would notoriously, make him ashamed of some his late sayings and doings, O Lord, how unbeseeming the tears of Christ, & alas, how likely to fore-run a miserable destiny? Let him reform his public, & redress his private, enormities, & with a sincere vow I swear him friendship, or let him rest quiet, & I am quiet. Harvey is doing his young monstrous adversary a favor, ‘a meritorious favor.’ How? By ‘concealing his utter discredit’ which would be declaring who he is without masks. That would have killed the young Donne; that would ‘make him ashamed of some his late sayings and doings’; more dangerously for Donne, that declaration of Harvey would have caused him his ‘utter discredit’ among the Court and his social, noble circle. Harvey is now on fire: Though Greene were a Julian and Marlowe a Lucian, yet I would be loath he should be an Aretine, that paraphrased the inestimable books of Moses, and discoursed the capricious dialogues of rankest bawdry; that penned one apology of the divinity of Christ, and another of paederastice, a kind of harlotry not to be recited; that published the life of the Blessed Virgin, and the Legend of the Errant Putana; that recorded the history of St. Thomas of Aquin, and forged the most detestable black book De tribus impostoribus mundi. O monster of extremities, and O abomination of outrageous wit. Nashe is a Gorgon, a ‘monster of extremities,’ an ‘abomination of outrageous wit.’ The Legend of the Errant Putana is alluding to that other legend of the Errant Lady, or Una in The Faerie Queene, published in 1590. That work could be The Choice of Valentines, ‘a kind of harlotry 346 not to be recited.’ Harvey tells his Gorgon pupil that it is fine to be a divine poet but not a blasphemous one. These words allude, for me, to Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine: Hyperbolical virtues (it is Aristotle’s epithet) are heavenly miracles, and hideous excellency an heroical wonder, like the labours of Hercules, and the bounties of errant knights, but superlative knavery is a rank villain, and UGLY BLASPHEMY a foul devil, tormented with his own damnable mouth. It is not puffing, or blustering in bombasted terms or Babylonian phrases … If humanity will needs grow miraculous, it must fly with the wing of divinity, not flutter with the plume of atheism, or hoise the sail of presumption. Whosoever despiseth the majesty of heaven, or playeth the Democritus in God’s cause, be his wit never so capon-crammed with vanity, or his heart never so toad-swollen in surquidry, is the abjectest vermin and vilest pad that creepeth on the earth. If there be no such matter in the world, all the better; if there be, woe be to the authors of their own confusion, and blessed they that take forth a good lesson from other men’s miscarriage. In other words: it is fine to be a proud, excellent poet of heroic poetry telling ‘the bounties of errant knights’ as Gorgon did in 1590 in The Faerie Queene with ‘bombastic terms,’ but to be just that in a blasphemous play of a tormented scholar like Dr. Faustus is utterly ugly, and to do that in ‘Babylonian phrases’ as in Tamburlaine is ‘ugly blasphemy.’ Harvey is repeating his words of 1592: be a musician, be a man, be a gentleman, be a philosopher, be a divine, not a tragedian, not the follower of ‘the slave of Fortune’ and the abuser of the tragedy of Hecuba, that is: do not follow Oxford-Shakespeare as the author of Hamlet and bastard son of the Queen, but be yourself as you truly are: ‘If humanity will needs grow miraculous, it must fly with the wing of divinity, not flutter with the plume of atheism, or hoise the sail of presumption.’ Socrates the teacher tells his Gorgon pupil a lesson now: He is the perfect orator that figureth and representeth everything in art as it is in nature, that dispatcheth light points roundly, handleth weightier matter more substantially, in the gravest subject proceedeth with due reverence, and of faith discourseth faithfully, of heaven heavenly, of divinity divinely, of Christ like Christ. Dalliance in the sagest and highest causes is an absurdity, and like a ridiculous vice in a tragedy, or a poisonous serpent in paradise. Cut your Gorgonian wits and masks, and be yourself, says Harvey: 347 I would every author that hath done no better had done no worse, and it were to be wished that some desperate wits were not so forward to disbowel the entrails of their own impious minds … Greene and Marlowe might admonish other to advise themselves, and I pray God the promised tears of repentance prove not the tears of the onion upon the Theatre. Harvey ends telling his young pupil to apologise to him in person, without masks, in public, not in print and ‘upon the shadow’; also, that what he is telling him is for his own benefit and ‘instruction’: To make short ... he that longeth to enjoy the fruit of private amity and public favour hasteth not to embrace the blossom, or to dote upon the shadow. His only small request and affectionate prayer is that howsoever poor men be used, the dear tears of Christ and the cheap tears of repentance be not abused. All is well that endeth effectually well, & so in some haste he endeth, that wisheth you entirely well, and for your instruction can assure you he needeth not to send to Athens for honey, or to Spain for sugar, or to Italy for aniseeds, or to the Orient for sanders or pearls, that may find as fine and dainty choice nearer hand. Now comes the Sonnets which say the same thing to his Gorgonian, young pupil behind his masks. They do not talk of anything else but what has been said above: Gorgon, or the Wonderful Year St. Fame, disposed to cony-catch the world, Upreared a wonderment of eighty-eight; The earth, adreading to be overwhirled, What now avails, quoth she, my balance weight? The circle smiled to see the centre fear; The wonder was, no wonder fell that year. Wonders enhance their power in numbers odd; The fatal year of years is ninety-three; Parma hath kissed, De Mayenne entreats, the rod; War wondereth, peace in Spain and France to see; Brave Eggenberg the doughty bashaw shames; The Christian Neptune Turkish Vulcan tames; Navarre woos Rome, Charlemagne gives Guise the fie; Weep, Paul’s, thy Tamburlaine vouchsafes to die. L’envoy The hugest miracle remains behind, 348 The second Shakerley rash-swash to bind. The key terms here are simple: if in 1588 you were Tamburlaine, mighty and a conqueror, now you are a weeping Christ and ‘vouchasfes to die.’ Harvey does not believe in this ‘second Shakerley rash-swash’ or new baptism. ‘The Christian Neptune Turkish Vulcan tames’. Harvey does not believe this. It is another imposture. Lately (a year ago), some critics have seen what Harvey is telling us here: ‘Nashe’s Christ speaks in the language of Tamburlaine while threatening destruction to Jerusalem.’ (The Age of Thomas Nashe, ed. Stephen Guy-Bray et al., Ashgate, 2013, p. 32) Then a poem on the ‘gentlewoman rare’ of Eros commented above, with a final gloss who tells the same thing as stated in prose: Gloss Is it a dream, or is it the highest mind That ever haunted Paul’s, or hunted wind, Bereft of that same sky-surmounting breath, That breath that taught the tympany to swell? He and the plague contended for the game; The haughty man extols his hideous thoughts, And gloriously insults upon poor souls That plague themselves, for faint hearts plague themselves, The tyrant sickness of base-minded slaves, Oh, how it domineers in Coward Lane; So surquidry rang out his larum-bell, When he had girned at many a doleful knell. The grand disease disdained his toad conceit, And, smiling at his Tamburlaine contempt, Sternly struck home the peremptory stroke; He that nor feared God, nor dreaded devil, Nor aught admired but his wondrous self, Like Juno’s gaudy bird, that proudly stares On glittering fan of his triumphant tail, Or like the ugly bug that scorned to die, And mounts of glory reared in towering wit. Alas, but Babel pride must kiss the pit. L’envoy Paul’s steeple, and a hugier thing is down; Beware, the next bull-beggar of the town. Fata immature vagantur. F.G. Hubbard (Possible Evidence for the Date of Tamburlaine, PMLA, 349 Vol. 33, No. 3, 1918, pp. 436-443) tried to see what work Nashe wrote in 1588, and could see none. As he was thinking that Tamburlaine was Marlowe’s work, he could not see a solution. But he did understand that the play was referenced for that is clear to see. Now, the solution to this mystery is easy once you listen to Harvey’s mockery and ignore the literary brands: Tamburlaine was mighty in 1588, but now he is weeping in 1593. Who? The author of both works: Nashe. An inconvenience to this theory could be said to come with Robert Greene and his “anger” caused by ‘two fantastical scholars’ who have written atheist things like Tamburlaine and laughed at him (poor, poor Greene). The words were published in 1588 in Perimedes, the Blacksmith: I keep my old course, to palter up something in prose, using mine old poesy still, Omne tulit punctum, although lately two gentlemen poets made two madmen of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers, & had it is derision for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fabunden of Bow-bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun. But let me rather openly pocket up the ass at Diogenes’ hand than wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry, such mad and scoffing poets that have prophetical spirits, as bred of Merlin’s race. If there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in an English blank verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with selflove, or too much frequenting the hothouse (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits, which wastes gradatim, as the Italians say, poco a poco. If I speak darkly, gentlemen, and offend with this digression, I crave pardon in that I but answer in print what they have offered on the stage. But leaving these fantastical scholars, as judging him that is not able to make choice of his chaffer but a peddling chapman, at last to Perimedes the blacksmith Considering the confirmation of Spenser as Donne now, and the situation of Nashe as Marlowe and the personal anger against Kyd, together with Nashe’s siding with Greene in here against Harvey and their school; and considering how the very same Nashe and Harvey are playing with names in their pamphlets, to confound the audience, we can be sure this attack of a university wit against another is a bait for sales: fantastical, atheist and bombastic, proud, monstrous and satanic is what Harvey accuses Nashe of. The question, then, is to focus on the HarveyNashe quarrel, and see that it is a question started on English poetry by a writer who was a poet of considerable powers. The young poet called 350 John Donne (aka Nashe, aka Marlowe—in collaboration with Oxford, aka Spenser) and Harvey losing his former pupil to the Euphues school are in the center of the stage here. The man in the shadow is Euphues, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. As it happened with Greene and Marlowe’s deaths for the London book market, the quarrel could have turned perfectly well into a show. At least, contemporary writers saw it that way later when all was over. For example, Thomas Middleton wrote in The Nyghtingale and the Ante (1604), inspired by Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, the following comment: ‘At dice? At the devil!’, quoth I, ‘for that is a dicer’s last throw!’ Here I began to rail like Thomas Nashe against Gabriel Harvey, if you call that railing; yet I think it was but the running a tilt of wits in booksellers’ shops on both sides of John of Paul’s churchyard, and I wonder how John escaped unhorsing. We can wonder too how John escaped unhorsing. Scene VII. ‘The only Shake-scene in a country’ We now come to the work of Robert Greene that Stratfordians consider as the great evidence that Shakspere was escalating towards the summit of Mount Parnassus. The work of Greene in question is Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, where the expression ‘the only Shake-scene in a country’ is found. The first thing that should be said is that this work by Greene is written in a style different from the courtier style he was known for. It was certainly written by a different author. And this is not only a question of opinion based on the text and our ears: Thomas Nashe himself writes in Pierce Penniless, published that same year of 1592, that he, contrary to what others in London’s literary circuit have said, did not write it; a fact that allows us to be sure that people back then knew that Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit was not written by that sweet honeytongued Greene famous for his romances and euphuistic style. In Pierce Penniless Nashe says: Other news I am advertised of, that a scald trivial lying pamphlet called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soul, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privy to the writing or printing of it. I am grown at length to see into the vanity of the world more than ever I did, and now I condemn myself for nothing so much as playing the dolt in print. Out upon it, it is odious, specially in this moralizing age, wherein everyone seeks to show himself a politician by misinterpreting. 351 We have a clue about who could be the author of this work when Nina Green writes: Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought With a Million of Repentance … was entered in the Stationers’ Register to William Wright ‘upon the peril of Henry Chettle’ on 20 September 1592, and was printed for Wright by John Danter and John Wolfe. Henry Chettle, who had entered into partnership with Danter and William Hoskins in 1591, and who continued to work for Danter for several years after the partnership dissolved, claimed in a prefatory epistle to Kind-Heart’s Dream that, because Greene’s handwriting was illegible, he (Chettle) had copied out Greene’s manuscript so that the work could be licenced. What Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit had done was precisely to attack Alleyn, the famous actor who had played Tamburlaine and Hieronimo and many other tragic characters of the time. Greene’s attack against this actor in 1592 quotes an expression from the play Henry VI, Part III: Base-minded men, all three of you, if by my misery you be not warned, for unto none of you (like me) sought those burrs to cleave, those puppets (I mean) that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you, to whom they all have been beholding, shall (were ye in that case as I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes factotum is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. O that I might entreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past excellence and nevermore acquaint them with your admired inventions. This rebuke against London’s most famous actor had already appeared in Greene’s Francesco’s Fortunes in 1590. Now, in 1592, a new Greene with a very different style returns to the attack against this Roscius actor of London, this ‘Shake-scene in a country.’ Ogburn may help us here: ‘R.G.’ was inveighing against actors, one in particular who was ‘beautified with our feathers’ –that is, we playwrights’ feathers–not his own. The upstart crow’s plumes were borrowed plumes–borrowed 352 from the playwrights. The Stratford legend interprets these words as saying that Greene is attacking an actor and a playwright, when Greene is saying to his fellow playwrights to beware of an actor in particular, the Roscius of the times, for he was taking advantage of their work. Ogburn continues demolishing the Stratfordian interpretation: The Groatsworth having evidently caused something of a furor, the man who had supplied the printer with the manuscript of the work offered an explanation of sorts in Kind-Hart’s Dreame, which appeared before the year was out. This was Henry Chettle, a writer of plays and miscellanies. As he tells us, he was accused of having written the Groatsworth himself. Ogburn now quotes the very same words of Chettle and his excuses for having registered Greene’s Groatworth of Wit: About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry book sellers hands, among others his Groatsworth of wit, in which a letter written to divers playmakers, is offensively by one or two of them taken … I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his demeanor no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. ‘The Stratfordians,’ Ogburn tells us, ‘embrace this passage with the same eagerness that they do the Groatsworth. Having made the upstart crow Shakespeare, they now do the same for the playwright whom Chettle was sorry not to have spared, of whom persons of high standing had spoken well. He, too, is Shakespeare.’ This interpretation is not consistent. Ogburn adds: Chettle wrote that the playwright who had taken offence and whom he was sorry not to have spared was one of the three playwrights addressed by Greene. If the offended playwright was Shakespeare and the actor denounced by Greene as the upstart crow was also Shakespeare, then Greene in warning the playwright about the actor was warning Shakespeare about himself! … Chettle incidentally makes doubly plain by leaving us in no doubt that it was not the actor, the victim of ‘R.G.’s’ attack, who protested, but one of the playwrights addressed by ‘R.G.’ … So far as the record shows, the insulted actor remained muted. 353 For those who cannot swallow the double-barrelled misreading of Chettle and the absurdity of ‘R.G.’s’ warning Shakespeare the playwright about Shakespeare the actor, orthodox biography collapses. Take away the misreading of Groats-worth and Kind-Harts Dreame and nothing during Shakspere’s life remains to suggest even remotely that he was a writer –and little enough that he was an actor. And to clarify this Stratfordian legend, Ogburn echoes an important discovery regarding the possible author of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit: [I]n 1969 … it was shown that Greenes Groats-worth of Wit was written not by Greene but by Chettle himself! (It was against the suspicion this was so that Chettle had defended himself in KindHarts Dreame.) The man to whom we are indebted for the discovery is Warren B. Austin … Postulating that an author exhibits stylistic preferences in his writing which are ‘largely unconscious’ and which will betray his authorship regardless of subject matter and date of composition, Professor Austin went to work with an IBM 7094 computer on five of Greene’s works and three of Chettle’s. He spent about three years on the task … [His conclusion] show[s] that by virtually every criterion used in the testing, Chettle is the author of Groats-worth. Describing Professor Austin’s work at length in his Shakespeare Newsletter for December 1970, Professor Lous Marder of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle called it ‘what may turn out to be one of the three most significant contributions to Shakespearean scholarship in this century.’ Stratfordians do not comment on this study carried out by Professor Warren B. Austin. For them it simply does not exist. And it is natural, for if they did, their Stratfordian legend would fall completely to the ground. But let us talk about the actor Alleyn as ‘the only Shake-scene’. I believe that everything points towards one fact: Edward Alleyn had achieved fame and a high standard of living by then. All of it by acting and performing characters and heroes other playwrights wrote for the stage. Since these playwrights, like Chettle or Kyd or Munday, were not wealthy (Oxford’s patronage had blown away like smoke due to his bankruptcy), it makes sense that Chettle should attack Alleyn for living from their work. Let us remember Greene’s words in 1590 on a certain Roscius of London, for they are in the very same tone as Chettle’s in 1592. In 1590, Greene (our poet) said in Franceso’s Fortunes: 354 [Y]et the people (who are delighted with such novelties and pastimes) made great resort, paid largely, and highly applauded their doings, insomuch that the actors by continual use grew not only excellent, but rich and insolent. Amongst whom, in the days of Tully one Roscius grew to be of such exquisite perfection in his faculty that he offered to contend with the orators of that time in gesture as they did in eloquence, boasting that he could express a passion in as many sundry actions as Tully could discourse it in variety of phrases; yea, so proud he grew by the daily applause of people that he looked for honour and reverence to be done him in the streets, which selfconceit when Tully entered into with a piercing insight, he quipped at in this manner. It chanced that Roscius & he met at a dinner, both guests unto Archias the poet, where the proud comedian dared to make comparison with Tully, which insolency made the learned orator to grow into these terms: Why Roscius, art thou proud with Aesop’s crow, being pranked with the glory of others’ feathers? This comment of 1590 refers to an actor who has grown insolent due to fame and because of the public’s applause and money. Now, in 1592, the same attack is made by Chettle. If we look into Alleyn’s life, we will have some more clues as to what was the underlying problem. The reader will see that, as usual, the problem was money. In the webpage Luminarium we are informed as follows: Edward Alleyn was the most famous actor in Elizabethan England, rivalled only by Richard Burbage. He was with Worcester’s Men in 1583, and joined the Admiral’s Men at the Rose around 1587. He was first to play such towering characters as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta, and Greene’s Orlando Furioso. His performances brought him universal admiration and praise from contemporary authors such as Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson. In 1592, Alleyn married Joan Woodward, the step-daughter of his friend and employer Philip Henslowe, owner and manager of the Rose Theatre. Alleyn retired from acting in 1597, and entered into a partnership with Henslowe. They ran the Bear Garden, a site for bearbaiting, possibly from as early as 1594. This is the life of an Elizabethan Robert de Niro. Through the Stratfordian Peter Ackroyd we learn this: A theatrical quarrel of more serious consequence took place six months later, in the spring of 1591, when Edward Alleyn was engaged 355 in a dispute with James Burbage. The precise cause and nature of their controversy are not known, but no doubt it had something to do with money … The consequence was that Alleyn decamped to the Rose, the theatre on the other side of the Thames that was owned and managed by Philip Henslowe … Richard Burbage of course stayed in the northern suburbs, in the theatres owned by his father, together with a group of players who had not wished to set up with Alleyn in a new playhouse … All of them … would also work with Shakespeare for the rest of his life. It is interesting that, in his revision of King John, Shakespeare gives Richard Burbage the most heroic part in the play. From the evidence of the surviving playbooks, too, it can be assumed that he was one of those who decided to stay with the Burbages and the others in the Theatre. Richard Burbage turned out to be the main actor for Shakespeare’s plays. The legend says that Shakspere started as an actor, but even if we believed this tale we must remember the kind of characters Shakspere is said to have played, which were minor ones; it is said that he acted in Hamlet as the ghost king, that is, a role for which he appeared little, said few words, and did not have to move at all, which was the perfect role for a minor, secondary actor. Thomas Nashe defended the actor Alleyn in August 8, 1592, just a month before Greene-Cheetle’s criticism was registered in September 20. In Pierce Penniless Nashe wrote: Nor Roscius nor Aesop, those admired tragedians that have lived ever since Christ was born, could ever perform more in action that famous Ned Allen. I must accuse our poets of sloth and partiality, that they will not boast in large impressions what worthy men, above all nations, England affords. The commercial name ‘Robert Greene’ continued to publish that year, but his works, leaving the euphuistic, romantic and pastoral Philomena aside, are written by another pen, perhaps by Chettle or other minor ‘university wits’. Regarding the anonymous play James IV published as written by Robert Greene years later, in 1598, Nina Green comments: As the editors of the Malone Society Reprint edition of James the Fourth point out, the play is completely unhistorical. Its acknowledged source is the third novel of the third day of Giraldi’s Ecatommiti, a story on which he later based his play Arrenopia … Giraldi, known to the Elizabethans as Cinthio, was an Italian novelist, playwright and dramatic theorist who lived 1504-1573 … Giraldi’s work was not readily available to the Elizabethans. Orr, in his Italian 356 Renaissance drama in England before 1625, highlights the extreme difficulty of accounting for the influence of dramatists such as Giraldi, whose works are not known to have been available in England during this time, in translation or otherwise … The chief problem lies in identifying an intermediary who could have been responsible for introducing the work of Giraldi and other Italian dramatists into England. This difficulty at once disappears when it is hypothesized that it was Oxford who served as the intermediary between Italian and Elizabethan drama. Oxford travelled to Italy in 1575, could read and speak Italian fluently, and had a marked interest in literature and drama. We are before a play where our poet put his mind at work, for, from the start, we see that the king of Faeries, Oberon, talks to someone called Boham, a kind of clown who has been dwelling in a tomb (I.i.1-22): Bohan Ay say, whats thou? Oberon Thy friend, Bohan... Bohan But what were those Puppits that hopt and skipt about me year whayle? Oberon My subiects. Bohan Thay subiects! whay, art thou a King? Oberon I am. Bohan The deele thou art! whay, thou look’st not so big as the King of Clubs, nor so sharpe as the King of Spades nor so faine as the King a Daymonds: be the masse, ay take thee to bee the king of false harts; therfore I rid thee away, or ayse so curry your Kingdome that you’s be glad to runne to saue your life. In the dialogue that follows, Bohan describes his life as our poet could have done: (I.i.34-73): Bohan Bread ay gad, what deele is in me? whay, tell mee, thou skipiack, what art thou? Oberon Nay first tell me what thou wast from thy birth, what thou hast past hitherto, why thou dwellest in a Tombe, & leavest the world? and then I will release thee of these bonds, before not. Bohan And not before, then needs must needs sal: I was borne a gentleman of the best bloud in all Scotland, except the king, when time brought me to age, and death tooke my parents, I became a Courtier, where though ay list not praise my selfe, ay engraved the memory of Boughon on the skin-coate of some of them, and reveld 357 with the proudest. Oberon But why living in such reputation, didst thou leave to be a Courtier? Bohan Because my pride was vanitie, my expence losse, my reward faire words and large promises, & my hopes spilt, for that after many yeares service, one outran me, and what the deele should I then do there. No no, flattering knaves that can cog and prate fastest, speede best in the Court. Oberon To what life didst thou then betake thee? Bohan I then chang’d the Court for the countrey, and the wars for a wife: but I found the craft of swaines more vile, then the knavery of courtiers; the charge of children more heavie then servants, and wives tongues worse then the warres it selfe: and therefore I gave ore that, & went to the Citie to dwell, & there I kept a great house with smal cheer, but all was nere the neere. Oberon And why? Bohan Because in seeking friends, I found table guests to eate me, & my meat, my wives gossops to bewray the secrets of my heart, kindred to betray the effect of my life, which when I noted, the court ill, the country worse, and the citie worst of all, in good time my wife died: ay wood she had died twentie winter sooner by the masse, leaving my two sonnes to the world, and shutting my selfe into this Tombe, where if I dye, I am sure to be safe from wilde beasts, but whilest I live, cannot be free from ill companie. Besides, now I am sure gif all my friends faile me, I sall have a grave of mine owne providing: this is all. Now what art thou? Oberon Oberon, King of Fayries, that loues thee because thou hatest the world. Leaving aside the Scottish blood and Bohan’s two sons, as Nina Green says, the rest is a brief recollection of our poet’s life up to 1588. Oberon is no other than the King of Faeries, of Art, like our poet was. With Greene ‘dead’ in 1592, and Marlowe disappeared the following year, our poet created a new pseudonym. This time with a precise goal in mind, for ‘Shake-speare’ will only be associated to his son Southampton and his candidacy as future King Henry IX, as Hank Whittemore has aptly remarked. 358 Scene VIII. 1593, the miraculous year of Venus and Adonis Anderson and Stritmatter inform us:87 Pierce’s Supererogation is subscribed with a specific date—27 April 1593—only two weeks after the registration of Venus and Adonis, the text in which the name “Shakespeare” first appears in print. Apparently, the poem was not yet printed. In Pierce’s Supererogation, however, Harvey is retailing his private knowledge of the not yet quite public ‘M. Pierce Penniless … in the rich garden of poor Adonis.’ The punchline, however, is yet to come. ‘Who can conceive small hope of any possible account,’ Harvey continues, ‘Or regard of mine own discourses were that fair body of the sweetest Venus in print as it is redoubtably armed with the complete harness [i.e. armaments] of the bravest Minerva.’ The conclusion is evident: If any confirmation is needed, Harvey here restates that it is indeed Shake-speare’s Venus and Adonis about which he writes. It is a work about Venus, ‘not yet in print.’ Furthermore, the poem is armed with ‘the complete harness’—i.e. with the armor and weapons—of the classical goddess Minerva/Athena, the patroness of literature known to Elizabethans as ‘the spearshaker.’ Venus and Adonis was more read and admired than any of our poet’s plays, even though today this may surprise us. It was said that it was ‘the best book in the world.’ And what is most important of all: it was the first work where the name William Shakespeare appeared. ‘Will I Am Shakespeare’ had arrived, as Nashe asked him one year before. With Greene and Marlowe dead, a new beginning rose in the sky. The author of this poetic jewel had not published anything before; suddenly, coming out from nowhere, like the speare shaker Pallas Athena coming out of Zeus’ head, Shakespeare appeared in London in 1593 with a narrative poem of evident complexity. The ‘Spearshaker’ was not a neophyte. Roger Strittmater tells us:88 87 http://shakespearefellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/SM1.2.pdf#page=26. 88 See http://shake-speares-bible.com/pdf/venus.pdf. 359 On the title page is the “purloined letter” … a two-line heroic couplet, excerpted from Ovid’s Elegy XV and transformed into an epigram introducing Shakespeare’s first venture into print … the couplet reads: ‘Let the vulgar admire vulgar things (vilia); as for me, tawny-haired Apollo fills my cups from the Castalian springs on Mt. Parnassus.’ … Annabel Patterson, a Yale University literary historian who has studied the importance of introductory materials—of which title-page epigrams are one type—suggests an intriguing point of departure which has lacked prosecution until now. Patterson refers to such introductory materials as ‘entry code[s]’ intended to ‘alert an educated audience to the possibility of hidden meaning.’ As W.R. Streitberger writes, the ‘prefatory couplet should suggest that we be careful in taking the poem too lightly.’ Stritmatter continues: Butler and Fowler, in their impressive study of the poem’s calendrical and numerical structure, note that although ‘the current conception of Shakespeare does not encourage us to look for esoteric structures in his poetry,’ the use of the ‘Ovidian epigraph hint[s] at the possibility of a meaning denied to the common reader.’ Venus and Adonis seems to be adapting the Ovidian story contained in the Metemorphoses, but as the comments of Beauclerk on this poem reveal, the adaptation is a very free one: Shakespeare’s most fundamental change to the myth of Venus and Adonis is Adonis’ rejection of Venus. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book X), and in all other variants of the myth, Adonis reciprocates the love of the goddess. Another striking Shakespearean divergence from the classical myth is the difference in age between Venus and the ‘tender boy’ Adonis … she is old enough to be his mother, and a good deal of maternal imagery is applied to her ... the very first lines of the poem clothe him in the mantle of the sun, which—like the flower that he becomes at the end of the narrative—is purple. (i.e. royal): Even as the sun with purple-coloured face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase; (lines 1-3) If Adonis is the son of Venus in Shakespeare’s personal mythology, then the youth’s rejection of the goddess’s love, which at times amounts to revulsion, is explained. There is a taboo here, which Adonis does not wish to transgress. After all, under normal circumstances, what young man would not give his right hand to 360 make love to the goddess of love? For her part, although she pursues him as her sexual prey, Venus evinces a mother’s concern and indulgence toward the pouting boy, and sees herself in him, his eyes being described as ‘two glasses where herself beheld.’ … Indeed, it could be argued that much of Adonis’s shocked revulsion at the goddess’ behavior stems from the fact that, being a hunter, he had expected the love and protection of Diana, the patron deity of huntsmen, only to discover that Venus had usurped her place. This “double vision” is brought home to us at the end of the poem when Venus presides over the virgin birth of the purple flower from Adonis’s blood, and, with the flower-child between her breasts, flies off to the island of Paphos, where she ‘means to immure herself and not be seen’—in other words, intends to hide the fact that she has given birth. The idea of the virgin queen giving birth incognito would not have been lost on Shakespeare’s court readers, who would have interpreted the poem as the revelation of a dynastic secret. Certainly, when Venus addresses the purple flower, it is in terms of royal legitimacy. ‘Thou art the next of blood, and ’tis thy right.’ … As a heraldic animal, the boar is doubtless the badge of the author himself, as well as representing the transgressive passion that engenders the tragedy not only of this poem, but of all Shakespeare’s subsequent work. He is both totem and taboo. The boar is also a powerful symbol of the mother at her most rapacious (we still use the term ‘boar mother’): what in psychological terms we might call the ‘devouring mother.’ In the context of the poem, it becomes the incestuous mother, intent on ravishing her own child. The poem then becomes a shamanic dream or nightmare initiation, in which the dreamer or hero is transformed by the confrontation with the mother. One could almost rename the poem “The Rape of Adonis.” Such a title certainly emphasizes how perfectly it mirrors its companion piece, The Rape of Lucrece. ...From the start, it is clear that the goddess is kissing Adonis to prevent him from talking, fearful no doubt of what he might say: but soon she stops his lips, And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken, ‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open’ And: He said he was immodest, blames her miss; What follows more, she murders with a kiss. (verses 46-48, 53-54). ...Both Hamlet and Adonis stand for Shakespeare, the truth teller, whose words are his chief weapon. Both relationships share the undercurrent of incest. The goddess’ love, then, is revealed as a means of silencing the 361 outspoken young man. And when he does manage to speak out, it is easy to understand Venus’ discomfort, for Adonis accuses the goddess of love of not knowing what love is: Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled, Since sweating lust on earth usurp’d his name. ...Thus Venus is using her sexual charms as a political tool, as Queen Elizabeth was notorious for doing [with the duke of Alençon, for instance]. As for her motive for behaving in this manner, she is clearly anxious lest Adonis should reveal some indiscretion that might compromise her authority ... she is determined that he will not speak out. In the end, when she realizes that the headstrong youth will not be governed, she murders him in the form of the boar. In a reversal of normal male-female relations, it is Venus who penetrates Adonis (with her boar’s tusk), suggesting an original model for Venus, who, although feminine by gender, possesses traditionally masculine attributes of power—for instance, the scepter of the monarch. The result of this piercing is ‘a purple flower’ (or royal child), though in the imagery of the time ‘flower’ also connotes a work of literature, especially poetry; thus this royal child becomes synonymous with the works of Shakespeare himself. In dying as the queen’s son, Shakespeare becomes an artist. If the poem revealed the most important secret of all, stating that Queen Elizabeth was actually not a virgin; and if the poem let everyone know that the Queen had conceived a son and a heir to the throne whom she had hidden from the world, why on earth was this book published and why was the author not punished for such a revelation, when others were severely punished for faults less grave than this one? The answer seems to point towards our poet’s identity: because he was a Tudor. This is what also explains Shakespeare’s absurd impunity when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion. In 1593 our poet also published, with the mask of Thomas Watson, the cycle of sonnets The Tears of Fancy. The work has all necessary ingredients to call our attention, for Watson sounds just like our poet. In sonnet 29 we have a reference to the nymph Echo in love with Narcissus: Taking a truce with teares sweete pleasures foe, I thus began hard by the fountayne side: O deere copartner of my wretched woe, No sooner saide but woe poore eccho cride. Then I againe what woe did thee betide, That can be greater than disdayne, disdayne: Quoth eccho. Then said I O womens pride, 362 Pride answered eccho. O inflicting payne, When wofull eccho payne agayne repeated, Redoubling sorrow with a sorrowing sound: For both of us were now in sorrow seated, Pride and disdaine disdainefull pride the ground. That forst poore Eccho mourne ay sorrowing ever, And me lament in teares ay joyning never. In sonnet 47 spring is associated to the ‘lusty ver’. In sonnet 48 ‘the force of ver’ is mentioned. These expressions had already appeared in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, later adapted as The Posies in 1576. In sonnet 48, Watson sounds just like ‘the Phaeton Sonnet’ and tells us that without the ‘force of ver’ there is no flower, which sounds just like L. Vaux’s feelings in A Paradise of Dainty Devices of 1576: The tender buds whom cold hath long kept in, And winters rage inforst to hide their head: Will spring and sprowt as they doe now begin, That everie one will joy to see them spread. But cold of care so nips my joies at roote, There is no hope to recover what is lost: No sunne doth shine that well can doe it boote, Yet still I strive but lose both toile and cost. For what can spring that feels no force of ver, What flower can flourish where no sunne doth shine. In sonnet 49 the characters of Actaeon and Diana appear: Diana and her nimphs in silvane brooke, Did wash themselves in secret farre apart: But bold Actaeon dard on them to looke, For which faire Phoebe turned him to a Hart. His hounds unweeting of his sodaine change, Did hale and pull him down with open crie: He then repenting that he so did range, Woulde speake but could not, so did sigh and die. But my Diana fairer and more cruel, Bereft me of my hart and in disdaine Hath turnd it out to feede on fancies fuel, And live in bondage and eternal paine. So hartles doe I live yet cannot die, Desire the dog, doth chase it to and fro: 363 Unto her brest for succour it doth flie, If shee debarre it whither shall it go. Now lives my hart in danger to be slaine, Unlesse her hart my hart wil entertaine. In sonnet 60 we discover clear evidence about who is behind The Tears of Fancy, for this sonnet is the same one our poet wrote around the early 1570s entitled “Love Thy Choice”: SONNET 60, by Thomas Watson. Who taught thee first to sigh Alasse sweet heart? Love Who taught thy tongue to marshall words of plaint? Love Who fild thine eies with tears of bitter smart? Love Who gave thee grief and made thy joyes to faint? Love Who first did paint with coullers pale thy face? Love Who first did breake thy sleepes of quiet rest? Love Who forst thee unto wanton love give place? Love Who thrald thy thoughts in fancie so distrest? Love Who made thee bide both constant firme and sure? Love Who made thee scorne the world and love thy friend? Love Who made thy minde with patience paines indure? Love Who made thee settle stedfast to the end? Love Then love thy choice though love be never gained, Still live in love, dispaire not though disdained. Finis, T.W. Note that the verse that would identify Queen Elizabeth as the poet’s lover has been removed in this new version. In 1593 an interesting publication also appeared: the anthology The Phoenix Nest, which is structured in 14 poems followed by ‘other diverse ditties.’ The Cambridge History of English and American Literature informs us that “The Earl of Oxford has a charming lyric, ‘What cunning can expresse,’ and it is possible that the longest poem in the volume, A most rare and excellent dreame, is the work of Greene.” W. Ron Hess has studied this poem. 89 He tells us: The energy and passion expressed in several ARD verses suggest the tone of other early poems by Oxford, in particular “Fain would I sing but fury makes me fret” and “This loss of my good name,” which even [the Stratfordian] may term ‘a defiant lyric without precedent in English Renaissance verse.’ 89 See http://shakespeare-oxford.com/wp-content/oxfordian/Hess-Dreame.pdf. 364 And he adds: As for Shakespeare, ARD seems in many ways comparable to Venus and Adonis. There was the same theme of a failed attempt at seduction, although in ARD it was the man who wooed and the goddess who rejected, but with many of the same arguments that Adonis used against Venus. As in V&A, the lover fainted, to be revived in exactly the same way as Adonis roused Venus. In the same way, the progress of the seduction is given a step-by-step description and in the same arch tone. ARD’s author shared Shakespeare’s fondness for the sea and shipwrecks. In this anonymous poem which starts “Weepe you my lines for sorrow whilst I write,” something sounds just like our poet’s energy and swing: My life is death, for no delights are in it: My musike mone, and yet I neuer leaue it: My succour hope, yet can I neuer win it: My gaines report, yet will I not perceiue it: My foode suspect, and yet I cannot flie it: My foe neglect, and yet I meane to trie it... With constant minde the poore remainder gift, That Loue amongst his many spoyles hath left me, Is that which to the heauens my face shall lift... And if I die, this praise shall me await, My Loue was endlesse, voide of all deceit. The poem “Feede still thy selfe, thou fondling with beliefe” sounds just like our poet as well: Feede still thy selfe, thou fondling with beliefe, Go hunt thy hope, that neuer tooke effect, Accuse the wrongs that oft hath wrought thy griefe, And reckon sure where reason would suspect. Dwell in the dreames of wish and vaine desire, Pursue the faith that flies and seekes to new, Run after hopes that mocke thee with retire, And looke for loue where liking neuer grew. Deuise conceits to ease thy carefull hart, Trust vpon times and daies of grace behinde, Presume the rights of promise and desart, And measure loue by thy beleeuing minde. 365 Force thy affects that spite doth daily chace, Winke at the wrongs with wilfull ouersight, See not the soyle and staine of thy disgrace, Nor recke disdaine, to doate on thy delite. And when thou seest the end of thy reward, And these effects ensue of thine assault, When rashnes rues, that reason should regard, Yet still accuse thy fortune for the fault. And crie, O Loue, O death, O vaine desire, When thou complainst the heate, & feeds the fire. The poem “Those eies which set my fancie on a fire” seems to bear the mark of Edward de Vere and is worth quoting in full: Those eies which set my fancie on a fire, Those crisped haires, which hold my hart in chains, Those daintie hands, which conquer’d my desire, That wit, which of my thoughts doth hold the rains. Those eies for cleernes doe the starrs surpas, Those haires obscure the brightnes of the Sunne, Those hands more white, than euer Iuorie was, That wit euen to the skies hath glorie woon. O eies that pearce our harts without remorse, O haires of right that weares a roiall crowne, O hands that conquer more than Caears force, O wit that turns huge kingdoms vpside downe. Then Loue be Iudge, what hart may thee withstand: Such eies, such haire, such wit, and such a hand. The poem that begins “Who list to heare the sum of sorrowes state” ends with these Deverian verses of grief: Yet more than this, a hope still founde in vaine, A vile dispaire, that speakes but of distresse, A forst content, to suffer deadly paine, A paine so great, as can not get redresse, Will all affirme, my sum of sorrow such, As neuer man, that euer knew so much. The poem “Cease restless thoughts” seems to be by our poet: 366 Ease restles thoughts, surcharg’d with heauines, Loue, fortune, and disdaine, with their endeuer, The forces of my life will soone disseuer, Without the sting of your vnquietnes. And thou oh hart, guiltie of my distresse, To harbor these faire foes, doost still perseuer, Whereby thou shewst false traitor, thou hadst leuer Their conquest, than mine ease and happines. In thee, Loues messengers haue taken dwelling, Fortune in thee, hir pompe triumphant spreadeth, Disdaine hath spent on thee, hir bitter swelling, Thus thou the root, from whence my woes proceedeth. Cease then vain thoughts, no more my sorows double. Loue, fortune, and disdaine, ynough of trouble. Compare the previous verses to these in sonnet 105 by Shakespeare: Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument, Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words; And in this change is my invention spent, Three themes in one. This triad seems to bear the same relation as the triad of the Shakespeare’s Sonnets and The Phoenix and the turtle. We will see that in due time. Greene’s work published in 1593, Mamillia, the Second Part of the Triumph of Pallas, possesses the clear and sweeping style of our poet, a sweet Euphuism employed all along to describe the life of the court and its ideals. The dedicatory verses written by Richard Stapleton, addressed to the female nobles of the court, read as follows: See here with sugared happy style as in a perfect glass He figureth forth how Venus’ troop in loyal faith surpass The martial brood of Mars his train deciphering to their face That Pallas’ ladies for their faith do daunt them with disgrace. With pen he paints your constancy, with pen he here displays Your faith, your troth, your loyalty, and what imports your praise. And champion-like he challenge makes 367 with Lady Pallas’ shield To stand in arms against your foes in open camped field. This Greene’s ‘sugared happy style’ is just how Francis Meres would describe Shakespeare’s style in 1598. The content of the second part of Mamillia shows the exiled Pharicles being compared in his exile to Corolianus and Alcybiades. Aeneas and Dido are mentioned several times, and women’s lack of perseverance is discussed, along with that same fault on the part of friends. In Greene’s next work that year, The Anatomy of Lovers’ Flatteries, we see the whole gallery of characters proper to our poet, such as Dido, Endymion and even Jaques, who talks about perfection and beauty. Scene IX. The Rape of Lucrece This narrative poem published in 1594 had an impressive dedicatory epistle; after reading it carefully we have to agree with Professor D. Nichol Smith of Oxford University: ‘There is no other dedication like this in Elizabethan literature.’ It says (my emphasis): To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesly Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness. Your Lordship’s in all duty, William Shakespeare. The poem adapts the story of Ovid contained in the second book of his Fasti. It describes how Tarquin, having killed his father-in-law, claims the throne of Rome against their laws and customs. During the siege of the city of Ardea, Roman generals celebrate a banquet. The conversation shifts from women to chastity. One of them declares that his wife Lucrece is the most virtuous of women, far above the rest. The son of Tarquin, Sextus Tarquinius, is so moved by that description of Lucrece that he decides to go to her house unnoticed. What follows is her rape. As it 368 seems to me, Lucrece is the virgin Queen; Tarquin is William Cecil (many referred to England as regnum Cecilianum), and Sextus Tarquinius, who rapes the virgin Lucrece, is the representation of William Cecil’s son, Robert Cecil. In Venus and Adonis’ dedicatory epistle published the year before, Shakespeare promised to publish a more serious poem in honor of Southampton, and The Rape of Lucrece is more than serious: it is tragic and written in the Chaucerian stanza rhyme royal. In this poem the ‘Shaker of spears’ is telling the reader that William Cecil (Tarquin) and his son Robert Cecil (Sextus Tarquinius) are the rulers of England, who will rape the virgin monarch Elizabeth-Lucrece and the Tudors. For those that welcome coincidences, it should be pointed out that in the dedicatory epistle of The Rape of Lucrece the name of the real author can be found. The name of the hidden author is before the eyes of all readers. In the fourth line from the bottom, it can be read: ‘VVere my worth.’ Elizabethans loved this kind of “coincidences.” The Roman camp awaits the arrival of night next to the city of Ardea. At this critical moment of twilight that divides day (good) from night (evil), Sextus Tarquinius, the son of Tarquin, hidden by the pale shadows, decides to go towards his virgin and defenseless prey (ll. 1-7): From the besieged Ardea all in post, Borne by the trustless wings of false desire, Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host, And to Collatium bears the lightless fire Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire And girdle with embracing flames the waist Of Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste. Lucrece welcomes Sextus Tarquinius. He is the man to whom her husband owes obedience. Like in Venus and Adonis, the crime that is going to happen includes the aggravating circumstance of breach of trust and helplessness. The lesson here, as before, is clear: power, the instrument that provokes and causes the temptation of all abuse, always corrupts humans (ll. 85-91). The poem is the description of that inner corruption which dwells inside every human in his/her thirst for power. Lucrece is described from the beginning with the colors of the rose of the Tudors: red stands for beauty and white for virtue (ll. 64-5). The reader already knows that it is a clear symbol for the virgin Queen Elizabeth I or for purity in the Tudor dynasty. Night has fallen; it is the right time for the sacrifice (ll. 117-119): Till sable Night, mother of dread and fear, Upon the world dim darkness doth display, 369 And in her vaulty prison stows the day. Dinner has finished and everyone in the house has gone to sleep. Sextus Tarquinius leaves his room and lights a torch in order to go to Lucrece’s room. Now, like a good Shakespearean character, the infamous one starts a monologue (ll. 211-217): ‘What win I, if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy— Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down.’ Sextus Tarquinius finally convinces himself that his will is above his reason, that his excessive passion is above his measured happiness. Romanticism versus classicism. Rousseau and the good savage win. This will later be proclaimed by Byron and Nietzsche against the civilized world (ll. 274; 279-80): ‘Then childish fear avaunt! debating die!... Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize; Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?’ Our poet, who seems to express the same feeling as Henry V’s in The Famous Victories of Henry V when the Prince took the crown while his father was sleeping, knows how to contrast the noise of the wind outside with the silence and peace of the family home. He walks. A noise. Where? False alarm. The door. Open the door. Be careful, be careful, do not do anything foolish now. Take a look at her. Is Lucrece not beautiful? Is the femenine sex not beautiful when it is innocent and also prohibited and lies defenseless and pure? Together with Ovid, the other great influence on our poet is the Bible, critics comment, and here we have the forbidden, the apple, Lucrece’s virginity, before our eyes. Will Sextus Tarquinius eat it? Will our poet do it? Will he rise up against Robert Cecil and his mother the Queen in order to take the crown and put it over the head of his son Southampton? This interpretation is also possible. In the poem Sextus Tarquinius seems to be Robert Cecil, but it seems that he could also be the young Henry V who entered the room of his father King Henry IV, who was also sleeping when his son took his crown from him. The aggressor has seen one of her gloves; he touches it and a needle cuts one of his fingers. It is the blood that runs before the sacrifice. 370 Immolate her? Yes, it does not matter. We have the power and the will to do it, haven’t we?, seems to think the aggressor. The serpent crawls towards her. The terror in the atmosphere, the wind outside, the silence, the inner desire, the struggle the poet is describing before and after Lucrece feels the hand of the rapist on her breast will be faithfully anotated by Poe for his short stories and also by Nabokov for the ending scene in the Ur-Lolita The Enchanter. The sequence is the jewel of the poem. It is masterly. Cinematographic. Pause. The poet knows how to measure the tempo. Silence! Some musical notes for Hugo, Darío and Lorca’s delight. Modernism and Parnasianism. Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du mal. The sickness of the blue bird (ll. 407-8): Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue, A pair of maiden worlds unconquered Then the intensity stops and falls, for there is, like in Venus and Adonis, a long demonstration of rhetoric, Sextus Tarquinius trying to convince his prey that she should give herself to him. It’s the calm before the storm. Let us go to the storm. He possesses her. What is happening with the wolf and the lamb? Blake also took notice of this very well. Raped, Lucrece tells us through the mouth of our poet that truth will come out. He will come out as the true poet and Prince Tudor (ll. 93940): Time’s glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light. Scene X. The two poems in context Having seen the first two works of 1593 and 1594 bearing the name of William Shakespeare, I think it is valuable to consider Joe Sobran’s comments so that the reader may know what is happening: 90 The first two published works of ‘William Shakespeare’ weren’t plays but two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. Both were immediately recognised as great poems; both were also very popular, going through more editions than almost any of the individual plays. Contemporary praise of Shakespeare always began by citing these two poems, not the plays. In 1598, for example, Francis Meres wrote that 90 See http://www.sobran.com/articles/earlypoems.shtml. 371 ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c.’ After naming a dozen of the plays, Meres added that ‘the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English.’ Other early tributes to Shakespeare likewise rated the two long poems above the plays, if they mentioned the plays at all. This is surprising, because modern taste has ignored and, I would say, underrated them, the only works to bear dedications by Shakespeare (to the young Earl of Southampton). Because the poet calls Venus ‘the first heir of my invention,’ scholars and biographers have assumed that both poems are among the Bard’s ‘early’ works, written near the beginning of his career as a dramatist. Sobran continues: Oddly, these poems are the only two Shakespeare works that can be dated with any precision—thanks to those dedications. Dating the plays is another matter, involving deduction, guesswork, and circular reasoning—chiefly the assumption that William of Stratford wrote them, and must have written them sometime during his adult life, between about 1588 and 1616. If we accept this question-begging method of dating, these works written around 1593–94 must fall near the outset of his career in the theater. But the scholars have gotten it all wrong. Venus and Lucrece are in fact fully mature works, written after most of the plays. Moreover, they all but prove that Will of Stratford couldn’t have been the author we know as Shakespeare. The orthodox belief in Will’s authorship depends wholly, as I say, upon dating his works plausibly within his adult life span—taking into account the first known dates of performance and publication (which prove next to nothing about when they were actually written), as well as clear stylistic developments. And the scholars have, on the whole, done a plausible job, given their premises. But there are serious difficulties, which they have done their best to explain away. And as we’ll see, the two long poems present a problem that just can’t be explained away if we posit Will’s authorship. Put simply, was Will old enough to have written the works attributed to him? First there is the problem of Hamlet, first published in a mutilated version in 1603 and in a far better one in 1604. The scholars date it around 1600, when, they reckon, Will had reached the peak of his genius. But this leaves them with the problem of explaining three references to a Hamlet play many years earlier—the first in 1589, when Will may not even have arrived in London yet. The style of 372 Hamlet, with its superbly flexible blank verse and discursive prose, is far too sophisticated to permit the inference that it’s an ‘early’ work. Solution? The scholars posit an older Hamlet play by somebody else. That would account for those vexing references. The trouble with this solution is that no trace of such a play has ever turned up. What the scholars do agree on is that Will of Stratford didn’t write that supposed play. Sobran continues demolishing the Stratfordian sand castle: Again, in 1591 Edmund Spenser published a poem saluting ‘our pleasant Willy,’ a brilliant writer of comedy who had ‘of late’ retired from the theater. This was long assumed to be Shakespeare, as the context suggests. But again, as the scholars eventually realized, in 1591 Will would have been far too young to have made much of a reputation as a playwright —let alone to have retired. Solution? The scholars have decided that Spenser’s ‘Willy’ couldn’t have been Shakespeare, but must have been some other Willy. But who? Nobody else fits Spenser’s description. What the scholars do agree on is that Spenser couldn’t have been talking about Will of Stratford. So a purely hypothetical ‘Willy’ joins a purely hypothetical Hamlet. Now Sobran returns to consider the two poems: Which brings us back to Venus and Lucrece. According to the scholars, these poems were written around the same time as the earliest and least distinguished Shakespeare plays, such as the Henry VI cycle and the more farcical comedies (The Comedy of Errors, for example). But here another dating problem arises, unnoticed by the scholars. Though we don’t know the exact dates of the plays, we can approximately tell their relative dates by their style. The relatively early plays are marked by their very regular blank verse—very good, but palpably inferior to the richer and far more irregular verse of the great tragedies. We know those tragedies were written later because they show the poet in much greater technical command of his poetic and rhetorical resources. This isn’t an aesthetic judgment or a question of personal taste, but a matter of his skill in his craft, as when a composer advances from simple melody to the more difficult form of the fugue. 373 Sobran quotes two examples of the early plays of Shakespeare. The first one, from The Comedy of Errors, usually dated around 1592, shows this kind of blank verse at the beginning of the play: Merchant of Syracuse, plead no more; I am not partial to infringe our laws. The enmity and discord which of late Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your duke To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen, Who, wanting guilders to redeem their lives, Have seal’d his rigorous statutes with their bloods, Excludes all pity from our threat’ning looks. Another one from King John, a play dated from around 1594 or later: Philip of France, in right and true behalf Of thy deceased brother Geffrey’s son, Arthur Plantagenet, lays most lawful claim To this fair island and the territories, To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, Desiring thee to lay aside the sword Which sways usurpingly these several titles, And put the same into young Arthur’s hand, Thy nephew and right royal sovereign. Then, Sobran quotes the verse of Venus and Adonis and compares it to those plays just quoted: Even as the sun with purple-coloured face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn. Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor ’gins to woo him. And some stanzas from Lucrece: From the besieged Ardea all in post, Borne by the trustless wings of false desire, Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host, And to Collatium bears the lightless fire Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire 374 And girdle with embracing flames the waist Of Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste. Haply that name of chaste unhapp’ly set This bateless edge on his keen appetite; When Collatine unwisely did not let To praise the clear unmatched red and white Which triumphed in that sky of his delight, Where mortal stars, as bright as heaven’s beauties, With pure aspects did him peculiar duties. Sobran then comments the four examples from the perspective of their quality: There is nothing very wrong with the first two selections; but they are no more than businesslike, colorless, legalistic, rather mechanical verse, displaying no particular wit, imagery, virtuosity, or any other quality we’d be tempted to call Shakespearean. As poetry, they are simply flat. By contrast, the latter two passages, written in difficult stanza forms and under the constraints of complex rhyme schemes, show the poet in full command of his medium, combining epigrammatic wit, rich alliteration, vivid colors, splendid images, a riot of vowels, an easy freedom of meter, a wealthy vocabulary, paradox, contrast, antithesis —all this visible in just 20 lines! Here is the same poet, but at a far riper stage of his development. The amazingly concentrated power of expression these two poems exhibit is fully equal to that we find in Hamlet and Othello. In short, by 1593 ‘Shakespeare’ had already discovered what the English language was capable of. This means, for one thing, that the standard dating of the plays is seriously amiss. The real dates of the plays are several years—maybe a decade or so, in most cases— earlier than the scholars believe. When the poet wrote Venus and Lucrece, he was nearer the end than the beginning of his literary career. The initial reception of these poems tends to confirm this. The poet spoke of his ‘unpolished’ and ‘untutored’ lines, but this false modesty fooled nobody. Nobody thought these were the work of a novice. Their mastery was obvious in every line: ‘Bewitching like the wanton mermaid’s song.’ ‘A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow.’ ‘Till he take truce with her contending tears.’ ‘The pith of precedent and livelihood … Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good.’ Unpolished? … To read these poems is to see, in glorious abundance, what Meres meant about ‘Shakespeare’s fine-filed phrase.’ It’s a marvel that generations of scholars have been able to believe that these are among the poet’s juvenile efforts; that he could have written them at the same time he 375 was writing plays in blank verse so immeasurably far below the level he would finally achieve. Those plays, we must conclude, were written many years before the two long poems. Which means that Will couldn’t have written them, unless he wrote them during his boyhood in Stratford. Which means that someone else, someone much older than Will, must have written them—someone who, by the way, was close to the Earl of Southampton. That would perhaps be Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a noted poet and playwright. In 1593 Southampton nearly married his daughter. Scene XI. Elizabeth I, Queen of Carthage After Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare will not dedicate any other work to anyone using his name until 1609. The author is forty-six (46) years old and, as Chateaubriand said in the Vie de Rancé, he feels his old age is a nocturnal bird: he has his feet on the ground, but his eyes only look to the sky. Prospero will go on writing, adapting, correcting, perfecting and publishing his works with the eyes in the sky, in the winged spirit of Ariel, so that performed and published they may help his son take the crown and the throne. This happens with the play we are going to consider next: Dido, Queen of Carthage, published with the names of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe as authors. The quality of the verse indicates that this is an early play of our poet that he gave to Donne-Nashe to fill in.91 This play orbits around the same old story told up to now by Edward de Vere again and again: the story of his royal identity and his son’s claim to the throne of England. For in the play Dido, Queen of Carthage there is evidence that points to Edward de Vere’s life; in particular, to the life of Edward de Vere described in PT II as defended by Paul Streitz and Charles Beauclerk. In other words, Edward de Vere was Queen Elizabeth’s son and had a child with her for whom he advocated as future king. In the Marlowe Society webpage we can read: 92 In many ways, Dido is one of Marlowe’s most fascinating plays. Although far from being the straight translation of Virgil’s Aeneid that it was sometimes lazily dismissed as, the close ties between the play and its source does provide us with a rare glimpse of Marlowe at work. The scenes that the playwright has added, the changes in characterisation, even the elements that Marlowe has chosen to leave 91 As Harvey had identified Nashe as Marlowe in 1593, Donne could have taken the interlude of Oxford and put both names as being the product of two different persons, when in fact Donne is the one who is filling the gaps. 92 See http://www.marlowe-society.org/marlowe/work/dido/intro.html. 376 out, all give us some insight into his process of dramatisation, his ideas, and perhaps where his sympathies might lie. J.B. Steane writes on Marlowe’s freedom in his adaption of Virgil: The play is based on Virgil, Aeneid, Books I, II, and IV. Of the 1,736 lines, 194 are straight translations, 420 are re-expressed (T.M. Pearce, University of New Mexico thesis, 1930). Perhaps it should be added (for the figures might suggest that Marlowe is overmuch dependent on Virgil) that (in this editor’s opinion) comparison only emphasizes Marlowe’s creative involvement with his material: it would be quite wrong to assume that he was only doing a piece of hackwork in translating and adapting. As Sara Munson Deats says of Dido, one thing is clear from the beginning: ‘No other play by Marlowe has such a strong female lead character.’ In the original version of the story told by Virgil, Aeneas introduces himself radiant and in full light to Queen Dido, like this (I.586-612): Then he addressed the queen, suddenly, surprising them all, saying: ‘I am here in person, Aeneas the Trojan, him whom you seek, saved from the Libyan waves.’ In Marlowe-Nashe’s version, Aeneas has already talked to a nymph who happens to be his mother Venus in disguise and has told her: ‘Of Troy am I. Aeneas is my name.’ (I.i. 216). When Dido comes, Aeneas’ identity is not that clear (II.i.74-76): Dido What stranger art thou, that dost eye me thus? Aeneas Sometime I was a Trojan, mighty queen, But Troy is not: what shall I say I am? The brave hero is now confused about his identity. What is really surprising is that Aeneas’ identity seems to depend on Dido’s power. A. Sometimes I was a Trojan, mighty queen, B. But Troy is not. What shall I say I am? 377 Dido can decide Aeneas’ identity from the beginning. There are two possibilities; on the one hand, Aeneas could be a Trojan; on the other hand, he could not be a Trojan. But, has not Aeneas already told the nymph that he was from Troy and that his name was Aeneas? And what is more, the answer to Aeneas’ identity seems to be a riddle, a riddle similar to the one we find in Pericles, the solution of which is contained within Aeneas’ very words: A. Sometime I was a Trojan, mighty queen, B. But Troy is not. C. What shall I say I am? The Queen solves the riddle when she chooses that Aeneas’ identity be that of a ‘brave prince’ (II.i.80-4). While in Virgil Dido addresses Aeneas as ‘son of a goddess’ (I. 615), in Marlowe-Nashe’s version, Aeneas is a ‘Prince’, that is, not a King. Dido, we see now, has chosen the second possibility to explain Aeneas’ identity: B. “But T-roy is not”. C. What shall I say I am? D. Roi is not. Not king. But if Aeneas is not king of the Trojans, as he certainly is in Virgil, for Ilioneus informs Dido as such, who are his father and mother, the King and Queen of Aeneas? The answer comes to us when Aeneas thanks Dido for his protection and help (II.i.99-104): Aeneas In all humility, I thank your grace. Dido Remember who thou art; speak like thyself: Humility belongs to common grooms. Aeneas And who so miserable as Aeneas is? Dido Liest it in Dido’s hands to make thee blest, Then be assur’d thou art not miserable. This is not a dialogue between Queen Dido and the warrior King Aeneas. This is a rebuke (‘Remember who thou art’) from a mother to her child, the prince, for not talking properly at the table among courtesans. Following this rebuke, Dido says: ‘Liest it in Dido’s hands to make thee bleest … thou are not miserable.’ Aeneas asks who could be more miserable than he is, and Dido, after responding that he will be blessed, recognised, crowned King at the right time, gives us proof that Queen Dido is more than mighty; she is his mother. The author’s reality, coming 378 from outside the play, intrudes here. At the beginning of the play, when Ascanius is with Dido for the first time, the child says to her, without any justification or cause: ‘Madam, you shall be my mother.’ (II.i.98). Dido, not surprised at all by this indiscreet proposition, answers boldly: ‘And so I will, sweet child’ (II.i. 99), only to give Aeneas a great reason for rejoicing, for she will be the mother of his son, she will recognise the child as the Queen’s: ‘Be merry, man: Here’s to thy better fortune and good stars.’ (II.i.99-100). The play, as we see, starts by confirming that Aeneas is a Prince and will be King and therefore he must be happy, as well as his son, whose mother shall be Dido. They must be merry, for they are not bastards but royal and recognised by Dido before the courtesans. They have ‘good stars’. Nothing in this sequence is from Virgil. It is a free adaptation by Marlowe-Nashe. Let us proceed directly to Aeneas’s coronation and see its details. Aeneas has been informed in dreams by Hermes that he must go to Italy, following Jove’s orders. Aeneas is determined to go. In Virgil he goes to Italy and does not shrink from Dido’s laments and cries. In MarloweNashe’s version this is what happens (IV.iv.29-37): Dido O false Aeneas!... Thou and Achates meant to sail away. Aeneas Hath not the Carthage queen mine only son? Thinks Dido I will go and leave him here? Dido Aeneas, pardon me; for I forgot That young Ascanius lay with me this night. Love made me jealous: but, to make amends, Wear the imperial crown of Libya, Giving him her crown and sceptre. Sway thou the Punic sceptre in my stead, And punish me, Aeneas, for this crime. What crime has Dido committed to deserve the punishment of King Aeneas? She has kidnapped his son, just like Titania with Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She is using the child as a hostage to keep Aeneas in Carthage, an extreme that is not found in Virgil. Aeneas is then crowned as we have seen and everything seems to be fine, until Hermes comes again, this time physically, and tells Aeneas that he must not forget the prophecy that awaits his son in Rome, and that Venus, his mother, has played a trick on him and exchanged his son for Cupid (III.ii.98-100). This is Aeneas’ reply (V.i.34-43): Hermes Vain man, what monarchy expect’st thou here?... 379 Aeneas This was my mother who beguil’d the queen And made me take my brother for my son. This answer does not match what has been told in the text. In Marlowe, Dido decided that Aeneas’ identity was of a royal nature, as well as his son’s, whom Dido said she would care for as a mother (Act Two, Scene One). And this happens before Venus exchanges her son for Cupid in Act Three, Scene Two. If Aeneas and his son had ‘good stars’ at the beginning, why is Aeneas using this incomprehensible excuse now at the end of the play? What do Cupid and Venus have to do with the already crowned King Aeneas escaping from Carthage, if Dido already recognised them as royal and as having ‘good stars’ from the start? We cannot find a reason in the play. Only when we see this moment through Edward de Vere’s life and perspective does the reason to make him ‘take [his] brother for [his] son’ make sense. For here Cupid (which in Virgil was Aeneas’ brother, which is the reason, indeed, why Oxford used this epic story as a template to fill in his biographical story in disguise) is the same Cupid of sonnets 153 and 154 as interpreted by Hank Whittemore. He is the Third Earl of Southampton as described in the Sonnets and in Dido, aka Elizabeth, or ‘Eliza’, as Queen Dido is called in the play (IV.ii. 10). The reality from the world of Edward de Vere, the writer, has intruded in the play. He was Queen Elizabeth’s first ward because he was the child she had in 1548 with Thomas Seymour. At the same time, Edward de Vere and the Queen had a relationship during the 1570s as a result of which, as we see in sonnets 153 and 154 interpreted by Hank Whittemore, they had a son, Cupid. Cupid and Ascanius are the same person, Southampton, and thus the truth of the statement: the Queen made de Vere the brother of his son. The reason to escape from the Kingdom is incest, like in Pericles. That was the great concern and doubt the writer of this play had regarding his son’s royal legitimacy, and that is the justification for his depressive answer to Hermes. The play Dido seems to have been politically daring, and as we now see, for very good reasons. According to Logan and Smith: The play was first published in 1594 by the bookseller Thomas Woodcock. The title page attributes the play to Marlowe and Nashe, and also states that the play was acted by the Children of the Chapel. That company of boy actors stopped regular dramatic performance in 1584, but appears to have engaged in at least sporadic performances in the late 1580s and early 1590s, so that scholars give a range of 1587-93 for the first performance of Dido. 380 The Children of the Chapel were a company of boy actors. Peter Thomson informs us as follows:93 John Lyly was the first of many accomplished Elizabethan dramatists to provide specially written material for the choristers, whose performances the Queen enjoyed, but it was Lyly’s vigorous engagement on behalf of the established church in the Marprelate controversy that led to the dissolution of the boys’ companies in about 1590. We also know the fate of the Children of the Chapel:94 In 1576, Richard Farrant, then Master of the Children of the Chapel, purchased a lease on rooms at Blackfriars, intending to convert them for indoor performance. This first Blackfriars theatre was closed in 1584 because the plays were too politically daring. ‘Politically daring’. Is it possible that this play, Dido, acted by the Children of the Chapel, was one of those politically daring plays? We should also consider the following:95 The plays performed by public companies had to be licenced by the Master of the Revels, and it is possible that the ‘private’ companies at ‘private’ playhouses were left free of this control by the fiction that they were not a commercial operation in the way that adults companies were. Perhaps as a consequence, the ‘private’ children’s companies were often accused of staging plays thought to have satirical or seditious content … which escaped the censor’s watchful eye. Only if you match Edward de Vere’s life as seen through the perspective of PT II and Hank Whittemore’s interpretation of the Sonnets according to PT I, will you be able to see anything ‘politically daring’ in this Children of the Chapel’s play. If we consider Logan and Smith’s time range for this play (1584-1593) and its date of publication (1594), you will see that what is politically daring in this play is Edward de Vere’s pleading for his son Southampton to be King, as he did in 1593 93 See http://www.fathom.com/feature/35172/index.html. 94 See http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/childcomp.htm. 95 Dawson, Lesel, The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 53, No. 211, 2002, p. 345. 381 in Venus and Adonis. Both works share the same ‘hidden royal son’ theme. In Dido we read (III.iii.98-100): Venus Meantime Ascanius shall be my sharge; Whom I shall bear to Ida in mine arms, And couch him in Adonis’ purple down. And Venus and Adonis ends: Thus weary of the world, away she hies, And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid Their mistress mounted through the empty skies In her light chariot quickly is convey’d; Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen Means to immure herself and not be seen. If the reader does not see the same ‘royal hidden son’ theme in both Venus and Adonis and Dido, Queen of Carthage, the first one published in 1593 and the second one in 1594, then I will paraphrase Orson Welles’ answer when he was asked about the Shakespeare authorship question: if you do not find the same ‘royal hidden son’ theme in both works, you have some pretty coincidences to explain away. With the decade of the 1590s, those critical years when the Queen was aging and people talked about her royal succession, Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594) were pointing at a rightful heir, the ‘next of blood’, the son of Adonis and Aeneas: the purple flower who had been hidden by the Queen until the right time arrived. In this play there seems to be a promise the author has in mind and expects to be fulfilled, like in Venus and Adonis (II.i.96104): Ascanius Madam, you shall be my mother. Dido And so I will, sweet child. Be merry, man: Here’s to thy better fortune and good stars. Drinks. Aeneas In all humility, I thank your grace. Dido Remember who thou art; speak like thyself: Humility belongs to common grooms. Aeneas And who so miserable as Aeneas is? Dido Lies it in Dido’s hands to make thee blest, Then be assur’d thou art not miserable. 382 But the promise was not fulfilled. As we read in the first seventeen Shake-speare’s Sonnets, Southampton did not marry like the Queen, William Cecil and Shakespeare wanted. The warrior Aeneas is like the warrior Shakespeare: they were both devoted to their sons. The thing that worried the author of Dido about his son’s royal legitimacy was incest, his being the ‘brother for his son.’ In respect to his son Ascanius, Aeneas says to the Queen (III.iii.42-3): ‘And mought I live to see him … load his spear with Grecian princes’ heads.’ Before 1594, that expectation seemed plausible to Edward de Vere, but Southampton rejected the marriage of convenience and, instead, embraced the Essex’s rebellious faction, forcing Cecil and his son Robert to counteract and defend their position. In 1593, Donne’s brother died, after a long agony, in prison. His crime was to help a Catholic priest. Hence, Nashe’s The Terror of the Night of 1594, which reads: As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins. The night is the devil’s Black Book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions. Even as, when a condemned man is put into a dark dungeon, secluded from all comfort of light company, he doth nothing but despairfully call to mind his graceless former life, and the brutish outrages and misdemeanours that have thrown him into that desolate horror; so when the night in her rusty dungeon hath imprisoned our eye-sight, and that we are shut separetly in our chambers from resort, the devil keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences, no sense but surrenders to our memory a true bill of parcels of his detestable impieties. The table of our heart is turned to an indez of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us. He has saved himself turning to the Reformed Church, but his brother remained faithful to his Catholic roots. This explains why Nashe feels that ‘the table of our heart is turned to an indez of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us.’ The decade of 1590s is considered today a glorious and golden time, the time when Shakespeare flourished; but is was not. It was a dark, convulse, and depressive decade where famine, the pest and a kingdom without a royal heir seemed to head towards rebellion. And that is what naturally occurred in 1601. Scene XII. Southampton’s marriage proposal is over In The Monument Hank Whittemore tells us that as of October 1589, Henry Wriothesley, passing his ‘official sixteenth birthday, is expected to marry Lord Burghley’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth Vere, a union that would bring him into a Cecil family alliance; but he stalls, requesting a year to think it over.’ And Whittemore adds: 383 Southampton is well aware he was born in May/June 1574 as the natural son of Oxford and the Queen. He also knows Oxford denied his paternity of Elizabeth Vere upon her birth in 1575; thus, if he accepted Elizabeth Vere as his wife, he would not be marrying his half-sister. In any case, his opposition to the marriage proposal is based on political judgment and on genuine differences with the Cecils. Southampton is stubbornly refusing the bargain, preferring to ally himself with Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex … in opposition to William Cecil’s power to direct England’s future. In sonnet 1 of the Shake-speares Sonnets, our poet Edward de Vere orders his son to marry Elizabeth de Vere, Lord Burghley’s granddaughter, so that the Tudors do not die with the Queen: ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase,/ That thereby beauty’s Rose might never die,’ writes our poet to his son in the first sonnet. In July and September of 1590, there is evidence which proves that Southampton is being pressed to marry. Whittemore writes: July 15, 1590: The first recorded evidence of William Cecil’s plan for Southampton to marry his granddaughter is a letter to Cecil from Sir Thomas Stanhope, who had made an overture for the marriage of the young earl to his own daughter. Upon discovering that Burghley had already made a preemptive bid, Stanhope promptly apologized to the Lord Treasurer for ‘so treacherous a part toward your honor, having evermore found myself so bound unto you as I have done.’ He added: ‘I name it treachery, because I heard (that) before them you intended a match that way to the Lady Vayre’ (Vere)... September 19, 1590: By now the marriage proposal has been in play for almost a year. The young earl’s grandfather, Anthony Browne, Vicount Montague, now writes to Burghley that he and the Countess of Southampton ‘have laid abroud unto him both the commodity and hindrances likely to grow unto him’ if he refuses the marriage. Montague says Southampton recalled that ‘your Lordship (Cecil) was this last winter well pleased to yield unto him a further respite of one year to ensure resolution in respect of his young years.’ But Montague reminded him ‘that this year which he speaketh of is now almost up, and therefore the greater reason for you Lordship in honor and in nature to see your child (granddaughter) well placed and provided for...’. Our poet is writing his first seventeen sonnets to convince his royal son to accept the marriage that the Queen, Cecil and he want, in order to beget a son of Tudor (and Cecil’s) blood. In sonnet 10, for instance, Shakespeare even goes to the point of rebuking him in a tone that seems 384 to express his anxiety due to Southampton’s delay: For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any Who for thyself art so unprovident! Grant if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many, But that thou none lov’st is most evident: For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate That ’gainst thy self thou stickest not to conspire, Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate Which to repair should be thy chief desire: O change thy thought, that I may change my mind; Shall hate be fairer lodged then gentle love? Be as thy presence is, gracious and kind, Or to thy self at least kind hearted prove. Make thee another self for love of me, That beauty still may live in thine or thee. It was not meant to be, for Southampton by 1594 rejected the marriage and allied with Essex. Hence, by 1593 Thomas Nashe, that is, the young and satirical John Donne, who just before this was praying forgiveness and writing about theology in Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, wrote The Choice of Valentines, dedicating it to some Lord S. (i.e. Southampton): To the right honourable, the Lord S. Pardon, sweet flower of matchless poetry, And fairest bud the red rose ever bare, Although my muse, divorced from deeper care, Presents thee with a wanton elegy; Ne blame my verse of loose unchastity For painting forth the things that hidden are, Since all men act what I in speech declare, Only induced by variety. Complaints and praises every one can write, And passion out their pangs in stately rhymes, But of love’s pleasures none did ever write That hath succeeded in these latter times. Accept of it, dear Lord, in gentle gree, And better lines ere long shall honour thee. Charles Beauclerk interprets these dedicatory verses to Southampton as follows: 385 [I]t was whispered in certain circles that he was of royal blood. Rumors even leaked from the court; hence Nashe’s audacity in dedicating his poem “The Choice of Valentines” to Southampton in these thinly veiled lines … Southampton is the fairest child that the ‘red rose’ (Elizabeth) bore E. Ver (Oxford). He is also the child of ‘matchless poetry’ (Shakespeare). It is obvious why Nashe is apologizing for broaching a taboo! This is the same taboo Spenser is breaking in The Faerie Queene. Cory writes (Variorum 1, p. 343-44): But Arthur was not to be the Arthur of the known legends. He was to be the accepted lover of Gloriana, the Faërie Queene. ‘In that Faerie Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faerie Land.’ Who then was Arthur? He was ‘magnificence,’ says the poet … But who was Arthur? What was the political allegory? We turn to the poet; but he has made a Parthian retreat. He had expressly declared a double allegory for the whole poem, but it remains only partly explained. Cory ignored the message the poet wrote in Book V, Canto VII, stanzas 1-23. In those stanzas Britomart-Elizabeth enters the Isis church and dreams she is impregnated by Arthegall-Osiris as a consequence of which a ‘Lion-like’ son is born. That Arthegall (Art-egal, or he who is the equal of Arthur) is the representation of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is stated by the poet himself in the ‘ever’ rhymes of stanza 22. The fact that the Queen ignored the words of Donne-Spenser in stanza 21 are the explanation why The Faerie Queene ends in seven books according to the seven days of the week, as Alastair Fowler saw (1964), instead of with Prince Arthur meeting Gloriana at last in Book 12. As with the Shakespeare’s Sonnets of 1609, book seven of The Faerie Queene published in 1609 finishes a poetical work which was started as a monument for the future of the Tudors, the ‘Lordly brood’ of Gloriana. There was no point in writing another six: the Tudors were over while the first six books and the epilogue which is the seventh are already finished and perfect. Let’s quote Cory again replacing Leicester for Oxford: No wonder the poet put forward his suggestion of the marriage of Gloriana and Arthur, audacious, for all the encouragement of thronging rumors, with Parthian reticence. No wonder his prefatory sonnets again and again implore the various lords at the court to protect his vaguely interpreted but boldly insinuating poem against 386 misreading and calumny … He was to make history for Elizabeth and [Oxford] in his first twelve books … A new epic type that turns from the old mode of remembering and exalting the past to foreshadowing the future! Could we accept my theory would it not be a final and triumphant justification of Spenser’s ‘dark conceit,’ his moral and political allegory? Would it not reveal depths in The Faerie Queene sufficient to allure even the most casual readers? G.R. Hibbard (Thomas Nashe, ed. Georgia Brown, Ashgate, p. 56) writes on the verses of Nashe to Lord S. in The Choice of Valentines: Nashe wrote only three sonnets … one occurs at the end of Pierce Penilesse, one serves as the dedication to The Choice of Valentines and one as the epilogue to it. All three were written under the influence of Spenser and derive from the dedicatory sonnets, addressed to great personages, which he appended to the first edition of The Faerie Queene, published in 1590 … In the dedicatory sonnet to The Choice of Valentines, which is addressed ‘To the right Honorable the Lord S.’, there is an unmistakable echo of Spenser’s sonnet ‘To the right Honourable the Earle of Oxenforde.’ As Hibbard notes, Spenser opens his sonnet with the lines: Receive most Noble Lord in gentle gree, The vnripe fruit of an vnready witt. While Nashe ends his sonnet with the lines: Accept of it Dear Lord in gentle gree, And better lynes ere long shall honor thee. The Choice of Valentines is a satire in the form of an elegy, just what John Donne was writing (among many other things) during the 1590s: satiric elegies. The elegy starts by paraphrasing Chaucer’s pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales. The day described is Valentine’s Day, February 14, and the reader should note that there are exactly 14 verses in the Prologue and 14 verses in the Epilogue. This satirical elegy could not be more scandalous, for since Chaucer and the Middle Ages Valentine’s Day was associated to romantic love; flowers and ‘Valentine’ greeting cards were the usual thing then, as they are nowadays, among lovers. And so Donne-Nashe reminds us of this tradition from the beginning (ll. 1-18): 387 It was the merry month of February, When young men in their jolly roguery Rose early in the morn fore break of day To seek them valentines so trim and gay, With whom they may consort in summer sheen, And dance the hay-de-guise on our town green As ales at Easter or at Pentecost, Perambulate the fields that flourish most, And go to some village abordering near To taste the cream and cakes, and such good cheer, Or see a play of strange morality Shown by bachelry of Manningtree, Whereto the country franklins flock-meal swarm, And John and Joan come marching arm in arm. Even on the hallows of that blessed saint That doth true lovers with those joys acquaint, I went, poor pilgrim, to my lady’s shrine To see if she would be my valentine According to Grierson (Variorum edition, Vol. 2, 455) the Elegies of Donne suggest that ‘they were inspired by the frank poetry of the 1590s, works such as Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis.’ And this seems to be accurate, for this elegy surprises us when the author abruptly reverses Chaucer’s spirit. What was supposed to be a pilgrimage to a sacred place is now a brothel where his lover has gone to hide from her creditors (ll. 19-28): But woe, alas, she was not be found, For she was shifted to an upper ground; Good Justice Dudgeon-haft and Crab-tree-face, With bills and staves had scared her from the place, And now she was compelled for sanctuary To fly unto an house of venery. Thither went I, and boldly made enquire If they had hackneys to let out to hire, And what they craved by order of their trade To let one ride a journey on a jade. The two meanings of jade as a poor quality horse and a woman of ill repute allows the simile of ‘the jade ride’ and the sexual intercourse with the prostitute in her ‘sanctuary’ to be very clear. Chaucer having been turned upside down, this pilgrim’s sanctuary is now a brothel where money allows sexual intercourse: 388 Therewith out stepped a foggy three-chinned dame That used to take young wenches for to tame, And asked me if I meant as I professed, Or only asked a question but in jest. In jest? quoth I. That term it as you will; I come for game; therefore give me my Jill. Why, sir, quoth she, if that be your demand, Come lay be a God’s-penny in my hand, For in our oratory sickerly None enters here to do his nicery But he must pay his offertory first, And then perhaps we’ll ease him of his thirst. I, hearing her so earnest for the box, Gave her her due, and she the door unlocks. The religious and sexual language could not be more mocking. The ‘offertory’, the mass only functions if there is money: ‘No penny, no paternoster,’ says Nashe in his Preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589). The ‘box’, the confessional where the young man wants to enter to have his sins forgiven, only opens if he has money. Luckily for him, he has plenty (ll. 43-52): In am I entered; Venus be my speed; But where’s this female that must do this deed? By blind meanders and by crankled ways She leads me onward (as my author says) Until we came within a shady loft Where Venus’ bouncing vestals skirmish oft, And there she set me in a leather chair, And brought me forth of pretty trulls a pair, To choose of them which might content mine eye, But her I sought I could nowhere espy. The young man wants a ‘fresher’ merchandise (‘ware’) named Frances, but she is going to cost him much more than the other girls (ll. 53-66): I spake them fair, and wished them well to fare, Yet so it is, I must have fresher ware Wherefore, Dame Bawd, as dainty as you be, Fetch gentle Mistress Frances forth to me. By halidom, quoth she, and God’s own mother, I well perceive you are a wily brother, 389 For if there be a morsel of more price You’ll smell it out though I be ne’er so nice. As you desire, so shall you swive with her, But think your purse-strings shall aby it dear, For he that will eat quails must lavish crowns, And Mistress Frances in her velvet gowns, And ruffs and periwigs as fresh as May, Cannot be kept with half a crown a day. As Donne wrote in “The Bracelet,” gold is ‘restorative’, for Mistress Frances ‘restores’ to him once he has paid (ll. 67-74): Of price, good hostess, we will not debate, Though you assize me at the highest rate; Only conduct me to this bonnibel, And ten good gobs I will unto thee tell Of gold or silver, which shall like thee best, So much do I her company request. Away she went, so sweet a thing is gold That (maugre) will invade the strongest hold. This same military sense used by Nashe to compare gold is used by Donne in his elegy “The Bracelet.” Commenting the line ‘Georgeous France … seuentene headed Belgia,’ volume 2 of the Variorum edition (531) says: SMITH (1971): Donne alludes to ‘the intrusive and corrupting power of Spanish gold in the European politics’ of the day, which ‘financed rebellion or sedition, paid invading armies, and played havoc with national currencies.’ Spanish intrigues in Scotland and France were ‘notorious,’ as was Spain’s ‘military intervention in the Low Countries’ (427) … ADAMS (1979): ‘the inflation brought about by Spanish importation of American gold turned Europe topsy-turvy; France went from riches to rags…’ Now comes the girl he wants, France, and he salutes her as if she were a horse (ll. 75-98): Hey-ho, she comes that hath my heart in keep Sing lullaby, my cares, and fall asleep; Sweeping she comes, as she would brush the ground, Her rattling silks my senses do confound. 390 Oh, I am ravished! Void the chamber straight, For I must needs upon her with my weight. My Thomalin, quoth she, and then she smiled. Aye, aye, quoth I, so more men are beguiled With smiles, with flattering words and feigned cheer, When in their deeds their falsehood doth appear. As how, my lambkin? blushing she replied, Because I in this dancing-school abide? If that be it that breeds this discontent, We will remove the camp incontinent; For shelter only, sweetheart, came I hither, And to avoid the troublous stormy weather, But now the coast is clear we will be gone, Since but thyself true lover have I none. With that she sprung full lightly on my lips, And fast about the neck me coils and clips, She wanton faints, and falls upon her bed, And often tosseth to and fro her head; She shuts her eyes, and waggles with her tongue. Oh, who is able to abstain so long? He tries to penetrate her, but is unable to do so: (ll. 99-130): I come, I come; sweet leman, by thy leave; Softly my fingers up these curtains heave, And make me happy stealing by degrees, First bare her legs, then creep up to her knees, From hence ascend unto her manly thigh (A pox on lingering when I am so nigh); Smock, climb apace, that I may see my joys. Oh, heaven and paradise are all but toys Compared with this sight I now behold, Which well might keep a man from being old; A pretty rising womb without a wem, That shone as bright as any silver stream, And bare out like the bending of an hill At whose decline a fountain dwelleth still That hath his mouth beset with ugly briers Resembling much a dusky net of wires. A lofty buttock barred with azure veins, Whose comely swelling, when my hand distrains, Or wanton checketh with a harmless stripe, It makes the fruits of love eftsoon be ripe, And pleasure, plucked too timely from the stem, To die ere it hath seen Jerusalem. 391 Oh gods, that ever anything so sweet So suddenly should fade away and fleet; Her arms are spread, and I am all unarmed; Like one with Ovid’s cursed hemlock charmed, So are my limbs unwieldy for the fight, That spend their strength in thought of their delight. What shall I do to show myself a man? I will not be, for aught that beauty can. I kiss, I clap, I feel, I view at will, Yet dead he lies, not thinking good or ill. She is surprised that he is not aroused, and tries to help him have an erection, which she achieves only with her expert hands and movements (ll. 131-144): Unhappy me, quoth she, and will’t not stand? Come, let me rub and chafe it with my hand; Perhaps the silly worm is laboured sore, And wearied that it can do no more; If it be so (as I am great adread), I wish ten thousand times that I were dead. Howe’er it is, no means shall want in me That may avail to his recovery; Which said, she took and rolled it on her thigh, And when she looked on’t, she would weep and sigh, And dandled it, and danced it up and down Not ceasing till she raise it from his swoon, And then he flew on her as he were wood, And on her breach did thack and foin a-good But the young man does not know how to breathe and control himself (ll. 145-178): He rubbed and pricked and pierced her to the bones, Digging as far as eath he might for stones, Now high, now low, now striking short and thick, Now diving deep he touched her to the quick, Now with a gird he would his course rebate, Straight would he take him to a stately gait. Play while him list, and thrust he ne’er so hard, Poor Patient Grizel lieth at his ward, And gives and takes as blithe and free as May, And e’ermore meets him in the middle way. On him her eyes continually were fixed; 392 With her eye-beams his melting looks were mixed, Which like the sun that ’twixt two glasses plays, From one to th’ other casts rebounding rays, He, like a star, that to regild his beams, Sucks in the influence of Phoebus’ streams, Embathes the lines of his descending light In the bright fountains of her clearest sight; She, fair as fairest planet in the sky, Her purity to no man doth deny; The very chamber that enclouds her shine Looks like the palace of that god divine Who leads the day about the zodiac, And every even descends to th’ ocean lake; So fierce and fervent is her radiance, Such fiery stakes she darts at every glance, She might enflame the icy limbs of age, And make pale death his surquidry assuage To stand and gaze upon her orient lamps Where Cupid all his chiefest joys encamps, And sits and plays with every atomy That in her sunbeams swarm abundantly. Thus gazing and thus striving we persever, But what so firm that may continue ever? Realising he is going to ejaculate, she cries out in dismay (ll. 179-195): Oh, not so fast, my ravished mistress cries, Lest my content, that on thy life relies, Be brought too soon from his delightfull seat, And me unwares of hoped bliss defeat; Together let our equal motions stir, Together let us live and die, my dear, Together let us march unto content, And be consumed with one blandishment. As she prescribed, so kept we crotchet-time, And every stroke in order like a chime Whilst she, that had preserved me by her pity, Unto our music framed a groaning ditty. She is worried that she may not get pregnant if he has an orgasm before she does, while he, unable to listen to her pleadings that he wait, ejaculates, his life forsaking ‘his fleshly residence’ (ll. 196-215): 393 Alas, alas, that love should be a sin, Even now my bliss and sorrow doth begin. Hold wide thy lap, my love Danae, And entertain the golden shower so free That trilling falls into thy treasury, As April drops not half so pleasant be, Nor Nilus’ overflow to Egypt plains, As this sweet stream that all her joints embains. With Oh, and Oh, she itching moves her hips, She jerks her legs, and sprawleth with her heels; No tongue may tell the solace that she feels. I faint, I yield, Oh, death, rock me asleep; For from us yet thy spirit may not glide Until the sinewy channels of our blood Withhold the source from this imprisoned flood, And then will we (that ‘then’ will come too soon) Dissolved lie as though our days were done. The whilst I speak, my soul is fleeting hence, And life forsakes his fleshly residence. She begs him to stay; at this moment, after realizing that he does not care for her, that he does not love her at all, she ‘shuts … her conduit all in haste,’ therefore “aborting” (ll. 216-235): Stay, stay, sweet joy, and leave me not forlorn; Why shouldst thou fade that art but newly born? Stay but an hour; an hour is not so much; But half an hour, if that thy haste be such; Nay, but a quarter; I will ask no more, That thy departure (which torments me sore) May be alightened with a little pause, And take away this passion’s sudden cause. He hears me not, hard-hearted as he is; He is the son of Time and hates my bliss; Time ne’er looks back, the river ne’er return; A second spring must help me or I burn. No, no, the well is dry that should refresh me; The glass is run of all my destiny; Nature of winter learneth niggardise, Who, as he over-bars the stream with ice, That man nor beast may of their pleasance taste, So shuts she up her conduit all in haste, And will not let her nectar overflow, Lest mortal men immortal joys should know. 394 What begins now could be entitled “The Complaint of Frances” or her tragic soliloquy. Frances cries out in dismay (ll.236-241): Adieu, unconstant love, to thy disport; Adieu, faint-hearted instrument of lust, That falsely hath betrayed our equal trust; Henceforth no more will I implore thine aid, Or thee, or men, of cowardice upbraid. But the reader is wrong if he or she thinks Donne-Nashe, the ‘Copernicus of poetry’, is going to leave this tradition of ‘complaint’ untouched. France has cried enough, for now she is going to give herself pleasure: an incredible, unexpected surprise for the reader, indeed, for a complaint against men turns out to be a celebration of the pleasures without them. What would have been “The Complaint of Frances” turns into “The Ode to Dildo.” First of all, her Dildo will not make her pregnant (ll. 242-249): My little dildo shall supply their kind, A knave that moves as light as leaves by wind, That bendeth not, nor foldest any deal, But stands as stiff as he were made of steel, And plays at peacock ’twixt my legs right blithe, And doth my tickling swage with many a sigh, For by Saint Runnion, he’ll refresh me well, And never make my tender belly swell. And her dildo is mighty and can make Troy and other kingdoms fall (ll. 250-271): Poor Priapus, whose triumph now must fall, Except thou thrust this weakling to the wall; Behold how he usurps in bed and bower, And undermines thy kingdom every hour, How sly he creeps betwixt the bark and tree, And sucks the sap, whilst sleep detaineth thee; He is my mistress’ page at every stound, And soon will tent a deep-entrenched wound; He waits on courtly nymphs that be so coy, And bids them scorn the blind alluring boy; He gives young girls their gamesome sustenance, And every gaping mouth his full sufficience; He fortifies disdain with foreign arts, 395 And, wanton chaste, deludes all loving hearts; If any wight cruel mistress serves, Or in dispair, unhappy pines and starves, Curse eunuch dildo, senseless counterfeit, Who sooth may fill, but never can beget, But if revenge, enraged with despair That such a dwarf his welfare should impair, Would fain this woman’s secretary know, Let him attend the marks that I shall show. Among other things, her dildo is direct, firm, restless and well guided: it always keeps one way, the best way, in ‘paths unknown’ (ll. 272-283): He is a youth almost two handfuls high, Straight, round and plumb, yet having but one eye Wherein the rheum so fervently doth rain That Stygian gulf may scarce his tears contain; Attired in white velvet or in silk, And nourished with hot water or with milk, Armed otherwhile in thick congealed glass, Upon a chariot of five wheels he rides, The which an arm-strong driver steadfast guides, And often alters pace as ways grow deep (For who in paths unknown one gait can keep?) The ode to Dildo ends now with the poet’s own self-accusation (ll. 284-293): Sometimes he smoothly slideth down the hill, Anotherwhile the stones his feet do kill; In clammy ways he treadeth by and by, And plasheth and sprayeth all that be him nigh; So fares this jolly rider in his race, Plunging and sourcing forward in like case, Bedashed, bespirted, and beplodded foul, God give thee shame, thou blind mis-shapen owl. Fie, fie, for grief; a lady’s chamberlain, And canst not thou thy tattling tongue refrain? Elizabeth de Vere, as the (official) daughter of Edward de Vere, Lord Great Chamberlain of England, is this ‘Lady’s Chamberlain’. Hence, the poet’s warning to himself to keep silent. He excuses himself while mentioning what the powerful Elizabeth de Vere, the ‘Lady’s 396 Chamberlain’s’ and grand-daugther of William Cecil (hence ‘Cicely’) could do to him if he was caught (ll. 294-298): I read thee, beardless blab; beware of stripes, And be advised what thou vainly pipes; Thou wilt be whipped with nettles for this gear, If Cicely show but of thy knavery here; Saint Denis shield me from such female sprites! Donne-Nashe excuses himself by saying that he is only telling the story for himself and his Muse, not for women to learn to hate men and love dildos. This too is shocking, indeed, for his Muse will lay ‘breathless’ and he without energy, as if they just had sex while writing or ‘penning’ the elegy. Hence, Donne-Nashe by writing the Elegy ‘only for myself’, has been giving himself pleasure just before our eyes: his poetry is the poet’s dildo! (ll. 299-315): Regard not, dames, what Cupid’s poet writes: I penned this story only for myself, Who giving suck unto a childish elf, And quite discouraged in my nursery, Since all my store seems to her penury. I am not as was Hercules the stout, That to the seventh journey could hold out; I want those herbs and roots of Indian soil That strengthen weary members in their toil; Drugs and electuaries of new device Do shun my purse, that trembles at the price; Sufficeth, all I have I yield her whole, Which for a poor man is a princely dole; I pay our hostess scot and lot at most, And look as lean and lank as any ghost. What can be added more to my renown? She lieth breathless; I am taken down. The poet asks for gentlemen’s gratitude, for he has shown them his own masculine dildo, which is poetry and satire: intellectual pleasure without women. A reference to his name crowns the elegy (ll. 316-320): The waves do swell, the tides climb o’er the banks, Judge, gentlemen, if I deserve not thanks. And so good night unto you every one, For lo, our thread is spun, our play is done. 397 The Variorum (Vol. 2, 498) says that in his later poetry Donne was “a chief actor and an influence in what might be called the ‘reinvention of love,’ from something essentially social and feudal to something essentially private and modern … but thinks that in the Elegies Donne views love simply as ‘Ovidian game-playing.’ In these Elegies, love ‘shares in the general corruption of society’ and ‘involves secrecy, adultery, and betrayal in all directions.’” In the epilogue, consisting of 14 verses like the prologue, Nashe ends: Thus hath my pen presumed to please my friend; Oh, might’st thou likewise please Apollo’s eye; No, honour brooks no such impiety. Yet Ovid’s wanton muse did not offend; He is the fountain whence my streams do flow; Forgive me if I speak as I was taught, Alike to women, utter all I know, As longing to unlade so bad a fraught. My mind once purged of such lascivious wit, With purified words and hallowed verse Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse, That better may thy graver view befit. Meanwhile yet rests you smile at what I write, Or for attempting, banish me your sight. This is just what John Donne was doing in his Elegies, following Ovid’s Amores model and ‘lascivious wit’. Elizabeth de Vere was the woman left unsatisfied, while Southampton allied with Essex in his quest for battles and power. So good and new was this elegy “Nashe’s Dildo” that Donne writes in Satire II (ca. 1593-4; ll. 23-32): And they who write, because all write, have still That excuse for writing, and for writing ill. But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw Other’s wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous maw Rankly digested, doth those things out spew, As his own things; and they are his own, ’tis true, For if one eat my meat, though it be known The meat do me no harm, nor they which use To out-do Dildoes, and out-usure Jews As Nashe and Marlowe are the same according to Harvey, ‘Jews’ seems to point to The Jew of Malta and ‘Dildoes’ to The Choice of Valentines or “Nashe’s Dildo.” 398 My interpretation of the theme of The Choice of Valentines by Thomas Nashe being poetry as the poet’s own dildo, together with my interpretation of Thomas Nashe being a young and satirical ‘Jack Donne’, find an explanation in Donne's elegy “To his Mistress going to bed.” In the Variorum edition of John Donne (vol.2) we read: Docherty claims that … [t]he metamorphosing of the woman into the male speaker leads to a form of ‘auto-eroticism,’ Docherty maintains, the woman becoming ‘the imaginative instrument’ by which the speaker ‘identifies, names and blesses himself as male’ … ElBed is not, Docherty argues, a study in ‘sexual relation’ but in ‘auto-eroticism, masturbation, talking to the isolated self,’ and because of this the woman has ‘no value’ and ‘does not, in fact, even appear’ … Thus for Docherty the poem does not reveal a woman but is rather a ‘male striptease,’ and he thinks that by the end of the poem it is clearly the male speaker who is undressing and exposing himself. The woman, Docherty maintains, is only ‘the literal extension of the phallus, representing the phallic erection,’ and what the speaker seeks is ‘recognition of his maleness,’ his phallus, and of the power its ‘potency’ should give him.” The Variorum continues with the confirmation of my interpretation by referring to the opinion of two scholars of Donne on the elegy “To his Mistress going to bed”: Leishman … argues that ElBed may have been suggested by Amores I.5, in which Ovid describes how Corinna came to him one hot summer day while he was resting, but he also points out English precedents for this kind of poem, especially Thomas Nashe’s “The Choice of Valentines”... Easthope … calls ElBed an expansion of lines 26-48 of Ovid's Amores I.5 but argues that it needs to be read in the context of other English Renaissance imitations of Ovid, especially Nashe’s “The Choice of Valentines” … Easthope further points…Ovid’s speaker overtly boasts and fantasizes for a male audience, whereas Donne’s speaker is ‘himself advanced in the role of confessional interlocutor’ seeking ‘to elicit truth from the woman’ … Drawing from psychoanalysis, Easthope notes that Donne’s idea of sexual intercourse differs markedly from that of Ovid ‘in the degree to which sexual drive has been transformed or sublimated into narcissism’ … and thus, his poem, often singled out for its notorious sexuality, is really ‘an expression of self-love’ The relation of Donne, Nashe and Marlowe’s Ovid’s Amores 399 translation will be dealt with in the next scene, but we see now the relation mentioned above. In his edition of Thomas Nashe’s The Choice of Valentines of 1899, John S. Farmer tells us that the poem was not printed as a book but only circulated in manuscript. A poem of John Davies of Hereford seems to point out that he was ordered by Nashe to make the satirical elegy disappear, as Farmer writes: 96 At all events, no copy is at present known to exist. John Davies of Hereford alludes to it, but leaves it uncertain whether its destruction occurred in MS. or in print. In his “Papers Complaint” he writes: But O! my soule is vext to thinke how euill It is abus’d to beare suits to the Deuill. Pierse-Pennilesse (a Pies eat such a patch) Made me (agree) that business once dispatch. And having made me vndergo the shame, Abusde me further, in the Deuills name: And made [me] Dildo (dampned Dildo) beare, Till good men’s hate did me in peeces teare. Of all the manuscript copies of “Nashe’s Dildo” we have, the Inner Temple one (Petyt MS.) is the most correct. Farmer tells us that: In the Petyt, however, we get a suppositional explanation of its manifestly purer text. Petyt, subsequent to his call to the Bar, in 1670, was for many years Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London. Now we know that Lord Essex, an intimate friend and connection of the Earl of Southampton, and like Southampton a generous and discerning patron of letters, was for some time in the ‘free custody’ of the Lord Keeper of the Tower. Further, Southampton, who had joined Essex in his rebellion, had been tried and convicted with his friend, and though the Queen spared his life, he was not released from the Tower until the ascension of James I. It is not unlikely, therefore, that a copy of Nashe’s manuscript made for Lord Essex passed, on the execution of the latter, with other papers and documents, into the official custody of the Lord Keeper, to be subsequently unearthed by his successor, Petyt, who, with a taste for the “curious,” had it copied for his own edification. This supposition is further borne out as follows: The particular commonplace book in which this poem occurs has been written by various hands. In the same handwriting as, and immediately preceding “The Choise of Valentines,” are two poetical effusions dedicated ‘To the Earl of Essex,’ both apparently written 96 See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17779/17779-h/17779-h.htm. 400 when he was in prison and under sentence of death. The other contents of the volume are likewise contemporaneous. When Essex returned from Ireland without permission, he was ordered to remain in Lord Egerton’s house in the Strand, where Donne was working as a secretary. According to John Stubbs, Donne referred to Essex as ‘our Earl.’ And when Essex was convicted in the Tower for his rebellion, John Stubbs tells us that as chief secretary of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal Egerton, ‘[p]art of Donne’s job, in the following days and weeks, was no doubt to help interview prisoners, to transcribe and circulate their dissonant testimonies.’ This seems a powerful reason for the manuscript of “Nashe’s Dildo” ending in the hands of Petyt, the Lord Keeper of the Tower, fifty years later. A satirical poem of Nashe laughing at Cecil and dedicated to Southampton included in the manuscript, together with two poems dedicated to the imprisoned Essex. In the Petyt MS, by the way, the last two lines of Nashe’s poem read: And so, good night! unto you euer’ie one; For loe, our thread is spunne, our plaie is donne. Scene XIII. Marlowe and Nashe are the same The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), that was dedicated by Nashe to Southampton, tells the adventures of Jack Wilton (a mask of ‘Jack Donne’) through Europe and Italy. Considering that Marlowe’s Amores was left unpublished during his lifetime (ten appeared in 1599, and the complete work in 1600 abroad) we may read these words of Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller (pub. 1594) with interest: The name of religion, be it good or bad that is ruinated, God never suffers unrevenged. I’ll say of it as Ovid said of eunuchs: Qui primus pueris genitalia membra recidit, Vulnera qua fecit debuit ipse pati. Who first deprived young boys of their best part, With self-same wounds he gave he ought to smart. (J.B. Steane, Penguin, 1985, p. 283.) And Steane adds in a note: ‘Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores (Elegies), II, 3, 3-4.’ The question is: How can that be? Marlowe the spy died in 1593 and Nashe is writing the translation as his own in 1594, while the work did not appear in print until the year 1599? And how B.I. added his translation of Elegy XV of Book I? Let us quote some words by 401 Stephen Orgel (Penguin, 2007, p. ix): But Marlowe’s Ovidian elegies are more than translations. They undertake, with remarkable energy and ingenuity, the adaptation of a quintessentially classical mode to the uses of English poetry … The excitement Marlowe brought to these poems is obvious, as much in the vividness and wit of the language as in the evident haste and occasional carelessness of the composition … But licentiousness is not the Elegies’ primary claim on our attention—indeed, by current standards they are barely warm. Their rhetoric, however, brings a new tone and a new range of possibilities into English verse. Donne’s Elegies are full of a sense of Marlowe’s language Moral of the story: Donne did the translation with the mask (or literary brand) of Marlowe. In other words: Nashe was the author, and quote them in 1594 as his own, and with all reason. As Nashe is Donne, Donne’s Elegies are full of them. That’s what reason and common sense and a good theory is all about. Ignore all this and you may start to think, along with Marlovians, that Marlowe was a ghost who wrote Donne’s Elegies and Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, along with Shakespeare and the Sonnets, even though the Sonnets were written from a Tudor father of 40 years to a Tudor son who was in the Tower of London awaiting execution for his treason against the Crown. In Marlowe’s Ovid, by M.L. Stapleton, we read: No definitive reason for Marlowe’s choice of the Amores for translation can be assumed [well, how about using the knowledge gained from that translation for his own Elegies, Donne’s Elegies?] … What do some of Marlowe’s contemporaries have to say about the Amores? His theatrical collaborator Thomas Nashe quotes it more than any other Ovidian text in his works, including the Metamorphoses, in an astonishing variety of contexts in his many prose treatises, without much concern for its allegedly forbidden nature, though he provides the appropriate disclaimer on the utility of erotic poetry in The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589): I woulde not haue any man imagine, that in praysing of Poetry, I endeuour to approue Virgils vnchast Priapus, or Ouids obscenitie. I commend their witte, not their wantonnes, their learning, not their lust: yet euen as the Bee out of the bitterest flowers, and sharpest thistles gathers honey, so out of the filthiest Fables, may profitable knowledge be sucked and selected. Neuerthelesse tender youth ought to bee restrained for a time from the reading of such ribauldrie, least chewing ouer wantonlie the eares of this Summer Corne, they be choaked with the haune before they can come at the 402 kernell. For an author who wrote The Choise of Valentines (c. 1594) and happily circulated this gleefully pornographic poem in manuscript under its other name, Nashe His Dildo, this seems to be quite a remarkable statement. His sense of humor is rarely absent from his writings. His benevolent Summer castigates Winter in Summers Last Will and Testament (1600), ‘Let none beleeue thee, that will euer thriue,’ for making frosty observations such as this: ‘Whoredome hath Ouid to vphold her throne, / And Aretine of late in Italie.’ Nashe may have also wanted us to notice Winter’s hypocrisy, since later in the same speech, he uses the Amores, which surely helped the magister Amoris uphold whoredom’s throne, as a moral exemplum. A pleasant comedie, called Summers last will and testament … In his judgment on Ovid, Winter quotes Amores 3.8.25-26: Naso, that could speake nothing but pure verse, And had more wit then words to vtter it, And words and choise as euer Poet had, Cride and exclaimde in bitter agonie, When knowledge had corrupted his chaste mind, Discite qui sapitis non haec qua scimus inertes, Sed trepidas acies & fera bella sequi. You that be wise, and euer meane to thriue, O studie not these toyes we sluggards vse, But follow armes, and waite on barbarous warres. It’s clear Nashe is using his own, not other’s, translation. And that Marlowe the spy is a brand: a mask, the monstrous atheist in town and the scourge of all pious believers. A legend who never said a word against anybody nor against Nashe for using (stealing) his work. Ben Jonson would have fulminated Nashe for this for sure but, in fact, he learned satire from Nashe, some critics have seen, or from Donne, as others have seen (both groups of critics are right, according to DINS theory). Ben Jonson’s epitaph to Nashe tries to minimise what Jonson copied from him. Originality, monstrous originality is what Harvey criticises Nashe with in his pamphlets. Nashe was not a stealer, but the most original pen of the times. As Georgia Brown writes, ‘Nashe’s style does not just strike the reader, it knocks them on the head ... Nashe is actually more creative linguistically than Shakespeare’ (Thomas Nashe. The University Wits, Ashgate, 2011, xxx.) In The Age of Thomas Nashe (Ashgate, ed. Stephen Guy-Bray et al, 2013, pp. 11 and 26) we are told: Elizabethan writers like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe certainly did recognise Ovid as a city poet and adapted his model to their own confrontations with emerging urban forces. Marlowe had 403 [mind this] probably finished his translation of Ovid’s Amores by the time he left Cambridge in 1587, and Nashe [mind this] certainly knew his translation, as he quotes from it in The Vnfortunate Traueller (1594) ... Nashe helps Elizabethan culture rediscover Ovid as the author of sex and the city, invoking Ovid to make issues of urbanization and urbanity available for debate. He uses Ovid to return again and again to an exploration of the city as the place for particular kinds of economic, sexual, social and cultural transaction. It is Nashe who comes to epitomize the Londoner and man-about-town in late Elizabethan culture, and it is Nashe who uncovers, through the Ovidian model, new ways of addressing the specific challenges and delights of London, in terms that Shakespeare, among other contemporaries, found particularly productive. Let us put it this way: pseudonym A uses the work as his without saying that he is using the work of B, but years later the work is attributed to pseudonym B by someone who, clearly, ignored that A used it as his for years. If A is using his work, and it is attributed to B by someone else in the future, the work is A by precedence. Which means that Donne-Nashe used the Marlowe pseudonym too and people confused what work belonged to one or the other. In this case, the translation of Ovid’s Amores belongs, in the end, to the real man behind both masks: Donne. We can see more on this. The Variorum of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne tells us something we should pay attention to when interpreting Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus: Davies (1994, 66-67) contends that readers of Donne’s Holy Sonnets seldom feel that they ‘are witnessing a verbal process representative of the act of contrition, but rather a dizzy, dazzling reportage of the experience of life,’ a kind of ‘performance-art’ (66). In Davies's view, ‘grace is not within reach so long as the speaker continues to perform,’ as in HSBlack 9-10 (‘Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;/ But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?’) (66) For Davies, the lines echo Faustus’ dialogue in Marlowe’s play: ‘Accursed Faustus, where is mercy now?/ I do repent, and yet I do despair;/ Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast’ (18.70-72) (66), and he observes that, like Faustus, Donne’s ‘struggle’ is also a kind of ‘staged event’ that he is not ready to abandon (66). Thus, Davies adds, in HSScene the speaker ‘expresses a Faustian sense of shock at the termination of the time allotted to his performance,’ and his only hope, Davies claims, is that his body ‘will take all the hellbent sins down into the grave with it: a nonsense?’ (66). But in some of the sonnets, such as HSRound 9, 13-14 and HSVex 12-13, Davies thinks, a ‘more tender 404 note” is apparent.’ (66-67). That Marlowe’s works are mainly the work of John Donne (with some intervention of Oxford, as when he gave the interludes to fill in), can be seen in the following quote from Dr. Faustus (13.90-109; Penguin 2003): Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. I will be Paris, and for love of thee Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked, And I will combat with weak Menelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumèd crest. Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel And then return to Helen for a kiss. O, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appeared to hapless Semele, More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Artethusa’s azured arms; And none but thou shalt be my paramour. The editors Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey write on these lines: This hymn of sexual desire conceals learned ironies in its dense classical allusions. The opening questions come from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, in which a visitor to the underworld, seeing Helen’s no-longer-recognizable skull, asks: ‘And is this what those thousand ships sailed for from all over Greece? Is this why all those Greeks and barbarians were killed? And all those cities sacked?’ Marlowe turns this into part of an oddly humanistic sexual fantasy, the necrophiliac equivalent of the scholar’s desire to revive the classical past … What fascinated him was the destructiveness of her beauty: men died and cities burned for it … the ‘thousand stars’, their number matching the ships, are alight with natural beauty (starlight often ignites Marlowe’s poetry) Let us consider this: 405 a) ‘Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies!’ This is pure Donne. You have the ‘suck’ and the soul flying in a metaphysical metaphor. b) ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.’ Ramie Targoff tells us: “With a characteristic mixture of exuberance and idiosyncrasy, Donne begins a verse epistle to his friend Sir Henry Wotton: ‘Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Souls.’ In making so extravagant a claim for the power of letters, he draws upon the ancient understanding that the soul resides in the breath, so that a kiss between two people would naturally involve an exchange of the two parties’ souls … In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe revived this ancient idea with Faustus’ desperate plea to Helen: ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss./ Her lips suck forth my soul!’” If you consider that the other Marlowe, the spy, was an atheist you will see here that this metaphysical kiss has nothing to do with such a mentality. This is a metaphysical poet, not an atheist spy. Also, the fact that ‘starlight often ignites Marlowe’s poetry’ is what William Epson tells Donne loved above all: the space and the stars. Also, what ‘fascinated [Marlowe] was the destructiveness of her beauty.’ Just think for one second who is the English poet of death. Then, read the Anniversaries or the Holy Sonnets. In Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (2008), by Judith Weil, we are told these interesting words: Douglas Cole has shown that Marlowe’s plots seem to provide rationalizations of an Augustinian moral psychology: The soul is weighed in the balance by what delights her, as St Augustine put it, which is another way of saying that what a man loves tells most about what that man is … Through the allusions which occur in all of his plays, Marlowe reveals an abiding preoccupation with wisdom. We can discern, behind his mistaken praisers of wisdom, the shadow of that lady who praised herself in the books of Proverbs and Wisdom as the bride of God and mother of all creation. The Church Fathers chose to replace this mediating Wisdom figure with the second person of the Trinity, Christ. Nevertheless, she preserved a feminine identity congenial to Erasmus and to such Christian poets as Dante, Spenser, and Donne. She writes near the end quoting a great Donnean scholar: Dame Helen Gardner treats Dr. Faustus as a ‘tragedy of damnation’ and its hero as a man incapable of change. But she observes, at the same time, that Marlowe is ‘more merciful, as he is always more metaphysical, than Shakespeare.’ 406 In a note we read her surprise: Sister Geraldine Thompson ... comes tantalizingly close to Marlowe when she calls Nashe (Marlowe’s sometime collaborator?) a ‘kindred spirit’ with Erasmus. That’s because Nashe and Marlowe were the same person: Donne. We now see that Donne is the main author behind Marlowe-Nashe, and Oxford a collaborator or master who supplied the interludes to fill in or collaborate on his works. There is more on this. In the case of Hero of Leander, commenting on verses 197-98 of the Second Anniversarie the Variorum tells us: LEGOUIS (1932) states initially that either Hesper or Vesper is a misprint for ‘Phosphor,’ since Hesper and Vesper are not two different names but two forms of the same name … and explains the typographical error by suggesting that ‘Phosphor’ in 1612 would have been a neologism … Subsequently, commenting on Donne’s Problem 9 (“Why is Venus-Star Multinominous, called both Hesperus and Vesper?”), says that, if not a misprint, Donne must have subconsciously confused ‘Hesper’ with ‘Phosphor’ … Similarly, Gill … who points out that Marlowe made a similar mistake in Hero and Leander. Considering that Donne was (after DINS theory) the author behind the literary masks of Thomas Nashe and Edmund Spenser, we find that, not only Marlowe’s verbal similarities with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are explained and natural now (for, after all, the legendary man was in Ireland isolated and alone, without contact with Marlowe’s works), but also that Marlowe-Nashe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage and Dr. Faustus with its theological questions are understandable and easy to grasp now. If we follow Donne after Nashe-Spenser-Marlowe, the road is open, at last, to see why George Chapman, a strict moralist, should have wanted to give his continuation to the legendary atheist Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Marlowe the atheist spy as author of impious plays was a brand, a legend, a ‘baite’, as Donne would have called it himself. As Thomas Thorpe writes to Blunt with a smile on his face and pulling the leg of his potential, and easily impressed London readers who have swallowed the immoral and atheist daredevil Marlowe (Lucan’s First Book, pub. 1600): TO HIS KIND AND TRUE FRIEND, EDWARD BLOUNT. 407 Blount: I purpose to be blunt with you, and out of my dullness to encounter you with a dedication in the memory of that pure elemental wit Chr. Marlowe, whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets. This ghost tale of Thorpe is a clear publisher bait with a lot of added sarcasm. In Imagining death in Spenser and Milton (Palgrave, 2003) we read: Marinell stands in a long line of proud and foolish virgins, and it is quite likely that Christopher Marlowe had Spenser’s representations of virginity in mind when he wrote Hero and Leander soon before he died in 1593. Marlowe’s poem casts Hero as the innocent nun of Venus who eventually realises that her role requires her to make good use of her body rather than flee all advances. Scene XIV. ‘She is no Saint, She is no Nun’ Willobie his Avisa, a narrative poem by one Henry Willobie which describes how a married and chaste Avisa, a beauty without peer, is wooed by many who solicit her, was published in September 1594. Now, this enigmatic Willobie tells how Avisa rejects all suitors, including the last one, young H.W., to whom an old playwright W.S. gives advice on how to win the hand of Avisa: She is no Saint, She is no Nun, I think in time she may be won. The Earl of Southampton was called Henry Wriothesley (H.W.), while W.S. is no other than William Shakespeare. Avisa, for her part, is Elizabeth I, for in this poem she signs all her rebuffs with the phrase ‘Semper Eadem,’ which was the Queen’s exact motto. John Kerrigan, editor of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets for Penguin, makes the following interesting comments: Avisa anticipates the fickle maid full pale of Shakespeare’s poem [i.e. “A Lover's Complaint”] … The poem [i.e. Willobie his Avisa] is not finally a true complaint, since, despite much woeful reflection on the nature of love and life, Avisa’s impregnable virtue leaves her with nothing to regret. Yet, while Willobie’s philosophical flights have not detained critics, his W.S. has –particularly in the context of H.W. Might these initials not represent William Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and a favoured candidate to be the 408 friend of the Sonnets? Some circumstances in Willobie’s story fit, but more do not. W.S. is called ‘the old player’, which gets the poet’s occupation right, but was Shakespeare ‘old’ in 1594 (when just touching thirty)? This is what happens when you have the wrong person in mind. Shakspere was not old in 1594 (he was not yet thirty), but Edward de Vere was forty-six (46) years old, which in those days was considered old. Peter Ackroyd writes: But the miracle of late sixteenth-century London lay in the fact that it was renewing itself. Its vigour and energy came from a fresh access of youthfulness. It has been estimated that half of the urban population was under the age of twenty years. This is what rendered it so strident, so tough, so excitable. Never again would it be so young … There is another aspect to this youthful city. The average expectancy of life in the parishes of London, rich or poor, was very low. An early sixteenthcentury diarist noted that he was ‘growing towards the age of forty, at which year begins the first part of the old man’s age.’ The fact is that W.S., ‘the old playwright,’ fits with Edward de Vere’s age when Willobie his Avisa was published. The poem, which is written in a poor style and does not match the style we found in Venus and Adonis or The Rape of Lucrece (Southampton seems to have written more than our poet here), ends with verses where the reader is taught that there is nothing like a ‘content mind,’ something that is absolutely Deverian. Below the last poem we can read: ‘Ever or Never.’ This book, which was banned, together with the 1596 edition, is important for critics because it contains the first ‘third party’ reference to William Shakespeare. In one of the laudatory poems to the work, we can read the following: Yet Tarquyne pluckt his glistering grape, And Shake-speare, paints poor Lucrece rape. This reference is important because even though the name of Shakespeare had appeared in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece without a hyphen, here the hyphen in the middle of the surname is indicating that this Shake-speare is nothing but a pseudonym: the ‘Shaker of Spears.’ Let us see Hank Whittemore’s interpretation of Willobie his Avisa: 409 The poems may amount to a plea to Elizabeth to forgive Southampton for his spirit of independence and to embrace him as her natural heir and successor: And sing the truth, I will, I must! First Venus fram’d a luring eye, A sweete aspect and comly grace: There did the Rose and Lilly lie... And here ‘Oxford may be viewed as pleading directly with Elizabeth’: Who dares to stirre, who dares to speake. Who dares our dealings to reprove? Though some supect, yet none will creake... My might will stand for thy defence, And quite thee clear of great offence. Who sees our face, knowes not our facts. Though we our sport in secret use. Thy cheekes will not hewray thy acts. But rather blushing make excuse : If thou wilt yeeld, here is my faith, I’le keepe it secret till thy death. Whittemore adds what seems clear now. In the following verses it is very evident that the poet is asking the Queen to make their son King of England, for he is English, not a foreigner like the Scottish James VI: Can Britaine breede no Phoenix bird, No constant feme in English field? To Greece and Rome, is there no third, Hath Albion none that will not yeeld? The fact that the poet asks ‘Can Britaine breede no Phoenix bird?’ indicates that the Phoenix is the symbol for a Tudor Prince who should hold the title of King of England. What Shakespeare is complaining about is that they are calling James VI of Scotland to take the throne of England when there was already a Phoenix to be named king. In his book Europe Divided 1559-1598, historian J. H. Elliott points out the following: Since the end of the summer of 1585, Philip [II] meditated on the purposes of Santa Cruz to carry out “the English Enterprise.” But he still needed a clear legal and moral excuse to go to war. This was provided by Mary, Queen of Scots, in the spring of 1586. Earlier that same year Walsingham, thinking he had irrefutable evidence of Mary’s plots against Elizabeth, invented the means to enable Mary to 410 communicate with France. In a letter to Mendoza dated May 20, in Paris, Mary declared she was ready to transfer, according to his wishes, the succession rights to the English throne from her heretic son James to Philip of Spain. In return, Philip would take her under his personal protection, and would revenge the injustices which the injured Queen had to suffer. The favorable answer from Philip to Mary’s letter committed him to help her. However, it looked like that both her interests and Philip’s could be better accomplished by the assassination of Elizabeth rather than by an expensive and difficult invasion of England. In July, Mendoza was privately informed of a plot planned by Anthony Babington, and he was asked if the Spanish would come to help the English in case of a Catholic uprising in England and Scotland. But Walsingham was also informed of the plot, and Babington and his accomplices were arrested and executed. Mary was the problem now. Those who wanted to finish with her troubled life had reinforced their ideas with the overthrow in Scotland, in the autumn of 1585, of the French party created by Esmé Estewart, Earl of Lennox, who had died in 1583. The signature of the treaty of Berwick by James VI in July 1586 encouraged them even more. By virtue of this treaty, England and Scotland promised to help each other in case of a foreign invasion, and James was offered a subsidy of 4,000 pounds per year. The delicate issue of the English succession remained, as always, as if it were a taboo, but James had good reasons to believe that if he behaved prudently before the eyes of Elizabeth, he would be rewarded at some point. If one day he had to choose between the Crown of England and the life of his mother, there were few doubts where his preference was. In October 1586 a commission was appointed for the trial of Mary Queen of Scots, and as expected, they found her guilty. Elizabeth could not bear the death of her sister, and the pleas for mercy from James strengthened her resistance to her Council’s and country’s petitions to carry out the execution. However, when James suggested in his private correspondence that he had not canceled the treaty of Berwick to save his mother, Elizabeth found herself alone to defend a desperate cause. For weeks she suffered agonies of indecision, but at last she signed a death warrant, and Mary went to the gallows in Fotheringay on the 18th of February, 1587. James had chosen the Crown instead of his mother’s life. More immoral than the incestuous love between a mother and her son is the assassination of a mother by her son. James did not assassinate his mother directly, but by ratifying the treaty of assistance with England in case of a foreign invasion, he had given the “green light” to her execution. He had chosen the crown without looking further. As Lord Acton wrote: 411 ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Powerful men are usually bad men.’ This could not be more Shakespearean, for most of Shakespeare’s works deal with power and the corruption it causes in human’s affections and consciousness. To return to Willobie his Avisa; take a look at its title-page. The portrait below shows the myth of Actaeon and his punishment. The hunter is being punished by the goddess Diana because he has seen her bathing naked; we know that he is in the process of being transformed because only half of the hunter’s body is transformed. He has a deer’s head while the rest of his body is still human. Let us read Beauclerk’s interpretation of the myth of Actaeon in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is almost a mirror image of the Actaeon myth. Adonis sees a side of the goddess not permitted to mortals (her sexual avarice), and for his transgression is pursued by a boar that represents his own passions as much as those of the enraged goddess. Like Actaeon, Adonis is a hunter hunted to death, the huntsman being a metaphor for the artist who pursues the truth of his inspiration, come what may. The ferocity of the boar in this context is the furor poeticus or creative rapture of the artist. And he adds: In 1594 Willobie His Avisa, a long cryptic poem of well over 3,000 lines, was published and then quickly suppressed. Treating allegorically of the queen’s love life (she being the chaste Avisa), it opened up the forbidden question of the succession … At the start of 1590, Oxford realized that he himself had no chance of inheriting his mother’s throne, disgraced as he was in the eyes of his peers. The only hope of keeping alive his dream of a new royalty—that of ‘beauty’s rose’—was to plow his efforts into glorifying Southampton’s claim … At the bottom of the title page [of Willobie His Avisa] is a drawing of Actaeon surprising the goddess Diana, bathing naked. Actaeon has already sprouted his antlered head, which appears again at the top of the page, crowned with a crescent moon, while the rest of his body remains human, suggesting perhaps that this very book will take the queen unawares. H.W., having been rejected by Avisa, compares himself to the ‘wounded deer, whose tender sides are bathed in blood’ (i.e. Actaeon savaged by his own hounds). Thus the illustration on the title page points to the supremacy of H.W.’s suit, or rather that of the duo, H.W. and W.S. The transformed Actaeon is also a good example of a symbol once applied to Oxford now reassigned to Southampton. 412 In the play Edward II, attributed to Marlowe, we see the relationship between our poet and his son again in the characters of Edward II and his son Edward, future Edward III. The father-son relationship is also presented in the play in the characters of Edward II and his favourite Gaveston, this time Edward II being Southampton and Gaveston being our poet. Oxford seems to have put his hand here or given the main lines for the quill of Donne to fill in. When the play begins, we see Gaveston rejoicing because King Edward II has written him a letter asking him to return to London and be by his side. Something sounds as if Falstaff had been forgiven by a Prince Hal turned into King. This exiled Gaveston seems to be expressing our poet’s dreams of seeing his son as a king: Gaveston The sight of London to my exil’d eyes Is as Elysium to a new-come soul: Not that I love the city or the men, But that it harbours him I hold so dear. After talking to three poor citizens of London, Gaveston projects the Actaeon myth again as a myth proper for a King and his Court (I.i.51-71): These are not men for me. I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Musicians, that which touching of a string May draw the pliant king which way I please: Music and poetry is my delight; Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night, Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows; And in the day, when he shall walk abroad, Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad; My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay; Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape... And in his sportful hands an olive-tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by, One like Actaeon, peeping through the grove, Shall by the angry goddess be transform’d, And running in the likeness of an hart, By yelping hounds pull’d down, and seem to die: Such things as these best please his majesty. Gaveston, who is hated by all noblemen of England for ascending to the rank of Earl and ‘Chamberlain of the kingdom’, is compared by the 413 noble Warwick to Phaeton (I.iv.15-16): ‘Ignoble vassal, that like Phaeton,/ Aspir’st unto the guidance of the sun!’ Gaveston replies lines later: ‘No, threaten not, my lord, but pay them home!/ Were I a king—.’ Gaveston’s fall is followed by the fall of Edward II. In conflict with his own wife, Queen ‘Isabella’ or ‘Isabel’ as she is often referred to in the play, the King expresses something that our exiled poet could have felt for his son who was in London and was being controlled by the Queen and the Cecils (IV.iv.51-2): Ah, nothing grieves me, but my little boy Is thus misled to countenance their ills! The King blames his wife and the ‘false Isabel’ who has imprisoned him. At the end the author writes that the new King, Edward III, the son at last crowned King, has imprisoned his own mother for causing the death of his father. It does not seem that the play Edward II was performed before an audience (I have not found evidence which proves otherwise), because the play blames Queen Isabel-Elizabeth of plotting against Edward II due to her unnatural love. Between Isabel’s lover in the play (Mortimer) and Isabel’s lover in real life (Robert Dudley) there seems to be no great difference. In fact, if we look at the matter closely, we will see that Mortimer the Younger is the exact image of his uncle, for he uses the same strategies as King Claudius (V.iv.1-34): Mortimer the Younger The king must die, or Mortimer goes down... Lightborn, come forth!... Well, do it bravely and be secret. Lightborn You shall not need to give instructions; ’Tis not the first time I have kill’d a man. I learn’d in Naples how to poison flowers... Or, whilst one is asleep, to take a quill, And blow a little powder in his ears. Concerning Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, the play seems to be propagandistic in the sense that it praises Protestants and criticizes Catholics, in particular, the Catholics under the power and control of the Duke of Guise. Although critics have noted that this play shows the massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Paris in 1572, the play centers on the life and death in 1589 of the last French King of the Valois dynasty. After mentioning the Spanish naval attack against England, the author concentrates on the last King of the Valois dynasty who was called Henry, like the last King of the Tudor dynasty in England: Henry Wriothesley, 3 rd 414 Earl of Southampton. Knowing that Southampton was a ‘changeling', we will not be surprised if we see the author of this play changing the historical truth when he makes the mother of Henry III, Catherine de’ Medici, say to his son that he is not really her son: ‘My son! Thou art a changeling, not my son’ (V.iv.154). The death of this Henry will be the same one that we will find in Hamlet. In The Massacre at Paris we read (V.v.65-107): Henry Navarre, give me thy hand: I here do swear To ruinate that wicked Church of Rome, That hatcheth up such bloody practices; And here protest eternal love to thee, And to the Queen of England specially, Whom God hath bless’d for hating papistry... Tell me, surgeon, shall I live? Surgeon Alas, my lord, the wound is dangerous, For you are stricken with a poison’d knife!... Henry….............................My lords, Fight in the quarrel of this valiant prince, For he’s your lawful king, and my next heir; Valoyses line ends in my tragedy. Now let the house of Bourbon wear the crown; And may it never end in blood, as mine hath done! Weep not, sweet Navarre, but revenge my death... I die, Navarre; come bear me to my sepulchre. Salute the Queen of England in my name, And tell her, Henry dies her faithful friend. This is the ending of Hamlet and the ending of Beowulf. This Henry, as the author of the play indicates, has a greater relation with Elizabeth I of England than with his own mother Catherine de’ Medici. The ending of The Massacre at Paris, it should be reiterated, is the same one as in Hamlet, and their tragedies are the same: the end of a dynasty and the beginning of a new one. This was the case of the Tudors. And the obsession in this play for the crown and the lost inheritance is not that of Marlowe the atheist and spy or Donne, but of our poet Edward de Vere, Euphues, Master Apis Lapis, alias Shake-speare. Contrary to Edward II, which does not seem to have been enacted before the public due to its contents, The Massacre at Paris, seems to have been a hit since it was performed in 1593. Its words in praise of the Queen no doubt helped it being performed in front of an audience. But there is more: the date of the performance seems to coincide with the “Shaker of Spears” and Southampton’s circumstances. 415 In 1591, about the time Shakespeare was writing the first sonnets to his son so that he would marry and have children, John Clapham, the secretary of Burghley, dedicated a Latin poem to Southampton entitled Narcissus, in which he compared the Earl to Narcissus as the ultimate example of egotism, when what he should do was to marry, like William Cecil, the Queen and Shakespeare wanted. The question is that in 1594, Southampton reached his age of majority and was now free from his tutor, the secretary of state William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, so he went on a tour throughout Europe. The marriage that the Queen, Cecil and Shakespeare wanted (in his first 17 sonnets) was gone. By 1594 the aims and goals of Venus and Adonis, Dido, Queen of Carthage, Willobie His Avisa, and The Massacre at Paris were lost and over. In 1594 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, a play by Robert Greene, was published, which seemingly must have been written around 1589 (that year the festivity of St. James fell on a Friday). Our poet seems to have put his hand here, for he makes the character Prince Edward (later on Edward I) say something that is not historical, since Prince Edward was never a hidden prince. The one who talks is Timon, or that Prince Henry of The Famous Victories of Henry V. The one who talks is Hamlet (I.i.133-137): Edward I am vnknowne, not taken for the Prince; They onely deeme vs frolicke Courtiers, That reuell thus among our lieges game: Therefore I haue deuised a pollicie. Lacie, thou knowst next friday is S. Iames. This is not the historical voice of Prince Edward, but Prince Hamlet. Here we have proof of the author’s expertise in blank verse and musicality (II.i.432-443): Henry Great men of Europe, monarks of the West, Ringd with the wals of old Oceanus, Whose loftie surge is like the battelments That compast high built Babell in with towers, Welcome my lords, welcome braue westerne kings, To Englands shore, whose promontorie cleeues Shewes Albion is another little world; Welcome sayes English Henrie to you all, Chiefly vnto the louely Eleanour, Who darde for Edwards sake cut through the Seas, And venture as Agenors damsell through the deepe, 416 To get the loue of Henries wanton sonne. On December 26, 27 and 28, 1594 a new company of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Oxford was the Lord -Great- Chamberlain of England, but was usually referred to in short as ‘Lord Chamberlain’), performed at Court and for the Queen for the first (registered) time. The register does not record which play was performed at Court and before the Queen, but it is sure that Shakespeare shook his spear in favour of his son’s candidacy, even though by then he knew that this question would not be achieved easily. In fact, we know that our poet shook his spear vigorously on December 28, 1594 when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed a revised version of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn, where our poet had studied in the 1560s. The Stratfordian Peter Ackroyd tells us: Shakespeare may have been chosen as the dramatist through his association with Southampton; Southampton was a member of Gray’s Inn … For the purposes of the Inn, Shakespeare also revised The Comedy of Errors. He introduced more legalisms and two trial scenes … But the play hardly received a fair hearing. The numbers of invited guests were so large, and the event so badly managed, that the entertainments had to be curtailed. The senior members of the Inner Temple, who had been invited by their colleages, left the hall ‘discontented and displeased’; spectators then invaded the stage to the obvious detriment of the players. A report in Gesta Grayorum concludes that ‘that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.’ Shakespeare was no doubt shaking his spear and waking the city of London up from its political lethargy. And theater was his best political tool. Scene XV. The company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men Who was directing the company of actors which all critics of whatever position regard as “the Shakespeare’s company”? The question was in need of an investigation, and Ogburn clarifies it for us: Apart from the Sonnets, there was the great body of his dramatic work to be wrought into shape. Nor was that all. The Lord Chamberlain’s company came into being at this time … [B]y 5 June, E.K. Chambers says, ‘the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, 417 must have been obtained’, for this was the company that, beginning on that date, Henslowe called the Lord Chamberlain’s men in recording it as taking part in joint performances with the Lord Admiral’s men in plays that included Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Taming of the Shrew. Soon thereafter, however, the combination broke up. ‘On October 8,’ Chambers resumes, ‘Lord Hunsdon was negotiating with the Lord Mayor for the use of ‘my nowe companie’ of the Cross Keys Inn for the winter season.’ The members of the new companie included Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Heminge, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan. Alleyn had dropped out, and perhaps for that reason, Chambers speculates, the Lord Chamberlain’s company as a business organization had to make a new start with new financing. ‘In some way,’ he continues, ’all those [‘books’] for Shakespeare’s earlier plays, including any which had been performed by Pembroke’s or Sussex’s, seem to have passed into the hands of the Chamberlain’s.’ The history of the company ‘is continuous throughout Shakespeare’s career, and there is nothing to show that he ever wrote for any other company. It became dominant at Court, giving 32 performances during Elizabeth’s reign to 20 by the Admiral’s and 13 by other companies. And during this period its run of prosperity seems to have been substantially unbroke. But the big question comes now. Ogburn writes: But which Lord Chamberlain was it who was patron of the company? To orthodoxy there are no two ways about it. It was the Lord Chamberlain. Nominally that was certainly so. From the founding of the company until 1603 the title was held by the Lords Hunsdon in succession—Henry Carey and his son George—with an eight-month interregnum when Lord Cobham was Lord Chamberlain. But Charles W. Barrell has raised a serious question as to whether these men had much to do with the company and whether it was not another Lord Chamberlain who managed its affairs so splendidly, after seeing to it that ‘in some way … Shakespeare’s earlier plays … passed into the hands of the Chamberlain’s’. Henry, the first Lord Hunsdon, held the important posts of Warden of the East Marches Toward Scotland and Governor of Berwick until his death in 1596 at about age seventy-two … Although the Queen appointed him her Lord Chamberlain in 1583, his ‘frequent absence from Berwick’ caused her in the next year to threaten ‘in a torrent of passion’ to ‘sent him by his feet’ and send another in his place’, despite his being her first cousin. He must have got the idea, for … ‘his office in the north did not allow him to reside regularly at court’. His career was a long series of military and political offices, among which during his last years was service as a commissioner in four treason trials, two at the time the Lord 418 Chamberlain’s company was being formed. Even had his demanding duties given him time for the affairs of an acting troupe, his inclination can hardly have been in that direction, for ‘he lacked most of the literary culture of his class’. Logically, if this Lord Chamberlain held a military office and had no literary knowledge, he could hardly have been the cause for the first works of Shakespeare to have passed in an exclusive way into the hands of the Chamberlain Company. Ogburn clarifies this as follows: The 1st Lord Husdon’s successor held the office of Lord Chamberlain but briefly. The aged Court politician, Lord Cobham, ‘appears in the chronicles as a choleric and domineering baron of the old school’, says Barrell, ‘with Puritan affiliations’ and, apparently, ‘no liking for the acting profession’. George Carey, the 2nd Lord Husdon, appointed Lord Chamberlain in March 1596, was as preoccupied as his father had been with military and diplomatic duties, being highly praised for his fortification of the Isle of Wight. Of his attachment to the theatre in general and the Lord Chamberlain’s men in particular there must be extreme doubt. In 1596, when James Burbage sought to open a new playhouse at Blackfriars, where Lord Oxford had once held a lease, ‘curiously enough,’ Chamber’s relates, ‘one of the protestants was the new Lord Hunsdon.’ Although ‘the new house [was one] which James Burbage may be presumed to have planned for the use of his son [Richard] and his son’s fellows’, of whom Hunsdon ‘was now the patron’! Hunsdon’s name was in fact second on the list of those opposing this new opportunity for the Lord Chamberlain’s men! By 1601, Barrell says, Elizabeth was persuaded of Hunsdon’s incapacitation and had to appoint two successive Vice Chamberlains. It is evident that the patron of the company of actors could not be the same person who stood as its firmest enemy, which makes us ask ourselves who directed the company. Ogburn resolves the mystery: The Lord Chamberlain’s was the best-organized and most-favoured and successful acting company in England from the time of its organization in 1594. Marchette Chute astutely observes that ‘Although such a record was almost inconceivable in Elizabeth London, no members of the Chamberlain’s company seem to have been sent to prison.’ For a troupe that enjoyed so exemplary a standing to have had the benefit of no more sustained and able direction or interested source of support than the Hunsdons and 419 Cobham would have provided seems to me hardly believed. That the company’s halcyon days ended when they did, shortly after the troupe received the patronage of James I and became the King’s men, is also significant. Sir Henry Irving writes in his edition of Shakespeare’s works: No sooner had our great dramatist ceased to take part in the public performances of the King’s players, than the company appears to have thrown off the restraint by which it had been unusually controlled ever since its formation and to have produced plays which were objectionable to the court, as well as offensive to private persons. Shakespeare from his abilities, station and experience, must have possessed great influence with the body at large, and due deference, we may readily believe, was shown to his knowledge and judgment in the selection and acceptance of plays … We suppose Shakespeare to have ceased to act in the summer of 1604. John Payne Collier had written also on this: We suppose Shakespeare to have ceased to act in the summer of 1604, and in the winter of that very year we find the King’s players giving offence to ‘some great counsellors’. We know that it was in June, 1604, when Edward de Vere disappeared and was thought to be dead. Ogburn’s conclusion is shared by many nowadays: It seems to me, in other words, reasonable to infer from the facts that the Lord Chamberlain under whom the company so prospered was the Lord Great Chamberlain, whose title was sometimes shortened by the omission of the ‘Great’. This, I suspect, is the explanation for the hard-pressed Countess of Southampton’s record of a payment to ‘Shakespeare’, inter alia, for performances by the Lord Chamberlain’s men. On February 6, 1594, Titus Andronicus was published, and there was no mention of the author on the title page. We know from the records of the theater director Philip Henslowe that on April 6, 1594 the Queen’s Men and the Sussex’s Men performed The King Leare (sic), and that three months later Hamlet was performed by the Admiral’s Men and the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Afterwards there was The Tame of A Shrew and The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster, later on revised as Henry VI, Part 2. All of them were published anonymously, except one play, Locrine, which appeared with the letters ‘W.S.’ on its title page. The content of Locrine 420 sounds like Edward de Vere, although it sounds as if it was written a long time ago. One can see the hand of our poet in this Shakespearean technique (V.ii): Thrasimachus Sister, complaints are bootless in this cause; This open wrong must have an open plague, This plague must be repaid with grievous war, This war must finish with Locrine’s death; His death will soon extinguish our complaints. The relationship between this play and Southampton’s circumstances seems clear, for the son of King Brutus, Locrinus, disobeyed his father’s order of getting married and as a consequence lost the crown. We seem to hear Timon’s voice here (IV.iv): Long have I lived in this desert cave, With eating haws and miserable roots, Devouring leaves and beastly excrements. Caves were my beds, and stones my pillow-bears, Fear was my sleep, and horror was my dream, For still me thought, at every boisterous blast, Now Locrine comes, now, Humber, thou must die: So that for fear and hunger, Humber’s mind Can never rest, but always trembling stands, O, what Danubius now may quench my thirst? What Euphrates, what lightfoot Euripus, May now allay the fury of that heat, Which, raging in my entrails, eats me up? You ghastly devils of the ninefold Styx, You damned ghosts of joyless Acheron, You mournful souls, vexed in Abyss’ vaults, Come, with your fleshhooks rent my famished arms, These arms that have sustained their master’s life. Come, with your razors rip my bowels up, With your sharp fireforks crack my sterved bones: Use me as you will, so Humber may not live. Accursed gods, that rule the starry poles, Accursed Jove, king of the cursed gods, Cast down your lightning on poor Humber’s head, That I may leave this deathlike life of mine! What, hear you not? and shall not Humber die? Nay, I will die, though all the gods say nay! And, gentle Aby, take my troubled corps, Take it and keep it from all mortal eyes, 421 That none may say, when I have lost my breath, The very floods conspired gainst Humber’s death. [Fling himself into the river.] Some Oxfordians think that Locrine was not written by Shakespeare. Michael Delahoyde of Washington State University tells us in an essay on this play in his website: [T]he date of Locrine, 1595, is too early to permit capitalization on Shakespeare’s success, at least in the area of printed plays ... since 1595 comes a few years before any plays with the Shakespeare name had yet been published. Locrine seems to have belonged to the Queen’s Men despite the absence of any record of performance. The elder Ogburns note that they credit the Earl of Oxford with this ‘apocryphal’ play In 1595 the mask of Spenser published Colin Clout Comes home again. In this poem Colin and Cuddie arrive by ship to the Kingdom of Cynthia (ll. 331-335): Foorth on our voyage we by land did passe, (Quoth he) as that same shepheard still vs guyded, Vntill that we to Cynthiaes presence came: Whose glorie greater then my simple thought, I found much greater then the former fame. In these verses Spenser seems to refer to Shakespeare’s Adonis (ll. 416-423): And there is a new shepheard late vp sprong, The which doth all afore him far surpasse: Appearing well in that well tuned song, Which late he sung vnto a scornefull lasse. Yet doth his trembling Muse but lowly flie, As daring not too rashly mount on hight, And doth her tender plumes as yet but trie, In loues soft lais and looser thoughts delight. And here, Spenser points out that Colin Clout is no other than Edward de Vere, for he sees how much he is in love with the Queen (ll. 466-479: 422 Ah far be it (quoth Colin Clout) fro me, That I of gentle Mayds should ill deserue: For that my selfe I do professe to be Vassall to one, whom all my dayes I serue; The beame of beautie sparkled from aboue, The floure of vertue and pure chastitie, The blossome of sweet ioy and perfect loue, The pearle of peerlesse grace and modestie: To her my thoughts I daily dedicate, To her my heart I nightly martyrize: To her my loue I lowly do prostrate, To her my life I wholly sacrifice: My thoughts, my heart, my loue, my life is shee, And I hers euer onely, euer one: One euer I all vowed hers to bee, One euer I, and others neuer none. The word game ‘ever/never’ could not have been clearer. Euphues could have put his hand here. In 1595 the mask of Spenser also published his cycle of sonnets Amoretti. Structured into three parts, as Daniel’s Delia of 1592, the sonnets are followed by a lyrical interlude which is followed by a final epithalamium. In this work we can see two things. First, that he has known his spouse, his love, after forty years (sonnet 40), and that he has spent one year loving her; and second, that his mother, as the Queen and his love, is called Elizabeth (sonnet 74). If we know that Edward de Vere was born in 1548, we will see that his first wife Anne Cecil died in 1588: forty years. And if we consider that Edward de Vere was born as the bastard son of the Queen in 1548, we will see that his mother was not Margery Golding, but Elizabeth Tudor, and that his second wife was Elizabeth Trentham. Edward de Vere fits the requirements of what Spenser is telling us in his sonnet 74. Of course, if we consider the case of Spenser himself, we cannot compare it to anything, for nobody knows anything about his life. If the case of Donne is considered, his mother was called Elizabeth, like the Queen, but not the 40 years he has spent until he met his new love. Sonnet 74 tells us that the Queen, like his mother, is ‘most kind’: Most happy letters fram’d by skilfull trade, with which that happy name was first defynd: the which three times thrise happy hath me made, with guifts of body, fortune and of mind. The first my being to me gaue by kind, from mothers womb deriu’d by dew descent, the second is my souereigne Queene most kind, that honour and large richesse to me lent. 423 The third my loue, my liues last ornament, by whom my spirit out of dust was raysed: to speake her prayse and glory excellent, of all aliue most worthy to be praysed. Ye three Elizabeths for euer liue, that three such graces did vnto me giue. Note that the three Elizabeths live ‘for euer’ and that the Queen, like his mother, is ‘kind’ to him; in other words, they are family. When the mask of Spenser says that the Queen has been ‘kind’ to him for he has received from her ‘honour and large richesse,’ it just does not fit with the real Spenser from Ireland, for he was not lucky when he was sent to Ireland, a wild country at war far away from the only cultural centre at that time, London. If we look at Spenser’s sonnet 80, we will find a description of Edward de Vere’s wife, Elizabeth Trentham, one of the ladies in waiting of the Queen: After so long a race as I haue run Through Faery land, which those six books compile giue leaue to rest me, being halfe fordonne, and gather to my selfe new breath awhile. When as a steed refreshed after toyle, out of my prison I will breake anew: and stoutly will that second worke assoyle, with strong endeuour and attention dew. Till then giue leaue to me in pleasant mew, to sport my muse and sing my loues sweet praise: the contemplation of whose heauenly hew, my spirit to an higher pitch will rayse. But let her prayses yet be low and meane, fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene. This work, then, presents the possibility that Donne wrote it altogether with Edward de Vere in mind, working under his guidelines, as his secretary: a secretary worthy of a king, as Lord Egerton would say years later. The epithalamion (the third part of this work), with its Neoplatonic thoughts and ideas and rhythm, point to Donne alone celebrating Oxford’s marriage with Elizabeth Trentham. The Variorum (Vol. 8) tells us this on Donne’s epithalamions: [T]he epithalamions are the only poems by Donne to show Spenser’s influence … Hunt … asserts that ‘next to Spenser’s [Epithalamion] our best Epithalamions, and the only ones, we fear, worth much 424 remembrance, are those of a great wit and intellect, who is supposed, by some, to be nothing but a bundle of conceits—Dr. Donne … Lewaski … finds that Donne’s epithalamions ‘yield three distinct personae: the city wit, the Spenserian Hymen-priest, and Idos the private man … Partridge … describes Donne’s epithalamions as ‘influenced by Spenser and the neo-Platonic tradition … Legouis … notes that Spenser’s Epithalamion and Prothalamion were published in 1595 and 1596, respectively, and argues that [Donne’s] EpLin, written (he believes) between 1592 and 1594, predates both. He cites M. Shapiro … to the effect that Donne and an older fellow student had been elected ‘Master of the Revels’ of Lincoln’s Inn on 6 February 1593 and that Donne had been fined for not having discharged his duties as ‘Steward of Christmas’ in 1594 … Gosse … terms the place of EpLin in the canon ‘somewhat unique.’ He finds that Donne ‘drops his accustomed manner and closely imitates the imagery, the prosody, and the tone of Spenser,’ … McPeek … finds that EpLin ‘exhibits what appears to be the mingled influence of Spenser, Jonson, and Catullus.’ He says the stanza form recalls Spenser’s Prothalamion and Epithalamion … adding that ‘the immediate juxtaposition [in EpLin and Spenser’s Epithalamion] of the stanzas on the slow declining sun and the appearance of the amorous evening star, through a natural conjunction, intimates that Donne remembered Spenser.’ He finds Spenser’s influence in the resemblance of his Epithalamion, stanzas 15-16, and EpLin, stanzas 5-6 … Hillyer … cites EpLin for its ‘Spenserian sweetness’ … Hughes … believes EpLin, which is ‘quite possibly the earliest of Donne’s poetry,’ exhibits ‘the green anger of the student rebel’ … Bald … states that ‘the piece has real charm’ and reflects ‘the all-pervasive influence of Spenser.’ … Ousby contends that ‘the Spenserian language, as well as the handful of direct echoes, indicate that Donne has studied the ‘Epithalamion’ and that he is practicing the lessons it has taught him’ … Milgate maintains that … his poem from time to time seems to assent to, and to express with some charm, the traditional motifs of the epithalamion, and it is not surprising that there is a sprinkling of verbal echoes of Spenser’s poem. ...Partridge … asserts that EpLin was, of the three epithalamions, the most influenced ‘by Spenser and the neo-Platonic tradition.’ On Donne’s Epithalamion Upon Frederick Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth married on St. Valentines day, the Variorum tells us: McPeek … finds Donne in EpEliz successfully imitating the melody and rhythm of Spenser’s Prothalamion … EpEliz ‘is the most beautiful poem of the kind in English after Spenser’ … Gransden … states that in the early stanzas of EpEliz Donne combines ‘decoration’ 425 and ‘a tapestry-like use of visual imagery’ … in the style of Spenser … Somura … compares EpEliz to Spenser’s Epithalamion, affirming Spenser’s influence on Donne. The moral of this story is easy to see: when Donne wanted or was asked to play the Spenserian instrument, he could play it very well, because ‘Edmund Spenser’ was nothing but one of his masks. 97 For instance, an evidence that goes to show that Amoretti was written by Donne with Oxford in mind is provided here. David Reneker, in his article “Oral Sex: A Theme in Donne and Some Cavalier Poets,” writes: 98 About ten years ago [ca. 1982], I realized that my career in publication was going backwards. I had imagined that, like most things, it would be difficult at first, but afterwards increasingly easy. C’est le premier pas qui coute, as the French say, the first step is the one that costs. But in fact, it had been just the opposite. My earliest essays, in 1972 and thereabouts, had been easy to publish. The later ones were more difficult, and the latest, impossible. I refer to “Oral Sex: A Theme in Donne and Some Cavalier Poets.” In 1992 I sent this essay to a famous journal published in Canada. When they had kept it a year I asked them to send it back without further deliberation. The editor answered that the essay had apparently got lost in the campus mail, and he could not encourage me to send a second copy because it was too specialized for his journal. So now people were rejecting my essays without even reading them. I seemed to be writing against the grain, getting on peoples’ nerves. What really matters is what Reneker says at the end of his article. For any naive scholar who still thinks and considers the author of The Faerie Queene as a puritan exiled in Ireland, this bit will be preposterous and scandalous. After having seen the relation of Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Nashe’s The Choice of Valentines, Reneker concludes in this way: From Spenser, Donne had acquired the notion that one could be the lover, in the amour courtoise manner, to one’s own wife, as in fact Spenser doubtless was to Elizabeth Boyle and Donne to Anne More. Here … Donne was supplied with the information that husband and 97 As it happened with Oxford, there are more awaiting to be discovered. I have studied the works of Thomas Lodge and Thomas Heywood. Lodge seems like a good candidate, but I am not convinced; nevertheless Lodge’s defense of poetry in reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, deserves a close study and comparison with John Donne’s prose and mind. 98 See http://www.davidrenaker.com/oralsex.php. 426 wife could engage in manual stimulation of the sexual organs, in fellatio, in intercrural masturbation or stimulation of the penis by ‘other parts’ of the wife’s body, and in sodomy, either with God’s blessing or at least without his curse. The poet was entitled to infer: if all these things, why not cunnilingus as well? Thus, as so often, scholasticism gave him an idea which no one before had ever expressed in a poem. Arthur F. Marotti (2008:135) writes confirming Reneker’s assertion: Donne’s lyrics of mutual love were the product of inextricably linked literary, personal, and socioeconomic contexts. Others have noted that Donne was somewhat unusual in dramatizing amorous reciprocity in his verse, for love poetry since the troubadours and Petrarch had thrived in situations of rejection and frustration, most men believing, with Andreas Capellanus, that marriage put an end to the love poets expressed. Donne knew he was going against the current of literary and cultural tradition (as did Spenser in the Amoretti) in defining ‘Correspondencie’ (“Loves Deitie,” 12) as love’s essence. In the summer of 1595 London theaters were closed. Ackroyd describes what happened at this time: There had been a number of food riots, over the soaring costs of fish and butter, in the late spring and early summer; there were twelve affrays in June alone. The apprentices had taken over the market in Southwark, and then subsequently the market at Billingsgate, to sell the staples of food at what they considered to be an appropriate rate. Then, on 29 June, a thousand London apprentices marched on Tower Hill to pillage the shops of the gun-makers there, clearly with nefarious intent. The pillories in Cheapside had been torn down, and a makeshift gallows was erected outside the house of the Lord Mayor. There were pamphlets circulated on the ‘rebellious tumults’ and in subsequent legal proceedings the apprentices were charged with attempting to ‘take the sword of auchtoryte’ from the mayor and aldermen of the city. Five of their leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered, thus incurring an unusually severe punishment. So London was placed under the Elizabethan version of martial law, and of course the theatres were out of action. In the second part of The Faerie Queene published in 1596, we see how John Donne is behind the Edmund Spenser mask when in Canto X of Book IV, where Scudamore is going to tell the adventures he 427 experienced to achieve the ‘price’ of his ’shield of love’ Amoret. In stanza 3 we read: Long were to tell the travell and long toile, Through which this shield of love I late have wonne, And purchased this peerelesse beauties spoile, That harder may be ended, then begonne. But since ye so desire, your will be donne. Then hearke ye gentle knights and Ladies free, My hard mishaps, that ye may learne to shonne; For though sweet love to conquer glorious bee, Yet is the paine thereof much greater then the fee. And then, just at this very same moment, one re-reads again how Scudamore compared love with martyrdom, which was a very dear issue for Donne, as John Carey saw perfectly well, and as anyone can see by perusing Pseudo-Martyr lightly. The Canto of the Temple of Venus in Book IV starts like this: 1 True he it said, what ever man it sayd, That love with gall and hony doth abound, But if the one be with the other wayd, For every dram of hony therein found, A pound of gall doth over it redound. That I too true by triall have approved: For since the day that first with deadly wound My heart was launcht, and learned to have loved, I never joyed howre, but still with care was moved. 2 And yet such grace is given them from above, That all the cares and evill which they meet, May nought at all their setled mindes remove, But seeme gainst common sence to them most sweet; As bosting in their martyrdome unmeet. So all that ever yet I have endured, I count as naught, and tread downe under feet, Since of my love at length I rest assured, That to disloyalty she will not be allured. Hamilton is silent on this question, but Dorothy Stephens (2006) comments: ‘I.e., as though they were proud of their inappropriate martyrdom (inappropriate either because a man should not martyr 428 himself abjectly to a woman or because no one should martyr him-or herself for a secular cause).’ In the eleventh canto of Book IV of The Faerie Queene we see this (stanza 34): Next these the plenteous Ouse came far from land, By many a city, and by many a towne, … Thence doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, My mother Cambridge, whom as with a Crowne He doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it With many a gentle Muse, and many a learned wit. We know Donne was in Cambridge, although we don’t know much about it. Bald tells us that, although Donne could have been in Cambridge, as Walton said, ‘it is hardly likely that he entered a college.’ According to DINS theory, not only Spenser, but Nashe was another mask of Donne, so what do we know about Nashe and Cambridge? We know this: Cambridge was clearly a prime influence in Nashe’s life. St John’s was a college with a great tradition, and Nashe several times points proudly to its former scholars and masters. It had been a notable supplier of men to Church and State … St John’s, he says (echoing Ascham’s in The Schoolmaster): was as an university within itself, shining so far above all other houses, halls and hospitals whatsoever, that no college in the town was able to compare with the tithe of her students... This comes from the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, addressed ‘To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities’, and written when Cambridge was a memory not above a year old [Donne left it at this time too, according to Bald]. He was to revert to it nearly ten years later in Lenten Stuff: ‘St John’s … in Cambridge, in which house once I took up my inn for seven year together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and ever was the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that University.’ (J. B. Steane, editor, Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and other works, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 2022.) Not everything a literary mask says must be true, obviously, but, at least, the Cambridge connection stands in line with Spenser and DINS theory. Well then. I searched for Donne and St John’s, Cambridge, and I found this in the St John’s webpage in the first page of Google: 429 Almost lost among a riot of other scribbles and flourishes the autograph of John Donne, the metaphysical poet, appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the title-page to this edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Cambridge, 1584). The volume has obviously been through the hands of numerous schoolboys, and it is likely that Donne was among them, although the location of his signature on the title-page does correspond to his later practice. It has also been incorporated into a later inscription by a later hand so that it forms part of ‘Daniel Evans his booke wittnes Arthur Donne.’ For further details see Geoffrey Keynes, ‘More books from the Library of John Donne’, The book collector (Spring 1977). Note that the edition above with the autograph of John Donne is the one of Natalis Comitis or Natalis Comes, a main reference for Spenser on The Faerie Queene. Maurice Evans writes (1970:194): In reading the two books [III and IV], and more particularly in reading book IV, one is aware of stories and characters melting into each other in a manner which resembles that of Ovid’s Metamorphoses more than anything else; and the fact that Ovid’s poem is largely concerned with love would justify Spenser’s choice of it as his model on the grounds of literary decorum alone. In a deeper sense than this, however, books III and IV are based on the principle of metamorphosis, for mutability and creation are ultimately names for the same thing. The perpetual regeneration and infinite plenitude of nature arise from the insatiable desire of first matter to partake of divine beauty, so that it takes on form after form in the endless circle of generation and corruption. Pure Comes and Plato; plain Metaphysical poetry. For example, just to pick one illustration among several along the poem. We find this in the Proem, stanza 2, verses 6-7, where the poet is dealing with his invented stone age and men as stones. The Variorum tells us: ‘LOTSPEICH (p. 53). The way he associates the myth with the stoniness of men since the Golden Age may have been suggested by Natalis Comes 8. 17, who thus interprets the story of the creation of men from stones ... Cf. also Georgics 1. 61.3.’ And on stanza 6, verse 2, we are told: “LOTSPEICH (p. 45) The idea ... that both [Castor and Pollux] are ‘twinnes of Jove,’ which contradicts the more common myth that Castor was son of Tyndarus, is supported by Natalis Comes 8. 9.” We may appreciate the value of DINS theory when we read that section of Book IV, Canto XI where the poet describes the Irish rivers. The first thing that one is reassured to find is that only 4 stanzas are dedicated to those Irish rivers, while 16 were dedicated to the English 430 ones. And the traditional ghost poet of Ireland given by tradition tells us that he had been living there the last 18 years (1580-1598) of his life. But this is not the only confirmation that the poet is uneasy with the Irish rivers in comparison with the English ones. In stanza 41 we read: There was the Liffy rolling down the lea, The sandy Slane, the stony Aubrian, The spacious Shenan spreading like a sea, The pleasant Boyne, the fishy fruitful Ban, Swift Awniduff, which of the English man Is cal’de Blacke water, and the Liffar deep, Sad Trowis, that once his people ouerran, Strong Allo tombling from Slewlogher steep, And Mulla mine, whose waues I whilom taught to weep. According to DINS theory this is a smokescreen; with this in mind we may understand what P.W. Joyce says about it (1866):99 The river Mulla or Aubeg, which flows by Buttevant and Doneraile has been already well described by several writers, so that no description is necessary here; but I wish to make a few remarks on the name. It is called the Aubeg to distinguish it from the Avonmore, ‘the great river’ –the Blackwater. Spenser has drawn on poetic license in calling it by the name Mulla, which could not be the name of a river at all except by transference from a hill; the Aubeg was never called Mulla except by himself. Kilnamullagh was, as Spenser says in the above passage [from Coulin Clout Come Home Again], the old name of Buttevant, and seeing this, he assumed or believed that the river was called Mulla, and that it gave name to Kilnamullagh; but this is all the work of his own fertile imagination. … Spenser takes great delight in the name of Mulla; and not content with impressing the name of the river, he has multiplied it in other localities; the plain through which it flows, he calls Armulla, and it is, no doubt, to carry out the same idea that he personifies the adjacent range of hills under the name of Mole –another imaginary name whose daughters, Mulla and Molanna, are to be understood as named from him. All this structure of fictitious names he has evidently built on the name Mulla –this, too, as we have seen, being the work of his own fancy. There can be no doubt that he selected the name for its soft musical sound, in preference to the true but less harmonious name Aubeg. 99 See https://archive.org/details/jstor-20488955. 431 Hamilton glosses this in his edition as evidence of his personal ‘experience’, but the right word is personal imagination. At least he admits the problem with the Spenser biographical question (2007:xix): In a 1946 review of Judson’s Life, Conyers Read noted the paucity of our knowledge: ‘Outside of what Edmund Spenser himself wrote all that is positively known about his life could probably be written in a few short paragraphs. The rest is inference, surmise, and conjecture’ (AHR 51:539). D. Cheney 1996:172 concludes that evidence for S.’s life is questionable: ‘not merely doubtful but calling its own authority into question and demanding that we question it’. Well, that’s what DINS theory does now, indeed. And Hamilton adds: Several critics who first flourished in the 1950s and 1960s responded initially to Spenser’s words and imagery rather than to his ideas, thought, or historical concept. One is Donald Cheney, who, in Spenser’s Image of Nature (1966), read The Faerie Queene ‘under the intensive scrutiny which has been applied in recent decades to metaphysical lyrics’, seeking out ‘ironic, discordant impulses’, ‘rapidly shifting allusions’, and the poet’s ‘constant insistence upon the ambiguity of his images’. Which is what Maurice Evans did in Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism (1970). Contrary to the grotesque Stratfordian-fairyland scholarship on Shake-speare, Spenserian scholars are serious and honest: we have a problem with Spenser’s biography and real life. And we need a new theory to solve it. The old one doesn’t work. Four hundred years of nothingness are enough evidence of this. The same feeling of the world’s decay in astrological terms is expressed in Spenser and Donne. This is from the Proem of Book V of The Faerie Queene (stanzas 4-7): 4 For that which all men then did vertue call, Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight vertue, and so us’d of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right, As all things else in time are chaunged quight. Ne wonder; for the heauens reuolution Is wandred farre from, where it first was pight, And so doe make contrarie constitution Of all this lower world, toward his dissolution. 432 5 For who so list into the heuens looke, And search the courses of the rowling spheares, Shall find that from the point, where they first tooke Their setting forth, in these few thousand years They all are wandred much; that plaine appeares. For that same golden fleecy Ram, which bore Phrixus and Helle from their stepdames feares, Hath now forgot, where he was plast of yore, And shouldred hath the Bull, which fayre Europa bore. 6 And eke the Bull hath with his bow-bent horne So hardly butted those two twinnes of Ioue, That they haue crusht the Crab, and quite him borne Into the great Nemoean lions groue. So now all range, and doe at random roue Out of their proper places farre away, And all this world with them amisse doe moue, And all his creatures from their course astray, Till they arriue at their last ruinous decay. 7 Ne is that same great glorious lampe of light, That doth enlumine all these lesser fyres, In better case, ne keepes his course more right, But is miscaried with the other Spheres. For since the terme of fourteene hundred yeres, That learned Ptolomoee his hight did take, He is declyned from that marke of theirs, Nigh thirtie minutes to the Southerne lake; That makes me feare in time he will vs quite forsake. And this was published a decade and a half later by the same Medieval mind (First Anniversary, ll.251-78 ): We thinke the heavens enjoy their Spherical Their round proportion embracing all. But yet their various and perplexed course, Observ’d in divers ages doth enforce Men to find out so many Eccentrique parts, Such divers downe-right lines, such overthwarts, As disproportion that pure forme. It teares The Firmament in eight and fortie sheeres, And in those constellations there arise 433 New starres, and old do vanish from our eyes: As though heav’n suffred earth-quakes, peace or war, When new Townes rise, and olde demolish’d are. They have empayld within a Zodiake The free-borne Sunne, and keepe twelve signes awake To watch his steps; the Goat and Crabbe controule, And fright him back, who els to eyther Pole, (Did not these Tropiques fetter him) might runne: For his course is not round; nor can the Sunne Perfit a Circle, or maintaine his way One inche direct; but where he rose to day He comes no more, but with a cousening line, Steales by that point, and so is Serpentine: And seeming weary with his reeling thus, He meanes to sleepe, being now falne nearer us. So, of the stares which boast that they do runne In Circle still, none ends where he begunne. All their proportion’s lame, it sinks, it swels. Scene XVI. Donne and his More Hymnes of 1596 The dedication of Spenser to this work of 1596 shows us the Donnean verb and his personality, something his mask cannot hide: Hauing in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Loue and beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, they hony to their honest delight, I was moued by the one of you two most excellent Ladies As Humphrey Tonkin writes on Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes (The Faerie Queene, Routledge Revivals): Osgood pointed out many years ago, the Hymne of Heavenly Love offers us a Christocentric route to an understanding of God (a route that leads the mystic to see Christ face to face while yet in the body), while the Hymne of Heavenly Beauty offers a theocentric route by means of a kind of excursion through the universe, a theme picked up later by John Donne in his Anniversaries. This is what Spenser writes in this work of 1596: 434 So hast thou often done (ay me the more) To me thy vassal —Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes. An Hymne in Honour of Love, lines 141-42. Which is a perfect match with Donne: When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For I have more.—John Donne, A Hymn to God the Father. The work shows us the young mind of Donne: Neoplatonism and Christianism. I rather like this piece of evidence. See the young DonneSpenser and his morbid imagination: Therefore where euer that thou doest behold A comely corpse, with beautie faire endewed, Know this for certain, that the same doth hold A beauteous soule—An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, lines 133-35. From line 235 to the end of the third hymn (An Hymne of Heavenly Love) we see Donne-Spenser and his meditation on death and Christ on the Cross. The same, years later, can be seen in the SecAn, when Donne is telling his soul to see itself in Donne’s body feeling the pain, the sickness, the coughs, the last moments of life on earth. In here, the year 1596, and under the Spenser mask, you can already see the Holy Sonnets’ method of meditation; the results are not so hard and horrible as in 1609-1611, but take a look at it yourself: Beginne from first, where he encradled was In simple cratch, wrapt in a wad of hay, Betweene the toylefull Oxe and humble Asse, And in what rags, and in how base aray, The glory of our heauenly riches lay. ... From thence reade on the storie of his life, His humble carriage, his vnfalty wayes, His cancred foes, his fights, his toyle, his strife, His paines, his pouerty, his sharpe assayes, Through which he past his miserable dayes, ... And looke at last how of most wretched wights, 435 He taken was, betrayd, and false accused, How with most scornefull taunts, and feel despights He was reuyld, disgrast, and foule abused, How scourgd, how crownd, how buffeted, how brused; And lastly how twist robbers crucifyde, With bitter wounds through hands, through feet and syde. Then let thy flinty hart that feels no paine, Empierced be with pittifull remorse, And let thy bowels bleede in euery vaine, At sight of his most sacred heauenly corse, So torne and mangled with malicious forse, And let thy soule, whose sins his sorrows wrought, Melt into teares, and grone in grieued thought. With sence whereof whilest so thy softened spirit Is inly toucht, and humbled with meeke zeale, Through meditation of his endlesse merit, Lift vp thy mind to th’author of thy weale The repetition of the word ‘more’ in Fowre Hymnes shows that John Donne had already met his future spouse Ann More (the Cádiz expedition arrived in London in July. Early in August, says R.C. Bald, Donne was already living his old life and writing. The poet writes his dedication on September 1, at Court, in Greenwich). Let us see them: And now t’asswage the force of this new flame, And make thee more propitious in my need, I meane to sing the praises of thy name.—1H, ll. 8-10. But man, that breathes a more immortal mynd, Not for lusts sake, but for eternitie, Seekes to enlarge his lasting progenie.—1H, ll. 103-5. For sure of all, that in this mortall frame Contained is, nought more diuine doth seeme, Or that resembleth more th’immortal flame Of heauenly light, then Beauties glorious beame.—1H, ll. 113-16. So hast thou often done (ay me the more) To me thy vassal—1H, ll. 141-42. Yet herein eke thy glory seemeth more, 436 By so hard handling those which best thee serue—1H, ll. 162-63. The more of stedfast mynds to be admyred, The more they stayed be on stedfastnesse—1H, ll. 171-72. T’approach more neare, till in her inmost brest—1H, l. 248. His troubled mynd with more then hellish paine!—1H, l. 253. Yet is there one more cursed then they all—1H, l. 266. Vnto thy heauen, and doest the more endeere Thy pleasures vnto those which them partake, As after stormes when clouds begin to cleare, The Sunne more bright and glorious doth appeare—1H, ll. 274-777. Thou in me kindlest much more great desyre,—2H, l. 5. Ore more or less by influence diuine, So it more faire accordingly it makes—2H, ll. 44-45. Which are arayd with mure more orient hew—2H, l. 79. But ah, beleeue me, there is more then so That works such wonders in the minds of men. I that have often prou’d, too well it know—2H, ll. 85-88. Which powre retayning still or more or lesse, When she in fleshly seede is eft enraced—2H, ll. 113-14. To habit in, and it more fairely dight With chearefull grace and amiable sight.—2H, ll. 130-31. And oft it falles (ay me the more to rew) That goodly beautie, albe heauenly borne—2H, ll. 148-49. Yet nathemore is that faire beauties blame—2H, l. 155. But gentle Loue, that loiall is and trew, 437 Will more illumine your resplendent ray, And adde more brithnesse to your goodly hew—2H, ll. 176-778. Therefore to make your beautie more appeare, It you behoues to loue—2H, ll. 183-84. That men the more admyre their fountaine may, For else what booteth that celestiall ray—2H, ll. 186-87. Then wrong it were that any other twaine Should in loues gentle band combyned bee, But those whom heauen did at first ordaine, And made out of one mould the more t’agree—2H, ll. 203-06. But they which loue indeede, look otherwise, With pure regard and spotless true intent, Drawing out of the object of their eyes, A more refyned forme—2H, ll. 210-14. For louers eyes more sharply sighted bee Then other men, and in deare loues delight See more then any other eyes can see—2H, ll. 232-34. All those, O Cytherea, and thousands more Thy handmaides be, which do on thee attend To decke thy beautie with their dainties store, That it may more to mortall eyes commend, And make it more admyr’d of foe and frend—2H, ll. 260-64. Many lewd layes (ah woe is me the more) In praise of that mad fit, which fooles call loue—3H, ll. 8-9. Drew millions more against their God to fight.—3H, l. 84. Then, the beloved More disappears and Donne takes the body of Christ on the Cross as himself. The word ‘more’ only appears once in the invocation and another in the opening of the Third Hymn: and then it stops. In this third hymn Donne wants to expiate (like Christ on the cross) his past errors and lovers (like in “Aire and Angels”). That’s why the word ‘more’ appears again in the Forth Hymn profusely, where More is represented as the Queen besides God, or Sapience; in other words, 438 Donne uses More as his Beatrice to reach God. Metaphysical love refined. This would explain and justify the weird music of these expressions to the ear too. As I say, in the Forth Hymne the soul of the Petrarchan Christ-lover is flying towards heaven, and More helps this soul to ascend: And further is from earth, so still more cleare And faire it growes, till to his perfect end Of purest beautie, it at last ascend: Ayre more then water, fire much more then ayre, And heauen then fire appeares more pure and fayre.—4H, ll. 45-49. And so much fairer, and much more then these—4H, l. 62. So those likewise doe by degrees redound, And rise more faire, till they at last ariue To the most faire, whereto they all do striue.—4H, ll. 74-76. More faire is that, where those Idees on hie—4H, l. 82. Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins—4H, l. 92. Yet fairer then they both, and much more bright Be th’Angels and Archangels, which attend On Gods owne person, without rest or end.—4H, ll. 96-98. As to the Highest they approach more neare—4H, l. 100. How much more those essential parts of his—4H, l. 109. His throne is built vpon Eternity, More firme and durable then steele or brasse—4H, ll. 152-53. But that immortall light which there doth shine, Is many thousand times more bright, more cleare, More excellent, more glorious, more diuine... There in his bosome Sapience doth sit, The soueraine dearling of the Deity, Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most fit For so great powre and peerelesse maiesty. 439 … And on her head a crowne of purest gold Is set, in signe of highest soueraignty, And in her hand a scepter she doth hold, With which she rules the house of God on hy, And menageth the ever-mouing sky, And in the same these lower creatures all Subiected to her powre imperiall.—4H, ll.169-96. And more increast by her owne goodly face, That it doth farre exceed all humane thought—4H, ll. 208-09. At the end even the name of his beloved is not uttered but ‘hidden ly’ in so many words that rhyme with ‘More’: But who so may, thrise happie man him hold, Of all on earth, whom God so much doth grace, And lets his own Beloued to behold: For in the view of her celestiall face, All ioy, all blisse, all happinesse haue place, Ne ought on earth can want vnto the wight, Who of her selfe can win the wishfull sight. For she out of her secret threasury, Plentie of riches forth on him will powre, Euen heauenly riches, which were hidden ly Within the closet of her chastest bowre, Th’eternall portion of her precious dowre, Which mighty God hath giuen to her free, And to all those which thereof worthy bee.—4H, ll. 239-52. No wonder Ann More fell in love with the metaphysical poet. A more fitting title of this work, more in accord with its personal purpose, would be, instead of Fowre Hymnes, More Hymnes (or Fowre More Hymnes). As the poet-persona writes, that is the sole purpose of the poem: And now t’asswage the force of this new flame, And make thee more propitious in my need, I meane to sing the praises of thy name.—1H, ll. 8-10. Prothalamion was also published in 1596 and was probably composed sometime between mid-August, when the Earl of Essex returned from the Cádiz expedition, and 8 november when the weeding took place at Essex 440 House (Richard A. MacCabe, Penguin, 1999). Donne was with Essex in the Cádiz expedition. The poet says about the glory of the Earl of Essex in Prothalamion (ll. 145-149): Yet therein now doth lodge a noble Peer, Great Englands glory and the Worlds wide wonder, Whose dreadfull name, late through all Spaine did thunder, And Hercules two pillors standing neer, Did make to quake and feare These are the verses of a first-hand witness of Essex’s naval feat. There was no poet-secretary lost in Ireland. The man who writes the Foure Hymnes and Prothalamion is with Essex, in London. And Essex asked him to write this poem to be sang in his House for the wedding. Donne had no official post and had just sang about his love for Ann More, so the authorial lines of the first stanza: When I whom sullein care, Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay In Princes Court, and expectation vayne Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, Like empty shaddowes, did aflict my brayne What hopes could the secretary of Ireland by the name Spenser had by 1596? He had a post, a marriage, a family, everything was, tradition says, settled for him. This is a young man with hopes for the future. This is John Donne. Scene XVII. Shakspere goes back to Stratford In 1597, Edward de Vere and his wife decided to move to King’s Place, a village located in Hackney, to the north of London. Interestingly, Henry VIII used to spend some time in King’s Place in the past. The name of the villa was a very apt one for our royal bastard Tudor to live in, as we see. While our poet retires from the city of London to a quieter place, Shakspere of Stratford acquires the second most expensive house in his town: New Place. Ackroyd recognises that Shakspere was spending more time now in Stratford than in London, where he was considered a resident alien. It is time now to listen to Thomas Looney, because the arguments he uses to dismantle the legend of the man from Stratford are glorious. Looney starts considering the most reliable Stratfordian source first: 441 Those who have had occasion to study Shakespearean problems will, we believe, agree that the most trustworthy work for particulars respecting the life of William Shakspere of Stratford is HalliwellPhillipps’s Outlines. Writing in 1882, six year’s before the appearance of Donnelly’s work, the problem of Shakespearean authorship seems never to have touched him; and therefore, undoubting Stratfordian though he was, he writes with perfect freedom and openness, glozing over nothing, and not shrinking from making admissions which some later Baconian or sceptic might use against the subject of his biography. Without wishing to imply anything against subsequent biographies, written in the refracting atmosphere of controversy, we may describe Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines as the most honest biography of William Shakspere yet written. Looney quotes, then, Halliwell-Phillips, for his words do not pretend to defend the legend from any kind of attack: Dirt and ignorance, according to this authority, were outstanding features of the social life of Stratford in those days and had stamped themselves very definitely upon the family life under the influence of which William Shakspere was reared. Father and mother alike were illiterate, placing their marks in lieu of signatures upon important legal documents: and his father’s first appearance in the records of the village is upon the occasion of his being fined for having amassed a quantity of filth in front of his house, there being ‘little excuse for his negligence.’ So much for the formative conditions of his home life. On the other hand, so far as pedagogic education is concerned there is no vestige of evidence that William Shakspere was ever inside of a school for a single day: and, considering the illiteracy of his parents and the fact that ability to read and write was a condition of admission to the Free School at Stratford, it is obvious that there were serious obstacles to his obtaining even such inferior education as was offered by schools in small provincial places in those days. Respecting this difficulty of meeting the minimum requirements for admission to the school Halliwell-Phillipps remarks: ‘There were few persons living at Stratford-on-Avon capable of initiating him into these preparatory accomplishments … but it is as likely as not that the poet received his first rudiments of education from older boys.’ Later generations of schoolboys have preferred more exciting pastimes. ...Shakspere, before reaching the age of thirty, is credited with the authorship of dramas and great poetic classics evincing a wide and prolonged experience of life. Even in such a detail as mere penmanship the contrast is maintained. Bums leaves us specimens of calligraphy which ought to have satisfied the exacting demands of 442 Hamlet, and won the praise which the first editors of ‘Shakespeare’s’ works bestowed upon the author of the plays. William Shakspere leaves specimens of penmanship so malformed that Sir E. Maunde Thompson is obliged to suppose that before the writing of his first great works and during the whole of his early Stratford life he had had but little opportunity for exercising his handwriting. The exceptional kind of life necessary to have evolved a ‘Shakespeare’ under such unhappy conditions would most certainly have marked him off from his fellows. No single record or even tradition of his early life is, however, suggestive of the student, or of a youth intellectually distinguished from those about him. Traditions of the oratorical flourishes with which as a butcher he would kill a sheep, and of his poaching exploits and misadventures, survive; definite records of marriage under compulsion at the age of eighteen to a woman eight years his senior, and grave suggestions that on the birth of twins a few years later, he deserted her: these things sum up the record of the formative years of his life. The argument has just started. Looney continues: The contrast between the coarse and illiterate circumstances of his early life, and the highly cultured character of the work he is supposed to have produced, is not, however, the strongest aspect of this particular argument: although quite alone it is enough to have created serious misgivings. The compelling force of this argument from contrast is only fully felt when it is clearly realized that the career of William Shakspere divides naturally into three periods: not two. We have the opening period at Stratford just indicated; we have a middle period during which he is supposed to have resided mainly in London and produced the remarkable literature to which he owes his fame; and we have a closing period spent, like the first, in the unwholesome intellectual atmosphere of Stratford. And it is the existence of this series of three periods which furnishes the data for a sound scientific examination of the problem. ...The fact which, once grasped, will carry us forward most quickly to a final settlement of this question is that the closing period of his life at Stratford stands in as marked contrast to the supposed middle period in London as does the first, and under precisely the same aspect, but very much less explicably. The operation of hidden forces and agencies might partly account for the obscure youth, blossoming out as the most cultured writer of his day. But with the literary fame he is supposed to have won, how can we explain the reversion to the non-intellectual record of his closing Stratford period? For it is as destitute of an aftermath of literary glory as the first period was 443 devoid of promise. Having it is supposed by virtue of an immeasurable genius forced himself out of an unrefined and illiterate milieu into the very forefront of the literary and intellectual world, he returns whilst still in his prime, and probably whilst relatively still a young man, to his original surroundings. For the last eighteen years of his life he has himself described as ‘William Shakspere, of Stratford-upon-Avon’; yet, with so prolonged a residence there, such intellectual gifts as he is supposed to have possessed, such force of character as would have been necessary to raise him in the first instance, he passes his life amongst a mere handful of people without leaving the slightest impress of his eminent powers, or the most trifling fruits of his attainments and educational emancipation upon any one or anything in Stratford. In the busy crowded life of London it is possible to conceal both the defects and qualities of personality, and men may easily pass there for what they are not; but one man of exceptional intellectual powers, improved by an extraordinary feat of self-culture, could hardly fail to leave a very strong impression of himself upon a small community of people, mostly uneducated, such as then formed the population of Stratford. When, then, we are told that that man was living at one time at the rate of £1,000 a year (£8,000 of to-day)–and Sir Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in the tradition—the idea that such a man could live in such a place, in such style, and leave no trace of his distinctive powers and interests in the records of the community is the kind of story which, we are convinced, practical men will refuse to believe once they are fairly confronted with it. Had he walked out of Stratford an ignorant boor in 1587 and returned ten years later having learnt nothing more during his absence than how to get hold of money and keep it, there is absolutely nothing in the records of all his affairs at Stratford that need have been in the slightest degree different from what it is. There was at least one man in Stratford who could write in a good style of penmanship, and he addressed a letter to Shakspere while in London. This is the only letter that has been preserved of any that may have been addressed to Shakspere in the whole course of his life, and the reader may see a facsimile of it in the book Shakespeare’s England. Its only purpose, however, is to negotiate a loan of £30 and it contains no suggestion of any intellectual community between the two men. This letter reappears under circumstances which would quite justify a suspicion that Shakspere himself had been unable to read it. No suggestion of its having been answered has been discovered, nor is there the faintest trace of any letter from his pen to any other person in Stratford. We do not mean merely that no autograph letter has been preserved, but there is no mention of any letter, no trace of a single phrase or word reported as having been addressed to any one during all these years, as a personal message from what we are asked to 444 believe was the most facile pen in England. According to every Stratfordian authority he lived and worked for many years in London whilst directing a mass of important business in Stratford. Then he lived for many years in retirement in Stratford whilst plays from his pen were making their appearance in London. In all, he followed this divided plan of life for nearly twenty years (1597-1616); a plan which, if ever in this world a man’s affairs called for letters, must have entailed a large amount of correspondence, had he been able to write; yet not the faintest suggestion of his ever having written a letter exists either in authentic record or in the most imaginative tradition. He returns to this ‘bookless neighbourhood’ one of the most enlightened men in Christendom … Possessing, it is presumed, a mind teeming with ideas, and coffers overflowing, there is no suggestion of any enterprise in which he was interested for dispelling the intellectual darkness of the community in which he lived. Having, it is supposed, performed a great work in refining and elevating the drama in London, and having thus ready to his hands a powerful instrument for brightening and humanizing the social life of the fifteen hundred souls that at the time formed the population of Stratford, he is never once reported to have filled up his own leisure with so congenial an occupation as getting up a play for the people of Stratford or in any way interesting himself in the dramatic concerns of the little community: nor even, when plays were banned, raising his voice or using his pen in protest. On the other hand there are records of his purchasing land, houses and tithes: of his carrying on business as a maltster: of his moneylending transactions: of his prosecution of people for small debts at a time when according to Sir Sidney Lee his yearly income would be about £600 (or £4,800 in money of to-day). We have particulars of his store of corn; of his making an orchard; ‘a well-authenticated tradition that he planted a mulberry tree with his own hands’; but not the slightest record of anything suggestive of what are supposed to have been his dominating interests. On the contrary he appears, even in his choice of a home, quite regardless of those things that press upon the senses and sensibilities of esthetic natures. For in picturing his last moments Halliwell-Phillipps refers to ‘the wretched sanitary conditions surrounding his residence,’ and adds, ‘If truth and not romance is to be invoked, were the woodbine and sweet honeysuckle within reach of the poet’s deathbed, their fragrance would have been neutralized by their vicinity to middens, fetid water-courses, mudwalls and piggeries.’ It is to this his biographer attributes the last illness of the great dramatist, rather than to conviviality. Now Looney talks about Shakespeare’s three periods: 445 Viewing then the three periods of William Shakspere’s career in their relation to one another we have an opening and a closing period which are perfectly homogeneous in the completely negative aspect they present to all literary considerations. Between them we have an intermediate period by which there is attributed to him the greatest works in English literature. The two extreme and homogeneous periods belong to his residence in one place, quite in keeping with his own non-literary records whilst residing there. The intermediate period, with which we shall presently deal specially, stands in marked and unprecedented contrast to its extremes, and was lived in quite another part of the country. With our present-day conveniences, news agencies and means of communication, it is perhaps impossible for us to realize how remote Stratford was from London in the days of Queen Elizabeth. We are quite entitled to claim, however, that their separateness, so far as intercourse is concerned, was in keeping with the role that William Shakspere was called upon to play. So far as the transition from stage to stage is concerned, few would deny that if the William Shakspere who had been brought up at Stratford, who was forced into a marriage at the age of eighteen with a woman eight years his senior, and who on the birth of twins deserted his wife, produced at the age of twenty-nine a lengthy and elaborate poem in the most polished English of the period, evincing a large and accurate knowledge of the classics, and later the superb Shakespearean dramas, he accomplished one of the greatest if not actually the greatest work of self-development and self-realization that genius has ever enabled any man to perform. On the other hand, if, after having performed so miraculous a work, this same genius retired to Stratford to devote himself to houses, lands, orchards, money and malt, leaving no traces of a single intellectual or literary interest, he achieved without a doubt the greatest work of selfstultification in the annals of mankind. It is difficult to believe that with such a beginning he could have attained to such heights as he is supposed to have done; it is more difficult to believe that with such glorious achievements in his middle period he could have fallen to the level of his closing period; and in time it will be fully recognised that it is impossible to believe that the same man could have accomplished two such stupendous and mutually nullifying feats. Briefly, the first and last periods at Stratford are too much in harmony with one another, and too antagonistic to the supposed middle period for all three to be credible. The situation represented by the whole stands altogether outside general human experience. The perfect unity of the two extremes, justifies the conclusion that the middle period is an illusion: in other words William Shakspere did not write the plays attributed to him. To parody the dictum of Hume in another connection, it is contrary to experience that such things should happen, but not contrary to experience that testimony, even the 446 testimony of rare and honest Ben Jonson, should be false. Looney focuses now on the middle period: We come now to William Shakspere’s middle period. Sandwiched in between two inglorious Stratford periods, what are the actual facts of his London career in reference to the works, which have made him famous? It is not as an actor, nor as a stage or theatre manager—the latter being a purely hypothetical vocation—nor even as a writer of plays for the contemporary stage, but as the author of literary works that he has won renown. As such, Sir Sidney Lee assures us that he had no hand in the publication of any of the plays attributed to him, but ‘uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracy of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands.’ The absence of all participation in the publication of plays which, as literature, have immortalized his name, is certainly a huge gap in his literary records to begin with. Again, although it has been found necessary to ascribe the first composition of plays to the years 1590-1592–otherwise time could not have been found for their production—the first of the series was not published until 1597, nor any with ‘Shakespeare’s’ name attached until 1598. Before that time, however, New Place, Stratford, had become William Shakspere’s established residence. There is no doubt that New Place (Stratford) was henceforward (from 1597) to be accepted as his established residence. Early in the following year, on February the 4 th, 1598, he is returned as the holder of ten quarters of corn in the Chapel Street ward, that in which the newly-acquired property was situated, and in future indentures he is never described as a Londoner, but always as William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. (Halliwell-Phillipps) Thenceforward his land, property and tithes purchases, along with the fact that in 1604 he takes legal action to enforce payment of a debt for malt which he had been supplying for some months past, are circumstances much more suggestive of permanent residence in Stratford, with an occasional visit maybe to London, than of permanent residence in London, with occasional trips to Stratford. The duration of this middle period is therefore most uncertain. Even on the assumption that he was the author of the plays, authorities differ by at least eight years respecting the date at which it closed (1604-1612); and when the date furnished by that assumption is rejected, as it must be in an enquiry like the present, the margin of uncertainty becomes considerably enlarged. The absence of definite information respecting the limits of this London period is certainly another serious omission from the records. 447 Looney remarks the absence of any incidents in Shakspere’s middle period: ‘Of the incidents of his life in London,’ Professor Sir Walter Raleigh tells us, ‘nothing is known.’ He lodged at one time in Bishopsgate and, later on, in Southwark. We know this, not because lords and ladies in their coaches drove up to the door of the famous man, nor because of anything else which could be called a personal “incident,” but because he was a defaultant taxpayer … for whom the authorities were searching in 1598, ignorant of the fact that he had moved, some years before, from Bishopsgate to Southwark. Evidently, then, he was not at that time living in the public eye and mixing freely in dramatic and literary circles. Sir Sidney Lee tells us that Shakspere ‘with great magnanimity, ultimately paid’ the money. If the claimant had been a private individual there might have been generosity in paying an account which could not legally be enforced; but it is not easy to associate ‘magnanimity’ with the paying of taxes. We must suppose then that either the money was due or was paid to save trouble. If the money were due then William Shakspere had been trying to defraud: if the money were not due one is a little curious to know what special inconveniences could have arisen from his contesting the claim. Every record we have of him proves that he was not the kind of man to submit to an illegal exaction without very substantial reasons. The point is a small one by itself: in connection with the general mysteriousness of his London movements, however, it has its proper significance. The absence of precise information respecting the actual location, period and form of his established residence in London is yet another of the great gaps in the record. Looney continues to focus on Shakspere’s London times: From the time when he was described as William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon (1597) there is no proof that he was anywhere domiciled in London, whilst the proofs of his domiciliation in Stratford from this time forward are irrefutable and continuous. Clearly our conceptions of his residency in London are in need of complete revision. It would appear that an attempt has been made to construct a London career for him out of materials furnished by the meagre particulars known of his actual life combined with the necessities of the assumed authorship, and from this material it has not been possible to form a consistent picture. In order to bring out this fact more clearly we shall place together two sentences from Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines. 448 ‘It was not till the year 1597 that Shakespeare’s public reputation as a dramatist was sufficiently established for the booksellers to be anxious to secure the copyright of his plays.’ ‘In the spring of this year (1597) the poet made his first investment in realty by the purchase of New Place … (which) was henceforward to be accepted as his residence.’ We are consequently faced with this peculiar situation that what has been regarded as the period of his highest fame in London began at the same time as his formal retirement to Stratford; and whilst there is undoubted mystery connected with his place or places of abode in London, there is none connected with his residence in Stratford. A curious fact in this connection is that the only letter that is known to have been addressed to him in the whole course of his life was one from a native of Stratford addressed to him in London, which appears amongst the records of the Stratford Corporation, and which ‘was no doubt forwarded by hand (to Shakspere whilst in London) otherwise the locality of residence would have been added’ (Halliwell-Phillipps). Evidently his fellow townsmen who wished to communicate with him in London were unaware of his residence there; and the fact that this letter was discovered amongst the archives of the Stratford Corporation suggests that it had never reached the addressee. It also permits of the alternative supposition, already mentioned, that having received it he was nevertheless unable to read it (notwithstanding the superior quality of its penmanship) and was obliged to forward it to his lawyer in Stratford, who resided in Shakspere’s house there. At all events the only letter known to have been addressed to him in the whole course of his life adds to the mysteriousness of his lodging in London. Looney now gets to the end of his argument: Altogether our efforts to come to close grips with the period of his greatest fame, on the solid ground of authenticated fact, have yielded most unsatisfactory results. We have no positive knowledge of his being in London before 1592: the year of Greene’s attack, in which he is accused of beautifying himself in the feathers of others, along with an innuendo suggesting that he was an uncultivated man, a ‘rude groome’ and a ‘usurer.’ And we have no record of actual residence in London after 1596, when ‘according to a memorandum by Alleyn he lodged near the Bear Garden in Southwark.’ This is precisely the time at which his father, who resided at Stratford, acting, it is generally agreed, upon William Shakspere’s initiative, made his first attempt to obtain a coat of arms on false pretences. The following year saw his purchase of New Place, Stratford, and as, in the next year, he is 449 returned as one of the largest holder’s of corn in Stratford, everything points to this being the actual time at which he established himself in his native town—if we may so dignify the Stratford of that day. The definitely assured London period appears then to be shrinking from twenty to a mere matter of four years (1592-1596), during which there is not a single record of his personal activities beyond the appearance of his name in a list of actors, but evidently much mystery as to his actual whereabouts. The literary references to the poems we shall treat separately. It was in this period that Venus and Lucrece appeared (1593 and 1594 respectively), and it was in this period that the great man who was supposed to have produced these famous poems eluded the vigilance of the tax gatherer. And he concludes: In 1597 the publication of the plays begins in real earnest. In 1598 they begin to appear with ‘Shakespeare’s’ name attached. From then till 1604 was the period of full flood of publication during William Shakspere’s lifetime: and this great period of ‘Shakespearean’ publication (1597-1604) corresponds exactly with William Shakspere’s busiest period in Stratford. In 1597 he began the business, connected with the purchase of New Place. Complications ensued, and the purchase was not completed till 1602. ‘In 1598 he procured stone for the repair of the house, and before 1602 had planted a fruit orchard. ’ (S. L.) In 1597 his father and mother, ‘doubtless under their son’s guidance,’ began a lawsuit ‘for the recovery of the mortgaged estate of Asbies in Wilmcote … [which] dragged on for some years.’ (S. L.) ‘Between 1597 and 1599 [he was] rebuilding the house, stocking the barns with grain, and conducting various legal proceedings.’ (S. L.) In 1601 his father died and he took over his father’s property. On May 1, 1602, he purchased 107 acres of arable land. In September, 1602, ‘and Walter Getley transferred to the poet a cottage and garden which were situated at Chapel Lane opposite the lower grounds of New Place.’ ‘As early as 1598 Abraham Sturley had suggested that Shakespeare (William Shakspere) should purchase the tithes of Stratford.’ In 1605 he completed the purchase of ‘an unexpired term of these tithes.’ ‘In July, 1604, in the local court at Stratford he sued Philip Rogers whom he had supplied since the preceding March malt to the value of £1 19s. 10d. and on June 25 lent 2s. in cash.’ … In a personal record from which so much is missing we may justly assume that what we know of his dealings in Stratford forms only a small part of his activities there. Consequently, to the contention that this man was the author and directing genius of the magnificent stream of dramatic literature which in those very years was bursting upon London, the business record we have just presented would in almost any court in the land 450 be deemed to have proved an alibi. The general character of these business transactions, even to such touches as lending the trifling sun of 2s. to a person to whom he was selling malt, is all suggestive of his own continuous day to day contact with the details of his Stratford business affairs: whilst the single money transaction which connects him with London during these years, the recovery of a debt of £7 from John Clayton in 1600, might easily be the result of a short visit to the metropolis, or merely the work of an agent. The licenses granted in 1603 to the company of actors in which ‘Shakespeare’s’ name appears would not necessitate his presence; and the fact that his name as it appears in these documents is spelt ‘S-h-a-k-e-s-p-e-a-r-e’ (i.e. the same as in the printed editions of the plays), whilst this spelling is not that of his own signatures, nor of some of the important Stratford documents, bears out the suggestion that these matters were arranged by the same person as was responsible for the publication of the plays … Whilst, then, everything about William Shakspere’s records suggests that he was settled permanently at Stratford during the important years of the publication of the plays, everything about the plays themselves betokens an author living at the time in intimate touch with the theatrical and literary life of London. So strong is the presumption in favour of this latter fact that no writer of any school has yet ventured to suggest the contrary. In attributing the authorship to William Shakspere it has been imperative to assume a settled residence in London during these fateful years. The utmost that could be allowed was an occasional journey to Stratford; and this notwithstanding the mysteriousness of his whereabouts and doings in London, the fact of his always being described as ‘of Stratford,’ never “of London,” and the large amount and special character of his Stratford business affairs. If, then, William Shakspere, the reputed author of the works, was not sent off to Stratford to be out of the way at the time when the literary public was being interested in the plays, he has certainly contrived matters so as to make it appear that such was the case, and thus to justify the strongest suspicion, on this ground alone, that the famous dramas were not of his composing. It is from a consideration of the manner of publication that Sir Sidney Lee concludes that William Shakspere had no part in the work. On the other hand we arrive at precisely the same conclusion from a consideration of the circumstances of his life: in the present instance on the grounds of what we are entitled to claim as an alibi. It is certainly interesting that two totally different sets of considerations should lead to precisely the same conclusion, although approached from two different standpoints and with different intentions; leaving but little room for doubt as to the soundness of the common conclusion. Whilst then we agree that William Shakspere had no hand 451 in the publication of this literature, to maintain that its actual author, if living, in no way shared in any part of the work, is the kind of belief which practical men in touch with life would hardly acknowledge without serious misgiving. While we leave Shakspere repairing his house, selling malt and lending money in order to increase his patrimony, it may be of use to remark that the first identification of William Shakspere of Stratford as the author of the plays of William Shakespeare did not occur until the First Folio of 1623. Scene XVIII. The Trimming of John Donne. The year 1597 was also an important one for Thomas Nashe. In the work The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, published in 1597 and written by some Richard Litchfield (none other than Gabriel Harvey himself) 100, we are told that the subject of the work is to identify who this Thomas Nashe is. The epistle reads: To tell you what the man is and the reason of this book were but trivial and superfluous, only this, you may call it The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, wherein he is described, in trimming of which description, though I have found out and fetched from the mint some few new words to colour him, grant me pardon … But now I remember me, there was no hatred between us before, and therefore ’twould be proved but chance-medley. Let it even alone, it cannot be undone, for a thing easily done never can be undone As Harvey wrote years before, the author behind Nashe’s mask is Donne. Harvey continues his trimming of Nashe in this way: Semper idem (thought I) might be your mot, and so you will die. Then I began to mark the note which you adjoined to your notes that they might be noted; there, tossing and turning your book upside down, when the west end of it happened to be upward, methought your note seemed a D. Ah, dunce, dolt, dotterel, quoth I, well might it be a D, and for my life for the space of two hours could I not leave railing of thee all in D’s. 100 It is not a coincidence that traditional scholars have denied the authorship of Harvey on this pamphlet of 1597, for it is here, as Harvey threatened Nashe in 1593, that he told who Nashe was at last. 452 The first letter of his surname already hinted at, Harvey adds the first letter of his name: Thou art as many ciphers without an I, which they wanting are of themselves nothing, and thou hast much apparency of wit which is as ciphers, but thou hast not this same I. Iota is wanting to thy ciphers, thou hast not one jot nor tittle of true wit. Hence, the man Nashe is no other but I.D., or Iohne Donne. And now Harvey gives a simile that fits John Donne, for he was with Raleigh and Essex at Cádiz in 1596: Again, as some soldiers that were at Cadiz, breaking into a shop for pillage and there seeing many great sacks ready trussed up, they with great joy made haste away with them, and so with light hearts carried away their heavy burdens, and when they brought them into the streets, opening them to see their booties, found in some of them naught but red caps, of which afterward they made store of fires, and in the rest naught but earthen pitchers, chafing dishes and piss-pots and suchlike, so whosoever shall see thee trussed up and in thy clothes might happily take thee for a wise young man, but when thou shalt be opened, that is, when he shall see but some work of thine, he shall find in thee naught but rascality and mere delusions. Donne, Nashe being described by Harvey as ‘a wise young man,’ was twenty four (24) years old in 1596. A reference to his surname is hinted at by Harvey when he refers to the ‘dung’, which is pronounced like the surname ‘Donne’, and is an express reference to the name of “John Dung”: Even as the nettle keepeth herself cleanest for that no man purgeth his post-pendence (there your nose, Thomas) with it, not because they cannot, but because it would sting them if they should, and so for that small good turn it would work them a more displeasure, so thou art suffered to be quiet and not wrote against, not for that thou canst not be answered, but that by answering thee they should but give more fodder to thy poison, put more casting to thy gorge, and he that intends to meddle with dung must make account to defile his fingers. Harvey then describes Nashe with a simile that Donne would later in life recall famously in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Harvey says of Nashe: 453 Thus (by these descriptions) the definitive sentence of my determination is this: Nashe, thou hast not a good wit, thou art a silly fellow, and more silly than Sir Thomas of Carleton who, being a little sick and the bell tolling to have him go read the service, the clerk of the parish going to him and telling him that the bell tolled for him, meaning to go read, he went presently and made his will because the bell tolled for him. And so do thou; ply thee, make thy will, and die betimes before thou beest killed, for thine own wit will kill thee, and call you that a good wit that kills a man? All the wise men of Greece and Gotham never came to the misery that thy good wit hath brought thee to. My mind presageth the great confusion that thy good wit will bring upon thee. Next, Harvey accuses Nashe of being effeminate: But this is thine answer, ’tis God’s will it should be so; thou wert never born to have a beard. ’Tis true indeed. Thus thou mightest answer to all the arguments in the world. But the want of a beard makes thee thus cold in answering, for a beard is a sign of a strong natural heat and vigour. But the true answer is, thou seekest too many ways to cast out thine excrements, thou art too effeminate, and so becom’st like a woman, without a beard. Nashe’s answer is not recorded, but Donne’s witty epigram “Manliness” reads: Thou call’st me effeminate, for I love women’s joys; I call not thee manly, though thou follow boys. This is a good reply to Harvey, for E.K. described (and excuse very personally) him in The Shepheard’s Calendar of 1579 as having a disorderly love with the boy Immeritô: Hobbinol) is a fained country name, whereby, it being so commune and vsuall, seemeth to be hidden the person of some his very speciall and most familiar freend, whom he entirely and extraordinarily beloued, as peraduenture shall be more largely declared hereafter. In thys place seemeth to be some sauor of disorderly loue, which the learned call paederastice: but it is gathered beside his meaning. Litchfield (that is, Harvey) continues repeating the same clear note of the surname of the real author behind Nashe’s mask: 454 In this thy trimming, thou being so fit for it, I will work a wonder on thee, and I will hold any man a wager that I will perform it, that is, whilst I am washing you I will request your connivence, and put myself to connivence and shave you quite through, and when I have done, you shall not be a hair the worse. You may make a riddle of the same if you will, but I will do it, and when I have done, raising myself on my tiptoes, I will so hunt thee for my pay that thou shouldst be in worse case than the beaver ‘I have done’ means he has got Nashe as John Donne. That is the ‘wonder’ of the riddle he is talking about. As we said before, Thomas Middleton wrote the following words in The Nyghtingale and the Ante (1604), inspired by Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless: ‘At dice? At the devil!’, quoth I, ‘for that is a dicer’s last throw!’ Here I began to rail like Thomas Nashe against Gabriel Harvey, if you call that railing; yet I think it was but the running a tilt of wits in booksellers’ shops on both sides of John of Paul’s churchyard, and I wonder how John escaped unhorsing. Georgia Brown thinks that this ‘John’ here ‘may well refer to Harvey’s printer, John Wolfe.’101 I think that this ‘John’ refers to John Donne. Who cared about a printer or the printer of Harvey? Middleton could have written the name of the printer in full, “John Wolfe,” and no one would have said nothing at all against that. But that is not the point of Middleton’s comment. The occult, witty point of Middleton’s comment (only for those in the secret) is that this anonymous John is the writer of all the jokes and insults Nashe wrote against the Cambridge Don, which was not the printer of Harvey, but John Donne, and that is why Middleton’s words contain a witty reference to the author behind the Nashe mask: John escaped unhorsing. Harvey, by the end of his pamphlet, seems to remind Nashe of his close friendship: This I speak not to wage discord against thee, but rather to make an end of all jars, that as wife & husband will brawl and be at mortal feud all the day long, but when board or bedtime come they are friends again, and lovingly kiss one another, so though hitherto we have disagreed and been at odds, yet this one coat shall contain us both, 101 Redefining Elizabethan Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Interesting comment by George Brown here: ‘Dr Faustus and Pierce Penilesse are both based on a supplication to the devil...’ 455 which thou shalt wear as the cognizance of my singular love towards thee, that we living in mutual love may so die, and at last, loving like two brothers, Castor and Pollux, or the two sisters, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, we may be carried up to heaven together, and there translated into two stars. This is a clear reference to Harvey and Immerito as the senior and the junior friends we see in The Shepheard’s Calendar of 1579. Harvey hints at the surname of the author behind Nashe’s masks at the end again: Thus (courteous gentlemen) I have brought you to the end of his trimming. Though he be not so curiously done as he deserveth, hold me excused: he is the first man that ever I cut on this fashion. What is interesting is that Nashe said nothing in reply to all this, but disappeared. What G.R. Hibbard writes fits with DINS theory: The technique used to transform the social type into this allegorical being has much in common with that employed by Spenser, a poet for whom Nashe frequently expresses his admiration. From what he says at the end of Pierce Penilesse it is evident that he had been reading the first three books of The Faerie Queene, published in 1590.102 Only they were the same person: Donne. The fact that Donne entered as the secretary of Lord Egerton in 1597 is a clue as to why Nashe ’s ghost was honoured with this epitaph by Ben Jonson: Mortals that yet respire with plenteous breath View here a trophee of that tyrant deathe And let the obiect strike your melting eyes blind as the night, when you but read, Here lies Conquerd by destiny & turned to earthe The man whose want hathe causd a generall dearthe Of witte; throughout this land: none left behind to equall hym in his ingenious kynd I vrge not this as being his parasite who lou’d him least will doe him greater right Noe well deserving muse but will impart her flowers to crown his Industrie & art when any wrongd him lyuing they did feele his spirite quicke as powder sharp as stele 102 Thomas Nashe. The University Wits, ed. Georgia Brown, Ashgate, 2011, p. 170. 456 But to his freindes her faculties were faire pleasant and milde as the most temp’rate ayre O pardon me deare freind yf fear controule the zealous purpose of my wounded sowle feare to be censured glorious in thie praise (A maime sone taken in these hum’rous dayes where every dudgeon iudgement stabs at witt yette (for thie loue) this truth Ile not omitte Which most may make thie merites to appeare & ioye thie glad suruiuing freindes to heare), thou diedst a Christian faithfull penitent Inspir’d with happie thoughtes & confident This though thie latest grace was not the least Which still shall lyue when all else are deceast farewell greate spirite my pen attird in blacke shall whilst I am still weepe & mourn thie lacke. When Ben Jonson says that he is not Nashe’s parasite, that he did not borrow much from Nashe’s immense wit, we feel that the comparison with Jonson’s literary debt to Donne is opportune. Because as Neil Rhodes writes (“Shakespearean grotesque: the Falstaff plays”), Nashe enjoyed an ‘immense prestige—or notoriety’; and he adds: ‘After the deaths of Greene (1592) and Marlowe (1593) he was the most celebrated professional writer in London … and by the end of the decade he had become the hero of the students who wrote the Parnassus plays.’ And on Nashe’s language Gibbard writes: Observation and the imaginative use of language that gives it edge and bite work together to produce a portrait that looks forward to those which are to be found in some of Ben Jonson’s comedies. Indeed, it looks as though Jonson learnt much from Nashe about the art of taking a social type and endowing it with individuality. Every Man Out of His Humour in particular is like a Nashe satire, provided with a few elements of plot and transferred to the stage … More striking still, the essential traits of Bobadil in Every Man in His Humour are already visible in Nashe’s sketch of the counterfeit politician, as he calls him, who lives in misery for most of the year And Ian Donaldson (Ben Jonson, A Biography, 2011) writes: The comparatively slow emergence of Jonson’s poetic powers is particularly evident when contrasted with the prodigious early achievement of John Donne. Donne and Jonson were exact 457 contemporaries, both born in 1572. By the early years of the new century they were already close friends. It is likely they met at some stage during the 1590s through the intellectual networks associated with the Earl of Essex, or through the Catholic community in London, with whom Donne, who had now abandoned the religion of his birth, still retained significant links, and with whom Jonson, whose recent conversion had taken him in a contrary direction, was becoming increasingly acquainted. Jonson evidently read Donne’s startling new poems with full attention as they emerged through the 1590s … One group of Donne’s verse writtings in particular evidently made a deep impression on Jonson during the 1590s. These were Donne’s Satires … Jonson must at some stage have wondered whether this style of writing, so often casually described in modern times as ‘dramatic’, could not in a literal sense be transferred to the stage … The comical satires that Jonson was soon to produce … are recognizably Donnean both in tone and subject matter. Whole scenes in the third act of Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) involving the tenacious bore Crispinus, for example, are virtually lifted from Donne’s first and fourth Satires … Many small touches in Every Man Out of His Humour—Jonson’s next theatrical venture, performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men late in 1599—have a similar Donne-like bravura. 103 Indeed, so intense is the influence of Nashe on Jonson in this work that we can see who Donne is when Jonson tells us himself. In Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour the merchant Kitely or Kit (i.e. Kit Marlowe) makes this comment about his page Thomas Cash (i.e. Thomas Nashe) to his friend Downright (II.i): Kit Do you see that fellow, brother Downright? Dow Ay, what of him? Kit He is a jewel, brother. I took him of a child up at my door, And christen’d him, gave him mine own name, Thomas; Since bred him at the Hospital; where proving A toward imp, I call’d him home and taught him So much, as I made him my cashier, And giv’n him, who had none, a surname, Cash John Donne wrote in his Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart...” a reference to his surname in the line ‘But, oh, to no end.’ For ‘no end’ is an anagram of ‘donne.’ In the Donne Variorum, Vol. 7, Part 1 (p.268-69) we read: 103 The letters we have of Nashe to others either are false or must be studied as smokescreens. A third possibility is that Donne wrote them with his pseudonym. In any case, that is the reason ‘Nashe’ has been occult these 400 years. 458 6 to no end. MALLET (1983): ‘unsuccessfully’ (59). WILLMOTT (1985): ‘to no avail’ (69). CAYWARD (1980): ‘no explicator, to my knowledge, has called attention to the anagram in line 6 of the poem.’ The lines ‘compare the speaker, the poet (Donne), to a town captured by Satan and powerless (through weakness of will) to admit, or readmit, God to His rightful place as ruler of the town.’ Furthermore, ‘if the letters of ‘no end’ in line 6 are rearranged, they form ‘donne’, reinforcing the simile of the poet as a captured town by spelling out the poet’s name.’ (5) Although Ben Jonson seems to be giving us these comments on Thomas Cash’s name apparently for no special reason on the surface, beneath, the Nashe and Donne’s dear friend Ben Jonson is leaving behind a clue on Thomas Cash’s identity. Kit gave the surname ‘Cash’ to the boy ‘who had none.’ Ben Jonson adds his witty remark and further clue for scholars to decipher in future times: ‘a surname’: Donne. Donne, like Nashe with Master Apis Lapis, knew who Oxford had been and what he had created as a writer and leader of writers. In his Essayes in Divinity, Donne remarks in passing (Essay VI, “On the name of God”) a man of immense literary output of the Elizabethan times recently gone: Names are either to avoid confusion, and distinguish particulars … but such a name, God, who is One, needs not. Or else names are to instruct us, and express nature and essences. This Adam was able to do. And an enormous pretending wit of our nation and age undertook to frame such a language, herein exceeding Adam, that … he named everything by the most eminent and virtual property ‘Pretending wit’ meaning a wit in disguise, a dissimulating wit, a hidden wit; what Oxford was. As Essayes in Divinity were written and finished before he entered the Church (ca. 1614), 104 when Donne writes that the ‘enormous pretending wit of our nation undertook to frame such a language’ he is speaking in the past, that is, the genius is already dead. Shakspere of Stratford still had two more years to live in his rural and dark retirement. I recommend all those readers sceptical of my list of the works of our poet so far included in this work, to remember these words of John Donne on the mastermind of Elizabethan culture, and to think twice before criticising that list beforehand. If John Donne wrote a lot, imagine what Oxford could have written. 104 R.C. Bald says (p. 281): ‘Even if, as seems probable, parts of Essayes had been written some years before, they may have reached their final form in 1614.’ 459 Scene XIX. The power struggle between Essex and Cecil In 1597, when the silence of the man from Stratford had been bought with enough money for him to acquire the second best house in Stratford, our poet’s edited plays started to be published in London. Hank Whittemore’s Twelve Years in the life of Shakespeare transmits to us the words of E.K. Chambers, the eminent Stratfordian critic: In 1597 began the printing of plays written by Shakespeare … with a ‘bad’ quarto of Romeo and Juliet, bearing on its title-page the name of Lord Hundson’s men and ‘good’ quartos of Richard II and Richard III, bearing that of the Lord Chamberlain’s. From the text of Richard II was omitted the deposition scene, which did not appear in print until after the death of Elizabeth. Whittemore adds: ‘William Shakespeare’ had appeared on the dedications of Venus and Adonis in 1593 and Lucrece in 1594 to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, but nowhere had that already-famous name landed on the title page of a published play. (In our own time it would be as though Norman Mailer was writing smash hits for the Broadway stage without anyone knowing about it.) Going by the record, the Elizabethan public in 1597 remained unaware that the sophisticated creator of two best-selling narrative poems was also a popular dramatist of the Chamberlain’s Men. Following Whittemore, we know that a change of guard was taking place that year, for the secretary of state William Cecil had been preparing his son Robert as the future Secretary of State. Whittemore quotes Robert Lacey: After waiting patiently for five years, old Burghley had achieved his last great ambition: to see his quiet, crippled, brilliant son take over the reins of effective power. The old man could die content. His boy Robert would still have to struggle with that other Robert, Earl of Essex, so much nobler born and so generously endowed with the superficial attractions that counted for so much at the Elizabethan Court. Yet as Principal Secretary to the Queen young Cecil was undeniably established—he could hold his own alone against Essex; and given time he could do more than that. 460 Thanks to his victory in Cádiz in 1596, Essex was now the star of the Court. In December, Sir Edward Hoby wrote to his cousin Sir Robert Cecil asking him to visit Canon Row in order to see the performance of Richard II. Through Ogburn we know that our poet had visited his sonin-law the Earl of Derby in Cannon Row in September, while on July 6th 1597, Walter Raleigh wrote to Robert Cecil saying that Essex was ‘wonderful merry at your conceit of Richard II.’ Whittemore writes that ‘Essex himself was known to enjoy the play,’ biographer Lacey writes, ‘going several times and applauding enthusiastically.’ After the Essex Rebellion of 1601, for which the conspirators will arrange for a special performance of Richard II at the Globe, Cecil will accuse Essex of having wanted to make himself king from 1596 onward. In the Secretary’s mind, therefore, the Queen’s favorite in 1597 is an embodiment of Bolingbroke the usurper. Having being appointed as commander of the naval expedition against the Spanish, Essex went to the Azores to intercept a Spanish convoy coming from La Havana. The tense environment in London was becoming more patent now that the aged Queen did not seem to be willing to appoint her successor. A play seems to have treated this theme. The new playwright, Ben Jonson, was behind it, as well as Thomas Nashe. Whittemore again: On or before this day [July, 28], the Pembroke’s Men perform Isle of Dogs at the Swan. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London request the Privy Council to issue orders for the ‘final suppressing’ of stage plays in and about the city. Also on the same day the Privy Council directs that ‘no plays shall be used within London or about the city or in any public place during this time of summer.’ In addition ‘those playhouses that are erected and built only for such purposes shall be plucked down, namely the Curtain and the Theatre near to Shoreditch or any other within that county.’ Food scarcity and high prices were added now to the political crisis which had caused the closing of the theaters. This prohibition showed how plays, then more than ever, had a political aim; their power on people was such that William Cecil and his son Robert were trying to control them. After returning from the fiasco expedition to the Azores, the good star of Essex started to decline. On November 1, as Whittemore says, the Government ordered to lift the ban on theaters: The inhibition of theaters is lifted. As performances resume, the Queen’s Master of the Revels issues licenses to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men, the two companies that wear the livery of her Privy Councilors. While responsible to the 461 ministers of state, they now enjoy the status of a protected monopoly (or duopoly). No license is issued to Pembroke’s Men; and the Swan, owned by Langley, is doomed as a venue for plays. Robert Cecil was behind all this. He was not going to let power go from his hands now that he had just got it. Whittemore gives us this analysis of the year 1597: Robert Cecil, having become Secretary of State, has gained unprecedented control of the London theater world via the Privy Council. He has also come into contact with Ben Jonson, through the interrogator Topcliffe. Ironically, given the explosion caused by Isle of Dogs, the skyrocketting of Jonson’s career now begins; and Every Man in His Humour will be presented by the Chamberlain’s Men in the fall of 1598 … After the dust kicked up by Isle of Dogs had settled back down, David Riggs writes, ‘the main beneficiaries turned out to be the Queen and her Privy Council and the two companies that her councilors patronized.’ The events of 1597 had marked a ‘watershed’ in the history of the English stage, concludes Glynne Wickham; and Riggs adds: ‘Previously the theater business was fundamentally independent in character. Henceforth the Court would increasingly make it an object of scrutiny, patronage and control.’ Whatever the true story behind Isle of Dogs, the play had crossed some line in terms of provoking the Elizabethan government. It had caused Robert Cecil and the Privy Council to charge attempted sedition by means of a performance on the stage, that is, attempted incitement of rebellion against the Crown. What happened in the summer of 1597 would culminate three and one-half years later—on February 7, 1601—in a special performance by the Chamberlain’s Men of Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Globe. This time the political purpose of staging a play would be transparent. This time supporters of Essex and Southampton would arrange for the production to rouse support against Secretary Cecil and his sway over the Queen; and the so-called Essex Rebellion would begin the next morning. Scene XX. 1598: Shakespeare, a playwright; Marlowe, a poet Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in the kingdom except for the Queen, died in September 1598. Before that, on March 10, and for the first time, the name of ‘W. Shakespere’ (sic) appeared as a writer of plays. The play that had the honour to bear his name for the first time was Love’s Labour’s Lost. One month later, the work Palladis Tamia was published. The writer, Francis Meres, confirmed that Shakespeare was a great playwright, the author of the anonymous Romeo and Juliet, Titus 462 Andronicus and Two Gentlemen of Verona, among many others. That Shakespeare was a pseudonym is confirmed by another work published that same year. Ogburn tells us: [A] few lines of verse … seem to me specially significant. They are from Scourge of Villanie, printed anonymously in 1598, by John Marston, whose first published work, earlier in that year, had been an erotic poem in the meter of Venus and Adonis. Son of a barrister of the Temple, a B.A. of Oxford, Marston was a satirist and dramatist to whom Henslowe once advanced 40 shillings, who engaged in a celebrated quarrel with Ben Jonson and later collaborated with him in a play that sent them both to jail. In a book of fulminations against human iniquity he breaks into a poem with lines that have virtually nothing to do with the rest of it and are totally out of keeping with the book as a whole, exclaiming: …......Far fly thy fame, Most, most of me beloved, whose silent name One letter bounds. Thy true judicial style I ever honour, and if my love beguile Not much my hopes, then thy unvalu’d worth Shall mount fair place when Apes are turned forth. Who had a ‘sillent name’ that ‘one letter bounds’? Who but Edward de VerE? It was precisely in 1598, when Meres had claimed that Shakespeare was not only a poet but a playwright of some very famous plays, that the poem Hero and Leander was published, informing the public that Marlowe was not only a playwright but a poet as well. Interestingly enough, the very same year that Shakespeare transformed from poet to playwright, Marlowe transformed from playwright to poet. Oxford and Donne were having fun, as we see. In the second edition of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander published in 1598, the poem was continued by George Chapman. How could Chapman want to relate himself to the already dead atheist Marlowe? Stephen Orgel, the editor of this poem for Penguin (2007), tells us: Marlowe’s poem is the best expression of the Ovidian world view in English … The most subversive of Marlowe’s subjects is how you get away with pleasure, and omitting the conclusion, the punishment for the lovers’–and the readers’—extraordinary enjoyment is a neat way of cheating the moralists. Ironically, but also significantly, the poem was completed by the most moral and moralistic of Marlowe’s contemporaries, George Chapman … Chapman’s style is quite 463 different from Marlowe’s, but his admiration for Marlowe is clear … The most extraordinary thing about Chapman’s continuation is that this moralist wants to be associated with the work of Marlowe at all: when he was murdered in 1593, Marlowe was under investigation for atheism, blasphemy, counterfeiting (all that is missing is sodomy, and the charges hover dangerously close to that, too)–in short, universal subversion. Concerning the explanation as to why the moralist Chapman would have wanted to be related to the atheist Marlowe, Orgel responds: ‘But Chapman saw a different Marlowe.’ All I can think of this ‘extraordinary’ fact is that Chapman the moralist was not crazy when he added his name to the atheist Marlowe’s great erotic poem; he was adding his name to the Marlowe mask, behind which stood, here, John Donne. Could someone really believe that Donne would have been influenced by Marlowe, as R.C. Bald and many other critics declare, if Marlowe the atheist spy had been the same person as Marlowe the poet-playwright? I think not. The year 1598 ends with another notorious event: Spenser, the real Spenser who could have been an informant of Walsingham and Robert Cecil, returned to London. According to a conversation Ben Jonson had with the Scottish poet Drummond, Spenser died in King’s Street ‘for lack of bread.’ The first question is: how could Jonson have known Spenser if he had lived in Ireland since 1580? Great mystery, unless we consider that this Spenser has nothing to do with the poet who was hiding behind that name. Indeed, this fact of dying for ‘lack of bread’ seems extraordinary in a poet as great as Spenser and with so many powerful friends at Court, and is therefore not considered to be true by many critics. In the Edmund Spenser webpage we read on Spenser’s last year of life:105 Arriving late in 1598, he took up residence in King’s Street, and died there, according to Ben Jonson ‘for lake of bread’, on a Saturday in January 1599. It is not clear how a poet so well-loved by so many, an official so highly-regarded by so many, and a man so politically wellconnected to so many, could have died in the fabled penury to which Jonson later testified. Camden recorded that the Earl of Essex paid for his funeral, and that poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens, along with many tears, into his grave. His tomb is situated, appropriately enough, adjacent to that of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. Ben Jonson’s lie about Spenser would be repeated with Shakespeare 105 See http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/biography.htm. 464 in 1623. As with the man from Stratford, there are no books in Spenser’s possession. And his house, conveniently for the legend, was burnt to ashes. As to his family and children, the reader is advised not to ask: nothing is known about them. In the same way as Spenser went to Ireland, he returned to London unnoticed. As to Camden’s report, please note that Camden was Ben Jonson’s beloved protector. He would not have minded to be asked for a false report. Another thing: the absence of letters to his friends concerning his poetry may be accounted with the burning of his house in Ireland, as Ben Jonson said; but Ben Jonson cannot justify the absence of letters received by his friends in London and in their houses, for they were not burned to ashes. As Ackroyd reminds us, these were years of hunger and revolts. The fact that the aged Queen continued to keep silent as to who would be the next successor was making matters more difficult. Everyone was nervous, for a civil war seemed to be approaching. In 1599, we know through Ogburn that our poet, his wife Elizabeth Trentham and his son Henry de Vere were visiting the Derbys, and that the convivial spirit was mutual because the Derbys returned the visits to the Oxfords. Ogburn remarks that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, son-in-law of Oxford, for he had married his daughter Elizabeth de Vere in 1595, apart from being an expert musician, also shared the love for theater with our poet: Oxford acquired a son-in-law eleven years his junior to whom he could apparently be close, one of tastes so similar to his own that, a case can be made out for the 6th Earl of Derby’s himself having been Shakespeare … Music was an avocation the two Earls shared. The theatre was more. It was about this time that the Jesuit George Fanner reported in an intercepted letter to his superiors that ‘The Earl of Derby is busied only in penning comedies for the common players.’ Meanwhile, Ireland was getting all the attention. Tyrone’s rebellion of 1598, which ended with the informant Spenser in London, had to be smashed. Essex was sent to Ireland to fight against the rebels, and Southampton accompanied him as second in command. Many sources point out that Corolianus was being written around this time, and that Essex was the model for that Roman tragic hero. The most interesting thing about the play, however, is Corolianus’ attitude towards his mother Volumnia. In “Prehistory and History of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch until Brecht and me, passing through Shakespeare,” Günter Grass wrote (my translation): If Plutarch bases the decadence and fall of his hero as caused by the lack of a father for this half orphan, and therefore, because he lacked the hand that educated him, in Shakespeare we can find a pervasive 465 complex of Electra, that does not leave room for any educational attempt. Victories are pursued, wounds are accumulated, without doubt for the sake of the homeland, but above all with the objective of putting the conquered city at the feet of the mother, in order to enrich his mother’s collection of scars; because she, Volumnia, treats her son as if he were her lover. Volumnia is Queen Elizabeth while Corolianus is de Vere in some parts and Essex in others. But more interesting is the fact that Volumnia is the name of Corolianus’ spouse in Plutarch’s version while in Shakespeare’s she is his mother. From the PT II perspective, this strange adaptation is not weird at all. In 1599 the work The Passionate Pilgrim ‘by W. Shakespeare’ appeared. It contains 21 poems: fifteen (15) poems and six (6) others belonging to the section “Sonnets for Sundry Notes of Music.” Poems 1 and 2 are the sonnets which will later appear as sonnets 138 and 144 of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets. Poem 3 is taken from Act IV, Scene II of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Poem 4 is a poem unpublished by Shakespeare until then, and many critics dispute its authenticity, even though it deals with the story of Venus and Adonis. Happily, we have an essay on this poem by W. J. Ray. Poem 4 says: Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook With young Adonis, lovely, fresh and green, Did court the lad with many a lovely look, Such looks as none could look but beauty’s queen. She told him stories to delight his ear; She showed him favours to allure his eye; To win his heart, she touched him here and there; Touches so soft still conquer chastity. But whether unripe years did want conceit, Or he refused to take her figured proffer, The tender nibbler would not touch the bait, But smile and jest at every gentle offer: Then fell she on her back, fair queen, and toward: He rose and ran away; ah, fool too froward. W. J. Ray writes the following about poem 4 of Shakespeare’s The Passionate Pilgrim:106 Comparing the historical Queen (Elizabeth) and youth (Oxford) to the verbal alchemy shown in ‘‘Sweet Cytherea’’, we find remarkable fidelity between what we know of the affair and its artistic depiction. 106 See http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/Shakespearean_Apocrypha.pdf. 466 Fiction feigns more than fact can say. Sweet Cytherea, named after one of the mythological erotic deities, symbolically equivalent with Venus, refers the reader back to the Spartan island Cythera, known for its purple dye, murex, a color sanctified since antiquity as royal … We are not left in doubt, reading the poem, which level of royalty Cytherea represents. From beginning to end, the tale’s moving party is ‘beauty’s queen,’ and she, ‘fair queen,’ falls finally on her back, postured toward her young interlocutor, as he bolts and runs like the wind. Cythera according to Greek myth was the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. In this poem the archetypal lover, ‘beauty’s queen’, sits by a BROOK. Lord Ox-FORD therein embeds his personal signature, as Alfred Hitchcock cinematically presents his comic rotundity, in the first entry of the drama. An early pseudonym of Oxford was Arthur Brooke. Ray continues his analysis: In the poem’s two-veiled reference to Elizabeth I, who received frequent allusions during her reign as the moon goddess Cynthia, Cytherea, first, is nearly homonymic with Cynthia, an allusion which in turn grants her mythic status, like Cynthia and Diana, as simultaneously the goddess of the moon and the chase. The moon votary in the poem encounters the short-living sun god Adonis, relying for metaphorical power upon the bond between those two celestial archetypes. Prince Oxford continued to couch his life experience in mythological terms when in Venus and Adonis he expanded into epic form the dramatic features of his experiment in the Shakespearean sonnet. We see a distinctive Oxfordian writing feature as well, the repetition of an ending phrase in the beginning of the following line, a personal technique linking together the obscure poem, Oxford as its author, and the pseudonymous cypher Shake-speare. Note that the words ‘look’ and ‘touch’ repeat in this poem: lines 3-4 and 7-8. The same repeat style also occurs in ‘Grief of Mind’, attributed to Oxford: ‘What plague is greater than the grief of mind?/ The grief of mind that eat in every vein...’ … It occurs somewhere else, in the early Shake-spearean Comedy of Errors (I,ii): ‘She is so hot because the meat is cold/ The meat is cold because you come not home…’ No other poet of the era but Oxford took on the challenge of echoing phrases end to end. For Ray, there is clinching proof that poem 4, “Sweet Cytherea”, is Oxford’s, due to 467 the nearly identical similarity of the last lines in the known Oxford poem, “If women would be fair and not fond” and in “Sweet Cytherea”, which was the apocryphal “Shakespeare” Sonnet IV ... It adds a little more weight to the judgment that Oxford wrote “Sweet Cytherea” as a creative prelude to Venus and Adonis, i.e., he used nearly the same phrase in two works earlier than Venus and Adonis, one of which is now half-way attributed to “Shakespeare”. He adds on the two poems’ parallel last lines: I am inclined to attribute the poem ‘If women could be fair...’ to Oxford, because of the narrator’s closing reference to himself as a fool: ‘To play with fools, oh what a fool was I,’ It is kin to the ending mood of “Sweet Cytherea”: ‘He rose and ran away; ah! fool too froward.’107 Poem 5 is an extract from Love’s Labour’s Lost; poem 6 plays with the word ‘brook’ and has such a genial erotic tone that Oxford is the best candidate. Poem 7 tells the story of Venus and Adonis and plays with his favourite word ‘fair’ (i.e. pronounced like ‘Ver’). Poem 8 had been published by Richard Barnfield a year before, and deals with Spenser: If music and sweet poetry agree... Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such As passing all conceit needs no defence... And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned When as himself to singing he betakes. One knight loves both, and both in thee remain. Poem 9 is Shakespeare’s: it contains the fair Adonis, the boar and the erotic description when Venus shows Adonis the sore on her thigh. Poem 10 deals with the ‘sweet rose’ (Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton) which death has tragically erased. Poem 11 had been published in 1596 by Bartholemew Griffin in his cycle of sonnets Fidesa. In an edition of Griffin’s cycle of sonnets, we are informed the following:108 The author of Fidessa has gained undeserved notice from the fact that 107 The words of this paragraph and the former one were given to my by Ray in a personal email communication. 108 See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15448/15448-h/15448-h.htm. 468 the piratical printer W. Jaggard included a transcript of one of his sonnets in a volume that he put forth in 1599, under the name of Shakespeare. It would be easy to believe, in spite of the doubtful rimes characteristic of Fidessa, that sonnet three was not Griffin’s, for no singer in the Elizabethan choir was more skilful in turning his voice to other people’s melodies than was he. He has been called ‘a gross plagiary.’ Poem 12 seems to have been written by Shakespeare and there is this autobiographical description of old age that fits with his life: ‘Youth is nimble, age is lame.’ Poems 14, 15 and 16 also sound as if they had been written by Shakespeare. Poem 16 is the first of the songs of ‘sundry music,’ and is extracted from Love’s Labour’s Lost. Poem 17 is attributed to Ignoto in the anthology England’s Helicon published in 1600. Ignoto had already appeared in a dedicatory poem of The Faerie Queene, and is no other than our poet. Poem 19 is a revision of the poem Edward de Vere left in Fisher’s Folly which was copied by Anne Cornwallis, the owner’s daughter. Poem 20 is pure Shakespeare but will be attributed to Marlowe in England's Helicon. Poem 21 was published by Barnfield in 1598, while in the anthology of England’s Helicon of 1600 it will be attributed to Ignoto. The poem reads: If Musicke and sweet Poetrie agree, As they must needs (the Sister and the brother) Then must the loue be great twixt thee and me, Because thou lou’st the one, and I the other. Dowland to thee is deere, whose heuenly tuch Vpon the Lute, dooth rauish humane sense: Spenser to me, whose deepe Conceit is such, As passing all conceit, needs no defence. Thou lou’st to heare the sweet melodious sound, That Phoebus Lute (the Queene of Musicke) makes; And I in deepe Delight am chiefly drownd, When as himselfe to singing he betakes. One God is God of both (as Poets faine) One Knight loves Both, and both in thee remaine. Of Dowland we know that ‘[n]o musician of the Elizabethan age was more famous than John Dowland.’109 Furthermore, there is a poem he wrote that relates him to Spenser and Donne. This is a clear instance of what happens when the same author uses different literary personae: 110 109 See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27129/27129-h/27129-h.htm#s1b. 110 See http://users.ox.ac.uk/~musf0058/Unquietthoughts.html. 469 The first song in John Dowland’s highly successful First Booke of Songes or Ayres, printed in London in 1597 by Peter Short, provides a fitting opening to the performance space of the whole book. The text of the first stanza is as follows: Vnquiet thoughts your ciuill slaughter stint, & wrap your wrongs within a pensiue hart: And you my tongue that maks my mouth a minte. & stamps my thoughts to coyne them words by arte: Be still for if you euer doo the like, Ile cut the string, that maks the hammer strike. ...The image of a poet minting words is extremely common in Elizabethan and Jacobean England—John Donne and Edmund Spenser, for example, used it fairly often. Some scholars have drawn attention to the Donne-like metaphysicality of this opening poem in Dowland’s collection but it can be argued that the link with Spenser is stronger. This lyric and an episode in Book IV of The Faerie Queene share the use of the smithy image and exploit it as a negative type of the Pythagorean forge, which provided an image of musical, and by extension, mental and social concord. Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores was published in 1599, and we now understand why in Book I, Elegy XV we see Marlowe’s translation followed by the translation of the same Elegy by B. J., that is, Ben Jonson. This elegy is no other than the one which was printed on the title page of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Donne-Nashe-Marlowe translates it: Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs. While on the next page, entitled ‘The same by B.J.,’ we read: Kneel hinds to trash: me let bright Phoebus swell, With cups full flowing from the Muses’ well. The relationship between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare is clear, but what is not clear is the relationship between Jonson and the legendary Marlowe, who had died before Jonson started his career as a poet. Who but the author of the translation permitted Jonson to print his version of that elegy in the same book? My hypothesis is that Marlowe’s translation of Amores was the work of Donne, that this translation served for his own Elegies, and that it was Donne who invited Jonson to include his 470 own translation of Elegy XV in Book I, a poem that Jonson included later in his play Poetaster (I i 43 ff), as Stephen Orgel notes in the Penguin Classic edition of Marlowe’s poems.111 By the end of 1599 Essex and Southampton decided that Ireland was a lost cause for them. Anderson writes: [T]hey were through dealing with the troublesome earl of Tyrone; they were through with receiving angry missives from the queen; they were through with her contradicting their orders. Despite specific instructions not to leave Ireland without Her Majesty’s permission, Essex, Southampton, and a cadre of other discontented commanders departed for London, leaving their botched military campaign … The decision to desert his command while on active duty was quintessential Essex. He felt he was owed the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth in private, without any Cecilians whispering poisons in her ear. So Essex … simply left his post. Essex showed up at the royal Nonsuch Palace four days later. The fight between Essex and Cecil’s supporters was approaching. Anderson writes: It was midmorning when Essex arrived, and without taking time to wash up or change out of his mud-spattered clothes … burst into the queen’s bedchamber while she was still in her dressing gown. Without her wig or her daily cake of makeup, Elizabeth must have looked as astonishing to the surprised visitor as she was astonished to see him. Still, the queen maintained her composure, listened to what Essex had to say, and bid him good-day. She would never allow Essex in her presence again. In October the queen had her onetime favorite confined to the chambers of Yorke House. By December, Essex would be under censure by the Star Chamber and all but stripped of his nobility. His household of 160 servants dispersed to find new work. The Cecil faction could now win the entire game if they could only complete Essex’s ruin before his star rose again … During the autumn of 1599, with nothing else to do, Southampton and his friend the earl of Rutland—another former ward from Cecil House—spent their afternoons at the public theaters. 111 In his introduction to the translation of Golding’s Metamorphoses (Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2000), John Frederick Nims writes: ‘Ovid’s earliest work, the Amores, consist of rather lighthearted amorous elegiacs, which, especially in the translation of Christopher Marlowe, sound rather like the Elegies of the young John Donne.’ 471 In December of 1599, Anderson informs us that the actor Robert Armin, who had joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men the previous year, published an introductory letter, dated December 1599, in a book of jokes entitled Quips Upon Questions. In this letter he said he was going to spend his holidays with a nobleman. Anderson writes: In an introductory epistle, dated in late December 1599, Armin wrote that he was preparing to spend the holiday with an unspecified nobleman. ‘On Tuesday [Christmas Day 1599] I take my jorney,’ Armin wrote, ‘to wait on the Right Honorable good my lord my master whom I serve in Hackney.’ There were two known noblemen with established households in Hackney at the time, de Vere and Edward, Lord Zouche. Zouche was out of town in 1599 on diplomatic missions to Denmark and preparing to settle in to a new interim job as deputy governor of the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. The only ‘Right Honorable’ lord whom Armin could have been serving in person in the borough of Hackney was de Vere. Armin is famous today as one of Shake-speare’s greatest clowns. 472 Works by our poet written during the decade of 1590s 1.- As You Like It, circa 1590s, as Shakespeare in Folio: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index20.html. 2.- The Royal Exchange, 1590, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Royal%20Exchange.pdf. 3.- Greene’s Mourning Garment, 1590, as Greene: http://www.oxfordshakespeare.com/Greene/Greenes_Mourning_Garment.pdf. 4.- Greene’s Never Too Late, 1590, as Greene: http://www.oxfordshakespeare.com/Greene/Greenes_Never_Too_Late.pdf. 5.- Francesco’s Fortunes, 1590, as Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Francescos_Fortunes.pdf. 6.- A Maiden’s Dream, 1591, as Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Maidens_Dream.pdf. 7.- Greene’s Farewell to Folly, 1591, as Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Greenes_Farewell.pdf. 8.- Phaeton Sonnet, 1591, anonymous: http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=80. 10.- Delia, 1592, as Samuel Daniel: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/delia.html. 11.- Venus and Adonis, 1593, as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/48.html. 12.- The Tears of Fancy, 1593, as Thomas Watson: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/watson. 13.- The Phoenix Nest, 1593, anthology, some poems by our poet: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/706/p hoenix.pdf?sequence=1. 14.- The Massacre at Paris, 1593, as Marlowe (with Donne): http://www.archive.org/stream/massacreatparis01496gut/msprs10.txt. 15.- Mamellia, 1593, as Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Mamillia_1593.pdf. 16.- The Anatomy of Lover’s Flatteries, 1593, as Robert Greene: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Anatomy_Lovers.pdf. 17.- Dido, Queen of Carthage, 1594, as Marlowe (with Donne): http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16169/pg16169.html. 18.- Willobie His Avisa, 1594, as Henry Willobie (with his son): http://ia700408.us.archive.org/18/items/cu31924013117332/cu3192401 3117332.pdf. 19.- The Rape of Lucrece, 1594, as Shakespeare: 473 http://www.bartleby.com/70/49.html. 20.- Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 1594, as Greene: http://ia700301.us.archive.org/12/items/playspoemsofrobe02gree/plays poemsofrobe02gree.pdf. 21.- Edward II, as Marlowe (with Donne): http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20288/pg20288.html. 22.- Locrine, 1594, as W.S.: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1548/pg1548.html. 23.- Amoretti, 1595, Donne-Spenser as Oxford: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/amoretti.html. 24.- James IV, 1598, anonymous, attributed to Greene: http://ia700301.us.archive.org/12/items/playspoemsofrobe02gree/plays poemsofrobe02gree.pdf. 25.- The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, most poems by Shakespeare: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext %3A1999.03.0063%3Asequence%3D1%3Apoem%3D1. 26.- The Winter Tale, as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index24.html. 27.- Corolianus, ca. 1599, as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index36.html. 28.- Julius Caesar, ca. 1590s, as Shakespeare: http://www.bartleby.com/70/index40.html. 474 ACT V ARIEL, THE SPIRIT 475 476 Scene I - The Essex Rebellion In 1600, two anthologies of poetry are published. In the first one, England’s Parnassus, some poems of Edward de Vere appear. In the second one, England’s Helicon, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature says that the poems signed with the name ‘Ignoto’ are the most remarkable. In the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim attributed to Shakespeare and published in 1599, poem 19 reads: Live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dales and fields; And all the craggy mountains yield. There will we sit upon the rocks And see the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers, by whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. There will I make thee a bed of roses With a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle. A belt of straw and ivy buds With a coral clasps and amber studs, And if these pleasures may thee move, Then live with me and be my love. One year later, in 1600, the anthology England’s Helicon attributed a variant of this poem to ‘Chr. Marlow’. The poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” reads as follows: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle, Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle. 477 A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull, Fair linèd slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold. A belt of straw and ivy-buds, With coral clasps and amber studs, And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning. If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love. Ch. Marlow. A third poem, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” is signed with the name ‘Ignoto’: If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. But Time drives flocks from field to fold, When rivers rage and rocks grow cold, And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come. The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields; A honey tongue, a heart of gall Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall. Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies, Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, In folly ripe in reason rotten. Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date, nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love. Ignoto 478 A fourth poem, also signed with the name ‘Ignoto’, is entitled “Another of the Same Nature, Made Since,” and it says: Come live with me and be my dear, And we will revel all the year, In plains and groves, on hills and dales, Where fragrant air breeds sweetest gales. There shall you have the beauteous pine, The cedar and the spreading vine, And all the woods to be a screen, Let Phoebus kiss my summer’s queen. The seat for your disport shall be Over some river, in a tree, Where silver sands and pebbles sing Eternal ditties with the spring. There shall you see my nymphs at play, And how the satyrs spend the day, The fishes gliding on the sands, Offering their bellies to your hands. The birds with heavenly tuned throats Possess woods-echoes with sweet notes, Which to your senses will impart A music to inflame the heart. Upon the bare and leafless oak The ring-doves’ wooings will provoke A colder blood than you possess To play with me and do no less. In bowers of laurel trimly dight We will outwear the silent night, While Flora busy is to spread Her richest treasure on our bed. Ten thousand glow-worms shall attend, And all their sparkling lights shall spend, All to adorn and beautify Your lodging with most majesty. Then in mine arms will I enclose Lilies’ fair mixture with the rose, Whose nice perfections in love’s play Shall tune me to the highest key. Thus as we pass the welcome night In sportful pleasures and delight, The nimble fairies on the grounds Shall dance and sing melodious sounds. 479 If these may serve for to entice Your presence to love’s paradise, Then come with me and be my dear, And we will straight begin the year. Ignoto This is very good poetry. It is understandable that nowadays many wonder who could have been the person behind the motto ‘Ignoto’ who made The England’s Helicon shine so much. When Donne died there was another version of this poem among his papers. Donne, in an exceptionally lyrical poem for those critics who think that Donne only thought in metaphysical conceits, wrote this variant of the poems above, known as “The Bait”: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines and silver hooks. There will the river whisp’ring run Warm’d by thy eyes, more than the sun; And there th’ enamour'd fish will stay, Begging themselves they may betray. When thou wilt swim in that live bath, Each fish, which every channel hath, Will amorously to thee swim, Gladder to catch thee, than thou him. If thou, to be so seen, be’st loth, By sun or moon, thou dark’nest both, And if myself have leave to see, I need not their light, having thee. Let others freeze with angling reeds, And cut their legs with shells and weeds, Or treacherously poor fish beset, With strangling snare, or windowy net. Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest; Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies, Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes. For thee, thou need’st no such deceit, For thou thyself art thine own bait: That fish, that is not catch’d thereby, Alas! is wiser far than I. 480 In 1600 Essex is still under arrest. Southampton and his followers start to plan his liberation and, if that is not possible, a rebellion. Interestingly enough, in 1600 the translation of Lucan’s Farsalia, attributed to Marlowe, appeared. The work is not amiss with the times, for in that same work Lucan deals with the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey, two figures that in England could be easily identified as Essex and Cecil. As Caesar had crossed the Rubicon without the Senate’s permission, so had Essex returned from Ireland without the Queen or the Privy Council’s permission. How could Marlowe, who had died in 1593, be the author? The mystery has no answer unless we identify the problem correctly: Marlowe here is a pseudonym of John Donne. A clue is found in the dedicatory epistle, written by Thomas Thorpe, the same publisher of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609. Thorpe writes in 1600 with the same wit he showed in the cryptic dedication of the Shake-speares Sonnets: TO HIS KIND AND TRUE FRIEND, EDWARD BLOUNT. Blount: I purpose to be blunt with you, and out of my dullness to encounter you with a dedication in the memory of that pure elemental wit Chr. Marlowe, whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the churchyward in (at the least) three or four sheets. Methinks you should presently look wild now, and grow humorously frantic upon the taste of it. That Marlowe is a ghost writer is clear, but Thorpe telling Blount to take the work with humour is paradoxical, for this is a political work which deals with civil war, no easy or comical matter indeed. A pun with Blount and blunt confirms that here Thorpe is joking with the whole Marlowe farce. The line on the ‘ghost or genius’ of Marlowe being ‘seen walk the churchyward’ is just making up a delightful horror story as a bait to sell the book to naïve and easily impressed London readers. The fact is that the translator of this work could not have a clearer object in mind when he ordered the publication of this translation. He wanted to prevent civil war, as he says in his translation (ll. 646-674): .............................shall the earth be barren? Shall water be congealed and turned to ice? O gods, what death prepare ye? with what plague Mean ye to rage? the death of many men Meets in one period... .....................Mars... 481 ......................Why art thou thus enraged? Kind Jupiter hath low declined himself; Venus is faint; swift Hermes retrogade; Mars only rules the heaven. Why do the planets Alter their course, and vainly dim their virtue? Sword-girt Orion’s side glisters too bright... ........................O Rome, continue The course of mischief, and stretch out the date Of slaughter; only civil broils make peace.’ These sad presages were enough to scare The quivering Romans, but worse things affright them. Essex was approaching his end and losing his mind. He saw conspiracies behind him coming from Robert Cecil and the Queen, and he was right. Anderson writes: Essex had lately been heard uttering such blasphemies as that the queen being now an old woman ... was no less crooked and distorted in mind than she was in body ... The queen’s godson Sir John Harington, who’d been keeping tabs on the defrocked commander for his godmother since the Irish expedition, recorded a visit he paid to Essex’s household in late 1600. Harinton wrote: [Essex] shifted from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason or right mind … He uttered strange words, bordering on such strange designs that made me hasten forth and leave his presence. Southampton was attacked in the streets of London on January 9, 1601, and one of his houseboys lost his hand. The Queen had the perpetrator, Lord Grey of Wilton, thrown in Fleet Prison, but the rebellion was in the air. And Cecil was prepared to face it. At that point a surprising event takes place. In 1599, a lawyer called John Hayward published a book, The Life and Reign of Henry IV, wherein he dealt with the deposition of King Richard II in favour of Henry IV. As an ally of Essex and Southampton, Hayward showed enough parallelisms in his book so that there could be no doubt that the abuses of Richard II were of the same kind as those of Queen Elizabeth. ‘Hayward’s polemic,’ writes Anderson, ‘implied that a similar fate should befall the queen. Queen Elizabeth saw Hayward’s book as incitement to revolution. He was tried for treason in the summer of 1600.’ One year later, in 1601, Shakespeare performed Richard II with his company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but he did not suffer any kind of public reaction. It is difficult to explain the difference of treatment given 482 to Hayward and Shakespeare if you don’t recognise that Oxford was of royal status. Only a royal person could have had that freedom of movement and impunity before the Queen and the State —unless you believe in ghost stories and think that Shakespeare was a ghost that could be seen walking and moving freely around. Beauclerk tells us that Essex and Southampton had fallen in disgrace when they returned from Ireland without permission of the Queen and that Essex, after not being allowed to see the Queen, started to promote the rebellion. In order to arouse the spirits of Londoners, Essex and Southampton convinced Shakespeare to perform the play Richard II in the theaters of the capital. This time, however, the play included an abdication scene that was not in the quarto edition of 1597. In sonnet 35, Shakespeare admits that he has authorised the rebellion ‘with compare’, that is: he has given his son a precedent for it. During his first 17 sonnets he has been trying to convince his son to marry and beget a son; from sonnet 18 to 25 he has been recording his love for his royal son. In sonnet 26, which has been dated by Whittemore in 1600, for Southampton was then 26 years old (he was born in 1574), the poet closes the first series of sonnets with this envoy: Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit; To thee I send this written embassage To witness duty, not to show my wit. Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it; But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul’s thought (all naked) will bestow it: Till whatsoever star that guides my moving, Points on me graciously with fair aspect, And puts apparel on my tattered loving, To show me worthy of thy sweet respect, Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee, Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me. J. M. Robertson wrote in 1926: Then comes N0. 26, which on the common assumption ends that series, and which so strongly suggests the dedication to Lucrece with its parallelisms of phrase and sentiment ... This has by many critics been taken as an envoy to a series A. L. Rowse in 1964 commented on this sonnet 26: 483 The first section of the Sonnets ends with an Envoi, Sonnet 26 ... The sonnet reads like an envoi to the whole of the first section, Sonnets 126, which may well have formed ‘this written ambassage to witness duty’ to his lord. Robert Giroux, in 1982, wrote the following about this question: The final link in the chain that binds the sonnets and the dedications is Sonnet 26 ... a private and more personal expression of what the dedication of 1594 states in equally explicit words: ‘The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end...’. The event that lies behind sonnet 27, with its dark images and depressing spirit, is the Essex Rebellion which Richard II represented the day before. Anderson tells us: Shake-speare’s Richard II is actually de Vere through and through—a philosophical poet-king and proto-Hamlet whose origin probably dates back to the 1580s when the author was more politically engaged himself. But what motivated the February 6 performance of Richard II—containing an actual deposition scene, no less—was the equation of ‘Richard II’ with Queen Elizabeth in the public’s mind. Elizabeth got the gist of the performance. ‘I am Richard [II]. Know ye not that?’ ... It is indicative that none of Elizabeth’s officials tried to find or punish the author of the play Richard II. ‘Indicative’ is not the word. The word is strange or amazing, if he was not of royal status, of course. Essex was now preparing his uprising. ‘In the morning upon Sunday the 8th of February,’ Camden registers, ‘the Earls of Rutland and Southampton’ together with some 300 gentlemen of prime note gathered in Essex house. He told them that ‘a plot was laid for his life; that he was therefore determined to go unto the Queen and inform her of the dangers intended against him, forasmuch as his overpotent adversaries abused the Queen’s name against him.’ Robert Cecil already had spies inside Essex’s house; the next incident suggests that Cecil wanted to incite Essex to act hastily before he was prepared. Camden writes (I quote through Whittemore’s): At this very time the Queen gave commandment to the Lord Mayor of London to take care that the Citizens were ready every man in his house to execute such commands as should be enjoyned them. To the Earl she sent the Lord Keeper, the Earl of Worcester, Sir William 484 Knollys, Controller of her household and the Earl’s uncle, and Popham Lord chief justice of England, to understand the cause of this Assembly. These Councilors are hardly let in through the Wicket, their servants being shut, all save the Purse-bearer. In the Courtyard was a confused multitude of men, and in the midst of them Essex, with Rutland, Southampton, and many others, who presently flocked about them. The Lord Keeper, turning to Essex, gave him to understand that he and the rest were sent by the Queen to know the cause of so great an Assembly; and if any injury were done unto them by any man, he promised indifferent justice. Essex ordered the ‘Councilors’ to be kept inside the house, while he went to London with two hundred men. The moment he arrived in London he started to shout that there was a plot against his life. Camden writes: Having walked almost the whole length of the City to the Sheriff’s house he came, much perplexed in mind, and in such a sweat that he was fain to shift his shirt. The Sheriff, in whom he had put assured confidence upon the uncertain credit of others, presently withdrew himself by a back door to the Lord Mayor Trapped by Cecil’s men and abandoned by the Sheriff of London and its citizens, Essex retreated to his house with the rest of his men. There he was surrounded. Whittemore writes: Essex makes a final stand while government officials surround his house and high-ranking lords of the Crown prepare to lead a full assault. When calls come for Essex to give up, Southampton shouts back: To whom should we yield? Our adversaries? That would be to run upon our own ruin! Or to the Queen? That would be to confess ourselves guilty! But yet if the Lord Admiral will give us hostages for our security, we will appear before the Queen! If not, we are every one of us fully resolved to lose our lives fighting! Before the hour was expired, Essex, holding all things for desperate and lost, resolved to break forth. Essex and Southampton were taken to the Tower. The other men were taken to other public prisons. ‘Thus,’ Camden writes, ‘in twelve hours was this commotion suppressed, which some call a scare, others an error.’ Whittemore remarks that Shakespeare himself was one of those who 485 called this reaction a rebellion: ‘So are those errors that in thee are seen,’ says sonnet 96, line 7. Now we find sonnet 27 and its abrupt change of tone. Whittemore, who has found the key to the interpretation of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets better than any other interpreter that I have read, tells us that the sonnets are the ‘monument’ the poet built for his royal son who did not succeed in being crowned King. And this is the structure of the book: ‘Lord of My Love’ 1-----------------26 (26 sonnets) THE MONUMENT Bath: ‘The Little Love-God’ 153-154 (2 sonnets) ‘My Lovely Boy’ 27---------------------------126 (100 sonnets) Dark Lady 127-------152 (26 sonnets) The first 17 sonnets deal with the marriage proposal of his son Southampton so that the beauty of the Rose of the Tudors should never die; from sonnet 18 to sonnet 26 the poet registers his son’s passing years until he is twenty six years old in 1600. In sonnet 27 everything changes, given that Southampton has been imprisoned in the Tower accused of treason. Therefore, from sonnet 27 to 126, in a cycle of 100 sonnets (like the 100 sonnets of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and Hekatompathia) the poet will describe the events which followed Southampton’s imprisionment from 1601 until he was liberated in 1603. In order to complete the structure of the monument, the poet added another 26 sonnets addressed to Queen Elizabeth, the Dark Lady. The two last sonnets, sonnet 153 and 154, are a kind of epilogue-prologue and refer to the time in 1574 when our poet was with his son in Bath, just before he was exchanged and given to the house of Southampton. The father already knows the tragic events. Sonnet 27 reads: Weary with toil, I haste to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travel tired; But then begins a journey in my head To work my mind when body’s work’s 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 Presents thy shadow to my sightless view, 486 Which like a jewell 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. The day after the rebellion evidence and testimonies were collected about the persons who had helped Essex and Southampton. The actors and everyone involved in the performance of Richard II were called as well, but Shakespeare was not. There is no mystery here if you are an Oxfordian from the perspective of PT II; but if you are not, you have to ignore this incredible fact and call it a “mystery” or just “good luck.” In sonnet 28 the poet continues to be ‘day by night and night by day oppressed,’ while on February 10, corresponding to sonnet 29, he writes: ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state,/ And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.’ That day Cecil wrote to Sir George Carew that ‘by the time my letters shall come unto you,’ he wrote, ‘both he [i.e. Essex] and the Earl of Southampton, with some other principals, shall have lost their heads.’ Oxford, as one of the noblemen chosen by the Privy Council, was summoned to be one of the judges in the trial for treason against Essex and Southampton, and this is what the poet writes on the February 11, 1601, in sonnet 30: ‘When to the Sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past...’. In sonnet 35, which describes the scene of the trial, the poet tells us that he has made a mistake, for he has given that rebellion his authorization: ‘All men make faults, and even I, in this,/ Authorizing thy trespass with compare...’. Although he is one of the judges in the trial, the poet says that he is defending his son: ‘Thy adverse party is thy advocate,’ and he adds that he is also to blame for the rebellion when he allowed the performance of Richard II: ‘That I am accesory needs must be,/ To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.’ That is why the poet tells his son ‘No more be grieved at that which thou hast done … All men make faults, and even I, in this,/ Authorizing thy trespass with compare.’ On February 17, the accusations against Essex, Southampton and Rutland were formulated. It seems that our poet managed to get a kind of agreement with Robert Cecil, whereby Southampton would save his life if Oxford renounced to the throne and separated from his royal son. Sonnet 36 reads: Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one: So shall those blots that do with me remain, Without thy help, by me be borne alone. In our two loves there is but one respect, 487 Though in our lives a separable spite, Which though it alter not love’s sole effect, Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight. I may not evermore acknowledge thee, Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame, Nor thou with public kindness honour me, Unless thou take that honour from thy name: But do not so; I love thee in such sort, As thou being mine, mine is thy good report. In sonnet 37 the poet fears his son is going to be sentenced to death for high treason: As a decrepit father takes delight, To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth. For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, or all, or more Entitled in thy parts, do crowned sit, I make my love engrafted to this store: So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised, Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give, That I in thy abundance am sufficed, And by a part of all thy glory live: Look what is best, that best I wish in thee, This wish I have, then ten times happy me. Once the trial ended, Essex was informed that he would be executed the next day, February 25, 1601. Francis Bacon, who had received honors, money and help from Essex for many years, declared against him too. Many, including Donne, felt repugnance for Francis Bacon’s behaviour. John Stubbs writes: Essex’s trial in Westminster Hall was swift and brutal, the prosecution conducted viciously by Sir Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, and the sentence was death. They took the loquacious Earl to pieces in court, and also in print, in a Declaration of the Practices and Treasons committed by Robert late Earl of Essex. This was drafted by Bacon – then approved by seniour councillors and the Queen herself– in order to make it clear to the public just why their fallen hero was in the wrong. Donne owned a copy. A caustic note on the title page indicates that he found Bacon’s behaviour difficult to stomach. Only a few years 488 before, Bacon had been an earnest supporter of the Earl, and a great depender on his favour … ‘If he have not a friend, he may quit the stage’: the last period of Bacon’s essay “Of Friendship” is perhaps the best epitaph for Essex. There is, however, a story that the Queen was willing to grant him a reprieve. Some time before, she had given him an exquisite ring, and now expected him to return it as a sign of repentance. Understanding this, Essex is said to have asked Lady Nottingham to pass the ring back to Elizabeth. It was a typical miscalculation: he entrusted his last hope of avoiding the axe to the wife of one of his sternest opponents in the Council. He went to the block, the Queen learning only afterwards that he had indeed shown the necessary contrition. She was upset. Between seven and eight in the morning, Essex was taken from his cell to the execution place in the Tower of London. Some noblemen went to witness the execution as if it were an entertainment. Essex asked for forgiveness and said that his sins were many, and that he hoped God would forgive him. Raleigh, who had been on Cecil’s side in order to get rid of his competitor Essex, was there too. The bitter comment Donne expressed on Raleigh’s ulterior years in the Tower, when King James I imprisoned him for treason as well, is explained by Raleigh’s shameful behaviour with Essex at this time now. Whittemore writes, quoting Strickland: Few of the peers who had been on the tribunal came to watch the execution, but more than a hundred others appeared nonetheless. Among the spectators was Walter Raleigh, one of Essex’s enemies, who said he wanted to be able to answer any last-minute charges the earl might make against him. Others, however, felt he had come to ‘feed his eyes’ on the sight of Essex’s blood; and when they told Raleigh to move away, he withdrew to the Armory to watch from there ... It was not until the axe had absolutely fallen that the world could believe that Elizabeth would take the life of Essex. Raleigh incurred the deepest odium for his share in bringing his noble rival to the block. He had witnessed his execution from the armory in the Tower, and soon after was found in the presence of the Queen, who, as if nothing of painful import had occurred, was that morning amusing herself with playing on the virginals. Whittemore, quoting Stopes, writes: The fall of Essex may be said to date the end of the reign of Elizabeth in regard to her activities and glories. After that she was Queen only 489 in name. She listened to her councilors, signed her papers, and tried to retrench in expenditure; but her policy was dependent on the decisions of Sir Robert Cecil. On August 16, 1601, Donne wrote his satirical poem Metempsychosis, dedicated to ‘Infinity’ (‘Sacrum Infinitati’). This poem is important because it offers us some clues regarding Donne’s relation to Spenser and Robert Cecil. In his article for The Review of English Studies (Vol. 24, No. 94), M. van Wyk Smith writes on the question of Donne’s purpose as outlined in this satirical mock-allegory, in this anti-epic of a contemporary ‘great soule’, corrupt, powerful, and menacing. Who was this menacing ‘great soule’ that Donne was writing about? Van Wyk says: The use of the beast fable is in itself a clue to Donne’s intentions since in 1601, the date of the poem, allegorical beast satires were almost all political satires, and at least two works of the period throw some light on Donne’s poem, namely Spenser’s Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591) and Richard Niccols’s Beggar’s Ape (1607). Both are beast satires, heavily camouflaged in order to protect their authors from the wrath of the powerful persons they attack. It has been suggested that in both cases the ‘victims’ are members of the Cecil family: in Mother Hubberd’s Tale the Fox is the elder Cecil, Lord Burghley, since this was the Queen’s nickname for him, while the Ape could be his son, Robert Cecil, who in 1591 was obviously being groomed by his father for the holding of high office … The Beggar’s Ape was written in 1607, after Donne’s poem, and not published till 1627, but its existence proves that at the beginning of the century at least one author took Mother Hubberd’s Tale as a personal political satire aimed at the Cecils and fit for imitation. Van Wyk continues his study on that corrupt ‘great soule’ of Donne’s times: In stanzas vi and vii of the Progress of the Soul Donne gives us most of the meagre information we have concerning the ‘great soule’s’ identity. The Epistle told us that he was male and alive ‘at this time’, and here we learn that he dwells ‘amongst us now’ in London (‘In Thames’) and has very great power. The references to Mahomet and Luther as earlier hosts of the soul seem to hark back to the scheme, outlined in the Epistle, of a long historical poem, but the names are here probably part of Donne’s allusory tactics, conveying ironically that his mighty protagonist is in no way inferior to these worthies in his propagation of ‘every great change’. He anticipates, in fact, the 490 court scene in Ignatius his Conclave, where the malfeasance of Ignatius is offset against both the spurious greatness of Paracelsus and the true worth of Copernicus. Another false trail Donne lays here concerns the meaning of ‘moves’: For this great soule which here amongst us now Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow, Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us; to heare Whose story, with long patience you will long; (For ’tis the crowne, and last straine of my song) With this in mind, he concludes: This rather too obvious reference to the common idealization of the Queen as the moon (Cynthia, Diana), coupled with the sly pun on ‘crowne’, has led most earlier critics like Gosse and Grierson to believe that the poem is an attack on Elizabeth. But it is surely inconceivable that the Lord Keeper’s ambitious young secretary would have either dared or wanted to attack the Queen, quite apart from the fact that the Epistle promises us a male protagonist. It is much more likely that while ‘the Moone’ here is, indeed, the Queen, the ‘great soule’ who moves her is not her own animating soul, but the protagonist, the powerful contemporary who is allegorized throughout the poem as the soul of havoc exerting its baleful influence on the world around it. The ‘great soule’, in other words, is a power behind the throne: sinister, influential, but nevertheless rather ridiculous. This, exactly, was the contemporary view of Robert Cecil, Secretary of State. At the apex of his power after the execution of Essex, Cecil was said to be ‘King there, in effect’, by James of Scotland. Evidence of his power could be seen everywhere and was all the more resented for being quite unprecedented. The Cecils were not of the aristocracy, so that the power amassed by Burghley and consolidated by his son drew frequent hostile comment and, not surprisingly, satires like those of Spenser and Niccols on the Cecils’ insinuating rise to eminence. Robert Cecil was popularly known as ‘Robertus Diabolus or Monsieur Bossu, physically weak and hunchbacked, Cecil was an obvious butt for satire.’ He also was known as the Shakespearean hunchbacked ‘Richard III’. And van Wyk writes: Even the Queen who was believed to be quite fond of him called him ‘Elf’ and ‘Pigmy’, appellations under which he smarted. Looking old long before his time and weighed down by the power and unpopularity of the ‘regnum Cecilianum’ he inherited from Burghley— 491 whose deliberate promotion of his son’s political career counted heavily against the latter—he represented the dullness and unapproachability of authority, quite in contrast to the active, flamboyant and popular Essex—whose fall Cecil was repeatedly rumoured to have caused—and Raleigh, whose lack of preferment was ascribed to Cecil too … On the removal of Essex the conflict between Cecil and Raleigh immediately became more prominent, and it is here that Donne enters more particularly into the story. Grierson suggests that the Metempsychosis reflects the gloom of many followers of Essex after February 1601, and although Professors R. E. Bennett and R. C. Bald have both cogently argued that Donne was a follower of Raleigh rather than Essex, it suffices for our purpose that as a follower of either he would have opposed Cecil, an opposition that would have increased when the struggle became a straightforward one between Cecil and Raleigh rather than a three-cornered conflict. Donne remained friendly for years with close followers of Essex. The well-known relation between Spenser and Raleigh is explained if Donne is considered. As van Wyk says: Donne had much in common with the Raleigh group. Raleigh himself was suspected at different times of being a Roman Catholic or an atheist, though this was no doubt his reward for showing a religious tolerance similar to that revealed by Donne in Satire III and the Preface to Pseudo- Martyr; in the year that Donne wrote Satire III, Raleigh made a notable speech in Parliament in favour of a liberalminded attitude to religious matters. They were related by marriage, Nicholas Throckmorton, Raleigh’s brother-in-law, being married to Donne’s sister. Donne was probably on Raleigh’s ship during both the Cadiz expedition and the Islands Voyage, while his verse letter ‘To Mr R. W.’ shows his concern for Raleigh’s Guiana projects. Van Wyk has something else to tell us: But the most remarkable connection, for our purpose, between Donne and Raleigh is revealed in a scurrilous epitaph on Cecil commonly ascribed to Raleigh: Epitaphon the Earl of Salisbury Here lies Hobinall, our Pastorwhile ere, That once in a Quarterour Fleeces did sheare. To please us, his Curre he kept under Clog, And was ever after both Shepherd and Dog. For Oblation to Pan his custome was thus, 492 He first gave a Trifle, then offer’d up Us: And through his false worship such power he did gaine, As kept him o’th’ Mountaine, and us on the plaine. Where many a Home-pipe he tun’d to his Phyllis, And sweetly sung Walsingham to’s Amaryllis. Till Atropos clapt him, a Pox on the Drab, For (spight of his Tarbox) he died of the Scab. Miss Latham is of the opinion that the poem dates from 1603, the year of Raleigh’s trial, and this proximity in time to the Metempsychosis paralleled by a similarity of incident. The shepherd who ties up the dog and then depredates the flock has much in common with Donne’s wolf-dog, who devours Abel’s sheep while pretending to guard them, and both poets probably owe the anecdote to Raleigh’s earlier great protégé, Spenser, whose Mother Hubberd’s Tale tells of a shepherd losing his flock to the Fox disguised as a watchdog. And the Fox, everybody suspected, was Burghley. Scene II. Southampton awaits execution While studying The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, I found this report by Lara M. Crowley: One should not assume that a previously explored archive has been exhausted, for discoveries continue to be made in literary manuscripts pored over by other scholars who sought other things. For example, while studying Donne’s prose Paradoxes and Problems in British Library MS Stowe 962, and early seventeenth-century miscellany examined frequently for its works by Donne, Thomas Carew, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Ralegh, and others, I encountered a seventy-four line poem entitled ‘The Earl of Southampton prisoner, and condemned, to Queen Elizabeth’. The poem appeared to be a copy of a verse epistle composed by Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, as well as a possible intended audience for Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Although the Earl was convicted of treason and sentenced to death in February 1601 for his leadership in Essex’s uprising, the Queen, for reasons never explained fully, commuted Southampton’s sentence to life in the Tower (King James I released him in 1603). Although I hesitated to defer my work on Donne’s prose, I recalled that Southampton is not acknowledged as a poet. Thus, I sought previous scholarship on the poem, but to my surprise I found no mention of it. In addition, my analysis of available evidence, such as the Earl’s four known contemporary Tower writings, suggested that Southampton probably did compose this verse petition. 493 As I found that Crowley had published an article on Southampton’s verse epistle, I informed Hank Whittemore of it, recognising that he was the expert on this subject and also the best authority to pass the message among Oxfordians. The verse epistle of Southampton to the Queen reads as follows: Not to live more at ease (Dear Prince) of thee But with new merits, I beg liberty To cancel old offenses; let grace so (As oil all liquor else will overflow) Swim above all my crimes. In lawn, a stain Well taken forth may be made serve again. Perseverance in ill is all the ill. The horses may, That stumbled in the morn, go well all day. If faults were not, how could great Princes then Approach so near God, in pardoning me? Wisdom and valor, common men have known, But only mercy is the Prince’s own. Mercy’s an antidote to justice, and will, Like a true blood-stone, keep their bleeding still. Where faults weigh down the scale, one grain of this Will make it wise, until the beam it kiss. Had I the leprosy of Naaman, Your mercy hath the same effects as Jordan. As surgeons cut and take from the sound part That which is rotten, and beyond all art Of healing, see (which time hath since revealed), Limbs have been cut which might else have been healed. While I yet breathe, and sense and motion have (For this a prison differs from a grave), Prisons are living men’s tombs, who there go As one may, sith say the dead walk so. There I am buried quick: hence one may draw I am religious because dead in law. One of the old Anchorites, by me may be expressed: A vial hath more room laid in a chest: Prisoners condemned, like fish within shells lie Cleaving to walls, which when they’re opened, die: So they, when taken forth, unless a pardon (As a worm takes a bullet from a gun) Take them from thence, and so deceive the sprights Of people, curious after rueful sights. Sorrow, such ruins, as where a flood hath been On all my parts afflicted, hath been seen: My face which grief plowed, and mine eyes when they 494 Stand full like two nine-holes, where at boys play And so their fires went out like Iron hot And put into the forge, and then is not And in the wrinkles of my cheeks, tears lie Like furrows filled with rain, and no more dry: Mine arms like hammers to an anvil go Upon my breast: now lamed with beating so Stand as clock-hammers, which strike once an hour Without such intermission they want power. I’ve left my going since my legs’ strength decayed Like one, whose stock being spent give over trade. And I with eating do no more ingross Than one that plays small game after great loss Is like to get his own: or then a pit With shovels emptied, and hath spoons to fill it. And so sleep visits me, when night’s half spent As one, that means nothing but complement. Horror and fear, like cold in ice, dwell here; And hope (like lightning) gone ere it appear: With less than half these miseries, a man Might have twice shot the Straits of Magellan Better go ten such voyages than once offend The Majesty of a Prince, where all things end And begin: why whose sacred prerogative He as he list, we as we ought live. All mankind lives to serve a few: the throne (To which all bow) is sewed to by each one. Life, which I now beg, wer’t to proceed From else whoso’er, I’d first choose to bleed But now, the cause, why life I do Implore Is that I think you worthy to give more. The light of your countenance, and that same Morning of the Court favor, where at all aim, Vouchsafe unto me, and be moved by my groans, For my tears have already worn these stones. To all those Stratfordians who deny any political purpose in the Shake-speare’s Sonnets this is very bad news, for Southampton’s verseepistle is a clear example that poetry was used, not only as the highest form of praise, but also as a political tool, which is what the Shakespeare’s Sonnets are all about. As I consider Whittemore’s interpretation of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets true and exact to the circumstances of its time, it does not surprise me that he has already discovered that Shakespeare’s sonnet 31 is a poem with which Southampton’s vocabulary in his verse-epistle bears resemblance. He tells us: 495 The other night I was re-reading the recently discovered poem The Earle of Southampton prisoner, and condemned, to Queen Elizabeth, written by the earl in February or March 1601, while he was in the Tower as a condemned man awaiting execution; and unexpectedly several lines of the poem seemed to leap out, reminding me of a passage in Sonnet 31 of the Shakespeare sequence of 1609. A comparison reveals that Southampton, in his “verse-letter” to her Majesty pleading for mercy, expresses virtually the same idea in the same language, as if he had Sonnet 31 with him in his prison room and was being influenced by it. In my view this similarity provides additional support for the Monument theory, which holds that the Earl of Oxford used the Sonnets as a ‘chronicle’ of Southampton’s ordeal in confinement. This proposed diary of “verse letters” to Southampton in the Tower begins with Sonnet 27 upon the failed Essex Rebellion on February 8, 1601 and concludes with Sonnet 106 (which refers to ‘the Chronicle of wasted time’) on April 9, 1603, the night before the younger earl was liberated by King James from being ‘supposed as forfeit to a confined doom’ (Sonnet 107). In the Monument view Sonnet 31 corresponds with the fifth day of Southampton’s imprisonment, when it was already clear (to Oxford, at least) that both Essex and Southampton would be convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Two weeks later Oxford writes in Sonnet 45 of ‘those swift messengers returned from thee/ Who even now come back again assured/ Of thy fair health, recounting it to me’–referring not only to the leg ailment suffered by Southampton, who cites it in his poem to the Queen, but apparently to Oxford’s use of ‘messengers’ riding to and from the Tower with (I suggest) copies of individual sonnets for him. Here in modern English are the specific lines of Southampton’s poem that seemed to cry for attention, with certain key words emphasized: Southampton to Queen Elizabeth: While I yet breath and sense and motion have (For this a prison differs from a grave), Prisons are living men’s tombs, who there go As one may sith say the dead walk so. There am I buried quick: hence one may draw I am religious [reverent; faithful] because dead in law. The idea expressed above by Southampton is that prisons are different from graves because prisons contain men who are still alive whereas graves contain those who are dead. On the other hand, he writes, prisons are the graves or tombs for the walking or living dead –for those who, like Southampton himself, are condemned to death by law (and who, therefore, might as well be dead). 496 Here is Oxford’s verse-letter to Southampton with their common words emphasized: Sonnet 31 Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts, Which I by lacking have supposed dead; And there reigns love and all love’s loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye, As interest of the dead, which now appear But things removed that hidden in thee lie. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies [memorials on graves] of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give; That due of many now is thine alone. Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me. Oxford’s idea in Sonnet 31 above is similar to Southampton’s theme, except he pictures the imprisoned younger earl himself as the grave. Southampton is the living grave that contains his own ‘love’ or the most important aspect or quality of his person. The ideas are similar but different; many of the words are the same: grave, dead, buried, religious, living/live, tombs/trophies and so on–more evidence that Sonnet 31 is concerned with the same individual (Southampton) in relation to the same “dark lady” (Elizabeth) in the same situation (in the Tower, facing death) in the same time period (February-March 1601). The value of a correct theory is shown when new evidence and tests are carried out. As we see here with this new discovery of Southampton’s verse epistle to the Queen, Whittemore’s theory is confirmed and strengthened. In sonnet 44 our poet talks about his ‘heavy tears’ when he ponders his son’s destiny. Surprisingly, he is not going to be executed, but will remain in the Tower awaiting a decision from the Privy Council or, more precisely, from Robert Cecil. Our poet seems to have agreed that if Cecil frees Southampton, he will not question James’ title as the new King of England. Sonnet 54 reads: O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, By that sweet ornament which truth doth give! The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour, which doth in it live. 497 The Canker blooms have full as deep a dye, As the perfumed tincture of the Roses, Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly, When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses: But for their virtue only is their show, They live unwooed, and unrespected fade, Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so, Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made. And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, When that shall vade, by verse distills your truth. ‘The Rose’ is not only Southampton’s surname (his complete name was Henry Wriothesley, “Rosely”), but the Rose of the Tudors. In sonnet 55 we clearly see what the poet intends to do with his sonnets when the eyes of posterity, ours, read them. The sonnets will be the monument and the ‘living record’ of his royal son Southampton: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall Statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn: The living record of your memory. ’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room, Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So till the judgment that your self arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes. The Ogburns interpret this sonnet 55 as addressed to a monarch, while Whittemore offers this valuable insight: With his son still facing execution, Oxford vows to create ‘the living record’ of Southampton to be preserved ‘in the eyes of all posterity.’ Along with Sonnet 81, this verse is a declaration of his utter commitment to making sure the truth about Henry Wriothesley will be known by future generations. The ‘living record’ of him (the story of his royal life until the fate of the Tudor dynasty is sealed) will be preserved for future readers within the tomb of the monument. The tomb contains a womb of verse in which he is still “living” and 498 growing in real time with this diary, the outcome of which remains uncertain. Whittemore describes sonnet 64 like this: ‘Tension mounts for Oxford as the Queen nears her decision about the fate of their royal son. Elizabeth has given the command for more executions to take place the next morning,’ which is March 18, 1601. And Whittemore adds: “In this verse Oxford focuses on the imminent fall of the House of Tudor that will occur when ‘the hungry Ocean’ (James of Scotland) comes to ‘gain’ advantage on the Kingdom of the shore (take over England) by the ‘interchange of state’ or royal succession. Such will be the case upon the Queen’s death if Southampton now gives up his claim to the throne and she (with Cecil) decides to spare his life”: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometime lofty towers I see down-rased, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage. When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss, and loss with store. When I have seen such interchange of State, Or state it self confounded, to decay, Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have, that which it fears to lose. On March 19, 1601, the Queen has decided to spare Southampton’s life, after Oxford agreed with Robert Cecil to relinquish all claims to the throne. The ‘guilded honor’ of Southampton has been ‘shamefully misplaced’ and his young ‘virtue rudely strumpeted’ by Robert Cecil. Oxford is now exhausted, but so grieved that he desires to kill himself and end everything. Sonnet 66 reads: Tired with all these for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, 499 And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, And simple truth miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill. Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that to die, I leave my love alone. ‘As late as March 25th,’ Akrigg writes, ‘spectators came to Tower Hill, drawn by a rumor that Southampton was to be executed there that day. They were disappointed. The decision had already been made to commute his sentence to imprisonment.’ Critics who do not accept PT I or II have here a great enigma, for nobody and no one understood how Southampton could have saved his life while Essex was executed. The value of PT I or II is to offer us a rational explanation. Scene III. Building the Monument Southampton, against all odds, has saved his life. Whittemore tells us that in sonnet 70 the poet expresses London’s opinion: Southampton is black like a ‘crow’ because of his disgrace. The father tells his son in the Tower not to be sad but to be strong, to be patient. Sonnet 70 reads: That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect, For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair, The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air. So thou be good, slander doth but approve, Thy worth the greater being wooed of time, For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love, And thou present’st a pure unstained prime. Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days, Either not assailed, or victor being charged, Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise, To tie up envy, evermore enlarged, If some suspect of ill masked not thy show, Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe. The line ‘A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air’ is related to the same crow that we find in the poem published in 1601 entitled “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” In this poem the poet expresses the same idea as in sonnet 70. After the crow appears in the poem, the crow of disgrace, Shakespeare starts his song. Note the deep allegory of the poem. Interestingly enough, some Stratfordians like Jonathan Bate recognise 500 now that the Phoenix is the Queen. As to what Shakspere of Stratford has to do with her, he does not say. The second part of the anthem is an elegiac and allegorical song for the death of the Tudor dynasty: Here the anthem doth commence: Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the turtle fled In a mutual flame from hence. So they loved, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance, and no space was seen ’Twixt this turtle and his queen: But in them it were a wonder. So between them love did shine, That the turtle saw his right Flaming in the phoenix’ sight; Either was the other’s mine. Property was thus appalled, That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called. Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded; That it cried, How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, reason none, If what parts can so remain. Whereupon it made this threne To the phoenix and the dove, Co-supremes and stars of love, As chorus to their tragic scene. THRENOS Beauty, truth, and rarity, Grace in all simplicity, Here enclosed, in cinders lie. Death is now the phoenix’ nest; And the turtle’s loyal breast To eternity doth rest. 501 Leaving no posterity, ’Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity. Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but ’tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be. To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer. The critic G.B. Harrison maintains that the meaning of this poem will be understood when we learn who Shakespeare’s close friends were. “Until these persons and events are discovered,” Harrison concludes, “‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ will remain an enigma.” 112 Since PT I or II was formulated, the mystery has been solved. “The Phoenix and the Turtle” is a tragic song on Robert Cecil and James I of Scotland’s rise to power in spite of Southampton and the Tudors. The three characters ‘beauty, truth, and rarity’ are Southampton, Oxford and Elizabeth. Hence, the poem claims that they left no posterity not for ‘their infirmity’ but for her ‘married chastity,’ which was ‘rare’ indeed for her bastard sons. The political propaganda of the Queen’s virginity was above everything else, including the supposed royal rights of her descendants. That is why our poet, Edward de Vere, whose surname meant ‘truth’ in Latin, sings that ‘truth may seem, but cannot be.’ And that is why these two, father and son, ‘truth and beauty buried be.’ This is also confirmed by Edmund Spenser in the second part of The Faerie Queene, for in Book V, Canto VII, he asked the Virgin Queen not to hide her royal sons from the country (stanza 21): Magnificke Virgin, that in queint disguise Of British armes doest maske thy royall blood, So to pursue a perillious emprize, How coulst thou weene, through that disguised hood, To hide thy state from being understood? Can from th’immortal Gods ought hidden bee? They doe thy linage, and thy Lourdly brood; They doe thy sire, lamenting sore for thee ‘Queint disguise,’ that is, ‘strange disguise,’ as Thomas Warton writes in Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1762). Strange and rare, indeed, was the disguise of the “Virgin” Queen. The sonnet that links with the funerary hymn of “The Phoenix and the Turtle” is sonnet 112 See http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xPhoenix.html. 502 73. Now we arrive at what Whittemore has discovered to be the center of the monument, which he structures as follows: THE CENTER OF THE MONUMENT 26 sonnets (1-26) SONNETS 76-77 ----------100 sonnets----------------27-------------76 77------------------126 (50 sonnets) (50 sonnets) 26 sonnets (127-152) At the center of the monument are sonnets 76 and 77, and because of their strategic location in the poem, they reveal the ‘invention’ or method of composition of all of them, as Whittemore tells us. When the poet wonders in sonnet 76 ‘Why write I still all one, ever the same,’ he is relating Southampton’s motto (‘One for all, and all for one’) to the Queen’s one (‘Ever the same’) and to his name: ‘E.Ver’: Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? O know sweet love I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument: So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told. Whittemore offers us these precious insights: Here is the key to the special language of the Sonnets, describing how their words revolve around the family triangle—All One, Ever the Same— or Southampton, Elizabeth and Oxford. The two most important of the special words are Love, representing royal blood, and Time, signifying the ever-dwindling life span and reign of the 503 Queen. The story of the Sonnets is the struggle of love, or royal blood, to survive the time leading to Elizabeth’s death and the succession to her throne. By this language, we are able to determine the chronological framework of the diary. The time, or chronology, leads to the Queen’s death on March 24, 1603, marked by Sonnet 105, and then to her funeral on April 28, 1603, marked by Sonnet 125, and finally to Oxford’s farewell to his royal son in the envoy of Sonnet 126, the last entry in the central 100-sonnet sequence. Whittemore tells us that having described in the former sonnet the invention of his monument, the poet now uses the following sonnet in the center to dedicate ‘this book’ to Southampton, who now turns out to be ‘the only begetter’ or “inspirator” of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets, as the dedication remarks. Sonnet 77 reads: Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear, Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste, These vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear, And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste. The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show, Of mouthed graves will give thee memory, Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know, Time’s thievish progress to eternity. Look what thy memory cannot contain, Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain, To take a new acquaintance of thy mind. These offices, so oft as thou wilt look, Shall profit thee, and much enrich thy book. Sonnet 78 starts the series of sonnets known as “the Rival Poet series” and explains how our poet has used other names, among them Shakespeare, to publish his poetry. Sonnet 78 reads: So oft have I invoked thee for my muse, And found such fair assistance in my verse, As every Alien pen hath got my use, And under thee their poesy disperse. Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly, Have added feathers to the learned’s wing, And given grace a double majesty. 504 Yet be most proud of that which I compile, Whose influence is thine, and born of thee, In others’ works thou dost but mend the style, And arts with thy sweet graces graced be. But thou art all my art, and dost advance As high as learning my rude ignorance. Sonnet 81 is very important. It reads: Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten, From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I (once gone) to all the world must die, The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie, Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. In sonnet 81 Shakespeare says that ‘From hence your memory death cannot take,/ Although in me each part will be forgotten.’ This means that the Fair Youth and his name ‘from hence immortal life shall have,/ Though I (once gone) to all the world must die,’ something that would only make sense if the name of the poet differed from the one used to publish his works, which was ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Shake-speare.’ In the last couplet of sonnet 87 the poet consigns: Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. The meaning of this couplet could not be clearer now. From now on, Southampton will remain in the Tower until the succession takes place, an event about which Robert Cecil has already written to James. From sonnet 87 to sonnet 97, Shakespeare is telling his son that he should not listen to those who tell him to escape from the Tower or rebel against Cecil. Whittemore explains that sonnet 97 describes the circumstances of Southampton’s life one year after the rebellion took place; that is, sonnet 97 is written on February 8, 1602: ‘How like a Winter hath my absence 505 been/ From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!,’ says our poet. In sonnet 99 Shakespeare talks about the purple pride of his son, purple being the color of royalty. Whittemore quotes a letter from James VI of Scotland (identified as ‘30’) sent to Robert Cecil (identified as ‘10’) dated June 3, 1602, wherein someone named ‘40’, very possibly Edward de Vere, is mentioned, as James relates ‘40’ with ‘ever.’ 30 writes to 10: For I must plainly confess that both ye and your faithful colleague 40 have by your vigilant and judicious care so easily settled me in the only right course for my good, so happily preserved the Queen’s mind from the poison of jealous prejudice, so valiantly resisted the crooked courses of some seditious spirits … But not that hereby I have any intention to desire you or 40 (whom I always and ever shall account as one) anyways to alter either in form or substance your accustomed form of answering me ‘Always and ever’ sounds strange unless ‘ever’ is 40 and E. Vere. In 1602 we know from Henslowe’s diary that The Massacre at Paris was being revised to be performed again. This is the play where Henry III of France, before dying, salutes the Queen as her greatest of friends. As Henry Wriothesley was in the Tower awaiting his liberation, it is not strange that this play should be revised again by our poet and, therefore, it is not strange that it contains so many Shakespearean traces, as some critics have noted. While the Queen was dying, London was scared of the worst possible outcome taking place: a civil war. John Stubbs writes: Early in 1603, the old Queen spent weeks passing away, ‘in obstinat silence’, knowing death was coming near but refusing to lie down in case it did. It did, and she died, with nothing on her lips but the murmur of an old lover’s name. Apocryphal versions of her end soon multiplied, ‘some whispering that her brain was somewhat distempered’ … Anxiety about the succession had mounted as Elizabeth’s terminal illness set in; her chief councillor and secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, conducted delicate negotiations with her wily cousin and heir, James VI of Scotland. Both men were determined to ensure a smooth takeover. Especial heed was taken of any factions that might have caused trouble: ‘During the Quenes sicknes some principall papists were made sure … and some dangerous companions clapt up. The mood in London was anxious, as Donne later reminded the citizens, teasingly, with vivid wit [in one of his sermons]: ‘every one of you in the City were running up and down like Ants with their eggs bigger than themselves, every man with his bags, to seek where to hide them safely.’ 