Numbers in bold brackets [] indicate original page numbers.
EARLY MANHOOD OF EDWARD DE VERE
I
[210] As Burleigh's papers are the chief original source of biographical matter relating to the Earl of Oxford's private life, and the writers upon whom we depend for most of our details are marked by Cecilian partialities, it is necessary to point out that, though we accept many of the facts upon their authority, they share in no degree the responsibility for the interpretation of them. This is entirely our own.
On coming of age, in April 1571, Oxford took his seat in the House of Lords, and in the same year distinguished himself at a solemn joust which took place in the Queen's presence at Westminster. In December of the same year he married, with the Queen's consent, Anne, daughter of Lord Burleigh. The Queen "attended the ceremony which was celebrated with great pomp."
As we have already had occasion to point out the remarkable parallelism between the case of the Earl of Oxford and Bertram in "All's Well," we must now add to it this fact of his marriage with a young woman with whom he had been brought up. In Bertram's case, however, they had lived together at his own home, whereas in Oxford's case they had lived together in the home of the lady. If we are to believe contemporary report on the matter the resemblance between the two cases extends to even more interesting particulars. Helena was socially inferior to Bertram. In the early part of the play he shows no inclination towards this young woman who is in love with him, and it is she who pursues the young man until she succeeds in winning him as her husband.
[211] Helena: "I am from humble, he from honour' d name;
No note upon my parents, his all noble;
My master, my dear lord he is; and I
His servant live, and will his vassal die."We may remark in passing that it is difficult to believe that these words could have been written by any one but an aristocrat in whom pride of birth was a pronounced feeling. We may also compare the last lines of this passage with the concluding part of De Vere's Echo poem:
"May I his favour match with love if he my love will try?
May I requite his birth with faith then faithful will I die?"Most people will agree that the similarity of these two passages is startling.
Now, not only did Anne Cecil belong to the newly emerging middle class, so much held in contempt by the few remaining representatives of the ancient aristocracy, but we have it reported by a contemporary, Lord St. John, that, "the Erle of Oxenforde hath gotten himself a wyffe, or, at leste a wyffe hath caught him. This is the mistress Anne Cycille, where unto the Queen hath given her consent." One may conclude, therefore, that the Earl of Oxford was not supposed to have been very active himself in bringing about the marriage. Rightly or wrongly others regarded Oxford's marriage with Burleigh's daughter in much the same light as is represented by the marriage of Bertram with Helena. All this reads very strangely in view of the age of the bride: for Anne was born on December 5th, 1556. Like Juliet she was, therefore, but fourteen years of age at the time when the courting alluded to took place, and when all the wedding arrangements were made. The marriage itself seems merely to have been delayed until the moment when she could be spoken of as being fifteen.
This combination of extreme youthfulness and the [212] bearing and conduct of a matured woman, common to Juliet and Anne Cecil, we shall find in a later dramatic representation of Lady Oxford. The resemblance to Juliet, however, must be viewed in the light of the remarkable correspondence in literary particulars between the work of De Vere and Shakespeare's play of "Romeo and Juliet." This play is recognized as one of the early productions of Shakespeare, and it is also interesting to notice that Mr. Frank Harris selects Romeo as a personal self-representation of Shakespeare in his early years.
The resemblance between Lady Oxford and Helena with which we are particularly concerned at this stage is further, supported by letters in the Hatfield manuscripts, in which her smallness of stature and sweetness of manner are indicated. She is spoken of, on two occasions, by different writers, as the "sweet little Countess of Oxford," precisely as Helena, in "All's Well," is spoken of as "little Helena" (1, 1) and "sweet Helena" (V, 3): the latter epithet being specially emphasized by repetition.
What the actual inward relationships of Oxford and his wife may have been, is one of the secrets over which the grave has closed for ever. We have impressions recorded, however, which are derived evidently from hostile Cecil sources. Oxford himself, on the other hand, preserves an almost complete silence, proof against all provocation; his enemies call it sulkiness. The one thing clear about it is that the union was unhappy, and had a marked influence upon his career. This being so, the matter concerns our present enquiry.
