It seems strange that a writer who left the impress of his achievements
so indelibly upon the golden age of English literature as did Arthur
Golding should have lacked a biography until the present day.
A debt of gratitude is due Louis Thorn Golding of Brookline, Massachusetts,
for the industry and enthusiasm that has at last brought about publication
of an adequate book on the foremost translator of the Shakespearean
era.
Under the quaint title of An Elizabethan Puritan, 1
Mr. Golding has assembled many long-hidden facts of his distinguished
ancestor's career. The presentation is sound and scholarly, showing
that considerable pains have been taken in locating original documentary
sources, and the narrative is smoothly contrived throughout.
Like Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, Edward Fitzgerald, George Borrow,
Constable and Gainsborough, and many another poet, dramatist and painter
who has played an important part in the development of English art,
Arthur Golding was born in East Anglia, the south-eastern country which
is, quite appropriately enough, the first corner of Britain to greet
the morning sun. Not least among the ancients of this group, Golding
can be accorded unique honours for his pioneering spirit and the fact
that his many important translations helped mould the thoughts, artistic
destinies and religious beliefs of many of the most remarkable minds
that England has produced.
Born at the manor of Belchamp St. Paul's, north-western Essex, in the
year 1536, the son of John Golding, Esquire, one of the auditors of
the Court of Exchequer, Arthur Golding was the sixth child in a family
of eleven.
His mother, Ursula Marston Golding, was the second wife of her husband
and a lady of brains and character from whom the translator appears
to have inherited habits of industry and sobriety, as well as his strong
religious convictions.
Many will find it a surprising anomaly that the man who first put the
sensuous measures of Ovid's Metamorphoses into English verse
was also the indefatigable reproducer of John Calvin's grimly interminable
Sermons. But the Elizabethan age has other examples to offer
of such seemingly contradictory personalities. That is perhaps one reason
why it is difficult at times for modem students to get a true perspective
on the human elements involved in the flowering of the English Renaissance.
John Golding died in 1547, leaving his principal estates to his eldest
son Thomas. But the rest of the family must have been well provided
for, as an elder daughter Margery married John de Vere, 16th Earl of
Oxford, on the 5th of August in the year following. And in 1552, at
the age of 16, Arthur Golding was entered as a "fellow commoner"
or privileged student at Jesus College, Cambridge. He appears to have
left without taking a degree some time after Mary Tudor came to the
throne, the inference being that state pressure exerted upon Cambridge
teachers at this unhappy period for their addiction to the principles
of the Protestant Reformation made college life too uncertain for students
of the same faith.
But Arthur Golding was a born scholar with an unusual aptitude for
foreign tongues and his lack of a college degree proved no bar to his
mastery of classic Latin and contemporary French.
The marriage of his half-sister Margery to the genial Earl John of
Oxford also opened many great doors to him, as the Veres of Hedingham
Castle represented what Macaulay designates as the "longest and
most illustrious line of nobles that England has seen." John of
Oxford unquestionably encouraged the young man in his studies, for later
in life Golding dedicated the translation of one of his Latin histories
to Edward de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford's heir, with the statement
that he had originally intended it for the senior nobleman "to
whom I had long before vowed this my travail."
Like nearly every other forerunner who has tried to scale the heights
with a pen for an alpenstock, Arthur Golding had plenty of trouble.
Money and property ran through his fingers like quicksilver. During
his latter years the bailiffs pursued him with malignant persistency
and on various and sundry occasions he was forced to study the problem
of supporting a growing family from behind the bars of a debtors' prison.
His end in May 1606, old, broken in health, debt-ridden to the last,
is too sad to dwell upon.
Was Arthur Golding Really "Shakespeare's" Tutor?
To those readers who are interested in the new theory, now taking root
in various parts of the English-speaking world, that the greatest literary
figure the race has yet produced was really Arthur Golding's nephew,
Edward de Vere, who wrote under the nom de plume of "William Shakespeare,"
An Elizabethan Puritan will provide valuable corroborative evidence.
