We are delighted to share Vere in Song: Shakespeare’s Musicke, a programme originally commissioned by The de Vere Society and performed by Amarylli.

Bringing together songs from Shakespeare’s plays with the poetry of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the programme offers a fascinating way to encounter the words and music of the period — not simply as texts on a page, but through music and performance.

At its heart is an invitation to listen. What happens when these songs and poems are placed alongside one another? What affinities emerge in language, mood and musical culture? And what might music add to our understanding of the world from which these works emerged?

We are very grateful to Amarylli for giving us permission to share this performance with our readers, and to all those involved in bringing this unusual programme of words and music to life.

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Amarylli · Luteweb

This performance was originally recorded for a De Vere Society webinar and is shared here with the kind permission of Amarylli.

Lords of the South and princes of esteem,

Viceroys unto the state of Africa,

I am no king, yet am I princely born,

Descended from the royal house of France

And nephew to the mighty Charlemagne,

Surnam’d Orlando, the County Palatine.

from Chapman’s Charlemagne, the Distracted Emperor (1604)

Many Oxfordian books and websites continue to be written from the ficti…

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Except Shakespeare alters the cen…

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First and foremost, we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who took part. We have been genuinely delighted by the response and enormously grateful to all those who took the time to record and share their personal journeys with us.

Each contribution offered something different - a particular book, discovery, piece of evidence or moment of realisation that led its contributor to question the traditional story and begin their own journey towards becoming an Oxfordian.

After careful consideration, we are delighted to announce our winners:

Alevi Peña
Shirin Crew
Jessica Lee

Each of our winners will receive a Great Oxford Box Set, congratulations to you all!

We also wanted to recognise every person who contributed to Becoming Oxfordian. Sharing a personal story on camera takes time, thought and no small amount of courage, and every contribution has helped make this project what it is.

For that reason, everyone who took part in the competition will receive a prize from The de Vere Society as a token of our appreciation and thanks.

One of the things this competition has shown us is that there is no single route to becoming an Oxfordian. Some encounter the question through a book or lecture; others through a particular piece of evidence, a film, a conversation or simply their own curiosity. What unites these stories is a willingness to question, investigate and follow the evidence wherever it may lead.

Your stories have made Becoming Oxfordian something very special. More importantly, we hope that by sharing them, they will continue to encourage others to explore the Shakespeare Authorship Question and perhaps begin their own journey of discovery.

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Earl Showerman, a much-loved and highly respected member of the international Oxfordian community.

Earl’s friend and fellow Oxfordian, Kevin Gilvary, has written the following tribute, reflecting on Earl’s life, scholarship and the remarkable contribution he made to Oxfordian studies.

Remembering Earl — by Kevin Gilvary

Oxfordians around the globe are mourning the death on 2 August 2026 of Earl Showerman. He will be remembered as much for his remarkable understanding of the works of Shakespeare as for his infectious enthusiasm in promoting the Oxfordian theory of authorship. Earl made significant contributions to the study of Shakespeare in two ways: firstly, drawing on his own experience as a specialist in the Emergency Department, (A&E) Earl demonstrated the poet’s enormous depth of knowledge and understanding of medicine. As if this was not enough, Earl studied a wide range of Ancient Greek Literature and showed its vastly underrated influence on the bard. Moreover, he played a key role in re-uniting the different Oxfordian societies in the USA.

Earl made a special visit to London in October 2024 to attend the joint DVS/SAT Conference at Charterhouse. He listened carefully to all the speakers and, at the close of the conference, presented the Tom Regnier Award to Alexander Waugh.

The day before he died, he sent me an email detailing his enjoyment of (among other memories) a visit to Westminster Abbey, a joint meeting at Cambridge University, and a conference at the British Library on Elizabethan manuscripts. Earl was born in Detroit on D Day in 1944. He studied at Harvard and then at the Michigan School of Medicine. For a while he lived and worked among the Native Americans in the mid-West before moving to Oregon to be with his wife Lee. He worked in the ER department of a large local hospital, and upon retirement he continued as a hospital porter. He will be missed.

On behalf of everyone at the De Vere Society, we extend our deepest condolences to Lee, Earl’s family, and his many friends and colleagues around the world. Earl’s scholarship, generosity, and friendship enriched our Society and the wider Oxfordian community. He will be sorely missed by us all at the DVS, but his legacy and his contribution to Oxfordian studies will endure.

A Glimpse of Earl’s Scholarship

To accompany this tribute, the following review (from the DVS newsletter, July 2013) gives an insight into Earl’s remarkable scholarship.

Originally reflecting on Earl’s address on Shakespeare and medicine at an Oxfordian conference at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, the article brings together two important strands of Earl’s life: his distinguished career in medicine and his deep engagement with Shakespeare and the authorship question.

It represents, of course, only one aspect of Earl’s extensive contribution to Oxfordian scholarship. His research ranged far beyond Shakespeare’s medical knowledge, not least into the influence of Ancient Greek literature on the plays, and his work, enthusiasm and generosity made a lasting impression on the international Oxfordian community.

We share this piece, not as a summation of Earl’s work, but as one fitting glimpse of the scholarship, intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm that he brought to his studies and so generously shared with others.

Shakespeare and Medicine by Earl Showerman, M. D.

Review by Kevin Gilvary

It is hard to imagine a better place than Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University to hear a distinguished physician with an Oxfordian outlook talk about Shakespeare’s knowledge of medicine. In the first place, after graduating from Harvard and University of Michigan Medical School, Earl Showerman practised emergency medicine for thirty years, living near Ashland, home of the award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After retiring from medicine in 2003, and inspired by seeing so many plays of Shakespeare performed, he enrolled at Southern Oregon University (SOU) to study Shakespeare and to pursue his decade-long love affair with the Shakespeare authorship mystery.

As a location, Gonville and Caius College is famous for its medical students, including William Harvey who attended the College in the 1590s before studying at the prestigious Padua Medical School. Harvey made his name as master of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. In 1616, he announced his theory of the circulation of the blood, which he published in 1628 in De Motu Cordis. A passage in Hamlet seems to anticipate Harvey (1.4.64-70):

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilment; whose effect

Holds such an enmity with blood of man

That swift as quicksilver it courses through

The natural gates and alleys of the body,

And with a sudden vigour doth posset

And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine;

Edward de Vere must have passed Gonville and Caius College frequently on his way from Queens’ where he lodged to St. John’s where he studied.

Earl began his talk explaining how in 2011 he had been invited to speak on his Shakespeare Research to a group of emergency physicians attending a medical conference at Yosemite National Park. At the same time, he had just read Dr. Kenneth Heaton on Shakespeare’s unique representation of psycho-physiological symptoms, such as fainting, hyperventilation, vertigo, and sensory disturbances, conditions that commonly present to the Emergency Room (ER). Thus his topic for that conference was dictated by serendipity. To prepare, Earl re-read Dr. Frank Davis superb Oxfordian article, “Shakespeare’s Medical Knowledge: How did he Acquire it?” (2000). www.shakespeare-oxford.com. Dr. Davis [a retired neuro-surgeon] has spoken on the importance of Shakespeare’s medical knowledge at several authorship conferences. His article demonstrates the playwright’s impressive medical knowledge and clearly challenges the assumptions of orthodoxy.

Dr. Davis reviewed three comprehensive texts (out of many) that have examined Shakespeare’s remarkable understanding of medicine: J. C. Bucknill, Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare (1860), R. R. Simpson, Shakespeare and Medicine (1959), and Aubrey Kail, In the Medical Mind of Shakespeare (1986). In his seminal analysis. Bucknill wrote: “It would be difficult to point to any great author, not himself a physician, in whose works the healing arts is referred to more frequently and more respectfully than in those of Shakespeare.”

Dr. Bucknill was superintendent of a 600-bed psychiatric hospital in Devon and founding editor of the journal Brain. He dedicated his book to Lord Campbell, the Lord Chancellor, who earlier wrote Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements Considered (1859). Dr. Simpson had systematically identified 712 medical references in the plays. More recent studies have confirmed that Shakespeare’s medical allusions refer not only to Galen’s doctrine of the humors, but also to contemporary texts on anatomy, physic, infectious diseases, psychology, alchemy, and many others.

Bucknill was a world-renowned psychiatrist and humanist. In his treatise The Mad Folk of Shakespeare: Psychological Essays (1867) he observes that Shakespeare took a particular interest in neurological and mental illnesses, which he supported by the sheer numbers who commit suicide (Romeo, Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony, Cleopatra), or suffer from epilepsy (Othello, Julius Caesar), alcoholism (Falstaff), melancholia (Hamlet, Jaques, Antonio), madness (Lady Macbeth, Ophelia), visual and auditory hallucinations (Macbeth) and dementia (Lear, King John, Shylock).

Prof. Sir Stanley Wells carefully attends to Dr. Earl Showerman who explains some of the finer points about Shakespeare’s knowledge of medicine outside the Shakespeare Birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Like Bucknill a century earlier, Dr. R. R. Simpson argued that the playwright was not only acquainted with the medical knowledge of the day, but also with the literature. With transparent admiration, Simpson concludes: “the accuracy of his observations, his art use of words, and the clinical picture he leaves in the mind of his audience, are not only unsurpassed, they are not even approached in clinical value in any medical writings, however erudite.”

Dr. Aubrey Kail in The Medical Mind of Shakespeare (1986) expresses similar admiration for Shakespeare’s achievement, asserting that the plays display “a profound knowledge of contemporary physiology and psychology” and that Shakespeare “employed medical terms beyond the powers of any ordinary playwright or physician.” Among other instances, Dr. Kail included the relationship between hope and prognosis, the value of mirth, the evils of alcohol, the pangs of insomnia and the benefits of sleep.

Earl then showed how the research published in the British Medical Journal (2006) and in Medical Humanities (2011) by Dr. Kenneth Heaton extends this tradition of admiration for Shakespeare’s uniquely nuanced representation of the relationship between mind and body. Heaton describes the remarkable frequency Shakespeare depicts episodes of sudden death from high emotion (10), fainting (18), hyperventilation (11) vertigo, hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, temporary deafness, and physical collapse.

Earl then pointed out the close proximity of the Earl of Oxford to much of the medical treatises published in the Elizabethan period. The earliest translation in English of Hippocrates was by Humphrey Llwyd, published posthumously as The Treasury of Healthe, containing many profitable medicines, gathered out of Hipocrates, Galen, and Auicen, by one Petrus Hyspanius & translated into English by Humfrie Lloyd, who hath added therevnto the causes and signes of euerie disease, with the aphorismes of Hypocrates, and Iacobus de Partibus, (1585; STC 14654). This was dedicated to William Cecil, Oxford’s father-in-law.

One other, of many links, was that Oxford’s personal physician, George Baker in 1576, dedicated to Anne Cecil, Countess of Oxford The newe iewell of health, wherein is contayned the most excellent secretes of phisicke and philosophie, . . . Faithfully corrected and published in Englishe, by George Baker, chirurgian (STC 11798).

Earl, however, doubted whether Shakespeare really intended circulation in the account given by the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, or whether he was simply referring to the flow of blood. Baker, who was Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, also dedicated two books to the Earl of Oxford. Apothecary John Hester, the man who would almost single-handedly bring Paracelsism to England, dedicated to Oxford A short discours of the excellent doctour and knight, maister Leonardo Phiorauanti Bolognese vppon chirurgerie. Translated out of Italyan into English, by Iohn Hester (1580; STC 10881). Earl also quotes sources that establish both Mildred Cecil and Ann Cecil de Vere as “empiric” medical practitioners.

Serendipity played out a few days after the Cambridge Conference. Visiting Stratford, Earl had just bought a copy of Kail’s Medical Mind of Shakespeare as a gift for Kevin Gilvary, when the two of them encountered none other than Professor Stanley Wells on Henley Street who obligingly conversed with the visitors on the question of Shakespeare’s medical acumen.

Earl’s talk formed the basis of Chapter 9: ‘How did Shakespeare Learn the Art of Medicine’ in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2013: 99-111)

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‘Shakspeare wrote’:

Whereas on or about the third day … of August having with my good friend … and others taken [a] boat near unto mine house … we did purpose going up Thames, but those that were so to conduct us being much too merry through liquor, they did upset our … barge. All but myself saved themselves by swimming, for though the water was deep, yet over being close nigh to shore made it little difficulty for them, knowing the foresaid art [of swimming. My friend] not seeing me, did ask for me, but one of the company did answer that I was drowning. On the which he pulled off his jerkin and jumped in after me. With much pains he dragged me forth, I being then nearly dead, and so he did save my life, and for the which I do hereby give him as follows: first my written play of Henry IV, Henry V, King John, King Lear … all the profits of the which are wholly to be for said [friend] and at his death then to his first son … and at his death to his brother … and so on for ever in his line.

25^th October 1604ⁱ

What a glorious story! The document containing this is described as a ‘deed of gift’ to Shakspeare’sⁱⁱ friend and neighbour in the Blackfriars. The scholar examining it was Edmond Malone, reporting upon a whole cache of documents, in An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV … Malone published his book in 1796. The cache had allegedly been handed down ‘and so on for ever in his line’, that ‘line’ being William Henry Ireland’s (1775 - 1835), and published the previous year, 1795.

There were a number of aspects in the documents which made Malone more than a little suspicious. In the above story, the spelling included some typical Tudor orthographical characteristics, like <y> for <i>, and a number of (now) surplus <e>s, but a surprising number of unwarranted double letters. Let us consider a sample:

… Masterre William henrye Irelande notte seeynge me dydd aske for mee, butte oune of the Companye dydd answere thatte I was drownynge onn the whyche he pulledd off hys Jerrkynne and Jumpedd inn afterre mee …ⁱⁱⁱ

Mention of gifting ‘mye written Playe neverr yett impryntedd which I have named Kyng henry thyrde of Englande’ was also not convincing. Moreover, Malone notes, ‘the King’s Servants were not then possessed of the Blackfriars theatre’.^iv As Malone piles up the evidence against the document’s authenticity, a sarcastic note emerges; the ‘Jerrkynne’ which the friend pulled off, Malone supposes ‘was made of blue velvet, drawn out with white sattin [sic], and given him by his friend, his Shakspeare, out of that splendid wardrobe, an account of which is reserved for a subsequent page’.^v Elsewhere in his critique Malone considers ‘upset’, or ‘upsett’. This, he comments, is so modern a word it isn’t even in Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755).^vi

Perhaps what is most interesting about the Ireland documents is why Ireland forged them. To please his father? To gain attention? For financial gain? Or because (like many) he felt the records pertaining to William of Stratford were so few and so poor in creating or contributing to the image of the most successful Renaissance playwright in England?

And what of the ‘signature’ at the top? It purports to be Shakspeare’s, and Malone found it at the end of a ‘Profession of Faith’ in the cache he examined. This ‘Profession’ was ‘manifestly formed on a Confession of Faith written by one John Shakspeare’, which Malone had published in 1790.^vii

In Ireland’s story about the drowning – a fictional one – William Shakspeare leaves profits from a number of his plays in perpetuity to W. H. Ireland’s ‘line’. This compares and contrasts with an article in the forthcoming DVS Summer 2026 Newsletter. There we learn that an English King Henry awarded a grant of £1,000 to an Englishman ‘and his heirs’, that is, his ‘line’.

The first recipient of that £1,000 grant was a distant ancestor of a man who may have been the real ‘Shakespeare’ behind the plays – the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Members can read more in the DVS Summer 2026 Newsletter.

Endnotes

i Modernized English, from the deed of gift quoted in Edmond Malone, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV ... T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1796. Pp 211-2.

ii Malone’s preferred spelling.

iii Malone, p 211.

iv Ibid., p 216.

v Ibid., p 218.

vi Ibid., pp 219-20.

vii Ibid., p 198.

