07/05/2008
Edward deVere: known comedy writer
Eddie deVere and I keep running into each other.
I was doing some research on the advent of blank verse as a new medium in English in the late 16th century, and came across two short accounts that at least take a good swipe at the ahistorical idea that a nobleman would have necessarily had to write plays anonymously:
In 1589, George Puttenham (or possibly a writer with the first name Richard), wrote a treatise on English poetry in which he praised the Earl of Oxford for his comedy writing. In another essay, Francis Meres describes Oxford as one of the better comedy writers of his time.
What's that again about the Earl of Oxford having to write plays in secret?
Yes, it would have likely been far more acceptable for a nobleman to write poetry than to write plays, but Puttenham's and Meres' references suggest that Oxford was a known comedy writer by 1589, the year before Shakespeare first appears on the scene, and at least five years before any of Shakespeare's plays is printed.
There is also the far more significant fact that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604 and Shakespeare wrote until at least 1611.
09:50 Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: authorship, pseudohistory
Comments
Don't be so quick to dismiss the notion that someone like de Vere was publishing his works incognito. One of the very sources you cite actually suggests as much.
The anonymously published 1589 book to which you refer, The Arte of English Poesie says the following: "In her Majesty’s time that now is, are sprung up another crew of Courtly makers (ie. poets), noblemen and gentlemen of her Majesty's own servants, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public, with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman, Edward, Earl of Oxford." It lists other writers of the period as well, indicating that Edward de Vere wasn't the only court poet or playwright who was concealing his writings in some way.
Elsewhere in Poesie it states, "I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and supressed it agayne, or els suffered it to be publisht without their owne names to it: as if it were a discredit for a Gentleman, to seeme learned, and to shew him selfe amorous of any good Art."
As for your quip about 1604, it is definitely the best counter-argument against the Oxforidans out there. The Tempest has had the strongest evidence that dates it after 1604 -- with parallels between the play and an account of a 1609 shipwreck in the New World
I say "has had" because new scholarship has emerged that now dates The Tempest to the period 1604 or before.
http://tinyurl.com/3xdg95
http://tinyurl.com/6et7ea
[Much of this work has been or will be published in top peer reviewed journals, such as the Review of English Studies, cf. the second link above]
Posted by: mark | 07/06/2008
Mark,
I can appreciate Kositsky and Stritmatter's work on The Tempest problem; their careful analysis will likely be able to be engaged by scholars for purposes other than proving that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays. In fact, it has been suggested [1] that because of the excitement about postcolonialist history and theory, some scholars may have automatically assumed that The Tempest was necessarily a drama derived from Bermuda travel narratives even though the island in the play appears to have Mediterranean features and even though Caliban seems to be not only designed for but based on the actor Will Kempe. The play surely has postcolonialist implications, especially in performance, but that doesn't have to mean that Shakespeare and company had Bermuda, the Americas, or the politics of colonization in mind when developing the play.
What concerns me about the Oxfordian argument -- something I've addressed more than a few times on this blog -- is that seems to view Shakespeare through a 19th century lens of Shakespeare-as-individuated-novelist. There also seems to be an element of Bardolatry (quite ironically) at work: why, for example, would Marlowe, seemingly in much more immediate danger, write plays under his own name? Why place grammar-school graduate Thomas Kyd in the same category as university men? Why has no one questioned the "true" authorship of The Spanish Tragedy?
I think what I would especially like to understand is the payoff of the Oxfordian argument: what happens when we attribute Shakespeare's plays to Oxford? What's gained for scholars, students, readers? What changes?
[1] http://tinyurl.com/5hhmqb
Posted by: PrimroseRoad | 07/06/2008
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