Shakespeare's Washing Machine

In the olden days, I could be depended upon to launch into a set-speech when someone complained about the harshness of their lives. Even the modern lower-middle class, I would explain, live better lives than the nobility of medieval and early modern times.

Our houses and apartments are much warmer than medieval castles, at any distance from the fireplaces, during the winter. Few buildings had potable water piped in, and, in almost all that did, the pipes were made of lead. There were no flush toilets until that late 18^th century.

Various methods were used to dispose of bodily waste: chamber pots were the indoor option of the householder and tenant. Castle walls were pocked with corbels, open at the bottom, that sent the waste of servants and soldiers either to a ditch that emptied into the nearest water source or simply onto the ground.¹ The nobility deposited in their private stool, built like a over-sized velvet-lined child's training potty, which had a dedicated servant who took the result (“the stool”) away to throw down an available corbel. The same was often the source of the castle's potable water. In London, and other large cities, professional water carriers lugged large jars-full from locations of cleaner water, or from aqueducts, to houses wealthy enough to afford to buy it.

Some castle “jakes” sat above indoor pits that smelled as might be expected. Inside the castle bailey were open-bottomed Port-a-Johns that were used until they filled up and then were covered over with dirt and a new hole dug nearby. Courtiers urinated in the fireplaces in waiting rooms. Litter was thrown everywhere within the walls and collected by garbage wagons every few months. Castle grounds periodically wreaked of garbage and offal. Tenement blocks in populated towns and cities could smell every bit as bad.²

It was one of the many signs of status to be given rooms away from the bailey and the kitchens which tended regularly to catch fire. Lesser beings were not so lucky.

It took until the 19^th century for London and Paris to grow desperate enough to stop the terrifying cycle of dysentery, typhoid, and cholera epidemics, which killed many tens of thousands, for the cities to build modern under-ground sewer systems. At about the same time, surgeons began in the habit of washing their hands before doing surgery. These two advancements have since saved more lives than all the subsequent medical advances until our day.

This subject could (and does) fill enormous libraries. This small sample will have to be sufficient for our present purposes.

One of the most ironic results of this is Shakespeare's washing machine. A considerable majority of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights were born into an England in which the word “Master” was rapidly transforming into “Mister”. Master had been the proper word for centuries with which to address superior officers of guilds, of noble households and other males awarded coats-of-arms for special services to the crown. But England was rapidly becoming a trading empire. Skilled workers of every type were needed in plenty. The respect for their station was growing rapidly. Toward the end of the 16^th century, any respectable head of household, tradesman, merchant, etc., was addressed as “Master”. The title was becoming our modern Mister.

The playwrights of the time were mostly drawn from this new class. And you can see it in their plays. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer's son. This did not prevent him from getting an excellent education in the premiere public school of his day but college proved beyond his family's means.

In Jonson's plays there are house-wives polishing pewter to a fine luster, doing laundry and much more. At the center of his plays, he is portraying the life of the new class to which he belongs. He shows his education, also, by references to, and plays about, classical history.

Another bricklayer's son who had access to a quality education and wrote exceptional plays and prose is Thomas Middleton. Middleton's works are chock full with laundresses, starchwomen, worsted stockings (what we call socks), and six-penny ordinaries (which we might call greasy spoons). His wives wash dishes. Shop keepers are everywhere at their shop doors heard to cry “What d'ye lack?” at passersby and sending their sons to be educated, as he had been, at Cambridge and the Inns of Court.

And what is seen especially in Middleton is servants and tenants shaking their heads at the foolishness of their “betters”. The tables are turned. Sons of gentlemen are all but uniformly ridiculously dressed and unmitigated dolts. Once sons of mercers turn courtiers (and they do in profusion) all hope of a useful life is lost. They will forever be a financial burden.

The likes of Jonson's and Middleton's works will be the model for Bertie and Jeeves stories for hundreds of years to come. At the behest of the likes of Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil, the nobility is being retired to their lands, where their ego and refusal to apply themselves to a practical education will be allowed a steadily shrinking domain. The new government is made up of myopic mercers' and drapers' sons graduating from the Inns of Court.

