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.

• 

Why and When Did the Playwright George Chapman Give Off Cursing?

The Life and Death of the merry Devill
of Edmonton (1631).

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. "Why and When Did the Playwright George Chapman Give Off Cursing?"' Virtual Grub Street, June 1, 2026.  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2026/06/why-and-when-did-playwright-george.html [state date accessed].

In our previous post we established that Tudors and Jacobins were given to oaths featuring the body and/or body parts of God, a habit reflected in some playwrights, among them George Chapman, and that far-and-away Chapman's favorite such oath was 'Sfoot (God's foot). But, strangely, such oaths suddenly disappeared from his plays.

Not before Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston were imprisoned for their 1605 satire Eastward Hoe. Not for oaths on body parts but for sniping at King James I for selling knighthoods to his Scottish favorites. This and other unflattering observations were played at Court. Jonson and Chapman were imprisoned. According to William Drummond's Certain Informations and maners of Ben Johnsons to W. Drumond (a.k.a. Conversations with Drummond), “the report was that they should then had their ears cutt [slit] & noses.” On top of imprisonment for an unspecified time, Chapman would be left with scars of shame the rest of his life.

Chapman was saved by the intercession of the Earl of Suffolk (Jonson, by his patron the Earl of Pembroke) but the experience must have been traumatic.

On January 1st (N.S.) of the next year “3 James 1 c.21: An Act to restrain the Abuses of Players” passed Parliament. As of the close of session, on May 27th, it would be illegal for players to “ jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost, or of the Trinity, which are not to be spoken but with fear and Reverence”¹. Chapman would not write another comedy of which we are aware for the rest of his days.

He had had great success, in 1603, with his play The Tragedy of Bussy Ambois and stayed with that genre, vis-a-vis the stage, and with Court masques. Perhaps his in-progress translations of the Homer's Iliad and Odyssey left him no time to do more. As for the tragedies, two instances of 'sfoot and one of 'slight appear in the published texts as they have come down to us. Apparently, they escaped notice in the performances. The Act did not prohibit such oaths in print, but, forbidden in the plays as acted, they were bound to disappear in both.

So then, 'sfoot tells us one more key bit of information. Chapman's The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608) and Thomas of Woodstock had to have been acted before May of 1606. The Merry Devil making considerable reference to the full script which first appeared in print as the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor², it was likely composed between the conjectured first performance of that play, in 1597, and 1606. Queen Elizabeth's ferocious anger at writing and acting plays about Richard II suggest that Woodstock was likely written between her death, in March of 1603, and May of 1606.³

As for Chapman's glaring authorship tell, after 1606 it is no longer available to inform the harried scholar. Other less immediately identifiable signs can still make a case for Chapman authorship. He was also in the habit of interpolating the word “come” to give his prosody a change up: “Come, come...” “Come then...” “Come, madam,...” “Come, sir...” “Come on, brave friend...” “Come, y'are a glorious ruffian...” etc. Common though the word is, in Chapman's plays it is noticeably moreso due to this prosodic ploy.

To a lesser extent, Chapman's use of let and let's is somewhat idiomatic at times. His habit, half the time, of contracting the phrase “Let's go,” leaving the verb implied, is not entirely common: “Come, let's away...” “Let's this way...” “Let's in and eat...” etc. His frequent imitation of Shakespeare's plays, of course, is another trait, however much he is by no means alone in it. In identifying him as author of an individual play these can only serve to add to the cumulative evidence.

In discerning a Chapman play from a Shakespeare play, in particular, there is generally a point of comparison that is unmistakable. As Shakespeare matured, he practiced numerous styles. Earliest he wrote in the style of the 1570s: irregular couplets, fourteeners, poulter's measure, etc. Next he wrote in the style of the early 1580s (largely prose), mid-1580s (crude blank verse), late-1580s (crude blank verse with many passages of iambic pentameter couplets). By the early 1590s, he began to display the mature Shakespearean style: upper class characters speak blank verse and rhymed poetry occasionally in instances of heightened emotion, lower class speak prose.

George Chapman's plays consistently show a similar pattern to the post-1590 Shakespeare, on one hand, and quite a different on the other. In his plays he also alternates between blank verse and prose. But when he is composing in blank verse all characters, high and low, speak in blank verse as the rule. When in prose, all characters speak prose. The impression is that he writes blank verse until it threatens to betray itself as verse (as contrived) and then switches into prose. Once he clears the audience's palate, as it were, he returns to blank verse.

