Having your pseudonym and eating it
J. Enoch Powell
THE LOST CHRONICLE OF EDWARD DE VERE by Andrew Field Viking, £13.99, pp.266 The 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), dying in obscurity and relative poverty in Hackney, is fictionally supposed to have managed to record memoirs and reflec- tions upon his life in a manuscript lately brought to light for the first time in a drawer of a piece of contemporary furni- ture.
Edward De Vere — the first of that Christian name in his line, having presum- ably been named after the reigning sovereign Edward VI — was a ward of William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I's celebrated minister, who stands suspect of having plundered Ox- ford's inheritance and married him off by guile to his own daughter Anne, and a courtier and Queen's servant as well as hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain. After Anne's death in 1588, de Vere married a relatively low-born Staffordshire lady, Elizabeth Trentham, who looked after him in his declining years in the house at Hackney.
Sufficient detailed documentary in- formation on Edward de Vere's life exists to provide material for the fictional memoir. What it does not include is evidence for Queen Elizabeth having been deeply attached to the Earl or actually his mistress, though the assumed emotional relationship between monarch and subject is a running theme of the memoir, which is salaciously biased towards the Earl's sex life, heavily spiced with bawdy detail. That the 17th Earl of Oxford produced and staged plays and other entertainments at Elizabeth's court is factually beyond cavil. What is not beyond cavil is that he was effectively the author of the poetry and plays attributed to 'William Shakespeare'. That assumption is taken for granted rather than argued, and woven into the narrative, in which the Dark Lady of the Sonnets plays a dominant part and the salient experiences of the Earl of Oxford's life are drawn from characters and inci- dents in the extant plays.
It is a method of proceeding which places heavy demands upon the reader's tolerance. The conventional account of the authorship of the Shakespearian works obtrudes many causes for scepticism; but the theory that 'William Shakespeare' is a pseudonym demands a solution, or at least an attempted solution, to three specific problems, which are treated cavalierly or ignored outright in the Lost Chronicle. What was the imperious motive for pseudonymity? Why did half the opus, and that not the least impressive half, remain unpublished between the quartos of the 1590's and early 1600's and the First Folio of 1623? And, finally, supposing that the whole business was a hoax, in whose interest and by whom was it elaborately and expensively organised and sustained?
The author of the Lost Chronicle attri- butes to Burghley and to Elizabeth, who found the plays too pointedly political, the insistence upon those court productions being anonymous. It was, he alleges, dur- ing the period 1578-1583 that Oxford drill- ed his players and helped to compose, in a sort of committee called 'the long table', those earlier versions which underlie the plays performed and produced later in the 1590s:
In the morning I would write with Church- yard and the lads. In the afternoon, if there was time, I would rewrite by myself and send instructions to Grays Inn for various neces- sary researches and texts . . . this was the time of day when I ceased to be Lord Oxford or a vigilant taskmaster and became simply 'our pleasant Willy' for the men.
Two seasons thus occupied were alleged- ly passed at Stratford, from which
the other boon we brought was young Shakespeare. I'll not begrudge him, who was innocent, my warmth, for in time he brought the solid virtues of the country to our enterprise and helped new theatre to survive.
That is what may be called having one's pseudonym and eating it. It renders the false attribution of the plays a degree even more unintelligible and leaves un- explained, even unmentioned, why, when dying in 1604 with all those Elizabethan complications behind him, the Earl fails to recover the fame of which he had deprived himself and contrived instead to enforce the cruel fraud upon posterity beyond his own lifetime. It is unfair to the reader, even in a composition attributed to a broken-down nobleman dying of the pla- gue, to decline to acknowledge, let alone to attempt seriously to solve, the problems which one's own hypothesis has created. Court plays, composed by many hands and containing secret political allusions, are not a thing in themselves improbable. Mr Field may even hit the mark when he claims that 'the idea for public theatres came from the court itself . . . the experiment had to do with an eye for money in the streets'. But court plays attributed to an existing 'Wil- liam Shakespeare', withheld from the pub- lic for decades, and then released with a flourish? That is much harder to imagine. The debate continues.
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