As amusing as these works may be the details of world they depict are foreign to us. The irony of this is that we feel a much closer relationship to the works of Shakespeare. With the exception of a single play, called The Merry Wives of Windsor, he makes no mention whatsoever of laundry. In none does he mention starchwomen or a character doing his or her best to preserve a farthing candle.

He resembles us. Unlike Middleton, he never mentions suet under the assumption that we will understand how candles were made. When his characters read at night it is by light that he feels no need to explain. Unlike Middleton, the author or his protagonist never complain

How many such black and ghastly seasons have I passed over, accompanied only with a demure watching-candle, that blinked upon Aristotle's works, and gave even sufficient glimmering to read by, but none to spare!³

Surely, Shakespeare feels no need, any more than the modern author to specify that a character is able to read his books because he or she has turned on the electric light. When they attend a masque, in a great hall, no one lights the scores of expensive candles. As in our world, the chandelier is simply there making light. Presumably someone turned on the switch.

His characters travel by horse like we travel by car. The horse stands waiting equipped with saddles, reins and bits, like all our cars stand at every moment awaiting our commands with power windows, cruise control and zero-to-sixty in impressive numbers of seconds that we do not need to mention. The details are unspoken, assumed. His silence on the matter, like the modern author's, makes clear that, upon their return home, they park their horse in the garage, just like we don't think to mention, hop off, and go straight into their abodes, filled with amenities unnecessary to mention, to see if there is any leftover pizza in the refrigerator.

What we likely do not notice is that Windsor is the town that serves the Queen's primary palace. It is a place that the noble and the wealthy and hangers-on walk into as they pass out of the back gate of the palace.⁴ The laundresses can be seen washing the laundry in Datchet Mead not far from the gate. At the distance, their own servants can hardly be made out from those of Mistress (Mrs.) Ford or Mistress Page. Their clothing simply appears at their privy chambers clean and fresh, at appropriate times, and together with servants to common to mention to help put it on them.

The overflow of the palace servants and guests take rooms at the inns and houses, drink at the taverns. Those who reside inside go out to get a change of air. Perhaps, a pottle of ale. The residents of the town grow wealthy with the business of the wealthy. Their wives have servants that can be seen carrying the buck-baskets filled with dirty laundry as one goes in and out of the gate.

Yet, only minor characters, meant to provide comic relief, or servants, seem ever to sport soiled or tattered clothing, or have to wait wrapped in a sheet until their only shirt comes back from the laundry, etc., in the plays of Shakespeare. In fact, there are no laundresses in his world. There is no laundry. The characters of the classes from which Shakespeare draws his plots don't even seem to express particular concern about such matters except in one instance. The theme of “exile” has long been noticed to be persistent in the works of Shakespeare and there he and his characters wear motley, in comedies, in tragedies rags.

Add to all of this, the fact that nearly all modern readers read the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare (if they read them at all) in modernized versions. The spelling is standardized, at times the grammar, and words or phrases are even sometimes replaced by modern equivalents. Still more, plays like Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus are almost never revived in print, on stage or on film. Some scholars are adamant that they could not possibly have been written by Shakespeare — at worst the offensive portions, they assert, were co-written by others and only less objectionable parts by the Bard.

It is no surprise, then, that Shakespeare is perceived to be like us; the world he depicts familiar. Neither is it a surprise that it is the more democratic direction of the late Elizabethan period that seems foreign — even off-putting. The details around washing cloths or dishes rarely enter into our literature because the washing machine, the dishwasher and drier are assumed thus a part of every story without being mentioned. Clean clothing comes from back stage... in both the 21^st century and in the plays of Shakespeare. We read Shakespeare as if he had a washing machine.

1See my “A Brief History of the Castle Jakes.” Virtual Grub Street, July 7, 2019. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-brief-history-of-castle-jakes.html

2See my “Livin’ Real at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth.” Medieval and Tudor Topics, June 4, 2022. https://vgs-pbr-reviews.blogspot.com/2022/06/livin-real-at-windsor-castle-with-queen.html

3Father Hubburd's Tales. The Works of Thomas Middleton, V.598 (1840). [Dyce ed.]

