Part II: Gentle Master William

By Mark Anderson for Gather.com

[In the following essay, the name "Shakspere" will be used to refer to the Stratford-upon-Avon native Will Shakspere (as he preferred to spell it), while "Shake-speare" (as the byline was often originally typeset) will refer to the author of the plays and poems, an individual who may well have been a very different person indeed from Shakspere.]

Part I of this series examined an early 17th century puzzle book, Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna, whose title page featured what appeared to be a disguised playwright writing out an anagram. One clue in this puzzle was "England's spear-shaker." And that anagram, unscrambled, spelled out "Thy name is de Vere."

Puzzles are, of course, always subject to second-guessing -- at least when the puzzle-maker is long since dead and left behind no answer key. But this particular puzzle is also just the very beginning of the story.

The "de Vere" whose "name" Minerva Britanna touts was an Elizabethan court poet-playwright named Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Born in 1550, de Vere's tumultuous and epic life at the English court tracked practically the entire 45-year career of Queen Elizabeth I (who reigned from 1558-1603).

De Vere died in 1604, a point that is often raised against his possible authorship of the Shake-speare plays and poems. (Conventional chronology dates plays such as The Tempest, Macbeth and Henry VIII to the decade after 1604.) I will be addressing this matter in the next essay.

But first, it's worth discussing briefly why doubt persists about the actor Will Shakspere and a few reasons why de Vere makes the most persuasive alternative candidate.

More than a century ago, authors and scholars first began amassing critical and historical evidence that at least some of the Shake-speare plays had been written by someone other than the Stratford native Will Shakspere. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the foreword to a volume of commentary by the scholar Delia Bacon who argued that Shake-speare was only a pen-name or a front-man for an author who was also a court insider. Ralph Waldo Emerson said he was unable to square the absence of any noticeable literary life for Shakspere with the self-portrait of the author contained in the Shake-speare plays and poems.

Mark Twain wrote an entire book, Is Shakespeare Dead, that tore the conventional biography of Will Shakspere to tatters. Twain pronounced himself certain was that Shakspere did not write the plays and poems. Twain wrote,

The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call us the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.

"To resume. What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built their entire superstition upon inferences, not upon known and established facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything else to resort to."

The poet Walt Whitman and the novelist Henry James shared Twain's deep reservations about the conventional Shakespeare story. Whitman told a confidant, "It is my final belief that the Shakespearean plays were written by another hand than Shaksper's [sic] -- I don't say whose that other hand was. But I am confident that it was another hand."

James wrote to a friend that he was "haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world."

Yet, how could so many eminent authors be so convinced of such heresy?

To begin with, no original Shake-speare play scripts exist. The greatest literary manhunt in history has yielded no manuscripts, no diaries, and no correspondence issuing from Will Shakspere of Stratford's pen. Despite the enormous economic incentive that has existed for centuries to find any scrap of paper that can be said to have been touched by the supposed Bard of Avon, scholars have authenticated only a few Shakspere signatures on legal and commercial documents written by other people. These six Shakspere signatures plus the words "by me" signed on his will are all that has ever been found from the pen of the man presumed to have been the greatest literary genius in the Western world. [*]

Then there's the question of Shakspere's presumed library. The Shake-speare plays and poems, in fact, showcase an author whose learning was unsurpassed in the Western literary canon. Studies of Shake-speare by lawyers, theologians, physicians, astronomers, philosophers, linguists, military tacticians, sailors, historians, botanists, literary scholars, musicians, and classicists conclude that Shake-speare manifests a ready knowledge of their respective fields. All find the author anywhere from competent to expert in these varied disciplines. The Shakespeare canon refers to more than 200 books — some of which were unavailable in England and could only be found published on the continent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian or Spanish. By way of comparison: Scholars have discovered some 200 books and broadsheets that once belonged to the early seventeenth century poet John Donne and the playwright Ben Jonson. Again, with Shakspere, there is not a scrap. Not a single book or broadsheet.

The gaping gulf between the documented educational and literary record of Shakspere (which is, in fact, precisely nil) and the vast, encyclopedic range of erudition and knowledge on display in Shake-speare staggers the imagination. Even an "incomprehensible genius" (as one prominent Shake-speare scholar supposes Shakspere to have been) would have left a trace of his learning or library or tutelage somewhere. Did he, perhaps, own a cloak of invisibility?

It's not as if Shakspere is completely missing in action from the historical record either. There are plenty of documents about him. But they all concern commercial ventures or his London career as an actor and theatrical entrepreneur. Looking at Shakspere's last will and testament, one sees a meticulous and detailed account of the Will Shakspere estate. Shakspere detailed his worldly possessions down to his silver gilt bowl and second-best bed. He bequeaths money to three actor friends for mourning rings. But, again, this most laborious record of Shakspere's life reveals no literary interest whatsoever. At the time of Shakspere's death in 1616, half of the Shake-speare plays hadn't even been printed. But Shakspere's will mentions no manuscripts, no plays, no diaries, no letters, no books — nothing that would indicate he was an author of any kind. As John Adams, one of America's founding fathers, recorded when he visited Stratford-upon-Avon, "There is nothing preserved of this great genius which is worth knowing. Nothing which might inform us what education, what company, what accident turned his mind to letters and the drama."

