"Vere-y Interesting": Shakespeare's treatment of the Earls of Oxford in the History Plays

by Dr. Daniel L. Wright

Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 1, Spring, 2000

(Prof. Daniel Wright was for many years Professor of English at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. He founded the Annual Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in 1997 and directed it for 17 years. He also founded the first Shakespeare Authorship Research Center in the United States in 2010, also at Concordia. He is a prolific authorship scholar.)

No scholar of any merit disputes that Shakespeare imaginatively rewrote English history in his chronicle plays. As Judith Anderson has observed, "Shakespeare's dramas ... show an explicit ... self-conscious concern with the natures and varieties of truth in the portrayal of historical persons in art and in chronicle."

Moreover, most readers of Shakespeare agree with such scholars as Peter Saccio, E. M. W. Tillyard and Lily B. Campbell that Shakespeare's purpose in manipulating and reconfiguring historical accounts was broadly political (1). For example, in composing The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eighth, Shakespeare dramatically shortens the life of Queen Katherine and sends her off to her eternal reward years before her death actually occurred. This was no careless compositional error. By so sequencing these events, Shakespeare aimed at quietly conferring added legitimacy (2) to Elizabeth's otherwise contestable claim to the throne by introducing the suggestion that Katherine of Aragon was dead at the time the Princess Elizabeth was born. Of course, we know that Elizabeth was born of Henry VIII's mistress and second wife while Katherine yet lived—but many in Shakespeare's audiences in his own day would not know this—and Shakespeare was not about to tell them.

In The Tragedy of Richard the Third, Shakespeare tells us that King Richard, at the fatal battle of Bosworth, encountered no fewer than six doubles of Henry, Earl of Richmond, in the field—of which Shakespeare's Richard fantastically claims that he has killed five. The claim, of course, is absurd, without any historical support, and contradicts all contemporary reports of the battle; John Julius Norwich, author of Shakespeare's Kings, declares that the account—an example of broad "dramatic license"—is anchored solely in Shakespeare's imagination.

So why, if it weren't true, and supported by no authority of any kind, would Shakespeare invent such a scene? What is the effect of Shakespeare's singular inclusion of this seemingly incidental fiction in his account? Can anyone doubt that his purpose in doing so is anything other than subtly to confer royal status on Richmond even before Richmond becomes King by right of conquest—assisting, thereby, on the public stage, in the greater legitimization of yet another claimant to the English throne whose legitimacy (and progeny) otherwise might be suspect?

Why does Shakespeare, in The Life and Death of King John, have John, a late twelfth/early thirteenth-century Angevin king, declare himself "supreme head" of the Church—a claim and a title that no English monarch would dare advance until the sixteenth century? Shakespeare has John defiantly address Cardinal Pandulph, the papal envoy, with the bold declaration that "[A]s we, under God, are supreme head, / So under Him that great supremacy, / Where we do reign, we will alone uphold, / Without th' assistance of a mortal hand: / So tell the pope, all reverence set apart/ To him and his usurped authority" (Ill.i. 155-60). Can this passage have been constructed for any other reason than to demonstrate, albeit anachronistically, the fundamentally Protestant character of true, sovereign English monarchy that knows obedience to no foreign power—temporal or spiritual? (3)

This is the public business of Shakespeare in the histories: rewriting already revised history in order to reinforce and consolidate the political claims of the Tudor dynasty and its Reformation heritage—an assertion, however, that must be foregone or somehow explained away if one embraces the now-fashionable but baseless claims of some scholars who assert that Shakespeare was a Catholic émigré to Lancashire where he also was known as "Shakeshafte."

There are other revisionist features in the Shakespeare histories which orthodox commentators are less able, or altogether unable, to explain. What, for example, are we to make of the way that the earls of Oxford—Edward de Vere's predecessors—are presented in the histories? Stratfordians cannot possibly account for the curiously selective manner in which the histories of the earls of Oxford are recounted in the Shakespeare histories (nor, for that matter, do any of them even try). After all, what interest—political or dramatic—would Will Shakspere, the Stratford man, have in creatively retouching de Vere family history to tell his epic story of England? None that I can imagine. However, if the writer of the Shakespeare plays were a de Vere himself, the revelation of a peculiarly personal interest in favorably presenting the history of the earls...