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THE RECORDS AND EARLY LIFE OF EDWARD DE VERE[172] "Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
* * *
If ever thou didst hold me in. thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story."
Hamlet (V. 2)."An unlifted shadow somehow lies across his memory."
Dr. Grosart.Authorities. The biographical records in the succeeding chapters are taken chiefly from the "Dictionary of National Biography"; "Historical Recollections of Noble Families," by Arthur Collins; "The Great Lord Burleigh," by Martin Hume; "The House of Cecil," by G. Ravenscroft Dennis; "Histories of Essex," by Morant and Wright; "The Hatfield Manuscripts"; and "Calendars of State Papers."
I
THE REPUTATION OF THE EARL OF OXFORD
Following the general scheme of the investigation as outlined at the beginning of this work, it will be well to recall at this point the nature of the phase with which we are at present occupied, and the exact stage of it now reached. The fifth step being to proceed from the man chosen to the works of Shakespeare, in order to see to [173] what extent the man is reflected in the works, the comparison of the two sets of writings just concluded forms the natural introduction to this phase of the enquiry. Continuing this step our next business must be to examine, in whatever detail possible, the life and circumstances of the man in order to ascertain how far they, too, relate themselves to the contents of, and the task of producing, the Shakespearean plays and poems.
In entering upon this series of biographical chapters we must remind the reader that the object of this work is twofold: to prove our case, and to help towards a fuller and more accurate view of the life and personality of the Earl of Oxford. Here our task is one of special difficulty, for our theory presupposes a man who had deliberately planned his self-concealment. Our material is bound, therefore, to be as scanty as he could make it, and, at the outset, probably misleading. We shall, therefore, be under the necessity of reconstructing a personality from the most meagre of data, with the added disadvantage of a large amount of contemporary misrepresentation, which it will be necessary to correct.
One naturally asks why the author of the great dramas should have wished to throw a veil over his identity as he did; and the strange thing about the matter is this, that, with the Shakespeare sonnets before us, we should have been so slow in framing this question and answering it satisfactorily. For, not merely in an odd sentence, but as the burden of some of his most powerful sonnets, he tells us in the plainest of terms, that he was one whose name had fallen into disrepute and who wished that it should perish with him.
"No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear-the surly sullen bell;
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it."[174] "My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.""Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die.""Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view.""Thence comes it that my name receives a brand."
"Your love and pity doth the impression, fill,
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow."When to all this we find him adding the fear
"That every word doth almost tell my name,"
it is made as clear as anything can be that he was one who had elected his own self-effacement, and that disrepute was one, if not the principal, motive. We may, if we wish, question the sufficiency or reasonableness of the motive. That, however, is his business, not ours. The important point for us is that he has by his sonnets disclosed the fact that he, "Shakespeare," was one who was concealing his real name, and that the motive he gives, adequate or not, is one which unmistakably would apply to the Earl of Oxford; and would not apply in the same literal manner to any one else to whom it has been sought to attribute the Shakespeare dramas. If the Earl of Oxford had filled an exalted place in general estimation, it ought to have worked against the theory of authorship we are advancing. That he was one "in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes" is what we should have expected, and is therefore an element of evidence in confirmation of our theory.
Under the Stratfordian and Baconian views mystifying interpretations have had to be read into the utterances just quoted. In spite of their intense reality and genuine [175] autobiographical ring, they have been treated as cryptic poetry or mere dramatic pose; and one of our greatest difficulties will be to combat the non-literal constructions forced upon these poems. In the proper place we shall have to show that their contents are as real and literal as the spirit and temper of the works suggest. Puzzling, Shakespeare could undoubtedly be, as in the "Will" sonnets (135 and 136) where he is obviously dealing in enigmas. The curious thing is that he has been read seriously and literally when in a playful mood, by the same people who have treated passionate, heart-wrung utterances as mere freaks of fancy. When moving on the plane of experience his conceptions attain a definiteness unequalled in poetry, whilst there has probably never been a writer capable of securing a more precise correspondence between a thought and its expression. When, therefore, he tells us, in so many words, that "vulgar scandal" had robbed him of his good name, and that although he believed his work would be immortal he wished his name to be forgotten, we are quite entitled to take his own word for it, and to demand no further motive for the adoption of a disguise. No mere nom de plume could have been so successful as his adoption of a mask: its success for over three hundred years will probably be a matter of astonishment for many generations to come.