4See my “Mr. Billington's Bluster: the Uncommon-ness of The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Virtual Grub Street, May 27, 2024. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2024/05/mr-billingtons-bluster-uncommon-ness-of_27.html

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

No, Shakespeare Was Not a Member of the Mermaid Club.

Having read yet again that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson famously traded witticisms at the Mermaid Tavern, on Bread Street, I am no longer able to put off addressing the myth as being too minor to give precious time. It so happens that Thomas Coriate [Coryate] sent a letter, in late 1615,

TO THE HIGH

Seneschall of the right

W'orshipfull Fraternitie of Sireniacal

Gentlemen, that meet the first Fridaie of every Moneth,

at the signe of the Mere-

Maide in Bread- streete in London,

from Asmere [Ajmer], India, the which was later printed in his THOMAS CORIATE Traueller for the English Wits: Greeting (1616).¹ The intrepid Coriate, unfortunately died in 1617.

The cover design of his book features him riding an elephant. The publisher of travels tales, Samuel Purchas, collected his letters to the various members of the Fraternitie and published them in his enormously popular Purchas' Pilgrims series.

In one letter to Laurence Whitaker, the aforesaid Seneschall of the Sireniacals, he writes

I have rid upon an Elephant since I came to this Court, determining one day (by Gods leave ) to have my Picture expressed in my next Booke , sitting upon an Elephant. The King keepeth a thousund Women for his owne body, whereof the chiefest (which is his Queene ) tis called Normal.²

Presumably, the thousand women was beyond any engraver's skill. As we can see, the elephant made the... ahem... cut.

The Sireniacal Gentlemen refers to the supper club that met at the Mermaid Tavern, on Bread Street, in London. Coryate made a point of addressing each of the members of the club individually by name.

There is no other such roster extant.

Some 50 years later, Thomas Fuller reported an oral history asserting that Shakespeare was a member and the club was delighted to witness epic wit-combats, on club nights, between he and Johnson.³

Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like

a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake- spear with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in failing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.

Fuller was cousin to the tireless self-promoter, William Davenant, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Shakespeare and was a source of other Shakespeare myths. It is more than a little likely that he got his information from Davenant or their still more imaginative friend John Aubrey. Regardless, there is not a stitch of evidence to support his story.

Still, the picture is an attractive one. So attractive that it has since been entered the scholarly record as fact. Such has been common practice in filling the entirely un-literary documented biography of the man from Stratford.

That said, it must be admitted that there is evidence of a possible connection between Shakspere of Stratford and the Mermaid Tavern. The owner of the property upon which the Mermaid stood, one William Johnson, is listed as a partner in Shakspere's purchase of the Blackfriars Gate House on March 10, 1613 [O.S.].

Furthermore, the author Hugh Holland, a member of the Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen, according to Coryat, provided a dedicatory poem to the Shakespeare First Folio. It gives no sign of the author having been a personal friend. Both congratulatory poems for the folio, other than Holland's, were provided by equally minor writers previously published by Edward Blount partner in the Folio project — not at all members of the Mermaid club.

For his part, Holland had had multiple close connections to Ben Jonson, editor-in-chief of the Folio. The two had been students together in the famous Westminster school of William Camden. Jonson had contributed a long allegorical ode to Holland's book-length poem Pancharis. Holland donated a congratulatory poem to Jonson's play Sejanus.

Jonson wrote poems to, or featuring, members of the Fraternitie: Hugh Holland; John Donne; Robert Cotton; Christopher Brooke; John Selden; John Hoskyns; Inigo Jones; and a prose dedication to Richard Martin. He wrote more than one poem to Francis Beaumont who does not appear on Coryat's list and who Coryat may not have met due to his extended absences for travel.

But Jonson never wrote the name Shakespeare in public print until the First Folio. He owed a great deal to his patron, William Herbert, Lord Chamberlain to the King, to whom the Folio was dedicated, together with his brother, son-in-law to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Surely, his poem "To the memory of my beloved, the AUTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: And what he hath left us." paid the Lord Chamberlain back in particularly gratifying fashion.

After that poem, there is no record that Jonson ever mentioned Shakespeare by name again. To the best of our knowledge, he never mentioned Shakespeare again in private or public.

