The Medical Mind and Knowledge of “Shakespeare” — Part Two of Reason 39 Why the Real Author was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

(Note to the Reader: Earlier I mistakenly posted this as part two of Reason 38, but have now used the correct number, 39)

Defenders of the Stratfordian faith often try to “dumb down” the Shakespeare works, to avoid having to explain how he could have acquired such amazing knowledge:  ”Well, see, he really didn’t know that much.  He wrote about stuff that anyone in England could have picked up, in the tavern or on the street, and of course he made mistakes…”   Such is the typical attempt to minimize the medical knowledge that Shakespeare displays with such precise, accurate details that — even so! — numerous books have been devoted to just this single topic of mental, physical and emotional health or illness.   If something is too large to be filled by the Stratford man’s pitifully small biography, it must be cut down to fit – even while “the miracle” of his “genius” is further inflated, to explain the inexplicable.

Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577)

Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford requires no such adjustments to explain the knowledge displayed by “Shakespeare” in his works.  Oxford was tutored during childhood by Sir Thomas Smith, known for his great library and his interest in diseases, alchemy and therapeutic botanicals; at twelve he became a royal ward in the custody of William Cecil (later Lord Burghley and his father-in-law), whose library held some 200 books on alchemy and medical topics; and in his twenties Oxford lived next door to Bedlam Hospital, a source of firsthand knowledge about patients suffering from mental illness.

Edward de Vere’s life forms a picture that deepens, rather than cheapens, our perceptions of what is contained within the great plays and poems.  And because of the Oxfordian authorship theory, researchers are now continually finding new evidence that “Shakespeare” was even more brilliant than we have been able to know and appreciate.

Dr. Earl Showerman

Shakespeare’s Medical Knowledge: Illuminating the Authorship Question was the title of a talk last April by Earl Showerman, M.D., during the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference at Concordia University in Portland, OR.  His comprehensive lecture was supported by dozens of slides, with information such as that the plays contain “over 700 medical references to practically all the diseases and drugs” that were known by the year1600, along with “knowledge of anatomy, physiology, surgery, obstetrics, public health, aging, forensics, neurology and mental disorders,” not to mention “detailed knowledge of syphilis.”

Dr. Showerman, current president of the Shakespeare Fellowship, graduated from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Medical School before practicing emergency medicine in Oregon for more than three decades.  In the past several years he has carried out extraordinary research into Greek literary sources and allegorical elements in plays such as Hamlet (see essay here) and The Winter’s Tale (see essay here).  His findings have already shattered the notion that Shakespeare had “small Latin, and less Greek” – another example of how we are learning (over and over) that the “big lie” of the Stratford man as “Shakespeare” is invariably covering up much larger and more meaningful truths.

“Shakespeare and Medicine” by R.R. Simpson (1962)

Dr. Showerman quoted from Shakespeare and Medicine (1962) by R.R. Simpson, who reports that Shakespeare demonstrates “not only an astute knowledge of medical affairs, but also a keen sense of the correct use of that knowledge” – a sign that he was well-acquainted with the medical literature of his day.  Among many other works he cited The Medical Mind of Shakespeare (1986) by Aubrey Kail, who writes that the Bard’s plays “bear witness to profound knowledge of contemporary physiology and psychology” and that he “employed medical terms in a manner which would have been beyond the powers of any ordinary playwright or physician.”

“The Medical Mind of Shakespeare” by Aubrey Kail (1986)

In his lecture Dr. Showerman gave much credit to the work of another leading Oxfordian researcher, Frank M. Davis, M.D., co-founder of the Tallahassee Neurological Clinic.  In a paper on Shakespeare’s medical knowledge (and how he acquired it) published in 2000, Dr. Davis writes that during Shakespeare’s time “true medical literature, like medicine itself, was still in its infancy,” so he could not have absorbed much from reading what was available in English.  “The vast majority of medical works were published in Latin or Greek.”

Dr. Davis finds it “remarkable” that Shakespeare refers in three plays to the pia mater, the inner lining of the covering of the brain and spinal cord.

“Knowledge of this relatively obscure part of anatomy could only mean that Shakespeare had either studied anatomy or read medical literature …

“The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man” by Thomas Vicary (1490-1561)

“Even more striking to me as a neurosurgeon is his acquaintance with the relationship of the third ventricle with memory,” Dr. Davis adds, noting that a possible source was Thomas Vicary’s Anatomy of the Body of Man, published in 1548, which refers to the third ventricle as the ‘ventricle of memory’” – a phrase used in Love’s Labour’s Lost when the pedant Holfernes states that his various gifts of the mind “are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of the pia mater…” (4.2.70-71)

William Harvey (1578-1657)

And another example – that while the discovery of the circulation of blood has been assigned to William Harvey, there are indications that “Shakespeare” was aware of it long before Harvey’s announcement of it in 1616.  There are “at least nine significant references to the circulation or flowing of blood in Shakespeare’s plays,” Dr. Davis writes.

