Footnotes part 2

SORTED FOR THE WEEKEND? and the other advertisements quoted here came from ads on the London Tube, March 2000. I didn't take my melatonin either and don't remember where most of them came from.

January, Mary's Giant Schnauzer: In-jokes. (January is Ana Cox's husband's band; she was my British publicist for The Knowledge of Water and Xeroxed me vital pages of The Paine of Pleasure. Thank you again, Ana! Mary's Giant Schnauzer is Max, ninety lovable doggy pounds of him. That's my wonderful sister-in-law Mary Jane behind him.)

Oxfordians argue there are more Oxfordian than Stratfordian in-jokes in Shakespeare's plays; but that may be because the Oxfordians try harder to find them.

Chris Quentin. Masterly with Distinction. Striking Also: March 2000 ad for Asahi Beer.

We waited all night in the cold….We were groundlings: An in-joke for my friends in London, 1968-69. Hi, gang.

Ted Gould's apartment: Thanks to David and Diana, whose apartment this really is (but theirs is much more tasteful).

Big velvety-looking engraving: The famous mezzotint of Garrick as Hamlet; Joe's knowledge doesn't extend this far.

A gigantic Ferris wheel: Much more pleasant than described. It opened in February 2000. There's a picture of it in my photo album.

Earth has not anything to show more fair: Wordsworth, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802."

He was not of an age, but for all time: Jonson on Shakespeare, prefatory matter to the First Folio.

Chemistry, philology, biography: See Rendell and Foster. Do I mean sodium hypochlorite? The article from which I got this said "hypocloride," which doesn't exist elsewhere.

Don Foster's Shaxicon database: Much has been written about Foster's SHAXICON database, both pro and con, and his methods of forensic literary detection. The database remains unpublished; recently Steve Roth has reverse-engineered a publicly available version, SHAXICAN, which is available at
http://www.totus.org/SHAXICAN/roth/shaxiconmeetsshaxican.htm

The Mysterious William Shakespeare, by Charlton Ogburn: Since Charlton Ogburn's death this book has been somewhat superseded by Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare and other works, most notably Mark Anderson's splendidly researched Shakespeare by Anolther Name; but at the time that this book is set, Ogburn was still the greatest mine of facts. Another, very old but useful source, is B.M. Ward's biography of the Earl of Oxford, which reprints many of the primary-source references to him.

Fulke Greville's father was honorary recorder of Stratford when Shakespeare was a boy: Honan, p. 175.

Tober used to collect them: The Frank W. Tober collection of forgeries is now at the University of Delaware and is described on their Web site. The Tober collection is not the Kellogg Collection; Frank W. Tober deliberately collected fakes.

Between ten and twenty million: My manuscript dealer friend Evan Holzwasser's very rough estimate; who can tell?

Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he has: The inscription on the lead casket (the right one) in The Merchant of Venice.

In Elizabethan times the rich folk ate beef, mutton, fish…: Thanks to Laurence Senelick.

Brittle beauty, that nature made so frail: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, "Brittle Beauty"

But in the middle of the lawn, in a pool of astonishingly green grass, stands one huge surviving tree: And isn't it beautiful.

Shakespeare wrote that the Wars of the Roses started in the Temple Gardens: Henry VI, part 1, Act II, sc. 4.

In every breath you take is an atom of oxygen once breathed by Julius Caesar: A classic case of a large number, applied to a small number, producing a result that looks more significant than it is.

Here's where Richard Field's shop was: Near Blackfriars.

Some of the publishers sold from taverns: Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but I couldn't resist the picture.

Bright's Treatise of Melancholy, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti, North's Plutarch's Lives, Sir John Harington's English Orlando Furioso: See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, and Arthur Baker, A Shakespeare Commentary. Sobran, pp. 156-157, gives a handy list of Shakespeare's major sources. There is little quarrel between Stratfordians and Oxfordians on this score, except with regard to the Strachey Bermudas letter.

