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Edward de Vere: The True Bard
By Allison Taylor
. . . Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die.
The earth can yield me but a common grave
When you entombed in all men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’erread;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse
When all the breathers of this world are dead
You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.Sonnet 81
The author of these verses seems very confident in his literary prowess. He boasts that when all his contemporaries are dead, the tongues of those not yet born will speak his poetry throughout the ages because of the “virtue” of his words. Why then does he consign himself to “a common grave?” When he sees the countless generations who will adore his words, why does he imagine they must forget his name?
The author’s pride for his masterpieces is mixed with sorrow that his life’s works will never be recognized as his own. This is no Emily Dickinson claim of anonymity, in which the author bundles up his works in a dusty box and pretends they will never be found. The author of this sonnet has a much deeper and truer lament, knows more surely he will be denied the understanding of the ages, because his works bear another man’s name.
The works of Shakespeare are acknowledged to be the greatest in the English language, likely in all the world. Schoolchildren across the nations are instructed in his literature, his name, his life. Everyone knows the story of an ordinary young man out of Stratford who made a name in London as an actor and became the darling of the queen as a playwright. Unfortunately, no one, not even scholars who have devoted their entire lives to the subject, can explain how all this happened.
It didn’t.
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays, poems, and sonnets eternally attributed to Shakespeare. The man Shakespeare himself was gifted with some wit and less education, certainly not enough to produce the immortal works which bear his name. Throughout his works, there is displayed a level of mastery which Shakespeare could not have attained, and an acquaintance with various fields with which a commoner from Stratford could not have experienced as fully as is indicated in the works. To have written as fully as he did, the explanation of “genius” is not enough; the author must have had extensive knowledge, gained through direct experience, of worlds as varied as those of law, the courts, soldiering, the aristocracy, music, and sport.
De Vere had this experience and expertise in those areas, as well as other experiences which would give him uncanny proximity to the worlds portrayed in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and the rest. Oxford was born to one of the oldest earldoms in English history, dating back to the Norman conquest. His ancestors had fought with Richard the Lionheart, and had supported the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses. He was raised, after his father’s death, in the house of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was the right-hand man of Queen Elizabeth and considered the most powerful man in England at one time. Hence de Vere’s personal knowledge of aristocratic affairs.
He also had access to books and works which influenced his works. Thomas Bedingfield’s Cardanus Comfort, which is considered the “source book” for Hamlet, was introduced by a letter and poem written by Oxford himself. In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are translated. The examples therein show a knowledge of the previous translation by Arthur Golding as well as knowledge of the original work, because certain lines are contained in Venus and Adonis which were excluded by Golding. As it happens, Golding was actually de Vere’s uncle and lived in the same household with him while Oxford was a ward of Lord Burghley.
Hamlet is often considered by Oxfordians, those who support de Vere as the true author, as an autobiographical account of the earl’s own days in court. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, is widely conceded to be the model for Polonius. Burghley was also the father-in-law of Edward de Vere. Hamlet’s dialogue reveals extensive knowledge of Burghley’s career, to which only someone intimately connected to the lord would have had access. In the play, Polonius mentions “young men falling out at tennis,” another event in the young earl’s own life: the quarrel between de Vere and another man, Sidney, over tennis-court claims.
Another outstanding similarity comes from Henry IV, Part I, in which Prince Hal’s friends accost travellers, playing tricks on them, on the stretch of road “between Rochester and Gravesend.” De Vere himself, with his own companions, was reported for playing pranks in the same manner, along that same road. De Vere is also known to have traveled to Italy in the 1570s and even built a house there; several of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy, notably Romeo and Juliet (“In fair Verona . . .”), which might have been a far stretch for a man of lesser means than Oxford’s.
The plays are not the only works which support Oxford in a semi-autobiographical role. The poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece reflect the earl’s life in court. Venus and Adonis can be read as the tale of the author’s own romantic involvement with the Queen of England during the 1570s. Like Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, these poems are set not in mythological worlds but in the equally fantastic world of Tudor courts and political intrigue.
There are numerous other literary references which seem to indicate the earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare’s works. De Vere wrote, “For truth is truth, though never so old, and time cannot make that false which was once true.” In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare wrote, “For truth is truth, to the end of reckoning.” De Vere, whose name itself means “truth,” is thought to have left a few hints, despite the secrecy he employed in hiding his name. He is known to have signed his name, on occasion, E.Ver.
