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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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Saturday, January 25, 2025

The Sonnets of Shakespeare and How They Got that Way.

'[P]erhaps , Shakespeare's " lovely youth" was merely the creature of imagination,' says Alexander Dyce, “and had no more existence than those fair ones, whom various writers have so perseveringly wooed in verse. I have long felt convinced, after repeated perusals of the Sonnets, that the greater number of them was composed in an assumed character, on different subjects, and at different times, for the amusement, and probably at the suggestion, of the author's intimate associates.”

Three points bear highlighting in Dyce's comment. First, the non-existent “fair ones” are a convenient invention. Second, his “repeated perusals” have convinced him of what he wished to believe. Third, nevertheless he was ironically correct, for all the wrong reasons, that the lovely boy, of Sonnet 126, was “the creature of imagination”.1

The main reasons that traditional Shakespeare scholars remain at the very least equivocal about the sonnets as autobiography are two. I'll start with the second: the documentary biography of the man from Stratford is limited and does not in any way remotely align with the poetry. Foremost, however, was the panic at the idea that the Shakespeare revealed in the sonnets might have been bi-sexual. Nevertheless, the sonnets were widely read as autobiography.

In accordance with the first version of the Stratford myth, the recipient of roughly half of the sonnets is an anonymous male friend, “H.W.” There was a sense, however, as far back even as the 1640 second edition of the poems, that the tone of some of the sonnets was problematical. One sonnet, in particular, — Sonnet 20 — was so particularly egregious as to provoke the towering scholarly figure, George Steevens:

—the master mistress of my passion,] It is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick addressed, to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation. We may remark also, that the same phrase employed by Shakspeare to denote the height of encomium, is used by Dryden to express the extreme of reproach.


“That woman, but more daub’d; or if a man,

Corrupted to a woman, thy man mistress.” Don Sebastian.


Let me be just, however, to our author, who has made a proper use of the term male varlet in Troilus and Cressida. See that play, Act V. sc. i. Steevens.2

When Steevens undertook the First Variorum Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, shortly afterwards, and published in 1578, he chose not to include the sonnets saying that they were “boring.”

Steeven's protege, Edmund Malone, included the Sonnets as Volume 10 of his own Variorum of 1790. In that volume he gave what is the orthodox reply to Steevens's objection to this day:

Some part of this indignation might perhaps have been abated, if it had been considered that such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our authour's time, and neither imported criminality, nor were esteemed indecorous. See a note on the words— “thy deceased lover” in the 32d Sonnet. To regulate our judgment of Shakspeare's poems by the modes of modern times, is surely as unreasonable as to try his plays by the rules of Aristotle. Master-mistress does not perhaps mean man-mistress, but sovereign mistress. See Mr. Tyrwhitt's note on the 165th verse of the Canterbury Tales, Vol. IV. P. 197. Malone.3

According to Malone, that was just the way men talked to/about male friends in those days. While attempts were made over the following century to make Malone's reply the final word the subject was simply too fascinating to let lie.

In 1817, Nathan Drake published his Shakespeare and his Times. The two volumes included “A Disquisition on the Object of His Sonnets” in which he identified Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, as the recipient of the first 126 sonnets in the collection. His evidence was almost entirely his own personal assertions. The only legitimate documents to support his claim were the dedications to Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. The rest was conjecture.

But the booming Shakespeare industry needed new discoveries. It wasn't at all particular how it came by them. Southampton was soon accepted by the majority of scholars as the male object of Shakespeare's affections and a new myth was constructed around the choice. A new popular debate began on the periphery comparing Southampton's candidacy to that of others but only Philip Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, had legs.

Still uncomfortable with the verbal intimacy of the sonnets purportedly to the “lovely boy,” many scholars took the position evident in Dyce's comments above. This largely remained the situation for above 100 years. No Shakespeare lover wanted a gay bard, social mores simply would not allow it, and none could imagine another recipient than Southampton or Herbert in a pinch.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

As alternative authors began to be forwarded for the works under the pen-name of Shakespeare, and the sonnets mined for references to the lives of other candidates, the position that some or all of the sonnets are entirely fictional began to be more popular for another reason. Like so much from traditional scholarship, the question of autobiography was repurposed to meet the needs of the new specialty called “Stratfordianism”. Anything in the works of Shakespeare that could be argued to relate to the life of the Stratford man, conveniently enough, became autobiographical. Anything that could not was said probably to have been written in the person of a fictional character. At the very least, it was argued, the details are lost to us due to the scanty documentation of the lives of the common folk of the time. That lack of evidence for the Stratford man was actually powerful evidence in his favor. A given sonnet could move back and forth between the categories as needs required.

To find any other biography than the Stratford man was a sign of heinous disrespect and probably mental illness. To find that the author was not gay was homophobic.