England was far behind the advances in medical technology taking place on the Continent.  Most of the great doctors and teachers were based at the University of Padua, then the center for medical learning; others studied there before returning to their hometowns to practice medicine.

University of Padua

And the Earl of Oxford, touring the cities of Europe during 1575 at age twenty-five, definitely visited Padua – at least once, probably twice.  “With the background in pharmacology gained from his years with Sir Thomas Smith,” writes Dr. Davis, “it seems unlikely that Oxford would visit Padua without attempting to discover the latest developments in ‘physic.’”

Fabricius (1537-1619)

Only the year before had the famous Renaissance doctor Fabricius discovered “the valves in veins responsible for keeping the blood flowing in one direction toward the heart,” Dr. Davis writes, noting that he was “the first to bring this important discovery to light.”  Even if Oxford hadn’t met with Fabricius in person “it is easy to imagine” that the great teacher’s 1574 discovery of those valves, along with other topics related to the circulation of the blood, “would have been an ongoing staple of conversation among the students and faculty at the time of Oxford’s visit the following year.”

We’ll try to wrap up Reason 39 with Part Three in the next installment; meanwhile, two other sources:

Shakespeare and Medicine by Stephanie Hughes

Shakespeare and Medicine by Michael J. Cummings

The Vast Medical Knowledge of “Shakespeare” and of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford — Part One of Reason No. 39 to Believe that “Shakesepare” was Oxford Himself

(Note to the Reader: Earlier I mistakenly posted this as Reason 38 but now have changed it to the correct number, 39)

In his edition of the Shakespeare sonnets, the Stratfordian scholar Stephen Booth includes the title page of The Newe Jewell of Health, wherein is contained the most excellent Secrets of Physic and Philosophy, divided into four Books by the surgeon George Baker, published in 1576.

Editor Booth presents an illustration of this important book in connection with Sonnet 119, which builds upon metaphors and analogies from alchemy and medicine:

What potions have I drunk of siren tears,

Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within…

“Shakespeare” knew all about the “distillations” of waters, oils, balms and so on as set forth by Dr. Baker, whose book has been long considered a key source for the Bard’s interest in alchemy as well as the full range of medical knowledge at the time. And it just so happens that Dr. Baker, who would become surgeon to Queen Elizabeth, was the personal physician of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and that he dedicated The New Jewel of Health to Oxford’s wife Anne Cecil.  In fact Baker dedicated his first book, Olenum Magistrale (1574) to Edward de Vere and, later on, dedicated his Practice of the New and Old Physic (1599) to the earl as well.

This is one relatively small example of how “Shakespeare’s” remarkable knowledge of medicine is mirrored by Oxford’s own demonstrable connection to the leading medical experts and advances of his time, not only in England but also on the Continent.  It’s also just the beginning of Reason No. 39 to believe that the Oxford theory of Shakespearean authorship makes sense of otherwise plain nonsense.

George Baker was part of the household of Edward de Vere, whose patronage undoubtedly made it possible for this forward-looking doctor-surgeon and medical pioneer to write his books in the first place.

If Dr. Baker had just once treated William Shakspere for a cut finger, upholders of the Stratfordian faith would have devoted entire books to that medical incident with titles such as Will & George, Poet & Physician: Their Amazing Relationship and Its Influence Upon Shakespeare’s Life and Work. 

On the other hand, Editor Booth uses a full page to illustrate The Newe Jewell of Health in connection with Shakespeare’s sonnets, but never indicates that Dr. Baker dedicated that very book to the wife of the leading candidate to replace the Stratford man, not to mention that the doctor dedicated two other books to the Earl of Oxford himself!

We’ll continue Reason No. 39 with Part Two in the near future…

A Rockin’ Version of “The Earl of Oxford’s March”

Thanks to Melora Creager for the comment [on our blog about composer William Byrd] suggesting this rendition of The Earl of Oxford’s March by the Philip Jones Ensemble:

Yes, it rocks!

“Last Will. & Testament” to be Launched in the United Kingdom

First Folio Pictures has announced that the Shakespeare authorship documentary Last Will. & Testament is scheduled to air in the United Kingdom on Saturday 21 April 2012 at 8:00pm on Sky Arts 2 HD.  Congratulations, folks!  Special hoorays for producer-directors Lisa Wilson and Laura Wilson Matthias … and Aaron Boyd!