All of these characteristics of Chapman are present throughout Thomas of Woodstock and The Merry Devil of Edmonton. In the former, for example, Richard's manipulative favorites, Bushie, Greene and Bishop Tresillian go back and forth, throughout the play, from blank verse to prose. In Act 3, Scene 2, Woodstock exchanges blank verse between himself and fellow noblemen, for the first half, prose between he, a servant and a courtier for a quarter and blank verse between he and the courtier alone to the end. In The Merry Devil, master and servant go blank verse and prose respectively, ala Shakespeare, then master prose then blank verse then prose. Sir Andrew starts the play prose, prose, prose, blank verse until the fifth act when he flips back and forth between the two again. The same pattern with the words lets and come prevails.

1The Statutes Project. “1605 [O.S.]: 3 James 1 c.21: Restraining abuses by Players.” Also, Statutes at Large, Volume 3 (1763). 61-2.

2See my Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff (2017) for more information on the relationship between these plays. https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Veres-Retainer-Thomas-Churchyard-ebook/dp/B077LVLXY2/

3The first published edition of Shakespeare's Richard II being in 1597, that, too, might suggest the early date.

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.

• 

The Playwright Who Wrote "Thomas of Woodstock or Richard II, Part 1."

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. 'The Playwright Who Wrote "Thomas of Woodstock or Richard II, Part 1."' Virtual Grub Street, May 26, 2026.  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-playwright-who-wrote-thomas-of.html [state date accessed].

First we should say that neither Thomas of Woodstock nor Richard II, Part 1 is the original name of the play. The single surviving copy is a manuscript bound together with British Library manuscripts catalogued as “Egerton 1994”. The title page and last page of the manuscript are missing. No entry in any document has yet provided a title or an author. The working title which has been adopted is entirely apt.

The manuscript seems for various reasons to be the work of a scribe. Minor additions and changes have been been made in differing hands and inks. I will be referring here to the transcription in the Keller edition of the play in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch of 1899¹

Since the discovery of the manuscript, there has been an ongoing debate as to the author and the date of composition. MacDonald P. Jackson has done computer analysis which he asserts shows Samuel Rowley to be the author.² Michael Egan (a fellow Oxfordian) had already staked a claim to Shakespeare himself as author.

Egan published an insightful reply — “Did Samuel Rowley Write Thomas Of Woodstock?” — detailing the weaknesses of Jackson's method. Those who have read my various essays on computer analyses know that I find most fail due to the researchers' complete lack of background in Elizabethan and Jacobin literature and theater. Jackson's would appear to be no exception.

On the other hand, traditional scholars share a weakness that is all to the point here. Almost everyone in the field has studied Shakespeare's vocabulary, grammar, style, etc., to the nth degree, but have given no similar attention to the other playwrights of the time. Every play suspected to be by or influenced by Shakespeare tests out as more or less “a play by Shakespeare”. If it compares to a lesser degree it becomes an “early play,” a play transcribed by a publisher's agent in the crowd during a performance, or an old play by an anonymous author that Shakespeare rewrote until it was “Shakespearean,” etc.

Every other play is just an Elizabethan/Jacobin play with generic Elizabethan/Jacobin traits. The reading list being overwhelming, and the headline value of any other candidate so low, the effort is foregone altogether. There is only Shakespeare or not-Shakespeare. Other attributions are carried over from the 19^th and early 20^th century findings or remain unsettled.

In the play Thomas of Woodstock, there are clear moments of imitation of scenes from plays by Shakespeare. Egan has properly noted them. And he is entirely correct to point out that Rowley did not have sufficient talent to write the masterly Thomas of Woodstock.

Jackson's Elizabethan/Jacobin computer database has properly noted similarities between what is quantifiable in the style of Woodstock and Rowley's When you see me, You know me. But neither he nor his computer can “see” differences of talent. Computers are entirely dependent upon being able to translate quality (analogue, in this instance talent) into quantity (digital, in this instance a mathematical equation). The “wonder” of computer analysis is supposed to be that context doesn't matter. Math is math.

On the other hand, humans are notoriously poor at assigning subjective qualities such as talent. They must spend many years trying on pair after pair of scholarly spectacles in order to find a pair that more or less brings those qualities into focus. The adjustment for bias or self-interest is particularly difficult.

What both scholars and computers have been blind to now for well above 100 years are the facts that: 1) authors often have tells that uniquely identify them, and 2) Elizabethans took God's name in vain a lot: cursed a lot. We don't even think of their curses as being offensive any longer. They have become quaint.