The antagonism between Oxford and Philip Sidney has already been referred to. Now we find that Sidney had first of all been proposed as a husband for Anne Cecil, and her father's conduct of the negotiations, however it may strike an aristocrat, appears to an ordinary Englishman as sordid a piece of bargaining over the disposal of a daughter as could well [213] be. Sidney, notwithstanding his family connections and personal prospects, which had evidently been quite enough to satisfy the demands of a prospective aristocratic father-in-law like Lord Devereux, was nevertheless too poor a man to satisfy the cupidity of Sir William Cecil, as he then was. He must needs procure for his daughter, he says, a richer husband than Master Philip Sidney. The difficulty was overcome, however, and arrangements were made for the marriage of Anne Cecil to Sidney, though both were hardly more than children at the time; for Sidney was Oxford's junior by four and a half years, whilst Anne was only 12 years old in 1569 when the marriage arrangement was made.
At the time when the marriage between Anne and Sidney was arranged the Earl of Oxford was, socially, "out of Anne's star." Now Cecil's care for the social and material advancement of his own family is one of the outstanding features of his policy. From this point of view the marriage of his daughter to one of the foremost of the ancient nobility, and a man of vast possessions, would be a great acquisition and the gratification of a high personal ambition. These social connections evidently meant much to him, for he had tried to make out an aristocratic ancestry for himself and had failed. Whether or not Elizabeth would sanction such an alliance might, however, be considered extremely doubtful; and if she were to consent, such consent would be almost as great a concession to Cecil as was that of Denmark's King and Queen to the marriage of Hamlet with the daughter of Polonius.
What may have transpired "behind the scenes" we shall probably never know; but we find that early in 1571 Cecil was raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Burleigh, the marriage arrangement with Sidney was cancelled, the Queen gave her consent to Oxford's marriage with Burleigh's daughter Anne, and in the latter part of the same year the marriage took place in the Queen's presence, being [214] "celebrated with great pomp!" It is not improbable, then, that Burleigh owed his own peerage to the proposed marriage.
A most curious circumstance, suggestive of more sordid bargaining, is what is recorded of Burleigh and Oxford's estates. Amongst the extensive estates of the De Veres, the two most directly associated with the family appear to have been those of Earls Colne and Hedingham in Essex. Now we find that, shortly after his marriage, the Earl of Oxford made over the important ancestral domain of Castle Hedingham to his father-in-law. What influences may have been at work to get him to part with Castle Hedingham to Burleigh it is impossible to surmise; but when we find that his father-in-law had been complaining of his poverty only a few years before, that he had managed to get himself made master of the court of royal wards, and that when he died he left three hundred landed estates, it needs no stretch of imagination to suppose that he had been able to exercise over the affairs of other royal wards something of the same kind of undue influence which he had evidently been able to exert over his youthful son-in-law.
If, therefore, there is any character in Shakespeare's works whom we may be able to identify with Burleigh, to have had him likened to Jephtha, as Hamlet does Polonius, would have been something of a slander upon Jephtha. For the conduct of this Old Testament character towards his daughter seems quite respectable compared with the sordid dealings of the great Lord Burleigh; and the tears which the latter seems ostentatiously to have shed at the death of her whom he called his "filia carissima" ought to have sprung from the grief of shame and repentance rather than the grief of bereavement. In the subsequent troubles Burleigh made much of the faultiness of Oxford's bearing whilst an inmate of the former's house, and if his accusations were found to be well grounded they would only render more [215] contemptible the sacrifice he made of his "filia carissima" for personal and family ambition. He cannot have it both ways.
Notwithstanding, therefore, the royal consent, the pomp of the ceremony, and the elaborate festivities, it is evident that the marriage had not taken place under the happiest of auspices for those most immediately concerned. To all these initial drawbacks must be added the fact that the young couple seem to have remained under the eye and direction of the lady's father who, we shall presently show, was about as incompatible with her husband in disposition, interests and circumstances as one man could possibly be with another. Oxford's mother-in-law was also an important factor to be reckoned with. The stern and vigilant Lady Burleigh apparently considered it part of her duty to keep a strict watch upon her young son-in-law, and was not afraid of rebuking the great Queen Elizabeth herself, then forty years of age, for attempting to flirt with the young man. The Queen's angry retort that "his lordship (Burleigh) winketh at these love affairs," is illuminating on more points than one, and helps us to envisage the whole moral situation. Finally, whatever the actual facts behind Burleigh's general accusations against Oxford whilst he was an inmate of the Cecil home, it is quite evident that Oxford's relationships with the family had not been harmonious, and only the best of luck and the utmost circumspection all round could have averted disaster.