Here’s some of the promotional copy:

Was Will Shakspere, the grain dealer from Stratford, really the literary icon we celebrate today?

The traditional story of a Stratford merchant writing for the London stage has held sway for centuries, but questions over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and poems have persisted. 

Why is there no definitive evidence of authorship that dates from his lifetime? And why are there discrepancies between the alleged author’s life and the content of his work? 

Writers and critics, actors and scholars, including Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Leslie Howard, and Derek Jacobi, have struggled to reconcile England’s ‘Star of Poets’ with the glove maker’s son from Stratford. 

In Last Will. & Testament Sir Derek Jacobi leads a host of actors, academics and historians on a hunt for the truth: who was William Shakespeare?

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,

To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.

- William Shakespeare

The Rape of Lucrece 

Act One explores the orthodox story of William “Shakspere” of Stratford and the long-standing views held by academia.

Act Two is a testament to an alternative Shakespeare – one presented to the world in the literary works themselves and in the testimony of his most insightful doubters.

Act Three weaves together the major historical events of the late Tudor era, including the crisis of succession and the Essex revolt.

Contributors

Sir Derek Jacobi, Actor
Charles Beauclerk, Author of Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom
Prof. Roger Stritmatter, PhD, Coppin State University
Vanessa Redgrave, Actor
Prof. Jonathan Bate, CBE, Oxford University
Prof. Stanley Wells, CBE, Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Diana Price, Author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem
Assoc. Prof. Michael Delahoyde, Washington State University
Dr William Leahy, Brunel University
Prof. Daniel Wright, Director – Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre, Concordia University
Mark Rylance, Actor
Bill Boyle, librarian at New England Shakespeare Oxford Library
Jon Culverhouse, Curator of Collections & Conservation at Burghley House
G. J. Meyer, Author of The Tudors
Michael Cecil, 8th Marquess of Exeter (descendant of Elizabethan statesman William Cecil, Lord Burghley)
Hank Whittemore, Author of The Monument - a 900-page edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets

“Shake-Speare’s Treason” – Special Free Performance at Rockland Community College on April 24

We’re looking forward to a special performance of SHAKE-SPEARE’S TREASON, the 90-minute one-man show, presented by Ramapo-Rockland Community College’s Performing Arts Department and the Rockland Shakespeare Company.

The event at the Cultural Arts Theater on the RCC campus is free and open to the public.

I’ll be performing the show at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 24, with a Q&A session to follow.  

Here’s the text of an RCC announcement online:

Ramapo – Rockland Community College’s Performing Arts Department and the Rockland Shakespeare Company present a special free performance of SHAKE-SPEARE’s TREASON, at RCC on Tuesday, April 24:

Tuesday, Apr 24, 2012
11:00 am to 1:30 pm
Rockland Community College
Cultural Arts Theater

SHAKE-SPEARE’S TREASON is an exciting 400 year-old mystery story. The dramatic re-telling of Shakespeare’s sonnets is written and performed by master storyteller Hank Whittemore as a gripping saga of murder, mistaken identity, hanging, treason, bastard royalty, love and betrayal. Directed by Ted Story, the show masterfully combines history and literature, offering insights into Shakespeare and life during the Elizabethan Age.

Hank Whittemore performing "Shake-Speare's Treason"

A Q&A session follows the performance, and Whittemore will also be available to sign copies of his books. The event is free and open to the public and funded in part by a grant from the RCC Foundation.

Hank Whittemore
Whittemore began acting professionally after high school, appearing Off-Broadway in “THIS SIDE OF PARADISE” directed by Herbert Berghof and on Broadway in “TAKE HER, SHE’S MINE,” with Art Carney. He performed with Helen Hayes in “THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH”, and appeared in “TOYS IN THE ATTIC” with Terry Davis. Other career paths have included newspaper reporter and radio news director before he began writing. Among his eleven published books are, The Super Cops, later made into a movie starring Ron Leibman, directed by Gordon Parks.

His non-fiction publications include a biography of labor leader Mike Quill, a reporter’s journey into African-American politics, a true story about Watergate, and an account of a remarkable counterfeiting case in London. He has also written CNN: The Inside, about the birth of Ted Turner’s all-news network; So That Others May Live, about a woman’s work with search-and-rescue dogs; and Your Future Self, a look at the inner universe of molecular medicine. Whittemore has also written many scripts for television documentaries such as “THE BODY HUMAN” (CBS), and “THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN” (ABC), winning two Emmy awards along the way. He has written more than a hundred articles for PARADE magazine, and the recipient of an award from the Little Theatre of Alexandria National One-Act Playwriting Contest.