All commentators on Shakespeare's literary background are agreed that
Venus and Adonis and many passing allusions in the plays trace
directly to Golding's publications of Ovid. Speaking of the Metamorphoses,
Sir Sidney Lee says:
"Golding's rendering of Ovid had been one of Shakespeare's best-loved
books in youth, and his parting tribute (in The Tempest) proves
the permanence of his early impressions, in spite of his widened interests."
There is nothing to prove that Golding and the citizen of Stratford-on-Avon
ever met, but one of the first things to arouse wide-spread interest
in the Oxford-Shakespeare case has been the fact that Arthur Golding
was not only the uncle of Edward de Vere but his companion and adviser
for some time after the twelve year old peer lost his father and, as
a Royal Ward, took up his residence in the household of Sir William
Cecil. During this period Golding worked upon his translations of the
Latin poet, which were printed in 1564 and 1567 with dedications to
Robert, Earl of Leicester.
The 17th Earl of Oxford is definitely known to have been an accomplished
Latin scholar as well as a poet of marked ability. Gabriel Harvey bears
witness to this. So does Angel Day, in the 1586 dedication of his English
Secretarie to the nobleman "whose infancy from the beginning
was ever sacred to the Muses." In the same year of 1586 William
Webbe's Discourse of English Poetry declared that "in the
rare devices of poetry" . . . "the right honourable Earl of
Oxford may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among
the rest." The anonymous author of The Arte of English Poesie
in 1589 also placed "that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford"
. . . "first" . . . among all the poets "of Her Majesty's
own servants who have written excellently well as it would appear if
their doings could be found out and made public with the rest."
Finally the great Edmund Spenser himself, who was not given to idle
flattery, addressed a dedicatory Sonnet to the Earl in the opening pages
of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. He referred to Oxford's
affinity to the Muses as
"… the love which thou doest beare
To th' Heliconian imps, and they to thee;
They unto thee, and thou to them, most deare."
These references to creative gifts are too categorical to be ignored.
They must mean that Edward de Vere had done outstanding work which is
either lost or has not come down to us under his own name.
Keys to the mystery will be found in the personal connection that existed
between Lord Oxford and Arthur Golding, on the one hand, and the clear-cut
reflection of Golding's own personality and his literary labors in the
works of "William Shakespeare," on the other.
In fact, study of Louis Thom Golding's research makes it possible at
this time to announce a discovery of heretofore unidentified Shakespearean
source material that seems to have escaped the attention of experts
in the field during the past three hundred years.
Edward de Vere had been entered as an "impubes fellow-commoner"
at Queen's College, Cambridge nearly fours years before he took up his
official residence with the Master of the Royal Wards. Arthur Golding,
fourteen years his senior, accompanied the young Earl as personal "receiver"
of the Vere estates which were then apparently among the greatest in
the realm. That Golding also acted as tutor and general adviser to his
nephew can be taken for granted, for the translator addresses Oxford
in such a dual spirit in dedications of books published in 1564 and
1571.
The first of these is an English version of Justin's previously untranslated
Abridgement of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, "a worke
conteyning briefly great plenty of most delectable Historyes, and notable
examples, worthy not only to be Read, but also to bee embraced and followed
by al men."
Lord Oxford was only fourteen years of age and about to receive a degree
from St. John's College, Cambridge, when his uncle offered the fruit
of his labors in the field of ancient history to him in these words:
… there was not any who, either of duty might more justly claim
the same, or for whose estate it seemed more requisite and necessary,
or of whom I thought it should be more favourably accepted, than of
your honour. For ... it is not unknown to others, and I have had experience
thereof myself, how earnest a desire your honour hath naturally graffed
in you to read, peruse, and communicate with others as well the histories
of ancient times, and things done long ago, as also of the present
estate of things in our days, and that not without a certain pregnancy
of wit and ripeness of understanding. The which do not only rejoice
the hearts of all such as bear faithful affection to the honourable
house of your ancestors, but also stir up great hope and expectation
of such wisdom and experience in you in times to come, as is meet
and beseeming for so noble a race.
