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Friday, August 29, 2025

The Rival Poets: A Peek Behind the Curtain.

In this series:

Upon accepting Edmund Spenser as the rival described in Shakespeare's Rival Poet sonnets, not only does Queen Elizabeth I clearly emerge as the recipient of Shakespeare's Rival Poet sonnets, and all of Shakespeare's Monument Sonnets, but a number of impediments are removed from reading certain poems by Edmund Spenser and by Shakespeare.

The first thing that becomes obvious is that the odds are astronomically against the Stratford man being the playwright Shakespeare. The intimacy with which the Queen is addressed requires an author of noble stature. And not just any man but a man with a deep personal relationship to the Queen.

So much in the plays and poems corresponds with the life of Edward de Vere that, together with this requirement, he becomes the leading candidate. Still more, Vere's appeals to bring an end to his extended exile from the Queen's presence correspond to sonnets 50-51. His memory of the time he was her favorite, and his hope to return to be so once again, closely corresponds with sonnet 521.

Taken in isolation, mere sonnets cannot possibly be definitive. But taken together with the plays and other sonnets, and the historical record a noble man so close to royalty was bound to leave behind, a life emerges. The historical record takes on flesh and blood.

The publication of Spenser's The Faerie Queene stunned the Elizabethan literary world. The shock was so great that its tremors are found in the works of Shakespeare. What else could be the case?

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

The first three books, published in 1590, included a dedicatory sonnet to Edward de Vere.

To the right Honourable the Earle of Oxenford Lord

high Chamberlayne of England


BY EDMUND SPENSER.


RECEIVE, most Noble Lord, in gentle gree,

The unripe fruit of an unready wit ;

Which by thy countenaunce doth crave to bee

Defended from foule Envies poisnous bit.

Which so to doe may thee right well besit,

Sith th'antique glory of thine auncestry

Under a shady vele is therein writ,

And eke thine owne long living memory,

Succeeding them in true nobility :

And also for the love which thou doest beare

To th' Heliconian ymps, and they to thee ;

They unto thee, and thou to them, most deare.

Deare as thou art unto thy selfe, so love

That loves and honours thee, as doth behove.

This much might be expected given the reputation of the earl as among England's finest poets and playwrights. Also the two did likely share a venue in the 1573 anthology, An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers2 before Spenser gravitated toward the Sidney circle at Wilton House.

Shakespeare's works show a familiarity with the goings on around the Wilton group. The same could be said of Vere, while he gathered Walter Raleigh, Tom Watson, John Lyly, Anthony Munday and many others of the London literati around him at the Royal Court and his rooms at the Savoy. In 1580 he acquired the London mansion called “Fisher's Folly” and the group revolved around that address.

Raleigh and Spenser traveled to Ireland, in 1580, with the English army under the Lord Grey, Baron of Wilton. Both received Irish estates for their service. Raleigh returned to London, leaving his in care of servants. Spenser remained a resident of Ireland for the remainder of his life, twice visiting London at Raleigh's invitation and once more, to die, following the destruction of his Irish estate by rebels.

It is an interesting question as to whether the line “Deare as thou art unto thy selfe” might be a bit of a jab at Vere. Usage was much looser in Tudor times. It need not have been.

A congratulatory poem appears in the same 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene by “Ignoto”. This is generally considered to be a monker employed by Shakespeare. Here it is written in the form since called “Venus and Adonis” stanza. No jab is returned upon the author. The praise is completely an act of the highest praise.

To looke upon a worke of rare devise

The which a workman setteth out to view,

And not to yield it the deserved prise,

That unto such a workmanship is dew.

Doth either prove the judgement to be naught,

Or els doth shew a mind with envy fraught.

Accepting these as words of Shakespeare, in 1590, by the time he was writing the Rival Poet sonnets the 1596 second volume had been published. Among the mix of emotions they contain is included envy.

There is a jab or two at Spenser but no worse. Perhaps done in return for the line in the dedicatory poem.

