The Edward Oxenford Review

In his Oct. 29 post, “Academic Response to Anonymous”, Hardy Cook, editor of SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference,  faced the looming crisis of Roland Emmerich’s Oxford-as-Shakespeare film (scheduled for release in September of 2011) by soliciting advice from members:

…how will we as responsible scholars and academics respond to and address the issues that will arise from the premier of this film.

A few days later, in a post offering “Evidence of Authorship ” he restated his query to include the subject of Emmerich’s film, Edward de Vere:

…my original query was concerned with ways to address those who might ask about authorship and in particular de Vere after seeing the film Anonymous when it is released

I especially liked Tom Reedy’s “No More Sneers” advice, and Dave Evett’s sensible caution against presumptions regarding “evidence”. On Nov. 17, I also sent Hardy Cook some thoughts on the matter, but since he didn’t include my response in what appears to have been his last digest on the thread, I’ve taken the opportunity to revise and upgrade my submission for posting here, with links and images.

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Dear Hardy Cook,

It seems to me that most of your respondents reacted against the main issue that will arise from viewing Emmerich’s film (namely, the authorship question) in general, and against the ways in which the case for Oxford has been presented in particular.  My response is more on the nut-n-bolts level of strategic preparation.  In order to anticipate how Emmerich’s story will pique the public’s curiosity, it seemed to me that you might want to have a better idea of what “Anonymous” will actually be about.  A few suggestions:

1) READ THE WORKS THAT INSPIRED THE SCRIPT: In 2004, I had the opportunity to read John Orloff’s original script, which told an imaginative “insider’s story” of the Elizabethan theatre world from the triple perspective of Ben Jonson, William Shakspere and the earl of Oxford.  The script opened from a “Sons of Ben” perspective with the closing of the theaters in 1642, five years after Jonson’s death in 1637, before diving into the bitter rivalries that accompanied the tail end of the Elizabethan era and Oxford’s life.  From what I recall, Orloff’s version of “William” seemed inspired in part by Alden Brooks, who saw him as the frippery-of-wit writer, play-broker and all-around knave that Ben Jonson excoriated in his epitaph “On Poet-Ape” (see “The Dyer’s Hand”, 1943,  and Charles Wisner Barrell’s review, “A King of Shreds and Patches“).

If you take the time to follow Brooks’ reading of the various legends, pamphlets, plays and poems upon which he builds this reprehensible image, you’ll find the essence of his “Wm. Shakspere of Stratford” in the scurrilous character of “Captain Tucca“, who appears in Jonson’s “Poetaster” and in the Marston-Dekker reply, “Satiromastix“.  Scholars long ago identified other characters from these “Poet’s War” plays as lampoons on Marston, Dekker, Weever and Jonson, but no one has yet found a real-life counterpart for Tucca.

If, indeed, Emmerich gives us a Brooks’ inspired play-broker/pander/showman as his take on “William Shakespeare”, the best answer to questions on this portrayal might be to suggest a reading of these plays, along with “The Dyer’s Hand” and more recent (albeit less imaginative) studies of the Poetomachia, such as James Shapiro’s Rival Playwrights, and Shakespeare and the Poet’s War by James Bednarz.

2) READ UP ON THE HISTORY COVERED BY THE MOVIE: We know for certain that Emmerich has chosen the Essex Rebellion and the fateful staging of Richard II by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for the catastrophe of his narrative.  Students and the general public may see a version of these events that highlights Shakespeare’s play as a provocative transgression – one that should have been severely punished but wasn’t. Be ready for the inevitable question, “Why not?”  With a dispassionate and respectful approach, the Essex Rebellion of “Anonymous” could provide a marvelous teaching opportunity, and a perfect launch into “Henry V”, “Julius Caesar” and “Troilus & Cressida“.