Then, after urging young Oxford to emulate the examples of Epaminondas
of Thebes and Arymba of Epirus who were not only great soldiers but
scholars and peace-makers as well, he concludes:
Let these and other examples encourage your tender years ... to proceed
in learning and virtue . . . whereof, as your great forwardness giveth
assured hope and expectation, so I most heartily beseech Almighty
God to further, augment, establish and confirm the same in your Lordship
with the abundance of his grace.
Your Lordship's humble servant,
Arthur Golding
A Discovery of Real Import
The "delectable Historyes, and notable examples" thus brought
to Edward de Vere's attention so persuasively during his formative years
must have vividly appealed to the precocious boy.
It is a significant "coincidence," now noted for the first
time, that the writer of the Shakespearean plays must also have been
vividly impressed by the succinct tales from Trogus Pompeius
for he alludes many times to striking incidents and unusual personalities
of the ancient world that appear in this early translation by Arthur
Golding. Lack of space prevents mention of more than two or three such
parallels here:
In the first chapter of the Historyes we find the story of Cyrus,
ruler of the Persian Empire, and his defeat and death by the unusual
strategy of the Scythian queen Tomyris.
Turning to Shakespeare 1 Henry Sixth, (II, 3), we discover the
Countess of Auvergne planning the capture and murder of the English
hero Talbot with comments such as these:
The plot is laid; if all things fall out right,
I shall be as famous by this exploit
As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus' death.
The connection here is unmistakable for Trogus Pompeius seems to be
the one historian of the period who refers to Tomyris as a Scythian
queen. Herodotus, and others speak of her as Queen of the Massagetae.
Again, in this book dedicated to Lord Oxford by Arthur Golding we read
of Semiramis the mythical queen of Assyria and her criminal exploits,
with her own son Ninyas.
Shakespeare's allegorical melodrama of Titus Andronicus compares
the blood-thirsty Tamora, Queen of the Goths (here evidently representing
the Spain of Philip II) with
This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
This siren, that will charm Rome's Saturnine.
And in the introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, the lord
who plays the practical joke on Sly, the drunken tinker, promises him
…a
couch
Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed
On purpose trimmed up for Semiramis.
The account of Alexander the Great in Trogus Pompeius is particularly
well handled—a model of clear and concise reporting. Two dramatic
incidents in this miniature biography of the classic superman seem to
have fixed themselves in the memory of Shakespeare. The first relates
to Alexander's murdering of his confidential friend Cleitus during a
drinking bout.
This is alluded to by the irrepressible and muddle-tongued Fluellen
in Henry V, (IV.7) as follows:
Alexander,—Got knows, and you know,—in his rages and his
furies, and his wraths, and his cholers, and his moods, and his displeasures,
and his indignations, and also being a little intoxicates in his prains,
did, in his ales and his angers, look you, kill his pest friend, Cleitus.
The other Alexandrian anecdote has to do with the great conqueror's
final act. It is reported in the ancient chronicle in this wise:
When his friends saw him dying, they asked him "whom he would
appoint as the successor to his throne?" He replied, "The
most worthy." Such was his nobleness of spirit, that though he
left a son named Hercules, a brother called Aridaeus, and his wife
Roxane with child, yet forgetting his relations, he named only "the
most worthy" as his successor; as though it were unlawful for
any but a brave man to succeed a brave man ...
Shakespeare's King Leontes in The Winter's Tale, having put
away his wife and daughter in a jealous rage, (just as Lord Oxford himself
did in 1576, by the way) finds himself likely to face the future without
an heir. The old noblewoman Paulina offers him this cold but familiar
comfort (Act V.1.):
Care
not for issue:
The crown will find an heir: great Alexander
Left his to th' worthiest; so his successor
Was like to be the best.
Altogether, there are ten or more clear-cut allusions in the plays
to memorable characterizations and passages that appear in Arthur Golding
translation of Trogus Pompeius. In addition, Shakespeare seems
to have drawn heavily upon the book in naming many of his dramatic personages.
