The Edward Oxenford Review

Then Moses said vnto god, Behold, when I shall come vnto the children of Israel, and shall say vnto them, the god of your fathers hath sent me vnto you: if they say vnto me, What is his name? what shall I say vnto them?

And God answered Moses, I Am That I Am.  Also he said, thus shalt thou say vnto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me vnto you.

Exodus 3: 13-14, Geneva Bible 1599

Many thanks to Sarah B. for her useful comment on my last post, “He that will forget God”:

“Your odd leap from the Richard conversation to the “I am who I am” thing seems illogical. The phrase doesn’t figure anywhere in the conversation.”

You’re right, Sarah, I did take quite a leap, depending more on innuendo and intuition than straight exposition and fact.  But I do appreciate your expectation of logic, and will try to add a few stepping stones to make it easier to follow what I only suggested a few weeks ago:

1). Elizabeth characterized the person responsible for portraying her as Richard the Second as “He that will forget God.”

2). A person who uses God’s own phrase, “I am that I am” without remembering that he or she is what they are by the grace of God has, quite literally, forgotten God.

3).  William Shakespeare, who was not brought to trial, or even brought in for questioning regarding his bit part in the Essex Rebellion, forgot to mention God when he said “I am that I am” in Sonnet 121.  Edward de Vere also forgot to mention God when he proclaimed himself “I am that I am” in a personal letter admonishing his father-in-law.

4). Therefore, William Shakespeare and Edward de Vere – two praised dramatists with well-documented ties to the London theater world -  both qualify for consideration as the subject of Lambarde and Elizabeth’s conversation, that unnamed he of the “wicked imagination”, aka “he that will forget God.”

Edward de Vere seems to hold the better claim, being a creature “made” by Elizabeth, who granted him a thousand pounds a year when he was bankrupt, for naught but keeping state in respectable style, so as to uphold the outward awe of England’s nobility.  And yet, if the earl of Oxford had anything at all to do with William Shakespeare and his poetry, by way of collaboration or subversion, for some reason, he neglected to claim responsibility for his contributions.  Perhaps like “Captain Tucca” of Satiromastix, he was content to let others take “the guilt of conscience” for his dramatic devices.

Of course, Elizabeth may have had many other manifestations of forgetting God in mind, when voicing her ire towards the gentleman with the “wicked imagination”.  She may have found evidence of a proud, humanist spirit in Shakespeare’s plays.  She may have recognized the perplexing impossibility of assessing Shakespeare’s true faith from reading his tragedies, histories and comedies.  She may have looked in vain for humble praise of God or adoration of Jesus Christ in Shakespeare’s published poems.

Did Elizabeth know of Shakespeare’s use of the phrase, “I am that I am”?  Perhaps, perhaps not, since his “sugared sonnets” may have been circulating among a circle of friends that didn’t include her Majesty.  And yet, that circle quite likely included Richard Barnfield, a friend of Meres, and intimate of high-society figures such as Penelope Rich (sister of Essex) and William Stanley, earl of Derby.  Barnfield’s saucy and salacious poem of 1596, brashly entitled Cynthia and dedicated to the queen, certainly caused more than a passing frown of consternation.  It isn’t hard to imagine that someone who had Shakespeare’s private sonnets in hand, sonnets that were being eagerly read among a privileged coterie, would have enjoyed sharing such charming booty with the ever-romantic Virgin Queen.

As for Edward de Vere’s “I am that I am” assertion, Elizabeth’s “spirit”, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, may have felt it his duty to let her majesty know of the incredibly arrogant letter he’d received from her proud subject.  As a devout man with Puritan inclinations, Lord Burghley would have immediately recognized the theological implications of de Vere’s usurping God’s sacred name for his own, tawdry ends.   Chances are he would have felt compelled to issue a stiff corrective to such presumption.

This, I believe, is what actually happened.  Shortly after Burghley received this letter, a legal complaint was allowed to proceed in which Edward de Vere’s legitimacy came under intense scrutiny.  Incredibly embarrassing details about John de Vere’s erratic love life were made public, including a lurid tale about the rape and mutilation of the 16th earl of Oxford’s second, bigamous wife, Joan Jockey.  Both Elizabeth and Burghley had the power to squash these proceedings, but did not.  Could it be that they both agreed that Edward de Vere needed a bit more humbling?  (For more on the connections between Oxford’s letters to his father-in-law Burghley, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 121, see Robert Detobel’s short essay, “I am that I am”).

In any case, Elizabeth didn’t need to see this letter to know Edward de Vere as “He that will forget God”.   Twenty years before her conversation with Lambarde, she’d read the testimony of de Vere’s cousin Henry Howard, and his former friend, Charles Arundel.  To back up the accuracy of what they say that Oxford said, these men called as witness Lord Windsor, Mr. Russell and Walter Ralegh.  Elizabeth could and probably did ask each of these men if Oxford really did indulge in such talk:

…his most horrible and detestable blasphemy in denial of the divinity of Christ, our Saviour, terming the Trinity as a fable, that Joesph was a wittold, and the Blessed Virgin a whore.  (see Monstrous Adversary, Alan H. Nelson, p. 210)

BTW, I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who has read Jonathan Bate’s discussion of Elizabeth’s conversation with Lambarde (Soul of the Age, 2009), and can either comment on his challenge to the authenticity of the record, or fill in some of the gaps from those pages unavailable on Google books!