Location of Oxford's family house: Oxford Court is off Cannon St. just opposite the Cannon St. Station.

J. Thomas Looney: Pronounced Loney. The alternate Shakespeareans tend to attract amusing surnames; one of the most notorious Baconians was George Batty. If your copy of Chasing Shakespeares says that Looney was published in 1928, you have an advance reader's copy.

Ogburn on Oxford's early life: Ogburn, p. 431 ff. In her study of Sir Thomas Smith, Stephanie Hopkins Hughes argues that Edward de Vere spent much of his early life, not with his father, but with Smith, an Elizabethan polymath and political figure, at that time Provost of Eton. Joe wouldn't have seen this, but Mark Anderson discusses it in Shakespeare by Another Name.

Wild pigs go two, three hundred pounds, and their tusks are knives: Matthew Renner, personal communication (which included showing me razor-sharp boar's tusks as long as your finger. Wow). You would indeed have to be crazy to try killing one with a rapier, a thin, flexible sword that tends to snap even when made of modern steel; rapiers would have been even more brittle in Elizabethan times. John de Vere's encounter with the boar is described by Gervase Markham; quoted in Ogburn, p. 430.

If hunting boars in Texas is your idea of fun, get in touch with Matt Renner at boarsoftexas@yahoo.com..

Two of Edward de Vere's aunts married poets: Ogburn, pp. 415-416.

Frances de Vere married Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Surrey first wrote sonnets in English; he was also the first English writer of blank verse. Surrey's sons were Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Henry Howard, both of whom we'll meet later. Thomas Howard's son was Philip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, canonized in 1970 as St. Philip Howard; he'll come up too.

Anne de Vere married Edmund, baron Sheffield, whose poetry has been lost.

Edward de Vere had literary connections through Cecil as well. Mildred Cooke, who married William Cecil, was one of four notoriously literary sisters. The others married Henry Killigrew, Sir Thomas Hoby, and Nicholas Bacon--the father of Francis Bacon, who thus became Oxford's cousin-in-law. The poet George Gascoigne was also a relative through the Cookes.

See the genealogical chart of the de Vere, Cecil, and Howard families.

John de Vere kept a company of actors: Ogburn, p. 400; Sobran, p. 110. So, intermittently throughout his life, did Oxford.

Lawrence Stone: The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.

Ogburn tells a story about the Veres and King Henry VII: Ogburn, pp. 428-429.

Arthur Golding, Oxford's tutor while he was translating the Metamorphoses. Arthur Golding, Oxford's uncle: Ogburn, p. 433. Ogburn thinks Oxford had a hand in the Metamorphoses, pp. 443-447, and says Golding tutored Oxford in both law and literature. Golding said of Oxford in 1564, dedicating to him Th'Abridgment of the histories of Trogus Pompeius: "It is not unknown to others, and I have had experience thereof myself, how earnest a desire your honour hath naturally grafted in you to read, peruse, and communicate with others as well the histories of ancient times, and things done long ago, as also the present estate of things in our days, and that not without a certain poignancy of wit and ripeness of understanding." Quoted Ogburn, p. 443. Other sources (which Joe hasn't seen yet) don't agree that Golding officially tutored Oxford; at the least, however, both were members of Cecil's household at the same time.

Oxford's education under Cecil: Ogburn, pp. 432 ff. Cecil's plan for his studies, p. 440. See Conyers Read, p. 125-126. This education is sometimes cited as a typical Renaissance education, which, of course, it is not.

epee: He probably means rapier.

An actor's education: See M.C. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player.

Stratford had a local troupe of amateur actors: Possibly; see Honan, p. 35.

August 1561, Queen Elizabeth visits Castle Hedingham: Ogburn, pp. 407, 409-410.

Tyrrell, the name of a murderer: Sir James Tyrrel, the murderer of the little princes in the Tower in Richard III.