Fully a dozen of the heroes of antiquity that Golding re-vitalized for
the delectation of his brilliant nephew reappear in name if not in exact
characterization in the Shakespearean comedies and tragedies—exclusive
of the Roman plays, modeled directly upon Plutarch.
"Thine Uncle, Famous in Caesar's Praises"
In October, 1565, from his East Anglian birthplace of "Powles
Belchamp," Arthur Golding dedicated one of his most important translations
"To the ryghte honorable Syr Willyam Cecill Knight, principal Secretarye
to the Queenes Maiestie, and maister of her highnes Courtes of wardes
and liueries."
This was a spirited English version of Caesar's Commentaries, bearing
the rather verbose title of The eyght bookes of Caius Iulius Caesar
conteyning his Martiall exploytes in the Realme of Gallia and the Countries
bordering upon the same. The volume represents a landmark in English
history and scholarship for it was the first' translation of the greatest
of all military classics to be printed in the vernacular. That it was
eagerly read by Golding's bookish young relative, there can be no doubt.
Shakespeare's preoccupation with the character and exploits of Julius
Caesar is too well known to require comment.
It is interesting, but perhaps not surprising to find the Bard adopting
Golding's exact phraseology when the latter makes Caesar remark:
Of all the inhabitants of the isle, the civilest
are the Kentish-folke.
This reappears in the speech of the doomed Lord Say to Jack Cade, 2
Henry VI, (IV.7):
Kent, in the Commentaries Caesar writ,
Is term'd the civill'st place of all this' isle.
Also in Cymbeline (III.1), the playwright has Lucius, the Roman
general, remark to the British leader:
When Julius Caesar, whose remembrance yet
Lives in men's eyes and will to ears and tongues
Be theme and hearing ever, was in this Britain
And conquer'd it, Cassibelan, thine uncle,—
Famous in Caesar's praises, no whit less
Than in his feats deserving it, etc....
Cassibelan does not appear in the play and his relationship to Cymbeline
and admiration for Caesar seem to stress the Bard's appreciation of
uncles who reflect Arthur Golding's particular characteristics. Half
a dozen pointed references in various plays to the fact that an uncle
can, if he will, fulfill the offices of a missing parent, come readily
to mind.
When my uncle told me so, he wept,
And hugg'd me in his arm ... (3 Henry VI)
. . . And thy uncle will
As dear be to thee as thy father was.
(King
John)
But the most unusual of these allusions that adumbrate Shakespeare's
familiarity with the scholarly Golding himself occur in As You Like
It.
Rosalind, disguised as a backwoods youth, meets Orlando in the forest
and is complimented upon her refined accent. She replies:
I have been told so of many: but indeed
an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak,
who was in his youth an inland man....
Later in the play, when Orlando tries to explain the contradictions
in Rosalind's hidden personality to the Duke, he says:
But my good lord, this boy is forest-born,
And hath been tutor'd in the rudiments
Of many desperate studies by his uncle,
Whom he reports to be a great magician...
The Protean Personality of the Poet-Peer
Close students of the personality of Arthur Golding as it emerges from
his biography will also find the idiosyncracies of this unusual puritan-poet-scholar
and his chief interests in life so persistently refracted through the
rays of Shakespeare's scintillating genius that the identification of
the translator with the poet's development is in many respects easier
to distinguish than is the part that Golding the man took in the education
and support of his own children.
For instance, the translator's dedication to his nephew in 1571 of
The Psalmes of David and others with M. John Calvin's Commentaries
might seem at first glance of very little significance, except to the
two people chiefly concerned. The "old religious uncle" appears
to have been somewhat concerned at this time about the spiritual welfare
of the dashing young peer who was known as a champion "spear-shaker"
in the lists, an ingenious writer of light verse, a patron of poets,
philosophers and dramatists, and the Queen's personal favorite among
Court entertainers. "If it were not for his fickle head he would
pass any of them shortly," wrote Gilbert Talbot to his father,
the Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1572. Evidently Arthur Golding watched the
development of Oxford's mind with some distrust, for the Earl was as
complex and contradictory a personality as the age had to offer: a voracious
student and distinguished scholar, and at the same time a highly-mannered
fop; a musician and a master-tilter; a poet, a keen follower of new
philosophies, but an incorrigible practical joker; an eager soldier,
an expert horseman, the best dancer at Court and withal a natural comedian.