Yet what of thee thy Poet doth invent,

He robs thee of, and payes it thee againe,

Still, there is no rancor. Shakespeare knows his sonnets have been displaced by a work of genius and cannot bring himself to say otherwise.3

That there is a jab at the queen in Sonnet #84, and that it does contain a touch of rancor, suggests that one of the sonnets was not designed for her eyes.

You to your beautious blessings adde a curse,

Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.4

The theme of the Rival Poet sonnets is that Shakespeare's monument to the Queen presented her actual self rather than making of her a faerie land character. Spenser, he said, several times throughout, had actually devalued her by implying she must be transformed into a faerie queene in order to be admired.

And their grosse painting might be better us’d,

Where cheekes need blood, in thee it is abusd.

Her real beauty could only be found in the sonnets, he averred. In real life she was even more beautiful than in faerie land.

In the meantime, all of these poems give us a peek behind the curtain. A verbal jab here and there, perhaps; a witty turn, there and here; an exasperated word on the queen, even; monikers and pen-names for the reasons of the time and place.



2See my Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14

3Time, of course, has reversed the estimates.

4Shake-speare's Sonnets, #84.



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Thursday, August 07, 2025

Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.” Virtual Grub Street, enter url here [state date accessed].


In this series:


 

86

Was it the proud full saile of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of (all to[o] precious) you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my braine inhearce,

Making their tombe the wombe wherein they grew?

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,

Above a mortall pitch, that struck me dead?

No, neither he, nor his compiers by night

Giving him ayde, my verse astonished.

He nor that affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

As victors of my silence cannot boast,

I was not sick of any feare from thence.

But when your countinance fild up his line,

Then lackt I matter, that infeebled mine.

As observed in the first part of this series, “I am a worthlesse bote, / He of tall building, and of goodly pride.” of Sonnet 80, and the “proud full sail,” here, in Sonnet 86, refer to stanza vii of the Dedicatory Canto to Queen Elizabeth I in Book VI of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser compares his poem to a ship sailing upon a long, diverse sea voyage:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine co[a]st,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet, making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.

The queen both rules the ocean and is the Ocean in the book. But these are only two of many references in Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets to The Faerie Queene and other of Spenser's poems published during his second visit to London, in 1595-6.

The “spirit” in Sonnet 86, refers to Edmund Spenser's call to the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, in the poem Ruine of Time (1596), to inspire (breathe into) him:

O noble spirite! live there ever blessed,

*

Thereto doo thou my humble spirite raise,

And into me that sacred breath inspire,

Which thou there breathest perfect and entire.

Sidney was the paragon of poetry and chivalry having died young while acting heroically in battle. He was also Spenser's host at Penshurst for a time. The queen would have recognized Shakespeare's reference.

It was Sir Walter Raleigh who arranged for Spenser's first visit to London, and the Royal Court, in 1590. Having read the first three books of The Faerie Queene, at the time, he abandoned an epic on the queen that he himself was writing and began a campaign at Court for the queen and courtiers to read Spenser's. Raleigh was particularly popular at Court, even while he was technically-speaking imprisoned within The Tower for impregnating one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, and he was almost certainly the “affable ghost” referred to in the sonnet.

When Raleigh convinced the poet to accompany him to the royal court, at the very end of 1589, it also resulted in Spenser's poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe describing the social circle at court at a level of detail he could only have gotten so quickly from Raleigh (then a particularly affable intimate of that circle) “gulling” him after their return to their lodgings each night. The gulling presumably continued by letter.

Colin Clout and the first full edition of The Faerie Queene both came out in early 1596. The dedication letter to Clout was dated 1591, and the years of the visit were essentially 1590-1, indicating that a manuscript edition was circulated as early as 1590. Numerous references to events as late as 1594, in the print edition, show that the print text was revised for publication. The first half of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590 but did not include the Book VI passages referenced in the Rival Poet Sonnets.

The “Ruine of Time” was published in the volume Complaints: Containing Sundrie Small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie in 1591. It was dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, in the memory of her brother Philip Sidney, and thanks for her “manie singular favours & great graces”.