1 See my “Sonnet CXXVI and the Lovely Boy.” Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015). @ location 308. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8/

2 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015) @ location 221. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8/ citing Malone, ed. Edmond. The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, Volume the Tenth. (1790). @ 207.

3 Ibid.



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Sunday, January 19, 2025

The Long and Winding Road to Shakespeare's Bohemian Sea Coast.

In this series:


In our previous article, “Why Shakespeare was Correct: Bohemia did have a seacoast,” we touched on the fact that the playwright's The Winter's Tale was based closely on Robert Greene's 1588 Pandosto: the Triumph of Time also known as Dorastus and Fawnia. Also that the play is almost certainly based upon the 1588, 1592 or 1595 editions of the tale.

The uncertainty as to which edition has to do with the fact that the sole copy of the 1588 edition is missing Signature B of the text. The text of the 1592 appears to have been identical, but it is not possible to be certain, vis-a-vis Signature B, and the 1595 edition to have been printed from the galleys of the 1592. The 1607 edition and later are missing a line quoted verbatim in the play from the three earlier editions.

For this and other reasons, the original source(s) for the tale were those adapted by Robert Greene. There can be no doubt that Greene borrowed widely for his tale. The debate as to just what the sources might have been is perhaps best summarized in the Moorman edition of Shakepeare's The Winter's Tale (1909).

Our eventual goal is to determine how Greene came to describe Bohemia as having a sea coast. As part of the process, we seek to determine any of his source(s) that led to the description. Toward that end, Frederick William Moorman brings to our attention an article that Professor J. Caro

contributed to the second volume of Englische Studien (1878), and entitled "Die historischen Elemente in Shakespeare's 'Sturm' und 'Wintermarchen,'" endeavours to show that the story of Pandosto's jealousy and cruelty towards Bellaria is founded upon an actual incident in the fourteenth century annals of Poland.1

In spite of the vague references to Polish folk history and historical fiction romances, to support his thesis, Caro manages to provide a number of strong clues that will eventually arrive at the answer to our question.

Caro takes his strongest parallel from Book IX of Jan Dlugossi's2 (in Poland and Bohemia famous) fifteenth century Annales seu cronici incliti regni Poloniae.3

When Jagiello returned to Poland from Lithuania in 1388, it was said that his chamberlain Gniewosz4 had whispered to him that William of Austria had been in Krakow in the meantime and had had secret relations with Queen Hedwig during a stay of several days. The king was inflamed with jealousy over this and only the clever intervention of the magnates was the dispute resolved. But new discord and mistrust soon arose and it was clearly evident that the king's slanderers had gained the ear and similar whisperings were poisoning the queen's life.5

The standard version of Dlugossi's chronicle was first published in 1711. During some 400 years prior to that, it was produced for distribution in large numbers by scribes. This means that there were minor differences between even the best copies and some downright blunders. These will prove to be key to identifying how Bohemia came to have a sea coast in Pandosto.

Caro chose the Jagiello-Hedwig historical moment because he wanted the Greene's source to coincide with a 1390-1 visit by an English delegation to Danzig whose ship had been driven off course, by a fierce storm, anchoring near Szczecin at the mouth of the Oder River. He intended to strengthen a separate theory, regarding the source of Shakespeare's The Tempest, by showing that Greene's source must have made its way to England with the return home of the Englishmen. For trying to kill two birds with one stone he ended up failing to kill either but leaving behind a description of what he had discovered in the process.

As fine a source as Dlugossi is, Caro could only bring him to a specific point by referring to the aforesaid folk stories incorporating the Jagiello-Hedwig story. As problematical as such a thing is for a scholar he did name names. Those names came to too little in Dlugossi but came to a great deal in the surprisingly many Silesian chronicles written over much the same time and published in the 18th century.

Caro expands upon the Jagiello-Hedwig story from the text of a purported 16th century manuscript allegedly discovered by the 19th century author Theodor Nasbutt best known for being a “scholar” with a novelistic method of evaluating historical evidence.

This is the tale of a different Duke and Duchess, of Mazovia, Semovit and Ludomilla, married some 20 years earlier.

The lady was of rare beauty, cheerful temperament, exemplary in every respect, charitable, pious, without pride or courtliness. The Duke loved her unconditionally, and with him she had complete freedom in her pleasures as well as in the disposal of treasures.6

Sometime after their marriage rumor came to the Duke that Ludmilla had been pregnant before their marriage. As the rumor went, her companion in this disgrace was none other than the duke's “cupbearer, Dobek, a very popular courtier.”7

The Duke “sent a secret order to [the Bishop of] Plozk[, his right-hand man,] to arrest the cupbearer Dobek, and returned to Mazovia with his wife as quickly as possible without telling anyone.”8 Dobek had already escaped, however.

