Was the Earl of Oxford an Actor?

The argument

Put at its strongest, 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; the knowledge is real, and every serious candidate for the authorship has it, so it sets no one of them apart. This is resemblance, the works looking like the work of a theatre man, and resemblance does not name an author (the logical shape 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, not an appearance on the public stage. Display of that sort carries no weight on who wrote the works.

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 in full: 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 very 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

One principle sits under all of this, and the site applies it throughout. Acting, by anyone, is proximity to the plays, and proximity does not amount to authorship; only a documentary record attests who held the pen (what the site claims). A life in the theatre, whether de Vere’s patronage or the Stratford man’s shareholding, sets a candidate beside the works without showing that he wrote them.

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). Set the dating and the pressed readings aside, and what remains is a nobleman who funded and ran companies and joined in court entertainments, as many peers did, and a body of plays written by someone who knew the stage well, as whoever wrote them plainly did. Neither of those reaches the question of who that was.