Was the Earl of Oxford an Actor?

The argument

The case has three steps. The plays handle performance, rehearsal and the playhouse with an insider’s ease, so whoever wrote them knew the stage from within. De Vere kept a life in the theatre. The man from Stratford, on this reading, was a shareholder and investor rather than a performer. Taken together, the three are said to make de Vere the author.

The first step is not in dispute here: whoever wrote the plays knew the theatre well. The argument turns on what happens after it, and that depends on what the word acting is being asked to carry.

What the word has to carry

The claim slides between three different things. One is an author who writes about the stage with close knowledge of how it works. A second is a nobleman taking part in the court’s masques, tilts and Shrovetide devices, the ordinary recreation of his rank. A third is a person performing as a professional on the public stage. Only the third would place de Vere among the players, and the third is the one the evidence never reaches.

The first belongs to the works, and it is expected of whoever wrote them. A dramatist who did not understand performance could not have written the play scenes in Hamlet, so the knowledge describes the author without telling us which candidate that was. This is resemblance, the works looking like the work of a theatre man, and resemblance does not name an author (the logical error is affirming the consequent).

The second was normal for any Elizabethan peer. Noblemen devised and appeared in court entertainments as a matter of course, and the surviving record for de Vere is of this kind. Gilbert Talbot’s letter of 1579 describes a Shrovetide device “presented by the persons of the Earl of Oxford” and three other lords, a courtly entertainment before the Queen. Display of that sort carries no weight on who wrote the works.

What that appearance involved is well recorded. In the court masque the courtiers danced, and the speaking and singing parts went to hired players and musicians: Anne of Denmark and her ladies danced in The Masque of Blackness in 1605 but did not speak. The first queen to speak a part was Henrietta Maria, in French, in a private performance of Racan’s pastoral Artenice in 1626, and The Shepherd’s Paradise in 1633 was the first masque in which she and her ladies took speaking parts. At the tilts the speeches were commonly delivered by boys and pages; when de Vere ran as the Knight of the Tree of the Sun in January 1581, a page spoke for him. The gentlemen of Gray’s Inn ran their own revels in 1594 and brought in professionals for the play, whom their record calls “a Company of base and common Fellows”. In 1601 Henry Clifton, a Norfolk esquire, took the men running the Children of the Chapel to Star Chamber after his thirteen-year-old son was seized on his way to school and made to act, complaining that the boy had been put to “the base trade of a mercynary enterlude player”; by 1606 the company’s patent barred choristers from being used as stage players. This site has found no record of a nobleman performing on the public stage in the period.

The record for de Vere

The documentary theatre record for de Vere is patronage and management. He maintained a playing company, Oxford’s Men, active from about 1580 to 1587. He held the lease of the first Blackfriars playhouse briefly in 1583 and made it over to his secretary John Lyly, and the company performing there was a boys’ troupe, the Children of the Chapel. This is a nobleman funding and running theatrical ventures, the relation Lord Hunsdon had to the company that later carried the King’s name. None of it records de Vere on a stage.

The passages that put him there are readings pressed onto ambiguous verse. Thomas Edwards’s L’Envoy to Narcissus (1595) is offered as showing “Adon” acting at Blackfriars, but the acting is supplied by the interpreter and written into the lines as bracketed gloss; the verse as printed will as readily carry the author of Venus and Adonis writing under cover. The suggestion that de Vere played Black Will in Arden of Faversham rests on nothing but the suggestion. An instrument cannot be calibrated against the reading it is meant to produce: to take de Vere for the author, read a doubtful line as de Vere on stage, and then offer that line as evidence for the authorship is to argue in a circle.

Where the acting premise points

Grant the first step in full, that the author must have been a working man of the theatre, and follow it on the documentary record. It leads to the candidate already documented inside a company. This site sets out that record: the man from Stratford was a sharer in the Globe and Blackfriars, named in the royal patent and the livery allowance, and a fellow of Burbage and the other players (the theatrical record). The site’s one qualification works against the Oxfordian use of it: the documents that call him an actor are retrospective, the cast lists first printed in 1616 and 1623, while the contemporary papers attest company membership and a financial stake rather than a performance (the acting career). Taken at its word, then, the acting premise favours a documented insider, the record the site grants under Objection 21.

The Groatsworth of Wit line often enlisted on the other side runs the same way. Its “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” the “Iohannes fac totum” and “onely Shake-scene,” is read by most scholars as a jobbing actor who has presumed to write, and the pamphlet’s own authorship is disputed among Greene, Chettle and Nashe. An upstart player decked in others’ feathers is about as far as the record goes from the second nobleman of England (this site’s fuller account).

Why it settles nothing

Acting, by anyone, is proximity to the plays, and proximity does not amount to authorship; everyone in the company shared it, so it cannot single out the author (what the site claims).

The fuller version of the argument also dates plays by their supposed year of composition, Hamlet to 1585 or 1586 and others with it, so as to place de Vere’s hand at the right moment. On the primary record no play is datable to a particular year, so composition dating rules no candidate in and none out (dating the plays).

Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library, Folgerpedia: The Elizabethan Court Day by Day, 1579 (Gilbert Talbot’s letter of 5 March 1579 on the Shrovetide device) and 1581 (the January tilt, with Oxford as the Knight of the Tree of the Sun; the Four Foster Children of Desire, May).

Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare Documented: Gesta Grayorum, references to The Comedy of Errors at the Gray’s Inn revels, 1594–95.

E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923), vol. 2: the Children of the Chapel and Henry Clifton’s complaint of 1601.

SHALT, De Montfort University: “First Blackfriars 1576–84”.

University of Oxford news, 19 June 2013: “Exploitation of Elizabethan child actors revealed”.

Wikipedia: Masque; The Masque of Blackness; The Shepherd’s Paradise; Histriomastix; Clifton Star Chamber Case; Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit.