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EDWARD DE VERE — MIDDLE PERIOD: DRAMATIC FOREGROUND
II
Our chief concern at this stage is with his dramatic activities. How soon after his return from Italy these were begun we cannot say; but the fact that he appears almost immediately to have adopted the practice of absenting himself from domestic and court life, and of sharing the Bohemian life of literary men and play-actors, suggests that he was not long in beginning his dramatic apprenticeship. Then, from this time up to about the year 1590, which we take as marking in a general way the beginning of the Shakespearean output, his life was largely of this Bohemian and dramatic character. Future research will probably furnish fuller details and dates of Edward de Vere's connection with the stage; sufficient has, however, already been established to show that by the year 1580 he was already deeply committed.
From the Calendar of State Papers we learn that in 1580 the heads of the Cambridge University wrote to Burleigh objecting to the Earl of Oxford's servants "showing their cunning" in certain plays which they had already performed before the Queen. By 1584 he had a company of players touring regularly in the provinces, and from this year until 1587 his company was established in London, occupying a foremost place in the dramatic world.
[257] In connection with his tours in the provinces it is worth while remarking that in 1584, that is to say just before settling in London, his company paid a visit to Stratford-on-Avon. William Shakspere was by this time twenty years of age and had been married for two years. There has been a great deal of guessing respecting the date at which William Shakspere left Stratford-on-Avon, and it is not improbable that it may have been connected with the visit of the "Oxford Boys." As it is the birth of twins, early in 1585, which furnishes the data from which the time of his leaving Stratford has been inferred, the latter half of 1584 may indeed have been the actual time.
However these things may he, the fact is that, whether in the country or the metropolis, it appears to have been quite recognized that the Earl of Oxford had a hand in the composition of some of the plays that his company was staging, whilst others were substantially his own.
The year 1584, which gives us the earliest evidence of his being directly implicated in dramatic work, connects him also with a writer of poetry and drama, and the manager of a theatrical company, called Anthony Munday; and as this connection is of a most important and interesting character it must be treated at some length.
One peculiar fact about Munday has been the attributing to him both of dramatic and poetic compositions of a superior order, which competent authorities now assert could not have been written by him. In order to establish this point we must first deal with matters which take us past the period of time with which we are now dealing. In the year 1600 there was published an important poetical anthology called "England's Helicon," containing, amongst others, the poems of "Shepherd Tony," whose identity has been one of the much-discussed problems of Elizabethan literature. Some writers have inclined to the idea that Anthony Munday was "Shepherd Tony"; and in a modern [258] anthology one of the best of the poems of Shepherd Tony, "Beauty sat bathing by a spring," is ascribed to Anthony Munday: as if no doubt existed on the point. Now Munday has, as a matter of fact, published a volume of his own poetry, "A Banquet of Dainty Conceits"; and of this the modern editor of "England's Helicon," Mr. A. H. Bullen (1887), says:
"Intrinsically the poems have little interest; but the collection is on that account important, as affording excellent proof that Anthony Munday was not the Shepherd Tony of 'England's Helicon.' Munday was an inferior writer."
He then gives a passages of ten lines from Munday's poems and adds: "Very thin gruel this, and there are eight more stanzas. After reading these 'Dainty Conceits' I shall stubbornly refuse to believe that Munday could have written any of the poems attributed in 'England's Helicon' to the Shepherd Tony."
We now revert to the period proper to this chapter, the years approaching 1580, in which De Vere was serving, as it were, the first term of his dramatic apprenticeship, and we ask for a very careful attention to the following passages taken from the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 5, chapter 10:
"Anthony Munday . . . a hewer and trimmer of plays."
"Of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists Munday is the most considerable, interesting and typical."
"These plays of Munday (have) no genius in them."
"A translation from the Italian may be given as the beginning of Munday's work. (It is) a comedy of Two Italian Gentlemen . . . Victoria's song at her window and Fedele's answer are of real poetic charm, and Fedele's denunciation of woman's fickleness is exactly in the strain [259] as it is in the metre of the rhyming rhetoric of 'Love's, Labour's Lost.' . . . Rhyming alexandrines and fourteen-syllabled lines are generally employed, but in Fedele's speech, special seriousness and dignity of style are attained by the use of rhyming ten-syllabled lines in stanzas of six lines (The 'Venus' and De Vere's 'Of Women' stanza) . . . What is unexpected is the idiomatic English of the translation; (for Munday's) prose translations do not display any special power in transforming the original into native English. . . .
"Munday in 1580 and in his earliest published works is anxious to proclaim himself 'servant of the Earl of Oxford' . . . The Earl of Oxford's company of players acted in London between 1584 and 1587. . . . (In a certain play) 'as it hath been sundry times played by the right honourable Earle of Oxenford, the Lord Great Chamberlaine of England, his servant,' the six-lined stanza occurs. (Much of it) might be Munday's work (but, he cannot have written the sonorous blank verse of the historic scenes . . . (One of) Munday's plays is a humble variation of the dramatic type of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' . . . And we find in (another of Munday's plays) phrases that may have rested in the mind of Shakespeare."
We feel entitled to say that the writer of these passages, the Rev. Ronald Bayne, M.A., was simply trembling on the brink of the discovery we claim to have made. The sentences quoted are not to be found in the close proximity to one another in which we have here placed them. They do, however, occur in the same chapter of the same work and are all from the same pen. A careful examination of the passages in these plays of Munday's, which "could not have been written by him," and containing passages which might have "rested in the mind of Shakespeare," would be necessary to make the present statement complete. They will need to be compared with Shakespeare's work on the [260] one hand, and with the De Vere work on the other. For the present we are content to let it rest upon the authority quoted, and ask the reader to observe the number and the important character of the connecting links which Anthony Munday thus establishes for us between Shakespeare and Edward de Vere. For, if the passages in question fulfil the description given by Mr. Bayne, there seems but one explanation possible, in view of the whole course our investigations have so far taken, and that is that prior to 1580 the Earl of Oxford was learning his business as dramatist, trying his prentice hand, so to speak, upon inferior plays then current, collaborating with inferior writers, interpolating passages of his own into plays produced by his employee Anthony Munday - such passages as "might have rested in the mind of Shakespeare."
As we are given one example of verse that appears in a play of Munday's, we shall reproduce it, along with corresponding passages from De Vere and Shakespeare, notwithstanding the repetition it involves:
1. Munday's play:
"Lo! here the common fault of love, to follow her that flies,
And fly from her that makes pursuit with loud lamenting cries.
Fedele loves Victoria, and she hath him forgot;
Virginia likes Fedele best, and he regards her not."2. De Vere's poems:
"The more I followed one, the more she fled away,
As Daphne did full long ago, Apollo's, wishful prey.
The more my plaints I do resound the less she pities me.
The more I sought the less I found, yet mine she meant to be."As the verse in Munday's play exactly reproduces the situation of the lover's in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," we quote the lines of the latter play dealing with the situation:
3. Shakespeare, "'M.N.D." I. 1 (Dialogue):
"I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.
O! that your frovvns would teach my smiles such skill.
[261] I give him curses, yet he gives me love.
O! that my prayers could such affection move.
The more I hate the more he follows me.
The more I love the more he hateth me."We are content to leave these matters to the reflection of the reader; and, as a last reference to Anthony Munday, merely point out the interesting fact that the recently discovered manuscript, which forms the subject of Sir E. Maunde Thompson's work on the penmanship of William Shakspere, is an interpolation into a play by Anthony Munday.