Ods bodkins, for example: we no longer know that it is the common contraction of “god's body-kins” i.e. “[Upon] god's little body”. Kin being a diminutive suffix it means not only “little” but “reduced, broken”. The phrase is an oath upon the crucified body of Christ. Zounds (Ods 'ounds, 'Sounds), is an oath upon Christ's wounds. 'Sblud is an oath upon the blood of Christ. When Robin exclaimed to Batman on the old television series, “Gadzooks Batman!,” he was unknowingly swearing an oath on God's hooks, the Tudor word for finger/toe nails.³

As it happens, characters in Thomas of Woodstock swear oaths a lot. More than in the plays of any other playwright of quality of the times. All of the plays of the author of Woodstock have the same characteristic until a textually shocking moment when the trait utterly disappears from all of his future plays. Together with a number of other characteristics, unique but not quite as unique, they identify him as the author of the anonymous play The Merry Devil of Edmonton, with its many close references to Shakespeare's Falstaff plays, (in particular, The Merry Wives of Windsor) which I have presented in my Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff .⁴

The tell is not simply that his characters swear oaths a lot but that one oath is this author's favorite to the point that it is sworn more than all of the others combined: 'Sfoot (“[upon] god's foot”)⁵. Here, in Woodstock, the scribe writes it “foote”.

Foote our deuisses heere are licke iewells kept in casketts... Foote, 'tis my lord, the duke!... Foot, vrge our suite agayne , he will forgitt it else !... Foote, what neede you care what the world talkes ? You still retayne the name of kinge,...⁶

George Chapman clearly thought this oath was particularly amusing. It is everywhere throughout his comedies until it suddenly disappears. When a reader finds this oath everywhere in an Elizabethan/Jacobin comedy it should immediately invoke the name “George Chapman” — a playwright almost as talented many times as Shakespeare.

Next: Why and When Did the Playwright George Chapman Give Off Cursing?

1Keller, Wolfgang. Richard II . Erster Teil. Ein Drama aus Shakespeares Zeit (1899). Jahrbuch Der Deutschen Shakespeare- Gesellschaft, XXXIV. 3-121.

2Macdonald P. Jackson, "Shakespeare's Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock", Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England14 (2001) 17–65.

3Thus the saying: “Don't let her get her hooks into you!”

4See my Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff (2017) for more on Churchyard and The Merry Devil. https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Veres-Retainer-Thomas-Churchyard-ebook/dp/B077LVLXY2/

5Rowley's play does use “'Sfoot” twice among general cursing. It also includes partial matches with other of Chapman's characteristic traits.

6Keller, Richard II. III.i.77-8, III.ii.166, IV.i.117, IV.i.136-7.

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.

• 

Shakespeare and MAGA: Oh, the Ironies of It All.

Having spent a goodly number of years researching the works and identity of Shakespeare, I have found the evidence overwhelming that Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works that go under that name. Since the advent of the Internet allowed me access to tens of thousands of works and other documents from Tudor and Jacobin times, and to digital publishing platforms, I have published (to date) 10 monographs/books and above 100 articles on the aforesaid works and identity. Two more are in-progress and the notes for more still are piling up.

What first attracted my attention to the identity question — the Authorship Question — , now many years ago, was the fact that the works were written resoundingly from the perspective of a member of the English upper classes – likely a member of the nobility but definitely of the upper classes. I have pressed home the fact that English commoners, like William Shakspere of Stratford, are often portrayed as comical bumpkins.

In the comedies, in particular, the malapropisms that compose the speeches of the man of the lower classes are hilarious, as when Dogberry calls for a stenographer, in the play Much Adoe About Nothing, in order to “set down our excommunication”. Or when Constable Elbow, in Measure for Measure, threatens an “action of battery” against a tapster who says he “respected” his wife before they were married. In the histories and tragedies, however, the matter is more serious and men of the lower classes take further parts as uneducated servants, thieves, henchmen and murderers for hire, etc., inasmuch as they are worthy of notice.

At the same time, those on the literary-political left (who do not question the Stratford man as the author), have grown steadily more strident rejecting his derisive depiction of those English commoners — and virtually everything else in his work, his biography and his legacy. For my part, I have averred that, if the Stratford man wrote the plays, surely he was a traitor to his class.

These are not new observations. As early as the mid-19^th century, Walt Whitman deplored Shakespeare's lack of democratic principles.

The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of Democracy.¹

Nevertheless, he cannot help but lavish praise upon the playwright. His awe almost overwhelms his point.

He seems to me of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are immense, forever dear to humanity and his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much in him that is offensive to Democracy. He is not only the tally of Feudalism, but I should say Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising Feudalism, in literature.²

Few descriptions from the progressive literary-political perspective get the balance so precisely right. Leo Tolstoy, still further to the left in his social agenda, to the point that it was all of his perspective, could not understand how so poor an author had ever gotten so high a reputation.

