Shakespeare Coincidences and Unfinished Manuscripts.

Regarding the recent challenge to my position that Susan de Vere, Countess of Montgomery, was the most likely candidate for having received manuscripts of her father's plays, I am challenged to declare “What evidence supports this theory?” The evidence begins with the long list of correspondences between Edward de Vere's life and the plays of Shakespeare. I cite a good many (but by no means all) of them below.

Richard Edwards' manuscript anthology The Paradise of Daintie Devises was compiled and circulated prior to his death in October 31, 1566.¹ In it were poems by young Court poets, during his time as Master of the Children of the Royal Chapel, and by himself. A considerable number of the poems were by the young Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford, then royal ward under the care of William Cecil, First Secretary to Queen Elizabeth. These poems would have been composed in Vere's first sixteen years. One of Master Edwards' poems/songs from the anthology is featured in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

The students of Gray's Inn, presented the play Supposes by George Gascoigne, before the Royal Court in 1566. Both the young Earl of Oxford and Gascoigne were in regular attendance upon the Court, at the time, when it was in London or environs. The Supposes is one of the main sources of Shakespeare's Taming of a Shrew.

Edward de Vere took on John Lyly, distant cousin of William Cecil, Baron of Burghley, Lord Great Treasurer, as his personal secretary, no later than 1582. The fact that Lyly's 1580 novel Euphues and his England was dedicated “To the Right Honourable my very good Lorde and Maister Edward de Vere, Earle of Oxenforde” strongly suggests he held the secretary position at that time.

Vere would purchase the lease to Blackfriars theater in June of 1583 and sign it over to Lyly. During 1584, they produced Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon. They produced George Peele's Arraignment of Paris in the winter of 1584 and Christopher Marlowe's play Dido, Queen of Carthage the next year. Throughout their tenure they produced numerous plays by Lyly. All are sources for (and influences on) the earliest plays from the Shakespeare canon.

George Peele is accepted as the main author of the first Tragedy of King John play believed to show touch up and editing by Shakespeare, and, later, to have been entirely rewritten by Shakespeare. Both Peele and Shakespeare are understood to have been among the co-writers of the Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster and True Tragedy of Richard III plays. Marlowe's play is commonly cited as the target of the “player's speech” in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Lyly's plays influence Shakespeare's earliest comedies — such as Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona — to a striking degree. Long lists of close correspondences of phrasing and vocabulary are available in Warwick Bond's edition of the works of Lyly.

De Vere had another secretary at this time (likely since 1579). Anthony Munday proudly advertised his service with the Earl at every opportunity. Munday's play Fedele and Fortunio was entered into the Stationer's Register on November 12, 1584, while the Blackfriars was still actively putting on plays. It's title page, published in 1585, boasts that it was “set down as it hath beene presented before the Queene's moste excellent Maiestie”. The Queen was watching all of her plays at Blackfriars at the time. That was the main purpose for which it had been formed. Fedele and Fortunio is recognized as an influence on Shakespeare's Two Gentlement of Verona.

There are questions regarding many of the two men's various works over the coming 15 years as to which had influenced the other or how both somehow found identical sources (often in French or Italian) at precisely the same time. Not the least of which is Munday's The Orator: Handling a hundred seuerall Discourses, in forme of Declamations, etc. (1596), translated from Alexandre Van Den Bussche's (penname “Sylvain”) 1581 Epitomes de cent histoires tragicques, in which appears “Declamation 95”:

Of a jew, who would for his debt haue a pound of the flesh of a Christian.

It is the source of Shylock's speech before the Doge in The Merchant of Venice. It seems that Munday and Shakespeare shared reading lists and timing.

The list of such “coincidences” goes on long enough to fill a thick volume. So I will end this little bit of it with the fact that De Vere sold the house called Fisher's Folly, in which he and his secretaries resided, during the years they managed Blackfriars, to William Cornwallis, in 1588. As Charlton Ogburn reminds us, a small manuscript book called Anne Cornwaleys her book was discovered, in 1852, which included a number of “Verses made by the Earl of Oxforde” together with several poems attributed to Shakespeare — the earliest known copies of any Shakespeare poems.²

Against these overwhelming coincidences, proponents of the authorship of the Stratford man offer the genuine fact that the First Folio forwards him as the author whatever its reasons for doing so. The saying that “Lack of Evidence is not evidence of lack” is also a common observation and pillar of the Straford case. Other than the Folio, there is indeed an impressive lack of evidence for his authorship.

And, then, of course, there is the purported semi-retirement of the Stratford man some little bit after the 1604 death of Edward de Vere. This evidenced by the fact that the plays begin to be co-written, and that, sometime prior to 1610, he sold his Globe share. Production might seem to have ramped down but to have continued nonetheless thus disqualifying Vere as author.

But it is all to the point to mention that first quarto editions of plays sometimes appeared as much as a decade after their original composition. The playing companies, or their representatives, bought all rights to their plays and kept them from publication so long as they still brought in profits by playing or might promise to do so in revival. First publication tells us little or nothing about date of composition.

Nevertheless, I agree that there is every reason to understand that further Shakespeare plays appeared after 1604 and that they were, for some reason, co-written. These might include Henry VIII, Macbeth and The Tempest. They may even refer to events after Vere's death.

Of course, this does not mean that Edward de Vere could not have written them. Or at least the part of them written by Shakespeare. The question would then remain as to who might have given permission to the co-writers to complete the plays and from where did the in-progress manuscripts come?

1  The first of many print editions appeared ten years later in 1576.

2  Ogburn, Charles. The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984). 711. Citing Barrell.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Ben Jonson and the Dedication to the Shakespeare First Folio. December 12, 2022. “Country hands reach foorth milke, creame, fruites, or what they have:...”.

• Labeo and Shakespeare on the Ladies' Toilette. November 13, 2022. “What woman would be anything but offended to be described in such a way?”

• The Gossip from Queen Elizabeth's Court, May 11, 1573. November 5, 2022. “My Lord of Oxford is lately grown into great credit; for the Queen's Majesty delighteth more in his personage, and his dancing, and valiantness, than any other.”

• Edward de Vere and Marlowe’s Dido of Carthage. July 5, 2022. “It was an historical effort and an historical two years for Elizabethan theater.”

• How Shakespeare gave Ben Jonson the Infamous Purge. November 7, 2021. “Of course, De Vere could not openly accuse Jonson of having outed him as Shakespeare.”
• 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 Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.