For more information about this performance, please contact Chris Plummer at 845-574-4380. RCC offers several degrees and courses in the Performing Arts.

Henry Peacham’s Loud Silence in “The Compleat Gentleman” of 1622 — No. 38 of 100 Reasons Why Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford = “Shakespeare”

In 1612, Henry Peacham (1578-c. 1644) apparently suggested in Minerva Britanna (1612) that Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford (1550-1604) had been a playwright of hidden identity.  A decade later, in 1622, he published his most popular work The Compleat Gentleman, in which he stated:

Title Page of The Compleat Gentleman

“In the time of our late Queene 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 Majestie, who had a singular gift herein) were Edward Earle of Oxford, the Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget; our Phoenix, the noble Sir Philip Sidney, M. Edward Dyer, M. Edmund Spencer, M. Samuel Daniel, with sundry others: whom (together with those admirable wits, yet living, and so well knowne) not out of Envie, but to avoid tediousnesse I overpasse.  Thus much of Poetrie.”

Eva Turner Clark (1871-1947)

The first Oxfordian to report on this passage was Eva Turner Clark in The Man Who Was Shakespeare (1937).  In that work Clark acknowledges that Peacham was following others (in the 1580’s and 1590’s) who had cited Oxford for his poetry and for his (officially “lost”) writings (“comedies”) for the stage; and “significantly,” she adds, Peacham “does not mention Shakespeare, a name he knew to be the nom de plume of Oxford.”

Louis P. Benezet (1876-1961)

Picking up on Clark’s observation, Louis P. Benezet, Chairman of the Department of Education at Dartmouth College, wrote in The Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly of October 1945 that Peacham’s statement in The Complete Gentleman is “one of the best keys to the solution of the Shakespeare Mystery.”  And he continued:

“We recall the statement of Sir Sidney Lee [1898], that the Earl of Oxford was the best of the court poets in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and Webbe’s comment [1586] that ‘in the rare devices of poetry he (Oxford) may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among the rest.’

“Also we remember that The Arte of English Poesie [1589] after confessing that ‘as well Poets as Poesie are despised, and the name become of honourable infamous’ so that many noblemen and gentlemen ‘are loath to be known of their skill’ and that many who have written commendably have suppressed it, or suffered it to be published ‘without their names,’ goes on to state that in Elizabeth’s time have sprung up a new group of ‘courtly writers, who have written excellently well, if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman, Edward, Earl of Oxford.’

“Now comes Henry Peacham, confirming all that has been said by others,” Benezet writes, noting the date of 1622, when the likes of George Chapman and Ben Jonson were “yet living, and so well knowne,” while William Shakspere of Stratford had been dead for six years and, by all rights, should have been on the list – unless, of course, the real “Shakespeare” was in fact heading the list under his real name, Edward de Vere, who had died in 1604.

Peacham  “was in a position to know the truth,” Dr. Benezet continues.  “He had been for several years the tutor of the three sons of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Oxford’s cousin.  Living in the family circle, he knew the secret behind the pseudonym under which were published Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, those poems which, with The Fairie Queene [by the late Edmund Spenser, whom Peacham mentions], provide the high water mark of Elizabethan rhyming.”

Sir George Greenwood in The Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908) had noted that the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe had never entered Shakespeare’s name in his diary, Dr. Benezet recalls, adding that “still more compelling is the silence of Henry Peacham, for not only does he ignore the Stratford man, but, at the head of his list of the great poets of ‘the Golden Age,’ where the name of the Bard of Avon should be expected, we encounter instead that of one who is not even mentioned in any of the histories of English literature consulted as ‘authority’ by my colleagues of the Departments of English, the greatest of the world’s unknown great, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.”

Back in the mid-1590’s, as a seventeen-year-old Cambridge graduate, Peacham had created a sketch apparently depicting the rehearsal or performance of a scene from Titus Andronicus,which was first published anonymously in a 1594 quarto.  Given that four years later Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia of 1598 listed Titus as one of Shakespeare’s tragedies on the public stage, we can be sure, if Henry Peacham had thought “Shakespeare” and “Edward de Vere” were separate individuals, he would have included both names on his list of the greatest no-longer-living authors of Elizabeth’s time.  Instead he knew the two names designated one and the same man.