Spenser also published his Fowre hymnes in 1596: two each to Love and to Beauty. The dedicatory letter, to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, refers to the hymns having been circulated in manuscript well before they were published. Portions — in particular the praise of Wisdom, the virgin Queen — seems written to flatter Elizabeth:

The soveraine dearling of the Deity,

Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most fit

For so great powre and peerelesse majesty,

*

And on her head a crowne of purest gold

Is set, in signe of highest soveraignty;

And in her hand a scepter she doth hold,

Nevertheless, this queen controls both heaven and earth to a degree that suggests more than her sovereignty over the Anglican church. The reader is left to interpret as he or she will. Few would have missed the reference.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 85, lines 7-10, we read:

To every Himne that able spirit affords,

In polisht forme of well refined pen.

Hearing you praisd, I say ’tis so, ’tis true,

And to the most of praise adde some-thing more,

Interesting that he speaks of the Rival Poet writing hymns to praise the queen at a time that his rival was also celebrated for writing hymns of remarkable beauty. As if he had conflated all of it — The Faerie Queene and the Fowre Hymns — as hymns to a faerie goddess who ruled over them at a pitch that mere sonnets could not reach.



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Tuesday, August 05, 2025

How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.


Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/08/how-shakespeares-rival-poet-sonnets.html [state date accessed].


In this series:


80


O How I faint when I of you do write,

Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,

And in the praise thereof spends all his might,

To make me toung-tide speaking of your fame.

But since your worth (wide as the Ocean is)

The humble as the proudest saile doth beare,

My sawsie barke (inferior farre to his)

On your broad maine doth wilfully appeare.

Your shallowest helpe will hold me up a floate,

Whilst he upon your soundlesse deepe doth ride,

Or (being wrackt) I am a worthlesse bote,

He of tall building, and of goodly pride.

Then If he thrive and I be cast away,

The worst was this, my love was my decay. 1


Centuries of debate have gone into the question of just who was the Rival Poet in Shakespeare Sonnets 78-86. The first candidate was advanced by the towering 18th century Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone. Malone advanced the name of Edmund Spenser.


[commentary on Sonnet 80. Line 9.] Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, ] Spirit is here, as in many other places, used as a monosyllable Curiosity will naturally endeavour to find out who this better spirit was, to whom even Shakspeare acknowledges himself inferior. There was certainly no poet in his own time with whom he needed to have feared a comparison; but these Sonnets being probably written when his name was but little known, and at a time when Spenser was in the zenith of his reputation, I imagine he was the person here alluded to. MALONE.2


Ironically, he was correct, and, straight away, his choice was rejected.

What would sweep aside Malone's candidate without further consideration was a single fact that has misled Shakespeare scholarship since shortly after the 1623 First Folio. If Spenser's Faerie Queene was the ship/poem “of tall building, and of goodly pride”3 that Shakespeare stood before in awe, then the Ocean that the two poets sailed upon — the recipient to whom they wrote their poems — was Queen Elizabeth I.

The odds against a London hustler from Stratford-upon-Avon writing intimate poems to the queen of England were astronomical. So then, the Shakespeare Industry turned the queen into Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and ever since have debated who sould be chosen to fill the role of the Rival Poet for Wriothesley's affections.

In this sonnet, the love-object of the Rival Poets is equated with the Ocean itself. From this metaphor comes the sea and ship imagery. Shakespeare’s tiny sonnets — previously bricks of a monument laid one by one — now are overwhelmed by the vast sweep of The Fairy Queen, so much so that his monument has been revealed to be a mere “sawcie bark” before Spenser’s huge, majestic sailing ship.

Shakespeare adopts the Rival Poet’s self-same imagery: the recipient to whom he writes is the Ocean itself now.

But since your worth (wide, as the ocean is,)

The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,

My saucy bark, inferior far to his,

On your broad main doth wilfully appear.4

These lines are followed by lines 1-12.

I am a worthlesse bote,

He of tall building, and of goodly pride.