At a conference in 2004, a colleague asked me how I envisioned the paradigm shift that would bring Edward de Vere in from the cold.  The first image that came to mind was the Berlin Wall: all my life, it was there, until suddenly one day it wasn’t.

For ninety years, the best and brightest of Shakespearean scholars have maintained a collective taboo against discussing the earl of Oxford.  This year, the torch will pass to those who can top James Shapiro’s evasive response to the youngster who asked him “Is that true?”

Here’s the real question they’ll need to answer: “Is it true that all of Shakespeare’s plays in some way mirror events in Edward de Vere’s life, with uncanny political, psychological and emotional depth?”  Who can we trust to give us an honest, informed and verifiable answer? The myth of authority dissolved with Shapiro’s admission that the topic of Oxford-as-Shakespeare has been and remains verboten within the academic community.  Only those with the courage to break the taboo will have the database necessary to evaluate the extent of Oxford’s presence, not only in Shakespeare’s psyche, but as a prime mover of the Elizabethan literary scene.

Will 2011, the ninety-first year of underground Oxfordian studies, begin the decade in which the academy slowly awakens from its fearful slumbers to face the ever-living, exuberantly wrathful, inebriated and melancholy spirit of Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, as preserved in Shakespeare’s cathartic dramas?  I sincerely hope so; those on the outside have no idea what thrills of discovery they are missing. Time and again, when historic documents are knowingly aligned with Elizabethan literary effusions, the resulting sparks clearly show that these writers – and many others – were preternaturally aware of Edward Oxenford’s disruptive presence.

Sometimes even the tiniest scrap of new evidence can send off fireworks.  To usher in the New Year with a spirit of adventure and possibility, I’d like to share a little something that I stumbled on the other night while reading the pleasantly soporific Place, Profit, and Power: a Study of the Servants of William Cecil, Elizabethan Statesman by Richard C. Barnett, (University of North Carolina Press, 1969).  What caught my eye and cost me several hours of good sleep was the name of one of Burghley’s servants:

THOMAS SPEED, ALIAS LEWKENOR

Unfortunately, Barnett wasn’t able to discover much about Master Speed:

“Here is a servant for whom there is scarcely any evidence beyond his reward to tell us how he served Burghley or even why he changed his name.  We know that he was a servant by August 14, 1577…  We also know that Speed was available for household duty on two extraordinary occasions in 1581.  When Burghley entertained the French commissioners on April 30, 1581, Speed shared charge of the plate house with one other.  He was again present when in October the Queen visited Theobalds, though his duty station, on this occasion, is not given.” (p. 135)

To my knowledge, no one has yet considered this servant in relation to Oxford-as-Shakespeare.  Perhaps we should: both names – “Speed” and the author Lewkenor – have no small relevance to Shakespeare’s work, and the time-span in which Thomas Speed was most visibly in Burghley’s employ contains some of the most emotionally wrenching months in Oxford’s life.

Just imagine the excitement, and the questions that would arise if scholars were to turn up a record of a servant named “Thomas Speed” in the employ of John Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon.  The first thing we’d want to do, no doubt, would be to re-read all the lines for the character “Speed”, one of the servants in Two Gentlemen of Verona.  After re-reading the play as well, we’d begin the literary and biographical inquiry:

How does this little tidbit add background color to the servants of Shakespeare’s painfully clumsy comedy?  Had his father’s servant done something to irritate him?  Impossible to know, of course, yet it does seem as if the author has a bone to pick with Servant Speed, some unresolved matter that keeps bubbling over into unguarded spite. Like most characters in this play, Speed is a bit of a chameleon, but at his first entrance, he’s clearly a dunce.  Proteus taunts him for being “a sheep who for fodder follow[s] the shepherd”, and concludes the scene by branding Speed as “a worthless post” or messenger (I.i. 92; 161).  Shakespeare even has Speed’s fellow-servant Launce shoot off this poisonous parting shot:

Now will he be swinged for reading my letter; an unmannerly slave, that will thrust himself into secrets! I’ll after, to rejoice in the boy’s correction.

Though we know more about William Shakespeare than any other Elizabethan writer – or so his academic apologists assure us – there’s nothing in his documentary life to give us any traction with a hypothetical servant named “Speed”.  Now let’s see what happens when we posit Edward Oxenford as Shakespeare.