Striking New Evidence in the Southampton Tower Poem in Support of “The Monument”

The other night I was re-reading the recently discovered poem The Earle of Southampton prisoner, and condemned, to Queen Elizabeth, written by the earl in February or March 1601, while he was in the Tower as a condemned man awaiting execution; and unexpectedly several lines of the poem seemed to leap out, reminding me of a passage in Sonnet 31 of the Shakespeare sequence of 1609.  A comparison reveals that Southampton, in his “verse-letter” to her Majesty pleading for mercy, expresses virtually the same idea in the same language, as if he had Sonnet 31 with him in his prison room and was being influenced by it.

Southampton in the Tower

In my view this similarity provides additional support for the Monument theory, which holds that the Earl of Oxford used the Sonnets as a “chronicle” of Southampton’s ordeal in confinement.  This proposed diary of “verse letters” to Southampton in the Tower begins with Sonnet 27 upon the failed Essex Rebellion on February 8, 1601 and concludes with Sonnet 106 (which refers to “the Chronicle of wasted time”) on April 9, 1603, the night before the younger earl was liberated by King James from being “supposed as forfeit to a confined doom” (Sonnet 107).

In the Monument view Sonnet 31 corresponds with the fifth day of Southampton’s imprisonment, when it was already clear (to Oxford, at least) that both Essex and Southampton would be convicted of high treason and sentenced to death.   Two week later Oxford writes in Sonnet 45 of “those swift messengers returned from thee/ Who even now come back again assured/ Of thy fair health, recounting it to me” – referring not only to the leg ailment suffered by Southampton, who cites it in his poem to the Queen, but apparently to Oxford’s use of “messengers” riding to and from the Tower with (I suggest) copies of individual sonnets for him.

Here in modern English are the specific lines of Southampton’s poem that seemed to cry for attention, with certain key words emphasized:

Southampton to Queen Elizabeth:

While I yet breath and sense and motion have

(For this a prison differs from a grave),

Prisons are living men’s tombs, who there go

As one may sith say the dead walk so.

There am I buried quick: hence one may draw

I am religious [reverent; faithful] because dead in law.

The idea expressed above by Southampton is that prisons are different from graves because prisons contain men who are still alive whereas graves contain those who are dead.  On the other hand, he writes, prisons are the graves or tombs for the walking or living dead – for those who, like Southampton himself, are condemned to death by law (and  who, therefore, might as well be dead).

Here is Oxford’s verse-letter to Southampton, also with certain key words emphasized:

Sonnet 31

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,

Which I by lacking have supposed dead;

And there reigns love and all love’s loving parts,

And all those friends which I thought buried.

How many a holy and obsequious tear

Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye,

As interest of the dead, which now appear

But things removed that hidden in thee lie.

Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,

Hung with the trophies [memorials on graves] of my lovers gone,

Who all their parts of me to thee did give;

That due of many now is thine alone.

Their images I loved I view in thee,

And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

Oxford’s idea in Sonnet 31 above is similar to Southampton’s theme, except he pictures the imprisoned younger earl himself as the grave.  Southampton is the living grave that contains his own “love” or the most important aspect or quality of his person.

The ideas are similar but different; many of the words are the same: grave, dead, buried, religious, living/live, tombs/trophies and so on – more evidence that Sonnet 31 is concerned with the same individual (Southampton) in relation to the same “dark lady” (Elizabeth) in the same situation (in the Tower, facing death) in the same time period (February-March 1601).

I offer it as striking new testimony that the Monument theory of the Sonnets is correct.

The Madrigal Composer John Farmer: Part Three of No. 37 of 100 Reasons Why the Earl of Oxford = “Shakespeare”

To shallow rivers, to whose falls/ Melodious birds sing madrigals!

- Song in The Merry Wives of Windsor (3.1) by Shakespeare

The celebrated madrigalist John Farmer dedicated his most important work, The First Set of English Madrigals of 1599, to “my very good Lord and Master, Edward Devere Earle of Oxenford,” praising his “judgment in Musicke” and declaring that “using this science as a recreation, your Lordship have over-gone most of them that make it a profession.”

John Farmer (c. 1570 - 1601)

This is high praise indeed for Oxford, to whom Farmer had also dedicated his previous work, Plainsong Diverse & Sundry of 1591, telling the earl he presented it to him because he knew “your Lordship’s great affection to this noble science.”

“Nothing is more astonishing in the whole history of music than the story of the English school of madrigal composers,” writes Dr. Michael Delahoyde of Washington State University, noting that the adapter of a key publication First Sett of Italian Madrigals Englished in 1590 was Thomas Watson, who had dedicated his 100-sonnet sequence Hekatompathia: or Passionate Century of Love in 1582 to Edward de Vere, his patron.

