De Vere's prodigality was but one aspect of a self-indulgent, erratic, open belligerent temperament which undermined his youthful prospects as well as his later ambitions. His tendency toward violence erupted at the age of seventeen when he killed one of his guardian's servants; his subsequent acquittal on a plea of self-defense was facilitated by Cecil's personal intervention with the jury (Ward, p. 124). Oxford so vehemently opposed the betrothal of his sister, Mary, to Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, that Bertie feared for his life, and the Earl not only quarreled with Sidney on the tennis court but may have planned his assassination as well. (3) In the first flush of his special attentions from the Queen, Oxford was noticeably disadvantaged by what Gilbert Talbot termed his "fyckle hed," a phrase which was to prove oracular. (4) Oxford rejected his first wife, Anne Cecil, on trumped up charges and refused to live with her for a period of more than five years. (5) In 1580 he betrayed the friends with whom he had joined in a secret profession of adherence to Catholicism, and when Anne Vavasour, Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber, gave birth at court to his illegitimate son he did not merely abandon her but insulted her publicly as well, to judge from the protracted feud which her uncle and brother waged against him (see the commentary for Nos. 7 and II.)
These reckless tendencies did not go unnoticed by the Queen. Although De Vere enjoyed Elizabeth's favor even after the Vavasour affair, he ascended brieRy if at all to the heights of favoritism sustained by such fellow courtiers as Leicester, Hatton, and Ralegh. In further contrast with these men it is noteworthy that she never appointed Oxford to a position of trust or sole responsibility. Throughout the 70's and 80's the Earl often requested military duty, yet he never gained the command of any sizable body of troops, nor was he actively engaged aside from a month or two at the time of the 1570 Northern Rebellion, an equally brief service in the Low Countries in 1585, and an even shorter one during the Armada crisis. He was never entrusted with a diplomatic mission, entertainment of foreign dignitaries, nor office at court or in the government at large. His sole distinction in affairs of the realm was his hereditary post as Lord Great Chamberlain, an office with very real if ceremonial duties, which traditionally included his presence at court during the five great feasts of the year, specific functions at a coronation or the creation of peers, attendance upon the sovereign in processions to Parliament, and jurisdiction over Westminster Hall at the time of a coronation, trial of peers, "or any public solemnity." (6) Oxford's only substantial mark of royal favor, a one thousand pound annuity granted him in 1586, is overshadowed by the continuous array of offices, monopolies, manors, and wardships which the Queen lavished upon many another favorite. Moreover, his pension was an act of charity rather than a token of personal affection or a reward for outstanding service. It came as the Earl's financial plight had grown desperate and long after the heyday of his close familiarity with the Queen. Its unusual form, an annuity payable in quarterly installments, shows that it was designed to solve an unusual problem, the preservation of a necessary state figure whose irresponsibility precluded a grant which might be farmed out, commuted, or sold.
Much as Oxford's rash, unpredictable nature minimized his success in the world of practical affairs, he deserves recognition not only as a poet but as a nobleman with extraordinary intellectual interests and commitments. Sir George Buc's awareness of De Vere's financial ruin did not prevent him from characterizing the Earl as "a magnificent and a very learned and religious man." (7) Abundant evidence of Ox- ford's lifelong devotion to learning occurs in the contemporary tributes to his patronage. In 1574 the eminent surgeon, George Baker, praised Oxford because "your honor doth hartely imbrace all such as excel in any worthy vertue, . . . neither dooth your honor suffer them to passe unrewarded, as may appeer by the moste Carte of them which your honor hath entertained into your service as I myself have had experience." And as late as hick the composer John Farmer gasped out his gratitude to Oxford with the confession that " . . . so farre have your Honorable favours out stripped all meanes to manifest my humble affection, that there is nothinge left but praying and wonderings The writers who dedicated more than one work to him provide a further measure of the very real value of his patronage. These include his uncle, Arthur Golding, with three dedications, Baker and Farmer with two apiece, and at least seven from Anthony Munday. In addition, John Lyly, John Brooke, and John Hester had already benefitted from the Earl's generosity or were actually employed in his household at the time they dedicated their books to him. (9)
The range of Oxford's patronage is as remarkable as its substance. Beginning about 1580 he was the nominal patron of a variety of dramatic troupes, including a band of tumblers as well as companies of adult and boy actors. Among the thirty-three works dedicated to the Earl, six deal with religion and philosophy, two with music, and three with medicine; but the focus of his patronage was literary, for thirteen of the books presented to him were original or translated works of literature. Besides Munday and Lyly, the list includes Underdowne's translation of Heliodorus, Greene's Gwydonius, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Thus forty per-cent of the books offered to the Earl were literary, and even if we subtract all seven dedications by the prolific Munday, this category would still account for almost one fourth of the total. By contrast, peers of similar means and with some reputation for cultivating the arts were rather less sought after by Elizabethan men of letters. The Second Earl of Essex, for example, was a much greater patron than De Vere, yet only eighteen per-cent of his dedications accompanied works of literature. A similar pattern obtains for Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, with sixteen per-cent, the Earl of Warwick with fourteen per-cent, and the Earl of Hertford with ten per-cent. We know, too, that Oxford was in close contact with a number of writers; he read Watson's Hekatompathia while it was still in manuscript, and personally encouraged Bartholomew Clerke's translation of Castiglione's Courtier, and Bedingfield's translation of Cardanus (see the commentary for Nos. X and 1l). Besides Lyly and Munday another writer, Thomas Churchyard, claimed to have been in Oxford's service and twice advertised his plans to dedicate a book to his patron. (10) Oxford's genuine commitment to learning throughout his career lends a necessary qualification to Stone's conclusion that De Vere simply squandered the more than 70,000 pounds he derived from selling off his patrimony (p. 582), for with some part of this amount Oxford acquired a splendid reputation for nurture of the arts and sciences.
Far more than his learning or patronage, it was Oxford's poetry which led J. Thomas Looney to thrust the Earl into the ranks of the Shakespeare claimants with the publication in 1920 of "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward De Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Professional scholars have dismissed his arguments along with those of his successors in the cause, often with some indignation, yet the "Oxfordians" have made worthwhile contributions to our understanding of the Elizabethan age. Foremost among these is Ward's quite competent biography of the Earl, in which speculation about Oxford's identity as Shakespeare is discreetly relegated to "Interludes" between the chapters. Also noteworthy is Charles Wisner Barrell's identification of Edward Vere, Oxford's illegitimate son by Anne Vavasour, a relationship which escaped E. K. Chambers as he worked out the details of the Oxford-Vavasour liaison for his biography of Sir Henry Lee. Scholars tend to belittle as well the significance of the Oxfordian movement, yet its leaders are educated men and women who are sincerely interested in Renaissance English culture. Their arguments for De Vere are entertained as at least plausible by hosts of intellectually respectable persons, and the general interest in the "Oxfordian" movement is undoubtedly more widespread now than ever before. Its scope is reflected in the recent appearance of a third edition of Looney's book, while another three dozen Oxfordian books, scores of articles, and at least two newsletters are found evenly distributed over the past fifty years. (ll)
The orthodox rejoinder has been set forth by many of this century's most distinguished Shakespeareans, yet neither they nor their opponents have determined what poetry Oxford actually wrote. Looney's edition, The Poems of Edward de Vere (London, 1921), does not qualify as a viable effort in this direction since he was admittedly a novice with regard to Elizabethan poetry, let alone textual method. He assigned to the Earl not only the poems wrongly attributed to him by Grosart, but also the songs from John Lyly's plays, plus eleven works which he arbitrarily selected from Englands Helicon, one of which is by Thomas Churchyard. Effectively, then, both sides in the debate have relied upon Grosart's edition of Oxford's poetry, a valuable collection, but one with many deficiencies of both text and attributions. Above all, its six poems which the Earl demonstrably did not write crucially affect the arguments favoring his composition of the works of Shakespeare. The poem designated below as WA (wrongly attributed) 4 [No. 5 in Looney] may be by John Lyly, and WA 6 [No. 24 in Looney] is probably but not certainly by the Queen, while Thomas Campion wrote WA 1 [No. 22 in Looney] and 5 [No. 23 in Looney], WA 2 [No. 7 in Looney] is Greville's, and WA 3 [No. 16 in Looney], Robert Greene's. The certainty of these last four attributions and the disparity among these three poets in matters of style and aesthetic purpose underscore the invalidity of the Oxfordian approach to the Earl's poetry. Nor is this a minor prop to their overall hypothesis. Looney compared various motifs, rhetorical de-vices, and phrases from Grosart's edition of Oxford with selected passages from Shakespeare, and announced that the similarities he found were "the most crucial in the piecing together of the case," because they revealed "a most extraordinary correspondence in the details of the work." (l3) Yet among the decisive parallels enumerated by Looney are the verses by Greene, Campion, and Greville, besides liberal quotation from "What is desyre?," WA 4, which is in no way connected with Oxford, and the spurious concluding stanza to No. 11 [No. 6 in Looney]. Later Oxfordians have fared no better at distinguishing the true Shakespearean ring from lines by other poets. Louis Benezet, Professor of Education at Dartmouth College, devised a collage of lines from Shakespeare and the poetry he thought representative of De Vere, and defied anyone to tell one poet from the other but his test incorporates the first two lines of Greene's poem. Similarly, Charles Wisner Barrell argued that Campion's WA 5 showed "the unmistakable thumbprints of 'William Shakespeare,'" Eleanor Brewster accepted Greville's poem as the work of Oxford-Shakespeare, and Miller's reprint of Looney's edition of the Earl's poems retains with- out comment all six of the wrongly attributed works. (14)
This on-going confusion of Oxford's genuine verse with that of at least three other poets illustrates the wholesale failure of the basic Oxfordian methodology. Put in the simplest terms, Elizabethan poets drew upon a broad, common range of motifs, rhetorical devices, allusions, and adages, so that, given the relative abundance of Shakespeare's verse, it would be surprising indeed to find a contemporary poet whose themes and phrasing did not correspond at some point and in some way with a passage or two by the Bard. Accordingly, the comparisons set forth by Looney and elaborated upon by his successors fail in any way to connect Oxford with Shakespeare; they reveal instead that verses from a number of Elizabethan poets cannot be detected from the work of either Oxford or Shakespeare when the excerpts are placed in selective juxtaposition.
