I realized that the poems would require considerable effort. While I was assembling those with which I was familiar I would search for others with which I was not.
It took several grueling and glorious months of seclusion to draw together years of notes into Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. Another 10 years later the Collected Poems is still in-progress. The research for it has resulted in a number of 20,000+ word studies that I have published under my Virtual Vanaprastha label.
What this process has made clear is that the original concept is too inclusive to be realized in a single volume, or even two. My intention had been to gather poems and critical commentary into the promised Collected Poems. While this remains the general plan, the process has revealed that the steps necessary in order to accomplish it are themselves made up of steps requiring considerable attention to detail. The final text must be developed through the short essays I provide for free through my Virtual Grub Street blog and various Facebook groups and pages, and, further, through further 20,000+ word thematic studies.
While I am working at several new 20,000+ word studies, then, there is still work that must be done in as timely a manner as possible towards the final Collected Poems. At the same time, there is the need to fulfill the on-going requirement for free short essays to gratify, inform and advertise. I have decided, therefore, to begin presenting the text of the individual poems variorum-style on my Virtual Grub Street blog, as free articles, and linking to them from the Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook Group and Book Page. In this way I will be able to satisfy the demand for new essays on the Shakespeare Authorship Question while I undertake the vast labor of bringing together and organizing my great mass of notes.
This intermediate effort is the reason I have created the new V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page [link]. I intend to gather hyperlinks to all of my Virtual Grub Street essays on the poems of Shakespeare onto this index. A poem at a time, it will become an table-of-contents to a considerable amount of my in-progress work toward the Collected Poems of William Shakespeare.
This beyond the extensive information I have provided in the following completed 20,000+ word studies:
Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017) in which I show composition dates and recipients of numerous Shakespeare sonnets. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1543136257/
Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015) In which I show that the monument poems were written not to the Earl of Southampton but to Queen Elizabeth I and reveal the identity of the Rival Poet. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8/
Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually)(2015), in which I reveal three new Shakespeare sonnets previously assigned to another Elizabethan poet. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514750406/
Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021), in which I show that dozens of the poems in an anthology entitled An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, many of them in the form we now call the “Shakespearean sonnet,” were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Also that many of them have stylistic traits we associate with the works of William Shakespeare. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14/
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| Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? |
Those who have been following my in-progress work on the subject, to date, have been presented with powerful evidence that the sonnets refer to the name “William Shakespeare” as being the pen-name of the author of the plays and sonnets. Also that a sonnet is addressed to the son of Edward de Vere that died shortly after birth, in 1583; that another refers to his son, Henry, who lived to adulthood and another to the wound he received in a duel, in 1582. Much more lies ahead.
Inasmuch as possible, the poems will be presented, in variorum-style, with notes on the details of the text together with commentary by scholars of every stripe (including myself). While they will serve me as notes toward my final product they are designed to serve you, the reader, as finished products filled to the brim with high quality content. As the number of essays grows, the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page [link] will become a free online book on Selected Poems by Edward de Vere, also known as William Shakespeare.
A note for those virtual teeth-gnashing, eye-bulging Authorship partisans who thought the “apology” in the title of this essay was going to be their long-awaited mea culpa, I remind them that “apology,” in scholarly terms, is a different thing.
Apology (O.E.D.) = 2. explanation of a course of action.
Oh well! There's always hope!
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- 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.
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