Giving Oxford the Boot

As an addendum to my last post, I thought I’d explain why I’m not longer sold on Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as the true Shakespeare.

Oxford remains the most popular authorship candidate – other than Will Shakspere of Stratford, of course. And there is much to recommend Oxford, especially the obvious parallels between incidents in his life and episodes in the plays. The plot of All’s Well that Ends Well mirrors the early years of Oxford’s unhappy marriage to Anne Cecil, and even the “bed trick” that resolves the conflict has a parallel in a contemporary rumor about how their union was consummated. In 1573 Oxford organized a rather mean-spirited prank involving the robbery of some travelers, an event clearly echoed in The Famous Victories of Henry V and later in Henry IV Part I. There are many other possible parallels.

Edward de Vere (Wikipedia)

If all this is true, why did I become an Oxfordian apostate? There are several reasons, some more important than others.

A dream of Kenilworth

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was obviously inspired by the elaborate festivities organized by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Familiarity with these festivities is so clearly implied by the play that ardent Stratfordians have gone so far as to suggest that Shakespeare’s father walked with him from Stratford to Kenilworth so the young lad could gaze through the fence and glimpse the spectacle. This is ridiculous. But Oxford had even less chance of viewing the action, because he was on the continent at the time.

Mermaid and Dolphin from A Midsummer Night's Dream, by Arthur Rackham, 1908 — a passage generally sourced to the Kenilworth festivities

“Tear him for his bad verses!”

Oxford’s extent poetry (the verses formally attributed to him) is markedly inferior to Shakespeare’s work. Oxfordians say the surviving poems represent the works of the earl’s youth, while the Shakespearean corpus represents his mature talent. Still, one would think that even the fledgling Bard would show more flashes of genius than are evident in poems like this:

O cruel hap and hard estate,
That forceth me to love my foe;
Accursed be so foul a fate,
My choice for to prefix it so.
So long to fight with secret sore
And find no secret salve therefore;
Some purge their pain by plaint I find,
But I in vain do breathe my wind.

(Poem 14.)

You’re a mean one, Mr. Vere

Though Oxfordians have made strenuous efforts to rehabilitate his reputation, Oxford seems to have been a pretty rotten human being. (A somewhat one-sided précis of his life is found here.) At age seventeen, in what may have been a careless exhibition of his fencing prowess, he fatally stabbed a cook in his household. He abandoned his wife and infant daughter for years because he suspected that his wife had been unfaithful (it is said the suspicion was based on his idiosyncratic belief that a woman’s gestation period was 12 months). Not above being unfaithful himself, he impregnated one of the queen’s ladies in waiting (it is not recorded if she took 12 months to deliver). He informed on some of his friends as traitors, subjecting them to imprisonment and the threat of execution (ultimately they were exiled).

True, we don’t know the full story in any of these cases; but it’s hard to say that the earl comes across well. Plenty of great writers and artists have been bad people, and it’s always possible that Shakespeare was a nasty piece of work, but that’s not the impression I get from his writings.

Send in the clowns

Oxford also seems to have been a fundamentally unserious person, who was the frequent butt of other courtiers’ humor. When he returned from Italy, he had affected Italian manners and attire to the extent of making a comical spectacle of himself. He started a pointless quarrel with Sir Philip Sidney over the use of a tennis court, which would have escalated to a duel had the queen not intervened. He spent himself into poverty, selling off his ancestral lands for cash, which he then lavished on friends and personal indulgences; eventually he was obliged to rely on the queen’s largesse to maintain himself in the manner to which he’d become accustomed. Most of his surviving correspondence deals with his insatiable need for money and his obsession with various unrealistic business schemes. Although we can perhaps see a parallel with Timon of Athens here, it’s hard to see Shakespeare behaving this way.

The same consideration argues against Oxford writing with unsparing honesty about himself. He would have had to undergo a complete personality change in order to immortalize himself as the shallow, unfaithful Bertram of All’s Well. (Sabrina Feldman, author of Thomas Sackville and the Shakespearean Glass Slipper, makes the same point.) Epiphanies can happen, but it’s difficult to imagine the giddy earl, stuffed to the gills with amour-propre, offering up a vicious self-caricature for the delectation of his fellow courtiers and the queen.

On the other hand, if Oxford cut a buffoonish figure in court, I could see others lampooning him while he silently seethed. We know, for instance, that an unflattering story circulated to the effect that when Oxford bowed low in homage to Her Majesty, he released a loud and prolonged fart, which so humiliated him that he vanished from court for seven years. I’m not saying this story is true, but it may give an idea of how he was regarded by his peers.

Her Majesty was not amused.

That’s my boy!

The Oxfordian theory has sometimes wandered down strange byways into increasingly complicated conspiracy theories. The most elaborate is the “Prince Tudor” theory, dramatized in the 2011 film Anonymous, which claims that Oxford and Queen Elizabeth were secret lovers, whose bastard child was raised as the Earl of Southhampton. Great efforts have been expended on behalf of this theory, perhaps most notably by Hank Whittemore, who interprets Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a detailed chronological commentary on the cover-up. But when we pile speculation upon speculation, the result is inevitably unconvincing. I should note, however, that most Oxfordians do not endorse this theory.

Rhys Ifans as Oxford in Anonymous

Tempest tossed

A final consideration is that some of the plays, notably The Tempest, appear to postdate Oxford’s 1604 death. (Admittedly, this objection can also be raised against Thomas North, who disappears from the historical record around the same time.) The schoolmaster J. Thomas Looney, originator of the Oxford theory, went so far as to insist that The Tempest could not be one of Shakespeare’s works. More recent Oxfordians have taken a different tack, making an attempt to date The Tempest much earlier than its first reported performance in 1611. The mainstay of the conventional dating is a 1610 document, the Strachey letter, which shares language and ideas with The Tempest. That there are verbal parallels seems undeniable, but Oxfordians Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky argue that the play came first and Strachey was the borrower.

Scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest, by William Hogarth; circa 1735 (Wikipedia)

True North?

Except for this last, none of these objections applies to Thomas North. He was almost certainly present at Kenilworth, in the company of his father Lord North, and would have witnessed all the key events firsthand. While we have no surviving poetry from him under his real name, we do know that he is regarded as one of the great prose stylists in English literature. Our friend ChatGPT summarizes the conventional wisdom:

North's prose is considered one of the earliest masterpieces of English prose. He was capable of writing in different styles, from the mannered style of The Diall of Princes to the fast-paced, informal narrative of The Morall Philosophie of Doni. 

And of course we know that a good deal of North’s prose made it into the Shakespearean canon, with only such minor changes as were necessary to convert it to blank verse.

While we know little about North’s personality, we can reasonably assume that he was a serious person, given his commitment to translating (and expanding on) complex literary works; his edition of Plutarch runs roughly two thousand pages. Though he fell afoul of both his father and his older brother, there is no reason to think he was of bad character; on the contrary, his relatives are the ones who come off badly.

Most important, as I explained last time, the case for North depends on specific verbal parallels between his published works and the Shakespeare canon, as well as source texts for the Shakespeare plays that were found (appropriately annotated) in the North family library.

Overall, then, I think it’s most likely that Oxford, rather than being the originator of the plays, was in some cases the target of the real playwright’s satirical jabs. For this much, at least, he deserves to be remembered.