This section continues the Introduction to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship presentation of early poems by Edward de Vere. You may return to the previous section or continue to the next section. The poems themselves (and a printable pdf version of the entire presentation) may be accessed from the Introduction.
Introduction, Part 3: Oxford’s Early Poetry in Elizabethan Literary History
Since most if not all of de Vere’s known poetry predates by some years the literary explosion of Spenser and Shakespeare, his proper place in the history of the English lyric must be assessed by what is otherwise known of the poetry being written in England between 1560 and 1590. From this perspective, Oxford’s role as a leading innovator and experimental poet becomes obvious, which also confirms and contextualizes the positive opinions voiced by his contemporaries about his literary talent.
Professor Steven W. May has set forth, in a series of publications (1975, 1980, 1991, and 2004), a wide range of not entirely consistent commentary and bibliographical study of de Vere as a courtier poet. Oxfordians have great respect for May’s diligent scholarship, even when we disagree with some of his conclusions. No other orthodox academic has devoted the extensive and respectful attention and study that he has to de Vere’s literary career.
In thoughtful dissent from the tendency of many Stratfordians to indulge in biased and exaggerated disdain for de Vere, May has observed that he was “the earliest titled courtier poet who can be identified in Elizabeth’s reign” (1980, 5), “deserves recognition not only as a poet but as a nobleman with extraordinary intellectual interests and commitments” (8), and was recognized in his time for his “lifelong devotion to learning” (8).
May also noted that de Vere was remarkably generous in his patronage of writers and other artists (8-9), and stayed in close communication with fellow writers, reading their works in draft (9). Such unusual generosity must have accounted for much of de Vere’s alleged squandering of his inherited fortune, since, as May conceded, “with some part of this amount Oxford acquired a splendid reputation for nurture of the arts and sciences” (9).
May has allowed that de Vere’s known verse reveals “a competent, fairly experimental poet,” that his poems show great variation in style — noting that the sixteen he viewed as most likely de Vere’s use “eleven different metrical and stanzaic forms,” including a Shakespearean sonnet (No. 15) — and that all the poems “are unified and brought to well-defined conclusions” (1980, 13). May noted that Oxford sometimes uses “simple” methods to achieve a “sense of design” (13), and then observed (13-14):
More complex is the weaving of a double refrain into the conventional fabric of No. 6, while the surprising and unconventional endings of Nos. 7 and 9 show Oxford playing upon the received tradition in imaginative ways. De Vere’s poetry … did more than just supply his fellow courtiers with pleasingly ornamental trifles.… He is [Queen Elizabeth’s] first truly prestigious courtier poet ….
May has praised the “innovation” (1991, 53) of de Vere’s poems (Nos. 2 to 9) published in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) (see Rollins ed. 1927; May 1980, 68-69). Those lyrics, May agreed, were written at the latest by the early 1570s when Oxford was “still in his early twenties …. De Vere’s eight poems in the Paradise create a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court up to that time,” May declared (1991, 53).
Furthermore, May has amply demonstrated on his own account that de Vere’s “verse does compare favorably with that of his ‘drab’ age contemporaries; it is, for example, varied in conception and execution in a manner well beyond the relentless plodding of Breton, Turberville, and Churchyard” (1980, 14; see also Goldstein 2016, 47-48). By “age contemporaries,” May apparently meant de Vere’s poetic cohort, not necessarily his age-mates. De Vere, as we have seen, wrote most of his known poems during his teens and 20s, even if May purports to dispute that point to some unclear extent (while supporting it on other occasions). Nicholas Breton (1545–1626), George Turberville (c. 1540–ante 1597), and Thomas Churchyard (c. 1520–1604) were by contrast five to thirty years older than de Vere, a youthful prodigy outshining them all.
May’s favorable appreciation of Oxford as an original and highly competent lyric poet is matched in the critical history of his reception until after 1920. Alexander B. Grosart in 1872 perceived in de Vere’s poems the same qualities that led Elizabethan and Jacobean literary critics William Webbe,3 “George Puttenham,”4 Francis Meres,5 and Henry Peacham6 to rank Oxford among the foremost courtier poets — a status endorsed by May (1980, 12 & n. 15; see also Looney 1920, 121-25; Goldstein 2016, 46-48; Waugh 82-83).