Examining the documentary record of Will Shakspere, Walt Whitman told a confidant in 1888, "I do not seem to have any patience with the Shaksper argument: it is all gone for me — up the spout! The Shaksper case is about closed."

But whereas Will Shakspere's documented literary life is a disquieting void, one finds an abundance of astonishing correlations between the life of the courtier-playwright Edward de Vere and "Shakespeare."

For instance, the satirist Thomas Nashe published a 1592 pamphlet that refers to de Vere using the nickname "Gentle Master William." And as "Shakespeare" By Another Name reveals, two years later a satirical poem was published, containing a passage alluding to de Vere under the initials "W.S."

Edward de Vere -- who was apparently known to at least a few London wags as "Gentle Master William" and "W.S." -- was an outstanding, ingenious and sometimes abrasive Elizabethan Renaissance man. Scholar, spendthrift, courtier, scoundrel, wit, adventurer, patron, prolific ghostwriter: De Vere encompassed the personalities and character traits of many Shakespearean icons, among them Hamlet, Romeo, Othello, Falstaff and King Lear.

Edward de Vere's father died when young Edward was 12, and the child was shipped off to Queen Elizabeth's court to be raised by William Cecil, the treasurer and chief spymaster of England -- a man who has been recognized for centuries as the historical prototype for the character Polonius from Hamlet. De Vere later took Cecil's daughter for his wife, and de Vere's troubled marriage with Anne Cecil took a nosedive when a malicious and back-stabbing servant whispered rumors of de Vere's wife's infidelity. De Vere heeded the counsel of his sinister Iago and unleashed a tempest of fury at his wife that resulted in their separation for seven years. Here was the green-eyed monster as dissected in such plays as Othello, The Winter's Tale, Much Ado About Nothing and Cymbeline. In his early 40s, due to the ruined state of his finances, de Vere was forced to disburse his ancestral fiefdom amongst his three daughters -- facing King Lear's future of landless destitution.

De Vere's sister was a raging fireball who met her match in a brash swashbuckler who wooed and wed her; their bizarre courtship is spoofed in The Taming of the Shrew. De Vere's beloved cousin was executed for attempting to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, and the twisted fate of the cousin's three sons is recited in As You Like It. De Vere became entangled in an extramarital affair at age 30 that resulted in London street battles between his family and his mistress's family -- Elizabethan Montagues and Capulets. De Vere's eldest daughter faced a lengthy and tangled marriage do-si-do with two changeable grooms -- a courtship that is recalled in A Midsummer Night's Dream. De Vere's own courtship is precisely mirrored — down to the dowry amounts and terms of the marriage contract — in The Merry Wives of Windsor. De Vere lived in Venice during his 20s and visited the cities in France and Italy that would become the setting for more than a dozen Shakespeare plays. De Vere's brother-in-law, the shrew-tamer, visited the Danish court at Elsinore; a memo now preserved at the British Library reveals a banquet the brother-in-law attended with Danish courtiers named Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

Perhaps the most autobiographical play in Shake-speare is Hamlet, with numerous connections to practically every phase of de Vere's life. For example, when de Vere was traveling through France at age 26, he encountered a Teutonic prince who paraded his troops before de Vere's eyes. Soon thereafter, de Vere boarded a ship that was overtaken by pirates. De Vere was stripped naked by these pirates and left on the English shore. In Act 4 of Hamlet, in a sequence that is in no known source text for the play, Hamlet first witnesses the invading Prince Fortinbras's troops and then boards a ship that is overtaken by pirates, in an ordeal that leaves a humiliated Hamlet stripped naked on the Danish shore.

"Shakespeare," it turns out, was one of the most autobiographical authors who ever took pen to paper. To recognize this, one need only redefine "Shakespeare."

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FOOTNOTE:

[*] Some scholars have argued that Shakspere wrote approximately 150 lines of emendations to a manuscript play called Sir Thomas More. (The bulk of this play, incidentally, was written out in the hand of Edward de Vere's personal secretary Anthony Munday.) However, this dodgy attribution is still controversial even among orthodox scholars. The definitive study of literary handwriting in the Shake-spearean age, W.W. Greg's English Literary Autographs 1550-1650, does not endorse the Shakspere-Sir Thomas More theory. Indeed, Greg leaves Shakspere (six signatures plus the words "by me") out of his catalog of handwriting samples altogether. "I have not considered it generally advisable to include hands known only from the writer's signature," Greg writes. "Since this is of very uncertain value as a guide to a man's ordinary handwriting."