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 Overview. The poems themselves (and a printable pdf version of the entire presentation) may be accessed from the Introduction.
Introduction, Part 5: Evaluating the Poetic Parallels
Professor May has criticized Oxfordians for detecting some Shakespearean echoes in a few poems mistakenly (in May’s opinion) credited to de Vere (2004, 222, 224-25). But more interesting is that several poems of which Looney was unaware in the 1920s — Nos. 12, 13, and 18 — are notably rich in parallels to the Shakespeare canon. May identified Nos. 12 and 13 as probably written by de Vere, and No. 18 as possibly so. See Note on Sources, Titles, and Presentation of Parallels.
Looney’s perception of telling similarities between de Vere’s known writing and that of “Shakespeare” has thus been corroborated by poems identified by May, which Looney did not even consider. This is only one of several intriguing cases in which evidence coming to light since Looney’s pioneering work has strengthened the Oxfordian hypothesis.
Considering all these factors, no special probative weight should be attached to any particular parallel or parallels in isolation from the larger fact pattern. Some may well be part of the common idiom of Elizabethan poetics, while others may have a more idiosyncratic value. Yet what ultimately matters is the large quantity of different types of parallelisms, including use of particular rhetorical figures when combined with parallel syntax or vocabulary. Nor should these parallels be considered final or definitive. Further connections certainly await discovery through more careful and refined methodologies, merging linguistics and literary study.
May’s only actual analysis of any specific Oxford-Shakespeare parallels appears in a short section of his 2004 article (223-29). While May essentially accused Oxfordians of cherry-picking similarities between the two bodies of writing (222-23), he limited his own analysis to only a handful of parallels and did not fully explore even those, missing the vastly greater number he could have addressed (including many much stronger ones), had he consulted Sobran’s extensive 1997 study — which instead May either overlooked or chose to ignore.
Departing in 1980 from the reasonable premise that “Elizabethan poets drew upon a broad, common range of motifs, rhetorical devices, allusions, and adages” (11-12), May offered the dubious contention that Oxford’s poems “fail in any way to connect [him] with Shakespeare” (12; emphasis added), later arguing that “nothing in Oxford’s canonical verse in any way hints at an affinity” with Shakespeare’s writings (2004, 242; emphasis added) — and in a startlingly unwarranted final leap, asserting that there is “a gulf between the two” bodies of writing that actually “rules out” de Vere’s candidacy as the true Shakespeare (2004, 221). The latter claim seems to echo dubious stylometric arguments mentioned in note 2 of the Introduction.
There would seem to be some tension, to say the least, between May’s classification of de Vere as a poet who, in Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), “create[d] a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court up to that time” (1991, 53), and May’s later claims that “Oxford’s verse [was] … without distinction [in] the mid-[16th]-century tradition of Tudor poetry” (2004, 223), and that “Oxford has no more claim to be the true author of Shakespeare’s works than any other of the hundreds of poets” writing during that period (232).
In 2004, writing for the first time in a more explicit context about authorship (223-30), May cited the formerly “drab” Turberville (1980, 14) as one of many poets allegedly indistinguishable from de Vere as a supplier of various motifs, words, and styles also appearing in the Shakespeare canon, which May argued were “ubiquitous” (2004, 227) in Elizabethan verse. May, in 2004, asserted that “Oxford’s verse, in short, lacks any unique features of style, theme, or subject to connect it to Shakespeare’s poetry” (225).
In 2004 May also lavished great attention on Oxford-Shakespeare parallels involving the “haggard” hawk (falconry) motif (Poems No. 9 and No. 19), as applied to willful women. To May this pattern, first explored by Looney (1920, 139-40, 163-64), is an irrelevant “commonplace in Elizabethan verse” (2004, 224). Taken in isolation, these parallels may not be as impressive as some others among the multitude explored here, which May could have considered had he consulted Sobran’s book.
In support of his claim, May cites six poems by others (223-24, 228, 244-45, 249), though one (by John Grange) does not refer to “haggards” at all, only the more generic term “Unmanned hawks” (244). One point of Looney’s argument, as May himself acknowledged, was the distinctiveness of the word “haggard,” a noun as used here which refers to a wild adult hawk, typically female, caught for training (OED 6: 1013).
Properly viewed in context, the haggard hawk parallels are actually very significant. We believe May was profoundly mistaken to dismiss them as irrelevant coincidences (see details in notes to Nos. 9 and 19). In any event, May fundamentally missed the broader relevant points, already stressed by Looney in 1920: first, the sheer quantity of all the interlocking parallels between Oxford’s known poetry and the Shakespeare canon; second, the unusual quality of many specific parallels; and finally, the overall combination of quantity and quality in the observed intertextuality.
Do the “drab” George Turberville et al. offer anything remotely comparable? We invite readers to compare for themselves the five references to “haggards” by other poets as cited by May. His first example, by the prolific hack Turberville (“wild … As though you were a haggard Hawk … Live like a haggard … and for no luring care,” 244), bears some comparison to language in No. 19. But it falls short of the strong parallels between Shakespeare (especially The Taming of the Shrew) and Nos. 9 and 19 (especially taken together), with regard to taming a haggard as a paternalistic metaphor for winning over a female lover.