A murderer and a villain! A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe/Of your precedent lord…: Hamlet, Act III, sc. 3.

Oxford's arrival in London: Ogburn, p. 437. "On the 3rd day of September came riding out of Essex from the funeral of the Earl of Oxford his father [actually three days after it], the young Earl of Oxford, with seven score horse all in black, through London and Chepe and Ludgate, and so to Temple Bar…between 5 and 6 of the afternoon." Ogburn thinks the horses are horses, but they are more likely to be horsemen. Pulling together 140 matched black horses is a little extreme even for Oxford.

More than half the size of King Henry's private guard, and larger than Elizabeth's escort when she entered London before her coronation: King Henry's private guard was about 250; Elizabeth entered London with approximately 100 men.

Framed in the front of forlorn hope, past all recovery: First published in The Paradise of Dainty Devices, ed. Richard Edwards [and others], 1576, where it is attributed to "E.O." Chiljan, p. 162.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…: Macbeth, Act V, sc. 5.

Comes to London around 1587: In September 1587 Shakespeare was in Stratford, Price, Shakespeare: The Unorthodox Biography, p. 15; but he may have been in London previously. Some commentators have argued that, since his last children were born in February 1585, Shakespeare could have left Stratford as early as May 1584.

In 1598 Francis Meres gives a list of a dozen Shakespeare plays, and missed a couple more; by 1598 Shakespeare had probably written about sixteen plays: Ogburn, p. 745. One of the plays Meres gives is Love's Labour's Won, not heard of before or since. The plays Meres lists are not necessarily the versions we have, of course.

Ogburn has a fancy-footwork explanation; all the plays have to be written much earlier: Ogburn, pp. 382-390. Considerable Oxfordian and Stratfordian effort has gone into dating the plays. On the Oxfordian side, texts often cited include Eva Turner Clark's Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays: A Study of the Early Court Revels and Personalities of the Times, 3rd revised edition by Ruth Loyd Miller, 1974; but this work is being supplanted by the De Vere Society dating project and others. Clark far overargues her points but includes interesting indications of early composition of some plays. See my short notes on dating Shakespeare's plays.

The Cecil monument: Described in Ogburn, p. 703 . Thanks to Mr. Bernard Barrell for sharing his expertise on Cecil's funerary monuments.

Lady Bridget married a nobody: Bridget de Vere married Francis Norrys, baron Rycote; Ogburn, p. 743.

Lady Elizabeth de Vere…is 14 years old: Ogburn's translation; Ogburn, p. 703.

Cecil set spies on his children and the wards: Ogburn, p. 405.

Don Cannon's a bookseller: He is, but everything else in this description, and everything this character does, is fictional. Thanks, Don, for supporting Bouchercon. Get in touch with me; I still owe you a book and your toys.

Conyers Read is completely inadequate: Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth. The Bedford Historical Series XVII. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. First published 1955. Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth. London: Jonathan Cape, 1960. Conyers Read is not friendly toward Oxford; "this is the letter of a cad if ever there was one," he writes in Burghley, p. 135.

Cecil and the ghost: Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (ed. 1634), p. 45, quoted in Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, p. 30-31. I slightly simplified this anecdote so that it could be echoed in Joe and Posy's visit to the Hatfield library. Cecil had actually lost books, money, and his bedding (it was apparently the first time he had gambled) and vowed revenge. At night he made a hole in the wall

Read characterizes this as "clever, if somewhat unscrupulous."

Peacham, the source of this anecdote, apparently knew the family well, and in that light he is interesting that The Compleat Gentleman is an Oxfordian locus classicus. In a list of authors that were eminent in Elizabeth's day, Peacham includes Oxford but not Shakespeare; Oxfordians argue that this is because Peacham had inside information that the two were one man. Peter Dickson, an Oxfordian, notes that Peacham's book went through four editions (in 1622, 1627, 1634, and 1661) without the "error" being corrected. See Oldenburg, summarizing Dickson's research, and Peacham, Compleat Gentleman (1622), pp. 95-96.