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On 4 March 1920, a quiet schoolmaster called J. Thomas Looney, published a seminal study entitled ‘Shakespeare’ Identified: in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. This work established the theory that Oxford was the concealed poet and playwright of the works of Shakespeare.

1 Life of Thomas Looney

Thomas Looney was born in 1870 in South Shields, an industrial town near the mouth of the River Tyne, about five miles downstream of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His family were Methodists. He attended the Chester Diocesan Training College, an Anglican institution, purpose-built as a teacher training college. His Principal there was the Rev. J. D. Best of Queens’ College Cambridge.¹ It seems that he first had a calling as a minister, but then adopted the vocation of a schoolmaster. He enjoyed a long and successful career in teaching, almost certainly at Gateshead High School, on the Durham Road. This establishment came under the authority of the local borough in 1894 when it admitted girls in addition to boys. It is unlikely that any other school in the borough would have been teaching Shakespeare. He lived nearby at 15 Laburnum Gardens, Low Fell, a suburb of Gateshead, and slightly closer to the centre of Newcastle. Aged 44 at the outbreak of the First World War, he was too old to be considered for active service.

During the Second World War, he was evacuated to the countryside in Derbyshire and died at the village of Swadlincote in 1944 aged 73. He was survived by his two daughters, Evelyn and Gladys. He was buried at Saltwell Cemetery in Gateshead, close to his home. In 2017, the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, with some assistance from the DVS, funded a memorial headstone for the grave.

A few miles north of where Thomas Looney lived and worked lies the prestigious Literary and Philosophical Club in Newcastle. The club was established as a hub of learning and enlightenment. In 1825, it had moved into a purpose-built neo-classical building and soon developed its collection of books into the largest lending library outside London. It was here that Thomas read widely and was able to quote from over 230 different books. He was ably assisted by the staff who were adept at obtaining loans from other libraries. After the publication of “Shakespeare” Identified, Looney wrote politely to every reviewer, keeping a copy of his own letters (See James Warren, 2019).

2 Existing accounts of life of Shakespeare

Looney read widely among those who had conducted biographical investigations of Shakespeare’s life, especially James Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889). In Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, first issued in 1881, but successively expanded, Halliwell-Phillipps published transcriptions of primary documents with his own detailed discussion.² Although Outlines is poorly organised and lacking an index, Looney found many admissions which suggested doubt over the authorship.

In his initial search for answers, he was lucky that in 1897, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography Sidney Lee wrote the entry for ‘William Shakespeare’. This entry was by far the longest in the DNB, at about 63,000 words, reflecting more Shakespeare’s importance as a national figure, than the paltry historical record of his life.³ The publishers then released A Life of William Shakespeare in a separate monograph in 1898, amounting to almost 500 pages, which was re-issued in many later editions.⁴ The significance of Lee’s study is not so much his views on “critical points” in the life of Shakespeare but the fact that he attempted a coherent narrative at all – against the admissions by Halliwell-Phillipps and other biographical investigators of the nineteenth century. Lee made the astonishing claim that so much was known about Shakespeare as to make a biography possible. In this, he was echoing John Payne Collier, whose attempt at a full-length biography in 1844 depended on the forgery of a wide range of documents. Unlike other commentators, Lee avoids making inferences from the plays, e.g. observing that in Prospero “traces have been sought without much reason of the lineaments of the dramatist himself” (257). He takes the sonnets to be mainly “literary exercises” in contrast to critics who believe that “Shakespeare avows the experiences of his own heart”. Lee’s own speculation is signalled by the use of the word doubtless on over seventy occasions: “The Rose Theatre was doubtless the earliest scene of Shakespeare’s pronounced successes alike as actor and dramatist.” There is no evidence for this claim. However, the most serious deficiency in this biography was that the character which emerged from the Stratford records did not accord in the least with that of a dramatist.

A completely different approach was adopted by the romantic writer, Frank Harris in The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (1909). Harris relies extensively on his own conjecture: the tragedy of the title refers to an apparently loveless marriage with an older woman and an unrequited love for Mary Fitton (who at the time led the race to be crowned the Dark Lady of the sonnets). For Harris, the character and the life events of Shakespeare could be found in the works:

I intend first of all to prove from Shakespeare’s works that he has painted himself twenty times from youth till age at full length: I shall consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character are clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities and shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was, with his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and paltry self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom.

Thus Harris portrays Shakespeare as gentle, amorous, music-loving, melancholic, unable to hold his drink. This was all very well in describing the character of the dramatist but little help in establishing the identity of the playwright.

3 The case against WS

During the course of his career, Looney taught The Merchant of Venice on a number of occasions.⁵ He became puzzled that a writer from the provinces could be so much at ease with Italian culture. The traditional biography imagined a man who had never travelled abroad, and whose personal records showed no literary interests. Another puzzle was the fact that the records in Stratford indicate that William was a shrewd and successful property dealer, quite at odds with the protagonists of The Merchant of Venice, Antonio and Bassanio, who were reckless spenders. The play suggested that the author thought of material possessions as trifles, certainly lacking an acquisitive nature.

Looney also read widely on those who had expressed doubt on the authorship. He dismissed the cryptographic approach of some Baconians, in particular Ignatius Donnelly.⁶ However, he was very impressed by the writings of Lord Penzance, Judge Webb, Sir George Greenwood and Professor Abel Lefranc, identified as “anti-Stratfordian” writers.⁷ He noted Shakespeare’s expert knowledge of the law, as described in detail by a number of legal authorities. How did a provincial actor from Stratford acquire such expertise? He also noted Shakespeare was exceptionally conversant with the classics. Again, he raised the question of how Shakspere could have acquired such knowledge. He noted further problems with the existing biography of the world’s greatest dramatist:

He was purely passive in respect of all the publications which took place under his name.

While he was apparently working hard in London and having his plays published, he was also living in Stratford and buying property (especially in 1598-1602).

Nothing is known of his activities in London and his addresses (known from his non-payment of taxes and from the Bellott-Mountjoy papers) add nothing to our knowledge of any literary or theatrical activities.

After Greene’s (apparent) attack, and Chettle’s apology, he was largely ignored by contemporaries.

References to the author between 1593-98 are confined to his narrative poems.

References to the author as a dramatist occur only after the first publications were attributed to him in print in 1598.

The public in the early modern period only knew the name ‘Shakespeare’ through printed works attributed to him.

The sole anecdote of him from this period (concerning Burbage and a lady) are consistent with him being personally unknown, as the writer John Manningham had to explain the joke by saying that Shakspere’s first name was William.

He left no trace of any communication with anybody in London. The only letter known to have been sent to him was only concerned with borrowing money.

Edmund Spenser (d. 1599) never mentions him.

Although his company toured the provinces, his name is never mentioned in any municipal archive.

There is no record that he ever acted in any of his own plays. He is only recorded as having acted in two of Jonson’s plays.

The accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber only mention him once (in 1595).

The Lord Chamberlain’s Books of the period do not survive.

His name is missing from the cast-list of Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour; all the other members of the company are listed.

His name is missing from the proceedings against the Earl of Essex and his Rising in 1601.

His name is missing from the company’s attendance on the Spanish Ambassador in 1604.

His name is missing from the company’s litigation in 1612. His name is missing from the company’s involvement in the investiture of Henry as Prince of Wales in 1610.⁸

His name is missing from the descriptions of the burning of the Globe in 1613.

4 Methodology: Profiling the Author

Gradually, Looney became convinced that there was insufficient evidence to even suggest that Shakspere had ever written any plays, ‘whilst there was a very strong prima facie presumption that he had not’. He concluded that the biographical record showed someone who was steady and business-like, a man of the world; but it did not support a case that the man from Stratford could ever be considered the author. While others such as Greenwood wished merely to establish doubt over the authorship, Looney took the argument further; he began a long search for the writer who had penned the plays. This self-imposed challenge was one which he saw ‘required the application of methods of research which are not, strictly speaking, literary methods’. The schoolmaster devised his own methodology; he systematically examined the works of Shakespeare ‘almost as though they had appeared for the first time, not yet associated with the name or personality of any writer’. He then identified characteristics in the plays which most readers would associate with the author. From such characteristics, he would select outstanding features to serve as paramount criteria in the search. Then he would proceed to a search for suitable candidates and finally would test the possible authors against all the known characteristics. All the time, he would maintain a crucial distinction between Shakspere, an actor and businessman from Stratford and Shakespeare, to refer to the author and the works.

Looney decided to draw up a list of characteristics of the author. In this sense, he was developing a profile, a method used by Lord Macaulay when investigating the pseudonym Junius in 1841.⁹ Profiling criminals has long been a practice used by detectives at Scotland Yard.¹⁰ This approach was made popular in the fictional investigations of Sherlock Holmes. In modern times, it is widely used, but in 1920 it was revolutionary. Looney began with hypothesising some general characteristics. Firstly he believed the genius who composed the works of Shakespeare would have been observed as a man of talent but also that he was something of an enigma who shunned the limelight. He would therefore have passed a considerable part of his life apparently doing nothing. So these were his first characteristics: of recognised genius and mysterious. Next, he decided that anyone who lived such a life would be considered eccentric. That he lived apart from the irritating milieu by appearing aloof or even defiant. Such behaviour would give rise to him being considered inferior. So these were the next characteristics: eccentric, aloof, unconventional.

Looney’s study of the history plays led him to decide that the author had enjoyed a superior education. He showed an enormous grasp of English history from 1400, the deposition of Richard II, until the birth of Elizabeth in 1533. His study of the comedies and the tragedies revealed a man of pronounced literary tastes, one completely familiar with classical literature and with Italian literature.

In addition, he decided that the author had an instinctive and unrivalled grasp of drama. Apart from writing the plays themselves, he makes references to the stage, the actors and the audience, within the plays. Well known examples include Jaques’ speech ‘All the world’s a stage’, in As You Like It (II, vii. 138) and of course Hamlet’s advice to the Players:

Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue... Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand... Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor, suit the action to the word... Hamlet III, ii. 1-4.

There is the playwright’s direct engagement with the audience. King Leontes, in The Winter’s Tale, soliloquises about his suspicions of his wife’s possible adultery, and turns to the audience to say:

There have been,

Or I am much deceiv’d, cuckolds ere now;

And many a man there is, even at this present,

Now while I speak this, holds his wife by th’arm

That little thinks she has been sluic’d in’s absence,

And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour,

Sir Smile, his neighbour. The Winter’s Tale, I, ii. 231.

The poetic qualities of the plays must also make us suspect the author was a lyric poet, for which he might well have been recognised. We think of the snatches of songs in the plays – Desdemona’s ‘Willow’ song is one example – or of passages such as Perdita’s at the shepherd’s feast in The Winter’s Tale. There are many lines which are both drama and poetry.

The schoolmaster also noted some special characteristics. The playwright showed unique powers in representing royalty and the nobility in vital, passionate characters, as if he were ‘to the manner born’, and Looney suspected the true author might be a court personage, with an innate feudal outlook. Thirty-four plays in the First Folio present the Ruler, Prince or Monarch of the state where the events take place. Many of these, from the Duke of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors to Cymbeline, King of Britain, exercise powers of life, exile, and even death. From this observation, Looney deduced that the author was an aristocrat writing for the aristocracy.

Moving on to the History plays, Looney enquired whether the author sided with one factor or not. He noted that Shakespeare greatly favoured the Lancastrian cause. Showing no sympathy with rebellion or usurpation, the playwright clearly favours John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster over Richard II and then emphasises that Bolingbroke is merely returning to claim his Lancastrian possessions by “fair sequence and succession”. Then comes “the glorification of Prince Hal” a Lancastrian, in the succeeding plays. In the Yorkist tetralogy, Shakespeare downplays the weakness of King Henry VI, and portrays the Yorkists as the rebels. The tetralogy closes with the monstrous Duke of Gloucester:

The play of Richard III lays bare the internal discord of the Yorkist faction, the downfall and destruction of the Yorkist arch-villain, and the triumph of Henry Richmond, the representative of the House of Lancaster, who had received the nomination and benediction of Henry VI.

In depicting, Henry Duke of Richmond, the Lancastrian with the righteous claim to the throne, Looney concludes that the author came from a family with distinct Lancastrian leanings.

Looney then returns to the setting of the other plays. While Denmark and France feature in some plays, Italy is overwhelmingly his preferred setting, with an atmosphere of someone who really knew and appreciated the culture. He calls this an enthusiasm for Italy. Next our schoolmaster recalls how many references there are to aristocratic pursuits such as hunting and hawking. He therefore cites aristocratic sports as a characteristic of author. Looney was also aware that there are many passages in Shakespeare which fittingly describe the charm and power of music. He therefore took him to be an accomplished musician. Regarding money, we see the contemptible characters of Iago and Polonius as anxious about money in their advice to others. In, “Shakespeare” expresses himself thus:

How quickly nature falls into revolt

When gold becomes her object. For this the foolish over-careful fathers

Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,

Their bones with industry; For this they have engrossed and piled up

The canker’d heaps of strange achieved gold. Part 2 Henry IV, IV, iii. 195

Looney also quotes:

There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,

Doing more murders in this loathsome world

Than these poor compounds… Romeo & Juliet, V, i. 85

He therefore surmised that the author was loose and improvident in money matters.

With respect to women, the author is self-consciously ambiguous, from Hamlet’s damning judgement on his mother – “Frailty thy name is woman!” – to misjudging faithful wives such as Imogen and Hermione. The plays often conclude with the success of a female protagonist, against the more autocratic and chauvinist male hero. Taking into account the negative view of women expressed in some of the sonnets, Looney suggested that the author had a conflicting attitude towards women.

Regarding religion, the author is keen on his monks (e.g. the friars in Romeo & Juliet and Much Ado) revealing interest, knowledge and inclination towards Roman Catholicism, against the steady rise of Protestantism. In Hamlet, the ghost of the Old King is a very Catholic ghost, lamenting that he was murdered before he could receive the catholic sacrament of the Last Orders, and that he would be:

Confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes, done in his days of nature,

Are burnt and purged away Hamlet, I, v. 10

The ghost is describing the horrors of Purgatory, central to Catholic doctrine but anathema to Protestants. Looney concluded that the author was of probable Catholic leanings, but touched with scepticism.

5 Searching for the Author

Looney then systematically searched for someone whose characteristics and background were a more convincing fit for the authorship. He was methodical and logical. He was tentative, and he was rigorous. After a while without gaining a point of departure, he hit upon the narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, which employed iambic pentameter in six line stanzas with the rhyming pattern ababcc.

He sees her coming, and begins to glow,

Even as a dying coal revives with wind,

And with his bonnet hides his angry brow;

Looks on the dull earth with disturbed mind,

Taking no notice that she is so nigh,

For all askance he holds her in his eye. (337-342)

Looney then consulted Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.¹¹ He was expecting to find many poems in the period written in this stanzaic form but he found only one, a three stanza poem on ‘Women’, by Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford:

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 goodwill;

But when I see how frail those creatures are,

I muse that men forget themselves so far.