Another “clue” in the Oxfordians’ arsenal is an enigmatic preface to the second quarto of Troilus & Cressida, which surfaced in 1609, five years after de Vere’s death. Embedded in the letter is a “Paul-is-dead” hint which fuels the conspiracy theory. The epistle which introduced the works was headed, “A Never writer, to an Ever reader. News.” De Vere was an E.Ver (“A Never“) writer, who would “never” be known. Perhaps just a simple line which sounded eloquent, but Oxford’s supporters find it so good one wonders just how much significance was imparted to that single line when it was written.
The few works which bear Oxford’s name bear some resemblance in places to those attributed to Shakespeare. De Vere’s poem “Anne Vavasor’s Echo” is similar to the passage about the “choir of echoes” (line 840) in Venus and Adonis. That play also uses stanzas of six-line pentameter, which were used in early verse written by de Vere but are otherwise nearly entirely absent from 16th century English poetry.
The sonnets of Shakespeare comprise the works which give the most convincing evidence of de Vere’s authorship. Solely in these does the author speak in first person and describe his own feelings and experiences to some degree. He uses legal terms readily, suggesting (again) familiarity with and training in the law. More telling are the comments on the author’s own life. He laments that he is “made lame by Fortune‘s dearest spite” (Sonnet 37). It is widely known that de Vere sustained an injuries while dueling in his youth and considered himself burdened with “infirmity.” In a letter to Burghley in 1595 he referred to himself as “a lame man.” Sonnet 125 states, Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy, With my extern the outward honouring, Or laid great bases for eternity, Which proves more short than waste or ruining? De Vere indeed bore the canopy over Queen Elizabeth during the celebration of English triumph over the Spanish Armada. However, he says it is of no advantage to him to have done so, giving glory to outer qualities, or creating works which will last forever, when he gets no more benefit than if he had wasted his time frivolously.
The author of the sonnets also reveals much about himself through what he says about others. In Sonnet 69 another aristocrat is told that “thou dost common grow.” No commoner could take such liberties with someone of rank that much greater. Moreover, it is agreed by most scholars on both sides of the debate that many of the sonnets are dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, a handsome young man. The Stratfordians claim Southampton was Shakespeare’s patron. But Southampton at one point nearly married Edward de Vere’s daughter.
The first fourteen sonnets dwell exclusively on an exhortation to reproduce. The author goes so far as to say that he is selfish in holding back from procreating, calling him “niggard,” “usurer,” filled with “murd’rous hate” and “murd’rous shame.” Certainly there would have been no excuse for Shakespeare to speak so liberally with a nobleman unless he were in the same class with Southampton, and then with some relation to him. Otherwise the author would have had no reason to chide him, saying that Southampton had no defense against Time “save breed.”
One of the strongest arguments of the Stratfordians is the claim that some of Shakespeare’s plays were written after 1604, the year which de Vere died. As with much of the evidence supporting the Stratford man, documentation here is ambiguous and inconclusive. The chronological order of the plays published in the Riverside Shakespeare sets eleven plays after 1604. The Pelican Collected Works dates only two works, The Tempest and Henry VIII after 1604. Though evidence for the plays argued to have been written after de Vere’s death is scattered and shaky, four plays--Lear, Macbeth, Henry VIII, and The Tempest--have the best chances of holding up the Stratfordians’ platform. Unfortunately, even these plays cannot definitively exclude de Vere as the author, as there is no absolute, immutable evidence that they could not have been written before 1604.
Macbeth is generally considered a post-1604 work because of a few comments in Act II Scene 3 in which the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation is mentioned: the equivocator that could “swear in both the scales against either scale . . . yet could not equivocate to heaven.” The Stratfordians hold that equivocation was not well-known until the trial of Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, in the spring of 1606. But the doctrine had been in the public eye years earlier, when, in 1595 Father Robert Southwell was executed for practicing Catholic rituals.