The references here are first to Book VI, Canto XII, Stanza i, second to Book II, Canto II, Stanza xl, of The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser compares his poem to the sailing of a ship upon a long, diverse sea voyage:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine co[a]st,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet, making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.5

(The italics are mine.) In the first we also find the inspiration for Shakespeare's image of his beloved friend as “ocean” with a “broad main”. His rival's poem is an ocean-going vessel on the beloved's ocean. 

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

In the second we have the most prominent of numerous examples, in The Faerie Queene, in which the Queen rules/is the ocean.

Great and most glorious virgin Queen alive,

That with her soveraine power, and scepter sheen,

All Fairy lond does peaceable susteen.

In widest Ocean she her throne does rear,

That over all the earth it may be seen;

As morning sun her beams dispredden clear:

And in her face, fair peace and mercy doth appear.6

As I have pointed out in my Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015), in the words of Edmund Spenser’s Fairy Queen, her subjects’ virtues originate in her, and return to her again, as rivers receive their water from the Ocean and return it there again.

Then pardon me, most dreaded Soveraine,

That from your self I do this vertue bring,

And to your self do it return again:

So from the Ocean all rivers spring,

And tribute back repay as to their King.

Right so from you all goodly vertues well

Into the rest which round about you ring,

Fair Lords and Ladies, which about you dwell,

And do adorn your court, where courtesies excel.7

Perhaps less noticeable but even more evident, the first five lines of the second stanza (quoted here in italics) are also clearly alluded to, with a twist, to try to turn the Rival’s words ironically back upon himself, in the Rival Sonnet 79:

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent,

He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.8

It is the very meaning of Shakespeare's image. The Rival Poet is Edmund Spenser, whose Fairy Queen Shakespeare recognizes dwarfs his sonnets. The love-object the rivals are competing over is Queen Elizabeth.


1Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80. Modernized orthography.

2Malone, Edmond. Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare's Plays Published in 1778. I.645.

3Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80.

4Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80.

5Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. With an exact Collation of the Two Original Editions (1751). Bk. VI, Canto XII, st. i. @ III.384.

6 Spenser, Bk II, Canto II, st. xl @ I. 254.

7 Spenser, Bk. VI, Canto I, St. vii. @ III. 205.

8 Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 79. ll.7-8.


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Sunday, July 20, 2025

AI and I... and the Favorite Word of Tom Kyd

I'd been assembling data on the plays of Thomas Kyd, during odd moments here and there, for some weeks. The aim was to determine, once and for all, whether Kyd did co-write the Elizabethan murder drama The lamentable and true Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent as is the present scholarly consensus.

For some time now I have suspected that Anthony Munday and Edward de Vere might have written the play. The maddening aspect of presenting evidence in Munday's behalf, however, is that his writing style is free of tells. It is more modern than other playwrights of the time, true: only moderately Euphuistic; competent with prosody but never inspired; primarily a prose writer — a freelance writer in a strangely modern sense.

Anyway, taking a break, recently, from yet another session tallying endless minutiae, it came to me to ask the Microsoft Copilot AI Mode search feature what was the most common adjective in the plays of Kyd. I had already compiled the clear answer. It dawned on me, however, that it would possibly teach me more than a little about AI to ask it this question.

The first thing I seem to have learned was that AI Mode was too lazy to go to the works themselves. It reviewed online linguistic studies.

There isn't a definitive linguistic study pinpointing the single most common adjective in Thomas's Kyd's plays....

Next it offered a half-dozen adjectives that

mirror the emotional intensity and moral complexity of his characters.

Finally, it ended with more distinctly “human” touches.

If you're diving into a textual analysis or building a corpus study, I can help you set up a method to track adjective frequency across his works. Want to go that route?

Most human of all, rather than admit it did not know the answer it changed the subject.

I could not help but reflect upon the fact that I did not ask what “definitive linguistic studies” said was the most common adjective. Nor did I ask to be invited to create a “corpus”.