As the personality of Elizabeth's great minister looms large in the life of the poet during the years immediately following the marriage, and probably exercised an influence over the whole of his career, it is necessary that the character of their relationship should be duly weighed. It is no part of our business to estimate Burleigh's value as a statesman or politician, nor even to take his moral measure as a whole. It is his dealings with one man that concern us, and how [216] these dealings would be likely to impress the man in question. In brief, we are concerned principally with Burleigh's dealings with Oxford, from Oxford's point of view.
On the one hand we have a man who for many years had maintained a supreme position in the political world at a time when such eminence could only be secured and retained by the most shifty opportunism. On the other hand we have a very young man, hardly more than a boy, with the sensitive and idealist temperament of the poet, keenly alive to the literary and intellectual movements of his time, and with a fervent attachment to the departing feudal order, the social and moral principles of which were at direct variance with the political opportunism of the age in which he lived. To the young man, politics, in their contemporary sense, would be as great an abomination, as they would be a ruling interest in the mind of the elder man. It is difficult, therefore, to conceive of two men more thoroughly antipathetical or less likely to understand each other. If, then, we recollect that the younger one had been subjected to the elder one's dominance from childhood, it speaks well for the former's strength of character and the decided bent of his genius, that his literary and poetic inclinations were not crushed by the weight of the influences working against them.
As some of the admirers of Burleigh have tried to make out that his influence was favourable to the literary movement of the times, we can, perhaps, best judge him in this respect by indicating his relationship to the second genius of that age, the poet Spenser. One or two expressions from Church's life of the poet will suffice:
"Burleigh's dislike to Spenser" (p. 47).
"Burleigh hated him and his verses" (p. 87).
"Under what was popularly thought the crabbed and parsimonious administration of Burleigh . . . . it seemed as if the poetry of the time was passing away in chill discouragement" (p. 107).
[217] No treatment of the question of Burleigh's dealings with other men would be adequate which omitted to mention the system of espionage which he practised. Even his eulogists are compelled to admit the far-reaching and intricate ramifications of the system he set up, the application of it to even those servants of the state who had every reason to believe themselves most trusted, and the low, unscrupulous character of the agents he employed to watch men of high station and approved honour. The article on Bur1eigh in the Dictionary of National Biography, which is very partial towards its subject, nevertheless admits all this, and it appears occasionally in the "Life of Spenser," of which we have made frequent use. Of course his admirers find a justification for this in the dangers to which his life was exposed. Other men in exalted positions have, however, been exposed to similar dangers and some of them have had to protect themselves by similar means, but have been able to do it without outraging the sense of decency to the same extent as was done by Burleigh. It is quite evident, moreover, from G. Ravenscroft Dennis's work on "The House of Cecil," that when his eldest son, Thomas, afterwards Earl of Exeter, was in Paris, Burleigh had him watched and secretly reported on, quite in the manner of Polonius's employment of the spy Reynaldo. In this case no such excuse as that proffered would apply. It seems more like the insensibility of a vulgar nature to the requirements of ordinary decency. The man who, having risen to eminence through his patron, the Duke of Somerset, saved himself when his patron fell by drawing up the articles of impeachment against his benefactor, was perhaps unable to believe that others could act from higher motives than his own, and was prepared to trust nobody. Certainly, no one could feel himself free from the attentions of Burleigh's spies, and least of all the son-in-law who knew that, beneath any external show of amicability, there lay between them a natural and rooted antipathy.
[218] In these spying methods of Burleigh's we may possibly find an explanation of a mysterious incident recorded as happening prior to Oxford's marriage, especially if we suppose Oxford to be "Shakespeare. Oxford had inflicted a wound on an under-cook in Burleigh's employ, and this wound unfortunately proved fatal. None of the circumstances are told, possibly because they are unknown, but, like everything else, the event must needs be set down to Oxford's discredit. Now, remembering Burleigh's spying methods and the peculiar circumstances under which Polonius received his death wound at the hands of Hamlet, we may possibly find in the drama a suggestion of something that had actually happened in the experience of its author; especially in view of Hamlet's exclamation:
"Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better."If, then, in Shakespeare there is any character whom we might identify with Burleigh we should expect to find a spying craftiness amongst his characteristics. This, of course, is the case with Polonius.