The name Shakespeare never appeared, before or after the Folio, on any commendatory poem overtly congratulating any living writer of his day. Poems of that genre did appear in association with the initials E.O. and the monikers Si fortunatus infoelix and Ignoto.

Beaumont wrote verse letters to Ben one of which makes reference to the Mermaid. Another does not, but does mention Shakespeare in a most intriguing way. I look forward to writing about those letters in the days ahead.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

1Coriat, Thomas. THOMAS CORIATE Traueller for the English Wits: Greeting (1616). 37ff.

2Purchas, Samuel. Purchas, his Pilgrimes (1625). I.594. Date only 1615.

3Fuller, Thomas. The History of the Worthies of England (1662). “The Worthies of England,” 126.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

A Review of Malachi Bogdanov's Production of Machiavelli's The Mandrake Root.

[New post] Few people have watched a 16^th century play by anyone other than William Shakespeare and maybe Christopher Marlowe. Late 15^th century Ferrara, Italy, introduced the Renaissance that gave the West the early modern theater. Particularly Ludovico Ariosto whose loose translations from the Latin playwright Plautus were the model for Shakespeare's early comedies — especially the Comedy of Errors.

The mid and late century passed the baton to the English. Thus Shakespeare's plays are filled with the influences of the Italian playwrights as well as those English playwrights who shared his era.

Of course, Italy was leading the rest of Europe in much more than the progress of popular theater. Nicholo Machiavelli was in the middle of it. By no means foremost a playwright, he was secretary to the governing Signoria, worked on engineering projects with Leonardo da Vinci, and, upon a change of government, was imprisoned and tortured.

Upon his release from prison, Machiavelli laid low. He had a modest house in Sant'Andrea, just outside of Florence. No longer tasked with reams of paperwork and travels to foreign courts, his life began to revolve around his writing room. During the years ahead he would write his most famous work, The Prince, and other minor masterpieces of western literature such as The History of Florence, The Art of War and La Mandragola (the Mandrake Root).

Like Edward de Vere, his fall from power would leave him with a great deal of time on his hands. Like Vere, he chose to fill the hours with his favorite pastime: writing.

But unlike Shakespeare, Machiavelli wrote only a handful of plays and still fewer poems. While one of those plays greatly influenced the Elizabethan playwrights, future eras had other interests. While England was in the process of becoming the world's greatest maritime empire, Italy was in the midst of decline. England's successor, the United States, was flush with vast wealth to invest in a spectacular movie industry that would bring Shakespeare to new generations of viewers. Italy had little wealth to spend in such a way.

Italian cinema did manage to produce a 1966 version of La Mandragola, in Italian, however, which would seem to be the best in any language to date taking into account that it greatly expands the play to tease the male viewers again and again with statuesque not quite nude young women. Not a classic but certainly a high-end bit of work that disclaimer aside. The characters are much more animated than other productions, the pace much faster and the dialogue crisper.

The only English language movie version (as opposed to filmed stage-play) happens to be Malachi Bogdanov's first full-length movie, released in 2008. While a low-budget affair it is entertaining enough and the only chance the English-language viewer is likely to have to get a feeling of what the 16^th century Italian theater was like.

Callimaco (Jason Nicoli) has returned from living in Paris, France, for ten years, in order to get away from the Italian Wars, which plagued central and northern Italy from roughly 1494 until decades after La Mandragola was first staged in 1518. Having heard, during a tavern conversation, in the French city, that the most beautiful woman in the world lives in Sassari, Sardinia, he is irresistibly drawn to see her.

Sassari is presumably chosen instead of Machiavelli's original, Florence, in order to identify the location in which the film is actually shot, and to explain why it is a village rather than a city. It is suitably quaint, and, more importantly, feasible on a low budget.

The young woman's name is Lucrezia (Chara Jackson). Her husband, Nicia (Geoffrey Bateman), a middle-aged lawyer, is impossibly gullible, to the point that he is constantly described by all as being “stupid”. He is also desperate to have a son after six childless years.

Callimaco's servant Siro (Craig Painting) provides a goofy confidant for his private thoughts. His friend Ligurio, who has given up working for a living, in favor of mooching, provides more of the same, and, additionally, volunteers to arrange for him to be intimate with Lucrezia.