506 In sonnet 105 all the poet’s ‘argument’ in the sonnets is mentioned: Let not my love be called idolatry, Nor my beloved as an idol show, Since all alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such, and ever so. Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence, Therefore my verse to constancy confined, One thing expressing, leaves out difference. Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument, Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words, And in this change is my invention spent, Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords. Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone. Which three till now, never kept seat in one. The trinity ‘beauty, kind and true’ points to the same trinity with Southampton, Elizabeth and Oxford. On April 5, 1603, James VI of Scotland was crowned (by Robert Cecil) King James I of England. One of his last decisions made in Edinburgh before going to London, Akrigg writes, was to send a letter ordering the liberation of Southampton, a liberation which our poet refers to in his sonnet 107. Whittemore writes that Southampton’s liberation is mentioned in sonnet 107 as ‘my love looks fresh.’ ‘The mortal Moon hath her eclipse endured’ refers to the death of Cynthia, Elizabeth I, as all critics now accept. After the Queen died on March 22, 1603, the fact that the poet writes about ‘peace proclaims olives of endless age’ confirms that civil war has been averted. The sonnets, this one in particular, declare that his son will have his monument when the tombs and crests of the tyrants (like Elizabeth I and Robert Cecil and James) have disappeared. Sonnet 107 reads: Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul, Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. 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. Now with the drops of this most balmy time, My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes. 507 And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent. Sonnet 107 is essential for our understanding of the “plan” of the Sonnets, because although many critics, including Stratfordians, say that the sonnets are inventions and only the product of imagination, this sonnet evidences a political reality: the Queen’s death and the arrival of the new king without any war tearing up the nation. This is recognised by Sir Sidney Lee, a Stratfordian scholar: Sonnet 107 … makes references that cannot be mistaken to three events that took place in 1603—to Queen Elizabeth’s death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who had been in prison since he was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex … Elizabeth’s crown had been passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable consequence of Elizabeth’s demise was happily averted As John Kerrigan, editor of the Sonnets for Penguin, recognises, 1603 and the death of the Queen seems to be the obvious date and substance of this sonnet, ‘with all which that implies for the dating of the sequence.’ Regrettably, this is what Stratfordians have not done. After having seen that the sonnets are related to Southampton and Elizabeth I, Stratfordian criticism does not want to look any further, the danger of doing so being the fall of the myth of the man from Stratford. As Blaise Pascal said: ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ Sonnets 107 to 125 describe the poet’s diverse feelings. In sonnet 111 he tells his son to forgive his art and his life as a poet and playwright because ‘[t]hence comes it that my name receives a brand,/ And almost thence my nature is subdued/ To what it works in, like the Dyer’s hand./ Pity me then, and wish that I were renewed.’ Sonnet 121 is important because here our poet defends himself from the calumnies spread by other noblemen regarding his life as theatrical producer, writer, director and poet: ’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, When not to be, receives reproach of being, And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed, Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing. For why should others’ false adulterate eyes Give salutation to my sportive blood? Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, 508 Which in their wills count bad what I think good? No, I am that I am, and they that level At my abuses, reckon up their own, I may be straight though they themselves be bevel; By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown Unless this general evil they maintain, All men are bad and in their badness reign. The expression ‘I am that I am’ was used before by our poet in a letter written in 1584 to William Cecil, where he defended his independence and dignity against the Secretary of State’s interference and espionage. In 1584, Oxford wrote to Cecil: ‘I serve Her Majesty, and I am that I am, and by alliance near to your Lordship, but free, and scorn to be offered that injury to think I am so weak of government as to be ruled by servants, or not able to govern myself.’ No other person used this expression at the time that we are aware of. In sonnet 125 describes Elizabeth I’s funeral procession, the official moment when her reign would formally end. With her, the Tudor dynasty was also buried. For our poet, note this, his son is more important than carrying the canopy of the Queen’s dead body. The aristocratic spirit and taste of this sonnet situates the man from Stratford a thousand (nautical) miles from being the true Shakespeare. In sonnet 91, for instance, the courtier poet is clearly speaking: Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force, Some in their garments though new-fangled ill: Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse. And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure, Wherein it finds a joy above the rest, But these particulars are not my measure, All these I better in one general best. Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ costs, Of more delight than hawks and horses be: And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast. Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take, All this away, and me most wretched make. With the Queen’s burial in sonnet 125 the sonnets come to an end, chronologically speaking. For sonnet 126 is not properly a sonnet in form. Thomas Looney already wrote about this: 509 Shakespeare’s sonnet 125 seems to be pointing to De Vere’s officiating at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. This may be taken as his last sonnet; for 126 is really not a sonnet but a stanza composed of six couplets, in which he appears to be addressing a parting message to his young friend. Sonnet 127 begins the second series Sonnet 126 can be seen as a farewell, Whittemore writes: Using a different rhyme scheme in just twelve lines, followed by empty parentheses in place of the final couplet, Oxford bids farewell to his royal son … The different rhyme scheme and structure underscores the finality of the series—in particular, its twelve lines of six couplets (12-6, or 126) indicating again its deliberate placement here. The use of the parentheses, in place of a final couplet, is also deliberate (i.e., it’s not the printer’s idea). The poet is intentionally leaving this one unfinished, because he has to. Only NATURE can ultimately determine what will happen to Henry Wriothesley, because Oxford will die before he does. The Sonnets will be published after Oxford’s death and before Henry Wriothesley’s death. Sonnet 126 is his farewell to his son. Ver, begin: O thou my lovely boy who in thy power, Dost hold Time’s fickle glass his fickle hour: Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st, Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st. If Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack) As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her O thou minion of her pleasure, She may detain, but not still keep her treasure! Her Audit (though delayed) answered must be, And her Quietus is to render thee. ( ) ( ) Scene IV. The Dark Lady Sonnet 127 opens the second series of 26 sonnets which are related to the first 26 sonnets of the Fair Youth; in this second series addressed to the Dark Lady –the Queen—, we find that sonnet 127 is correlative to sonnet 27: it recounts the night that his son is imprisioned in the Tower. In sonnet 131 he calls her ‘tyrannous,’ for ‘in nothing art thou black save in 510 thy deeds.’ Sonnet 133 is related to sonnet 33 (and the mythical age of Jesus Christ was when he suffered torment and died); the poet blames the Queen for having imprisoned their son: Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan For that deep wound it gives my friend and me; Is’t not enough to torture me alone, But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be? Me from my self thy cruel eye hath taken, And my next self thou harder hast engrossed, Of him, my self, and thee I am forsaken, A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed: Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward, But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail, Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard, Thou canst not then use rigour in my gaol. And yet thou wilt, for I being pent in thee, Perforce am thine and all that is in me. Sonnet 134 echoes sonnet 42. The poet asks the Queen to liberate their son, for ‘now I have confessed that he is thine,/ And I myself am mortaged to thy will.’ Sonnet 135 reminds her that she had had her Will to her service, referring to the fact that the poet had been supporting her with his art all along. In the edition of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609, every Will is capitalized and in italics, as Whittemore informs us. In sonnet 136 he plays with the word Will, making reference to the fact that Will is a pseudonym, for the poet, furthermore, has told us that his name be buried when he die (sonnet 81). Sonnet 140 is spectacular because it possesses a great sense of veracity and force, as if Hamlet were speaking to his mother the Queen: Be wise as thou art cruel, do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain: Lest sorrow lend me words and words express, The manner of my pity-wanting pain. If I might teach thee wit better it were, Though not to love, yet love to tell me so, As testy sick men when their deaths be near, No news but health from their physicians know. For if I should despair I should grow mad, And in my madness might speak ill of thee, Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad, Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. That I may not be so, nor thou belied, 511 Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide. Hamlet seems to be talking as well in sonnet 143, for the poet describes himself as her abandoned son: Lo as a careful huswife runs to catch, One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay: Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent, To follow that which flies before her face: Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent; So run’st thou after that which flies from thee, Whils I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind, But if thou catch thy hope turn back to me: And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind. So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will, If thou turn back and my loud crying still. The interpretation offered by Paul Streitz of the line ‘Whils I, thy babe’ as a confirmation of PT II seems clear to me, although Hank Whittemore translates this line as if Southampton were the one talking to the Dark Lady. But the poet has never varied the person of his voice in the Sonnets, so to create an exception here does not seem correct to me. The poet is saying it clearly: ‘I, thy babe.’ With Southampton in the Tower, sonnet 147 is evidence of how our Hamlet feels about his mother Gertrude’s life and virginity (ll. 9-14): Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, And frantic mad with ever-more unrest, My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are, At random from the truth, vainly expressed. For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. In sonnet 150 the poet asks her the same question he asked in his poem of 1571, but with a different turn: ‘Who taught thee how to make me love thee more,/The more I hear and see just cause of hate?’ Sonnet 152, the last of the Dark Lady series, is important. Whittemore writes: In Oxford’s final words to Elizabeth, he accuses her of having played 512 the false role of Virgin Queen to the very end of her life. ‘And all my honest faith in thee is lost,’ he writes. She has caused him to swear against his own truth—‘To swear against the truth so foul a lie!’ This verse corresponds in time to Sonnet 105 of the Fair Youth series, marking the death of Elizabeth. In his early sonnet to her entitled “Love Thy Choice,” he asked himself: ‘Above the rest in Court who gave thee grace? Who made thee strive in honor to be best, in constant truth to bide so firm and sure’—and here, three decades later, he recalls having sworn ‘Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy.’ But it turns out that he has sworn falsely: she has proved him wrong. Sonnet 152 reads and cries: In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn, But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing; In act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn In vowing new hate after new love bearing: But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee, When I break twenty? I am perjured most, For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee, And all my honest faith in thee is lost. For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness, Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy, And to enlighten thee gave eyes to blindness, Or made them swear against the thing they see. For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, To swear against the truth so foul a lie. Here we can quote the words Shakespeare addresses to Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, for they could fit perfectly with what his bastard son would have felt during the Queen’s final years, the ones that went from Essex’s execution in 1601 to her death in 1603 (IV.iv): Queen Elizabeth O, thou didst prophesy the time would come That I should wish for thee to help me curse... Queen Margaret I called thee then vain flourish of my fortune: I called thee then poor shadow, painted queen... A dream of what thou wast... A queen in jest, only to fill the scene... Who sues, and kneels and says, ‘God save the queen’? Where be the bending peers that flattered thee? Where be the thronging troops that followed thee? 513 … Thus hath the course of justice whirled about, And left thee but a very prey to time, Having no more but thought of what thou wast, To torture thee the more, being what thou art. Thou didst usurp my place, and dost thou not Usurp the just proportion of my sorrow? Whittemore’s interpretation of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets has been a true revolution for the Shakespeare Authorship Question, and deserves every single word William Boyle declares in the following paragraphs (A Poet’s Rage, 2013): Hank Whittemore’s Monument Theory now has provided the context that completes the unveiling, exposing, in unprecedented detail, the connection between the verses and their historical context, thus resolving the mystery and “solving” the sonnets … The Monument Theory provides, for the first time, a unified theory of how the Shakespeare authorship came into existence, and in so doing provides answers to two outstanding unanswered questions from the history of the Essex Rebellion: why Southampton was spared execution, and why Shakespeare was spared punishment for his supporting role in those events. The simple answer to both these questions—an answer that only Oxfordians can provide—is that the true Shakespeare (Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) was punished—virtually erased from history—and it was his punishment, his sacrifice, that saved Southampton. ‘Shakespeare’ died so that Southampton could live. Such a simple and elegant solution to the authorship problem is just what Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for over twenty years ago … In his closing statement, Justice Stevens declared that while he suspected a conspiracy involving the Queen and Burghley could be behind this incredible story, Oxfordians had yet to articulate an all-encompassing account … it is time to build on what Whittemore has discovered and defined in his “monumental” study and complete our work in gaining the world’s acceptance of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare with attendant appreciation for the reasons this writer wrote that he did and allowed his name to be buried these many centuries, in expectation of a time when “eyes to be” could behold his work and “tongues to be” could salute his noble purpose. 514 Scene V. Strange events ‘One of James’ first acts,’ Beauclerk tells us, ‘was to pardon Southampton, who was released from the Tower in April and was made captain of the Isle of Wight (his own island as a kingdom).’ And he adds: He renewed Oxford’s £1,000 annuity, and granted his long-standing suit for the keepership of the Forest of Essex and also of Havering House … As for the theater, all three companies licensed to perform in London, including the combined company of Oxfords and Worcester’s Men, were taken under royal patronage … James, well aware of the danger posed by the popular and glamorous Southampton, decided to keep him close and shower him with honors, rather than make him a martyr to the disaffected. When Oxford died—on June 24, 1604, less than a year after James’ coronation—James had Southampton arrested, and released the next day. On his behalf, Whittemore writes: June 24: Oxford’s death Fifty-four-year-old Edward de Vere is reported to have died on this date at his Hackney home, of unknown causes. June 24: Southampton’s Arrest Late this evening Henry Wriothesley is arrested and held prisoner by the Government of King James. Southampton’s papers are seized and scrutinized while he is interrogated. ‘According to the French ambassador,’ Akrigg writes, ‘King James had gone into a complete panic and could not sleep that night even though he had a guard of his Scots posted around his quarters. Presumably to protect his heir, he sent orders to Prince Henry that he must not stir out of his chamber.’ June 25: Southampton’s Release This morning, while the Privy Council is examining Southampton and those arrested along with him, wild rumors sweep through the Court. Some men say a plot was discovered against the King and the Prince. ‘Southampton was quickly found innocent of whatever charges had been brought against him,’ Akrigg continues. ‘According to both the Venetian and French ambassadors, he was released on June 25, the day after his arrest. Probably we shall never know the nature of the charges brought against Southampton … Probably King James, embarrassed by what had occurred, ordered that all the papers be destroyed. Certainly a determined effort seems to have been made to 515 hush up the whole affair. King James’ attitude towards Southampton seems to be pointing not to the death of Edward de Vere, but to his disappearance. Beauclerk writes: A more likely scenario, given the complete absence of notices at his death, the fact that he left no will, and the rich symbolism of the date of his passing—it was the feast of St. John the Baptist, and the day on which the oak-king was sacrificially burned alive—is that Oxford did not die, but went into hiding, quite possibly on the Isle of Man where his son-in-law and fellow playwright, the Earl of Derby, was king. In The Tempest, it seems we are listening to Edward de Vere and his daughter Elizabeth de Vere (and Earl of Derby’s wife) when we read (I.i. ll. 68-70): Miranda Sir, are you not my father? Prospero Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and She said thou was my daughter 1604, the year of our poet’s disappearance, is also the year of the publication of the second quarto of Hamlet, bearing the Tudor coat of arms on its title page. Around 1604 is where Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky date the composition of The Tempest, in their book On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a truly remarkable work for the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Scene VI. The strange Persian Portrait Charles Beauclerk tells us about a special portrait known as the Persian Portrait, which is surrounded by mystery, although not for those who acknowledge the truth of PT II:113 [The Persian Portrait] depicts a pregnant Elizabeth crowning a weeping stag with a garland of pansies. She wears a loose silver gown decorated with Tudor roses, honeysuckle, exotic birds, and clusters of grapes, and a tall Oriental hat with a full-length veil. A string of pearls dangles from her right arm, coming to rest on the stag’s head; and around her neck hang two rings (wedding bands?) suspended from a 113 See http://www.sirbacon.org/graphics/liz1.jpg. 516 thread. Directly behind the stag’s head, so that one of its horns appears to metamorphose into one of the branches, is a walnut tree in fruit. This is the myth of Actaeon reconciled at last. Charles Beauclerk writes that we must not be surprised of the numerous attempts that have been made in the past to alter or rename the portrait, ‘as in this single image the whole official version of Elizabethan history comes crashing to the ground.’ And he continues: Here is the tale that Shakespeare tells repeatedly in veiled terms of royal union and broken troth. It is the tale of the life-and-death struggle of the poet and the goddess, the one made mute—and finally destroyed—by the fury of the other. But the portrait does more. It transcends the ancient Greek myth, for here before us is an image of Actaeon and Diana reconciled. This surely is the moment that all Shakespeare’s works strive toward: the poet (son) and the goddess united in a new myth for the renewal of the kingdom—the union of truth and beauty forming a new and chastened royalty. In the Winter 2002 issue of Shakespeare Matters, Paul Hemenway Altrocci informs us that this portrait has surprised English art experts for its complex, indecipherable symbolism. Altrocci writes: [The portrait] has been owned for more than 300 years by the English Royal Family which labeled it as Queen Elizabeth until recently … In 1898, Ernest Law agreed that the portrait was of Queen Elizabeth and concluded that ‘This curious picture, with its fantastical design, enigmatical mottoes, and quaint verses, doubtless has some allegorical meaning which we are now unable to interpret.’ … England’s most respected art expert Sir Roy Strong, said that ‘Without doubt we are looking at … the most complicated of all Elizabethan allegorical portraits.’ He also stated that ‘such a picture cannot have been conceived as anything other than a major statement.’ Altrocci informs us about its history: 1.- The portrait was painted between 1594 and 1604 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1635). 2.- In 1613, a portrait of ‘a beautiful Turkish Lady’ was seen hanging at Somerset House in Westminster, a house owned by the Crown. 3.- The portrait was lost to the royal family sometime during the 517 1600s. Whether it was thrown out during the Commonwealth, after the beheading of Charles I in 1649, is not known. 4.- In the early 1700s Sir John Stanley recovered for the Crown the painting of ‘Queen Elizabeth in a strange fantastick habit’ from a painter who had bought it at a flea market in Moor Fields. 5.- George Vertue in 1725 saw the royal cipher of Charles I (16251649) on the back of the painting, subsequently removed. 6.- In Queen Anne’s reign, 1702 to 1714, the portrait was displayed at St. James’ Palace, labeled as ‘Queen Elizabeth in a fancy dress.’ 7.- Queen Caroline, the wife of King George II (1727-1760), transferred the painting to the Queen’s Gallery of full-length portraits of English Sovereigns in Kensington Palace, where it stayed for more than 100 years as a portrait of Queen Elizabeth. 8.- Queen Victoria moved the portrait to Hampton Court Palace in 1838 where it has remained, currently in the Renaissance Galleries, Room 1. 9.- In 1849, art critic Horace Walpole described it as a ‘picture of Elizabeth in a fantastic habit, something like a Persian.’ 10.- In 1898 Ernest Law, in a description of all paintings hanging at Hampton Court Palace, for the first time printed a photo of the painting and described it as Queen Elizabeth in a fanciful dress … In sum, the portrait has hung in Royal Palaces for almost 300 years, at Hampton Court Palace for the last 164 years. During this time, the portrait’s lady was designated as Queen Elizabeth until the 20th century when the label at Hampton Court was changed to ‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman.’ The current listing by The Royal Collection is ‘Portrait of a Woman … in a loose white Oriental dress richly embroidered.’ We find three mottos on the tree which read: 1. Iniusti Justa querela; 2. Mea sic mihi; 3. Dolor est medicina ed tori. What do they possibly mean? In 1992, Sir Roy Strong said: ‘This picture is unhappy. Its theme is of wrongs and injustice, of tears and grief, of fruits snatched by others.’ The mottos mean: 1. Iniusti Justa querela (upper motto): “A complaint about injustices is just.” 2. Mea sic mihi (middle motto): “Thus what is mine should be mine.” 3. Dolor est medicina ed tori (lower motto). Altrocci comments that this motto has the problem of the missing space (erased) between ‘ed’ and ‘tori.’ He translates it as follows: 518 Dolor.- grief, anguish, sorrow, or, as used by Livy, the torment of love. Est.- is. Medicina.- medicine, remedy, or healing process. Ed.- is not a Latin word. Tori.- is probably the plural of torus, bridal or conjugal bed, bulge or round swelling. With such meanings, a play on words is conceivable since the portrait lady is clearly pregnant, although the Romans did not use torus to mean pregnancy. In respect to this problem, Atrocci decodes ‘ed...tori’ in this way: But why would the painting’s creative designer put in a non-word followed by a space? For two reasons. Most importantly, the words ‘ed tori’ must have a symbolic meaning on their own. Secondly, the space after the nonword ‘ed’ is an open invitation to fill in whatever number of letters is most appropriate to create a new and significant last word in the motto. …Accepting the implied invitation to fill in the blank between the nonword ‘ed’ and ‘tori,’ the following three missing letters are now proposed: ‘uca.’ “Dolor est medicina educatori,” seems a plausible sentence, which means: Educatori = the plural of rearer, bringer up, foster father or, as used by Cicero, foster parentage. Thus, the motto can now be translated as: “Anguish is part of the healing process for foster parentage.” So the plot thickens as we are now made aware of a foster parent theme in the portrait. But the quintessential third motto yields a further decipherment. Torus is pronounced the same as its homonym, the Latin word taurus, meaning bull, steer, or ox. The plural is tori = tauri = oxen. Immediately, the crucial cipher becomes clear: Dolor est medicina ed tori = Dolor est medicina ed tauri. “Anguish is part of the healing process for Ed Tauri = Edward Oxen = Edward Oxenford.” Edward de Vere was the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The word ‘oxford’ derives from oxen fording a stream. De Vere often signed his name ‘Edward Oxenford.’ The three mottoes, therefore, inform us of the portrait’s major symbolic themes: 519 1. Injustice. 2. The Queen should have been mine. 3. Foster parentage. 4. The person who suffered anguish from these three central themes is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxenford. Interestingly, the sentence ‘Dolor est medicina educatori’ is similar to the one pronounced by Hieronimo after he realises his son Horatio has been hanged on the tree, in the play The Spanish Tragedy, which many Oxfordians attribute to our poet. On that occasion the father says after his son’s death: ‘O aliquis mihi quas pulchrum ver educat herbas misceat,’ that is, “Let someone mix for me herbs which the beautiful spring brings forth”; and the father adds: ‘et nostro detur medicina dolori,’ which means, “and let a medicine be given for our pain.” Altrocci’s conclusion is clear: With Edward de Vere’s signature literally staring us in the face, new portrait hypotheses are now justified. Sometime between 1594 and his demise on June 26, 1604, Edward de Vere commissioned Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger to paint the portrait of a pregnant Queen Elizabeth, with de Vere himself devising the complex symbolism. The purpose? To record for history that the Queen was pregnant by him in 1573-1574 with the son who became Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, who should have been lawful heir to the Tudor throne. One may postulate that symbolism on the painting’s right side contained buildings which identified the Third Earl of Southampton. Why buildings? Because remnants can still be seen under magnification. The painting’s theme would represent a threat to the legitimacy of the Stuart monarchy and one may speculate that these paint-overs occurred during the many years of ownership of the painting by the Stuarts in the 1600s. In the past century the paint-over deceptions had another purpose— to protect the myth of The Virgin Queen by eliminating any connection of the pregnant lady to royalty and thus to Queen Elizabeth I. As to the poem in the cartouche, as Altrocci comments, it has a tone similar to the one our poet used in his dedicatory epistle to Bedingfield’s translation of the work De Consolatione (1573) by Cardano, a book critics think is the one Hamlet is reading when he meets Polonius and answers that he is reading ‘words, words, words.’ The Persian Portrait poem says: 520 Poem of Persian Portrait 1594-1604 The restless swallow fits my restless mind In still reviving still renewing wronges; Her just complaints of cruel[t]y unkind, Are all the music that my life prolongs. With pensive thoughts my weeping stagg I crown, Whose melancholy tears my cares express; His tears in silence and my sighs unknown Are all the physic that my harms redress. My only hope was in this goodly tree, Which I did plant in love, bring up in care; But all in vain, for now too late I see The shales be mine, the kernels others are. My music may be plaints, my physique tears If this be all the fruit my love tree bears. The Tudors had the shells, while the new dynasty of the Stuarts got the kernels. Scene VII. Ariel liberated Our poet seems to have lived in exile from 1604 to 1608, very possibly on the Isle of Man, where the Earls of Derby were the absolute owners. The tone of The Tempest seems to fit perfectly with this hypothesis. The Isle of Wight, where Southampton was ‘king,’ is another possibility. In 1604, the publication of Shakespeare’s plays stopped, while in 1619 King Lear was printed, bearing the false date of 1608 and showing the Tudor coat of arms on its first page. Lastly, in 1609, the Shake-speares Sonnets say that the poet has become eternal at last, while a new quarto of the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was published, a play where the reader can see the ‘royal incest’ theme from the start. Also in 1609, the printed edition of Troilus and Cressida said in its preface: ‘A never writer, to an ever reader.’ Anderson writes: Troilus and Cressida’s second-state quarto preface (titled ‘A neuer writer, to an euer reader...’) also claims of the author, ‘...and when hee is gone and his commedies out of sale’—implying that Shakespeare was still alive when the preface was composed. On this point, Peter W. Dickson … observes: The reader should know that, of the fourteen Shakespearean comedies in the First Folio, eight were never printed prior to 1623. Among the remaining six, The Taming of the Shrew was printed in 1607 but anonymously. Among those five comedies with 521 Shakespeare on the title page, only one was printed after 1600: The Merry Wives of Windsor, registered for publication on January 15, 1602. The inescapable conclusion—which has awesome implications for the authorship debate—is that the Troilus and Cressida ‘Never writer...’ preface must have been composed in 1602-1603 when those ‘commedies’ were still available, and while Oxford was still alive. At the end of the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609 there followed the narrative poem “A Lover’s Complaint.” John Kerrigan reports that this ‘extreme, rewarding poem has been for many years marginalized in Shakespeare criticism.’ To A.C. Partridge ‘the poem was a belated experiment in Spenserian pastoral, but wholly Shakespeare’s work.’ Kerrigan points to the similarity between this Shakespearean poem and Spenser’s The Ruins of Time (published in his volume of Complaints, 1591), a poem that is connected with A Theater for Worldling of 1569. Considering that our poet wrote the cycle of sonnets Delia, published in 1591 using a different name (Samuel Daniel), with the tradition of the tripartite structure in the cycle of sonnets (poems, lyrical interlude and narrative poem of complaint), it is easy to see that, as Kerrigan writes, the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609 are also structured with this cycle of sonnets, a lyrical interlude (sonnets 153 and 154 as variations upon a sixline Greek epigram by Marianus Scholasticus), and a narrative poem of complaint. If we read this final poem we find a woman complaining that she has been abandoned by her lover, who is described not only as noble and peaceful, but also aggressive, because he exploded furiously and spontaneously when he was attacked (ll. 99-105): ‘His qualities were beauteous as his form, For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free; Yet if men moved him, was he such a storm As oft ’twixt May and April is to see, When winds breathe sweet, unruly though they be. His rudeness so with his authorized youth Did livery falseness in a pride of truth. Apart from always telling the truth, the woman says that her lover could also ride his horse like no one else (ll. 106-112): ‘Well could he ride, and often men would say, “That horse his mettle from his rider takes: Proud of subjection, noble by the sway, 522 What rounds, what bounds, what course, what stop he makes!” And controversy hence a question takes Whether the horse by him became his deed, Or he his manage by th’ well-doing steed. He was also a great speaker (ll. 120-126): ‘So on the tip of his subduing tongue All kind of arguments and question deep, All replication prompt, and reason strong, For his advantage still did wake and sleep. To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep, He had the dialect and different skill, Catching all passions in his craft of will The woman says that she tried not to fall in love with him, but that she failed. Although she is now sorry to have been made a fool, she confesses that she would fall in love with him again if he returned. The end of the poem is crowned with the letter ‘O’ of O—xford repeated like a chorus (ll. 321-329): Ay me, I fell, and yet do question make What I should do again for such a sake. ‘O, that infected moisture of his eye, O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed, O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly, O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestowed, O, all that borrowed motion, seeming owed, Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, And new pervert a reconciled maid.’ The Shake-speare’s Sonnets have been studied by Roger Strimatter in relation to Edward de Vere’s Bible, now at the Folger Library. Strimatter’s Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible describes the point of view from which the reader should approach our poet’s image of himself and his works: King David of Israel exercised an influence over Renaissance theological thinkers which is almost impossible for a modern, secular, literary critic to imagine. He stood at the imaginative nexus between sacred history and the new Machiavellian science of political theory. He was a king—but he was also, according to scripture, an ancestor of 523 Jesus Christ. He was an awful sinner who wrote the Psalms—probably the most widely copied, published, read, recited and sung book on the European continent … to repent for his sins. As William Whittingham thought on him … David was ‘the true figure of Messiah placed in [Saul’s] steade, whose pacience, modestie, constancie, persecution by open enemies, fained friends, and dissembling flatterers are left to the Church to every member of the same, as a pattern and example to beholde their state and vocation … Whittingham may have been taking his cue from Calvin, the patriarch of Genevan theology whose sister he married. Writing in the introduction to his edition of the Psalms, as translated by Arthur Golding with a dedication to Edward de Vere in 1571, Calvin saw in David a mirror for his own condition and inspiration for the proper endurance of his own spiritual struggles: ‘whatsoever that most excellent king and Prophet endured, was sette forth to mee for my instruction’ … David grew up as a shepherd boy … but he became one of the most powerful and authoritative kings in the history of the planet … He alone of the Israelites dared to go into single combat with the great Goliath … Elizabethans sincerely believed that David was the author of many of the 150 Hebrew Psalms. As a musical poet-king, sacred history’s Orpheus, the most ancient of the holy singers, the anxiety of his influence was immense. He could be compared only to Moses, Socrates or Jesus … Because the Hebrew Psalms are written to be set to music and are fundamentally musical in their character … It also reminds us of the intrinsic identity of poetry and music in the arts of the ancient world and, to a lesser extent, the Renaissance. To consider David a musician is tantamount to seeing him as a poet … One of J.T. Looney’s original criteria for identifying the real Shakespeare was that he should be a man of pronounced musical affinity … Indeed, Shakespeare is said to employ over one hundred musical terms; Campbell and Quinn state that ‘Shakespeare’s familiarity with the music of his time is indicated by more than 500 pages in his works’ … More fundamentally, his verse patterns are markedly lyrical, viz. musical—exploiting the musical properties of spoken language to their highest potential through devices such as rhyme, assonance, consonance, complex patterns of rhythm, and implied variations in pitch—imitating the melodic and harmonic intervals of music. Frequently his characters, unable to restrain themselves from the expression of emotional tenor in music, break into open song. In Strimatter’s view, Edward de Vere was not a royal bastard Tudor prince, but a person who was dominated by David’s image and model. He writes: As a talented musician whose actors, like Hamlet’s own, ran afoul of 524 political powers apparently offended by jokes like the one in which Lord Burghley is compared by Hamlet to Jeptha, Edward de Vere appears to have had a “David complex.” For him as for other Renaissance thinkers, the figure of David exerted a magnetic influence. Just as he had done for Calvin, David set a moral precedent for de Vere, whose disciplined leadership and devotion to art earned the approval of God-the-father. De Vere’s underlining of verses [on his Geneva Bible] recording David’s attempts to soothe Saul’s troubled spirit by musical magic, and those in which he ‘danced before the Lord’ (Samuel II 6.14), indicate his perception of David as the figure of Christ-Orpheus, the holy songwriter and fool who became King of Christ’s nation. And he continues: André Gide has remarked that the Shakespeare’s Sonnets are ‘the Davidic hymns of modern man—the supreme cry of the will made audible in lyric voice.’ Alastair Fowler, in his book Triumphal Forms (1970), echoes Gide, arguing that the Sonnets depend on the Psalms as a structural model, and finding that ‘the contents of several of Shakespeare’s Sonnets correspond to those of psalms bearing the same numbers in the book of common prayer’ … and that ‘the entire set of regular sonnets corresponds numerically to the entire set of psalms’ … Like the psalms, the Sonnets are a lament over the loss of political power. The Sonnets reveal the autobiography, the ‘unguarded letters in verse’ … of a man crushed between his own humble submission to anointed authority and his craving for recognition as a monarch, or at the least consort to a monarch, in his own right. We might wish to consider closely the peculiar concluding couplet of Sonnet 87: Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. In 1609 Two Cantos of Mutability by Spenser appeared as well. DINS theory may offer us one reason why the last canto of The Faerie Queene was published in 1609, for we know that John Donne composed his religious and divine poems during his Mitcham years, that is, between 1606-1610. As Bald writes: 525 He was in doubt of his salvation, and therefore terrified at the thought of death … Thus the years 1607-10 were probably the most disturbed and anxious years of Donne’s life. He passed through a spiritual crisis which was in large measure concealed from those close to him. Let’s look at the tone of The VIII. Canto, vnperfite of The Faerie Queene: 1 When I bethink me on that speech whyleare, Of Mutability, and well it way: Me seemes, that though she all vnworthy were Of the Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say, In all things else she beares the greatest sway. Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And loue of things so vaine to cast away; Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. 2 Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd, Of that same time when no more Change shall be, But steadfast rest of all things firmely stayd Vpon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrayr to Mutabilitie: For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight: But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight. In the Variorum we read: And how noble those two concluding stanzas are in themselves! Could even Spenser’s genius have devised a fitter close for this great poem? How well the lament of the first over the fleeting nature of earthly joys (uttered doubtless from the bitter depths of its author’s own experience) befits the last lines of a poem … And how magnificent is the Sursum Corda of the second composed, it might seem, fresh from the perusal of St. Augustine’s noble commentary on the opening verses of the second chapter of Genesis … Thinking of these two stanzas … witnessing to us the religious superiority of Spenser’s England over Ariosto’s Italy … who would not earnestly hope that they express, not alone the faith of the age in which their writer flourished, but the unfeigned confession also of the faith which filled his own 526 heart? As Walton, and anyone else, knows when reading his sermons, Donne had St. Augustine as his model, since he offered him a parallel of his own life. ‘In God there is no change, nor shadow of change,’ Donne wrote in the fifth of his prebend sermons upon his five psalms, preached at St. Paul on May (or June), 1627. In The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (2010) we read: The intelectual problem actually addressed in the Mutabilitie Cantos –continuance-within-change— belongs to metaphysics, not ethics … In the Mutabilitie Cantos, however, the irony is not occasional but pervasive, affecting even the Goddess of Nature. Finally, for the poem’s temporal orientation, instead of looking back, as Spenser does in the rest of The Faerie Queene, from a degenerate present to an idealized, antique world, the Mutabilite Cantos look toward a future in which the cosmos will fall slowly into ruin, until it is burned at the Last Judgement … In the final stanza of the Mutabilitie Cantos, therefore, the language of metaphysical speculation gives way to religious prophecy. To ensure priority of permanence over change, of identity over non-identity, it is necessary to go outside metaphysics and natural philosophy to theology, in the Christian, not the Aristotelian sense: ‘For, all that moveth, doth in Change delight;/ But thenceforth all shall rest eternally/ With Him’ … In the final stanza, the poet remembers Nature’s obscure prophecy of a time when ‘no more Change shall be’, and he concludes with a prayer to the God of Hosts (‘Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight’) to bring him at last to the sight of the apocalyptic day of rest, the ‘Sabaoths sight’. Perhaps hope of that sight will give him the courage to love the good of life A close reading of his Divine Poems with these two Spenserian stanzas reveals their common themes. Just as the last two stanzas of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are ‘unperfite’ or ‘imperfect’, so we have from Donne a poem of these years called “Resurrection, Imperfect”: Sleep sleep old Sun, thou canst not have respast As yet, the wound thou took'st on friday last; Sleepe then, and rest In Holy Sonnets 1 we read: Onely thou art above, and when towards thee 527 By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe In sonnet 2 we read: Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight, Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wil’t not chuse me In sonnet 19, there is the theme of inconstancy and mutability: Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott A constant habit … and as soone forgott: … I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod. And the last sonnet of the Original Sequence of John Donne, note this, also appeals to God and the Sabbath, just like Spenser did in his last stanza of 1609.114 From 1606 to 1611 John Donne was suffering the worst days of his life, away from London. It is in 1606 that Dekker wrote about Nashe’s banishment due to his ingenuous and ingenious personality, for after John Donne married in secret with Anne More, he was sent to jail for some time and lost his position as Egerton’s secretary. Thomas Dekker wrote on Thomas Nashe (News from Hell, 1606): And thou into whose soule ... the raptures of that fierie and inconfinable Italian spirit were bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometimes secretary to Pierce Pennylesse and master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious T. Nash, from whose aboundant pen hony flow’d to thy friends, and mortall aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the doctor a flat dunce ... sharpest satyre, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with me awhile. 115 And around 1611 John Davies of Hereford wrote about Donne’s 114 Sonnet 12, ll. 4-7: ‘The Father having begotten a sonnet most blest,/ And still begettinge, (for he nere begunne)/ Hath daign’d to chuse thee by adoption/ Coheire to his glory and Sabbaoths endles rest’. 115 J.J. Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. 528 ingenuous and ingenious personality too, using the same expression of Thomas Dekker: To the no less ingenious then ingenuous Mr. John Dun. Dunne is the mouse (they say) and thou art Dunne: But no dunne mouse thou art; yet thou art one That (like a mouse) in steepe high-waies dost runne, To finde foode for thy Muse to prey upon... And that (I know) thy pen hath rightly donne, Which doing right makes bright the name of Dunne. As R.C. Bald argues: From 1606 to 1611 are the most difficult years of Donne’s life to describe in a connected narrative … The very lack of regular employment and of a sense of definite direction contributes to the sense of complexity in Donne’s life at this period... If Mitcham was his home, it was also a place of retirement where he could pursue his studies … free at least from those calls on his time and company which he expected when in London. In the sermon Donne preached at St. Paul’s on Easter Day (1628) concerning Paradise or Heaven, he wrote: ‘[w]hat a Holy-day shall this be, no working day shall ever follow! By knowing, and loving the unchangeable, the Immutable God, Mutabimur in immutabilitatem, we shall be changed into an unchangeablenesse.’ And in his sermon upon the day of St. Paul’s conversion (1629), preached at St. Paul’s in the evening, Donne says: But I am the Lord; I change not. I and onely I have that immunity, Immutability. And therefore, sayes God there, ye sons of Iacob are not consumed; Therefore, because I, I who cannot change have loved you; for they, who depend upon their love, who can change, are in a wofull condition. And that involves all. All can, all will, all do change, high and low. It is commonly agreed that Donne wrote his Holy Sonnets around 1609. The one beginning with the line “Batter my heart, three person’d God” is commented as follows (Variorum The Holy Sonnets, Vol. 7.1., p. 238): 529 Scansion reveal … that the disruptions are consistent with the meaning … Linville explains this feature of the sonnet by pointing to ‘the plea for a personal apocalypse or destruction of the old world of the self and the summoning up of souls on Judgment Day,’ both of which ‘entail annihilation of present temporal and spatial order, an annihilation which rhythm helps to reflect.’ One important fact should convince us that Spenser’s identity is a decoy, for Gabriel Harvey, his great friend who outlived him many years, abstained from writing anything in the 1611 edition of Spenser’s work. As Henry John Todd writes: ‘There is no preface to this edition. I have sometimes thought that Gabriel Harvey might be the editor. But, probably, he would have furnished us with further information in regard to the ‘never-before-imprinted’ Cantos, if he had undertaken such an office.’ In the same vein as Spenser wrote in his last ‘imperfect’ Canto of The Faerie Queene, John Donne wrote in the sermon of December 12, 1626: [F]irst, That there is nothing in this world perfect; And then, That such as it is, there is nothing constant, nothing permanent. We consider the first, That there is nothing perfect, in the best things, in spirituall things … And we consider the other, That nothing is permanent in temporall things; Riches prosperously multiplied, Children honorably bestowed, Additions of Honor and titles, fairly acquired, Places of Command and Government, justly received, and duly executed; All testimonies, all evidences of worldly happiness, have a Dissolution, a Determination in the death of this, and of every such Man. In 1611 the King James Bible was published, The Tempest of Shakespeare was performed at Whitehall Palace, and the works or First Folio of Edmund Spenser were published as well. ‘The Prince of Poets’ was buried at Westminster, next to Chaucer, where one can see his monument today. In 1931, Axiochus, a lost work of ‘Edw. Spenser’, was discovered. It was the translation of a pseudo-Platonic dialogue of consolation. It is not surprising that the text was followed by Oxford’s speech at the tournament of 1581 at Whitehall, when he appeared as the knight of the Tree of the Sun. As a result of this discovery, the nearest tomb to Spenser’s monument was opened with the hope of finding the poems that the historian Camden (a friend of Jonson and Donne) said were written to Spenser and buried in his tomb, a public expression of ‘love’ and admiration that was not declared to him while Spenser was dying in London 1598 ‘for lack of bread’ in King’s Street. The tomb was opened. But there were no poems and no body, which is natural, for the 530 poet ‘Spenser’ was a pseudonym. In The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (2010) we are offered a brief summary of the Spenser biography question. Willy Maley’s conclusion is this: Alas poor Spenser, we do not know him well. Two weddings and a funeral can be confirmed. Much else is speculation. Even the marriages and burial retain question marks. Neither a 1938 search for Spenser’s grave in Westminster nor excavations sixty years later in Kilcolman, Spenser’s home for the last ten years of his life, yielded significant results … A familiar lament in Spenser studies is the absence of a proper biography … The verse epistle to The Shepheardes Calender refers to it as ‘child whose parent is unkent.’ … The poet himself tells us only that he was a Londoner by birth: ‘merry London, my most kyndly Nurse, / That to me gaue this Lifes first natiue sourse’, as he says in Prothalamion … We know he forged a friendship with Fellow of Pembroke and Professor of Rhetoric, Gabriel Harvey … Spenser claims acquaintance with Philip Sidney by 5 October 1579 … Spenser died in King Street, Westminster, on 13 January 1599. According to Ben Jonson, ‘the Irish, having robbed Spenser’s goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died for lack of bread in King Street ’ … Buried in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer, on 16 January, Camden spoke of Spenser’s ‘hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, thrown into the tomb’ … The monument notwithstanding, no grave was found during that 1938 search … Welply’s harsh judgement of biographical studies of the poet—‘This is just blethers’ (1941:56)—is hard to shake off. Contrary to what The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser tells us, the attribution of A View of the Present State of Ireland (1598) to Edmund Spenser is not clear at all. As Jean R. Brink writes in Sounding of Things Done (1997:93): In an article examining Spenser’s patronage connections with Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, S. K. Heninger Jr. has called into question the legends suggesting that Spenser ‘played a significant role in the power brokerage of Elizabethan England as one of Leicester’s agents.’ In respect to Spenser’s biography in Ireland being based on the View, Brink writes: 531 Two texts are responsible for this perception [i.e. the poet’s centrality to the politics of Elizabethan Ireland] of Spenser: the View of the Present State of Ireland and A Brief Note of Ireland … The View was not attributed to Spenser until 1633 … It did not appear in Spenser’s collected works until the 1679 folio … A Brief Note of Ireland consists of three comparatively short tracts on Ireland … [that] were first attributed to Spenser by Alenxader Grosart in 1894 … It is bibliographically significant that Lownes [the publisher of the 1611 folio], who had a manuscript of the View in 1598, never attributed this work to Edmund Spenser. Considering the theory that Donne was ‘Edmund Spenser’ and wrote The Faerie Queene may help us listen to C. S. Lewis’ words in relation to the Cantos of Mutabilitie with a different attitude. Listen to these words of his (Spenser’s Images of Life, edited by Alastair Fowler, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p. 74-6): Mutabilitie … represents a cosmic principle, which in certain respects may be compared to the principle known to our own science as entropy. The drama of Mutabilitie is set out in two acts. In the first she certainly is, or appears to be, an evil figure … The second act is entirely devoted to the trial. God appears as judge, but of course in the person of his Vicegerent Nature, and even she is veiled … Mutabilitie, to prove her case and so to rule the universe, produces the greatest of all the poem’s pageants. She calls as her witnesses the Seasons and Months, Day and Night, the Hours, and Life and Death, in all their incessant interchange. It is persuasive. But the more Mutabilitie proves her case, the more she refutes it. For it is precisely in the pattern of continual mutation that the permanence of Nature consists. And this, by a swift but inevitable-seeming peripeteia, is Dame Nature’s verdict. She adds one thing: a warning to Mutabilitie to accept her ruling and aspire no further, ‘For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire’ (VII, vii, 59). In demanding absolute mutability the Titaness seeks her own decay, since the assent to that demand must end the permanence of Nature. Nature once gone, mutability will indeed be complete—there will be no more mutability, no more change of any kind: ‘thenceford, none no more change shall see.’ Since John Donne wrote his divine poems during his Mitcham years (1607-1611), we will be surprised to learn that C.S. Lewis’ intuition came very close to identifying Donne as the author of the Cantos of Mutabilitie. You have to go no further than the famous couplet of Donne’s HSDeath to know why: 532 One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. C.S. Lewis writes: Change and permanence when carried up to the cosmic level are not really opposed, but involve one another. Both exist now in mutual dependence; and both, one day, will be annihilated. For Nature is merely an exposition of the natura unialis. Of that, her verdict at the trial shows her to be well aware: But time shall come that all shall changed be, And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see. (VII, vii, 59) No sooner has this been said than we see it happen, emblematically: Then was that whole assembly quite dismist, And Natur’s selfe did vanish, whither no man wist. After that we have only Spenser’s own voice, praying for eternity in the two stanzas of the imperfect Eighth Canto. So far as we know, he had no intention of ending The Faerie Queene at this point. But has any poem ever had a better end? The last Canto of The Faerie Queene is entitled as imperfect for the very same reason that Donne’s poem “Resurrection: Imperfect” was. Only after the last Judgement could they (and this world) be perfect. Lara M. Crowley writes (John Done Journal, Vol. 29, 2010, p. 187): “Resurrection. Imperfect.” is perhaps the least studied of John Donne’s divine poems because it has generally been perceived as an unfinished effort. But “Resurrection. Imperfect.” is not incomplete. Rather, it is a finished poem concerned with unfinished time. Frost, like Frontain, declares, ‘the appearence of incompleteness is deliberate.’ “Resurrection. Imperfect.” ends with the Latin words ‘Desunt caetera.’116 Raymond-Jean Frontain writes about them and explains their 116 As Marlowe’s Hero and Leander ends with the words: ‘Desunt nonnulla’, or ‘the rest is lacking’. Some critics have seen that this ending of Marlowe is deliberate, and his two Sestiads complete in themselves. See Benjamin Carlton, Marlowe’s Anti-Hero: Reconsidering Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” in academia.org. By the way, “Marlowe’s opening line [‘Come live with me and be my love’] is adapted and readdressed by Mary to Jesus in ‘Our Blessed Lady’s Lullaby’ by the Roman Catholic R. Verstegan (alias Rowlands), Odes. In Imitation of the Seven Penitential Psalmes, with Sundry Other Poemes (Antwerp, 533 meaning: ‘Desunt caetera.’: the rest is lacking. Poetically, Donne’s end lies in his beginning; the title is explained by the tag. The poem leads the reader to the point of revelation, only—as in the much-debated final episode of television’s The Sopranos—to pass abruptly to black. The subject of the poem is what cannot be put into words, the soul’s life once it is released from the body. It’s a brilliant maneuver, and one thoroughly Donnean, to advertise that something is lacking in a poem that purports to celebrate the source of “all”; indeed, the very last phrase of the fragment proper is “of the whole.” Donne’s Slinkey toy can never complete its walk downstairs, but must pause expectantly in midspring, un-done, or not-yet-done, in its anticipation of the All. “Resurrection, imperfect” reminds us that, in Donne, there is always something more. Alastair Fowler confirms that Book VII is a finished one, and is wellplaced in the poem’s structure as a whole. He writes: An unintended convenience of Spenser’s numerology is that it throws new light on the vexed question of the rubrics attached to the posthumously published Cantos of mutabilitie. What position did Spenser intend those cantos to occupy in the completed Faerie Queene?... It is not known from external evidence whether the running title ‘VII. Booke,’ and the canto numbers vi, vii, and viii, derive from Spenser’s manuscript. These rubrics have consequently come under scrutiny, and their internal probability has more than once been questioned by the more speculative Spenserian critics. Most recently, Miss Pauline Parker has remarked: as I am not the first to perceive, the more one tries to enter into Spenser’s mind and follow his construction of the poem, the less likely it appears that this [the Mutabilitie fragment] could have been part of a seventh book … its obvious position would be in Book Eleven. The basis of her conviction is that she finds the theme of the Mutabilitie Cantos too large for any middle book; while the twelfth book of her Faerie Queene is already devoted to a Legend of Magnificence. On numerological grounds, however, we have the very strongest reasons for dismissing all such speculations, and for upholding the authority of the running title and canto rubrics. 1601).” See The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins, Longman Annotated English Poets, Pearson, 2010, p. 134. 534 Seven was in medieval tradition the number of the mutable world; being contrasted …. with the eight of resurrection, eternity, and final glory … Macrobio bases a whole chapter on Cicero’s remark that seven is ‘the key to the universe.’ What more appropriate place than seventh, then, for a book concerned with the extent of mutability in the natural order?... The imperfect canto viii, on the other hand, looks forward to the last things. It opens with a prayer of aspiration towards the great Sabbath when ‘all shall rest eternally’: that eighth day when the seventh-fold cosmos will be made new and eternal. Spenser here echoes the hope of St. Augustine, who tells us, in a fine passage of number symbolism in the Epistles, that there was no evening of the seventh day of creation because the first life was not eternal; but the final rest is eternal, and for this reason too the eighth day will hold eternal blessedness: because that rest, which is eternal, is received from the eighth day, not ended by it … So, then, what was the first day will be the eighth; so that the first life will be restored—but eternized. A.C. Hamilton (2007, 712) says that ‘The VIII., Canto, unperfite,’ as the eighth canto, is the symbol of redemption and resurrection. And he adds that the poet ‘prays for the sight of the Lord on the last day: both for the sight of the host, the body of the redeemed, and for his place of rest after the six days of creating the six books of the FQ.’ As to the Holy Sonnets of John Donne as a whole, Oras (1960:19) comments that the poet, ‘specially’ in ‘the Holy Sonnets revert to a type of firm design, with iambic peaks, in some instances reminiscent of Spenser.’ Zimmerman (1960, 25-26) calls the Holy Sonnets the ‘prayers of one who has discovered the truth of his own being and the certainty of God’s.’ No attention has been paid as to why the poet of The Faerie Queene was so influenced by Torquato Tasso and his Gerusalemme Liberata, a work written by a Jesuit-educated Italian poet who tried ‘to appease the multiple demands of Aristotle’s Poetics, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and powerful contemporary literary critics.’ A. Bartlett Giamatti writes:117 Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata ... Shorter, more consciously contrived than Ariosto’s poem, the Jerusalem Delivered had to appease the multiple demands of Aristotle’s Poetics, CounterReformation Catholicism, and powerful contemporary literary critics. Tasso unified the chivalric and Christian epic … Doctrinal where 117 Play of Double Senses, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Norton & Company, N.Y., 1975, p. 31- 32. 535 Ariosto’s was silent and skeptical, moralistic where Ariosto’s tended to psychology, beautifully structured where its predecessor seemed free-flowing, Tasso’s poem was extremely important for The Faerie Queene. Spenser constantly borrowed versions of Nature from Tasso: from Armida’s garden (G.L. XVI) for Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss (F.Q. II, xii); from Erminia’s pastoral interlude (G.L. VII) for Serena’s pastoral recuperation (F.Q. VI, ix). But even more than Nature, Spenser found in Tasso confirmation for a natural longing. Like Spenser, but in his own fashion, Tasso constantly sought reconciliation and synthesis—of art and nature, city and country, man and woman, mankind and God —and if his efforts to achieve this unity are sometimes desperate, that only reflects the depth of his desire for union and peace. We can now see how Immeritô learnt by heart, as a child, the great poem of this Jesuit-educated poet of Trentine Italy, Torquato Tasso. R.C. Bald writes: Of Donne’s ancestry on the maternal side much more is known. His mother was the youngest daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist and writer of interludes … Some of Heywood’s talents and independence of mind where almost certainly inherited by his daughter and transmited to her son. In one of his rare references to his ancestry Donne speaks of himself as ‘being deriued from such a stocke and race, as, I beleeue, no family, (which is not of farre larger extent, and greater branches,) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doctrine, then it hath done.’ … Two other Heywoods of the generation immediately preceding Donne are even more important. Donne’s grandfather had two sons who both gave up promising careers in England and eventually became members of the Jesuit order. Ellis, the elder … He became a Jesuit and in 1573 was appointed to the Jesuit college at Antwerp … Ellis’s younger brother Jasper was born in 1535 and as a boy served for a time as a page to the Princess Elizabeth … he took his first Jesuit vows at Rome in 1562. From 1564 to 1581 he was Professor of Theology at the Jesuit college at Dillingen, where his brother Ellis spent his novitiate. In The John Donne Critical Heritage, Vol. 1 we see that John Davies of Hereford points to the same pun on the poet’s surname when he writes: Davies must have read Donne’s The second Anniversary as soon as it 536 came out for he alludes to it by its particular title Of the Progresse of the Soule, in a funeral elegy published in the same year. Davies’s elegy was written on a girl of sixteen, Elizabeth Dutton, who died in 1611 (‘A Funerall Elegie, on the death of the most vertuous, and no less lovely, Mris Elizabeth Dutton’ in The Muses Sacrifice, or Divine Meditations, 1612, f.117v-18r) I must confesse a Priest of Phebus, late, Upon like Text so well did meditate, That with a sinlesse Envy I doe runne In his Soules Progresse, till it all be DONNE. But, he hath got the start in setting forth Before me, in the Travell of the WORTH: And me out-gone in Knowledge ev’ry way Of the Soules Progresse to her finall stay. But his sweet Saint did usher mine therein; (Most blest in that) so, he must needs beginne; And read upon the rude Anatomy Of this dead World; that, now, doth putrifie. The author Hereford (or the editor of the poem) only stresses the pun, but not its significance for all his contemporaries who knew the ending couplet of The Choice of Valentines or the paragraphs quoted here from The Faerie Queene that use the surname of its author. In the same work cited above, Donne and Spenser are quoted in the same paragraph on the same theme of the ‘Antichrist’ by a writer, contemporary of Donne, in the very important year of 1609: 1609 Joseph Wybarne drew on Donne and Spenser to illustrate an account of Antichrist (The New Age of Old Names, 1609, pp. 112–13): This is their Antichrist, a thing stranger then the Crocodile of Nilus, then all the rare things of Arenoque or Guianoque, rivers in America: But because I cannot in prose express it, you shall heare the tenth Muse her selfe, utter it in her owne language thus, A thing more strange, then on Niles slime... [He quotes lines 18–23a of Satyre iv, which are glossed in the margin ‘Dunne in his Satyres’.] This Antichrist is most poetically figured also by the famous heire Apparant to Homer and Virgil, in his Faery Queene under the names of Archimagus, Duessa, Argoglio the Soldane and others, throughout the first and fifth Legends 537 The year 1609 (bear it in mind) is important for Donne and for the end of the Faerie Queene. As far as I have seen, Wybarne never writes the name of Spenser as such, but only indirectly as we see above; he also calls him ‘our second Chaucer’ (Spenser Newsletter, Fall 1970, Vol. 1, Number 3, p. 11). So that, in the end, ‘Dunne’ is the only authorial name quoted by Wybarne on the theme of the ‘Antichrist’. Did Wybarne know the secret? It is a nice coincidence that the author of The Faerie Queene is linked to Donne by a contemporary in the year 1609, when Donne was lost in Mitcham and England was dominated by Robert Cecil, that Antichrist Donne wrote about in his 1601 poem Metemphsycosis, a very Spenserian poem, by the way. There is a book which has been described as ‘the Spenser book for Spenserians to beat, a critical and scholarly achievement of the very first order.’ This book, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, by Paul J. Alpers, is ‘an essential commentary on Spenser’s brilliant poem The Faerie Queene’ that ‘won the 1967 Explicator Award,’ has this key to interpret the poem and the way it should be understood (p. 14): There is a temporal dimension in our reading of any poem, and in a narrative poem it is conventionally identified with a sequence of fictional events. But in The Faerie Queene … time is the dimension of verbal events—the lines and stanzas that evoke and modify the reader’s response. An episode in The Faerie Queene, then, is best described as a developing psychological experience within the reader, rather than as an action to be observed by him. The Encyclopaedia Britannica writes the following about Donne: Readers continue to find stimulus in Donne’s fusion of witty argument with passion, his dramatic rendering of complex states of mind, his daring and unhackneyed images, and his ability (little if at all inferior to William Shakespeare’s) to make common words yield up rich poetic meaning without distorting the essential quality of English idiom. As Frank A. Doggett writes in his article “Donne’s Platonism”118: “It is an experience of the intellect to read Donne as it is an experience of the senses to read Keats.” Or as C.S. Lewis famously put it in The Allegory of Love: ‘To read him [i.e. Spenser] is to grow in mental health.’ As with the Shake-speare’s Sonnets of 1609, book seven of The Faerie Queene published in 1609 finishes a poetical work which was started as a 118 The Sewanee Review, Vol. 42, No. 3. 538 monument for the future of the Tudors, the ‘Lordly brood’ of Gloriana. Prince Arthur never meets Gloriana because in real life, in History, Gloriana remained virgin and Southampton never married with whom Cecil wanted. There was no point in writing another six books: the Tudors were over while the first six books and the epilogue which is the seventh are already finished and perfect, and they follow the structure of the seven days of the week, the astrological, Ptolemaic, Neoplatonic and Christian week. 539 Works by our poet written during the decade of the 1600s 1.- England’s Parnasus, 1600, anthology, some poems of Oxford: http://ia600308.us.archive.org/22/items/englandsparnassus00crawuof t/. 2.- England’s Helicon, 1600, some poems of our poet, specially Ignoto: http://ia600504.us.archive.org/4/items/englandsheliconr012181mbp/e nglandsheliconr012181mbp.pdf. 3.- The Phoenix and the turtle, 1601, as Shakespeare: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/shake/pt.html. 4.- Hamlet, Quarto 2, 1604, as Shakespeare: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/Q2/default/ 5.- Shake-speare’s Sonnets, 1609, as Shakespeare: http://www.luminarium.org/renascenceeditions/shake/wssonnets.html. The Sonnets accompanied with “A Lover's Complaint”: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/shake/lc.html. 6.- Henry VIII, as Shakespeare: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/shake/khe.html. 7.- The Tempest, as Shakespeare (Derby could have collaborated here): http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/shake/tempest.html. 540 EPILOGUE 541 542 The Translation of the Bible: the King James Version of 1611 In 1611 the majestic translation of the Bible known later on as the King James Version appeared, ‘the book that changed the world.’ Donne’s situation from 1602 to 1615 was determined by his marriage to Lord Egerton’s niece Anne More, which he did without the consent of her father Sir George More. During those years Donne was ‘undone.’ In 1600, Lord Egerton’s wife died, and he married Alice Spenser, to whom Edmund Spenser had dedicated The Tears of the Muses (1591) and Thomas Nashe Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem. Donne’s outrageous marriage to a noble person like Anne More should have ended with his career for ever, but Donne seems to have been more than a mere secretary of Egerton, for it seems that Alice Spenser interceded with Anne More’s father to calm his wrath. Edmund Gosse writes on his biography on Donne: Friends exerted themselves to act in a mollifying degree upong Sir George More, who now began to regret that he had adopted so extremely choleric a tone. It would seem that among these friends were some recent additions to the household at York House … The manners of Donne … could … become extremely insinuating. He had with women specially a mode of roguish and fantastic respectfulness, a familiar and yet not obtrusive gaity which were absolutely irresistible. Gosse continues: He had not failed to exercise these arts upon Alice Spenser, the third wife of Sir Thomas Egerton, and upon her children. This lady, when she married for a second time in October 1600, was the widow of Ferdinand Stanley, fifth Earl of Derby, who had died in 1594 … The Countess of Derby had three young daughters, all of whom married, and married well, after the re-marriage of their mother. It might be supposed that this bevy of ladies, whose introduction to York House raised the family of the Lord Keeper to a higher, indeed to the highest, stratum of aristocratic society, would be profoundly indifferent to the fate of the indiscreet and even indelicate secretary who had vexed the new head of their house to a tiresome mésalliance. But Donne had not wasted the few months he had enjoyed the advantage of their society. It is strange to read this. For a secretary to have been helped by the highest feminine aristocrat in England thanks to some enchanting 543 powers proper of a Don Juan and only in a few months is tantamount to an illiterate Shakspere coming to London in 1588 and writing in a few years Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as Venus and Adonis in 1593. Gosse continues: They all took a romantic and sympathetic interest in his fate; they all favoured his fortunes, and became, and remained, among the staunchest of his friends. It is certain that Sir George More desired to retain that easy admission to York House which had been so advantageous to him … We cannot question that the attitude of the Countess of Derby had not a little to do with the change of Sir George’s attitude to Donne. As Donne was sent to prison for his extraordinary audacity in marrying a noble so high above his station and who was still underage when he was thirty (30) years old, the unexpected happened. Gosse tells us: Donne was set at liberty, no doubt on the recommendations of the Commissioners … Society, taking its cue from the distinguished ladies of the Derby family, ‘approved of his daughter’s choice,’ and was disposed to congratulate Sir George More on having unwittingly secured for his daughter—who, however, was still separated from Donne—, so brilliant and so promising a husband. I cannot see how a man without a job and no title of nobility could have been ‘so promising a husband’, unless the Derby family said so for a good (poetical) reason, a powerful reason. There is something “dunne” or “dark” beneath all this if Donne was only a secretary and not “the Prince of Poets.” The marriage which by all legal means should have been declared invalid, for the spouse was underage and without any legal capacity to bind herself to a husband, was declared legal and binding. Stubbs writes: Late in April the court that spoke with the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury himself finally ruled that the marriage was valid in the eyes of the established Church. Only power, and aristocratic power in particular, could have made the Church of England allow a marriage like this one. Donne had powerful friends in the Derby family who could have operated the miracle. But during the years that followed Donne did not have a job. While studying 544 in his country house in Perford all his divine and theological books, he was asked by Reverend Dr Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, to visit him. Stubbs tells us: What Morton was offering was this: he had just been made Dean of Gloucester, but he still held his previous church benefice, and he proposed to give this up for Donne to take over, if he would enter the priesthood … ‘You know I have formerly perswaded you to wave your Court-hopes, and enter into holy Orders,’ said Morton. This was the first time, however, that Donne had been tempted by a guaranteed living in the Church. This makes sense if Donne had previously showed proof of his theological knowledge, as would be the case if he was the man behind Thomas Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem and The Faerie Queene. The fact is that Donne’s reply fit with his Nashean past. Stubbs reminds us of the following: To most who knew him or knew of him, the idea of Donne taking orders would have become as a complete shock—as something almost blasphemous … Those who knew him through his work dating from the 1590s knew him as the erotic and critical poet of the elegies and satires. In some quarters it was beginning to be seen just what a treasure of a poet he was. For Ben Jonson, Donne was ‘the delight of Phoebus’… He turned Morton’s offer down … The reasons he gave instead for declining were concerns about his social reputation: ‘some irregularities of my life,’ he said, ‘have been so visible to some men, that though I have, I thank God, made my peace with him by penitential resolutions … yet this, which God knows to be so, is not so visible to man.’ Donne remained in regular contact with Morton, and he even helped Morton to set his principles of theology forward ‘more coherently by reading and commenting on his work,’ as Stubbs writes. Probably, Donne helped to write and revise Morton’s Apologia Catholica published in two volumes in 1605-6. Then, in 1610 and 1611, Donne published PseudoMartyr and Ignatius his Conclave respectively. In the latter, published anonymously by Donne, we find a message from the ‘the printer’ to the reader: ‘Does thou seeke after the Author? It is in vaine; for hee is harder to be found than the parents of Popes were in the old times.’ This is Thomas Nashe’s wit slapping your face from the start. In The Oxford Handbook of John Donne Graham Roebuck says in his essay “The Controversial Treatise,” that the Martin Mar-prelate traces 545 were ‘rich in wit and invective,’ and he adds: ‘It is likely that the spirit of the Marprelate pasquils, and Thomas Nashe’s salty responses, flavours the controversy to which Pseudo-Martyr belongs.’ Donne had been commissioned by King James I of England to write a book so that Catholics would take the Oath of Alliance to his Majesty without being afraid of losing their souls in hell. This was the object of his PseudoMartyr, a monumental treatise even more learned and erudite and arid that Milton’s theological pamphlets. Graham Roebuck tells us: Pseudo-Martyr’s array of learning, in addition to theology and mastery of languages, includes document-based historiography (anticipating seventeenth-century advances), political theory, literary criticism … and textual criticism in identifying doctrinal intrusions into key texts ... Donne draws on his familiarity with the sciences, especially medicine, mathematics, and navigation … His mastery of jurisprudence, especially of canon law, is seen throughout … In dramatic language Donne arraigns the Jesuits before the Court, and on the stage, of history: you excell in … kindling and blowing, begetting and nourishing jelousies in Princes, and contempt in Subjects, dissention in families, wrangling in Schooles, and mutinies in Armies; ruines in Noble houses, corruption of blood, confiscation of States, torturing of bodies, an anxious entangling and perplexing of consciences … you are in your institution mixt and complexioned of all Elements, and you hange betweene Heaven and Earth, like Meteors of an ominous and incendiarie presaging. (Pseudo-Martyr 106). Such language would not be out of place in Shakespeare … Satirical and mocking tones, Menippean in spirit as befits an anatomy, sound frequently alongside earnest exhortation and personal confession in the mode of spiritual autobiography … In short, tonal suppleness and verbal dexterity, delight in paradox and conceit, play their parts in creating the unique Donnean texture. And he adds: Although by its nature the controversial treatise is ephemeral, some scholars have discerned more durable properties in Pseudo-Martyr. As A. L. Rowse declares, it is ‘mistakenly little read by literary scholars, though it is Donne’s most important prose work and of acute historical significance.’ … Donne was a potent influence on the Erasmian circle of Great Tew when it was composing religious tracts and histories, and commemorative verse in the 1630s just before the Civil War, as was Thomas Nashe for laughing the Marprelate sectaries off the stage 546 We know that the KJV is a communal work of 6 companies of 9 members each; that is, around 54 members. It seems fairly clear that 7 members are still unknown and the rest were of not much value except Lancelot Andrews, the most famous writer of sermons of the time, although he was not a poet. As the majority of experts in this Bible acknowledge that its musicality and majesty are unexplained to this day, I will quote some opinions on this question via Paul Streitz, the person that alerted me of this literary mystery. He tells us: After each section had finished its task, twelve delegates, chosen from them all, met together and reviewed and revised the whole work. Lastly the very Reverend the Bishop of Winchester, Bilson, together with Dr. Smith, now Bishop of Gloucester, a distinguished man, who had been deeply occupied in the whole work from the beginning, after all things had been maturely weighed and examined, put the finishing touch to this version. We know from R.C. Bald that Donne was working under Thomas Morton during these years and Morton was later (1607) nominated by King James as Dean of Gloucester. Moreover, Morton was the first one to offer Donne entry to the Church. R.C. Bald writes (p. 207): It is thus clear that Donne was reading portions of the manuscript of A Catholic Appeale a full eighteen months before that work was published. Morton clearly had sufficient confidence in Donne’s learning and acumen to submit the manuscript to him for criticism and possible correction Streitz’s research tells us this: One would expect an enormous amount of historical material with fifty-four clerics and scholars collaborating on the project. It would seem there would be notes, annotations in their Bibles. There would be letters and arguments over literary and religious interpretations and there would be records of meetings and records of publications. However, there is nothing, simply nothing. There is also the problem of the literary quality of the KJV. If the work were done by a number of contributors, then there would be stylistic differences between sections composed by different authors. Yet, the KJV is written with one clear hand. This leads to the idea of a hidden genius behind the work, but no Biblical scholars are able to give any indication as to who that might be. 547 And he continues: Olga Opfell’s book The King James Bible Translators is a detailed history of the KJV, always with the assumption that the book was written by a committee even though she is well aware that committees seldom produce anything with style and grace. She starts by stating that the dean of Westminster, Lancelot Andrewes was to lead the group at West-minster: James named the scholarly dean of Westminster, Lancelot Andrewes first of all to the group of learned men who were to make a new translation of the Bible. Andrewes suggested other scholars and assisted in the preliminary arrangements. She proceeds to describe the translation of the KJV: The first Westminster group reportedly met in the famous Jerusalem Chamber, which was part of the original Abbey House and used for meetings of the dean and chapter … The Abbey library has been suggested as a likely meeting site although it may not have been properly fitted up at the time … Here he lived the greater part of the time, and perhaps the scholars held some meetings within its rooms. Streitz quotes these KJV’s scholars: ‘[T]hat a committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths; that is a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast.’ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, quoted in Olga S. Opfell, The King James Bible Translators. ‘It is a miracle and a mystery, since group writing seldom achieves great heights. Individual writings of the committeemen show no trace of the magnificent style ... Though their work was a revision, which represented a long evolutionary progress, it was also creation. Not all the pages were of equal literary value, but over all the result was stunning ... To this day its common expressions—labour of love, lick the dust, clear as crystal, a thorn in the flesh, a soft answer, the root of all evil, the fat of the land, the sweat of thy brow, the shadow of death —are heard in everyday speech.’ Olga S. Opfell, The King James Bible Translators. ‘Perhaps the greatest of literary mysteries lies in the unanswered question of how fifty-four translators managed to infuse their work with a unity of effect which seems the result of one inspired imagination. The mystery will never be solved; but the perfect choice 548 throughout of current English words, the rhythmic fall of phrase and clause, the unfailing escape from the heavy and sometimes pompous renderings of the older translations, remain.’ Mary Ellen Chase, The Bible and the Common Reader. It is believed by many that the KJV was translated by a poet with great musical skills. Streitz quotes: ‘The Authorized Version is a miracle and a landmark. Its felicities are manifold, its music has entered into the very blood and marrow of English thought and speech, it has given countless proverbs and proverbial phrases even to the unlearned and the irreligious. There is no corner of English life, no conversation ribald or reverent it has not adorned. Embedded in its tercentenary wording is the language of a century earlier. It has both broadened and retarded the stream of English Speech. It is more archaic in places than its forerunners, and it is impossible for us to disentangle from our ordinary talk the phrases of Judea, whether Hebrew or Greek, whether of the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Poets, or the Apostles. Only the closest scrutiny can give precision to the rhapsodical vagueness with which the Authorized Version is worshipped at a distance.’ H. Wheeler Robinson, The Bible In Its Ancient and English Versions. ‘How did this come to be? How to explain that sixty or more men, none a genius, none even as great a writer as Marlowe or Ben Jonson, together produced writing to be compared with (and confused with) the words of Shakespeare?’ Gustavus S. Paine, The Learned Men. When we read that the KJV ‘is more archaic in places than its forerunners’ something here recalls Spenser’s archaic language. When R.C. Bald tells us about Donne’s interest in the divine studies, something here may give us a clue: Donne’s interest in these studies suggests that he must have kept in touch with the learned ecclesiastics of his acquaintance, and confirmation is to be found in some slight but none the less highly significant references in the letters. For instance, writing to Goodyer on 14 March 1614, while still unwell, Donne concludes somewhat abruptly, and in so doing excuses himself by saying ‘leave to make this which I am fain to call my good day, so much truly good, as to spend the rest of it with D. Layfield, who is, upon my summons, at this hour come to me’. This is John Layfield, D.D., rector of St. Clemens Danes. He was an excellent Hebraist, and had been one of the group of divines who sat at Westminster to revise the Pentateuch for the 549 Authorized Version. The fact that he was prepared to come and spend a large portion of the day with Donne on being told that Donne was sufficiently recovered makes it likely that they were studying together. Layfield may well have been reading Hebrew with Donne, and his concern with the translation of the early books of the Bible may also have helped to determine some of the topics with which Donne dealt in the Essayes in Divinity. In Donne we have the poet and the utmost Bible expert all in one. A good clue I have found is this. Note the similitude of Donne’s Holy Sonnet line ‘And never chaste, except you ravish me’ (HSBatter), with these words of the translation of the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon in the KJV. In God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, Adam Nicolson writes: Again and again, as the marginal alternatives make clear, they chose the more passionate, the more immediate, and the more exciting of the alternatives that were open to them. ‘Thou hast ravished my heart’, the lover tells his girl, not, as he might have done, ‘Thou hast taken away my heart’. They called the myrrh she poured on him ‘sweete smelling’ and in the margin suggested it might mean ‘running about’ or very liquid. In the most direct moment of the whole enchanted seduction, they wrote, ‘My beloued put in his hand by the hole of the dore, and my bowels were moved for him’. Although there is a euphemism here –the phrase ‘of the dore’ is in italics because it is not to be found in the Hebrew– they nevertheless placed in the margin a note which would give the even more explicit ‘and my bowels were moued in me for him’. Any close reader would realise that the fullest and most explicit statement they were suggesting was: ‘My beloued put in his hand by the hole, and my bowels were moued in me for him.’ This is not the work of people who are avoiding the rich and potent interpenetration of religion and flesh. It is in fact one of the greatest of all English celebrations of that union, culminating in the verse which the Translators entitled ‘The vehemencie of loue’. The girl of the song, the church, declares, in language as magisterial, passionate and imposing as the translation gets: ‘Set me as a seale vpon thine heart, as a seale vpon thine arme: for loue is strong as death, iealousie is cruel as the graue: the coales thereof are coales of fire, which hath a most vehement flame than Shakespeare, more populist than Milton, a common text against which life itself could be read. This is more about rhetoric, a certain way of speaking or writing, than about the dogma or the many conflicting theologies which the Bible can be found to contain. The sense of the many threads by which the real physical world is bound to a magnificence which goes beyond the physical; the simple word held in a musical rhythm; a poetic 550 rather than a philosophical approach to reality, an openness to the reality of dreams and visions: all of these treasured qualities of Englishness can be seen to stem from the habits of mind which the Jacobean Translators bequeathed to their country. As we see in the following paragraph, Nicolson wants to understand by any means how this translation was made possible, even against reason itself, asking a question which deserves a thunderous “No!”: The men at the core of this Oxford group were deeply engaged with the realities of money and power. That political involvement brought a worldliness and glamour which provided a certain steel. And that raises an intriguing question: was the King James Bible so alive precisely because the Translators weren’t entirely good? But Nicolson writes something interesting now, for the following words of T.S. Eliot are said precisely of Donne-Spenser’s verse: The Jacobean translation ... This Bible was appointed to be read in churches (and thus had no illustrations for study at home) and so its meaning had to be carried on a heard rhythm, it had to appeal to what T. S. Eliot later called ‘the auditory imagination’, that ‘feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word’. Under these pressures, Tyndale’s words become, very slightly but very significantly, musically enriched: This is my Commaundement, that ye loue one another, as I haue loued you. Greater loue hath no man then this, that a man lay downe his life for his friends. The meanings of the two translations are not essentially different, but the Jacobean words are clarified where Tyndale’s are clotted; they are memorable where Tyndale stumbles over his grammar; the Jacobean choice of word is more authoritative, ‘one another’ better than ‘togedder’, ‘lay down’ better than ‘bestowe’; and the Jacobean sentences sound like the voice of a divine wisdom and certainty Hamilton’s edition tells us (p. 6): The poem interprets and reinterprets itself endlessly, as Tonkin 1989:43 suggests in commenting on Spenser’s cumulative technique: ‘All the virtues spring from the first and greatest of them, Holiness, and are summed up in Book VI, with its climatic vision of the Graces’. 551 Clearly the poem was meant to be read as a verse in the Bible was read in Spenser’s day: any stanza is the centre from which to reconstruct the whole. David Norton (The King James Bible. A short history from Tyndale to Today, 2011) writes: One thing very few of them [KJV translators] did was to write imaginative literature, and, with a few exceptions such as Lancelot Andrewes viewed through the eyes of T.S. Eliot, none had reputations for their ability to write English. In the primary respects of scholarship and devotion, therefore, they are an apt group for the work, but in other respects they seem unlikely to produce either the central book of English religion and culture or ‘the noblest monument of English prose’. How could individuality emerge from committees? Where is the genius worthy to be compared with –and by some even found superior to– Shakespeare? Such questions have been asked but are in some ways wrong questions. Norton writes that the KJV was started in this way: Broughton agitated long and hard for a new version [of the Bible, the future KJV] ... He had some success in winning support from Archbishop John Whitgift, and this may be behind a draft Act of Parliament, probably from late in Elizabeth’s reign. Now, read this on Thomas Nashe: 119 On the surface, the man least likely ever to employ Thomas Nashe. Whitgift was the most senior churchman in England, and one of his many responsibilities was censoring the press ... He also rigorously enforced church discipline for her, and was consequently loathed by the Puritans, who called him ‘the Pope of Lambeth’. His connection with Nashe perhaps began back in 1589, during the Marprelate campaign. By mid-1592 Nashe was part of Whitgift’s household, temporarily at Croydon to avoid the London plague. But by early next year, he wasn’t. And six years later in 1599, it was Whitgift who banned all his work. With this in mind, now let us read these words of J.B. Steane 119 See http://www.members.tripod.com/sicttasd/patrons.html. 552 (Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, Penguin, 1985, p. 35): For there is little reason to doubt Nashe’s sincerity, and the genuineness of his intentions in his homiletic work can hardly be in question when there is so much evidence of care over structure and expression, and when the piece is so resolutely sustained (it is easily the longest of Nashe’s works. It is severely criticized in Hibbard’s study: ‘Christ’s Tears is a monument of bad taste, tactlessness and unremitting over-elaboration for which it is not easy to find a parallel; a kind of gigantic oxymoron in which style and content, tone and intention are consistently at odds.’ Actually, these strictures are made to apply principally to the first half, the second containing some lively observation and social criticism in a manner more naturally Nashe’s own. But, although many points are acutely noted in Hibbard’s chapter, and although Nashe’s faulty taste is sometimes glaringly obvious, I still think there is merit ignored. For example, Hibbard says that Nashe ‘seems to have had not understanding of how much the Gospel owes to the nakedness and directness of its prose’; yet, following on the very passage whose quotation has led up to that remark, there are a couple of pages in which the parable of the owner of the vineyard is told with admirable simplicity and directness, and, what is more, with a feeling for prose rhythms which is closely akin to that of the Authorized Version, and which is beautiful. David Norton’s conclusion in his book of 2011 is this: Sometimes the argument that the KJB was a literary revision [the work of a poet, that is, an expert in how words sound and swing] has been powerfully made ... A chorus of claims and phrases expressed faith in the excellence of the KJB. Thomas Babington Macaulay proclaimed on ‘that stupendous work’ that if was ‘a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power’. Among many others, Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop, philologist and one of the makers of the Revised Version, and the American scholar George P. Marsh thought it ‘the first English classic’, Marsh adding that it was ‘the highest exemplar of purity and beauty of language existing in our speech’ ... Others including three of the makers of the Revised Version liked the phrase from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, ‘well of English undefiled’. Another favourite with a lengthy history was Lowes’s essay title, ‘the noblest monument of English prose’. 553 And from Marotti (1986) we can read that ‘[w]hat Bald says of Donne’s activities in 1606-1611 applies to this whole time span.’ As Bald writes: His life seems more complex during these years than at any other period ... Donne was in London as often as with his wife and family at Mitcham; he followed the Court and cultivated patrons and patronesses; he devoted laborious hours of study and research to problems of divinity and canon law Retaining the above words on the prose of the KJV as ‘well of English undefiled’, now we can pay attention to these of Roger Tisdale, whose dedication of 1622 to John Donne merits attention (see John Donne. The Critical Heritage, Volume 1): Nothing is known of Tisdale save that he published several small volumes in the early 1620s versifying public themes. He addressed to ‘the Learned and Reverend John Donne, D. of Divinitie, Deane of the Cathedrall Church of St. Paule London’ the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ of one of these books: ’Tis you, deare Sir, that after a soaring flight of many yeeres, have now lighted upon a faire Tree ... Yet I must ingenuously confesse, as an ancient observant of your worth, that your yong daies were to me of much admiration, as these dayes are now of deserved reverence ... I know you doe love pure, and undefiled Poesie ... And I hope for the love of the Muses (who in your Youth initiated you their Son, and now in your Age have elected you a Patron) you will open the imbraces of favour … And so with my Love and Duty equally twined together, either into a Lawrell or a Willow Garland (which you please to account it) I offer it up with a desire it were worthy (I will not say your best, but) any little acceptance Let us comment the above: 1.- ‘You … after a soaring flight of many years’: that is, great poetry, high poetry of elevated style: The Faerie Queene and Neoplatonic poetry of the Spenser mask. 2.- ‘I must ingenuously confesse’: without any other vested interest on this question whatsoever, except the confession of admiration in itself. 3.- ‘As an ancient observant of your worth’: he knows Donne since his childhood. 4.- ‘Your young daies were to me of much admiration’: he really loves Donne the Neoplatonic poet of ‘the golden mould,’ as Gabriel Harvey said 554 of him in 1592. 5.- ‘I know you doe love pure, and undefiled Poesie’: see the phrase from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, ‘well of English undefiled.’ As that phrase is said in relation to Chaucer and his language, Tisdale is saying that his master poet is Chaucer, which is what Donne-Spenser says in The Faerie Queene IV. ii. 32.8: ‘Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled.’ Also, ‘That old Dan Geffrey (in whose gentle spright/ The pure well head of Poesie did dwell)’ VII. Vii. 9.3-4. 6.- ‘The love of the Muses (who in your Youth initiated you their Son...’: clearly, you were born a genius, a poet of undefiled, Chaucerian vein, with a soaring and epic altitude. Ignore all these, and the words of Tisdale will leave you asking: What is he talking about? Well, what he is talking about is: I know that you were born a genius and wrote great soaring poetry when you were young and chosen by the Muses, now that you are a divine. I just wanted to tell you that as I know you from your early days, you are high above in my estimation and that I admire what you did in those early, young days of yours, when you wrote pure, undefiled Poesie like Master Chaucer did, as you yourself said in the fourth book of your Faerie Queene. Hope you favour this book of mine, which is my token of recognition to you for what you did when you were the Son of the Muses and what you do now that you are the Patron of the Muses and a divine. John Donne’s Irregular Ordination In 2008, John N. Wall studied the ordination of John Donne according to the documents in the Archives of the Diocese of London and of Cambridge University. In his article “The Irregular Ordination of John Donne” for the John Donne Journal (Vol. 27), Wall explains: These documents—three in number—at once clarify and complicate our understanding of the events of early 1615 as a result of which Donne was, in rapid succession, made Deacon and Priest of the Church of England and awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Cambridge University. Donne’s ordination turns out to have been highly irregular; proceeding at the direction of King James, it was in violation of the Canons in at least three ways. The circumstances of Donne’s ordination thus demonstrate more clearly the pivotal nature of James’s role in the shaping of Donne's career King James’s plan was, according to Wall, ‘a four-stage plan that included, in rapid succession, Donne’s ordination, his being named a Royal Chaplain, his being granted an honorary DD degree from Cambridge University, and his being given a significant job in the Church 555 of England, the Deanship of a major cathedral.’ Wall explains: Donne was ordained both deacon and priest on the same day, technically a per saltum ordination, an ordination ‘at a leap’ … Such ordination was in direct violation of Canon 32, which states that under no circumstances is one to be ordained deacon and priest on the same day, and requires that a period of months … elapse between After the first step, the second step took place smoothly. Wall continues: He was ordained deacon and priest on 23 January 1615, by John King, Bishop of London. He was almost immediately named one of King James’s Royal Chaplains... This appointment opened to Donne other forms of employment; those appointed as Royal Chaplains could, in addition to their regular jobs, or ‘cures,’ hold a plurality of benefices, able to receive appointments to two other parish positions in the church. Donne received the first of these … when he was appointed by James to be the rector of the Church of St. John the Baptist in Keyston, in Huntingdonshire, near Cambridge, on 16 January 1616. The second was added shortly thereafter when Donne was appointed by the Lord Chancellor to be rector of St. Nicholas, in Sevenoaks, in Kent. The third step towards the deanship was the Cambridge degree. But this was not so easily granted by King James, for he faced opposition, even though Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton, wrote that the scholars in Cambridge were ‘glad’ to grant him the degree: [T]he subject of a cathedral deanship for Donne emerges in one account of the controversy surrounding Donne’s being awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Cambridge University on 7 March... The veracity of Walton’s account is of course undermined immediately by his mistake in dating—Donne was ordained in January and the King went on Progress to Cambridge in March, not in the ‘Summer,’ and not ‘in the very same month’ of Donne’s ordination. We thus turn to the second account, from a letter of John Chamberlain; it describes a very different scenario. Reporting on the King’s visit to Cambridge and his request that various honorary degrees be awarded, Chamberlain writes: Almost all the courtiers went foorth masters of art at the Kings 556 being there, but few or no Doctors … The vice chauncellor and university were exceeding strict in that point, and refused many importunities of great men … neither the Kings intreatie for John Dun wold prevayle, yet they are Threatned with a mandate which yf yt come yt is like they will obey but they are resolved to geve him [i.e. Donne] such a blow withal that he were better be without yt. ...Donne’s degree was finally awarded but not until after the King and his party had left Cambridge. The question is that King James wanted the four-stage plan to be carried out: James had promised Donne that if he would agree to be ordained the King would take care of him. Which brings us back to John Chamberlain’s report that Donne had obtained ‘a reversion of the Deanery of Canterbury,’ i.e. had been promised that he would be the next Dean of Canterbury Cathedral … First of all, in March 1615 the current Dean of Canterbury was in Cambridge along with Donne and King James … James knew Neville; in 1603, Archbishop Whitgift chose Neville to travel to meet James in Scotland and convey to England’s new King the united greetings of the clergy of England on his accession. ...Even though it was clear from Neville’s health that a new dean of Canterbury Cathedral would need to be appointed soon, James of course did not appoint Donne as dean when they were all together in Cambridge, nor did he appoint Donne to his post when Neville died two months later. He instead appointed one Charles Fotherby, who had been Archdeacon of the Diocese of Canterbury for twenty years— a classic example of a ‘worthy and ancient divine’ whom Donne would have been leaping over had James appointed him to the post instead … James success—and difficulty—in fulfilling his promise to Donne to help him make his way in the world of the clerical profession suggests both the extent and limitations of royal power in the seventeenthcentury. James was able to have Donne ordained on short notice by the Bishop of London in January 1615 and to name him immediately as a Royal Chaplain. James had more difficulty—though he was ultimately successful—in getting Donne an honorary DD degree from Cambridge, but he had to exercise clear royal authority to get that job done; personal requests by the King and his party were not successful and the King had to issue an official royal mandate to get the University, grudgingly, to award the degree … James did intend Donne for a Deanship, and failed to secure it, at least for the time being. 557 The conclusion is clear. Wall ends his article as follows: Donne’s ordination turns out to have been far more complex an affair than either Walton or Donne’s subsequent biographers have claimed. Donne’s career in the church got off to a far more difficult beginning than we have realized and now must be considered from that point of view. King James was rewarding Donne, but for what kind of work? What had Donne written to deserve such a success? Could Donne be the poet who gave the King James Bible of 1611 its noble quality? The first clues are in Donne’s favor: he was a major poet, a great mind, and a great expert in the Bible. The fact that Donne was promoted to the Church of England makes us think that there might be something else going on. Contrary to the case of Gosse’s arguments about the Derby family helping the secretary because of Donne’s charms, in this case, Donne’s Don Juan skills and charms have to be rejected, for although King James was a notorious homosexual, Donne was not, we may safely presume, his “type,” if we consider James’ type of man to be his lovers Robert Carr, later 1st Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, later 1 st Duke of Buckingham. Donne knew the Bible perfectly well and all its translations and exegetes. In his sermon Preached to the Kings Majestie at Whitehall, 24 Febr. 1625 [1625/6], he says: Surely a good Spirit mooved our last Translators of the Bible [i.e. the KJV], to depart from all Translations which were before them, in reading that place of Malachi thus, The Lord the God of Israel saith, that hee hates putting away. Whereas all other Translations, both Vulgat, and Vulgar, And in Vulgar, and in Holy Tongues, The Septuagint, the Chalde, all, read that place thus, If a man hate her, let him put her away, (which induced a facility of divorces) our Translators thought it more conformable to the Originall, and to the wayes of God, to read it thus, The Lord the God of Israel saith, that hee hates putting away. In 1619, John Donne dedicated a sermon to the Countess of Montgomery, Susan de Vere, our poet’s youngest daughter. The sermon of February 21, just before embarking in an European and very dangerous tour for his life (so thought he himself), had this dedication that reads as follows: 558 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE COUNTESS OF MONTGOMERY Madam, Of my ability to doe your Ladiship service anything spoken may be an embleme good enough; for as a word vanisheth, so doth any power to serve you; things that are written are fitter testimonies, because they remain and are permanent: in writing this Sermon which your ladiship was pleased to hear before, I confesse I satisfie an ambition of my own, but it is the ambition of obeying your commandment, not onely an ambition of leaving my name your memory, or your Cabinet: and yet, since I am going out of the Kingdom, and perchance out of the world, (when God shall have given my soul a place in heaven) it shall the lesse diminish your Ladiship, if my poor name be found about you. I know what dead carkasses things written are, in respect of things spoken. But in things of this kinde, that soul that inanimates them, receives debts from them: the Spirit of God that dictates them in the speaker or writer, and is present in his tongue or hand, meets himself again (as we meet our selves in a glass) in the eies and eares and hearts of the hearers and readers: and that Spirit which is ever the same to an equall devotion, makes a writing and a speaking equall means to edification. In one circumstance, my preaching and my writing this sermon is too equall: that that your Ladiship heard in a hoarse voyce then, you read in a course hand now: but in thankfulnesse I shall lift up my hands as clean as my infirmities can keep them, and a voyce as clear as his spirit shall be pleased to tune in my prayers for your Ladiship in all places of the world which shall either sustain or bury Your Ladiships humble servant in Christ Iesus J.D. ‘Ever the same’ is a witty homage of Donne to Susan de Vere’s dear father. The fact that John Donne wrote to her these words before departing from England, ‘and perchance out of the world,’ speaks volumes. And to hear that he satisfied an ambition of his own by writing and dedicating this sermon to Edward de Vere’s daughter is an homage too of what his dear father did for England. In this sermon, moreover, Donne talks about Christ being a Lapis fundamentalis for us sinners. It is interesting to note and see that Donne uses this Latin word in a sermon to Susan de Vere, for that is the word Nashe uses to refer to Edward de Vere: Master Apis Lapis. Oxford had been the Lapis Angularis for the 559 poets of his age indeed. Let us hear the words Donne dedicates to Susan de Vere before departing from England, maybe not to return again: [A]nd then, after we have considered him, first, in the foundation (as we are all Christians) he growes to be Lapis Angularis, the Corner stone, to unite those Christians … In Esay hee is both together, A sure foundation and a Corner stone as he was in the place of Esay, Lapis probatus, I will say in Sion a tryed stone, and in the Psalm, Lapis reprobatus, a stone that the builders refused, In this consideration he is Lapis approbatus, a stone approved by all sides that unites all things together Finally, just as Edward de Vere began this work, John Donne will close it. Winter, begin: Death be not proud, though some haue called thee Mighty and dreadfull, for thou art not soe. For those whome thou thinkst thou dost ouerthrowne Dye not (poore Death) nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flowe And soonest our best men with thee doe goe, Rest of their bodyes, and Soules deliuery. Th’ art slaue to fate, Chaunce, Kings, and desperate men, And dost with poyson, warre, and sickness dwell And poppy or charmes can make vs sleepe as well And easyer then thy stroke: why swell’st thou then? One short sleepe past, we liue eternally And Death shalbe no more: Death thou shalt dye. 120 120 Original Sequence. 560 561 562 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Solicitor (Universidad de Huelva, 1999) specialised in International Trade and Maritime Law for the University of Southampton (LLM Maritime Law, 2001) and a lover of philosophy, music and art, Ricardo Mena has been writing essays and short stories in diverse webpages since the year 2002. In the year 2009 he had the pleasure to participate in the Third International George Santayana Conference that took place in Valencia with his personal communication “Santayana y la poesía primera.” Göngora, Mozart and Picasso as creators, with Aristotle, Santayana and Richard Dawkins as thinkers, form the peak of his present canon, always subject to the continuous Heraclitian fluctuations (i.e. you will never ever bath in the same object twice). Together with Ver, begin (2011, 2014 and 2015), he has edited and translated into Spanish The Faerie Queene (2014), Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Anniversaries and Death’s Duel (2014), Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes (2014), Whittemore’s Shakespeare’s Son and his Sonnets (2014), and Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified (2014). He has written two narrative works in 2014, Voces a Venus and Elegías a Talía. At present, he is editing and translating into English the whole work of Göngora online at: http://englishgongora.blogspot.com.es/ His Amazon Author page at: http://www.amazon.com/Ricardo-Mena/e/B00N447WV4 563