Had these sonnets been published by their author during his own lifetime they would have been absurd from the point of view of the particular contents we have just been considering. Imagine any man publishing, or allowing the publication under his own name, of documents in which he specifically states that he wished his name to be buried with his body! It is equally absurd to suppose that their author permitted the issue of documents implying that William Shakspere was but a mask. They were, however, published during the lifetime of all the men to whom it has been sought to attribute their authorship: William Shakspere, Francis Bacon, William Stanley and Roger Manners: [176] but after the death of Edward de Vere. The particular sonnets seem to belong to a date at which Oxford's fortunes were at about their lowest and when the motive assigned for hiding his name would be most applicable; the works being published under the mask would then be the two long poems published in 1593 and 1594.
We do not maintain that the motive assigned in the sonnets was the only one that operated. By the time that the mask was employed again, after an interval of four years during which some of the plays had appeared anonymously, there are evidences that Oxford was making efforts to retrieve his position socially as well as financially. When plays were being published under Shakespeare's name, Oxford was seeking to regain favour with the Queen and setting family influences to work to obtain for himself the position of governor of Wales. Needless to say to have appeared at the time in the role of dramatic author would have been completely fatal to any chances he may have had: for in those days "dramatic authorship was considered hardly respectable." And Oxford especially, having incurred his disgrace in the first instance by deserting the court for a Bohemian association with actors and play-writers, could only hope to recover his social position and secure an appropriate official appointment, by being seen as little as possible in such connections.
After Oxford's death his widow, a lady of private means, assisted by her brother, continued the struggle to recover for her son Henry, the eighteenth Earl of Oxford, the prestige which had been lost to the family by the extraordinary career of his father. A legal case that arose out of this is a recognized landmark in the history of the law, and shows clearly that the recovery of what had been lost had become a settled object of family policy. Even supposing, then, that they may not have considered themselves under a moral or contracted obligation to continue the secrecy, it would [177] hardly have been in harmony with their general policy to have discontinued it.
Although we have put forward these considerations with regard to motives, we must make it clear that no obligation to furnish motives rests upon an investigator in such a case as this. Motives are sometimes altogether impenetrable. Objective facts, and the evidence for the truth of such facts, form the proper material for enquiries, like the present.
From the biographer's point of view, however, all these considerations constitute a double difficulty. We have first to surmount the obstacles which an able intellect, bent on secrecy, would himself interpose between himself and the public; and then we must penetrate the mists of disrepute which he assures us had gathered round his name. Before this can be properly done many years must elapse, and many minds must be interested in it: the correction of an erroneous estimate of an historic personality being one of the slowest of human processes. We make here only a first simple effort in that direction.
No one who is able to appreciate humanity's debt to "Shakespeare" can, under any circumstances, regard him as a man who has merited abiding dishonour. The world has taken to its heart men like Robert Burns and Molière, whose lives have fallen far short of the pattern we could have wished for them. And if Edward de Vere is, as we have every reason to believe, the real "Shakespeare," the world will not be slow to allow the great benefits he has conferred upon mankind to atone for any shortcomings that may be found in him. Our task at the present, however, is to see him as he was, in so far as his character and the events of his life have a bearing upon our problem. Everything that comes before us in the form of mere traditional view, inference, or impression must be rigidly separated from ascertained facts; and even these will need to be accepted cautiously and reinterpreted from the point of view of one great dominating possibility — that of his being [178] endowed with the heart and genius of Shakespeare and of having produced the Shakespeare literature.
If, for example, the Earl of Oxford was only a son-in-law of Lord Burleigh's, who had achieved nothing more noteworthy than the writing of a few short lyrics, and had spent the best years of his life in fruitless amusement with a company of play-actors, then we must judge him mainly by the part he played in the life of Burleigh. If, however, the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare, then he towers high above Lord Burleigh, and we shall have to judge Burleigh very largely by the part he played in the life of Oxford. Or if, in the domain of poetry, he is chiefly to be remembered as the man who called his rival, Philip Sidney, a "puppy," we shall have to judge him by his bearing towards Sidney. If, however, Oxford was "Shakespeare," gifted with all Shakespeare's penetration into human nature, our interest will lie in discovering how far Sidney may have merited the epithet.
