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Thursday, August 07, 2025

Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.” Virtual Grub Street, enter url here [state date accessed].


In this series:


 

86

Was it the proud full saile of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of (all to[o] precious) you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my braine inhearce,

Making their tombe the wombe wherein they grew?

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,

Above a mortall pitch, that struck me dead?

No, neither he, nor his compiers by night

Giving him ayde, my verse astonished.

He nor that affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

As victors of my silence cannot boast,

I was not sick of any feare from thence.

But when your countinance fild up his line,

Then lackt I matter, that infeebled mine.

As observed in the first part of this series, “I am a worthlesse bote, / He of tall building, and of goodly pride.” of Sonnet 80, and the “proud full sail,” here, in Sonnet 86, refer to stanza vi of the Dedicatory Canto to Queen Elizabeth I in Book VI of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser compares his poem to a ship sailing upon a long, diverse sea voyage:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine co[a]st,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet, making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.

The queen both rules the ocean and is the Ocean in the book. But these are only two of many references in Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets to The Faerie Queene and other of Spenser's poems published during his second visit to London, in 1595-6.

The “spirit” in Sonnet 86, refers to Edmund Spenser's call to the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, in the poem Ruines of Time (1596), to inspire (breathe into) him:

O noble spirite! live there ever blessed,

*

Thereto doo thou my humble spirite raise,

And into me that sacred breath inspire,

Which thou there breathest perfect and entire.

Sidney was the paragon of poetry and chivalry having died young while acting heroically in battle. He was also Spenser's host at Penshurst for a time. The queen would have recognized Shakespeare's reference.

It was Sir Walter Raleigh who arranged for Spenser's first visit to London, and the Royal Court, in 1590. Having read the first three books of The Faerie Queene, at the time, he abandoned an epic on the queen that he himself was writing and began a campaign at Court for the queen and courtiers to read Spenser's. Raleigh was particularly popular at Court, even while he was technically-speaking imprisoned within The Tower for impregnating one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, and he was almost certainly the “affable ghost” referred to in the sonnet.

When Raleigh convinced the poet to accompany him to the royal court, at the very end of 1589, it also resulted in Spenser's poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe describing the social circle at court at a level of detail he could only have gotten so quickly from Raleigh (then a particularly affable intimate of that circle) “gulling” him after their return to their lodgings each night. The gulling presumably continued by letter.

Colin Clout and the first full edition of The Faerie Queene both came out in early 1596. The dedication letter to Clout was dated 1591, and the years of the visit were essentially 1590-1, indicating that a manuscript edition was circulated as early as 1591. Numerous references to events as late as 1594, in the print edition, show that the print text was revised for publication. The first half of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590 but did not include the passage referenced in the Rival Poet Sonnets.

The “Ruine of Time” was published in the volume Complaints: Containing Sundrie Small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie in 1591. It was dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, in the memory of her brother Philip Sidney, and thanks for her “manie singular favours & great graces”.

Spenser also published his Fowre hymnes in 1596: two each to Love and to Beauty. The dedicatory letter, to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, refers to the hymns having been circulated in manuscript well before they were published. Portions — in particular the praise of Wisdom, the virgin Queen — seems written to flatter Elizabeth:

The soveraine dearling of the Deity,

Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most fit

For so great powre and peerelesse majesty,

*

And on her head a crowne of purest gold

Is set, in signe of highest soveraignty;

And in her hand a scepter she doth hold,


Nevertheless,this queen controls both heaven and earth to a degree that suggests more than her sovereignty over the Anglican church. The reader is left to interpret as he or she will. Few would have missed the reference.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 85, lines 7-10, we read:

To every Himne that able spirit affords,

In polisht forme of well refined pen.

Hearing you praisd, I say ’tis so, ’tis true,

And to the most of praise adde some-thing more,

Interesting that he speaks of the Rival Poet writing hymns to praise the queen at a time that his rival was also celebrated for writing hymns of remarkable beauty. As if he had conflated all of it — The Faerie Queene and the Fowre Hymns — as hymns to a faerie goddess who ruled over them at a pitch that mere sonnets could not reach.