Inserted in that song-book [title page at left] are “two excellent Madrigalls of Master William Byrd, composed after the Italian vaine, at the request of the sayd Thomas Watson.”   So we have Oxford connected personally and professionally to Farmer, Byrd and Watson, not to mention his company of musicians and the fact that his many youthful poems turn out to be lyrics for songs.  It would appear that he was a driving force, or even the driving force, behind the sudden rise of the entire English Madrigal School.

Farmer has the distinction of composing one of the most popular and fun pieces of the period, the madrigal Fair Phyliss I Saw Sitting All Alone, telling the story of the shepherdess Phyllis and her lover, who searches the hills before finding her:

What does all this have to do with Oxford as Shakespeare?  Well, the point is that he was an expert in the musical field, just as “Shakespeare” shows himself to be — although orthodox scholars, well aware that the man William Shakspere of Stratford was no such expert, tend to play down or ignore the actual contents of “Shakespeare” works in that regard.  The only way to maintain that the Stratford man was the Greatest Writer of the English Language is to keep “dumbing down” the works themselves!

Elizabethan Musical Instruments

Well, he was an expert in the musical field, as the Earl of Oxford was an expert.  In Shakespeare’s England (1916) we are given the honest truth that “in no author are musical allusions more frequent than in Shakespeare,” whose musical terms include:

Accord, Air, Anthem, A-re, Bagpipe, Bass, Base, Bass viol, Bear a part, Breast, Broken, Broken Music, Burden (Burthen), Cadence, Carol, Catch, Chant, Chittern (Cithern), Clef, Cliff, Close, Compass, Concent, Concert, Consort, Concord, Cornet, Crotchet, Cymbols, Dead March, Descant, Diapason, Discord, Division, Drone, Drum, D-sol-re, Dulcimer, Ear, E-la-mi, Fa, False, Fancy, Fiddle, Fiddler, Fiddlestick, Fife, Fingering, Fit, Flat, Flute, Fret, Gamut, Good-night, Govern, Government, Ground, Harmony, Harp, Hautboy, Holding, Hornpipe, Hymn, Instrument, Jack, Jar, Kettle(drum), Key, Knock it, La, Lesson, Lute, Madrigal, March, Mean, Measure, Mi, Minim, Mode, Mood, Music, Musician, Noise, Note, Organ-pipe, Part, Peg, Pipe, Plain-song, Play, Point, Prick-song, Proportion, Psaltery, Re, Rebeck, Record, Recorder, Reed-voice, Relish, Rest, Round, Sackbut, Scale, Sennet, Set, Sharp, Singing-man, Sol, Sol-fa, Soundpost, Speak, Still Music, Stop, Strain, String, Strung, Tabor, Tabourine, Three-man-song, Time, Tongs, Touch, Treble, Triplex, Troll, Trump, Trumpet, Tucket, Tune (melody), Tune (to adust tone), Ut, Ventages, Viol, Viol da gamba, Virginals, Virginalling, Wind, Wind up, Wrest… 

All these terms, and more, appear in the Shakespeare works. They are often technical, always accurate.  They come bursting freely and spontaneously from the pen of the poet-dramatist, flowing from his very being, and never inserted as information from research.  The terms come cascading forth not to instruct or impress or do anything other than lend greater power, beauty, humor and meaning to a character’s speech of the moment, mostly by way of metaphor: “What, to make thee an instrument and play false strains upon thee?  Not to be endured!” – As You Like It (4.3)

The Composer William Byrd: Part Two of Reason No. 37 to Believe the Earl of Oxford was “Shakespeare”

Imagine setting forth to investigate whether Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford was the true author of the “Shakespeare” works.  Now imagine going to Amazon.com and locating the site for an album called Shakespeare’s Music, complete with a portrait of the Bard on its cover … only to find that the first song listed is My Lord of Oxenfords Maske, a.k.a. The Earl of Oxford’s March by William Byrd (c. 1540-1623), considered the greatest composer of the English Renaissance.

It would be natural (and logical) if the best writer of that glorious age in England, who seemed to know everything about music, would have known and worked with the best composer of the same age – which, the evidence shows, is exactly what happened.

Except it didn’t happen in the way that orthodox history would have it:

*  William Byrd was past fifty when he moved from London circa 1593 to the small town of Stondon Massey, Essex, where he lived the rest of his life.  But according to tradition William Shakespere of Stratford-upon-Avon (1564-1616) was just getting started in 1593, so on that basis alone he and the great composer never even met each other.

*  Edward de Vere Lord Oxford, on the other hand, was twenty-two and in the highest of royal favor at Court in 1572, when Byrd was named a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and began work under Queen Elizabeth as organist, singer and composer.