3) KNOW THE BASIC FACTS OF OXFORD’S BIOGRAPHY: Emmerich’s film will show the well-connected earl of Oxford walking about the streets of London as a patron, poet and direct contemporary of William Shakspere.  Be prepared for people to ask, “Couldn’t they have known each other?” or “Wouldn’t Shakspere at least be very aware of the earl, maybe even curious about him?”  Whatever the claims that others have made in his behalf, Edward Oxenford did, indeed, serve as patron to writers and playing companies, and had direct connections, whether through blood, enmity or patronage,  to major and minor literary figures of the day: Henry Howard, Arthur Golding, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe, etc.

Reportedly, Emmerich will present Oxford as a royal bastard with an identity crisis, along the lines of Charles Beauclerk’s study of an alienated poetic psyche, Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom. You should know that Oxford was regarded as illegitimate by his half-sister Katherine, who soon after their father’s death brought a case against him that would have stripped him of his name and inheritance.  On record, we have Charles Arundel’s witness of Oxford’s fury “that the Queen said he was a bastard for which cause he would never love her, and leave her in the lurch one day.”

Finally, I suggest that you portray the movie as Opportunity rather than Disaster.  Ridicule – of the film, of the authorship question, of Oxford himself – may seem to your students like a nervous defense against a devil you don’t dare look in the face.  The way I see it, anything you can say that will send your seeker back to The Bard’s ever-living poetry, with confidence in his or her own ability to discern the truth, may turn out to be a kindness long remembered.     ~Marie Merkel

REVIEWS

THE ELIZABETHAN PRODIGALS

by Richard Helgerson

University of California Press, 1976

In the late summer of 1562, Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford began his journey out from under his father’s wing and into William Cecil’s mansion, home of the famous set of precepts on how to be a virtuous son, serve the Commonwealth, and marry well.  Setting an example for Burghley’s later wards, Essex and Southampton, Oxford managed to defy nearly every point in his new master’s rules of order.  Tales of prodigality saturate accounts of his life, no matter how brief.  High points of this bad-boy biography include his penchant for spending, drinking, wenching, rioting, lying, reckless swordplay and in general wasting hours in idleness and lewd poetry, without ever once holding “a real job”.

What a shining example he must have been to the up-and-coming writers of Helgerson’s study: George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Philip Sidney.  Greene and Lyly both dedicated works to the earl; Philip Sidney was his rival in love and poetry, while Gascoigne and Lodge at one time delighted in the same sort of roistering company that wreaked havoc on Oxford’s marriage to Anne Cecil.  Even though Helgerson misses the opportunity to assess the earl’s premier place among Elizabethan prodigals, his compact survey of the causes and constant themes of these Prodigal Narratives shows a neat fit with Oxford’s literary world and personal history as William Cecil’s ward and then son-in-law.  Indeed, Helgerson identifies Cecil and his utlitarian views on education as a prime influence on the younger generation:

The Prodigal Son 1623

In a patriarchal state, deriving its moral authority from its likeness to the family, Burghley, whom Peele addressed as parens patriae, was the archetypal father.  He was, moreover, the most active and powerful advocate of the ideals of mid-century English humanism…  Ascham’s Schoolmaster was dedicated to Burghley and begins with a debate in his chamber, a debate in which the Queen’s first secretary, as Burghley then was, takes a leading part.  He took that leading part in the educational affairs of the nation as well.

Perhaps with Father Burghley’s admonitory finger-wagging in mind, young George Whetstone (Burghley’s neighbor in Stamford) takes a reformatory stance when hawking his wares to members of his own generation:

…in plucking off the vizard of self-conceit under which I sometimes proudly masked with vain desires, other young gentlemen may reform their wanton lives in seeing the fond and fruitless success of my fantastical imaginations, which be no other than poems of honest love, and yet, for that the exercise we use in reading loving discourses seldom, in my conceit, acquiteth our pains with anything beneficial unto the commonweal or very profitable to ourselves, I thought the “Garden of Unthriftiness” the meetest title I could give them.

