What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01?

In this series:

• Malvolio’s Crow's Feet and “the new Mappe”
• Henry Neville’s Twelfth Night in Context.
• What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01?

Having investigated the Nevillian claim that only Henry Neville could have written Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and that he did so in 1600/01, it might be of some interest to contrast it with another possibility.  We have shown that Neville had no assurance that the Italian Duke of Bracchiano, Virginio Orsino, would be present in the English Court in time for Twelfth Night festivities.  Therefore, Duke Orsino being the main male character of the play could not mean that the play was written expressly for the arrival of Bracchiano at the English court.   Furthermore, Neville would have had no more than twelve days to write and produce the play, during part of which he was laid up with kidney stones and all of which he was on call for immediate departure for France.

The assignment of 1600/01, inasmuch as it has any basis, is supported by  John Mannigham’s diary from February 2, 1602 (N.S.) in which we find the following:

At our feast wee had a play called "Twelue Night, or What you Will," much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfeyting a letter as from his Lady in generall termes, telling him what shee liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparaile, &c, and then when he came to practise making him beleeue they tooke him to be mad.[1]

This establishes a terminus ante quem of 1602 for the play.  Being the first mention of the play, it can also be advanced as evidence that it had been written not long before.

In the version Manningham saw there may have been a difference from the play we presently know.  The female supporting character, Olivia, it would seem, was a widow.  This could be a mistaken recollection.  His statement that the play was like Gl’ Inganni was, after all, not precisely correct.  The first of the plays with variations on this plot was Gl’ Ingannati.

Curiously, however, Barnabe Riche's novel Apolonius and Silla (1581) was one of the family of translations that derived from the vastly popular Gl’ Ingannati.[2] For numerous reasons it is clear that Riche’s was one of several versions Shakespeare consulted in writing Twelfth Night.  In Riche’s novel, Silla is described as a widow.

The clear influences of the novel on Twelfth Night, then, establish a terminus post quem of 1581.  Stratfordians, of course, believe it couldn’t have been written before 1590 because their candidate would have been too young to write a sophisticated play any earlier.  Their canonical date is 1600.  I have shown further evidence suggesting the year 1581 in my ‘Malvolio’s Crow's Feet and “the new Mappe”’.

But 1581 needs only point to the first version of the play.  Manningham’s description, in 1602, suggests that the play had still yet to reach the version we have from the Folio.  Other internal evidence from the Folio text points to a 1581 origin and a 1586-ish expansion.  Manningham points to a 1602 version and the Folio gives us the final form.

Leslie Hotson, who brought the Orsino-Orsino coincidence to the attention of the Nevillians seems to have made one particular mistake that is all to our point.  In his The First Night of Twelfth Night (1954) he liberally quotes from the extensive Chamberlain’s notes for the occasion and informs us that the Chamberlain was George Carey, the 2^nd Baron Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household.  The reader is also informed, by gleeful Nevillians, that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, is not listed as being present, all but disqualifying him as the author of the play.

Nick Drumbolis reminds us, however, in his brilliant The Chamberlain's Notes for Twelfth Night at Whitehall 1601[3], that the festivities were held at the Palace at Whitehall, where the Lord Great Chamberlain — not the Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household — ruled, and was tasked with managing royal events.[4]  The Lord Great Chamberlain was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

In case a Nevillian should balk it is pointed out that George Carey had been ill and unlikely to have attended.  Also, the Countess of Oxford carried the train of the Queen, unlikely in the event that the Earl was not also in attendance.  Vere was not tallied in the record as “present” because he would have been the one assembling the record.

So then, the pieces of the puzzle are all at hand.  The Twelfth Night festivities of 1600/01 were intended by Queen Elizabeth I to be particularly lavish in honor of the ambassador of Russia, the evening’s highly honored guest.  All of the nobility within travel distance were ordered to appear.  Those present were recorded in the Chamberlain’s record.  The order went out for plays and masks to be selected sufficient to the particular importance of the day.

It is possible that one of the plays may have been Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  As was customary when a play was revived, it was “dressed” or updated to the events of the day in order to heighten audience interest.  While the dressing was underway (likely with only Shakespeare’s indirect supervision), Virginio Orsino, the Duke of Bracchiano, unexpectedly arrived three days before the festivities.  The dressers could then have been called upon to change the main character’s name to Duke Orsino in order to make him feel specially honored.

A small inconsistency particularly confusing to scholars over the centuries, Orsino is only called “duke” twice at the  very beginning of the play.  In the rest of the play he is referred to as the “count”.  While we have a list of characters at the beginning of our versions of the play, no such thing existed in 1600/01.  The players’ texts, it may be surmised, were quickly altered from the original name for the main male character to “Orsino”.  In the intense hurry, the references to the original character as a count were too much to be concerned with.  The Duke would hear “Duke Orsino” clearly forefronted in the first references in the first act and Orsino throughout.  It would have to be enough.[5]

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[1] Manningham, John. Diary of John Manningham,… 1602-1603 (1868),  18.

[2] His was a translation derived from Francois de Belleforest’s translation of Gl’ Inganni in volume IV of his Histoires Tragiques.

[3] Drumbolis, Nick. The Chamberlain's Notes for Twelfth Night at Whitehall 1601 A Closer Look at the Alnwick Manuscript (2014).

[4] Ibid. 18. ‘…the Chamberlain’s warrant preserved at Alnwick properly accords with the “Warrants for the preparing, fitting and furnishing” of the Hall, categorically the authority of the Lord Great Chamberlain.’

[5] It is worth noting that Orsino wrote numerous letters to his wife, back in Italy, about the impressive Twelfth Night festivities.  None mentions that he was honored by having his name in one of the plays.  He does,  however, make a point of saying that he will tell her many more wondrous details upon his return home.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Lady Southwell on the Final Days of Queen Elizabeth I.  March 24, 2019.  “her majesty told [Lady Scrope] (commanding her to conceal the same ) that she saw, one night, in her bed, her body exceeding lean, and fearful in a light of fire.”
• Hedingham Castle 1485-1562 with Virtual Tour Link.  January 29, 2019. “Mr. Sheffeld told me that afore the old Erle of Oxford tyme, that cam yn with King Henry the vii., the Castelle of Hengham was yn much ruine,…”
• 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 Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
• Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.