The subject matter of the poem, women’s fickleness, accorded instantly with the characteristic established previously. There was little information in Palgrave beyond Lord Oxford’s dates. Looney then consulted history books covering the period and found that Oxford was known for his Catholic sympathies. He then consulted the entry for de Vere in Volume LVIII of the DNB and quickly found the following assessment of Oxford’s character and interests:

Oxford, despite his violent and perverse temper, his eccentric taste in dress, and his reckless waste of his substance, evinced a genuine interest in music, and wrote verse of much lyric beauty. Puttenham [The Arte of English Poesie, 1589] and Meres [Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, 1598] reckon him among ‘the best for comedy’ in his day; but although he was a patron of a company of players, no specimens of his dramatic productions survive. A sufficient number of his poems is extant, however, to corroborate Webbe’s comment that he was the best of the courtier poets in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and ‘that in the rare devices of poetry, he may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent of the rest.’ [Discourse of English Poetrie, 1586]

Looney felt that if the name was deleted at the beginning of the paragraph, and a few particulars, almost everybody would accept that the assessment applied to Shakespeare.

6 The Conditions fulfilled

Looney then began to investigate Oxford’s life in more detail and found the conditions fulfilled. From Lee’s description, he noted that Oxford “set his patrimony flying”, which indicated he was improvident in financial matters. He was eccentric, being known for the distinctiveness of dress, and his preference for the Bohemian literary and play-acting associates. He had his own company which played at court and toured the country. He wrote comedies which have not been identified. His education was conducted by celebrated classical scholars and he was keen on travel, especially enjoying a year or so spent in Italy. From the entry in the DNB, Looney was able to conclude that most of the conditions had been fulfilled. Only four points needed separate corroboration, which he offered in the following manner:

1. In relation to sport we notice—and this is really the point that matters — that his poems, few as they are, bear decided witness to the same interest. The haggard hawk, the stricken deer, the hare, the greyhound, the mastiff, the fowling nets and bush-beating are all figures that appear in his lyric verses. In addition to this we notice that his father, John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford, who died when Edward was twelve years of age, had quite a reputation as a sportsman, and until his death Edward was, of course, living with him. The article from which we first quoted mentions his interest in learning to shoot and to ride, so that there is abundant evidence of his familiarity with those sporting pastimes which Shakespeare’s works so amply illustrate.

2. Though no statement of his actual sympathies with the Lancastrian cause has been found, we are assured by several writers that he was proud of his ancient lineage, which, taken along with the following passage on the relationship of the De Veres to the Lancastrian cause, may be accepted as conclusive on the subject:

John the 12th Earl (of Oxford) was attainted and beheaded in 1461, suffering for his loyalty to the Lancastrian line. His son John was restored to the dignity in 1464, but was himself attainted in 1474 in consequence of the active part he had taken on the Lancastrian side during the temporary restoration of Henry VI in 1470. … (He) distinguished himself as the last of the supporters of the cause of the red rose, which he maintained in the castle of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall for many months after the rest of the kingdom had submitted to Edward IV. . . Having been mainly instrumental in bringing Henry (VII) to the throne he was immediately restored to the Earldom of Oxford, and also to the office of Lord Chamberlain which he enjoyed until his, death in 1513. (Archaeological Journal, Vol. 9, 1852, p. 24.)

3. So far as his attitude towards woman is concerned, the poem already quoted in full is sufficient evidence of that deficiency of faith which we have pointed out as marking the Shakespeare sonnets; the very terms employed being as nearly identical as Shakespeare ever allowed himself in two separate utterances on one topic. Then that capacity for intense affection combined with weakness of faith which is one of the peculiarities of Shakespeare’s mind, has not, so far as we are aware, so close a parallel anywhere in literature as in the poems of Edward de Vere. It is not merely in an occasional line, but is the keynote of much of his poetry. Indeed we may say that it probably lies at the root of a great part of the misfortune and mystery in which his life was involved, and may indeed afford an explanation for the very existence of the Shakespeare mystery.

4. So far as the last point, his attitude to Catholicism, is concerned, the quotation we have already given from Green’s “Short History” is all that is really necessary. The fact that his name appears at the head of a list of noblemen who professed to be reconciled to the old faith shows his leanings sufficiently well for us to say of him, as Macaulay says of Shakespeare, that he was not a zealous Protestant writing for zealous Protestants. When, further, we find that his father had professed Catholicism, it is not unlikely that on certain sentimental grounds his leaning was that way. Roman Catholicism would, moreover, be the openly professed religion of his home life during his first eight years. There is also evidence in the State Papers of the time that the English Catholics abroad were at one crisis looking to him and to the Earl of Southampton for support.

Looney then stated his conclusion:

On all the points then which we set before ourselves in entering upon the search, we find that Edward de Vere fulfils the conditions, and the general feeling with which we finish this stage of our enquiry is this, that if we have not actually discovered the author of Shakespeare’s works we have at any rate alighted upon a most exceptional set of resemblances.

Much of the remainder of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified was taken up with describing Oxford. Firstly, he considered the lyric poetry of Oxford and showed how it accorded with ideas, feelings and sentiments expressed in the sonnets of Shakespeare. Then he recounted the life of Edward de Vere from contemporary records, with much discussion. He suggested that when Oxford’s company of players visited Stratford in 1584, young William Shakespeare might have joined them, leaving his wife to give birth to twins the following February. He argued that after his second marriage in 1591, Oxford devoted his life to revising, editing and preparing his poems and plays for publication. The period 1591-1604 was when a majority of plays were published in quarto and when William of Stratford gained enough wealth to buy New Place in 1597, 107 acres of land and an interest in the Stratford tithes. He also links events implied in the sonnets to this period, e.g. the advice to Southampton to marry.

Looney devotes a late chapter to what he found to be an astonishing number of coincidences between Oxford and Hamlet. Just from the first Act of the play, Looney could infer: both lost a father when they were young, both widowed mothers soon remarried. Both have their rightful inheritance withdrawn. Both have ambivalent views towards women. Both are denied permission to travel. Polonius is Burghley and Ophelia is Anne. Laertes is Thomas Cecil. Both have associates named Francis / Francesco and Horace / Horatio.

Finally, Looney looked at posthumous considerations, noting that

His death, we found, was followed by an immediate arrest of Shakespearean publication, and by a number of other striking evidences of the removal of the great dramatist, whilst a temporary revival of publication a few years later was of such a character as to give additional support to the view that the author was then dead.

When confronted with the problem of dating The Tempest, Looney opted against saying it was an early play (like The Comedy of Errors, which is the only other play to observe the unities of time, place, and action), but pronounced it as by another person. Most Oxfordians since have opted for the former explanation. Finally, he makes a plea for all sincere admirers of the works of Shakespeare “to examine, and even to insist upon an authoritative examination, of the evidence”.

7 Positive Reactions to ‘Shakespeare’ Identified

Thomas Looney started a Literary Society dedicated to researching the Authorship Question, from which there exist in 2026 the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, the De Vere Society and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.

Shakespeare Fellowship and its successors

On 6 November 1922, Thomas Looney and a group of other Shakespeare enthusiasts met in Hackney Library, London, to establish the Shakespeare Fellowship. Sir George Greenwood was elected President, Abel Lefranc and L. J. Maxse (the editor of The National Review) were elected vice-presidents, and Colonel B. R. Ward was appointed Honorary Treasurer and Hon. Secretary. The organisation was devoted to researching the Shakespeare Authorship Question, but not to advocate an individual candidate.¹² It had the following aims:

To seek, and if possible establish, the truth concerning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

To organise and encourage research, to promote the discussion of the authorship question and to provide means of publishing contributions to its solution.

To maintain and add to a reference library of works relating to the subject.

The Fellowship’s activities were regularly reported by the Hackney Spectator and by the Stratford Pictorial. Montagu W. Douglas served as President from 1928-45.¹³ Charles Wisner Barrell became the Fellowship’s treasurer in the 1940s. One of the later presidents, Judge Christmas Humphreys (1901-83), arranged for The Shakespeare Fellowship to change its name to the Shakespearean Authorship Society in 1959 and became the Shakespearean Authorship Trust in the 1980s, all the while retaining its original aims. In 1985, The de Vere Society was formed by Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford, and re-established under a new constitution in 1998, under the chairmanship of Christopher Dams. Latterly, Brian Hicks, Mike Llewellyn, Elizabeth Imlay, Kevin Gilvary, Alexander Waugh and Richard Clifford have served as chairman.

In 1957, as an American offshoot from the Shakespeare Fellowship, The Shakespeare Oxford Society (SOS), was dedicated to exploring the Shakespeare authorship question and to researching Edward de Vere as the true author of the works of “Shakespeare.” Among many distinguished contributors to the SOS were Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., Louis Benezet, and Ruth Lloyd Miller. Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens (1920-2019), continued the tradition of lawyers being committed Oxfordians. Another organisation based in the U.S.A. emerged in 2002 the Shakespeare Fellowship, and these organisations merged into the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship in 2013 under their joint presidents, John Hamill and Tom Regnier.

The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford by Capt. B. M. Ward (1928)

The investigation of biographical materials for the Earl of Oxford was initially conducted by Colonel Bernard Rowland Ward (1863-1933), who was a soldier, a poet and a student of Elizabethan literature. He had served in the Royal Engineers in India and Flanders, and was made a C.M.G. in 1917. In February 1922, Col. Ward travelled from London Victoria to Gillingham in Kent to give a lecture to a local literary society about the Sonnets. On the way, he read a favourable account of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in the National Review. This piqued his interest and he bought the book. Already conversant with the doubts expressed by Mark Twain and Henry James, he was immediately convinced that Oxford wrote Shakespeare. Col. Ward then undertook much research himself and made his home in Buckinghamshire the centre of the incipient Oxfordian movement. He linked the sale of Brooke House in 1609 with the publication of the sonnets that year. He also discovered the record of Elizabeth’s payment of £1,000 annuity to Oxford and claimed that Oxford was involved in war propaganda at this time.

His son, Captain Bernard Mordaunt Ward (1893-1945), lived with him and published the biography The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford in 1928. He had taken on the task of investigating original sources, among them the State Papers in the British Library, the Public Record Office, and the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House. From these and many other records, he was able to establish a full account of the Earl’s life in an altogether more sympathetic portrait of the Earl than had hitherto been the case. He was however prevented from treating the Earl as the hidden author by his publisher, John Murray.

Review of Looney by noted Cambridge academic, Joan Robinson

Joan Violet Robinson (1903-1983)¹⁴ was one of the most important British economists of the twentieth century. Born in Surrey as Joan Maurice, she read economics at Girton College, Cambridge.¹⁵ She was a fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, published three books and several articles, became active in the British Labour Party, and gave birth to two daughters. Promoted to a full professorship at Cambridge in 1965, she was also a Fellow of the British Academy from 1958 to 1971. In 1933, she published a review article of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in the Cambridge Review, an in-house magazine for Cambridge students.

The Cambridge Review, 54, 12 May 1933, pp. 389-90. © King’s College, Cambridge

In 1920 a schoolmaster named Looney published a book called ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. This does not sound very promising, and any sensible person would be inclined to dismiss it as some new Baconian nonsense and leave it unread. But Mr. Looney’s book is no such matter. He does not rely upon codes and anagrams, nor upon doubtful interpretations of the plays. Making use mainly of recognised authorities such as Sir Sidney Lee’s Life of Shakespeare, he succeeds in building up what any impartial reader must recognise to be at least a plausible case for De Vere.

In the first chapter he summarises the negative evidence which goes to show that William Shakspere of Stratford could not have been the author of the plays. Now, as long as the only alternative to accepting William Shakspere was to believe that the plays were written by Bacon or by the Man in the Moon, most people preferred to accept William Shakspere. But when a reasonable alternative is offered the negative evidence begins to have weight.

It has always been surprising that Shakespeare (whoever he was) should have been so little remarked by his contemporaries. I do not wish to maintain that any poet of genius must necessarily have a striking personality, but I cannot help feeling that Shakespeare, of all writers, must have been very noticeable, and yet no one appears ever to have noticed him. This is perhaps merely a personal impression, but there is considerable circumstantial evidence to throw doubt on William Shakspere’s claim. I will quote merely one instance. The scholars have been perplexed by the marked differences in the hand-writing of the six known Shakspere signatures. Mr. Looney suggests that Shakspere was unable to write, and that when he had to sign a document he called upon whoever was with him to help. The orthodox, on the other hand, maintain that on one occasion he was nervous, on the next he wrote beautifully, and on a third he was just recovering from a fit.

Having disposed of William Shakspere with this and numerous other points (each of which separately, of course, can be explained away) Mr. Looney set about to find another candidate for the authorship of “Shakespeare”.

Joan Robinson’s Review: ‘Shakespeare’ Identified: continued,

With engaging simplicity he explains how he happened upon Edward de Vere by a fluke. Then he proceeds to construct his case. I will make no attempt to summarise the evidence, firstly because it is all circumstantial and built up by small touches, so that any condensation of it must make it appear unconvincing; secondly because I do not wish to spoil for anyone the purely detective-story pleasure of reading Mr. Looney. I will merely endeavour to describe the final impression.

On the one hand we have the works of Shakespeare attached to the name of a person who, on all the external evidence, appears to have been a nonentity. On the other hand we have a very gifted, fascinating, and somewhat explosive character, claimed by his contemporaries to be the leading poet of the age, of whose work only a handful of early lyrics has survived. On the one hand we have an unknown provincial, arriving in London, it seems, with, his pockets stuffed with accomplished and courtly verses (Venus and Adonis was published shortly after the date of the first recorded reference to Shakspere). On the other hand we have the leading poet of the court, the patron of a company of players, known to be a prolific writer, publishing nothing after the age of twenty-six. The double coincidence is certainly striking. The mystery of de Vere’s silence after 1576 is quite as great as the mystery of Shakspere’s sudden outburst in 1593.

But to all this there is an obvious answer. Hitherto de Vere has been an almost unknown figure. It is recorded of him that he had a quarrel in a tennis court and called Sir Philip Sidney “Puppy.” Successive historians, like sheep following each other through the gap in a hedge, have fastened upon this incident and left the rest of his life unexplored. In this convenient blank, it is natural to argue, Mr. Looney has been free to build whatever structure his fancy led him to prefer. Certainly Mr. Looney appears to be painstaking and scrupulous, but he is admittedly an amateur at research; it is natural to say that, when a qualified student gets to work on the records, it would be a very strange chance if something does not come to light which will blow Mr. Looney’s theory sky high.

But now comes Mr. B. M. Ward’s The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1928). This is a meticulously impartial work, compiled entirely from contemporary documents, and dabbling in no controversial matters. When much unpublished material is brought to light by Mr. Ward no single fact emerges that is incompatible with Mr. Looney’s hypothesis. On the other hand every fresh touch which is added to the portrait of de Vere makes him resemble more closely, in character and in circumstances, the kind of man who might have written “Shakespeare.” Moreover it is remarkable that on several occasions where Mr. Looney turns out to have made an error (for instance in the identification of Spenser’s Willy) the removal of the error actually strengthens his case.

Meanwhile a follower of Mr. Looney had pointed out this passage in the Arte of Poesie, (1589):

In these days poets as well as poesie are become subjects to scorn and derision. Who so is studious in the art, and shows himself excellent in it, they call him phantastical and lightheaded. Now of such among the Nobility or Gentry as be very well seen in the making of poesie, it is come to pass that they are loath to be known of their skill. So, many that have written commendably have suppressed it, or suffered it to be published without their names. And in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of courtly makers, Noblemen and Gentlemen, 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 Earle of Oxforde.

If this passage had started Mr. Looney on his search the rest of the evidence might have been built round it, but on the contrary it turned up after Mr. Looney’s case was completed.