Another example cited by May, by George Whetstone (“The haggard then that checked of late, Will stoop to fancy’s lure,” 245), connects rather weakly to the taming theme, but more like crass bribery, as Whetstone describes his swain raiding his “novice purse” to woo his lady with “trifling chain[s,] A caul of gold and other knacks.” May’s three other examples are weaker still by comparison (one might even say “drab”). They do not connect to the theme or language of taming nor the language of haggards ranging wild. Compare, for example, No. 19 (line 9) and its parallels to Much Ado About Nothing and Othello, with May (2004, 245, 249) (George Gascoigne, “haggard hawks mislike an empty hand”; John God, “her body[’s] … haggard wonts”; and again Turberville, “a haggard kite”).
The haggard hawk echoes reveal that de Vere, in three separate references in two of these twenty surviving early poems — and Shakespeare, in at least six separate references in five very different plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet (seven references in six plays if we count Edward III) — share a fascination with the aristocratic sport of falconry and its terms of art as metaphors for human behavior.
The three de Vere references use the haggard mainly to illustrate the wooing and “taming” of strong-willed women (though with some gender ambiguity in No. 9). So do the four references in Shrew, Much Ado, and Othello. Perhaps reflecting some degree of personal and artistic growth as compared to the time when de Vere wrote his youthful lyrics, Shakespeare also flips the genders — in Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Edward III — to use falconry in the context of describing or luring a male, with Juliet imagined as a female falconer.
If a comparable set of falconry parallels exists between Shakespeare and any other early modern English writer, we are not aware of it and May has not pointed it out. And this is merely one example of May’s generally inadequate analysis of the poetic parallels, just as the haggard hawk echoes are merely a tiny sampling of the hundreds of parallels explored here, many of them much stronger than these falconry parallels.
May also seized on and attempted to discredit the Shakespearean parallels to the “damask rose” references in Poems No. 14 and No. 17 (see May 2004, 224, 245-47). Those echoes, like the haggard hawk parallels, were first explored by Looney (1920, 141-45). Unquestionably, the pervasive popularity of white (or lily) and red (or rosy) imagery in the poetry of the time (and many other times), to describe facial beauty (and not only female — see, e.g., Venus and Adonis), limits the conclusions that can be drawn from such examples in isolation from other, more tellingly idiosyncratic comparisons. As May showed, the damask rose seems to have been a popular Elizabethan motif.
Yet these damask rose echoes are still significant — especially, again, considering how they fit into the broader intertextuality explored here. As Looney noted, No. 14 “is the only poem in the De Vere collection in which the writer lingers tenderly and seriously on the beauty of a woman’s face; and … his whole treatment turns upon the contrast of white and red, the lily and the damask rose” (141-42). Looney observed the “striking fact … that the only poem of ‘Shakespeare’s’ [Lucrece] in which he dwells at length in the same spirit upon the same theme is dominated by the identical contrast” (142).
No similarly strong parallels are suggested in any of the examples by other poets (such as Turberville), regarding white and red facial imagery as cited by May (246-47). Looney correctly concluded that No. 14 and Lucrece, by contrast, “form an excellent example” (145). They do indeed resonate tellingly (see details in notes to Nos. 14 and 17).
Furthermore, May misunderstood and exaggerated Looney’s reliance on the damask rose parallels. Looney did briefly discuss them, but he then immediately and very carefully (145) “emphasize[d] a principle which is vital to the argument … namely, that we are not here primarily concerned with the mere piling up of parallel passages [emphasis added]. What matters most of all is mental correspondence and the general unity of treatment which follows from it.”
It is possible that Looney may have been overly impressed with some structural or stylistic similarities he noticed between the de Vere poems and the Shakespeare canon. Though a diligent schoolteacher and rigorous scholar, Looney candidly confessed his own lack of deep expert knowledge of Elizabethan poetry. And he was, moreover, writing before modern bibliographical tools and practices were very developed. Conceding May’s reasonable premise that some structural or stylistic echoes were widespread in the poetry of the time (1980, 11-12; 2004, 223-30), that cannot in itself refute Looney’s conclusion. Far less can it negate the stunning array of parallels summarized and explored here.
Looney barely scratched the surface. May focused briefly on a few leaves on a few trees, but failed to see the forest.
May’s reply to Goldstein’s 2016 article (in an email quoted in Goldstein 2017, 23-24) typifies the weak arguments deployed by Stratfordians to contest the growing evidence for Oxford’s authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems.
First, May inexplicably claims that the Oxfordian “argument assumes that Shakespeare repeated himself, expressing the same ideas over and over with similar wording. Did he? I don’t think he did.” But Oxfordians “assume” nothing of the kind. We observe and document the undeniable empirical fact that Shakespeare did echo both himself (as anyone with a standard concordance may confirm in a few minutes) and the young de Vere (as numerous studies, including this one and those by Sobran and Fowler, amply demonstrate).