Some time later I did ask the AI for a definition of adjective. It answered with a clear, concise and correct definition. It knew that there were such things as linguistic studies and knew to look to one for an answer. From those studies, it had an idea that there existed such a thing as “the plays of Thomas Kyd”. But what it gave no sign of knowing was what “adjective in the plays of Thomas Kyd” meant. Actual adjectives in the wild, as it were, it seemed to know nothing about.

We all may struggle to see objects out of their expected context. AI, it seems, can cannot see them at all. Microsoft Copilot AI Mode1 can only detect that words are written about them in studies. There are “adjectives” and there are “adjectives in the plays of Thomas Kyd” and the two exist in separate worlds.

The answer was the word “sweet”. The most common adjective in Arden of Feversham is also sweet. (The matches between Kyd and the play go further.) My question did not indicate in any way a desire to build a “corpus” of the vocabulary of Thomas Kyd. In fact, the final suggestion called upon me join an effort to instruct it how to discover the answer I sought.

The only thing that could change the answer from one researcher to another would be to select different plays as being by Thomas Kyd and/or what part of the plays in question had he written personally. It is this that I had been driving myself crazy with. This that I had taken a break from.

Munday began writing around 1577. His earlier plays and poetry are written predominantly in rhymed fourteener couplets as was common circa 1580. He doesn't pronounce the suffix -ed for the past tense as a separate syllable (unless to regularize the scansion of a line), does end the third person present tense of verbs “-eth” (unless the modern “-s” will regularize the scansion of a line). He loved trendy words and sayings (a la Euphuism), used the word nick to mean all of “steal,” “in the best of shape,” and “just in time,” and was the rare playwright to use the word “delicate” in the few of his plays that survive.

Munday often referred to his time as a spy in the English Seminary in Rome and the English county of Kent. By these, and his constant flattery of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, we know that he co-wrote the fictional Chronicle of some of the principal events in the Life, Adventures, and Times of Edward Webbe, chief master gunner, his trauailes (1590) and other prose works. In the late 1570s, he briefly served as apprentice to the printer John Alde who published a ballad entitled “A ballad of the Deliuery of 266 prasoners from the Turkes,” in 1579, an event that relates to Edward Webbe. I've yet to find a copy.

Edward de Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)!

According to Collier's Extracts From The Registers Of The Stationers Company, page 96, a prose version was licensed in the same year to Thomas Dawson and Stephen Peele. The prose version was reprinted in 1608 and is the apparent source for some details in Edward Webbe.

It is by such extrinsic means as these that one may identify Munday as the author of an anonymous work. Patterns of vocabulary, grammar and/or prosody are not sufficiently pronounced.

As it turns out, the most common adjective in Munday's plays also seems to have been “sweet” (but not so as to be obsessive). The county of Kent is the setting of Arden of Feversham. And Munday had published a highly popular prose account of famous murders and violent deaths in England entitled A View of sundry Examples. Reporting many straunge murthers (1580). Of much more interest, the saying

When two bones are at strife for a dog, it is commonly séen:

That the third comes and takes it, and wipes their mouthes cléen.

appears both in Arden of Feversham and Munday's Fidele and Fortunio (1584). A third playwright, however, was a still better match than either Kyd or Munday for at least half of the play. But that will have to wait another day.

As for Microsoft Copilot AI Mode (and Google AI), while they are not the most developed applications of AI, their failures do inform us. Textual analysis and author attribution are tedious and delicate tasks. The first question the AI needed to answer was what plays it would identify as being by Kyd. Then it needed to identify what portions of the plays were actually written by Kyd. These tasks are highly demanding.

Having made its choices in those categories, determining the most common adjective is a simple counting exercise. There is no indication that the AI even attempted to do either. Admittedly, after many years of practice this all will still take me many hours and I will likely never be totally satisfied with the precision of my data. But I am not a glorious AI Large Language Model computer program, yet I have at least arrived, in the process, at any number of simple word counts across dozens of plays all of which seem to be beyond the capability of AI at any speed.

Much bigger players than I also report that AI is only being trusted to generate output to be carefully reviewed by high level experts before being accepted.



1Google AI Mode did no better. “a definitive answer requires detailed textual analysis”.



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