Review of Peck’s Leicester’s Commonwealth with Download Link.

The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents, edited by D. C. PECK.

Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press: 1985.   ISBN: 978-0821408001.  [Reprinted in PDF format, 2006]  227 pp.

It is particularly important to read well researched books on matters of Oxfordian interest written by scholars unaware or unconcerned about the Authorship Question.  Alternative perspectives challenge popular conceptions that can too easily turn out, in the end, to be misconceptions.

Dwight Clark Peck’s edition of The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (a.k.a. Leicester’s Commonwealth) is such a study.

The present edition is a collation of nine copies of the 1584 text; Appendix A lists these nine and cites the only three variants found. In order to assist smooth reading and emphasize the book’s content rather than its typographical idiosyncrasies, I have elected to regularize the spelling in both the text and the other quoted documents, with abbreviations silently expanded.

The scholarly Introduction is separately and thoroughly annotated.  The endnotes to the text are even more extensive.  The observations throughout are thoughtful and informed.

The position, held by some, that Edward de Vere might have written Leicester’s Commonwealth, for one example of a misconception, while always questionable, is revealed to be untenable by Peck’s exceptional analysis.  Four closely reasoned pages on this other authorship question make clear the likely authors:

To summarize the much-vexed authorship problem, then, our reflections suggest that Leicester’s Commonwealth was written chiefly by Charles Arundell, probably with the as­sistance of all or some of the group comprising Lord Paget, Thomas Fitzherbert, William Tresham, Thomas Throgmorton, and possibly still others; so far this conclusion confirms the assertion of Father Parsons and the opinions of the scholars Pollen and Hicks.

No attempt is made to exclude De Vere.  He simply does not come into view when the history is impartially considered.

By the same token, the purblindness of mainstream scholars deprived of legitimate facts that they are required to ignore or deny, can be highly informative.  The “old play” that has long been understood, by mainstream scholars, to have provided the text of the Ulysses and Agamemnon portion (a.k.a. “the Camp Portion”) of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, proves to be an impenetrable mystery that “may never be solved”.  They are positively are not allowed to connect it to the Ulysses and Agamemnon play performed by “Oxenford’s Boys” in 1584[1].

The Earl of Leicester portrayed in Leicester’s Commonwealth is not allowed to be compared to the Achilles described by Ulysses in the opening speech of Ulysses and Agamemnon[2] though both are described in identical language.  Moreover, the old play is not allowed to be the play we find embedded in Troilus and Cressida.  The fact that the play was performed less than a year after the existence of  Leicester’s Commonwealth had been reported by Walsingham’s spies — that is to say, at a time that the scandal was the subject of every courtier’s whispered gossip — is not allowed into evidence. 

The powerful relationship between the works is either coincidence or the “old play” was written by another.  On this occasion, another who was neither Shakespeare or the Earl of Oxford and certainly not both at once.

All of this said, it is essential that an edition of the Commonwealth be absolutely rigorous.  The facts must be perfectly analysed (inasmuch as they can be known).  This is what Peck has accomplished with his edition.  It is difficult to believe that it could have been better done.  Anything that can be added can only be added because Peck created the essential foundation for further study, further debate.

All of this said, the author does have the habit of referring to the two dominant parties at Court as “Catholic” and “Protestant”.  Although this is common practice now for centuries, it is misleading in important ways. 

Leicester was not a religious man for all that he was the leader of the Puritan religious faction in England.  Their alliance was one of necessity.  The Puritans stood at the brink of being interdicted for their rejection of the Queen as the head of the church and of her bishops as her lieutenants.  Leicester made their excuses for them in the council room in exchange for intelligence on the country’s Catholic sympathizers and the utility they provided via their various offices.

His opponents at Court are more properly referred to as the “Howard-Vere faction” for all that many of them were indeed practicing Catholics.  Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, second in command, as it were, until the execution of Norfolk robbed the faction of its only natural leader, was also not at all a religious man.  If fact he was reckless at times, per reports, in his pursuit of forbidden books and his declarations, among his private friends, against many articles of faith.

Both factions existed mainly for reasons surrounding Leicester’s outsized influence with the Queen.  Of particular concern was the matter of her marriage.   Leicester wielded his forces in order to keep himself the only viable marriage partner for the Queen.  The Howard-Vere factions used theirs (far less effectively) to attempt to arrange a marriage to two successive Dukes of Anjou.  While the Dukes’ Catholic faith was not insignificant in their calculations, the overriding point was that there be no marriage to Leicester.

In 1581, the Howard-Vere faction was revealed to have unexpectedly close ties to the Spanish ambassador Mendoza and sympathies with the supporters of the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots.  

Howard, Arundell, and Southwell received word of their imminent arrest from an unnamed friend on the Privy Council, and the former two took refuge in the Spanish ambassador’s house in the middle of the night. Although he had never spoken with them before, Mendoza saw in his hospitality a chance to win valuable contacts;…

The last of their power was ended through trials, executions and escape into exile.  Mendoza was dismissed and transferred into France.  He and numerous French Catholics provided resources to the Howard-Vere exiles, and, soon afterwards, numerous pamphlets calling for the overthrow of Leicester and the Queen began to appear.  Among them was  Leicester’s Commonwealth.

With this, Elizabeth’s tolerance of the Catholics in her realm came to an end.  Her Secretary Walsingham — a vicious anti-Catholic — immediately rose to be her foremost councilor in the matter.  Slights real and imagined resulted in imprisonment, torture and drawing-and-quartering for English printers and publishers.  For noblemen such slights resulted in the destruction of their power and fortunes, if not execution.  The council, led by Walsingham, called repeatedly for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.   Censorship laws were strengthened and vigorously enforced.

Apart from his tendency to see his subject too much through the perspective of a religious conflict, Dwight Clark Peck’s work verges on perfection.

Dr. Peck’s book can be downloaded in pdf format for free.  Click on the cover page at the beginning of this review to go to the download page.

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[1] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley.  Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584). “In actuality, according to the minimal records of the time, the play was performed on St. John’s Day, December 27, by “Earl of Oxenford his boys,” a name briefly given to the Boys of St. Pauls.”  Introduction, 243.

[2] Purdy. “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre observe degree, priority, and place, insisture, course, proportion, season, form, office, and custom, in all line of order; and therefore is the glorious planet Sol in noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd amidst the other, whose medicinable eye corrects the influence of evil planets, and posts, like the commandment of a king, sans check to good and bad. But when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander, what plagues and what portents, what mutiny!  What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, commotion of the winds, frights, changes, horrors, divert and crack, rend and deracinate the unity and married calm of states quite from their fixure!...”  350 ff.

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• Why Shakespeare Appears on Title Pages from 1598.  November 20, 2018.  ‘These he finds unconvincing.  The author’s name having appeared in a number of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless they had other reasons not to do so.”’ 
• The Nymphs of Doctor Foreman’s Macbeth.  October 21, 2018. “How did Foreman make the mistake of describing them precisely as Holinshed?  But differently from the text we have of Macbeth?  To consider Foreman’s account a simple mistake would require an astronomically improbable coincidence.”
• The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
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