Since the existing evidence (or such as I’ve been able to discover in the last 48 hours) shows no direct contact between the earl and Thomas Speed alias Lewkenor, all guesses on the coincidence of servant names must remain flexible until more information comes to light.  In the meantime, what we do have here is the gift of a likely time-frame for when the name “Speed” for a servant would have caught the author’s fancy – the winter and spring of 1581.  As it happens, the word “speed” was used in a most intriguing manner by Charles Arundel, when he testified on the Friday before Christmas, 1580, to what he believed was the root cause of his friend’s betrayal:

Now the truth is, that this noble count, finding himself forsaken for his horrible enormities rather to be buried in the dunghill of forgetfulness than reported by any modest tongue, obtained my Lord of Leicester’s favor by the mediation of his man Milles, upon condition that he should speed us three, [i.e., Howard, Arundel and Southwell] and thus the bargain was concluded. (pg. 251, Monstrous Adversary)

In other words, Leicester would help Oxford if he would agree to speed or facilitate the doom of his three friends.

Whatever the deficit in our information concerning Oxford vis-a-vis Burghley’s man, Thomas Speed, we’re back in the black with the earl’s long-time servant Arthur Milles.  From the information provided in Alan Nelson’s biography (not only in the passage quoted above, but also here on pp. 268-9 and here again on pp. 402-3), we find Oxford with some good (as well as fickle-headed) reasons to consider Milles an “unmannerly slave”, and for much the same reason as Launce had condemned Speed.  From an obscure letter written by Charles Arundel (who was still under confinement due to his former friend’s “monsterous dealinge”), it appears that Milles had violated Oxford’s trust as a messenger:

Milles hath reported that there is a great person who, not seeming to have any conference with the villain his master since his flight, [i.e., Oxford, who had attempted to flee the country after Anne Vavasour gave birth to his son] taketh a certain message from his mouth pretended to be sent him from the villain at his going out, to this intent: that her Majesty should not so far show herself with choler for this fact.

I won’t pretend to understand just what Arundel is attempting to convey here, but even without sorting out the “who’s who” of this passage, clearly, the writer had gained access to privileged information about Oxford’s affairs through Arthur Milles.  And as you’ll see on pages 402-3 of Monstrous Adversary, Oxford and Milles also had a messy falling out late in 1601 or early 1602, when “my lady of Oxford” found that a casket of hers went missing, and sought to pin the blame on her husband’s old servant, as Milles complains in a memorandum to Robert Cecil:

Yet my Lady’s malice did not cease there, but some 5 days after that, I was accused for the same upon these three several points: first, that I was twice that day with the Lord of Oxford; Secondly, that I did not stay that day with him so long as I was wont to do; and the third accusation was, that I came that day by his door with my Cloak cast over my shoulders…

If you recall, in Act III, scene i – one of the clumsiest scenes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and perhaps all of Shakespeare – a cloak becomes a major prop.  Shakespeare has the Duke corner the fleeing Valentine, who excuses his haste thus: “Please it your Grace, there is a messenger/that stays to bear my letters to my friends/and I am going to deliver them.”  “Be they of much import?” asks the Duke.  Valentine assures him,  “The tenor of them doth but signify/My health and happy being at your Court” (ll. 52-7).

Here we have a rough paraphrase of the message that Milles reported to Arundel in 1581, which concerned the future of Oxford’s “health and happy stay” at Elizabeth’s court, at the time in which he had attempted to flee the country.  Curiously, much of the story in Two Gents revolves around haste to catch the tide, sorrow at parting, betrayal and banishment from court – a fantastical mirror image of Oxford’s life in the winter of 1581.   Six repetitions of the word “cloak” suggest an author overly anxious to convey his winks and nods.  They also serve to impeach Valentine as a most ridiculous fool, contrary to the health and well-being of Shakespeare’s ostensible romance:

VAL: It will be light, my lord, that you may bear it/under a cloak of any length.

DUKE: A cloak as long as thine will serve the turn?

VAL: Aye, my good lord.

DUKE: Then let me see thy cloak./I’ll get me one of such another length.

VAL: Why, any cloak will serve the turn, my lord.

DUKE: How shall I fashion me to wear a cloak?/I pray thee, let me feel thy cloak upon me.

If this play had come down to us with Edward Oxenford’s name on the title page, it seems to me that Milles the unmannerly messenger, with that casket allegedly hidden under his cloak, would have been pegged long ago as the inspiration for these intrusive and highly personal scenes.  One aspect of Milles’ service is masked under the red-herring name of “Speed”; his alleged theft using a cloak comes through loud and clear in Valentine’s fumbled attempt to abduct his forbidden love.

Something may eventually turn up that shows Thomas Speed actually crossing Oxford’s path.  Given the part of  “Speed” in the “Imprimis/Item” scenes of Two Gents, my guess is that he may have been present on the January day of 1581, when Oxford wrote down his “Imprimis/Item” interrogatories for Howard, Arundel and Southwell.  Whether as recorder, secretary, or simply a personal messenger for those in charge, Speed’s hypothetical presence on the fringes of the investigation into an alleged Papist conspiracy, accords with his sober service to Burghley, and the “passionate” and “unmistakably Protestant” tone that Barnett observes in his will. (Place, Profit, p. 136)  But as the careful reader will have already noted, I’ve now crossed the line into indulgent, effervescent speculation.

Happy New Year, my friends!

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