The first of Ligurio's plans is abandoned. The second is for Callimaco to pretend to be a doctor specializing in infertility cures. Ligurio praises him to Nicia. The two concoct a guaranteed fertility potion from the Mandrake root (La Mandragora). Nicia is eager to give it to his wife. So eager that, even when he is informed that a powerful poison inherent in the potion will certainly kill the first man to have sex with her, after she has taken it, he agrees to find someone else to lay with her before he does.

Lucrezia, it turns out, is genuinely pious, and resists the idea of adultery. The ruse requires both the village priest (Jonathan Owen) and Lucrezia's mother (Den Woods) to be recruited to the cause. Their task will be to convince her that this particular adultery is a godly act. Callimaco and Ligurio must figure out a way to make Callimaco her first post-potion lover without detection by Nicia.

It can be quite shocking, at first, to learn how freely Italian plays of the time portray priests as venal hypocrites. Father Timoteo appreciates that value of ducats and would be quite happy to do almost anything in order to receive them. It is implied that he indulges in all of life's pleasures as occasion permits.

This and similar plays were regularly presented before the Pope himself, and members of the Consistory, at a time when Rome was under fire for its corruption. Martin Luther had posted his 95 Theses only the year before Machiavelli is believed to have written La Mandragola. Entire swathes of the faithful would soon be abandoning the communion for Protestantism.

But then, the gravity of the situation could not yet have been understood. Both Pope and council were highly cosmopolitan. They were still able to laugh at themselves, still able to enjoy fine meals and nights out at the theater. Even in his tenuous political situation, Machiavelli did not fear to write as he did and to bring it on the very public stage.

Students of the theater of the period will perhaps be disappointed that the canzone (songs) after each act of the original play are left off in this production. A general audience is likely rather to be pleased to forego this touch outdated now by some 500 years.

A YouTube portal to Bogdanov's production can be found at the end of this review.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

Toward a Genuine Chronology of the Works of Shakespeare.

If one takes the Revels account entry for “Newyeres daie at night” 1576 [O.S.], “a play The historie of Error,” as the first performance of the play that would become Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors¹, one may have identified the second play by Shakespeare for which we have a record. As much of the text that has come down to us is embedded in the much later version of the play. The signs are clear that the version that has survived was expanded from at least one earlier version when plays were considerably shorter, written more in irregular couplets. As it is, the version we have is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays.

The text we have received may be the one acted at Gray's Inn, on an infamous occasion, in 1594², or there may have been another still later revision. This would then become yet another play, according to orthodoxy, written well before the Stratford man could have written a play — he would have been no more than 12 years old — and longer still before he could have had it performed before the Royal Court. From time to time, orthodox scholars have suggested that it had to have been written by another far less capable playwright and rewritten by Shakespeare.

That another listing on Twelfth Night of 1583 [O.S.] was entered by a busy Revels accountant as “a play A historie of fferrar,” suggests that the first performance must have been well enough received that it was revived. That the second performance was by “Seruauntes of the Lorde Chamberlayne,” then Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex, means that it was chosen for performance by the acting company of a staunch ally of Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford.³ Nearly 26 years of age, at the time of the first performance, he was old enough to have written it. Surely, Vere was writing comedies, in particular, at least by this time, in order that George Puttenham would write, in 1589, that among the noblemen writing for Queen Elizabeth's Royal Court, the Earl of Oxford deserved the highest praise for interlude and comedy.⁴

The much earlier date of the Comedy of Errors forces a much different chronological ordering of Shakespeare's works from at least 1576 to the year of Edward de Vere's death, in 1604. The playwright's inexplicable preference, by orthodox reckoning, for taking earlier plays by inferior craftsman and rewriting portions to make them his own, adopted expressly to suit authorship by the Stratford man, then becomes Edward de Vere writing plays for the Royal Court during the 1570s and 80s and revising them to suit the early public stage and yet again as the craft of play-writing rapidly progressed from the mid-1580s to the end of the century.

The Comedy of Errors, then, shows the vestiges not of an earlier less talented playwright but of a less mature Shakespeare progressing through his own personal literary maturity together with a series of rapid historical improvements to the craft of play-writing. In its time it was admired as among the best comedies on the stage.