The Porter’s remarks in Macbeth, then, which are widely supposed to refer to Garnet, might just as well be an allusion to Southwell instead. Macbeth is also held to a later date because of a tradition which claims the play was written in honor of King James’ assumption of the throne. This argument may be the most twisted of them all, for Macbeth is the most frightening and disturbing of all Shakespeare’s works, a play of “black and deep desires” in which the King is murdered cruelly. It would have been most imprudent and inappropriate to compose such a dark work for the coronation of the new king.
The main argument for Lear’s late appearance is the apparent use of Samuel Harsnet’s book A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published in 1603. Edgar’s madness, and especially the use of names of demons, such as “Hoppedance,“ resemble Harsnet’s description of demonic possession, a topic which Harsnet had researched from the Catholic Booke of Miracles. However, in his book The Mysterious William Shakespeare, Charlton Ogburn attests to the availability of this Booke of Miracles to Oxford, who could access it through a neighbor in the 1580s and 1590s. Other sources indicate that Lear, if not in his finished form, walked the stages prior to 1604. Phillip Henslowe reported that “King Leare” had been performed in Easter of 1594. In the Stationers’ Register of 1605 was entered a record of a play written some time before 1594, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which had no author named on its cover.
Prominent authorities date Henry VIII to 1613, when Sir Henry Wotton recorded seeing a performance of the play, which he assumed to be “new.” Conversely, there are three other accounts of Henry VIII, which was well-documented because it was being staged at the time the Globe theater burned, none of which calls the play a new one. In fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries, nearly every scholar dated the play to the Elizabethan era: before 1603. The documentary evidence putting Henry VIII after this time relies solely on the letter from Wotton, who was in no position of knowing whether the play had been written earlier.
The Tempest is thought to have made use of Sylvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, published in 1611. In the play, though, there are no obvious hints of Jourdain’s influence, such as images or phrases borrowed from Discovery. Actually, the author would have had several other sources detailing shipwrecks in the New World. Outstanding is Richard Hakluyt’s 1600 work Voyages, Navigations, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation Vol III, which contains an account from the captain of the Edward Bonaventure, which wrecked in the Bermudas in 1593. Interestingly, this ship was itself owned by Edward de Vere at one point. Therefore it would be ridiculous to exclude de Vere as the author of the Tempest on the grounds that he had no access to descriptions of shipwrecks before 1604.
Whereas there is an egregious dearth of documentation of Shakespeare as a playwright, de Vere is mentioned well-recorded as a man of literary talent. In the anonymous The Arte of English Poesie, written in 1589, Oxford is praised “for Comedy and Enterlude.” The anonymous author also spoke of “noble Gentlemen in the court that have written commendably well and suppressed it agayne, or else suffered it to be publisht without their own names to it.” He later refers to those whose writings would be praised “if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman, Edward Earle of Oxford.” William Webbe, in A Discourse of English Poetrie, praises Oxford’s writings, claiming that “the right honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among the rest” of Elizabethan poets. In 1598 Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia, claimed that, among others, “The best for comedy among us be Edward Earl of Oxford . . .”
If Edward de Vere was such a magnificent and noteworthy author, why have none of his works survived? The only answer, short of a mass book-burning, is that they did survive, but under another’s name.
As for the name itself, there are prolific suggestions, many quite feasible, for the devising of the name Shakespeare. De Vere was well-acquainted with theatre, and Athena, patron goddess of the home of Greek theatre, was known sometimes as Hasti-vibrans, the spear-shaker. More relevant to Oxford himself is his own coat of arms, which features a lion brandishing a spear. Because of this and his skill in tournaments, de Vere is said to have been greeted in court as “Spear-shaker.”
Additionally, Stratfordians cite Ben Jonson’s reference to Shakespeare as the “Sweet Swan of Avon” in the First Folio. However, the Earl of Oxford himself had an estate which was bounded by the Avon River on one side; it cannot be presumed that one man alone in all of England lived near the Avon.
In the England of Shakespeare’s time it was unseemly for a man of the courts to write plays, a pursuit left to the lower classes. Perhaps de Vere wrote the plays within him and signed them with a likely nom de plume, which serendipitously chanced to be similar to the Stratford man’s name, and the actor simply happened into immortality. Or it may have been that the two were conspirators against the ages: de Vere the writer of eternal verse and Shakespeare the lucky man chosen to act as the figurehead for the genius.