At The Blue Boar Tavern on April 12th we will celebrate Edward de Vere’s birthday by talking about the so-called University Wits and a London house known as Fisher’s Folly where they may have hung out. Elizabethan names, dates and places can be difficult to keep straight, even when they are familiar to us, so we the Tavern Dwellers thought a primer could be helpful.
The University Wits (end of the 16th century)
This is a partial list of the most commonly accepted members of the group:
- John Lyly
- Robert Greene
- George Peele
- Thomas Lodge
- Thomas Nashe
- Thomas Kyd
- Christopher Marlowe
Broadly speaking, these writers who were associated with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge transformed play writing from its prior two principal forms known as interlude and chronicle.
Interludes were a transition from medieval morality plays, acted at the homes of nobility by minstrels and amateurs. Most were nonreligious.
Chronicles (often called history plays) told the past as a comment on the present. They were especially popular during times of nationalistic fervor.
The Wits introduced such ideas and themes as introspection, revenge, tragic heroes with character flaws, blank verse, the common man and mixtures of verse and prose to suggest the worlds of reality and romance. You know – the good stuff.
From Wikipedia:
Fisher’s Folly was a large mansion on Bishopsgate Street, in Bishopsgate, London, built by Jasper Fisher in the 16th century.[2] In his 1598 Survey of London, Stow reports that the home was “so large and sumptuosly builded” by a man deeply in debt that it became known as Fisher’s Folly.[3]
Despite his own excessive debt, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford bought the mansion in 1580. Oxford’s biographer, Alan H. Nelson, quotes Stow’s 1598 description of the house as “farre more large and beautifull” than its neighbors “with Gardens of pleasure, bowling Alleys, and such like.” The Queen lodged at Fisher’s Folly, though it’s unclear whether she stayed at the home “before, during, or after Oxford’s approximately eight-year-tenure.”[3]
William Cornwallis (c. 1545 – 1611) purchased the home from Oxford in 1588.[3][4] Stow reports that a “Roger Manars”—presumably Roger Manners—owned the property by 1603.[5] In the 17th century, the Earls of Devonshire owned it. By 1773, it was gone.[2][6]
There is much societal discussion of artificial intelligence of late and here from the latest entry – Bard – we have:
Edward de Vere, worked with several of the university wits, including Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe. These young men were all recruited from Cambridge and Oxford by the Elizabethan government, during the 1580s, to serve as informants or spies for its wartime intelligence service. They also worked as secretaries-scribes-writers under the financial support of Edward de Vere, who provided them with writing space and materials as well as plots, themes, language and even entire works to be published either anonymously or under names that were either fictitious or their own.
Bard cites two articles from Hank Whittemore’s Shakespeare Blog as sources: Did Marlowe and Shakespeare Collaborate? Well … yes! … because Marlowe Worked with Oxford, Who then Became Shake-speare
and:
Christopher Marlowe and Why Oxford was “Shakespeare”
Is the Fisher’s Folly house still standing? Alas no, but on separate occasions Blue Boar Dwellers Earl Showerman and Dorothea Dickerman tracked down its remnants. Be sure to join us on April 12th to hear their stories!