The Duchess was placed in prison where she had a boy-child, Henry. The Duke ordered that it be disposed of. His Duchess died in the prison. Dobek was lured back to the Duchy and brutally murdered where his corpse revealed that he had actually been a woman. Meanwhile, the child was being brought up by a rustic peasant woman.

If this tale seems far-fetched, to the reader, and lacking a provenance, they are correct on both counts. It seems clearly to take the historical record regarding Ludomila and to fictionalize it with the intent to turn it into a popular pot-boiler and/or to create a connection with Greene's Pandosto. Strange as it may be, however, all of the above amounts to a map to an historical scavenger hunt that arrives in the end at the actual source from which Greene developed the plot of Pandosto's jealousy.

We will follow that map in the next installment.



1Shakespeare, William. The Winter's Tale, F. W. Moorman. Ed, (1912). xviii.

2Generally referred to by his Latin name, Johannes Longinus.

3The 1711 Frankfort edition is entitled: Dlugossi, Joannis. Historiae Poloniae (1711).

4Gniewosz's Latin name in Dlugossi was Gnieuossium de Dalewycze.

5Caro, Die historischen Elemente in Shakespeare's »Sturm« und »Wintermährchen«. Englische Studien 1878. 141ff.@160. Als Jagiello nämlich aus Litthauen 1388 nach Polen zurückgekehrt war, so erzählte man, habe ihm sein unterkämmerer Gniewosz zugeraunt, dass inzwischen Wilhelm von Oesterreich in Krakau gewesen und während eines mehrtägigen aufenthalts geheimen verkehr mit der königin Hedwig gehabt hätte. Darüber sei der könig in eifersucht entbrannt und nur durch die kluge dazwischenkunft der magnaten seien die zwistigkeiten beseitigt worden. Bald aber war neuer Zwiespalt, neues misstrauen eingetreten, und es war deutlich erkennbar, dass Verleumder des königs ohr gewonnen, und ähnliche einflüsterungen auch das leben der königin vergifteten. [translation by Google Translate].

6Caro, 166. Die dame war von seltener Schönheit, fröhlichen temperaments , musterhaft in jeder beziehung, wohlthätig, fromm, ohne stolz oder hoffahrt. Der herzog liebte sie grenzenlos, und sie hatte bei ihm jede freiheit in Vergnü-gungen ebenso wie in der Verfügung über die schätze. [translation by Google Translate]

7Ibid., 167.

8Ibid.



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Monday, January 06, 2025

Updated Group Advertising Guidelines

We begin to have members sign-on who only wish to post direct advertisements for their products. Subsequently, it has become time to establish an advertising policy.


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Saturday, January 04, 2025

Queen Elizabeth's 1564 Visit to Cambridge University, Edward de Vere and Shakespeare.

Upon Queen Elizabeth's arrival at Cambridge University, in August of 1564, several scholars from the school presented her with compositions they had written to celebrate her visit.

When her Majestie was about the middle of the Scholars or Sophisters, two appointed for the same, came forth and kneeled before her Grace; and kissing their papers exhibited the same unto her Majestic. Wherein were contained two orations gratulatory; the one in verse, the other prose. Which her Highness received, and gave them to one of the footmen. The like was observed and done by the Batchellours of Arts; and of two Masters of Arts.1

One of the two Batchelors was a young William Lewin. One of the Masters was Thomas Drant fellow of St. John's College. Behind the Queen rode her proudest Earls, among them the 14 year old Earl of Oxford.

Like so many other scholars at the English universities of the day, their names will enter in the historical record as servants, agents, tutors, etc. — minor figures first met during a visitation to the given college. Only on rare occasion was the visitation a royal one. Various august members of the royal court might pass through at any time. Prize scholars would be appointed to regale them. Their names would some 10 or 20 years later appear as a secretary to the visitor, perhaps, or a tutor to his children. A visit from the powerful was a cherished opportunity for advancement.

The Cambridge visit being a royal one, and the university being a premiere institution, unusually many names appear again. William Lewin, for example, will impress Sir William Cecil, the august First Secretary to the Queen, who will choose him as tutor to his daughter, Anne.2 Anne, of course, will marry Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, in 1571, after which she will write from Wivenhoe — the Earl's preferred seat, at the time — asking her father to recommend Lewin for a grant from the Queen.

But we next see Lewin described as a servant of Oxford. He is chosen to accompany the young Earl on a tour of Europe. The two wait upon the court of France for a short time before traveling to Strasbourg where they become house guests of the famous scholar, Johannes Sturmius.