The incongruities in the play Much Ado About Nothing are left over not from an earlier less talented playwright but from the original 1580s Shakespeare version, the text of which seems to have disappeared, called Love's Labours Won. The popular 1579 play The Jew, mentioned by Stephen Gosson⁵, was Shakespeare's first version of The Merchant of Venice. Edward de Vere's 1584 play, Ulysses and Agamemnon was expanded, in the late 1590s into Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.⁶ The Hamlet mentioned by Thomas Nashe, in 1589⁷, and off-hand by others, is the less mature earlier version obsessively rewritten for over a decade until it arrived at Shakespeare's masterpiece. When a Stratfordian troll demands to see an actual play by Edward de Vere, there are a handful of them right there. The earlier playwright is Edward de Vere: the earlier Shakespeare.

Not that Shakespeare never adapted another playwright's play. Traditional scholarship is quite right to assign the first version of King John to George Peele with some modifications by Shakespeare. Less confident about the first Taming of a/the Shrew, still it is periodically and correctly assigned to Peele as well. The first King Leir was likely written by William Stanley none of whose plays are thought to have survived — except in the minds of those who consider him that man behind the pen-name Shakespeare.

What is the first extant play by Shakespeare, you may ask. That must await a better time.

1The base pattern here was first noted by Eva Turner Clark in her Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays (1931).

2Gesta Grayorum; or, The History of The Prince of Purpoole. Anno Domini , 1594. (1688). 22. “after such Sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the Players. So that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Consusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.”

3 An history of the creweltie of A Stepmother, suspected by some to be an early version of Shakespeare's Cymbelline, was also acted by the Lord Chamberlaynes players on December 28, 1578. The bond between Vere and Sussex was formed when Vere served under the older man in the Scottish campaign of 1570.

4Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie 1589 (Arber ed., 1869). 77. “That for Tragedie, the Lord of Buckhurst, and Maister Edward Ferrys for such doings as I have sene of theirs do deserue the hyest price: Th'Earle of Oxford and Maister Edwardes of her Maiesties Chappell for Comedy and Enterlude.”

5Gosson, Stephan. The Schoole of Abuse (1579). The Shakespeare Society (1841). 30. “The Jew, and Ptolome, showne at the Bull; the one representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of usurers;...”

6See my Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare).) https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Agamemnon-Edward-William-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B07JD7KM1T/

7Greene, Robert. Menaphon: Camillas alarm to slumbering Euphues (1589) . “Thomas Nashe, To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities”. 'yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as “Bloud is a begger,” and so foorth: and, if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches.”'

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

Re-purposing Stratford-upon-Avon: A Modest Proposal.

The First Folio has long been the center-piece of traditional assignment of the works of Shakespeare to William Shakspere of Stratford upon Avon. Since the letters in its front matter, attributed to John Heminge and Henry Condell, began to be exposed as having actually been written by Ben Jonson¹, however, questions have arisen.

the dedication to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery and the address to The Great Variety of Readers are both signed by Heminge and Condell but a number of scholars have doubted their authorship, adducing the quality of writing as evidence that they were composed by others involved in the compilation of the volume.... W.W. Greg, for example, remarks that 'one thing is certain: whoever wrote the address - and we may fairly assume that the epistle came from the same pen - if it was not Jonson himself, was a close student of his works'... The address to The Great Variety of Readers is racy and informal, strongly reminiscent of the prefatory material to [Jonson's] Bartholomew Fair, and the formidable array of parallels that Greg assembles in support of his case for Jonson make it very hard to resist the conclusion that he was indeed the author.²

The questions raised in this representative quote are two fold. 1) Why did the editors demonstrably create a myth that, once discovered, throws a great deal about the Folio into question? 2) William and Philip Herbert, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery³ being related, through the marriage of the latter to the daughter of Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, and Ben Jonson being a much indebted beneficiary of Pembroke, why does Vere's name quietly hover around the project?