In the thinly-veiled conflict between the two men it is evident that Burleigh had not all his own way. Accustomed as he had been to the thought of others yielding to his domination — a domination possibly less real than he imagined, as he appears to have been more of an instrument in the hands of his capable mistress and less a ruling power than he supposed — treated as he undoubtedly had been with extreme deference by one of the most autocratic of a despotic dynasty, he nevertheless found himself contradicted, remonstrated with, and embarrassed by a son-in-law who was little more than a boy, and who undoubtedly regarded the great minister as belonging to an inferior order.
It is difficult to appreciate the point of view of writers [219] who speak of Oxford's "ingratitude" to Burleigh, and of his having added to his own eminence by marriage. The fact is they merely repeat Burleigh's own account as it appears in the documents he has left. As master of the court of royal wards, Burleigh had had charge of Oxford and had used his position both to elevate the social prestige of his own family and to add to his own estates. So far as De Vere is concerned it is difficult to see that he owed any substantial advantage to his connection with Burleigh; whilst the latter was undoubtedly the source of a very great deal that acted as a drag upon the life of his son-in-law, interfering with the natural expansion of his powers, intensifying the chagrins of domestic trouble, and fastening a stigma on his reputation. We have already referred to Burleigh's repeated thwarting of Oxford's desire for a more useful career and a more extended experience of life; and whatever reason he may have offered, it is quite clear that behind it all there was no real friendliness towards the younger man. The pretence of a good motive behind the repeated refusal — that he hoped the Queen might find something better for him — is so evidently a subterfuge as to make the real hostility all the more evident.
Nor is it the only instance in which we find Burleigh trying to give a gloss of friendliness to his attempts to injure his son-in-law. Some years later, when Oxford was in trouble with the authorities, we find Burleigh appealing to Raleigh and Hatton to use their influence with Queen Elizabeth on Oxford's behalf. This reads at first like a friendly act. When, however, we remember that Raleigh was possibly the one man about court whom his royal mistress most delighted in teasing; whose real influence with the Queen was practically negligible; and between whom and Oxford there was a long standing antagonism; if to all this we add the fact that Burleigh, in making the appeal to Hatton, uses the occasion to gather together all the charges he can formulate against [220] the very man for whom he is supposed to be interceding, and pours them into unfriendly ears - for Hatton also was of the hostile party and wrote a letter of complaint to Queen Elizabeth speaking of himself as the "sheep" and Oxford as the "boar" - we can only wonder at the clumsiness of a manoeuvre, hardly entitled to rank even as low cunning.
As we have had occasion thus to mention the unfriendly relationship of Oxford to Raleigh we may see a reflection of it in Shakespeare's allusion to "the sanctimonious pirate that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped one out of the table, thou shalt not steal.'" ("Measure for Measure.") For it is not easy to reconcile the religious pietism of Raleigh's poetry with certain of his well-known sea-faring episodes. The moral standards of the time are sometimes urged in extenuation of Raleigh's doings; but Burleigh himself, to his credit, disapproved of the great sailor's buccaneering, although on the other hand he saw that the Queen secured some share of the spoil.
We cannot yet piece together with a sense of true sequence the recorded details of the early life of Oxford. It is evident, however, that such efforts to obtain a relief from court life in a life of wider experience and greater usefulness as he had made before his marriage, were repeated after his marriage, and still without success: presenting a shameful contrast to the treatment extended to his rival Sidney. Oxford was one of the foremost and wealthiest of the nobility; Sidney at the time was simply Master Philip Sidney; for he only rose to the inferior honour of knighthood three years before his death. He was considered too poor to marry a daughter of Burleigh's, and he was more than four and a half years younger than Oxford. Yet, at the age of seventeen, Sidney began his travels on the Continent, visiting Paris, Frankfort, Vienna, Hungary and Venice, and having every facility afforded him for meeting prominent men. On the other hand, Oxford with his superior social [221] position, wealth, culture and genius, at the age of twenty-four was still to be kept at home in the leading strings of an uncongenial father-in-law. It is difficult, even for those who are in no way involved, and after a lapse of nearly three hundred and fifty years, to contemplate such treatment without a feeling of indignation. Certainly the man who was responsible for it was no friend to the Earl of Oxford.