Courthope in his History of English Poetry describes him (appropriately
enough) in exactly the same words that Shakespeare uses to characterize
Falstaff: "He was not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit
in others." Sir William Cecil, his guardian, sketches the Earl
realistically in a letter written to Lord Rutland at this time.
I find…that there is much more in him of understanding than
any stranger to would think. And for my own part I find that whereof
I take comfort in his wit and knowledge grown by good observation.
This was the distinctly "off standard" representative of
the ancient English aristocracy to whom Arthur Golding addressed his
1571 edition of The Psalms of David with the heartfelt hope that
Oxford would take their message as
...the lantern of your feet, and the light of your steps. Whosoever
walketh without it walketh but in darkness, though he were otherwise
as sharp-sighted as Linceus, or Argus, and had all the sciences, arts,
cunning, eloquence, and wisdom of the world.
For many generations writers on the Elizabethan period who did not
bother to look closely into the matter have held the opinion that this
good advice of Arthur Golding was thrown away on Edward Earl of Oxford,
and that the talented but eccentric young nobleman degenerated into
a quarrelsome wastrel, a treasonable turn-coat in religion, in brief,
a flighty nonentity who was chiefly distinguished for his monumental
debts and his differences with Sir Philip Sidney.
But the actual facts of his life, as they have been dredged up from
the original records of the times by J. Thomas Looney, Capt. B. M. Ward
and others of recent years, tell a far different story. Lord Oxford
appears to have been the most misunderstood and persistently misrepresented
poet that was ever born in England. His talents as a scholar, an entertainer
and a comedian fused into focus as his wealth declined, and the best
of evidence now exists to show that he was really the creative power
behind the development of the Shakespearean stage. That he wrote the
plays and poems generally credited to the unschooled and untravelled
business man of Stratford-on-Avon who had such difficulty in penning
his own signature, a very substantial mass of testimony bears witness.
We also know that while Lord Oxford never announced himself a Calvinist,
as his uncle may have hoped he would, his spiritual stamina was sufficient
to enable him to rise above the mistakes and misadventures of early
manhood which had landed him in the Tower on two separate occasions.
Some of the valuable properties which Arthur Golding sacrificed so mysteriously
at about the same period undoubtedly went to help the Earl out of these
embarrassments. In any event, Oxford lived long enough to emerge from
the shadows. When James I came to the throne in 1603 he rescued the
poet-peer from official obscurity and financial uncertainty and made
him a member of the Royal Privy Council. In a letter to Sir Robert Cecil,
the Earl's brother-in-law, James refers to him as "Great Oxford."
No other Englishman of the day can be shown to have elicited so unusual
a tribute from the drama-loving monarch of Edinburgh. Neither is there
any evidence to show that Edward de Vere had achieved notable success
in any fields other than poetry, music and playwriting when James arrived
in England.
An Amazing "Coincidence"
The Psalms of David which Arthur Golding so hopefully dedicated
to his twenty-one year old nephew may have helped Lord Oxford through
some of the crises of his chequered career. At least we have the comment
of Sir George Buc, who served for many years in the office of the Master
of the Revels and licensed several of the Shakespearean plays for production,
that
... certaynly the erl was a magnificent and a very learned and religious
man ...
This comment was recently decyphered from some half-burned notes in
Buc's handwriting, found among his manuscripts in the Harleian collection.
The Master of the Revels adds other significant words in defence of
the peer who had unquestionably lost caste by becoming a public playwright,
ending as follows:
I spea (k) bu (t) what I know, for he vouchsafed me . . . the honour
of his familiar ac(quaintance).