What remains to be done from the standpoint of literary and cultural history is to determine Oxford's actual place as a courtier poet minus the untenable Shakespearean trappings. The followings edition of Oxford's poems shares sixteen texts with Grosart's collection, four- teen of them classified as canonical, and two as possible, with a considerable alteration of substantive readings in nearly every case. I also add two certain poems and two possible ones to the corpus (Nos. 12, 13, II, and IV) , while deleting the six works which Grosart mistakenly ascribed to the Earl. In all likelihood these sixteen definite and four possible poems amount to no more than a good sampling of De Vere's total output, in light of the contemporary praise of his writing. Both Webbe (1586) and Puttenham (1589) rank him first among the courtier poets, an eminence he probably would not have been granted, despite his reputation as a patron, by virtue of a mere handful of lyrics. (l5) It is also possible that Oxford wrote masques or drama for the court, perhaps along the lines of Sidney's Lady of May or Essex's 1595 Accession Day entertainment (see Essex's No. 3). Puttenham, and later Meres, cite Oxford as a writer of "Comedy and Enterlude," besides which is the reference to a Shrovetide show of 1579 prepared for the court by Oxford and three other noblemen.l6 The only trace of a specific lost poem by the Earl, however, is Francis Peck's allusion to "a pleasant conceit of Vere, Earl of Oxford, discontented at the rising of a mean gentleman in the English Court, circa 1580." (17)
De Vere's sixteen canonical poems are the output of a competent, fairly experimental poet working in the established modes of mid- century lyric verse. The majority of Oxford's certain poems are love lyrics: four analyze the lover's predicament (Nos. 7, 8, 11, 13) [Nos.18, 4, 6 in Looney, with No. 13 not in Looney], five are outright complaints (Nos. 2, 3, 5, 9, 12) [Nos. 15, 13, 14, 12 in Looney, with No. 12 not in Looney], and three praise the loved one or love in general (Nos. 6, 14, 15) [Nos. 17, 3, 2 in Looney]. For the rest, No. 16 [No. 20 in Looney] is a whimsically philosophical poem, 4 and 10 [Nos. 10 and 11 in Looney] are non-amorous complaints, and No. 1 [No. 8 in Looney] is a verse epistle in commendation of Bedingfield's book. Only the latter poem is clearly topical, for most of Oxford's verse deals with conventional subjects which do not point to a specific occasion or circumstance. No. 6, with its reference to "her alone, who yet on yearth doeth reigned may well concern his relationship with the Queen, and Nos. 4 and 10 could be autobiographical expressions of a desire for revenge. The rest, however, are detached, rather impersonal examples of the standard varieties of mid-Elizabethan amorous Lyric. The translated dialogue, No. 11, and its companion dialogue, No. 8, are no more suitable vehicles for intense personal emotion than are the other droll and distanced analyses of love, 7 and 13. The absence of personal feeling in these works is, of course, characteristic of much Elizabethan love poetry and must be understood in terms of Oxford's poetic intentions, which were more structural and rhetorical than sentimental. His technique is dominated by alliterative phrasing, allusions to classical mythology and history, and copious formulae: the parallel examples of No. 9, 1-3, 13-16, the list of contraries in the second stanza of No. 12, the line by line interrogatives of No. 15, or the extended metaphor of No. 13, an intricate comparison of love to a game of tennis. While five of the Earl's poems are laid to rest in the futureless prosody of poulter's measure and fourteener couplets, he does use eleven different metrical and stanzaic forms in these sixteen poems, including one English sonnet, the graceful trimeters of No. 14, and the unexpected tetrameters at the end of each stanza of No. 9. Structurally, the poems are unified and brought to well-defined conclusions. The sense of design may be as simply achieved as by the recapitulation in the last stanza of 14 of topics from the preceding stanzas, or a similar device in the epigrammatic last line of No. 16. More complex is the weaving of a double refrain into the conventional fabric of No. 6, while the surprising and unconventional endings of Nos. 7 and 9 show Oxford playing upon the received tradition in imaginative ways. De Vere's poetry, most if not all of which circulated in manuscript at court, did more than just supply his fellow courtiers with pleasingly ornamental trifles. Oxford's poems 1-9, all written by 1576, comprise the earliest substantial alleviation of a dearth of courtier verse throughout the first decade of Elizabeth's reign. He is her first truly prestigious courtier poet, and while we cannot know to what extent his example spurred on those who followed, his precedent did at least confer genuine respectability upon the later efforts of such poets as Sidney, Greville, and Ralegh. Moreover, much as the work of these poets overshadows Oxford's, his verse does compare favorably with that of his "drab" age con- temporaries; it is, for example, varied in conception and execution in a manner well beyond the relentless plodding of Breton, Turberville, and Churchyard.