The discovery, more recently, that an earlier collected plays of William Shakespeare, by the publisher Thomas Pavier, had been brought to a halt by an order of the Earl of Pembroke, in 1621⁴, greatly adds to the impression that the Herbert brothers took an active interest in the plays of Shakespeare. Especially considering the fact that the project of the First Folio began in their names immediately after the order.

There is not remotely enough room available here to give all of the other close connections between Edward de Vere and the works of Shakespeare. The evidence is actually quite overwhelming. On the other side of the argument are largely ridicule, exclusion, accusations of elitism, pop psychology diagnoses. The quality of almost entirely amateur Oxfordian scholarship being uneven, these tactics succeed by separating out the weaker arguments to target and declaring that their failure represents Oxfordianism as a whole.

Ironically, the authorship debate is so sexy nonetheless that Vere advocates draw much more attention, among the general public, than Stratfordian apologists. So much so that academia has greatly reduced its scholarly standards, in a panic, in order to constantly supply competing sensational headlines to the Internet. Forged and other highly questionable texts and artifacts, rejected by traditional scholars for centuries, are suddenly being “reassessed” and accepted as legitimate.

Almost anything that might push back against alternative authorship, it seems, now passes peer review. The once vaunted gold standard more and more often results in fool's gold. These peer reviewed findings in favor of Stratford are trumpeted as incontestable fact solely by virtue of the fact that they have passed review by peers absolutely dedicated to the Stratford myth. 

The Internet tabloids are provided a steady stream of sexy headlines now based upon peer reviewed findings. As a result, the scholarly record is more and more shot-through with historical fiction: “Shakespeare manuscripts” that aren't by Shakespeare but rather by the infamous forger John Payne Collier; witness accounts of the Stratford monument assigned dates in which the purported witness was scores of miles away; Shakespeare plays assigned dates after Edward de Vere had died by whatever measures come to hand; much more.

I submit that this corruption of scholarly method can only spread to other aspects of the Humanities — in fact, already has even into scientific disciplines — turning huge swathes of the field into historical fiction forwarding one or another partisan belief. It is naive to believe that this can remain limited to Shakespeare scholarship.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that the tourist reconstruction of Stratford-upon-Avon — material and documentary — be revised to strictly reflect the actual history of the time and place and persons as it existed circa 1560-1630. This as a beginning to recover scholarly rigor. The model for this reconstruction might be the American attraction Old Sturbridge Village.

Gross misrepresentations of the Stratford town school, for just one glaring example, as offering an education in classical literature on a par with modern universities, would be replaced by a one room school house. Consistent with historical fact, there will be no desks (much less a “precise location of Shakespeare's desk” as featured in a popular brochure by Sidney Lee), but, rather, benches along the walls, and very few books.

A single teacher will dictate a short text taken from an author in his small personal library to an all-male student body to be copied into whatever version of a notebook each might have managed to assemble for the text to be parsed and translated. Should the school receive a bequest of books they too will be available to dictate passages for the class to copy.

If the students will possess common class texts at all they will be horn-books or a pamphlet-length abecedarium and catechism. In upper grades some of the boys from wealthier families might possess their own copy of Lily's Latin Grammar — likely as not a hand-me-down.

In short, Stratford must be given a school appropriate to a tiny inconsequential town and consistent with the records of Stratford as they have come down to us. A town which periodically had to threaten citizens who let their dog or pigs run free and who threw their offal in the street with fines. A town which only ordered the last of the thatched roofs of its houses be removed as fire hazards in 1623.

Sidney Lee's assertion that “The wage [of a Stratford headmaster] was larger than that paid to the headmaster of Eton in those days,”⁵ was blatantly disingenuous. The historically correct headmaster must properly be selected from the less respected in the profession willing to accept a smaller salary out of which he must also pay the salary of an usher/beadle, and pay for labor and materials as required for the upkeep of the classroom and the rooms in which he will live, firewood to heat the same and to cook, etc.⁶

Unlike the headmasters of Eton, he will have no well-appointed rooms in addition to his salary; nor will he receive his meals for free from the dining hall or delivered to his rooms as he wishes.