We see this same pretense of reformatory zeal already articulated, however crudely, in the early 1560s by Arthur Brooke and Arthur Golding, in the pious prefaces to their translations of seductively Romantic and/or Pagan literature.  Once the reader has been duly forewarned, these fantastical poets let loose with abandon.  Perhaps the Patriarchs will be too busy running the Commonwealth to notice these flights of idle fancy?  As Helgerson notes, “…it has become usual to distinguish between the Elizabethan fathers and their sons by identifying one group with mid-century English humanism and the other with Italianate and romantic courtliness, opposing “the wisdom of a Burghley” to “the graces of a Sidney.”

Hold on there.  Philip Sidney as Prodigal?  Twice in his chapter on Sidney, Helgerson acknowledges that these yoked opposites don’t repel quite as expected.  Sir Philip’s didactic nature and quest for honor seemed born for the “Mirror of Duty” frame; his fate was to inspire eulogies to virtue.  In contrast, Burghley’s poetic wastrel of a son-in-law chose a course well-suited to tales of thrilling excess, followed by canned remorse and crocodile tears.  One can only imagine how often Burghley must have wished he’d chosen Philip’s good intentions and mean portion over Edward’s landed nobility and giddy brain.

Sir Philip Sidney: A Prodigal Son?

While we’re imagining, it does seem as if Edward de Vere’s rebellion against all that his father-in-law held dear just might have had some small influence on Helgerson’s band of prodigal brothers.   The possibility – and swift dismissal – inevitably comes up in his chapter on Lyly, but rather than his customary acuity, here he pleads obscurity:

Nor is it clear that the viciousness of Oxford’s life led him as a patron to prefer licentious writing.  As Hunter remarks, Oxford ‘commanded’ his ‘loving friend’ Thomas Bedingfield to translate Cardan’s Comfort into English (1573) and this argues seriousness of mind and sobriety of taste.

As welcome as we might find this combination of serious and taste attributed to the subject of these pages, one can’t help but suspect that Helgerson doesn’t know the earl.  Somehow, he seems to have missed Gabriel Harvey’s poem branding the earl a decadent “Italianate”.  Also overlooked are dedications to the earl of several dangerously seductive Courtly Romances and Love Poetry, by Munday, Greene and Watson.  Combined with his patronage of Lyly’s Euphues, these connections put the earl of Oxford at the epicenter of Elizabethan literary rebellion.  These were the dare-devil scribblers who paved the way for Shakespeare’s artistic triumph over the Moral Majority of his youth.  Helgerson deftly summarizes the stakes in this generational struggle at the end of chapter 2:

I see humanism and romance as opposed members of a single consciousness, as the superego and id of Elizabethan literature, competitors in a struggle to control and define the self.  Humanism represented paternal expectation, and romance, rebellious desire.

…The highest officers of the realm proclaimed the attitudes of conservative, mid-century humanism for all to hear; but romance, however much it might try to disguise itself as another form of humanistic admonition, lurked in the corners, passing in manuscript from hand to hand, never venturing into print without an apology.  Humanism belonged to the hierarchical relations of father and son, schoolmaster and pupil, elder and younger; romance to the egalitarian commerce of friend with friend – those lewd and flattering companions whom fathers and prodigal son plays continually warn against.  Humanism inhabited the masculine and misogynistic world of school and state; romance “had rather be shut in a lady’s casket than open in a scholar’s study.

Never venturing into print without an apology – to whom were they apologizing?  Father Burghley?  Their home-town vicar?  Edmund Tilney in the censor’s office?  If Edward de Vere contributed to the Prodigal literature – as his life and works dedicated to him suggest that he might – would he have kept his trifles shut in a lady’s casket, away from his father-in-law’s unappreciative eye?  Or clap a vizard on his vain conceits and fantastical imaginations?                 ~~Marie Merkel

Follow-up studies influenced by The Elizabethan Prodigals:

Redefining Elizabethan Literature by Georgia E. Brown, 2004

Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England by Derek B. Alwes, 2004