The evidence suggests “an association between Byrd and Oxford of at least ten years,” according to Sally Mosher, a highly respected authority on the subject, in an article for the Shakespeare-Oxford Society entitled William Byrd’s “Battle” and the Earl of Oxford, available online at the SOS website.

“William Byrd and the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford were both at the Court of Elizabeth I from about 1572 on,” Mosher writes.  “Both were involved in activities that provided music for the Court; and during this period, Oxford saved Byrd from possible bankruptcy by selling a certain property to Byrd’s brother.”

The Chapel Royal consisted of some twenty-four male singers and organists who provided church music for the royal household.  They remained with the Queen as part of her entourage, which included Oxford himself, as she traveled from palace to palace.

“The likelihood is strong,” Mosher writes, “that both Oxford and the Queen would have played these pieces [on lute and virginal keyboard] by the composer whom both had patronized.”

Byrd’s piece The Earl of Oxford’s March “has been preserved in at least four versions,” she reports, and “it was clearly well-known during the period.”  As a ranking earl, Oxford had his own “tucket” or musical signature announcing his arrival at tournaments and while traveling.  The tune at the heart of The Earl of Oxford’s March “has all the earmarks of such a tucket,” according to Mosher, who adds, “In deference to [Oxford’s] dreams of martial glory perhaps, or else to provide an entertainment at Court, at some point during their close association William Byrd worked Oxford’s tucket into a musical setting that called up visions of battle.”

I urge readers to go over to YOUTUBE and see/hear the many selections of Oxford’s March.  Here is one, recorded in Sils, Switzerland (www.SynergyBrass.com) that brought me to tears of joy over the sheer beauty of setting and music bursting with grandeur:

“The Shakespeare plays are full of tuckets,” Sally Mosher observes (King Lear, Henry V, Henry VIII, et. al.).  ”In Othello, when Iago hears ‘Othello’s trumpets,’ it means that he recognizes Othello by his tucket.  The brief and open-ended tune that introduces Oxford’s March has all the earmarks of this kind of semi-military identification … Oxford, a veteran of real military action [i.e., service in 1570 against the Northern Rising of Catholic earls) by the time he and Byrd met, would have known the military calls in use and could have supplied them to Byrd."

Part Three of this Reason will be forthcoming soon.   Meanwhile, as Mosher notes, William Byrd also composed a piece of music to a poem, attributed to Oxford, entitled If Women Could be Fair [see below] — included in a collection of Byrd’s vocal works published in 1588.

And still another example of such collaboration involves My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, a poem [see below] attributed to Oxford and published in Byrd’s Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety (1588), described this way at Harper’s Magazine blog:

“This poem is one of the true masterpieces of the Elizabethan era, understandable on many levels: as a sanctuary of conscience, as a statement of Calvinist precepts, as a dissertation on contentment, as a praise of the powers of imagination and invention. William Byrd’s setting of the Oxford poem is one of the finest English art songs of the Elizabethan era.” 

“Of the recordings,” adds the unnamed Harper’s poster, “the performance of the inimitable Emma Kirkby, on this Fretwork CD is surely the best. Listen to William Byrd’s Fantasia No. 2 a 6 in G Minor” — and here it is:

IF WOMEN COULD BE FAIR AND YET NOT FOND, Or that their love were firm, not fickle still, I would not marvel that they make men bond, By service long to purchase their good will; But when I see how frail those creatures are, I muse that men forget themselves so far.  To mark the choice they make, and how they change, How oft from Phoebus do they fly to Pan, Unsettled still like haggards wild they range, These gentle birds that fly from man to man; Who would not scorn and shake them from the fist, And let them fly, fair fools, which way they list  Yet for disport we fawn and flatter both, To pass they time when nothing else can please, And train them to our lure with subtle oath, Till weary of their wiles, ourselves we ease; And then we say when we their fancy try, To play with fools, O what a fool was I. From the appendix of Roger Stritmatter’s dissertation on Oxford’s Geneva Bible

MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS, 

Such perfect joy therein I find

That it excels all other bliss

That world affords or grows by kind.

Though much I want which most men have,

Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

No princely pomp, no wealthy store,

No force to win the victory,

No wily wit to salve a sore,

No shape to feed each gazing eye;

To none of these I yield as thrall.

For why my mind doth serve for all.

I see how plenty suffers oft,

How hasty climbers soon do fall;

I see that those that are aloft

Mishap doth threaten most of all;

They get with toil, they keep with fear.

Such cares my mind could never bear.