Joan Robinson’s Review: ‘Shakespeare’ Identified: continued,

Mr. Looney was no doubt right to avoid as much as possible the doubtful ground of internal evidence. But internal evidence cannot be neglected, and Dr Rendall, in his study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Edward de Vere,¹⁶ has discovered evidence in plenty. The Sonnets have always presented a dilemma. They are obviously personal, sincere, and written by one equal for another; the attempt to twist them into artificial tributes from a poor poet to a noble patron can only be the result of a complete lack of sensibility. On the other hand to read them against the background of a murky, hand-to-mouth existence in theatres and ale-houses is quite impossible. No sensible reader ever attempts to do so; he reads them on their merits, entirely in a void. Indeed, he may very well protest that this is what he prefers, and that to have to remember Edward de Vere as he reads them would be quite as tiresome as to have to remember William Shakspere. But Dr Rendall, who has both sensibility and common sense, makes it clear that to recognise de Vere as the author robs the Sonnets of none of their greatness, and adds to them many minor charms.

In all this I have made no attempt to restate the evidence. I merely wish to mention that it exists. The case constructed by Mr. Looney and Dr Rendall, has been supported by further research on minor points, and has been neatly flanked by some detailed work by Dr Rendall on the handwriting of de Vere, and by some strange stuff about the portraits which, if it can be established, may well prove unanswerable.

Now, if the case is as strong as I am affirming it to be, how does it happen that the orthodox scholars are content to meet it either by silence or by a few unkind jibes? Why do they not set seriously to work either to explode it or to establish it once and for all?

In the first place, the new theory is extremely disconcerting, the story which it unfolds is excessively queer, and, if it were established, the joke would be far too good. No-one, particularly if he occupies a recognised position, wants to have his ideas so violently upset. Moreover the weight of vested interest, both of capital and of reputation, bound up with the Bard of Avon, is so great that the orthodox have naturally preferred to ignore the new hypothesis rather than to take the smallest risk of helping to establish it.

But secondly, there is some excuse for the scholars who refuse to put their natural scepticism to the test by trying to refute Mr. Looney. For Mr. Looney, as was to be expected, has been followed by a crowd of outrageous cranks. There are books in favour of de Vere which are full of more-than-Baconian orgies of cryptogram hunting, of fantastic identifications in the plays, and of such nonsensical theories as that the sonnets are addressed to an unknown bastard son of de Vere. To the academic critics they have been a god-send, for it is easy enough to protest that to refute such creatures is merely a waste of time, and, lumping Mr. Looney and Dr Rendall along with the rest, the academics dismiss the whole business with a shrug.

My own subject [Economics] provides instructive examples of the relationship between the academics and the cranks. To begin with the cranks have the right intuitions, but they use the wrong arguments. They are coldly received by the academics, who have been taught how to argue. Then the cranks become embittered and begin to abuse the academics, at the same time strengthening the academic position by piling one absurdity upon another in defence of the crank theories. The academics try to teach the plain man to sneer at the cranks, but the plain man feels in his bones that there must be something in what the cranks are saying. The whole position is very unsatisfactory to all concerned. Then at last there arises someone who has the training of an academic, the insight of a crank, and the common sense of a plain man; and the whole muddle begins to be cleared up. The cranks, embittered by long oppression, attack him just as though he were orthodox, the academics look at him askance.

Joan Robinson’s Review: ‘Shakespeare’ Identified: continued,

The plain man hails him as a prophet. It would be rash to press the analogy too far. But it seems to me that this Shakespeare controversy has reached the second stage, but not the third, and, writing as a plain man in these matters, I appeal to Cambridge once more to come to the rescue.

Correspondence with Looney

Looney received a letter from Joan Robinson, dated 28 August 1933, but this letter has not been traced. Looney’s reply, held in the archives of King’s College, Cambridge, confirms her Oxfordian sympathies.:

Will you please accept my warmest thanks for writing as you have done. After all, it is the quality rather than the volume of the support that one wins that matters most in a case like this; and from this point of view I have had little cause for complaint. Although you and your immediate associates many not be identified specially with literary interests, I do not doubt that, working as a group, you will eventually make yourselves felt. … The future is certainly with us, and, sooner or later, the authorities will have to succumb. … All the strength of the Stratfordian case consists in its long acceptance, and it is safe to say that, if the plays had come down to us anonymously, no reasonable person would hesitate to attribute them to the Earl of Oxford.

Geoffrey Hodgson writes: Looney acknowledges that Shakespeare specialists have invested too much in the Stratford man and turns for hope ‘to the rising generation of students.’ In a postscript to this letter, Looney expresses reservations concerning ‘extravagant and improbable’ theories concerning Oxford and Queen Elizabeth that ‘are likely to bring the whole cause into ridicule’. Joan Robinson also wrote that ‘Mr. Looney … has been followed by a crowd of outrageous cranks’ but does not explicitly refer to any particular theory. She opines that apparently ‘nonsensical’ theories help the academic Stratfordians to ‘dismiss the whole business with a shrug.’

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century, was interested in the works of Shakespeare from an early age and recognised Hamlet as the playwright’s most self-revealing character by far.¹⁷ Freud read ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in 1923 and was quickly persuaded that Hamlet was a perfect fit for the life, loves, passions and feelings of Oxford. “I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him” he wrote in his Autobiographical Study (1927).¹⁸

I no longer believe that … the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him. Since reading ‘Shakespeare’ Identified by J. Thomas Looney, I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford…. The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.

Freud was ill when he was to be awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930 and sent his daughter, Anna, to collect it on his behalf. She read his speech in which he described her father’s identification of Oxford as the true author. Freud continued to maintain this position for the rest of his life, especially when he fled from Austria and settled in the London suburb of Hampstead in 1939, despite the pleas of his pupil Ernst Jones and his translator, James Strachey.¹⁹

8 Negative reactions against ‘Shakespeare’ Identified

There have been many attempts to discredit Looney often by silly personal attacks on him, his name or his background. Or, worse, by simply ignoring the value of his arguments. These objections have been collected by Samuel Schoenbaum in Shakespeare’s Lives, fifty years later. Firstly, authorship sceptics were not simply treated as pariahs but were branded with the name ‘heretic’ as if there were a Shakespeare Orthodoxy under divine guidance, dissent from which merited punishment by death. The terms ‘orthodox’ and ‘heretic’ were first applied in the Victorian period to anyone who doubted the traditional attribution of the works of Shakespeare. These ‘heretics’ were simply dissatisfied with the speculative, romantic biographies which had begun with Charles Knight (1843) and John Payne Collier (1844). Yet at no stage do any ‘orthodox’ Shakespeare commentators ever claim divine inspiration for their belief in the Stratford Man, nor could they ever.

The main objection to the new Oxfordian theory of Authorship was the fact that Oxford died in 1604, whereas many plays had been dated afterwards. Schoenbaum (Lives 601) makes an extraordinary admission: that Oxford had died before a string of plays had “appeared on the stage”. Against this, it should be noted that:

a) there is no record of All’s Well, Coriolanus or Timon of Athens on stage in the early modern period anyway; so it was possible for plays to premiere after an author’s death.

b) there is NO contemporary record as to the date of composition of any play of Shakespeare.

c) the dates have been assigned closely prior to those published mainly in the 1590s.

d) the remaining plays have been allocated to dates roughly in the period assumed for Shakespeare’s working career, roughly 1590-1612. There is no independent basis for such dating.²⁰

Here are ten more objections to Looney’s thesis, most of which are easy to dismiss even by someone who did not agree with Looney’s findings.

i. Stratfordians seem unable to resist making silly quips about the name Looney. As if this were of any relevance to the theory proposed. There is a distinguished professor of Italian literature in the University of North Carolina, called Dennis Looney (b. 1955); it would be an impertinence to attempt to ridicule his name, or any other person’s family name.

ii. It was also noted that the name is of Manx origin and that the Looney clan might claim descent from the Earls of Derby. Again irrelevant, as well as untrue. Looney never made this claim.

iii. There were no books north of the River Wear, the location of Durham Cathedral and the University which was established in 1832. Again very silly. The Literary & Philosophical Library (Lit & Phil Library) at Newcastle had opened in 1825, while Durham University had established affiliated colleges in Newcastle from 1852. In the Act of 1908, Parliament recognised that the University of Durham had two divisions and that King’s College, located in Newcastle, was already teaching a full range of arts, sciences and medicine.²¹

iv. Looney undertook training as a minister at Chester Diocesan Training College, before switching to become a schoolmaster. As if this could be twisted to impugn his character. Again irrelevant. Many people embark on one vocation and switch to another.

v. Looney admitted that he was not an expert, even though he had devoted years to the study of the subject. Who at the time was an expert? Professors and students of English literature at the universities were rare in 1920. Note that the most highly regarded Shakespeare authority of the nineteenth century, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, was self-taught in the subject. So was Sir Edmund Chambers (1866-1954) in the twentieth century. Chambers had studied Litterae Humaniores (Classics) at Corpus Christi College Oxford, before spending his entire working life at the Board of Education, while researching a wide range of sources for his publications on Shakespeare and on the Elizabethan theatre.

vi. Schoenbaum refers to Looney as a “gentle retiring soul”. Please be more patronising.

vii. Schoenbaum claims that snobbery apparently led Looney to look for a Shakespeare with blue-blood in his veins. Er, excuse me. Just reading the opening chapters of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified should convince anyone as to why Looney was not satisfied with the traditional story and how he came to realise that the author was almost certainly from the nobility. After all, thirty-four plays have a court setting with the Monarch or Ruler as a speaking character. There are no plays which feature a provincial ale-taster as its hero.

viii. Schoenbaum not only refers to Aubrey’s “presumably apocryphal anecdote” about the Earl’s having broken wind in the presence of the Queen, yet he quotes it verbatim. Again irrelevant.

ix. Renowned scholar, A. W. Pollard claimed that the works of Shakespeare could be fitted to almost any person. That is, any person except a glove-maker, a corn dealer, or a wool merchant from a provincial town, who absconded from his parish lodgings every time he had to pay some tax.

x. Finally, Schoenbaum mentions Looney’s long list of correspondences between the life of Oxford and major characters in the works of Shakespeare. He dismisses these with an ironic comment: “Indeed the Earl can scarcely restrain himself from putting in appearances everywhere in the canon.” Hamlet, Bertram in All’s Well, Posthumous in Cymbeline, Timon of Athens and many other protagonists in the plays closely parallel documented events in Oxford’s life. Perhaps the great Samuel Schoenbaum should have meditated upon such correspondences and compare how far serious character in the plays comes close to the documented events in the life of William of Stratford.

Yet Samuel Schoenbaum makes a final admission in Shakespeare’s Lives:

Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record.

Now if Schoenbaum and other ‘orthodox’ writers simply reconsidered Looney’s thesis with an open mind, they would find that the ‘vertiginous expanse’ has indeed been bridged.

References

Greenwood, Sir George (1908) The Shakespeare Problem Restated.

Hope, Warren and Kim Holsten (1992) The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories, (2d ed. 2009).

Lefranc, Abel (1918) Sous le masque de William Shakespeare: William Stanley, Vie comte de Derby (2 vol.)

Looney, J. Thomas. (1920) ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London: Cecil Palmer). Published in the same year in New York by Frederick A. Stokes Co. Second U.S. Edition published in 1948 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Third U.S. edition published in 1975 by Kennikat, ed. Ruth Lloyd Miller. Centenary Edition published in 2018 (ed. Warren below).

Rendall, Canon G. H. (1930) Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward De Vere. Schoenbaum, Samuel (1970) Shakespeare’s Lives.

Shahan, John and Alexander Waugh (eds. (2013). Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? Exposing an Industry in Denial.

Warren, James A., ed. (2018) “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Centenary Edition (Somerville Press, MA).

Warren, James A., ed. (2019) “Shakespeare” Revealed: The Collected Articles and Published Letters of J. Thomas Looney.

Webb, Judge Thomas E. (1902) The Mystery of William Shakespeare, A Summary of Evidence.

Wells, Sir Stanley and Rev. Dr. Paul Edmondson, eds. (2013) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy.

Wilde, J.P. (1902) Lord Penzance on the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy - A Judicial Summing-Up.

Wilde, J.P. (1992) Lord Penzance’s Trial of Shakespeare: Verdict for Bacon (ed. M.H. Kinnear).

Click here for Endnotes

To introduce Jan’s work, we are pleased to share her article Life at Cecil House. Offering a vivid glimpse into the environment that shaped the young Edward de Vere, it is a fascinating and thought-provoking piece that showcases…

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This Chapter therefore contains many items which will be news to the student or other interested reader and it is right that the sceptic and the public generally should be able to see as much as a short Chapter can unfold the extent of the Oxford effect. For the rock-solid sceptic, I make no claim for Oxford until the last paragraph of the text, but no doubt alternative persons will be suggested – or not.

Chapter Five

The Introduction suggests that the moment the Revolution in English Literature takes off is with the return of Oxford from his Italian journey in the April of 1576, being unceremoniously dumped by his pirate captors on a Sussex beach wearing only his shirt. Political Revolutions have a leader who emerges: which is also a moment when that leader makes his entry. For example, Lenin appears after a journey from Germany in a sealed train at St Petersburg station 3^rd April 1917, and the rest is recorded history with plenty of eyewitnesses and commentators. The Cultural Revolution, four hundred and fifty years ago, while infinitely more beneficial, is not so fortunate in both the number and quality of its contemporary commentators. It is essential to examine such evidence as we have for that Revolution. The conclusion is that in that Cultural Revolution Oxford is that leader and his return to England is that moment.

A: The Revolution in English Literature

The Renaissance achievement had been sudden and substantial

— Gavin Alexander 2004 p. xxii

Although we may date in effect the Revolution in English Literature to 1575/80, there were forerunners, as in Lenin’s Revolution as those embedded Bolshevik and fellow-traveller cells in Tsarist Russia prior to 1917. Around 1530, William Tyndale asserted – in response to claims that English was too barbarous for biblical translation – that the English language did possess grace.

There can be little doubt that the effect of the translation of the Bible was the main catalyst, and with that Revolution would be the accompanying preaching from the Church and other pulpits. The state would take a very full interest in the ‘orthodoxy’ of contemporary preaching.

There are a number of examples of early translators who were actually proud of the English tongue. Thomas Phaer 1558 deliberately undertook a translation of the Aeneid to defend his native tongue against the charge of barbarism, and to encourage young writers to engage in the composition of poetry by showing them the potentialities of their native language, and his advice was repeated by Barnabe Googe in 1560.

Sir Thomas Smith, the sometime tutor and de facto guardian to the Earl of Oxford and perhaps the leading scholar of his time, wrote c. 1570 that when the use of English “was marked by precision and purity it might even compare with Latin for beauty and force of expression”.¹

George Gascoigne in his anthology A Hundreth Sundry Flowers 1573 wants future authors to leave off writing trifling love poems for more serious subjects:

For if quickness of invention, proper vocables, apt epithets, and a store of monosyllables may help a pleasant brain to be crowned with laurel. I doubt not but both our countrymen and country language might be entronised [enthroned] among the old foreleaders unto Mount Helicon.

