Edward de Vere & "Shakespeare's Company" - What We Know

One frequent question I find when giving talks on the Shakespeare authorship mystery is "What was Edward de Vere's relationship with Will Shakspere?" It's a good question for which "I don't know" is not a very satisfactory reply.

One way at this question is to point, for instance, to the revealing scene between the clown Touchstone, Audrey and the country lad Will in As You Like It (5.1). As Alex McNeil has argued in an article for Shakespeare Matters, it suggests an antagonistic relationship between author and front-man.

To me, though, the best answer would incorporate evidence and perspectives from outside the "Shakespeare" canon. And to this end the best alternative I've come up with -- I'm open to other suggestions -- is an answer to a slightly larger question on which we do have some guidance.

My standard response to the question above is: There's some very suggestive evidence that de Vere was working with at least one member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (a.k.a. "Shakespeare's Company") around the time of the first public performance of As You Like It.

The story begins with a book written by Lord Chamberlain's Men player Robert Armin. It's called Quips Upon Questions (1600) and is, essentially, a book of jokes. Alas, they're not terribly funny ones. But the introductory dedication is where the action's at.

Armin's book dedication talks about the comic actor's heading out to serve "the right Honorable good Lord my Master ... [in] Hackney." And in 1599, when these words were written, there was only one person who fit this description (i.e. both a resident of Hackney and a nobleman befitting the "Right Honorable good Lord" honorific) -- Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Also in 1599, the final draft of As You Like It was being prepared for a public performance by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. (The date derives from contemporary references in the play to current events, such as the 1599 "Bishop's Ban" on satires.) Robert Armin is believed, for good reason I think, to have been the first actor who played the role of Touchstone on the public stage.

Summarizing, then, The actor who, it appears, first played the character Touchstone during the year he was preparing the role was spending time in Hackney working in the service of Edward de Vere. This, I think, is phenomenal evidence for at least one actor in As You Like It workshopping his role with de Vere.

It suggests a model of adapting these courtly entertainments that, according to Oxfordians, de Vere wrote for private audiences in the 1570s and '80s. And in the 1590s and early 1600s, de Vere then transformed these texts for the public theaters. It stands to reason de Vere was consulting with the players who were bringing these works to the world at large. And the Armin example is, so far at least, the closest we have to a gold standard for de Vere's relationship to the public staging of plays we today know as "Shakespeare."

Will meets Queen! (Correction at 11)

If sunsets have seemed particularly red lately, this may be for good reason. Clouds of housedust, blown from countless old anthologies the world over, have recently been lofted into the atmosphere over the announcement of the latest (ahem) Shakespeare "discovery." It was certainly true in this office, where, upon learning of a new Shakespeare poem, I (quite literally) turned to a cobwebby stack of dusty books that I've long been meaning to sell—so I could look this "new" poem up.

The verse is a choppy old thing. It's an anonymous 18-line Elizabethan ditty that comes down to posterity as item 228 in an anthology of 400-year-old ditties and riddles and other miscellany, recorded by one Henry Stanford. It's titled "to ye Q. by ye players 1598." It's hardly lustrous—though it does have some spear-shaking overtones. Here: Read the old thing for yourself.

Point is that these 18 lines of anonymous verse, transcribed as part of their larger anthology in 1968, argued to (possibly) be by Shakespeare in 1972 and then published in book form in 1988, are just the latest dredgings that pass for bold new scholarship in the boneyard of conventional Shakespeare scholarship today.

Media reports of this "new" poem, however, have embellished the story almost beyond recognition.

Shakespeare, we are told, was "a resident playwright at Richmond Palace" at the time of this verse's royal recitation—which "may well have been spoken by Shakespeare himself." Plus Will was, says an editor of the new edition of the collected works that reprints the old thing, "probably in the habit of dashing some lines down on the back of an envelope and then chucking them away."

Yuh-huh. Did you know that there's just as much evidence that Shakespeare invented spaghetti? That he whistled while he worked? That he liked to wear red on Tuesdays?

Most intriguing observation about the old thing, though, must go to James Shapiro, who in his recent book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare writes:

"Shakespeare imagines Elizabeth as a timeless and rejuvenating force, likening her to a clock hand perpetually circling, resistant to the ravages of time, outliving generations. There's a slight undertow to the conceit... the uncomfortable thought that Elizabeth will be around in a half century." [74-5]

Elizabeth was 65 years old at the time of this poem's known public reading. Wishing that this senior citizen stick around for another couple generations is more than just a "slight undertow." It's downright bizarre.

However, written to a much younger queen and then pulled out for old times' sake some two or three decades later is another story. One of the tenets of both "Shakespeare" By Another Name and the larger Oxfordian movement is that proto-"Shakespearean" works first written for a courtly audience in the 1560s, '70s and '80s were later revised or just re-performed for Elizabeth in the waning years of her reign.

It's an open question. Could this "new" poem, if indeed it is by the Bard, be like much of the rest of the Shakespeare canon: Bearing earmarks of a historical moment that was far too early to have been written by Will Shakspere of Stratford?