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Tuesday, August 05, 2025

How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.


Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/08/how-shakespeares-rival-poet-sonnets.html [state date accessed].


In this series:


80

O How I faint when I of you do write,

Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,

And in the praise thereof spends all his might,

To make me toung-tide speaking of your fame.

But since your worth (wide as the Ocean is)

The humble as the proudest saile doth beare,

My sawsie barke (inferior farre to his)

On your broad maine doth wilfully appeare.

Your shallowest helpe will hold me up a floate,

Whilst he upon your soundlesse deepe doth ride,

Or (being wrackt) I am a worthlesse bote,

He of tall building, and of goodly pride.

Then If he thrive and I be cast away,

The worst was this, my love was my decay. 1

Centuries of debate have gone into the question of just who was the Rival Poet in Shakespeare Sonnets 78-86. The first candidate was advanced by the towering 18th century Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone. Malone advanced the name of Edmund Spenser.

[commentary on Sonnet 80. Line 9.] Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, ] Spirit is here, as in many other places, used as a monosyllable Curiosity will naturally endeavour to find out who this better spirit was, to whom even Shakspeare acknowledges himself inferior. There was certainly no poet in his own time with whom he needed to have feared a comparison; but these Sonnets being probably written when his name was but little known, and at a time when Spenser was in the zenith of his reputation, I imagine he was the person here alluded to. MALONE.2

Ironically, he was correct, and, straight away, his choice was rejected.

What would sweep aside Malone's candidate without further consideration was a single fact that has misled Shakespeare scholarship since shortly after the 1623 First Folio. If Spenser's Faerie Queene was the ship/poem “of tall building, and of goodly pride”3 that Shakespeare stood before in awe, then the Ocean that the two poets sailed upon — the recipient to whom they wrote their poems — was Queen Elizabeth I.

The odds against a London hustler from Stratford-upon-Avon writing intimate poems to the queen of England were astronomical. So then, the Shakespeare Industry turned the queen into Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and ever since have debated who should be chosen to fill the role of the Rival Poet for Wriothesley's affections.

In this sonnet, the love-object of the Rival Poets is equated with the Ocean itself. From this metaphor comes the sea and ship imagery. Shakespeare’s tiny sonnets — previously bricks of a monument laid one by one — now are overwhelmed by the vast sweep of The Fairy Queen, so much so that his monument has been revealed to be a mere “sawcie bark” before Spenser’s huge, majestic sailing ship.

Shakespeare adopts the Rival Poet’s self-same imagery: the recipient to whom he writes is the Ocean itself now.

But since your worth (wide, as the ocean is,)

The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,

My saucy bark, inferior far to his,

On your broad main doth wilfully appear.4

These lines are followed by lines 11-12.

I am a worthlesse bote,

He of tall building, and of goodly pride.

The references here are to stanza vi of the Dedicatory Canto to the Book VI of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser compares his poem to the sailing of a ship upon a long, diverse sea voyage:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine co[a]st,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet, making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.

(The italics are mine.) Here we find the inspiration for Shakespeare's image of his beloved friend. His rival's poem is an ocean-going vessel on the beloved's ocean.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

As I pointed out in my Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015), in the words of Edmund Spenser’s Fairy Queen, her subjects’ virtues originate in her, and return to her again, as rivers receive their water from the Ocean and return it there again.

Great and most glorious virgin Queen alive,

That with her soveraine power, and scepter sheen,

All Fairy lond does peaceable susteen.

In widest Ocean she her throne does rear,

That over all the earth it may be seen;

As morning sun her beams dispredden clear:

And in her face, fair peace and mercy doth appear.5

*

Then pardon me, most dreaded Soveraine,

That from your self I do this vertue bring,

And to your self do it return again:

So from the Ocean all rivers spring,

And tribute back repay as to their King.

