Even as the Stratford man became popularly identified as Shakespeare some 150 years after his death, many readers knew he was a very unlikely candidate, but if not him, whom? It was popular, and reasonable, to consider people known for their brilliance, like Bacon, or people known for their playwriting, like Marlow. One had to consider people known because to consider someone unknown—well, I’m sure you grasp the problem.
J. Thomas Looney tried something different. He approached the problem like a profiler looking for a serial killer. Glean what one can of the subject from what they do (or in this case, write), look for someone who fits the profile, and eliminate those that don’t. Here’s some of the profile Looney created: He (of course “he”) was of recognized genius, mysterious, eccentric. A known lyric poet with enthusiasm for drama. Classical education. Completely familiar with law. An aristocrat with an attachment to feudalism. Interest in music, dancing, falconry, horses. Italian enthusiasm. Lack of interest in money. Possible Catholicism.
Looney closely read Shake-speare’s first published work: Venus and Adonis, and noted, most basically, that it is written in stanzas which rhyme in an ABABCC pattern, each line having ten syllables. Figuring there was no way anything so brilliant could be anybody’s first effort, he searched anthologies of 16th century poetry, where he found only two poems in this style. One was anonymous and one was by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. This was not a name Looney was familiar with, and he set about to find out what he could. In The Dictionary of National Biography, an article by Sir Sidney Lee described him like this: “Oxford, despite his violent and perverse temper, his eccentric taste in dress, and his reckless waste of substance, evidenced a genuine taste in music and wrote verses of much lyric beauty.” Elsewhere, he was “the best of the courtier poets in the early reign of Queen Elizabeth.” From Sir Edward Chambers commenting on distinguished poets: “the most hopeful of them was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a real courtier, but an ill-conditioned youth, who also became mute in later life.” Also “… Noble men … who have written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford.”
Nothing Looney ever found was an impediment to Oxford being the writer and so much evidence was in favor that he finally felt the identity was incontrovertible. In 1920 he published “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
Oxford was born in 1550 at Hedingham castle where his father, the 16th Earl, kept a proper court with his own company of players. Catholic Mary was on the throne; Elizabeth would not be queen for another eight years. The family had come from France with William the Conqueror in 1066 and was onto the 3rd Earl when the Magna Carta was signed. Steeped in chivalry, hereditary Lord Great Chamberlains of England, there was no family of more noble lineage—including the Tudors.
When the boy Edward was twelve, a disaster befell him: his father suddenly died. He could not inherit until he was 21 and so became a ward of the crown. Wardship appears to have provided something of a free-for-all as the properties he would have inherited were parceled out by the queen to be “managed” until his majority. Her boyfriend, Robert Dudley, got a generous share. Edward went to live at court in the home of the queen’s chief minister, William Cecil, Master of the Court of Wards. The boy would spend years as the court’s delight, producing plays, masques, and writing poetry, and being perhaps rather more than that to Elizabeth after he became an adult.
As to Oxford’s education, there was none better, and apparently no one with more genius to appreciate it. He had the finest tutors, who claimed that he soon surpassed them, degrees from Oxford and Cambridge in his teens, and from the Inns of Court where one studied law. He was fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and more. He translated Ovid, whose tales appear in Shakespeare, into English with his tutor. He excelled at all the things nobles did: serving in the army, and at sea during the time of the Armada, jousting, fencing, falconry, tennis, hunting, riding, dancing. As to his charisma, Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains an anecdote of a man at a dinner who laughed so hard at Oxford’s stories he had to leave.
Cecil had a daughter, Anne, to marry off and Oxford’s noble name was in his sights. But even after Elizabeth elevated her position by making her father 1st Baron Burghley, it took two scheduled weddings and financial blackmail for Oxford to turn up and go through with it. The marriage was a disaster, involving five years without cohabitation, a pregnancy of disputed origin, and terrible relations with Oxford’s powerful father-in-law who never stopped disparaging his character. He endured, not always gracefully, the conflict of occupying a position atop the hierarchy of nobility, while his choices and finances were controlled by the queen and her powerful favorites.
After many requests, Elizabeth granted Oxford permission to leave England and he began his 16 months of travel which left him so ravished with Italy that, when he returned in 1576, he dressed in the flamboyant Italian manner and introduced commedia dell’ arte-style theater and playhouses, the delight of the common people in Italy and ever after in England. While still not living with his wife, he had a son, named Edward De Vere, with one of the queen’s ladies, Anne Vavasour. She and Oxford both spent a few months in the Tower in 1581 as a consequence. He and his retainers engaged in street battles with one of Vavasour’s kinsmen and his retainers, disturbing the civil peace as Capulets and Montagues did in Romeo and Juliet.
In 1586, with unique largesse, Elizabeth granted Oxford £1000 per year (the equivalent of $250,000 US today). In spite of everything, did she appreciate that the historical plays could cohere the populace in the face of foreign threats and that the whole body of the work would glorify her reign? The money continued for 17 years until her death and continued under King James.
Around 1590, Oxford withdrew from court and public life, and devoted time to patronage of the arts. Twenty-eight works were dedicated to him by writers he was encouraging, including financially. He established a company of players and wrote plays—plays of which supposedly none have survived. He can be found quietly connected to players’ companies and theaters for the rest of his life, but as a nobleman who stooped to entertain his inferiors? That could be plausibly denied.
Anne Cecil had died in 1588. After a reconciliation, the marriage had left three surviving daughters, whose guardianship Burghley would never give up to their father. With a second marriage he finally got his heir. He died in 1604 and was buried in a chapel in Hackney, later destroyed, but a cousin claimed that his body had been moved to Westminster Abbey. In 1623 the first folio appeared with 26 plays never before printed to go with the 12 that had been before 1604. It’s not clear how these plays were assembled, but perhaps it is relevant that the dedicatees were the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and that the latter’s wife was Susan Herbert, née De Vere—Oxford’s daughter.
Though their research is ignored by the academy, there is no lack of scholars who investigate Shakespearian authorship and the favorite candidate, Oxford. My outline of his story brushes by the details that convince many that the plays are full of parallels to his life. There are of course the seven set in Italy. Hamlet is seen as the most autobiographical: death of the father, prompt remarriage of the mother, Polonius with precepts closely matching those Burghley privately printed, capture by pirates … But I hardly want to name these few points should it suggest that I couldn’t go on far, far beyond them.
However, I can’t resist this tidbit: In 1578, Oxford went with Elizabeth on progress. The court descended upon Audley End in Essex for some days of revelry. There was (and still is) in the library a treasure of a book written in Greek in the early 3rd century: History of Rome by Cassius Dio. Forensically verified marginalia in Oxford’s hand* (writing in Latin) notes a passage in which, after Caesar has defeated Egypt at Actium, he meets Cleopatra in her palace. She gives him an inventory of her possessions and says it is entirely accurate, but her treasurer, Seleucus, admits that she has kept back enough to buy everything on the list. Cleopatra blushes. “She blushes” has been underlined in the book. And then this from Shakespeare’s play, Anthony and Cleopatra: After Cleopatra’s defeat, she gives Caesar what she says is an accurate inventory of her possessions, but her treasurer, Seleucus, enjoined to speak “on his peril,” admits that she has held back enough to “purchase what you have made known.” Caesar’s next line: “Nay, blush not, Cleopatra.”
*Journal of Forensic Document Examination Vol 31, 2023
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