Footnotes
1 The Breviary of Britayne, . . . lately Englished by Thomas Twyne, 1573 (STC 16636), sig A 3_3V; Buc. BL Cotton Tiberius MS. E.x (a draft of his "History of Richard 111"), f. 210.
2 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford, 1965), yp. 701,514; B. M Ward, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London, 1928), p. olo.
3 HMC Ancaster Manuscripts (Dublin, 1907), p. 4; P.R.O. S.R 12/15. 45. Introduction
4 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth(London. t823).1, 328-9.
5 Above all, Oxford charged that the daughter born to Anne during his journey overseas was illegitimate, a claim which is belied by his casual references to Anne's pregnancy and delivery in his letters from the continent (see Ward, pp. 102, 108).
6 William J. Thoms, The Book of the Court, and ed. (London, 1844), pp. 236-7. Ironically, Oxford's claim to this office was a fraudulent one. His grandfather held the Chamberlainship as a grant from the Crown which expired upon his death. Edward's father claimed the office at the time of Elizabeth's coronation and, since there was no counterclaim, enjoyed the title by default, as did the Seventeenth Earl. At the coronation of Edward Vl, however, the Earl of Warwick had of fidated as Lord Great Chamberlain, an honor not even sought by a De Vere on that occasion. See J. Horace Round's The King's Servants and Officers of State (London, 191l), pp. tt8-22.
7 Cotton Tiberius MS. E.x, f. Zoo.
8 Baker, The Composition or making of the oil called Oleum Magistrate (STC 1209), sig. B 2-2'; Farmer, The First Set of English Madrigals to Foure Voices (STC 10697), sig. *2.
9 See the epistles dedicatory to Lyly's Euphues and his England, 1580, Brooke's The Staffe of Chnstian Faith, 1577 (STC 12476), and Hester's A Short Discours, 1580 (STC 881).
10 In Churchyardes Chance, 1580 (STC 5250), sig. K 4V, he proposed to dedicate his "Challenge" to Oxford, while in the epistle to Churchyardes Charge, 1580 (STC 5240) he wrote that his next book "shall be dedicated to the moste worthiest (and towardes noble man), the Erle of Oxford." These intentions perhaps became casualties of Oxford's disgrace after the Vavasour affair.
11 Ed. Ruth Loyd Miller, 2 VOLS. (Port Washington, N. Y., 1975). Miller also reprints Looney's edition of Oxford's Poems plus a wide selection of later Oxfordian studies, with numerous plates and facsimiles.
12 A. B. Grosart, Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies' Library (Blackburn, 1876), IV,394-429
13 Miller, I, 170.
14 Benezet, Shakspere, Shakespeare, and De Vere (Manchester, New Hampshire, 1937), pp. 32-4; Barrell, "Elizabethan Mystery Man:' Saturday Review 1 May 1937, p. 14; Brewster, Oxford, Courtier to the Queen (New York, 1964), p.174.
15 William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, ed. G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1yo4), 1, 243; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesey, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice WaLker (X936; repr. Cambridge, 1970), p. 61. Oxford's contemporary, Sir Arthur Gorges, was also ated by Puttenham as a well-known courtier poet, yet only eight of his lyrics had been retrieved from contemporary manuscripts and prints by 1940 when the British Library acquired Egerton MS. 3165, Gorges' personal collection of his verse, containing ninety-eight poems from the 70's and 80's (ed. Helen E. Sandison, The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges Oxford, 19531)-
16 Willcock and Walker, p. 63; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598, ed. Smith, n, 320; Ward, p. 163.
17 Desiderata Cunosa (London. lm), 1, z7o.
18 Arthur Collins, ed., Letters and Memonals of State (London, o746), 1,o47; Longleat House, Devereux Papers, Vol. 2, f. 29. For this and my subsequent references to the Devereux Papers I am grateful to the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Wiltshire, England.