It is unfortunate that all of Buc's notes on this matter have not been
preserved for no one can question the significance of the fact, in connection
with other Oxford-Shakespeare authorship evidence, that this remarkable
nobleman was on terms of "familiar acquaintance" with a licenser
of Shakespeare's plays.
Turning back to these masterpieces with the thought that perhaps Arthur
Golding's presentation of The Psalms of David and others to their
apparent author may have had some perceptible influence upon the creative
structure of the plays, we find the conjecture justified beyond all
reasonable doubt. Expert opinion informs us that
From first to last there is not a play in the Folio entirely free
from a suggestion of a use of the Psalms. In two plays, 2 Henry
VI and King Henry VIII the allusions to the Psalms
run into double figures. Even the Sonnets are not devoid of
quotations from the Psalms. If Shakespeare made instinctive and spontaneous
use of any part of Scripture it was of the Psalter.
This testimony appears in Richmond Noble's authoritative work on
Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge, published 1935. Mr. Noble was
granted a scholarship by the University of Liverpool to carry out his
research. He also secured the advisory co-operation of the greatest
living authorities on the history of English Biblical publication and
the Shakespearean texts. He seems to have been in no way concerned with
the problem of the disputed authorship of the plays and expresses the
orthodox point of view throughout his investigation that Shakespeare
the dramatist was a citizen of Stratford-on-Avon.
But here again, in tracing the Bard's familiarity with Biblical text,
the investigator reaches conclusions that can be shown to corroborate
the Oxfordian theory in convincing detail.
Realizing that no direct evidence exists to prove that the householder
of Stratford ever personally owned a Bible or for that matter, any other
book, Richmond Noble at first adopted Sir Sidney Lee's supposition that
the poet had been instructed in Biblical lore at school. He soon found,
however, that
. . . unfortunately this view seems to have been based on nothing
more substantial than a confident assumption; there is nothing to
show that (Lee) took any pains to confirm it by means of inquiry.
There has as yet been no adequate proof adduced that the English Bible,was
taught generally in country schools between 1572 and 1580, or if we
agree that Shakespeare served as an usher, even as late as 1586.
Mr. Noble then goes on to prove that the man who wrote the plays had
a scholar's knowledge of all the Biblical texts that were circulated
in England prior to the King James version—but particularly
of the phraseology of the Genevan Bible, so dear to the hearts of John
Calvin and Arthur Golding.
It is beyond all shadow of doubt (says our authority) that on occasions
Shakespeare used the Genevan, just as on others he used the Bishops;
and on others again, a rendering found in the Prayer Book . . . but
the evidence is in favor of Shakespeare's possession of a Genevan
Old Testament . . .
We have italicized some of Mr. Noble's words to accentuate their import
in relation to (1) the lack of proof that the Stratford man ever owned
any books and (2) the fact that indisputable documentary evidence is
on file at Hatfield House, the ancient home of the Cecil family, showing
that Edward, Earl of Oxford early in life purchased a copy of the particular
rendering of the Scriptures with which Shakespeare, in Mr. Noble's expert
opinion, was personally familiar. Proof of this appears in an old account
book under date "from January 1st to September 30th, 1569/70,"
with the notation, "payments, made by John Hart, Chester Herald,
on behalf of the Earl of Oxford." The item with which we are now
concerned reads:
To William Seres, stationer, for a Geneva Bible gilt, a Chaucer,
Plutarch's works in French, with other books and papers . . . 2 .
7 . 10.
So it would seem that Calvinist Arthur Golding's eloquent appeal to
his unpredictable nephew to take the scriptures—and particularly
the Psalms—"as the light of your steps" may very
well have been acted upon in a way far different from that in which
the puritanical translator had intended but to the eternal glory of
English literature!
Charles Wisner Barrell
Part
2
Notes
1. An Elizabethan Puritan, by Louis Thom Golding.
Richard R. Smith, New York. $3.50. back
