This section continues the Introduction to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship presentation of early poems by Edward de Vere. You may continue to the next section here. The poems themselves (and a printable pdf version of the entire presentation) may be accessed from the Introduction.
Introduction, Part 2: Oxford’s Known Poetry as Juvenilia
De Vere probably wrote most of his extant acknowledged poetry when he was still in his teens and 20s, as argued by J. Thomas Looney (1920, 125) and John Shahan & Richard Whalen (2009, 236-42), among many others. Steven May, the leading orthodox (Stratfordian) scholar of de Vere’s poetry, professes to some unclear extent to dispute that proposition (2004, 231-32). Yet Professor May has also opined, consistently with the Oxfordian view, that the “poems date primarily from [de Vere’s] heyday at court during the 1570s” (1991, 270), when he was in his 20s.
Oxford actually established a presence at court while still a teenager during the 1560s. In 1562 at the age of 12, upon the death of his father, he became a royal ward of Queen Elizabeth, placed in the custody of her most powerful advisor, Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley (see, e.g., Anderson 16-22, 44-45). See notes to Poem No. 4 (and Appendix A), discussing reasons to think de Vere may have written that poem in 1563 at the age of 13. Eight de Vere poems (Nos. 2 to 9) were first published in 1576 in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (Rollins ed. 1927; see May 1980, 68-69). But since Richard Edwards, who compiled manuscripts on which that volume was based, died in 1566, all those poems may well date from de Vere’s adolescence.
May has conceded that “[t]here is little reason” to date any of de Vere’s acknowledged verse “later than the 1580s,” when he was still only in his 30s (1991, 270). Indeed, May’s 1991 book, while referring glancingly to de Vere throughout, discussed him most extensively in chapter 2, “Courtier Verse Before Sidney” (41-68), covering the period only up to the late 1570s and dating de Vere’s composition of his most “innovati[ve]” known verses to the early 1570s (53). May has also agreed that de Vere’s known poems must be only a fragment of his corpus (1980, 12; 1991, 32).
These points are in considerable tension with May’s later claim that there is “a gulf between” de Vere’s poetry and the Shakespeare canon that allegedly “rules out” de Vere as author of the latter (2004, 221). Allowing for these two key likelihoods — that de Vere’s known poetry is only a fragment of his corpus and furthermore is merely part of his juvenilia — goes far to bridge the disjunction perceived by May and other orthodox critics.
The Oxfordian view, generally speaking, is that de Vere probably wrote or revised the works credited to “Shakespeare” about a full generation later, during his 40s and 50s. No work was published under the “Shakespeare” name until 1593 (Venus and Adonis), the year Oxford turned 43. The first canonical Shakespeare plays, or possible early versions of them, were not published even anonymously until the early 1590s (e.g., The Troublesome Reign of King John in 1591, and Titus Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, and The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, later known as Henry VI, Part 2, in 1594). No canonical play is known to have been published under Shakespeare’s name until 1598, when Oxford turned 48.
As discussed by Cheryl Eagan-Donovan (2017), scholars studying many great poets — Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, and Sylvia Plath, to name just a few diverse examples — have noted how dramatically they may change and develop their voices over time. Not just the extent but the pace and timing of development may vary greatly. Some poets blossom from immaturity to mastery while still precociously young (Rimbaud is a famous example), and some (like Whitman) much later, in middle age.
The first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), a radical break with anything he (or anyone) had written before, appeared when he was 36. The expanded 1860 edition, first presenting some of his greatest work, came out when he was 41. The year Oxford turned 41, interestingly, was 1591 — the very year the first version of King John was published (albeit anonymously) and just two years before works published under the name “Shakespeare” started appearing.
A leading expert on Whitman (Schmidgall 4) notes that the great American poet’s “[b]iographers and critics have unanimously accounted his early poetry [published into his early 30s] … very bland stuff, indistinguishable from the countless chunks of poetasting produced to satisfy … [newspaper] weeklies and dailies. … These [early] poems never rise above the arch or maudlin ….”
In sum, the allegedly mysterious “gulf” between these early de Vere poems and the Shakespeare canon is much ado about nothing. De Vere had more than sufficient time to grow and develop as a writer — in effect, to become Shakespeare — between his mid-20s and his mid-40s (see, e.g., Ogburn 390-97). Sobran, for example, noted that “whoever wrote The Tempest was at one time capable of writing Titus Andronicus, a play so inferior to Shakespeare’s mature work that its authorship was formerly in doubt” (231).
The posited evolution of de Vere into Shakespeare is certainly far less mysterious than the many puzzling incongruities of the Stratfordian authorship theory. Borrowing the words of a staunchly orthodox Stratfordian scholar, if only we had evidence even remotely comparable to this massive array of poetic parallels to “bridg[e] the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of [‘Shakespeare’ the author] and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record” concerning Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon (Schoenbaum 568).
Whitman, it should be noted, was himself a Shakespeare authorship doubter. Indeed, he anticipated the Oxfordian theory as early as 1888, observing that “only one of the ‘wolfish earls’ so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works” (52, referring specifically to the English history plays).
Return to the Introduction (with access to all poems) or continue to the next section.
[published June 22, 2018, updated 2021]