Content I live, this is my stay;

I seek no more than may suffice;

I press to bear no haughty sway;

Look what I lack my mind supplies;

Lo, thus I triumph like a king,

Content with that my mind doth bring.

Some have too much, yet still do crave;

I little have, and seek no more.

They are but poor, though much they have,

And I am rich with little store.

They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;

They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.

I laugh not at another’s loss;

I grudge not at another’s gain;

No worldly waves my mind can toss;

My state at one doth still remain.

I fear no foe, nor fawning friend;

I loathe not life, nor dread my end.

Some weigh their pleasure by their lust,

Their wisdom by their rage of will,

Their treasure is their only trust;

And cloaked craft their store of skill.

But all the pleasure that I find

Is to maintain a quiet mind.

My wealth is health and perfect ease;

My conscience clear my chief defense;

I neither seek by bribes to please,

Nor by deceit to breed offense.

Thus do I live, thus will I die.

Would all did so as well as I!

Number 37 of 100 Reasons Why Oxford was “Shakespeare” — “Mark the Music!”

This reason why Edward de Vere the seventeenth Earl of Oxford was “Shakespeare” can be expressed in a single word … Music!

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and at Amazon.com music

(And below is a scholar’s observation in 1916 about Elizabethan musical history, which, in my view, serves to rule out William of Stratford as the great author.)

Only a man with music flowing in his veins would give Lorenzo his famous lines to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (5.1):

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears.  Soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony…

Music is pervasive in Shakespeare’s plays and poems; some 170 passages introduce the words “music” or “musical” or “musician.”

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold!

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

Such harmony is in immortal souls…

Shakespeare uses “sing” in various forms no less than 247 times.  Some forty passages deal with musical instruments.

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[Enter Musicians]

Come, ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!

With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear

And draw her home with music…

Shakespeare includes or alludes to the texts of well over a hundred songs.  In addition to the numerous stage directions for music and sound effects, his dramatic and poetical work is permeated by specific references to more than 300 musical terms.

[Play Music]

The man that hath no music in himself

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils:

The motions of his spirit are dull as night

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.  Mark the music!

Edward de Vere was associated with music from his teenage years at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, before he arrived at Court in 1571, age twenty-one, and quickly gained the highest favor of Queen Elizabeth, becoming her dance partner and performing for her on the lute and the virginals.

Early on he had become associated with Richard Edwards, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, who is credited with compiling The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) – which includes at least eight of Oxford’s early poems that appear to also be lyrics for songs.   Oxford had a company of adult actors and one of choir boys, who sang as well as performed stage works (at the private Blackfriars Playhouse and the royal court); and records of the 1580’s indicate he patronized a traveling company “The Earl of Oxford’s Musicians.”

Oxford was the patron of John Farmer, the celebrated madrigalist; and from about 1572 onward he was involved in musical activities at Court with the composer William Byrd, one of the very greatest musicians that England has produced; and it appears he was Byrd’s patron as well.  The earl’s own accomplishments in the field were praised by professional musicians.

While preparing this post I stumbled upon an extraordinary fact in Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age (1916).  In the chapter on music, W. Barclay Squire reports that Shakespeare “is far in advance of his contemporaries” in terms of musical references, although his education in that field, “wherever it was acquired,” had been “strictly on the lines of the polyphonic school” — a musical teaching that all parts of a composition must fit equally into the whole, as expressed in Richard II (5.5.):

Music, do I hear?

Ha, ha!  Keep time.  How sour sweet music is

When time is broke and no proportion kept!

Such a passage, Squire observes, “cannot be understood without some knowledge of the elaborate system of proportions inherited by Elizabethan composers from the earlier English school,” but here comes the extraordinary aspect:  It seems “remarkable,” he continues, “that the musical terms of the plays should be so consistently those of the old school of polyphony.”  And why?  Because, during the last half of the 1590’s, a new style of musical arrangement replaced the old one, yet the great dramatist was apparently unaware of it!  “This change dates from about the year 1597,” Squire writes, unable to conceal his bafflement, “yet in all the plays which Shakespeare produced from then until the performance of The Tempest in 1611, no allusion to the ‘new music’ can be discovered.”

Well … this would be baffling indeed if the author had been William of Stratford, who, within the traditional time frame, still had the best part of his career in front of him and surely would have incorporated the “new school” of music into his plays.   But in the Oxfordian view, Edward de Vere had finished writing the early, basic versions of all his plays (including The Tempest) by 1589 – which would quickly and easily explain why “Shakespeare” failed to embrace a musical revolution that began so much later, in 1597!

Next: Oxford’s relationships with the Elizabethan musical giants William Byrd and John Farmer…