May’s second and more interesting response is that “most of [de Vere’s early poems were] in print and available for Shakespeare to plagiarize” (quoted in Goldstein 24). But how “available” were they, really? To the extent they largely circulated in manuscript (some of them exclusively so) among de Vere’s aristocratic social circle, it seems puzzling how a young commoner recently arrived in London’s disreputable theatre scene might have gained access to them. May’s suggestion is also a curious example of the modern orthodox tendency to prop up the Stratfordian authorship theory by diminishing Shakespeare’s originality. Was the great author a mere plagiarizer? Are Stratfordians inadvertently destroying the Shakespearean village in order to save it (or their theory)? Equally important, the argument smacks of the ad hoc reasoning that Stratfordians regularly employ to avoid reconsidering their own assumptions. May began by arguing there are no connections between Shakespeare and de Vere’s lyric voice. He now admits that maybe such connections do exist but then pivots to try to explain them with an improbable theory of literary influence.
May’s third response is that parallels are “evidence of a single authorship ONLY if … Oxford, Shakespeare, and no one else used these phrases,” which May noted was not always the case (quoted in Goldstein 24; ALL-CAPS in May’s original email; italic emphasis added here). That is mistaken in multiple ways. Many of the stronger echoes explored here may not be fully replicated (if at all) by any other writer of the time (though we concede this is a valid subject for continuing study). In any event, the mere fact that some other writer might also echo a given verbal motif does not negate its significance if the parallels between de Vere and Shakespeare are more numerous and telling in context. Quality, quantity, and context are all extremely important. It would be arbitrary to ignore a parallel just because some “two- and three-word clusters” (as Goldstein noted, 24) generate multiple “hits” in databases of contemporary writings. All evidence must be evaluated for its nature and weight, which may vary.
May further argues: “No matter how many examples you find, the repetitions have no evidentiary value” (quoted in Goldstein 24; emphasis added here). We respectfully disagree. Cumulative, corroborative, and contextual evidence, given sufficient quality and quantity, is the essence of a valid circumstantial argument — a very powerful argument in this case.
May’s all-or-nothing approach is illogical and tiresomely reminiscent of the long-held attitude of many Stratfordians — that unless and until Oxfordians produce conclusive airtight proof, the theory should simply be ignored and ridiculed, not seriously studied. That is not how scholars should debate issues, especially ones like this one where much evidence is unclear, disputed, or missing due to the ravages of time. Orthodox scholars, for their part, despite centuries of sustained and strenuous efforts, have yet to produce anything remotely resembling airtight proof that William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon had any literary career at all, far less that he was the greatest writer of his age.
May’s second suggestion, that Shakespeare plagiarized de Vere, raises some fascinating issues, not merely about the particular instance in dispute, but more broadly about the use of ad hoc arguments to salvage a declining paradigm. May’s suggestion is strangely at variance with the general orthodox dismissal of de Vere as merely one of numerous unremarkable poets, indistinguishable from the rest, recycling ubiquitous tropes of the era. As discussed above, May himself, by 2004, seemed to fully embrace that view, at the cost of contradicting (to some extent) his own earlier praise for de Vere’s artistic innovation and distinction.
But May and other orthodox critics cannot have it both ways. In one view, the echoes between de Vere and Shakespeare are allegedly irrelevant, coincidental, and meaningless, indicating nothing more than a shared set of Elizabethan literary idioms, common to all writers of the time. In the other view (as May now suggests), the echoes are not meaningless at all. Rather, they indicate that Shakespeare — star of poets! soul of the age! — was influenced to a remarkable and unusual degree by the early verse of a supposedly mediocre courtier poet, verse that was circulating up to a full generation before Shakspere of Stratford arrived in London.
In fact, May now suggests, Shakespeare might have been so impressed by young de Vere’s work that he extensively “plagiarized” it! Who knew? We suggest it is more plausible and likely they were the same person at different stages of life and artistic development.
To be sure, it is common ground that the author Shakespeare (whoever he was) borrowed plots and ideas from many others. Doubtless he borrowed language too, as well as structural and stylistic ideas. He was certainly influenced by other writers, just as he influenced many. In some cases, as with Christopher Marlowe, the influence seems to be important and to have gone both ways. The lines between literary influence, borrowing, and outright theft (plagiarism) may often be blurred. Furthermore, writers in cultures and times different from our own did not necessarily have the same attitudes about this that we do today.
In any event, May’s latest suggestion seems to be that de Vere was, at the very least, a remarkably influential and important Elizabethan poet. His suggestion that Shakespeare might have plagiarized de Vere’s juvenilia necessarily focuses even more attention on the compelling and extensive parallels between de Vere’s early work and the Shakespeare canon. We look forward to May and other orthodox scholars pursuing this fascinating suggestion.
Return to the previous section or continue to the Overview. You may also return to the Introduction (with access to all poems).
[published June 22, 2018, updated 2021]