Famously, Vere suspected Lewin — correctly as it turned out — had been sent along to inform Cecil (by then the Baron Burghley), of his activities. Lewin woke one morning — after the end of the Frankfort Fair — to discover Vere gone having left no clues to which direction. By way of consolation prize, Lewin seems to have remained to learn at Sturmius' feet for a year or so before returning to England. There he appears to have become a secretary to Edmund Grindal — the Archbishop of Canterbury and close friend of William Cecil. He also acted as Sturmius agent with the English royal court.

As for Thomas Drant, he managed somehow to become an influence on the works of Shakespeare. I have described, in my edition of Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)3, how he presented an English poem to the Queen on the occasion of her visit, and how, two years later, 'In 1566, a Cambridge student, Thomas Drant, published his A medicinable morall, that is, the two bookes of Horace his satyres, Englyshed,... The book was dedicated to “The Right Honorable my Lady Bacon, and my lady Cicell, sisters, fauourers of learnyng and vertue.”.'

While Drant's translation is written in fourteeners, it shares striking stylistic and vocabulary traits with Shakespeare. His next translation — of Horace's Art of Poetry4 — also in fourteeners, was very loose. Portions could easily be added to the literature on Shakespeare's free use of prefix and suffix coinages. Similarities of style and vocabulary are found to Edward de Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) which would later be incorporated into Troilus and Cressida.5

Drant graduated D.D., from Cambridge, in 1569. Soon thereafter, he became private chaplain to Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was likely at about the same time that he was named Archdeacon of Lewes, which was in the gift of Canterbury. His short life ended in 1578.

Short though his life may have been, Drant wrote many (brief) Latin works and the aforesaid translations from Horace. He also made many connections and effected the literary world around him. According to Seccomb and Allen, Drant “drew up rules whereby English might be tortured into pentameters and sapphics, and his rules were very seriously considered by Dyer and by Sidney.”6

For our present purposes, Horace's Epistle to Lollius, or Drant's translation of it, have a strong claim to forming the character of Achilles in Edward de Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584).7

The hystorye of Parys love, (for which as we do heare

Greate Gréece empayred verye sore, which wreakinge Parys sinnes

Did wayne awaye with ten yeares fighte prolongde by lingeringe twynnes)

Of foolishe kinges and foolishe folke conteynes a fumishe flame.

Antenor would have compremize to cut awaye the same.

What saies our Parys? what sayes he? compell him shall theire none

To cease to bathe in worldlye blis, and flow in joy alone.

Duke Nestor sillie carkinge segge the tempeste to appease

He cummes, and goes, twixte king of men and awfull Achilles.

The kinge for love, both twayne for ire are in a chafinge fitt

What so the princes dote in lyfe, the commons smarte for it.

Throughe treason crafte, mischiefe, and luste, through wrothe of stomacke stowte,

Theye spare no sinne within Troye walles, nor none they spare without.8

He has also become a front-runner for influencing Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, I.i.8-9:

Like to a Step-dame, or a Dowager,

Long withering out a yong mans revennew.

This was long thought to have been directly influenced by Horace's Ars Poetica until James Halliwell discovered that Drant's translation of the passage was a still closer fit.

Ut piger

Annus Pupillis, quos dura prerait custodia matrum.

Sic mihi tarda fluunt, ingrataque tempora.

Thus translated by Drant, 1.567, —

Slowe seames the yeare unto the warde

Which houlden downe must be,

In custodie of stepdame straite, —

Slowe slydes the time to me. 9

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

What is of even greater interest, Drant was in the habit of maintaining his iambic foot through coining new words by adding prefixes or suffixes to their base. It is a habit he continues even in his original Latin poetry.

The student of Shakespeare will surely notice that this innovation has long been credited to him. But here is Drant overflowing, in 1567, with: unassayde; unfalliablie; “Lyke beastes unbroake, unusde to toyle, Bruits of untamed neckes,...”; upmost; updrest; dehuskd; “The head detruncte...” and much more. Add to this that the translations will share highly unique vocabulary and images with Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584).



1Cooper, Charles Henry. The Annals of Cambridge (1843). II.188.

2Strype, John. Annals of... Queen Elizabeth's Happy Reign. (1824). III.i.81. This presumably after he took his LL.D.

3Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare) Book 1)(2018). Location 6465ff. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T/

4Drant, Thomas. Horace his arte of Poetrie, [E]pistles, and Satyrs Englished (1567)

5Purdy, Location 6023. 'Stokes, x.] It has often been remarked that passages and even scenes in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," as printed in the Quarto and the Folio, seem to be boulders from an older drama embedded in the newer and more celebrated formation.'

6Seccomb, Thomas and Allen, J. W. The Age of Shakespeare (1579-1631)(1903). I.9.

7Later incorporated into Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

8Drant. “Epistle to Lollius”. No page numbers.

9Halliwell, James O. The Works of William Shakespeare... a New Collation (1856). 29-30.


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