At length, finding his entreaties useless, he resolved to take the law into his own hands, and, in 1574, without the consent of the authorities, left the country in order to fulfil his purpose of travelling on the Continent. He had got no further than the Low Countries when he was overtaken by Burleigh's emissaries and brought back. Again we find the extraordinary parallel between the Earl of Oxford and Bertram, in "All's Well," maintained. Bertram had begged in vain to be allowed to undertake military service just as Oxford had done. He had begged to travel only to be put off with specious excuses, "'too young' and 'the next year' and ''tis too early,'" until, yielding to the suggestion of some friend (Act II, i) he exclaims, in a passage already quoted:
"I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock,
Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry,
Till honour be bought up and no sword worn
But one to dance with. By heavens! I'll steal away."This he did forthwith.
We venture to say that it would be difficult to find in English literature a closer analogy anywhere between the particulars narrated of a fictitious personage and the detailed records of a living contemporary than we have here between Bertram and the Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare's partiality for the Earls of Oxford has already been pointed out ("Henry VI," part 3). His interest in the particular Earl who was then living, and who was a poet and dramatist, is the most natural assumption. Whether, therefore, [222] the Earl of Oxford was the writer of the play, "All's Well," or not, one cannot doubt, in the face of such a continued parallelism, that the man who wrote the play had the Earl of Oxford in his mind as the prototype of Bertram. Amongst the records of royal wards of the time we can find no other instance which touches Bertram at so many points. Reiterating a principle, therefore, upon which we have insisted from the first, we would urge that to discover such a parallelism in Shakespeare's works at an advanced stage of the investigation strengthens our convictions immeasurably more than if the case of Bertram and its analogy with Oxford had been known before the selection was made.
The special point with which we are now dealing — the obstacles thrown in the way of a young man's wish to travel — appears again in "Hamlet." Laertes applies for the king's permission to go abroad, and the king asks, "Have you your father's leave? What says Polonius?" To which Polonius replies:
"He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave
By laboursome petition, and at last
Upon his will I seal'd my hard consent:
I do beseech you, give him leave to go."Then there is the king and queen's opposition to Hamlet's wish to go to Wittenberg, and the false reasons assigned:
King:
"It is most retrograde to our desire;
And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son."Again we notice that it is Polonius who is chiefly opposed to his son's travelling, exactly as Burleigh raised his own opposition into a settled maxim of policy:
"Suffer not thy sons to cross the Alps and if by travel they get a few broken languages they shall profit them nothing more than to have one meat served up in divers dishes."
(Burleigh's maxims - Martin A. S. Hume.)[223] Resuming the story of De Vere's early manhood, we find that in the year following his abortive attempt to travel he was at last granted permission to go abroad. How important a matter this was to him may be judged by the fact that it is, spoken of as "the ambition of his life"; yet by this, time he was twenty-five and a half years old, and inferior men had enjoyed the privilege whilst in their teens. Even at this age he had only been able to wring the concession from Elizabeth by means of entreaties; and, considering the favour and indulgence that the Queen showed to him both before and after this, it appears as if the concession had at last been gained in spite of the covert opposition of his father-in-law. In view of all this the speech of Polonius's just quoted is of extraordinary significance. In October, 1575, then, he reached Venice, having travelled by way of Milan.
Our present business being to trace in the works of Shakespeare indications of the life and circumstances of the Earl of Oxford we ought not to leave this question of foreign travel without drawing attention to the play of Shakespeare's, in which this, subject comes in for special treatment, namely, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." The date usually assigned to this work is 1590-92; that is to say it is recognized as being amongst the first of Shakespeare's dramas, although it was not published until it appeared in the Folio edition of 1623. Now we find that a play whose title is suggestive of this one was being acted by the company of Anthony Munday, who more than ten years, before the date assigned to this drama acknowledged himself the servant of the Earl of Oxford. As Munday's play, "The Two Italian Gentlemen," may have formed the basis for Shakespeare's work, it is not improbable that the latter was, in fact, the first play of Shakespeare's and may, if we assume the De Vere authorship, have been begun shortly after his return from Italy. It is worth remarking, too, that in it [224] the scene moves from Verona to Milan, a town specially mentioned in the slight record of Oxford's travels. We have had occasion, moreover, to point out already a very striking parallel between the early work of De Vere and the discussion on love with which this particular play opens.