In Scotland, perhaps the Revolution was scarcely slower off the ground. For instance, Thomas Hudson, who recounts the genesis of his translation of du Bartas’ The History of Judith 1581² in terms which shed a light on Court manners of the time, and the respect given to the barely teenage James VI’s view of the language:

As your Majesty Sir, after your accustomed and virtuous manner was sometime discoursing at table with such of your Domestiques [courtiers of the Royal household], as chanced to be attendant. It pleased your Highness (not only to esteem the peerless style of Homer, and the Latin Virgil to be inimitable to us, whose tongue is barbarous and corrupted) but also to allege partly through delight your Majesty took in the haughty style of those most famous writers, and partly to sound the opinion of others, that also the lofty phrase, the grave indictment, the facound [facile, fecund] terms of the French Sallust [du Bartas] (for the like resemblance) could not be followed, nor sufficiently expressed in our rude and impollished English language. Wherein, I more boldly than advisedly (with your Majesty’s licence) declared my simple opinion. Not calling to mind that I was to give my verdict in presence of so sharp and clear-eyed a censure as your Highness is: but rashly I alleged that it was nothing impossible even to follow the footsteps of the same great poet Sallust, and translate his verse (which nevertheless is of itself exquisite) succinctly, and sensibly in our own vulgar speech. Whereupon it pleased your Majesty… to assign me, the History of Judith, as an agreeable subject to your Highness, to be turned by me into English verse: not for any gift or special science that was in me, who am inferior in knowledge and erudition to the least of your Majesty’s Court, but by reason (peradventure) of my bold assertion that your Majesty, who will not have the meanest of your house unoccupied, would have me bare the yoke, and drive forth the penance, that I had rashly procured. … In the which I have so behaved myself, that through your Majesty’s concurrence, I have not exceeded the number of lines written by the author: in every one of which, he also hath two syllables more than my English bears. And this notwithstanding, I suppose your Majesty shall find little of my author’s meaning pretermitted [missed out]. Wherefore if such be done by me, who am of another profession, and of so simple literature, I leave it to be consired [considered] by your Majesty what such as are consummate in letters and knows the weighty words, the pithy sentences, the polished terms, and full efficacy of the English tongue would have done.

I do hope the depth to which Hudson’s tongue went into his cheek did not do him too serious an injury.

And then the Revolution happened. Before we consider the elements of it, we ought to treat the effect of the explosion and seek out those commentators who understood, some more than others, the effect and extent of that Revolution.

In 1577, the historian Holinshed in his first edition contends that the vernacular had so developed that:

there was no one speech under the sun spoken in our time, that hath or can have more variety of words, copie [copiousness] of phrases, or figures or flowers of eloquence, than hath our English tongue ... .

The second edition 1587 produced some years after his death is widely considered a source for some of the history plays and King Lear: as we shall see in Ch. 8, it may be the borrower from those plays.

In 1580, Jacques Bellot in his The English Scholemaister 1580 writes that though English has as yet no great reputation, the language is so rich that it deserves to be placed among the most famous of the modern languages. The following year having written a polemic against the detractors of English, George Pettie continues in the Civile Conversation of Mr. Stephen Guazzo:

But how hardly soever you deal with your tongue, how barbarous soever you count it, how little soever you esteem it, I durst myself undertake (If I were furnished with learning otherwise) to write in it as copiously for variety, as compendiously for brevity, as choicely for words, as pithily for sentences, as pleasantly for figures, and every word as eloquently, as any writer should do in any vulgar tongue whatsoever.

This element of eloquence is recognised quite early as the essential ingredient, which transforms English into its post-1580 form, or provides the basis for its changed reputation. Henry Peacham, whom we met when the dating of Titus Andronicus was considered (in Ch. 2), sets out many illustrations from the Bible to indicate clearly that eloquence is possible in the vernacular, in his (a very early critical essay) The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning The Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick From Whence May Bee Gathered all manner of Flowers, Coulors, Ornaments, Exornations, Formes and Fashions of Speech, very profitable for all those that be studious of Eloquence, and that reade most Eloquent Poets and Orators, and also helpeth much for the better understanding of the Holy Scriptures 1577.

The most eloquent of Peacham’s contemporaries would appear to be Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Westminster School and play producer. In his First Part of the Elementarie 1582, he has the confidence to write:

If the spreading sea, and the spacious land could use any speech, they would both show you, where, and in how many strange places, they have seen our people, and also give you to wit, that they deal in as much, and as great varieties of matters, as any other people do, whether at home or abroad. Which is the reason why our tongue doth serve to so many uses, because it is conversant to so many people, and so well acquainted with so many matters in sundry kinds of dealing.

and:

For is it not indeed a marvellous bondage, to become servants to one tongue for learning sake, the most of our time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue, with the gain of most time? our own bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom, the Latin tongue remembering [reminding] us of our thraldom and bondage? I love Rome, but London better, I favour Italy, but England more, I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.

and:

But why not all in English, a tongue of itself both deep in conceit, and frank in delivery? I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater plainness, than our English tongue is, if the English utterer be as skilful in their matter, which he is to utter: as the foreign utterer is. Which methink I durst prove in any most strange argument, even myself, though no great clerk, but great wellwiller to my natural country. And though we use and must use many foreign terms when we deal with such arguments, we do not any more than the bravest tongues do and even very those, which crake of [grate harshly in] their cunning… It is our accident which restrains our tongue, and not the tongue itself, which will strain with the strongest, and stretch to the furthest, for either government if we were conquerors, or for cunning, if we were treasurers, not any whit behind the subtle Greek for couching close, or the stately Latin for spreading fair. Our tongue is capable, if our people would be painful [work at it]. — quotations from E. T. Compagnac edition (Blackwell, Oxford 1924) at p.90 and between pp.266 and 277

From the examples quoted at the beginning of this chapter, it might be possible to believe that English and its reputation evolved slowly, but there can be no guarantee of this, especially as stacked against such evolution theory are the opinions of those contemporaries who did not believe that English could attain or surpass the achievements of Latin, Greek, Italian, French and Spanish, or who saw only imitation as the only way to improvement. So there must have been a more accelerated process to provide the catalyst to the Revolution.

When we look back via the prose of Dr. Johnson or the verse of Dryden, it is too easy to view the history of the English language and its literature as a gentle, inevitable evolution towards regularity and refinement, and the idea of English as a world language as a foregone conclusion. But we must not forget what Dryden and Johnson knew well – that the Renaissance achievement had been sudden and substantial [my emphasis], and the story of language and literature they wrote … really began in the sixteenth century.³ — Gavin Alexander

Elizabethans of the final two decades of the reign recognised that there had been a substantial change, which they put down to the efforts of the poets, and to Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy.⁴

William Webbe (fl.1568–1591) is an intermediate figure, who commended Oxford (in Ch. 2):

among whom [the Court litterati] the right honourable Earle of Oxford may challenge to him selfe the tytle of the most excellent among the rest,

but then, perhaps in contradiction:

gain though our words cannot be forced to abyde the touch of Position and other rules of Prosodia,yet there is such a natural force or quantity in eche worde, that it will not abide anie place but one, without some foule disgrace: as for example, try anie verse, as thys: ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange I purpose to intreate’;

which happens to be the first line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Oxford’s translation (see Ch. 2) Its use (of all the many thousands Webbe could have chosen) may indicate that the attribution to Golding may not have been accepted by those in the know, notwithstanding the lavish encomium Webbe gives him (Arber edition pp.62, 33, 34).

So Thomas Nashe in 1592:

the Poets of our time have cleansed our language from barbarism, and made the vulgar sort, here in London…to aspire to a richer purity of speech than is communicated with (among) the Comminalty of any Nation under heaven.⁵

Thomas Lodge praises the poets,

who brought the Chaos of our tongue in frame.

George Puttenham, the likely author of The Arte of English Poesy 1589, which I comment on in greater depth in Chapter 9, affectionately thanks those poets, whom he lists:

for their studious endeavors, commendably employed in enriching and polishing their native tongue” which they have “so beautified … as at this day it will be found our nation is nothing inferior to the French or Italian.

Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia 1598 gives credit to a long list of poets, by whom:

the English tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments.

The majority of these poets flourish later than that vital period 1575–80. This means that there is a void in that vital period, an absence of evidence for literature at that date which is logically unacceptable. Living so close to that period, perhaps those contemporary critics did not perceive fully how the Revolution had developed (e.g. William Webbe see above). At an early stage before printing and publication, they or some of them might have had access to manuscript versions of Sidney’s poems and Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and no one could blame them from being bowled over by the impact of these poems and giving some credit to them for the Revolution – incorrectly, I think, and I discuss this aspect further below.

However, the effect of the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593 is apparently that Shakespeare put himself at the head of a fashion instead of imitating one (Dover Wilson p.54). However, for the reasons outlined in Chapter 3, Venus and Adonis was certainly written and attained a following (with the author at its head) a good deal earlier. Some of the Eclogues in Greene’s Menaphon 1589 owe something to Venus and Adonis.⁶

Oxford was the catalyst for the English Language Revolution. R.F. Jones (p.212 n.94) writes:

The democratic humility of earlier vernacular writers gave way to the aristocratic [my emphasis] spirit of the poets… The democratic implications in Protestantism, and the invention of printing, both definitely associated with the vernacular, had something to do with the perception of English as uneloquent, and with hostility to rhetoric. Elizabethan poets reverse both attitudes. They join with the Humanists in placing high value upon eloquence, but break with them, emphasising the eloquent nature of the native tongue, and, as a result, the simple homespun vernacular passes from its humble abode to dwell in the gorgeous palace of its literature.

Jones does not discuss the writers behind that process, but it seems clear it was the dramatists [or rather a dramatist] who led the field. In corroboration I quote in n.17 the opinions of C. S. Lewis and Saintsbury where I draw clear conclusions as to Oxford’s responsibility.

Ted Hughes (p.192) in his critique aptly sums it up:

In responding to that need for that language of the common bond, Shakespeare has invented, as if accidentally, an extraordinary new form of English. He has demonstrated high language and low, with what to forced system of intermarriage that goes right through his usage. This reflects the interfertilisation of the high seriousness and low comedy on the plane of action. [Later in his career] he welds the contrasts and conflicting extremes of his, into the composite, new stage language of the common bond. …. And the strange fact is that while accomplishing all of this, for that very specific and historically brief situation within the theatre, he invented a language that is somehow closer to that vital expressive life of English, still than anything set down since.

His view has ancient support from Mulcaster’s Elementarie 1582, who wrote (p.172):

Our tongue seemeth to have two heads, the one home born and the other a stranger.

The Revolution without the input of Oxford after 1575 might well have been gradual or delayed or proved stillborn. In addition to a residue of academic critics, who would not accept the ascent of English to the first rank of literary languages, there was also another set of conservatives who argued that English was a perfectly good language, but to be put in verse acceptable as literature, it had to be written in Classical metres in imitation of the Classic Latin poets. Thus William Webbe, author of A Discourse of English Poetry 1586, recognising the part played by prose writers in the refinement of the mother tongue, complains that “only Poetry hath found fewest friends to amend it”, so that “our English speech, in some of the wisest men’s judgments, hath never attained to any sufficient ripeness, nay not full avoided the reproach of barbarousness in Poetry”. He exhorts the poets to abide by the Classical rules, whether or not modified to suit the language as necessary.⁷

R.F. Jones summarises the progress of reform in English and the critics’ views on spelling, grammar and lexicography from 1550 onward and reviews the works of (inter alios) Sir Thomas Smith and Mulcaster in their efforts to raise English as a respectable language, but:

the tongue was rushing on past [my italics] the demands of spelling, grammar and lexicography to a rendezvous with the greatest literature England ever produced. - p.167

Oxford’s views on grammar are no doubt reflected in the quotation from Nashe in Ch. 10.

Chief among the conservatives was Gabriel Harvey who after the publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes’ Calendar 1579 sought to persuade the author to abide by those rules, and had a (mercifully) short-lived success in that endeavour. Harvey was able to praise Stanyhurst who like Webbe did permit some modifications in his 1582 translation of the Aeneid, with the following result, which trembles between not-too-happy and ludicrous:

This said, with darksome night shade quite cloudy she vanisht

Grisly faces frouncing, eke against Troy leagued in hatred

Of saints sour deities I see

Then did I mark plainly the castle of Ilion uplayed

And Trojan buildings quite topsy turvy removed.⁸

Harvey⁹ and his friends laboured on, and in 1599, there appeared The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry VII, compiled in English rhythmical hexameters with from its preface:

And to refine our speech, to procure our natural English

Far to be more elegant; that verse may skilfully flourish.

Which when it is re’d’ifi’d, eloquent and known to be perfit,

Unto thee, and to thy realm, (O puissant Prince) what credit!

Hexameters will amend our speech (thou sacred Eliza)

Publish an orthography, and teach us true idioma.

Oxford, aided as time passed in effect by Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney,¹⁰ no doubt saw these ideas off. Claims are made that these poets were the authors of the Revolution or took some major part in it. Spenser’s Shepheardes’ Calendar was published in 1579 and shortly after that, he may have begun The Faerie Queen. This appears to have circulated quite widely in manuscript, but was not published and printed till 1589. Sidney’s works circulated in manuscript before he died of wounds after Zutphen in 1586, but Astrophel and Stella was not published until 1591.

Shepheardes’ Calendar comes in for criticism, in that, although the many archaisms delighted contemporaries, “they were really alien to their experience”¹¹ and in effect nostalgic or retrogressive: Spenser attached himself to a fading past of medieval romances including Arthurian stories. His effects can be studied and over-literary. In summary, he was a one-off, not a leader of a poetic or language revolution, notwithstanding that The Faerie Queen is a poetic masterpiece.

John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit 1579 and Euphues His England 1580 are landmark works in the history of the novel, but his Courtly mannerist style of writing with its reliance on a temporary conversational fad rather than the essential rhetoric element hardly fills the evidential void in the Revolution period. Likewise, Sidney’s own prose works of criticism can be ruled out, since they evince a conservative turn of mind, and were not published until 1592. Sidney launched an attack on Shakespeare as will be seen from the next chapter.

Much of this chapter could have been taken up with examples from poets from the last ten or twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign. These would merely exemplify the triumph of the Revolution, and not necessarily help to identify its causes or take forward the history of its genesis. However, this is not to underplay its triumph, which was recognised by the Elizabethans themselves. An eccentric Frenchman calling himself John Soothern, in the service of Oxford himself, in 1584 serenaded his mistress thus:

My name, quoth I, is Soothern, and

Madame, let that suffice;

That Soothern will raise the Eng-

Lish language to the skies.

The wanton of the Muses, and

Whose well composed rime

Will live in despite of the heavens,

And Triumph over time.¹²

Then more seriously, Samuel Daniel in Poetical Essays – revised 1599:

Should we this ornament of glory then

As th’ immaterial fruits of shades, neglect?

Or should we careless come behind the rest

In power of words, that go before in worth,

Whenas our accents equal to the best

Is able greater wonders to bring forth

When all that ever hotter spirits exprest

[i.e. Italian, French or Spanish]

Comes bettered by the patience of the North?

And who in time knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent,

T’ enrich unknowing Nations with our stores?

What worlds in th’ yet unformed Occident

May come refin’d with th’ accents that are ours?

[brilliant prophesy!]

Or who can tell for what great work in hand

The greatness of our style, is now ordain’d?

What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,

What thoughts let out. What humors keep restrain’d

What mischief it may powerfully withstand,

And what fair ends may thereby be attain’d.

And as for Poesie (mother of this force)

That breeds, brings forth, and nourishes this might,

Teaching it in a loose, but measured course,

With comely motions how to go upright:

And fostring it with bountiful discourse

Adorns it thus in fashions of delight.” — Musophilus, ll. 939-964¹³

“Bountiful discourse” is essential, but the real problem is that there is not yet, or not yet enough, eloquential appeal, and with it the declamatory opportunity that the theatre gives. The theatre’s essential contribution is considered in the next section.

While poetry is a vital element in consolidating the gains of the Revolution and in recording its progress, there is one all-important ingredient needed to complete the picture of the explosion of that Revolution.

Elizabethan literature is a literature of the spoken word. Just as oratory dominated the domestic training of the humanist, so – in the age of the Reformation and popular controversy – the spoken literary forms of preaching and acting dominated the printed forms of journalism and fiction, while in poetry there was the related influence of song.¹⁴ — Camden: Essay on the Languages – quoted by Bolton p.30

In effect, the stage provides the principal setting for that essential eloquential appeal enabling that “discourse” to be or become “bountiful.”