Right so from you all goodly vertues well

Into the rest which round about you ring,

Fair Lords and Ladies, which about you dwell,

And do adorn your court, where courtesies excel.6

Perhaps less noticeable but even more evident, the first five lines of the second stanza (quoted here in italics) are also clearly alluded to, with a twist, to try to turn the Rival’s words ironically back upon himself, in the Rival Sonnet 79:

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent,

He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.7

It is the very meaning of Shakespeare's image. The Rival Poet is Edmund Spenser, whose Fairy Queen Shakespeare recognizes dwarfs his sonnets. The love-object the rivals are competing over is Queen Elizabeth.


1Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80. Modernized orthography.

2Malone, Edmond. Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare's Plays Published in 1778. I.645.

3Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80.

4Ibid. Sonnet 80.

5 Spenser, Edmund, The Fairy Queen: with a Glossary Explaining old and obscure words. In Two Volumes. London: Tonson, 1758. Vol. 1, Bk II, Canto II, Stanza XL @ 203.

6 Ibid., Vol. 2, Canto Introduction to Bk. VI, Stanza VII @ 310.

7 Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 79. l.7-8. Modernized orthography.




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Sunday, July 20, 2025

AI and I... and the Favorite Word of Tom Kyd

I'd been assembling data on the plays of Thomas Kyd, during odd moments here and there, for some weeks. The aim was to determine, once and for all, whether Kyd did co-write the Elizabethan murder drama The lamentable and true Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent as is the present scholarly consensus.

For some time now I have suspected that Anthony Munday and Edward de Vere might have written the play. The maddening aspect of presenting evidence in Munday's behalf, however, is that his writing style is free of tells. It is more modern than other playwrights of the time, true: only moderately Euphuistic; competent with prosody but never inspired; primarily a prose writer — a freelance writer in a strangely modern sense.

Anyway, taking a break, recently, from yet another session tallying endless minutiae, it came to me to ask the Microsoft Copilot AI Mode search feature what was the most common adjective in the plays of Kyd. I had already compiled the clear answer. It dawned on me, however, that it would possibly teach me more than a little about AI to ask it this question.

The first thing I seem to have learned was that AI Mode was too lazy to go to the works themselves. It reviewed online linguistic studies.

There isn't a definitive linguistic study pinpointing the single most common adjective in Thomas's Kyd's plays....

Next it offered a half-dozen adjectives that

mirror the emotional intensity and moral complexity of his characters.

Finally, it ended with more distinctly “human” touches.

If you're diving into a textual analysis or building a corpus study, I can help you set up a method to track adjective frequency across his works. Want to go that route?

Most human of all, rather than admit it did not know the answer it changed the subject.

I could not help but reflect upon the fact that I did not ask what “definitive linguistic studies” said was the most common adjective. Nor did I ask to be invited to create a “corpus”.

Some time later I did ask the AI for a definition of adjective. It answered with a clear, concise and correct definition. It knew that there were such things as linguistic studies and knew to look to one for an answer. From those studies, it had an idea that there existed such a thing as “the plays of Thomas Kyd”. But what it gave no sign of knowing was what “adjective in the plays of Thomas Kyd” meant. Actual adjectives in the wild, as it were, it seemed to know nothing about.

We all may struggle to see objects out of their expected context. AI, it seems, can cannot see them at all. Microsoft Copilot AI Mode1 can only detect that words are written about them in studies. There are “adjectives” and there are “adjectives in the plays of Thomas Kyd” and the two exist in separate worlds.

The answer was the word “sweet”. The most common adjective in Arden of Feversham is also sweet. (The matches between Kyd and the play go further.) My question did not indicate in any way a desire to build a “corpus” of the vocabulary of Thomas Kyd. In fact, the final suggestion called upon me join an effort to instruct it how to discover the answer I sought.

The only thing that could change the answer from one researcher to another would be to select different plays as being by Thomas Kyd and/or what part of the plays in question had he written personally. It is this that I had been driving myself crazy with. This that I had taken a break from.

Munday began writing around 1577. His earlier plays and poetry are written predominantly in rhymed fourteener couplets as was common circa 1580. He doesn't pronounce the suffix -ed for the past tense as a separate syllable (unless to regularize the scansion of a line), does end the third person present tense of verbs “-eth” (unless the modern “-s” will regularize the scansion of a line). He loved trendy words and sayings (a la Euphuism), used the word nick to mean all of “steal,” “in the best of shape,” and “just in time,” and was the rare playwright to use the word “delicate” in the few of his plays that survive.