On the subject of travel we have first of all Valentine's statement that "Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits," followed by his urging Proteus,
"rather
To see the wonders of the world abroad,
Than, living dully sluggardised at home,
Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness."This is followed in Act III by Panthino's taxing the father of Proteus with having suffered him,
"to spend his youth at home,
While other men of slender reputation
Put forth their sons to seek preferment out."He therefore proceeds to "importune" him,
"To let him spend his time no more at home,
Which would be great impeachment to his age,
In having known no travel in his youth."To this the father of Proteus replies:
"I have considered well his, loss of time,
And how he cannot be a perfect man,
Not being tried and tutor'd in the world."On the one hand we cannot ascribe these lines to a man indifferent to foreign travel, and on the other hand it is difficult to think of them as being written by one who had found the way to foreign travel readily open to him. Everything points to the writer being one who had chafed at "living dully, sluggardised at home," and who had had to fight to get himself "tried and tutor'd in the world"; whilst "men of slender reputation" had been freely accorded the advantages which had been denied to himself.
[225] Before leaving the play of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," we notice that the passage just quoted is followed by another which touches a point already mentioned elsewhere:
"'Twere good, I think, your lordship, sent him thither:
(to the royal court)
There shall he practise tilts and tournaments,
Hear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen,
And be in eye of every exercise
Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth."Associate this with Edward de Vere and again we have a case in which comment is, superfluous. To think of the passage coming from a writer of lower or middle class origin demands considerable credulity. Every word bespeaks the special interests of De Vere, and pulsates with that excessive respect for high birth which is common to De Vere and "Shakespeare."
The records give no indication as to how his time was spent in Italy. This could only be learnt accurately from himself, and as a large reserve and secretiveness in respect to his doings seem to have been characteristic of him throughout, we can only surmise what his occupation would be during the six months of his stay. Considering, however, the literary and dramatic movement in Italy at the time, his own particular bent, and the course his life took after his return to England, there can be little doubt as to his chief interest whilst in that country. He would be much more likely to be found cultivating the acquaintance of those literary and play-acting people of whom his father-in-law would disapprove, than mixing in the political and diplomatic circles that the great minister would consider proper to an eminent English nobleman.
As an illustration of a principle and Baptista method upon which much stress has been laid Minola's throughout these researches we would draw crowns attention to a detail in connection with Oxford's Italian tour [226] which, though slight in itself, adds much to that sense of versimilitude that has followed the investigations at each step. Whilst looking up references to Oxford in the published Hatfield manuscripts we noticed the record of a letter he had addressed to Burleigh from Italy. It is but a brief note concerned solely with the fact that he had borrowed five hundred crowns from some one named Baptista Nigrone, and requesting Burleigh to raise the money by the sale of some of his lands - a method of raising money which appears more than once in the pages of "Shakespeare."
As some discussion has taken place over Shakespeare's use of the name "Baptista," its presence in this note of Oxford's naturally arrested attention, and the thought immediately presented itself that if Oxford were actually the writer of the play in which Baptista, the rich gentleman of Padua, appears ("The Taming of the Shrew") we should expect to find "crowns" introduced into the drama in some marked way, and probably in association with Baptista Minola himself. And this is so. As a matter of fact these particular coins are much more to the front here than in any other of Shakespeare's Italian plays. They are mentioned no less than six times whilst "ducats" are only twice mentioned. On the other hand, in "The Comedy of Errors," for example, "ducats" are mentioned ten times and "crowns" not at all. "The Merchant of Venice," which also contains no mention of "crowns" but abundant references to "ducats" is, for special reasons, unsuitable for purposes of comparison. What is more to the point than the actual number of references in "The Taming of the Shrew, is the fact that the crowns of the wealthy Baptista are specially in evidence, and enter as an important element into the plot. Oxford, it appears from a letter sent home by an attendant, spent some time in Padua itself, and seems to have been involved in riotous proceedings there: not at all unlikely in the creator of the character "Petruchio."
It may be worth while adding that we even find a [227] suggestion of Baptista's surname, "Minola," in another Italian, Benedict Spinola, whose name also appears in connection with this tour. Burleigh, it seems, received from him a notification of Oxford's arrival in Italy. Benedick in "Much Ado" is a nobleman, also of Padua, and these are the only two gentlemen of Padua to be found in Shakespeare's plays. It must further be pointed out that the names "Baptista Nigrone" and "Benedict Spinola" are not selected from amongst a number of others, but are two out of the three Italian names with which we have met in connection with the Italian tour; and to find that, in combination, they almost furnish the identical name of Shakespeare's "Baptista Minola," will be admitted by the most sceptical as at any rate interesting. Certainly such discoveries as that of the place occupied by Baptista's "crowns," agreeing with the conclusions of mere a priori reasoning, have added, as can be easily imagined, no small spice of excitement to our researches.