The playwright Heywood bears this out, writing in his Apology for Actors 1607:

Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven and broken language in the world…is now by this secondary means of playing, continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it: so that in the process … it is grown to a most perfect and composed language, that many excellent works and elaborate Poems writ in the same, that many nations grow enamoured of our tongue (before despised). — Book III

The historian and antiquarian William Camden (a follower of Sidney, which may account for the tone of his comments – Ian Johnson p.122) was perhaps not quite as convinced, but he did write (1605):

… pardon me and think me not overbalanced with affection, if I think our English tongue (I will not say as sacred as the Hebrew, or as learned as the Greek), but as fluent as Latin, as courteous as the Spanish, as courtlike as the French, and as amorous as the Italian, as some Italianated amorous have confessed.¹⁵

Perhaps he had Oxford in mind.

B: The Revolution and The Theatre

The summary of one ‘orthodox’ critic¹⁶ sets the scene:

One generalisation about Elizabethan drama which would perhaps be near the truth could be formulated in these terms: Elizabethan drama is great because it draws its lifeblood from a culture which is in a state of unity within itself. During Shakespeare’s working life time, or at any rate at most during the years 1585 [notice how the date chosen is somewhat late for Oxford] to 1615, it is a form of art which appears to have been accessible to almost every rank in the rather rigidly maintained social hierarchy. That social hierarchy, although subject to all sorts of disintegrating pressures, is, generally and for a brief moment in history, agreed upon as a suitable solution to the theological and social problem; therefore, it can equably and with the agreement of most, be reflected in the drama. The drama, in fact, is itself the aesthetic expression of the common culture. Consequently, the dramatists, who for the moment become the representatives of the people in the widest sense, have an eagle eye for the manifestation of the disintegrating processes which threaten – and do, in fact, finally overwhelm – the cultural unity.

It is interesting that the datings roughly correspond to the period of general appreciation of Oxford as author before that appreciation begins gradually to decrease (see Ch. 13).

1576 is an absolutely vital year in the history of English language and culture. First, it is the date for Oxford’s return from Italy, and secondly, it begins the supply of that vital element of public eloquence lacking as we saw at the end of the last section: the opening of The Theatre in 1576, the essential development in English Literature and theatre.¹⁷ Now the writers and the players have a permanent forum for experiment as well as rehearsal and performance. This is the ‘Bastille moment’ for the Revolution.¹⁸

Prior to 1576, there were only very short-lived fixed public theatres. Theatrical companies would travel round England under the protection of a great lord, making one-off performances, mainly of morality plays. These plays must have had some success, but there was no commercial or artistic incentive for a fixed locus where the art of theatre could be refined or be the subject of experiment, or even for meeting the need for dramatic works to please a consistently attending and paying public. These travelling theatrical companies might be compared to the ownership of a one channel television station switched on once a year in the provinces and not much more in London: the sixteenth century could switch on by attending a performance or miss out on the very infrequently available externally produced entertainments. The companies’ effective monopoly to a virtually captive audience (to say nothing of the physical effort and management of the travelling, setting up and taking down) would take away the incentive for artistic improvement. A case therefore for low estimation of public performances of plays prior to 1576 seems to be made out. The verse in these plays is disfigured by doggerel and fourteen syllable iambics, which “died hard, however, thoroughly ill-fitted as they were for dramatic use, and, as readers of Love’s Labours Lost know, survived even in the early plays of Shakespeare” [no doubt as parodies]. “… In the lighter parts there are sometimes fair touches of low comedy; in the graver occasionally, though much more rarely, a touching or dignified phrase or two. But the plays as wholes are like Ovid’s first fruits of the deluge – nondescripts incapable of life, and good for no useful or ornamental purpose.”¹⁹ This view is shared by Samuel Johnson (see Ch. 13).

Archaeologists in June 2020 uncovered the base of the Red Lion playhouse in Whitechapel, London, built in 1567 by James Burbage and his brother-in-law John Brayne, but how long this playhouse lasted remains in doubt. The title of one play The Story of Samson may not indicate much sophistication, and whether Oxford was then involved as a seventeen year old seems unlikely. If he or any of the Court literati was concerned, perhaps the plays (with versions written, say, before 1575) mentioned in Chs. 1 and 9 should not be overlooked.

In 1576, the first permanent theatre, The Theatre, opened in London at Shoreditch. Richard Burbage takes the credit, but in order to launch the undertaking and to provide a permanent stage for plays and full(er) employment for actors, the following requirements would need to be met:

1. finance

2. political clout

3. premises (design and construction)

4. actors

5. materials (plays, etcetera)

I divide this section into two: the first containing the elements a), b) and c): the second d) and e).

1. FINANCE, POLITICAL CLOUT, PREMISES (DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION)

The building of theatres was unknown in the Middle Ages in England, or indeed in any European country. Theatre building building starts suddenly starts in London in the sixteenth century. Yates 1969 p.101

Some one or more persons with finance and/or political clout would have to be keen enough to join in the project, even though the social status of actors, acting and even playwriting was very low. If one of those persons were also an actor and/or a playwright, the show could go on. We know it did and all five preconditions were met, as The Theatre lasted at Shoreditch for twenty-two years before being ‘transferred’/relocated.

Cuthbert Burbage stated much later in the Sharers’ Papers (1635):

The father (James Burbage) of us Cuthbert and Richard Burbage was the first builder of playhouses and was himself in his younger years a player. The Theatre he built with many hundreds of pounds taken up at interest.²⁰

However:

Burbage was a man of small means not worth above a hundred marks (£34) and had no credit.²¹

Some of the resulting litigation appears to show that James Burbage had borrowed £500 and (as the litigation about the balance reveals) required £200 to complete.²² While there is no direct evidence as to who provided that first £500, the absence of such evidence is, in itself, a matter of comment.²³ Oxford sold five estates in 1576, presumably to pay off borrowings incurred on his Italian expedition:²⁴ he might also have then possibly raised the £500 (say £350,000 or $450,000 today) loan to Burbage. Speculations about Oxford’s hand in the financing of The Theatre receives a boost. A Frenchman, Louis de Grenade who was resident in London in 1578, records his description of two theatres, the Curtain and the other one which must be The Theatre, one with “an imposing appearance on the outside”. One (but he does not say which) was erected by a “great Lord”, but the question who this great Lord might be can only be resolved in favour of Oxford himself.²⁵

Like the Globe and its successors, it had a broad stage, “well suited both for the rich words and rapid movement”,²⁶ and for concentration on the richly apparelled actors, and not on the colourful background as in contemporary Italian theatre – someone in a position to formulate such a critique must have realised that. And yet expense would have to be contained. J. Middleton Murry wrote (page 33) that “this simile strikes me as altogether more detailed and factual than Shakespeare’s similes are wont to be.:”

When we mean to build,

We first survey the plot, then draw the model:

And when we see the figure of the house,

Then we must rate the cost of the erection:

Which if we find outweighs ability, [the available finance]

What do we then but draw anew the model

In fewer offices, … 2 Henry IV I, iii, 41 – 47

The Shakespearean philosophy-scholar Frances Yates (1899–1981) first pointed out that the original theatre and the subsequently constructed Globe followed in design the plan suggested by the Roman architect Vitruvius (d. c. 20 BCE) in his De Architectura Book V with its circular interior and octagonal exterior. The book can only have been very rare in England in the 1570s and Yates suggested that the mathematician John Dee (see Ch. 1 n.6) was the only person she could think of with the necessary mathematical as well as Classic skills (let alone access to Vitruvius’ book anyway). Sir Thomas Smith (see Ch. 1) had four copies, in Latin, French, Spanish and Italian in his library, to which Oxford may well have had access. With his apparent or possible interest in the financing, political clout, acting, writing and directing, with no great leap of imagination, the design of the premises would also be of interest and concern to him, and his interest in the problems of astronomy shows to me at least that design would be well within his intellectual capacity (see his conjectured dispute with Bruno – see Ch. 4 n.47). Yates’ magisterial final comment about Dee, who wrote in English for the benefit of designers and craftsmen, is in point:

Yet there is an aristocratic side: there are mysterious noblemen behind him. He is both extremely exoteric and practical, and at the same time esoteric among some vaguely defined circle.” — Yates 1969 p.18

2. ACTORS, MATERIALS (PLAYS, ETCETERA)

[Elizabethan Drama] seems to spring fully-formed into existence in the 1580s… – Martin Wiggins 2000 p.7

This is a further aspect of The Shakespeare Revolution. There seems to be no evolutionary element, although there was a body round Sidney perhaps wanting to see (and write) Senecan Castelvetro type (as they saw it) scope-limiting plays. The mystery plays of the Middle Ages leave no impression. The actors’ companies must therefore have had a substantial repertoire and/or the promise of new plays; otherwise, The Theatre would not have come into being.

The Theatre remained open for some twenty years,²⁷ and it was followed in 1577 by the Curtain.²⁸ As the travelling companies’ practice of one-off performances was followed, the demand for plays must have been endless.

So it was essential for these theatres to have regular sources for new plays. There are no records for extrinsic sources for these plays, except that plays were regularly produced at Court. I imagine other plays which were hawked round the provinces would either be too poor for the sophisticated city and would need rewriting, or, even when once made good enough, too few to constitute an opening repertoire for more than a few weeks.

One modern critic makes a revealing point in comparing the situation in 1660, when the theatres were reopened, with that in 1576. In 1660,

old plays were plentiful and the authors did not need to be paid for their work.

With no new playwrights emerging for twenty years, after 1660,

the first new plays to appear were translations or works by aristocrats who did not need to worry about supporting themselves on the profits of play making, no playwright made a living from the theatre for the first five years after the Restoration …

By contrast, in 1576, he suggests,

there was no significant pre-existing repertoire [by which he means that he knows of no evidence for such repertoire]. The theatres, actors and audiences all needed plays, and a class of professional playwrights arose to supply them.²⁹

This skews the argument by ignoring the possible elements available in 1576: if it took five years for playwrights to emerge in the 1660s with all the exemplars they had before them, how much more difficult would be the situation and longer required for the emergence of enough of this new class in the late 1570s without any exemplars with track records for proven theatrical skills. The reliance on translators and experimenting aristocrats then therefore has to be infinitely greater for a public theatre with in effect a standing start.

While there is a case for some evolutionary process from 1560 on, the argument has been thought only to refer to Court or private productions. Another modern critic is obliged to claim accurately that Elizabethan drama “seems to spring fully formed into existence in the 1580s”.³⁰

During this time (1576–80), we do have records of plays produced for the Court, and these seem to have been one-off performances as well. With both private and public theatres having to meet such enormous demands, it must be sensible to suggest that the Court plays put in another appearance in public, perhaps suitably (or unsuitably, depending on the prejudices of the playgoer critic) adapted. In addition, if the Court performance was written or produced by a successful amateur, then the author might welcome a second outing of his masterpiece on the public stage. This would mean that the Courtly author would be in contact with the vagabond status actors.³¹ The identities of these authors are on the face of it not revealed to us: it was beneath the dignity of a gentleman to be seen writing for the public. No doubt, the theatre financiers would be delighted not to have to pay these authors. Less likely, in the beginning the reverse may have happened: a professional play might be translated from the public theatre to the Court. Again, we have no direct or ostensible evidence of any play transferred from the Court to the public theatre, so the evidence has to be secondary. For example, the play Murderous Michael produced at Court in March 1578/9 seems to be the precursor of Arden of Feversham, a public play printed in 1592 and subsequently reprinted in 1599. The connection is also discussed in Ch. 4. However, it announces “the real English revolution in drama” as Will Sharpe says in Bate and Rasmussen p.650, whose whole argument is considerably fortified once the dating is properly aligned - see Ch. 12. While Sharpe reveals the lack of consistency among ‘orthodox’ critics, there seems no dispute about the quality of the language: he cites Wiggins in support of the view that the play’s deficiencies are in the plotting and staging, a ‘back door’ argument for the dating of an original version to 1577, and the need for the young playwright to acquire more dramatological experience for public productions (see Ch. 1). It is suggested that scene 4 l.88:

What dismal outcry wakes me from my rest?

is a crib from The Spanish Tragedy:

What outcry calls me from my naked bed? — II, v, 1.

instead of its more likely predecessor.

The economic problems are hinted in the complaints of Greene and Reede in the play.

The public theatre clearly attracted a riff-raff element. The Puritan-convert Gosson testifies, perhaps involuntarily, to the social success of the playhouses of which the attraction of plays in the new eloquential English of the Revolution must have been an element. In his work of 1579 The School of Abuse which Gosson dedicated to Sidney, he complains bitterly of the effect of plays on contemporary behaviour:

Our wrestling at arms is turned to wallowing in ladies’ laps, our courage to cowardice, our running to riot, our bows to bowls, and our darts to dishes. We have robbed Greece of gluttony, Italy of wantonness, Spain of pride, France of deceit, and Dutchland of quaffing. Compare London to Rome and England to Italy, you shall find the theatres of the one, the abuses of the other, to be rife amongst us. … In our assemblies at plays in London you shall see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by women: such care for their garments that they be not trodden on; such eyes to their laps that no chips light upon them; such pillows to their backs that they take no hurt; such masking in their ears, I know not what; such giving them pippins to pass the time; such playing at foot saunt without cards; such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking and such manning them home when the sports are ended that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour…”³²

Before becoming a Puritan-convert, Gosson had also been a playwright, having had two plays produced in public, although apparently neither made it to a Court performance (perhaps because Gosson was accused by Lodge of plagiarism,³³ from whom is not disclosed). He had become convinced that the theatre was evil in its effect on public morality. He therefore attacks the plays and the theatre as works of the devil, who:

first sent over many wanton Italian books, which being translated into English, have poisoned the manners of our country with foreign delights. So that more could be affected, the devil caused comedies to be devised, “comedies cut by the same pattern [of ‘Italian bawdries’], which drag such a monstrous tail after them as is able to sweep whole cities into his lap”.³⁴

In his later work Plays Confuted in Five Actions 1582, Gosson becomes more explicit:

In plays those things are feigned that never were, as Cupid and Psyche played at Paules: and a great many Comedies more at the Blackfriars and in every playhouse in London, which for brevity’s sake I over skip [pity!] … So was the history of Caesar and Pompey, and the Play of the Fabii at the Theatre, both amplified there, where the drummes might walk, or the pen might ruffle; when the history swelled and the pen ran too high for the number of persons that should play it, the poet with Proteus [error for Procrustes] cut the same fit for his own measure… I may boldly say because I have seen it, that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Asse, the Ethiopean history, Amadis of France, The Round Table, bawdy Comedies in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London … Forsooth saith the Authour of the Play of Plays shown at the Theatre, the three and twentieth of February last: they shall now be purged, the matter shall be good [and Gosson clearly does not trust that Authour with the capital A]… As for that glosing play at the Theatre that profers you so fair, there is interfaced in it a bawdy song of a maid of Kent, and a little beastly speech of the new stawled rogue, both of which I am compelled to bury in silence, being more ashamed to utter than they.³⁵

Gosson’s importance to us is two-fold: it lies in the facts that he writes about and in the fact that he should have written at all.³⁶

From Gosson’s point of view, these plays, being the work of the devil, must have been very superior productions: the devil would deploy only the most sophisticated and damaging weapons. These weapons, the metaphor may be continued, would be all the more dangerous in the hand of a playwright (Gosson’s unnamed, perhaps noble, “Authour”, who is most likely Oxford) schooled and confident in the revolutionary use of English being developed at the same time, as is confirmed from a contemporary tract: “And so, according to the quality [i.e. their social standing, not their competence], superstition doth increase [i.e. because the author is upper class, so superstition is nurtured].”³⁷ We do not need to call in the devil; but the effect is the same if we rely on the steady stream of translations of the Classics and Italian. The latter were an especially spikey fishbone as we have seen in the throat of Burghley and of Gosson. Nevertheless, Gosson makes two named exceptions from his denunciation of all playwriting: one play is called The Jew,³⁸ and could therefore be linked to The Merchant of Venice. Nevertheless,

The fact is well known that writing for the stage was not regarded as Literature in Shakespeare’s time.³⁹

Gosson’s views are also supported from a literary-critical angle by George Whetstone. In the Epistle Dedicatory to his Promos and Cassandra of 1578 (a very early date, which supports my argument), he wrote:

An Englishman in this quality [i.e. a writer of plays – a modern degenerate race compared to the aristocratic ancient Romans] is most vain, indiscreet and out of order: he first grounds his work on impossibilities: then in three hours’ runs he throws the world, marries, gets children, makes children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and brings gods from heaven, and fetches divels from hell; and (that which is worst) their ground is not so unperfect as their working indiscreet: not weighing, so the people laugh, though they laugh them (for their follies) to scorn. Many times (to make mirth) they make clowns [peasants] companion with a King: in their grave Councils they allow the advice of fools: yea, they use one order of speech for all persons: a gross indecorum for a crow will ill counterfeit the nightingale’s sweet voice: even so affected speech will misbecome a clown.