Munday often referred to his time as a spy in the English Seminary in Rome and the English county of Kent. By these, and his constant flattery of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, we know that he co-wrote the fictional Chronicle of some of the principal events in the Life, Adventures, and Times of Edward Webbe, chief master gunner, his trauailes (1590) and other prose works. In the late 1570s, he briefly served as apprentice to the printer John Alde who published a ballad entitled “A ballad of the Deliuery of 266 prasoners from the Turkes,” in 1579, an event that relates to Edward Webbe. I've yet to find a copy.

Edward de Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)!

According to Collier's Extracts From The Registers Of The Stationers Company, page 96, a prose version was licensed in the same year to Thomas Dawson and Stephen Peele. The prose version was reprinted in 1608 and is the apparent source for some details in Edward Webbe.

It is by such extrinsic means as these that one may identify Munday as the author of an anonymous work. Patterns of vocabulary, grammar and/or prosody are not sufficiently pronounced.

As it turns out, the most common adjective in Munday's plays also seems to have been “sweet” (but not so as to be obsessive). The county of Kent is the setting of Arden of Feversham. And Munday had published a highly popular prose account of famous murders and violent deaths in England entitled A View of sundry Examples. Reporting many straunge murthers (1580). Of much more interest, the saying

When two bones are at strife for a dog, it is commonly séen:

That the third comes and takes it, and wipes their mouthes cléen.

appears both in Arden of Feversham and Munday's Fidele and Fortunio (1584). A third playwright, however, was a still better match than either Kyd or Munday for at least half of the play. But that will have to wait another day.

As for Microsoft Copilot AI Mode (and Google AI), while they are not the most developed applications of AI, their failures do inform us. Textual analysis and author attribution are tedious and delicate tasks. The first question the AI needed to answer was what plays it would identify as being by Kyd. Then it needed to identify what portions of the plays were actually written by Kyd. These tasks are highly demanding.

Having made its choices in those categories, determining the most common adjective is a simple counting exercise. There is no indication that the AI even attempted to do either. Admittedly, after many years of practice this all will still take me many hours and I will likely never be totally satisfied with the precision of my data. But I am not a glorious AI Large Language Model computer program, yet I have at least arrived, in the process, at any number of simple word counts across dozens of plays all of which seem to be beyond the capability of AI at any speed.

Much bigger players than I also report that AI is only being trusted to generate output to be carefully reviewed by high level experts before being accepted.



1Google AI Mode did no better. “a definitive answer requires detailed textual analysis”.



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Sunday, February 02, 2025

Shakespeare's Sonnets as Autobiography.


It is a strange experience to read traditional scholarship on Shake-Speares Sonnets (1609). Half of the community asserts that there is not enough information about the life of Shakespeare to read any of them as autobiography. The other solves the issue by creating an autobiography from the sonnets. Each half agrees that pretty much everything about the sonnets can be called into question, by individuals within the groups, except one: that they were written by the man from Stratford. The inconvenience of consistency or consensus is not indulged in even the broadest matters,

Stranger still to read Baconian commentators. While the worshipers of Stratford enjoy the freedom of needing no demonstrable connection between the sonnets and the life of the Shakspere of that town, in order for it to be accepted that he wrote them, the Baconians revel in twisting themselves in the most excruciating mental knots in order to bind together connections where none exist to their candidate's well-documented life.

What both groups have in common, however, is that the biographies of their candidates for writing the works attributed to the name of Shakespeare bear no demonstrable connection to the sonnets that go under that name. Their claims of a relationship between their candidates' lives and the sonnets are contrived or drawn from generalizations upon human nature and/or traits shared by many who occupied the time and place.