Again, if, as we shall see was the case, we find that, as a young man, he begged to join the army; when that was refused him he begged to be allowed to join the navy; when that in turn was refused he begged to travel abroad; and when, though by this time he was twenty-four years of age and married, that was also refused, so that he seemed condemned to spend his life hanging about the court, and finding the court life irksome, ran away to the continent, only to be brought back before he had had a chance of seeing anything of life, we may be able to agree with those who speak of him as being wayward, if we suppose him to have been incapable and an intellectual mediocrity. But if we suppose him possessed of the genius of Shakespeare, with Shakespeare's capacity for experiencing life, and all that capacity as so much driving force within him, urging him to seek experience of life; indeed, if we take into account nothing more than what is positively known of his powers as revealed in his poems and dramatic record, we shall be much more [179] inclined to consider him a badly used man, the victim of most unfavourable circumstances and manifest injustice, with a very genuine grievance against the guardian and father-in-law, Burleigh, who had so persistently thwarted him.
Finally, if, remembering the character borne by the play-actors of the time, as described in the passage we have quoted from Dean Church, we believe him to have wasted the best years of his life in intimate, useless association with them, we shall be inclined to see in his conduct a manifestation of dissoluteness and to acquiesce in Burleigh's statement that he had been "enticed away by lewd persons." If, on the other hand, we believe that Oxford was Shakespeare, and that during these years he was hard at work, seriously, but in a measure secretly, engaged in the activities that have produced at once the greatest dramas and the finest literature that England boasts, then the facts have a totally new light thrown upon them, and admit of a vastly different interpretation. For, the secrecy in which his work as a whole is involved would surely be maintained towards those who were out of sympathy with him, amongst whom we can certainly place his father-in-law and probably his wife; all of which seems clearly alluded to in sonnet 48:
"How careful was I, when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay,
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust."We shall avoid, therefore, all unauthenticated stories which seem to have had their roots in personal animosity. Such particulars as are narrated in the Dictionary of National Biography, that a certain man's "story that the Earl" did so-and-so, but that it "is not confirmed, and was warmly denied by" the very man whom he was reported to have injured, is not biography. It serves to show, however, that he was the victim of false and unscrupulous calumny. When, therefore, we find great admirers of Philip Sidney, like Fulke Greville, Sidney's [180] biographer, promulgating impossible stories about projected assassinations, and another antagonist making, almost in so many words, the same false charges that Oliver makes against Orlando in "As You Like It," we begin to realize the type of men with whom we are dealing; what freedoms the group of court adventurers, to whom Oxford was clearly hostile, had taken with his name and reputation; and how little reliance is to be placed generally upon their records either of their friends or of their enemies.
It is unfortunate, then, that the names which predominate in the article upon which we are dependent for so many of the facts of Oxford's life are those of people antagonistic to him, and most of the facts bear evidence of having come to us through these unfriendly channels. Anything which bears the mark of Burleigh, Fulke Greville, or Raleigh, the true type of the picturesque but unscrupulous adventurer of those days, must be suspect in so far as it touches Edward de Vere; and anything which research may be able to recover, that shall furnish us with the names and the opinions of his friends about the court, and, more important still, his dealings with men of letters, and with playwrights and actors, will be invaluable as tending to furnish us with a truer view of the man. So far as we can make out up to the present, however, his friends seem to have respected loyally his desire for personal oblivion, and have remained silent about him; thus, of course, allowing free currency to all that his enemies have been able to circulate to his discredit.
As this is not intended to be a complete biography, facts which do not appear relevant to the argument, either for or against it, and which, from some other consideration, might necessitate lengthy discussion, will, for the most part, be omitted.
Note.
To illustrate again the curious way in which evidence has fallen into our hands, we would draw attention to the [181] above reference to Oliver in "As You Like, It." When we came across the murderous charges made against Oxford by Charles Arundel, the first thing that seemed to stand out was the name "Charles," and an evident vulgarity in the man, which brought Charles the wrestler, of "As You Like It," to the mind. Being somewhat "rusty" at the moment in reference to subordinate details in the play, the next thing was to look up the parts dealing with Charles the wrestler; only, of course, to find the same charges that Charles Arundel made against Oxford being insinuated by Oliver into the mind of Charles the wrestler. And so the parts of the mosaic keep fitting in. The jesting threats of Touchstone in the same play may therefore furnish the explanation of the charges made against Oxford: for practical joking could hardly be above the dignity of the writer of some of "Shakespeare's" comedies, who, according to his own confession, had made himself "a motley to the view."