This Month in Oxfordian History – August

By Sara Hill

It’s August of 1561. Twenty-eight-year-old Queen Elizabeth is making her annual summer progress in the English countryside with her sprawling entourage of courtiers and servants. The throng eddies around Hedingham Castle in Essex, ancestral home of the de Vere family, for a five-day soirée, hosted by the current lord of the castle, John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford. Tonight, Earl John’s acting troupe, Oxford’s Men, will perform in the great hall to the delight of the queen and (perhaps) Edward, Earl John’s 11-year-old son.

Included in the queen’s retinue is her constant companion and rumored lover, Robert Dudley, later made Earl of Leicester, and William Cecil, recently made Master of the Court of Wards. 

The next August of 1562 Earl John will die suddenly and unexpectedly, precipitating young Edward’s wardship under Cecil’s custody and the spoliation of his inherited lands and tenures by Dudley.

Could it be that here we have in thin disguise the main characters of the Shakespearean play Hamlet? (Some people think so.)

• The newlywed royal couple: Elizabeth as Gertrude and Robert Dudley as Claudius, murderer of King Hamlet;
• Earl John as King Hamlet’s armor-clad ghost, roaming the castle battlements;
• William Cecil as Polonius, Claudius’s lackey and spymaster; and
• Edward de Vere himself as Prince Hamlet, feigning madness in self-defense.

Let us assume that the commoner, William Shakspere of Stratford, wrote Hamlet and that he somehow obtained intimate knowledge of these foremost figures of the royal court. How might he haved dared to publicly portray them as connivers and spies and murderers?

Yet the Stratford man, so far as we know, was never even questioned, detained, or arrested.

Was that because a very important someone knew he was not the writer of Hamlet?