Fish on Wednesdays: Cecil was responsible for the notorious and unpopular bill establishing a second "fish day" on Wednesdays to encourage the English fishing industry. Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, pp. 271-274; Ogburn, MWS, p. 369.

She let him visit when she was in bed. When she created him Earl of Leicester she tickled him on the neck: Weir, Elizabeth, p. 150.

Amy Dudley: I am indebted to Weir's version, Elizabeth, pp. 92-112. Weir is more even-handed than my hunters after conspiracy, but concludes that Cecil had "a compelling motive for doing away with Amy, and was the person who profited by her death." Weir, p. 109.

"So wretched a conspiracy to prosper": Alvaro de Quadra to the Duchess of Parma (King Philip's sister), Sept. 11, 1560, quoted Weir, Elizabeth, p. 97. Compare Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil, pp. 199-203.

Read thinks that Cecil was sending a message to Elizabeth: Read, ibid., p. 200.

She never gets the man she wants: Weir expresses some reservations that Elizabeth in fact wanted to marry Dudley--which would, in any case, have been politically unsettling even if Dudley's wife had died blamelessly.

When he was seventeen, he killed a man: Ogburn, p. 454-455; Read, p. 126.

Why came you between us? I was hurt under your arm: Romeo and Juliet, Act III, sc. 1.

Shakespeare jokes about se offendendo in Hamlet: Hamlet, Act V, sc. 1.

Fishmonger: "Fishmonger" has often been glossed in its slang meaning of "brothel-keeper." This meaning would be consistent with Oxford's feelings toward the father of his supposedly unfaithful wife, if Oxford were the author and especially if Cecil himself arranged for his daughter to become pregnant by another man. But, as I mentioned above, it might equally refer to the Cecil's Fast bill.

Like the evidence Katherine Darnell is going to show Joe, this evidence allows one to infer a relatively early date for Hamlet; the Cecil's Fast bill was passed in the Parliament of 1563.

Oxfordians would be quick to point out that in 1563 Oxford was a ward in Cecil's household and would have been familiar with the bill.

Polonius's advice to his son is taken from a letter of Cecil to Robert Cecil: "Certain Precepts to his Son," written about 1584 and not published until 1616 (Sobran, p. 103), by which time William Shakespeare of Stratford was dead. If it is a source, the playwright must have seen it in manuscript. Chambers notes some resemblance to Polonius's speech, most closely in the advice on lending and borrowing. "Certain Precepts" can be viewed at http://www.princehamlet.com/burghley.html .

He was in his first military campaign at nineteen: Under Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex. Thomas Radcliffe was Southampton's uncle. See Ogburn, pp. 466, 469. Read is less sure about Oxford's military experience: Read, p. 127.

Elizabeth called him 'my Turk'": Ogburn, p. 502. Cf. OED, "Turk," definition 4: "Applied to any one having qualities attributed to the Turks; a cruel, rigorous, or tyrannical man; any one behaving as a barbarian or savage; one who treats his wife hardly; a bad-tempered or unmanageable man… 1579 Lyly, Euphues: 'Was never…any Turke so vyle and brutishe.'" Oxford wanted to visit Turkey and the Grand Turk during his European tour, though the furthest east he seems to have got is Dubrovnik, "the seacoast of Bohemia."

Cecil says in a letter that it was Oxford's idea, which clearly isn't true…Cecil actually had Elizabeth come to his house one day to give the bride away, and Oxford didn't show: Ogburn, p. 491.

Sir Cloudesley Shovell: An eighteenth-century admiral with a delightful name.

According to a rumor at the time and a Privy Council minute three years later, Oxford bought a ship and offered a captain two thousand pounds to take Norfolk to Spain: Ogburn, p. 493; Read, pp. 128-129, who gives a verdict of "not proven."