There is a clear reference to The Famous Victories of Henry V, as well as support for Gosson’s view as to the dangerously good quality of the productions (“and (that which is worst) their ground is not so unperfect…”). Sidney noticeably cannot acknowledge this - see Ch. 9.

In support of my ‘revolution’ thesis, F. P. Wilson, the leading English drama scholar of the period to his death in 1963, wrote:

Allow something for a pamphleteer’s inflation of his [Gosson’s] case, and even so enough is left to suggest that the lost material might wholly change our estimate of the drama of this period.⁴⁰

Once the hostile comments of Gosson, Whetstone, and Sidney are recognized as evidence of the Revolution — and are allied with the views of R.F. Jones, C.S. Lewis, and F.P. Wilson (quoted in the Introduction and in Ch. 2) — it becomes clear that this revolution is a fact. It was not a miracle that caused Elizabethan drama “to spring fully formed into existence in the 1580s” (as we saw one critic make out, see above). See also Ch. 2 and Ch. 9 n.36.

Translations must have been made with the encouragement of the nobility, to whom many were dedicated. So the sources for the plays reaching the Court literati and perhaps by the mid-1580s include the University wits Lyly (c. 1554–1606), Marlowe (1564–93), Greene (1558–92), Peele (1558? –98?), Lodge (1558–1625) and Nashe (1567–1601?), and with them (the apparently non-University educated) Kidd (1558–94), either in untranslated works or in new translations in post-Revolutionary English. These sources are thus employed first by the Courtly writers to make plays and those plays would be produced at Court. It does seem likely that the producers of public high quality classic or Italian-based plays would not be involved in the 1575–80 period until those plays had first been first written and tried out at Court and only then adapted/perfected for commercial success on the public stage; again an unknown university educated writer could have been the first to produce a play for the public stage. This is evidenced by the patent issued in December 1582 to Edmund Tilney as Master of the Revels, responsible initially not for censorship but for the entertainments to be set before the Queen:

And furthermore also we have and do by these presents authorise and command our said servant Edmund Tilney Master of his said Revels by himself or his sufficient deputy or deputies to warn command and appoint…all and every player or players with their playmakers either belonging to any nobleman or otherwise, bearing the name or names of using the faculty of playmakers or players of Comedies Tragedies enterludes or what other shows so ever, from time to time and at all times to appear before him with all such Plays Tragedies Comedies or shows as they shall have in readiness or mean to set forth, and with them to present and recite before our said servant or his sufficient deputy whom we ordain appoint and authorise by these presents of all such shows plays players and playmakers, together with their playing places, to order reform authorise and put down as shall be thought meet or unmeet unto himself or his sufficient deputy in that behalf…”

on pain of imprisonment.⁴¹

At first, these non-court-originated plays had to be recited before Tilney but later, perhaps because it was beneath the dignity of the aristocratic author(s), the delivery of the manuscript (but only from certain authors?) sufficed – like the one for with the different hands of the secretaries taking dictation. As the More manuscript (see Ch. 8) shows, Tilney vetted the manuscript, acting more as a censor than as an artistic examiner. In this way, an element of political censorship comes into practice.

So by 1582, there must have been a highly advanced sophisticated repertoire of plays, including some locally sourced efforts, for the players to draw on for their one off performances in public – and yet very few of these plays on the face of it survive – according to the critics. They tell us that the great moment was the arrival of Marlowe with Part 1 of Tamburlaine The Great in 1587:

The success of this play is perhaps the greatest event in our literary history.⁴²

Again,

To the Elizabethans, Marlowe’s plays must have had all the aural impact of a symphony orchestra taking over from a barrel organ.⁴³

Gosson however is witness that the Revolution had already come to the theatre: as the same critic puts it,⁴⁴

His book Plays Confuted in Five Actions shows that the emergence of the drama was a phenomenon which was felt to require explanation even before there had been performed a single one of the plays we now consider classics of the Elizabethan stage, and this complicates our notion of the suddenness with which [i.e. ‘renders invalid our perception of the dates when’] those classics appeared… Gosson’s comments on tragedy and comedy bear witness to the generic diversity the theatre had achieved by the time he left in 1579: these were plays which evidently bore some similarity to the kind of drama Marlowe and (William) Shakespeare were writing a decade later.

The comparison between such difference (or similarity) and that between an orchestra in 1587 and a barrel organ in 1579 does not have any rational appeal, and moreover, the critic writing over four hundred years afterwards has perhaps less chance of being more perceptive a critic than Gosson.

SUMMARY

In logic, the apparent commercial success of the public performances of these pre-Marlowe plays, allied no doubt to their critical success, makes their alleged non-survival surprising and unlikely, because a commercially successful play would well be followed by a (cheap) revival or succession of revivals, perhaps including (successive) rewriting(s). At the same time, the absence of the authors’ names is also surprising, but if those authors or any one of them were from the nobility, then society would demand that those names be withheld from the public, as it would be thought far beneath the dignity of the nobility for any member to be associated with the public stage.

We may actually have a spiral situation, and we have seen question of primacy in time and adaptation for the Court and Public Theatres is an exceptionally difficult one, not least for ‘orthodox’ critics. Oxfordians do have an advantage in that they do not have to explain how ‘Shakespeare’ came to write for the Court, as in Oxford’s case this is obvious enough. In addition we can see that by the time the first public theatres were opened, he did have a body of Court juvenile work, which could be rapidly rewritten as necessary and adapted for public performance. Whether in the first place he subsequently wrote for the public stage this early cannot be established. Where a play has 2,800 lines or fewer, it may well be a public “two hours traffic” pay, while longer ones were efforts for the Court, which with suitable intervals happily sit through over 3,500 lines (Dutton pp. 67ff., 81ff.). So it is nearly impossible for any critic to come up with a final solution, let alone one that does not make mincemeat of the collaboration and stylometrics nonsense. Love’s Labours Lost would hardly be suitable for a public audience, with its presentation of complex ideas and obvious topicalities (see Ch. 8). Quite how Shakespeare himself came to write for the Court the longer versions with their abstruse classical and other connotations is not a question that receives much of an answer: indeed Dutton (p.98) suggests that the public ‘quarto’ versions are cut down from Court productions, and those of other writers are polished up for Court productions – p.137). For Dutton the evidence dries up in 1604, the year of Oxford’s death (Ch. 6).

For the purposes of public drama, Oxford needed to put across his language both to the educated minority as well as to the groundlings in his audiences. He hit upon the expedient and use of the double adjective (a form of hendiadys, one Classical in origin appealing to the educated minority and the other more demotic). By way of example, this passage presents this practice twice:

… nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe’er

But falls into abatement and low price

Even in a minute — Twelfth Night I, i, 11-14

Ted Hughes in his critique of the practice, aptly described as ‘the common bond’ wrote:

In responding to that need for that language of the common bond, Shakespeare has invented, as if accidentally, an extraordinary new form of English. …. This reflects his interfertilisation of the high seriousness and low comedy in the plane of action. [Later in his career] he welds the contrasts and conflicting extremes of his into the composite, new stage language of the common bond. ….. and the strange fact is that while accomplishing all this, for that very specific and historically brief situation within the theatre, he invented a language that is somehow closer to the vital expressive life of English, still, than anything down since.” - (Essay in A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse p.192)

Mulcaster grasped this when he wrote:

Our tongue seemeth to have two heads, the one home born and the other a stranger (Elementarie 1582 p.172).

The Revolution may have hit home first at the Court plays, making a more sophisticated and yet respectful and respectable form of English current, along with the conversational fad of euphuism. The Court plays in public adaptation make revolutionary English flow out into the world outside and thus the national confidence in the English language and with it, the nation and the people are developed and fortified – reflected in the quotations from Mulcaster (himself a producer of plays for the schoolchildren in his care) in Part A above. If we add in the element of the actors’ rhetoric, persuading the populace of the glories, not to say cultural serviceability, of English, and thus remedying the perceived ‘eloquential deficiency’ referred to in the previous chapter, we arrive at the top of the spiral and find the cause of those choruses of praise for the English language exemplified earlier. Some may say that the public theatres promoted different dramatic tastes, e.g. romantic, idealistic, patriotic or religious elements, while the Court or private productions leaned towards satiric comedy, but others argue that the repertoires were substantially the same, and therefore crosspollinating.⁴⁵ The debt to the theatre’s essential contribution could hardly be fully acknowledged because the social position of the theatre, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) its popularity, continued to be low, certainly as long as Oxford’s apparent efforts to improve appreciation of the actors’ art were unrecognised:⁴⁶

For Elizabethans with these (political and religious) interests the drama was the art best fitted to express their deepest convictions, the art most fully designed to appeal to the people. Poetry could give much, prose pamphlets, some of them approaching the novel in form, abounded, but, in neither was there the opportunity of watching men and women, as though in life, acting out their stories and directly expressing themselves in richly sounding words.⁴⁷

The pulpit and the stage were the two main elements in the spread of eloquence in English. The pulpit was the subject of state and Church control. The stage was able to portray political opinions of the most subversive type in the mouths of every class of character, but usually disguised by locating the evolving drama of the play in a historical (or foreign) context; classic, ancient or foreign scenarios seem to provide sufficient cloak for the playwrights’ messages. It must have been quite obvious what the writers were up to, and yet while Oxford lived no proceedings, whatsoever were taken concerning a public performance: the only exception was the investigation into the performance of Richard II after the Essex putsch in 1601 (see Ch. 10).

After Oxford’s death in 1604, the players and dramatists found themselves in trouble, if they were thought to be out of line. Through the Master of the Revels, the Court and government did try to exercise some control over the texts in advance of performances from 1590 on, but an actor’s art then and now is to get away with anything he/she can by adding nuance in performance. We can be in little doubt that the actors did. In a way perhaps, Oxford could afford a political protection no other writer could to these developments, and ought to receive proper recognition, for while the poetry and the drama climb the cultural heights, perhaps the real legacy is the way these elements nourish and fortify the new political ideas in them, to the terror of tyrants in every territory ever since.

If only because of the (then) relatively free spread of political ideas by the stage, it is all the more important to make the effort to identify these early plays, and with them their authors: We know the plays’ Court names and from these and occasionally from internal evidence we can identify the names by which we now know them or the final rewrite of them with varying degrees of certainty.⁴⁸ ‘Orthodox’ scholarship tells us that we have the names of plays dating from the immediate post 1576 period and only a handful of texts. Good plays with their political messages would always survive, if only as fodder for cheap revivals.

The really amazing conclusion is that Oxford was the prime mover not only of the literary Revolution but also of the actual public theatre design and construction Revolution, as my quotations from Wiggins and Yates show the suddenness and contemporaneity of both transformations giving a date of 1576 for the Theatre design and construction Revolution and 1575–80 for the literary Revolution (see also Jones in the Introduction Part C).

Click here for Endnotes

Entries are now closed, and The de Vere Society committee will begin the process of reviewing the submissions before selecting a winner. We would like to thank all our contributors for helping to make this competition such a success.

Last, but certainly not least, we are pleased to share April’s contribution.

About April...

“I grew up in Hawaii, and received a Master’s Degree in English literature from the University of Hawaii. I have been living in Tucson, Arizona since 1992; and, though now disabled by chronic illness, I have been pursuing independent scholarship and writing.

The Shakespeare Authorship Question was a perennial curiosity since I first heard about it in high school, but in 2016 it became one of my intense interests. In addition to the sources mentioned in my video, Birth of a Discovery: How April Became an Oxfordian, I have had the privilege of a brief correspondence with Alexander Waugh, shortly before his passing left us all bereaved. Of Waugh’s videos on YouTube, my favourite is Sweet Swan of Avon: for in it, his exposition of the “Calygreyhound”, a mythological animal found only in the iconography of the de Vere family, and in Shakespeare’s First Folio, is especially convincing evidence that de Vere was, in fact, Shakespeare. I have also been fascinated by the late Tom Regnier’s video Did Shakespeare Really Write Shakespeare? and one of my favourite books is Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, in which Price not only presents impressive scholarship — sparking one’s interest in Renaissance writers other than Shakespeare, particularly Ben Jonson — but makes it rich, poetic, and entertaining.

Like many people, I felt profoundly uncomfortable when I first discovered convincing evidence that Shakspere of Stratford was not Shakespeare. It can be a dizzying experience, shaking up one’s faith in teachers and mainstream scholars; at times it can make one long to return to a former self, and to the prior beliefs that now feel like “lost innocence”. However, there is no turning back. Fortunately, time and additional study have made me more comfortable that I have reached a new level of knowledge, and grateful to be living at a time when this work is making progress into academic acceptance. May we all live to see the day when the Authorship Question receives its long-overdue recognition as a valid area to explore.”

We hope you enjoy April’s story.

As our Becoming Oxfordian Video Competition draws to a close, we are delighted to share Alex’s story and the path that led him to explore the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Alex Jones is a student of esoteric philosophy and Shakespeare. He holds a Ph.D. in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University, alongside a Master’s in English Literature and a Bachelor’s in Secondary Education. Alex’s research spans the rhetoric of hypertext, combinatorial mechanics in Italo Calvino, and building learning management systems for universities. Formerly a secondary and post-secondary teacher, Alex spent the last 25 years at Fortune 500 companies leading IT strategy, governance, and solution delivery.

We hope you enjoy Alex’s contribution.

In the previous blog, it was shown that the Audley End Unknown annotator was not, as Casson and Rubinstein had assumed, Sir Henry Neville (1564-1615). The books in question do appear to have been moved, in or around 1925, to Audley End from Neville’s Berkshire estate at Billingbear (not, as has sometimes been reported, much earlier). They also do contain a few annotations by Neville, and more by his tutor and long-term associate Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622). But by far the largest and most widely distributed group are by a third party, writing in a very fine italic hand, provisionally labelled the “Audley End Unknown”. At least three readers, then, belonged to a group which shared, read, and annotated the same books (Figure 1).