This Stratford school likely served dozens of children at any one time. One among them may have been William Shakspere, son of John, a glover, who, like others, intent to achieve comparative wealth and status, ran illicit side-businesses off-the-books — in his case, dealing in wool and grain. The status gained from his growing wealth allowed him to serve at various times as Mayor, Alderman and Justice-of-the-Peace for the town and to send his sons to the village school if he so chose.

Not everything written about Stratford is such blatant myth as stories of the school and its curriculum. Nevertheless, as a “living history museum,” rather than a theme park, there should be more time and need to present authentic Tudor village life filled with hardy, hard working folk of simple appetite. Those who were able to attend school might even have retained a smattering of Latin.

While modern visitors could not be expected to bear the constant stench of offal from the shambles and of run-off from the tannery, in the areas designated Middle Row, the Bridge Streets and the Water Way, a brief presentation on the odors of the time could serve. The single color white for the facades of homes and shops (both often occupying the same building or yard — then referred to as a “tenement”) could cue yet another presentation on what passed for paint at the time: “Pieces of sheep skin boiled down to make size, which was mixed with lime”.⁷

Many such genuine facts as these, described by employees in period dress, in rooms with period furniture built with period tools, would surely provide a memorable day for the whole family. And a genuinely educational one.

It is quite appropriate to take advantage of the fortuitous amount of research done into the citizen, William Shakspere, and his proto-Capitalist family, to help tell the story of the town and its residents — a town representative of its kind. As William and his brothers grew up they expanded the family businesses to London with considerable success and William used his share of the profits to invest in real-estate and theater shares. He may also have acted in the occasional play when his company found itself short-handled — or just for fun. But as a share-holder his role was to share in managing accounts, and upkeep of the theater and the company's chattel property.

The intent of this living history museum being to be as precisely historical as possible, it is appropriate to mention, that in 1623, seven years after the Stratford man's death, the collected works of William Shake-speare was published. A dedicatory poem in the front matter mentions a “Stratford monument”. It was the first time that anything out of the ordinary for a hustler from Stratford-upon-Avon was attributed to him. A plaque, first attested in 1634, is mounted below that tacky graveside monument, declaring in high Latin and period English that he had been a great writer. On the lid of the grave below the monument was inscribed the Stratford man's own personal choice for epitaph:

GOOD FREND FOR IESVS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.

BLESTE BE Ye MAN Yt SPARES THES STONES,

AND CVRST BE He Yt MOVES MY BONES.

There is no sign that any of the residents of Stratford so much as suspected that he was a playwright at all, much less one of the most famous. Nor did William Camden, contemporary historian of the reign of Elizabeth I, who recorded a list of notable citizens of Stratford that did not include a William Shakespeare.⁸

As was also common in such rural towns, Stratford was filled with citizens eager for entertaining ways to fill their days (there being few books in the town and no such thing as a public library) and to make a buck. Soon after the town was reputed to have been the home of the famous playwright Shakespeare, and tourists and historians began to arrive, all suddenly remembered that they had known it all along. The taverns were full of tales of the playwright during his youth, at the mere price of a tankard of ale. In time, the town would grow prosperous on stories and the sale of endless quantities of relics touched by the playwright during his life.

1At least as early as C. M. Ingleby's Shakespeare's Centurie of Praise (1879). 143-6.

2Scragg, Leah. "Edward Blount and the Prefatory Material to the First Folio of Shakespeare". Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (1997). V. 79, No. 1, 117–126.

3William Herbert, the 3^rd Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Herbert, the 1^st Earl of Montgomery, were brothers. Pembroke issued the order in his capacity as the Lord Chamberlain to King James I.

4Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017). i-v. https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Vere-was-Shake-speare-proof/dp/1543136257/

5Lee, Sidney. The Grammar School Of King Edward The Sixth (SHAKESPEARE'S School) In Stratford-Upon-Avon (1919). 9.

6Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere's Small Latine Lesse Greeke (1944). I.465. Citing Minutes and Accounts of The Corporation of Stratford-Upon-Avon and Other Records 1553-1620. I.35-6.

7Minutes and Accounts of The Corporation of Stratford-Upon-Avon and Other Records 1553-1620. III.46n.

8Jimenez, Ramon. “Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing: Shakespeare in Stratford and London” Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, September 8, 2011. https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/ten-eyewitnesses/

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

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