These are obvious questions for anyone who can’t believe that Will Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author William Shakespeare. Why ever should the author hide his light under a bushel?
Let’s be honest. The answer – or answers – may never be completely clear. But they must involve us trying to understand aspects of the very different world of late 16th century England. We must also assume – escaping from the legend of the unlearned country genius - that the author was the well-educated, well-read, high-born individual that is evident from the works themselves, in all likelihood the Earl of Oxford.
The stigma of print
The aspect that we in the 21st century find trouble understanding is that members of the social elites of the 16th century, “gentlemen” in their terminology, a term that had a clear and precise meaning, and even more so, aristocrats, did not demean themselves by going into print. It has been referred to as the “stigma of print”.
This was not just a matter of avoiding the public theatres and the plays they put on in insalubrious places. It applied to poetry. The name William Shakespeare first appeared in the dedication for the long poem Venus and Adonis. Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella was only published after he died. The Earl of Surrey, one of the originators of the sonnet form and Lord Oxford’s uncle, refrained from publishing his work. And Oxford himself, in his preface to Thomas Bedingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comfort, appears to be apologetic in overruling Bedingfield’s reluctance to publish – and Bedingfield was a mere gentleman.
It also applied more generally and outside England, in other aristocratic environments. Even a century later, a Dutch nobleman wrote musical compositions that were thought until recently to have been by Pergolesi. The violinist and conductor Roy Goodman explains that for him to admit he was a composer would “at that time [have been] far beneath the dignity of a true nobleman”.
Fear
But even if these considerations of social etiquette explain the pseudonym during Oxford’s lifetime, they do so less convincingly after his death. There is another possible explanation of the pseudonym that also doesn’t explain anything after his death. That is the fear that any author in those tense years towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign might realistically have had in writing anything that could be treated as seditious. The deposition scene in Richard II may well have been dangerous. Authors were thrown into the Tower of London – and worse. But, obviously, any concern of that kind, even if it ever existed for Lord Oxford, became irrelevant after his death.
Sexuality
There is, however, one other factor that could have been very important – and could also go a long way towards explaining the secrecy. The two poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. The dedication of the latter was couched in terms that were extravagant even by the hyperbolic standards of the day: “The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end . . .”
The sonnets are a mystery, but most of them – all but the “dark lady” sonnets - are addressed lovingly to a man. The first 17 of them are encouraging him to get married and produce an heir. But many of the rest, from 18 to 126, appear to be homosexual love poems. The man they are addressed to is thought by most scholars to have been Southampton (even including those scholars trying to stick to the unlikely line that they were written by Shakspere). When Oxford died in 1604, Southampton was alive. Neither he nor Oxford’s surviving family would have been keen for the nature of the Oxford/Southampton relationship – whatever it was - to be brought into the glare of publicity. The pseudonym would have been helpful.
It must have gone beyond that. The collected edition of the plays was published in 1623 in the substantial volume that we know as the First Folio. Although up at least until 1598 William Shakespeare was known mainly as a poet, the author of the highly successful and popular two poems dedicated to Southampton, no mention of them or Southampton appears in the Folio. Certainly there was no mention of the sonnets. Instead, the Folio was dedicated to William and Philip Herbert, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery respectively, the latter married to Lord Oxford’s daughter Susan. They were presumably happy for the author of the plays to be “William Shakespeare”, described by Ben Jonson in his eulogy to be the simple countryman with “small Latin, and less Greek”. They could hardly have dreamed how successful their camouflage would turn out to be.
Tony Herbert
22 February 2021
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