Shakespeare as Burleigh's Guest at Castle Hedingham?

In the Ninth Series,Volume XII, of the journal Notes and Queries (July—December, 1903) a particularly shocking query appears.  There have been a number of Shakespeare traditions over the centuries.  Most can be dismissed with even the slightest investigation.

Upon investigation, Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer park, in which the young Stratford Shaksper was supposed to have poached, turns out not to have existed until after the alleged offender’s death. Theories have been forwarded, of course, in the attempt to keep the story alive.  There is, after all, so little we know about the playwright that we cling to his effigy and the stories that seem to tell us what he was like.

That he was educated at the Stratford grammar school is possible however much there are no records showing him in attendance there.  He did know how to sign his name in secretary hand which implied he had some degree of literacy.  The now popular claim, among Stratfordians, that Lily’s Grammar — the text of most such schools — could be the source of  a Latin cultural literacy on a par with today’s university degrees, much less with Shakespeare’s works,  is insupportable.  The references to the classics were single, brief quotes given as examples of usage.  Even so much as brief passages were not provided.  It was the rare grammar school that was so well funded that it could afford actual classical texts for the boys beyond their Lily.

That Shaksper became a bosom friend of the Earl of Southampton and finished his education in the Earl’s personal library hasn’t a shred of evidence.  We know only that Shakespeare’s longer poems, of around 1593, were dedicated to the man.  Did the poet receive a reward?  Was he even seeking one?  We do not know.  We have no evidence that they even met.

About the purported gift of ₤1000 that Southampton gave to the Stratford effigy there may be a bit more substance than we are used to admitting.  While the poem Venus and Adonis was dedicated to Southampton, it is  generally admitted by scholars traditional and otherwise that the poem was written to flatter Queen Elizabeth — even to warn the young Earl to beware of the lusts of the Queen.  She flirted (sometimes disconcertingly) with her young courtiers well after her looks had failed her.  Queens, after all, are always beautiful… if one knows what is good for one.

No entry has been found in any of the Southampton household accounts in such an amount and none at all regarding Shakespeare.

If Southampton was a front for the Queen, in the dedication, however, and the name Shakespeare a pen-name for the Earl of Oxford, then “Southampton” did give ₤1000 to “Shakespeare”.  In fact, he/she gave him an annuity of that amount.

Like the once popular game in which a large circle of people is formed and a message whispered in the ear of the first person, who whispers it in the ear of the next, and so on, around the entire group, we do not know what exactly was the original message but only that the message we hear from the last person is strangely suggestive.  What started the ₤1000 story we cannot know.  But that it bears a strange relationship, after the passage of many years and tellings, to established facts can only leave one to suspect.

This query from Notes and Queries would seem to be another such story.  I’ve yet to find any confirmation that the tradition was more widely held than the acquaintance of “S.M.”  But how — some 17 years before Professor Looney’s Shakespeare Identified first advanced the Earl of Oxford as the actual author of the works under that name — had the Baron Burghley and Castle Hedingham become attached, in some tradition, with the poet and playwright William Shakespeare?

On the face of it, this is an enormous coincidence.  I provide the query:

Shakespeare and Lord Burleigh.— Can any of your readers give me information on these two points?—

1. I have heard a tradition that Shakespeare was given by Lord Burleigh a temporary home at a farmhouse in Castle Hedingham, Essex, at a time when, by the extravagance of the then Earl of Oxford, the estate of Hedingham Castle passed into the hands of Lord Burleigh, the earl's father-in-law.

2. Is there any detailed record of a visit Queen Elizabeth paid to the earl at Hedingham Castle? S. M.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• 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.”
• Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.