The plan was that I would scour Tudor publications and manuscripts for further poems attributed to Vere / Shakespeare as part of further research on authorship topics with which I had become familiar over the years. To these attributed poems I would expect to add a number of other Vere / Shakespeare poems anonymously published or misattributed. To the poems I would add critical materials.
It soon became clear that the research undertaken in order to fill out the necessary detail for the completed poems was yielding material that demanded a number of book-length studies on individual sub-topics. Otherwise, the material would be overwhelming.
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| Was Shakespeare Gay? What do the sonnets really say? |
In 2015, then, I published Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? In which I point out that at least some of Shakespeare's procreation sonnets were written, circa 1580, as part of the well-known attempts of courtiers at that time to convince Queen Elizabeth to marry and produce an heir.
Be not self-willed for thou art much too fair,
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.1
Also that the evidence resoundingly points to Elizabeth being the subject of Shakespeare's Monument Sonnets, rather than the Earl of Southampton.
Once these facts are accepted, a great many of the mysteries of the sonnets are mysteries no longer. Sonnet 74 is written shortly after the serious wound Edward de Vere suffered in a duel with Thomas Knyvet in 1583.
My spirit is thine the better part of me,
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The pray of wormes, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretches knife,
We can then see that the Dark Lady sonnets are written to/about Vere's mistress, Anne Vavasour. At least two were written to his wife, Anne Cecil; one to his son who died shortly after birth; at least one to his second wife, Elizabeth Trentham; one to the son that outlived him.
Edmund Spenser becomes the infamous Rival Poet of the sonnets upon the publication of the first part of his epic poem The Fairy Queen in 1591.
My saucy bark, inferior far to his
*
Or, being wreck’d, I am a worthless boat,
He of tall building, and of goodly pride;2
Compared to Spenser's ship “of tall building” celebrating Elizabeth, Vere had to admit that his Monument of mere sonnets was but a “saucy bark”.
Several months later, in 2015, I published Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually), the record of my research into three Shakespeare sonnets pirated and published in an anthology of courtier poets in 1591. In 2021 I published Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal the results of my years of research into the anthology of courtier poetry, An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, first published in 1573, in which dozens of poems by Edward de Vere — many of them sonnets in the form history has come to call “Shakepearean” — appeared under the moniker Si fortunatus infoelix.
These were not by any means the entirety of my studies of the poetry of Vere / Shakespeare. In fact, those studies had necessarily to include in depth studies of the authors, publishers and works of Vere's literary community at any given time — his context.
And the poetry will
not be limited to 14-line sonnets. Edward de Vere wrote poetry in
many meters and forms in least two languages, translated from at
least four languages. He did so under his own name, one moniker, one
pen name and anonymously, over at least 38 years. Those forms and the
language that fills them each require individual attention.
The topic is enormous. I have further trickled out findings in my Virtual Grub Street blog family, over the years, and linked to them from my Facebook groups and pages. Readers may have noticed that the rate of posting about Shakespeare's poetry has been increasing. The project needs to move forward with greater speed.
Toward this end, I have begun a hyperlinked topic page: the Virtual Grub StreetOxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page [link]. It joins Virtual Grub Street hyperlinked pages to posts on the following topics:
I will periodically be updating the Poetry Page, as I do all my topic pages, with links to new posts.
The individual posts relating to the poetry of Shakespeare will be intended to be various-stage draft pages of the Complete Poetry of William Shakespeare that I promised when I published Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof. There is a vast amount of information to be sorted through, selected and arranged. Revision will undoubtedly be necessary as the work proceeds. This is the only way to move the project forward while continuing to research and write my other studies of the plays and life of Edward de Vere / William Shakespeare.
Hopefully, final drafts of the poetry pages published in the Virtual Grub Street blog will soon be gathered together into a Complete Poems of William Shakespeare.
1 Sonnet 6.
2 Sonnet 80.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”
- Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
- Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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