A ward can't marry the daughter of a commoner: A guardian cannot force a ward of higher rank to marry a person of lower rank. The legal term is disparagement. In All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram complains that his marriage to Helena disparages his rank, and the King says he will therefore ennoble Helena. There are very few cases of disparagement, says Patrick Murphy, but Oxford's marriage to Cecil's daughter is one of them; Cecil was ennobled in order to prevent a charge of disparagement. Patrick M. Murphy, "Wriothesley's Resistance," p. 325.

The peers condemned Norfolk: Read, pp. 46-48. But apparently Oxford was not one of the peers who tried him.

Norfolk was the only duke in England then, and there were no marquesses, so the earl with the oldest title was the highest-ranking nobleman in England: Oxfordians make much of this, which may or may not be significant. By itself his title gave Oxford no political power.

St. Edward's Chapel: I am very grateful to Mr. Bernard Barrell for a private tour of the Confessor's Shrine.

Strong doesn't understand: Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth.

The court wasn't that large: There were 26 peers. All earls were (and are) addressed by the Queen as "cousin", but in Elizabeth's time this was literally the case; eight of her earls were her first cousins.

Cecil has control of Oxford's money, because the story is Oxford's a spendthrift: Even his supporters have not been impressed with Oxford's financial sense. The tin mining letters show it in some detail; he was quite an optimist. But Elizabethan courtiers were expected to be spendthrift.

In May 1573, "by the highway from Gravesend to Rochester," Oxford and three men stage a mock-robbery: Ogburn, pp. 528-529. Henry IV part 1, Act II, sc. 2.

And Shakespeare says the robbery takes place in May in the fourteenth year of Henry IV's reign. Henry IV died before May of his fourteenth regnal year, but Elizabeth didn't and May of her fourteenth regnal year was May 1573: The date is given, not in Henry IV part 1, but in The Famous Victories of Henry Fift, which is not necessarily Shakespeare's.

Without permission, Oxford leaves England and goes to Brussels: Read, pp. 130-132; Ogburn, pp. 531-533.

But within two weeks he lets himself be hauled back: By Thomas Bedingfield, later the translator of Cardanus Comfort.

Thereby to take an occasion to return I am off from that opinion: Oxford to William Cecil, March 17, 1575; Chiljan, p. 17.

Advanced Renaissance Culture: Among the people Oxford is known to have visited is Johannes Sturmius, a major European educational theorist; see Ogburn, pp. 542-543.

Nothing is better than God, and peanut butter is better than nothing, but peanut butter's not better than God: Thanks, Delia.

Upon a raw and gusty day, The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores: Julius Caesar, Act I, sc. 2.

Oxford hears about the birth only in late September: The mail between England and Italy was not remarkably fast, but, if Cecil wrote to his son-in-law when the child was born on July 2, his letter seems to have taken longer than usual to reach Italy. The whole story of who did what when in the case of Elizabeth de Vere's paternity is rich with opportunities for insinuation and counteraccusation. Ogburn suggests a plot involving Lord Henry Howard and/or Rowland Yorke, Oxford's receiver, to blacken Oxford's reputation, and marshals evidence that Elizabeth de Vere may have been born later than the last date at which Oxford thought she could have been his. Both Ogburn and Read write extensively on this; Ogburn, Chapter 28, pp. 555-580; Read, pp. 133-138. See also Patrick Murphy, "Wriothesley's Resistance," p. 336.

Attacked by pirates in the English Channel: Ogburn, p. 556; Read, p. 133.

Who's sick of his son-in-law?: Original to Posy, as far as I know, but the Henry Howard-Rowland Yorke combination has been suggested as a source for Iago.

Bachelor rooms: At Charing Cross; Chiljan, p. 26, Ogburn, p. 561. He had previously lived at the Savoy, haunt of writers, with Anne; the Savoy is an easy walk from Charing Cross.

continued