In the appendix to the English translation of Tolstoy's thoughts on Shakespeare, Ernest Crosby makes the positive point.

A glance at Shakespeare's lists of dramatis personae is sufficient to show that he was unable to conceive of any situation rising to the dignity of tragedy in other than royal and ducal circles.³

Some ten years later, Albert Tolman's more meticulous “Is Shakespeare Aristocratic?” appeared in the PMLA⁴, with detail which illustrates Crosby's point. Foremost, he cites numerous occasions when Shakespeare's source for a play, including one or another peasant uprising, gave a balanced view of the issues involved, the peasant side of which the playwright left out 'apparently because the author is "unable to conceive a popular uprising in any other terms than the outbreak of a mob."'⁵

But the difficulty of making this all square the grain-dealing Stratford man with the playwright heavily biased toward the aristocracy trips even Tolman up at one key point. He cites the play Henry VI, Part 2, to show that Shakespeare also had “a disbelief in the middle classes.” The passage he cites from Jack Cade's rebellion in the play makes the true point which is entirely different.

Clerk. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.
All. He hath confessed: away with him! he's a villain and a traitor.
Cade. Away with him, I say! hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.

Shakespeare's point, here, and in many other places throughout his plays, is that the middle class is found guilty by the lower classes of being able to read and write thus being elitists intent to document their various crimes and misdemeanors. From wealthy merchants to the literate clerks that serve them and the government, there are no malapropisms. Nor are there paeans. Shakespeare honors each in accordance with their rank.

Traditional scholars find it difficult to concede the aristocratic bias of Shakespeare's works. They are not only compelled to support the Stratfordian authorship, because of their dependence on the myth for their livings, but they take as their strongest argument that the likes of Edward de Vere only attract advocates by virtue of those advocates' fascination with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. After this fashion, the Stratford man has become a miracle — a natural genius exemplifying man's ability to overcome all obstacles including a paucity of books and education and unashamedly adopt a staunch aristocratic perspective from out of a natural sense of nobility.

In fact, profound ironies are the rule in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship as a result of the Stratford myth. The Stratford authorship has risen to the level of a religious verity. To oppose it is heresy. Any tactic, any mental contortion, any accusation against the heretic is fair game in order to protect the precious story of the humble birth of the Shakespeare.

According to the official life, the child went on to attend a few years of schooling punctuated by impregnating a local woman, who he was then obligated to marry, by poaching deer at a nearby game park and by apprenticing to a local butcher. He is said to have thundered iambic pentameter speeches as he butchered the meat.

Until his arrival in London, to expand the family business, none of it is documented except his approximate date of birth, his hurried, irregular marriage, and his children's birth dates. Upon his residence in London the records show he threatened severe physical harm to at least one person to whom he had lent money, who, fearing for his life, sought the protection of the courts. When not loan-sharking, he engaged in illegal grain trade, was delinquent in paying his taxes and eventually invested the profits from these activities into real-estate and highly profitable theater shares.

In short, the documented life of Shakspere of Stratford portrays a life that any mother would be proud for her son or daughter emulate. A life commensurate with a staunch aristocratic perspective and multi-lingual reading list sufficient to arrive at literary greatness.

And, as the final, and perhaps the grandest, irony, the literary-political left now meets the common man of the lower class in the persons of those who have no more than a high school education. They are the vast majority of the MAGA base that has elected their Jack Cade to the Presidency. Their Cade now says:

Smart people don't like me, you know?⁶ And they don't like what we talk about.... We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people,...⁷

He likes them because he finds them easily manipulated to act even against their own interests so long as they can dismiss intellectual elites and peoples of color. We laugh a pained laugh at the malapropisms they so confidently spout in interviews standing in the long lines outside of Trump rallies and eating fried dough at various mid-western state fairs.

They don't like Shakespeare any more than the literary-political left does. Writers should have to write American in America.

Take from it what you are able.

1 Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas (1871). 32.

2 Ibid. 81.

3Crosby, Ernest. “Shakespeare's Attitude Toward the Working Classes.” Tolstoy on Shakespeare (1907), Tchertkoff tr., 127.

4Tolman, Albert H. “Is Shakespeare Aristocratic?” Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1914. 277-98.

5Ibid. 285, Citing MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, 525.

6 Donald Trump. Bedminster, New Jersey. September 14, 2025.

7 Donald Trump. Las Vegas, Nevada . February 23, 2016.

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.

•