In a famously mysterious comment half a century before Looney first proposed de Vere in 1920 as the true Shakespeare, Grosart noted that “[a]n unlifted shadow somehow lies across his memory,” and that de Vere’s known poems “are not without touches of the true Singer” and have “an atmosphere of graciousness and culture” (359).
In the words of Oxford University Professor William J. Courthope in the second (1897) volume of his monumental study, A History of English Poetry (312), de Vere “was a great patron of literature, and headed the literary party at Court which promoted the Euphuistic movement. His own verses are distinguished for their wit, and in their terse ingenuity reflect something of the coxcombry which seems to have been a leading feature of his character.”
Closely and rather curiously paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Falstaff (see Henry IV, Part 2, 1.2.9-10), Courthope added that de Vere “was not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others” (313). (Many Oxfordians believe de Vere created the louche knight Falstaff as something of a self-parody.) Even Sir Sidney Lee, the leading (and adamantly Stratfordian) Shakespeare biographer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, recognized that de Vere was “the best of the courtier poets in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign” and “wrote verse of much lyric beauty” (quoted in Goldstein 2016, 47).
Oxford’s reputation as one of the foremost lyrical poets of the Elizabethan age thus survived into the early 20th century before being challenged by partisans of the Stratfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. During the three decades from 1560 to 1590, the only other poet whose versatility, range of expression, and literary influences might compare would be George Gascoigne. Although disputed, it has even been suggested that some of de Vere’s poetry might have appeared under Gascoigne’s name (compare, e.g., Ward’s 1926 and Miller’s 1975 editions of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, Ogburn 513-19, and Kreiler, with Prechter 2010).
May affirmed that Oxford was “the premier Elizabethan courtier poet” (1991, 52) and “the chief innovator due to the range of his subject matter and the variety of its execution.… [His] experimentation provided a much broader foundation for the development of lyric poetry at court [than Edward Dyer’s]” (54).
The modern decline in Oxford’s reputation among most other orthodox scholars appears to be an anachronistic reaction to his emergence, since 1920, as the leading non-Stratfordian authorship candidate (see, e.g., Shahan & Whalen 251-52; Goldstein 2016, 47; Waugh 82-83).
3 As Webbe stated (1586, C3v) [sic]: “I may not omitte the deserved commendations of many honourable and noble Lords, and Gentlemen, in her Maiesties Courte, which in the rare devises of Poetry, have been and yet are most excellent skylfull, among whom the right honourable earl of Oxford may challenge himselfe to ye title of most excellent among the rest.”
4 One passage in the anonymously published Arte of English Poesie (1589) (commonly attributed to Puttenham) discussed the “very many notable gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, And suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it: as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned” (Arber ed. 37). Another passage (Arber ed. 75) specifically named Oxford as foremost among those who “in her majesty’s time that now is are sprong up [sic] another crew of courtly makers, Noblemen and Gentlemen of her Majesty’s own servants, who have written commendably well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest.” The author declared that of this “number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford.”
5 As Meres stated (1598, 283v) [sic]: “The best among us for comedy be Edward Earle of Oxford, Maister Rowely … Master Edwardes … Iohn Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, Green, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Mundye our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathaway, and Henry Chettle.” Anti-Oxfordians often tout the fact that Meres listed both Oxford and “Shakespeare,” but there are several plausible explanations for that consistent with “Shakespeare” being Oxford’s pseudonym, including that Meres was unaware of it or was going along with, perhaps even helping to maintain, the pseudonym.
6 As Peacham stated (1622, O2r) [sic]: “In the time of our late Queen Elizabeth, which was truly a Golden Age (for such a world of refined wits, and excellent spirits it produced, whose like are hardly to be hoped for, in any succeeding age) above others who honoured poesie with their pennes and practice (to omit her Majesty, who had singular gift therein) were Edward Earl of Oxford, the Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, our Phoenix the noble sir Phillip Sidney, M. Edward Dier, M. Edmund Spencer, and M. Samuel Daniel, with sundry others whom (together with those yet living, and so well known) not out of Envie but to avoid tediousness I overpasse. Thus much of poetry.”
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[published June 22, 2018, updated 2021]