Yet the Stratfordian myth has become so pervasive that even the advocates of other candidates, such as the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas North, Henry Neville, etc., feel compelled to adopt the Stratfordian framework for commenting upon the sonnets. The first 126 are generally accepted as having been written to/about Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, and the rest to “The Dark Lady”. The two groups of poems are considered to have been intentionally ordered by Shakespeare himself in order to tell the largely chronological tale of his adult emotional life, or, if a given candidate was dead at the time of publication, the matter avoided.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

Astonishingly, the Oxfordian commentators have even found it impossible to resist the Baconian trope of detecting ciphers. Whereas the Baconians adopted the strategy because the pieces of their authorship puzzle do not remotely fit the life to the works, Oxfordians have adopted it because they have chosen to accept the Stratfordian framework for the sonnets: that 1-126 have Southampton for their object.

But the Southampton connection became orthodoxy among Stratfordians because no other recipient was possible within the known social network of the Stratford man. The Shakespeare industry demanded a back-story that could not be provided without a name. That Shakespeare dedicated his Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece to Southampton describes the entirety of his relationships to persons among the nobility — or, for that matter, to any identifiable person at all meriting the sophisticated imagery of the sonnets. The sole argument for Southampton is that, while there is no meaningful probability that he was the object of the sonnets, he is the only person with any probability at all. The only alternative to Southampton is no one.

All of this said, I submit that I have already shown a unique correspondence between the sonnets of Shakespeare and the events and the pattern of the life of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford in my various publications. There is Sonnet 74 in which Shakespeare receives, like Edward de Vere, in 1582 [1583 N.S.], so serious a wound in a duel that he fears he will die “The coward conquest of a wretch's knife...”. None of the other candidates is known to have suffered such a wound.1 There is Sonnet 125 in which Shakespeare says he “bore the canopy” such as Edward de Vere bore over Queen Elizabeth more than once but especially during the grand national celebration to thank God for victory over the Spanish Armada.2 No other candidate is known ever to have borne a canopy of any sort.

While these first two examples caught scholars attentions some time ago, I have added Sonnet 33 in which Shakespeare mourns the death of an infant son such as was the case with Edward de Vere.3 History does not record the Stratford man or any of the other candidates bearing such a loss.

At 36 years of age, however, a (by all appearances) healthy Stratford Shakspere did lose his only son at the age of 11 years. Which raises the question: “How did Shakespeare write Sonnet 108, as he felt death approaching,wondering how his young son would ever come to know him?”4 Edward de Vere's second legitimate son, Henry, did survive child-birth and was 11 years old when his father, who had been in declining health for some years, died.

These are just four of a great many examples. In each instance the sonnet in question describes a trait or event specific to the life of Edward de Vere. In none of the above cases does a sonnet describe the same from the life of any of the other candidates.

All of this said, it is true that individual short lyric poems, in isolation, can support a wide range of interpretation. Added to this is the fact that biographical records from Tudor lives were notoriously erratic. Few records from the life of a commoner like the Stratford man would be likely to have survived. The discovery of those that do would be largely serendipitous and the texts nondescript.

What is different about the results of my research into a Collected Poems of William Shakespeare — to which I wrote the introductory critical biography some 11 years ago5 — is that so many of the sonnets reveal a precise correspondence with events and traits from the documented biography of Edward de Vere few or none from any of the other candidates. Whereas isolated single sonnets may quite properly be dismissed as “insufficient evidence,” the correspondence between the known biography of Vere and the texts of a majority of the sonnets — a correspondence not found in the biography of any other candidate — constitutes so unique a pattern that it argues powerfully for Vere as their author. Such a pattern, and such a pattern alone, argues autobiography.

I have begun publicly composing drafts of the results of my years of research toward the promised Collected Poems of William Shakespeare — the earliest poems which pre-date the year 1566 — in my individually published studies and at my Virtual Grub Street blog, in a desperate attempt to finally complete the text I have promised for so many years. For me it is exciting and daunting that I still make major findings on the subject. The project has proven to be nearly overwhelming but I hope to complete it soon.




1 See my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1543136257/

2 Ibid.

3 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 33. Edward de Vere's Memorial For His Son." Virtual Grub Street. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-sonnets-of-shakespeare-sonnet-33.html 

4 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry." Virtual Grub Street. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-sonnets-of-shakespeare-sonnet-108.html

5 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1543136257/



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