Who was this mystery annotator? I first learned of the Casson and Rubinstein book at the 2019 annual Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship meeting at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Ct., from Dr. Jan Scheffer. Having read my PhD dissertation and acquainted himself with the handwriting of Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), Scheffer already hypothesized from Casson and Rubinstein’s images that the “Audley End Unknown” might be de Vere. To test this hypothesis my wife Shelly Maycock and I, with the support of the de Vere Society and Dorna Bewley, twice visited Audley End to examine and document the annotations, eventually discovered as many as six books contained notes by the Audley End Unknown writer, and that several of these also contain notes by Savile and Neville.

An axiom of modern forensic handwriting science holds that an individual’s handwriting – at least under normal circumstances – is unique (Srihari et al. 2002), composed of a sequence of markings that possess an identifiable individuality. The individuality of handwriting is a topic in King Lear, a tragicomedy written over four hundred years ago. In Shakespeare’s play, the gregarious, bespectacled sensualist, Gloucester, cannot distinguish between the actual handwriting of his good son Edgar, and the Machiavellian forgeries of his bad son, Edmund. The forger baits his confused father by distinguishing the handwriting from the letter’s wicked contents, which appeal to the concept that a grown child must sometimes usurp control from a declining parent: “It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents” (1.2.67-68). Unable to detect either the handwritten forgery, or the verbal dissimulation of his evil son, the epicurean Gloucester is eventually punished by having his eyes put out by Lear’s evil daughter Regan and her sociopathic husband Cornwall (3.7).

Of the three identified Audley End writers, by far the most prolific, and the one of greatest interest to our inquiry, was the Audley End Unknown. An 18,000-word forensic analysis (Stritmatter 2023), published in the Journal of Forensic Document Examination (JDFE), now identifies the writer of these Audley End notes as de Vere. JDFE is an internationally recognised peer-reviewed journal of forensic studies that began in 1987 as the in-house journal of the American Association of Forensic Document Examiners before joining forces with the International Graphonomics Society, founded in 1985 to “promote research into motor control and movement including handwriting.” The journal publishes “many of the most current scientific research papers on handwriting execution and identification.” Published in late 2023, the findings of this study have not been challenged in any serious way.

The JDFE article, “The Audley End Annotations: Applying and Huber and Headrick’s Elements of Handwriting Discrimination to a 16^th Century Unknown Document”, details the visual material evidence that confirms this hypothesis (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Comparison of handwriting samples from the Audley End Unknown hand (left) and Edward de Vere (right) showing the shared feature of shaded terminations on letters p, s, and A. Reprinted courtesy the Journal of Forensic Document Examination.

The shaded terminations of Figure 1 occur only in the most carefully executed, “calligraphic” samples from both the de Vere and Audley End data bases, but there is no mistaking the comparability of the samples, even though one is written in the limited margins of a book and the other on a full page. The JDFE study covers more than ten standards of comparison. These are first applied to reveal the defects of the Casson-Rubinstein hypothesis of Neville as the annotator. Instead, the evidence eventually proves that de Vere is the annotator responsible for that subset of the annotations that relate in such direct and stunning ways to the Shakespearean ethos found in the plays.

The JDFE study covers more than ten standards of comparison. These are first applied to show the defects of the Casson-Rubinstein hypothesis of Neville as the annotator. Instead, the same evidence verifies that de Vere is the annotator responsible for that large subset of the annotations previously identified as the “Audley End Unknown”, that relate in such direct and stunning ways to the Shakespearean ethos found in the plays. For example, in Figure 2 it is shown that the Audley End and de Vere samples match in five distinct subtypes of the highly variable lower-case letter-p.

Figure 2. Five variations of the letter P in Audley End and de Vere samples reveal the striking match in range of variation in the letter. While the samples written on a full page show a consistently more pronounced slant, they are in every other regard virtually identical in their construction and range of variation. Reprinted courtesy the Journal of Forensic. Document Examination.

The case for de Vere as the annotator is not merely a forensic one. To start from the most generic considerations in the case, few 16^th century English writers could furnish such an elegant, sometimes calligraphic Italic hand like that seen in the Audley End annotations. Even fewer wrote such a hand and also illustrate the profound fluency of both Latin and Greek that is characteristic of the Audley End Unknown sample. The Italic style had only been introduced into England in the 1520s and was by the early 17^th century already being superseded by the so-called English Round hand, the precursor of modern cursive handwriting. Even while it lasted, the style was confined to a minority of writers in England, while the dominant hand for most uses remained the English secretary hand, derived from the northern European Gothic script. In 16^th century English documents, the Italic hand occurs most commonly in diplomatic correspondence in Italian or French, or for special uses like the signing of a name or stage directions in a theatrical manuscript (the same sorts of purposes that modern italic is still used as a variant of the Roman typeface).

Although his handwriting varies with the formality of the occasion, few English writers employed the Italic script as consistently as de Vere in his surviving correspondence at locations such as Hatfield, the Public Record Office, and the Essex County Library. If he also – as is probable – wrote a secretary hand, it remains poorly documented by contrast to the dozens of documents surviving in his italic script. The Audley End notes show that in additional to writing in an italic hand – in Latin, Italian, French, and English – de Vere also wrote fluently in Greek, a finding consistent with his early reputation for genius in language, music, poetry, and even comedy.

But who was Edward de Vere? If we are to trust Berkeley Professor Alan Nelson’s myopic 2005 biography, de Vere was a “monstrous adversary” who ratted out his Catholic cousins for plotting against the Queen, and lived a life of debauchery, theatrical excess, and necromancy. A wealthy spendthrift whose father died in 1562 when the young Earl was twelve, he became a ward of the court and was raised as a teen in the household of the Court of Wards administrator, Lord Treasurer, and Principal Secretary to the crown, William Cecil – a man long proposed as the real historical figure behind Shakespeare’s parody of Polonius in Hamlet. De Vere was also a generous patron, with as many as 37 books – of philosophy, theology, literature, history and music – dedicated to him. Given his reputation as a leading intellectual of the day, one with apparent Essex sympathies, and probably a patron and advisor to the jailed Southampton and Neville, de Vere’s hand in the Audley End books makes contextual sense.

Before considering the Audley End annotations in further detail, it will be useful to learn something about the man who penned them. Who was this controversial man, typecast by the Shakespeare industry via Alan Nelson’s Monstrous Adversary? While we can only hint at some answers here, several books, perhaps starting with B.M. Ward’s 1928 biography of him, Charlton Ogburn’s 1984 magnum opus, or M.K. Anderson’s Shakespeare by Another Name provide the rich detail needed to comprehend why he was already, long before the present Audley End inquiry began, the most well-known and widely acknowledged alternative to the Stratfordian “just so” story of the origins of the plays. Most important of all, however, is John Thomas Looney’s incisive and compelling 1920 Shakespeare Identified. The books’ few misinterpretations of evidence pale in comparison with the intellectual rigor of Looney’s argument. A complete bibliography republished by James Warren in a 2020 centennial edition, holds up remarkably well and had already by the 1920s begun to attract a wide range of adherents to the hypothesis of de Vere’s authorship of the plays.

Trained in his earliest years by the diplomat, translator, and scholar Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577) – one of England’s most distinguished classical scholars, de Vere’s handwriting has sometimes been confused with Smith’s, but the two hands are quite distinct on a close examination (Stritmatter 2021a). After the death of his father in 1562, de Vere became a ward of the court, living at Cecil House in London. There he had the attention of the best tutors his adoptive father, Lord Treasurer and Principal Secretary William Cecil could find. The earliest surviving production of his pen is a letter to Cecil, written in 1564 when he turned fourteen, in studiously perfect French using the most au courant diacritic system of the orthographic reformer and Cecil associate, John Hart.

The de Veres of Castle Hedingham had long been a literary family (Anderson 1993). The 12th Earl, John de Vere (1408-1462) had owned the famous Ellesmere Chaucer, which includes a personalised dedication to him as the book’s patron (see David, and Hanna and Edwards). In accounts kept by the Court of Wards the young de Vere in 1569-1570 purchased not only a Geneva Bible, but copies of Chaucer, Plutarch’s Lives in French, Plato, Cicero, “two Italian books” and “other books, paper and nibs” (Ward 33). Of these books, only the Bible – now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC – is today documented (Stritmatter 2001). The Amyot copy of Plutarch is the text from which Sir Thomas North translated his English edition of 1579 and which, along with North, furnished so much material for Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays. De Vere’s copy may have been the one sold at auction in 1948 as an association copy formerly owned by Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, the current whereabouts of which remain unknown.

The young Earl’s tutors, among the best in England, praised his precocious intellect, eagerness for history, and facility with languages. At Cecil House on the Strand the young Earl was tutored in Anglo-Saxon by Sir Lawrence Nowell, the best scholar of the language in his generation. By 1563, when his student was 13, Nowell informed Cecil, “I clearly see that my work for the Earl of Oxford cannot be much longer required” (Ward 20). It is plausible to infer that by that age the student, studying with a tutor who possessed the only copy of the Beowulf MS (Golding 1937), had mastered Anglo-Saxon. In Latin his tutor was most likely his uncle Arthur Golding, commonly regarded as the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphosis as well as many works of religious piety including Calvin’s edition of the psalms, which he dedicated to his nephew in 1566.

In spring, 1564, de Vere graduated from St. John’s College Cambridge. His guardian Cecil had also attended St. John’s and was (among other distinctions) the brother-in-law of Sir John Cheke, the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. His adoptive mother, Cecil’s wife Mildred Cooke (1526-1589), was a formidable classical scholar who assembled an impressive inventory of the best scholarly editions of many works of classical literature. Christopher Ockland described her as “most famous, most learned, most skilled in Greek and Latin literature, and other literature” (in Hager, 77). As Eddi Jolly has shown, many important literary sources were already available to de Vere in the extensive Hatfield library, assembled by Principal Secretary Cecil and his scholarly wife.

Even the staunchly pragmatic Cecil, in a 1571 letter to the Earl of Rutland, concedes the remarkable intelligence of his ward: “And surely, my Lord, by dealing with him I find that which I often heard of your Lordship, that there is much more in him of understanding than any stranger to him would think. And for my own part I find that whereof I take comfort in his wit and knowledge grown by good observation” (Ogburn 483-484).

In 1578, perhaps around the time these annotations were inscribed (the most important of which appear in books published in 1546, 1548, and 1551), the Cambridge Don Gabriel Harvey (1545-1630), who had earlier been in school with de Vere, toasted him at the Queen’s visit to Audley End. In this widely reproduced speech, Harvey hailed de Vere as one whose “eyes flash fire” and “countenance Shakes a speare” – a line thought by many (Hannas 1991), to be the inspiration for the “Shake-speare” nom de plume. Equally significant, given the new discoveries at Audley End, is Harvey’s commentary on de Vere’s powers of Latin composition and cosmopolitan literacy: “Your British meters have been widely sung, while your (Latin) epistle (to Castiglione’s Courtier) testifies how much you excel in letters, being courtlier and more polished than Castiglione himself. I have seen your many Latin things, and more English are extant; of the French and Italian muses, the manners of many people’s, their art and laws, you have drunk.” Harvey’s accolades correspond in many details to the portrait of de Vere that emerges from contemporaneous sources, which praise his generosity as a patron and approve his skill and preternatural facility with drama, philosophy, poetry, music, and languages. To the those of small mind, he seemed a “monstrous adversary” – one who wickedly brought to life long dead characters in his insufficiently didactic and – as they saw it – amoral dramas.

Over a hundred years ago, John Thomas Looney also predicted that “new data may be unearthed,” leading to “larger and truer results” (414), when others assumed the quest to understand this “singular odd man” – as Harvey would also describe him. That evidence of the quality and detail forthcoming from the Audley End annotations could still be forthcoming from the remains of 16^th century libraries may seem almost beyond belief to some, but for those who have witnessed the unfolding probative value of Mr. Looney’s words over the past century (Warren 2024), the evidence may seem more gratifying than surprising. In the next three blog entries, some highlights of this evidence will be brought forward and featured for the consideration of readers. In the meantime, all corrections, comments, or queries are warmly appreciated. On this subject, as so many others, it is a truism that someone, somewhere on the internet, knows more than you do.

Anderson, Margo. “Shakespeare” by Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man who was Shakespeare. Gotham, 2005.

Looney, J Thomas. “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford. Centenary Edition Edited by James A. Warren. Forever Press, 2018.

Nelson, Alan. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward deVere, 17^th Earl of Oxford. Liverpool University Press, 2003.

Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality. Dodd and Mead, 1984.

Srihari, Sargur, Sung-Hyuk Cha, Hina Arora, and Sangjik Lee. “The Individuality of Handwriting,” Forensic Sci,July 2002, Vol. 47, No. 4, 1-17.

Stritmatter, Roger. “The Audley End Unknown Annotations: Applying Huber and Headrick’s Elements of Handwriting Discrimination to a 16^th Century Document,” Journal of Forensic Document Examination, 13-66, 2023.

Ward, B.M. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford from Contemporary Documents (1550-1604). London: John Murray, 1928.

Warren, James. An Index to Oxfordian Publications. 5^th Edition. Veritas, 2023.

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Our latest contribution comes from Shirin Crew, we hope you enjoy her story.

My fascination with the Shakespeare authorship question began in my teens, sparkling a lifelong curiosity that eventually lead to the De Vere Society.

I hold a BA (Hons) in English and American Literature with Creative Writing. In my spare time I can be found wandering through old bookshops in search of hidden gems, exploring castles with beautiful gardens, or visiting art galleries ... (that, or baking sourdough bread!)

We’re inviting subscribers to tell their story:

• How did you first encounter the Shakespeare Authorship Question?
• What sparked your journey to becoming an Oxfordian?

Your video doesn’t need to be professionally produced—a short 3–4 minute recording on your phone is absolutely perfect. What matters most is your perspective. What first sparked your curiosity? What convinced you? And why does the authorship question matter to you?

We’ve been thrilled by the response so far and, as more videos continue to come in, we’re pleased to extend the competition deadline by one month to allow even more voices to be heard.

Please send your entries to substack@deveresociety.co.uk by 31 May.
The winning entry will receive a limited edition Great Oxford box set.

We look forward to hearing your story.

Our latest contribution comes from Cheryl Eagan-Donovan — we hope you enjoy her story.

Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, MFA, is a writer, director, and producer whose documentary, Nothing Is Truer than Truth, premiered on Hulu in 2019, is available on Amazon Prime in North America, and aired on SkyArts TV in the U.K. and in New Zealand under the title Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Name.

She was awarded three research grants to study manuscripts pertaining to Edward de Vere’s life and work in London and is in post-production for her next film project, All the World’s a Stage: Shakespeare and the Invention of Modern Theatre.

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We’re inviting subscribers to share their story.

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· What sparked your journey to becoming an Oxfordian?

Your video doesn’t need to be professionally produced, a short 3–4 minute recording on your phone is absolutely fine. What matters most is your perspective. What first sparked your curiosity? What convinced you? And why does the authorship question matter to you?

Please send your entries to substack@deveresociety.co.uk by 30 April. The winning entry will receive a limited edition Great Oxford box set.

Our latest contribution comes from Jessica Lee — we hope you enjoy her story.

Until 2006, Jessica’s focus was on raising her four children. Since then, alongside her interest in the Shakespeare authorship question, she has developed a deep appreciation for theatre and botanical illustration.

Jessica received a distinction from the School at the Chelsea Physic Garden for her work and continues to paint and draw flora. She also enjoys accompanying her husband on vinous travels and cellar visits.

In this chapter, and the one to follow, the focus turns to the factual evidence for Oxford’s early works (with an overlap into that area usually of poetry which has the writings attributed to Oxford). The extent to which we have to apply logic where the case is incomplete is also clearly indicated. This is a range where the Oxfrauds (the passio…

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