"Because a bard of Ireland told me once..."
Richard III, IV.2.108
The Celtic scholar, T.F. Healey, sponsors the whimsical theory in the
September 1940 issue of The American Mercury that "Shakespeare
Was An Irishman."
This is probably the one thousand and first effort that has been made
to provide a realistic personal background for the elusive Bard. And
Mr. Healey's effort, though undeniably far-fetched, has the virtue of
being both readable and stimulating. While the Stratford-on-Avon milieu
disappears like a puff of smoke from the Healey dudeen, we are not asked
to seek the true answer to Shakespeare's identity in cryptograms, spirit
rappings or other abracadabra. He is considered primarily as a poet,
and poetic license is not too rudely violated in claiming his racial
affinity to the land that traditionally honors bards.
The harp that once thrilled Tara's halls would have awakened a responsive
cord in Shakespeare's breast. Of that we can rest assured.
From the Oxford-was-Shakespeare point of view, Mr. Healey's brief provides
new arguments to prove that the personal psychology behind the plays
and poems is that of Edward de Vere, "most excellent" of Elizabethan
Court poets. For he alone of all the creative "claimants"
that have ever been put forward can be shown by authentic documentation
to have been accused of harboring sentiments of radical approval for
the activities of Irish patriots. And this, mind you, at a time
when the expression of such sentiments was a treasonable offense!
Not a line nor a word has ever been found which personally connects
Shakspere of Stratford with the Irish geographically, politically, genealogically,
or through any of the numerous business deals and legal squabbles in
which this citizen figures.
Neither was Sir Francis Bacon ever charged with being pro-Celtic. He
was too active and ambitious a politician for any such foolishness.
Roger Manners, the boyish Earl of Rutland (born October 6, 1576), fought
against the Irish in the army of the Earl of Essex in 1599.
None of these men can be shown to have been the sympathetic Celt-at-Heart
that Mr. Healey analyzes.
The situation is quite different when we begin to thumb over Elizabethan
State Papers and long-forgotten publications relating to the 17th Earl
of Oxford who lost caste by his addiction to poetry, music and the stage.
Following his denunciation in December 1580 of Lord Henry Howard and
Charles Arundel as English spies and conspirators in the pay of the
King of Spain, the Earl of Oxford was in turn accused by Arundel of
a list of offenses so numerous that Arundel states:
"...to report at large all the vices of this monstrous Earl
were a labour without end."
Written in the Tower in an effort to save his own neck, Arundel's counter-accusations
are hysterically phrased and in certain particulars unprintable. A digest
is given in the Calendar of State Papers, Elizabeth, 1581-1590.
Captain B.M. Ward made a complete transcript of the material while preparing
his biography of Edward de Vere.
Charles Arundel later died on the Continent, a pensioner of Philip
Il. His written catalogue of Oxford's "vices" must be accepted
with allowances due the testimony of a proven traitor and political
termite. But several of his comments on the literary Earl are extremely
interesting when studied in connection with the Healey theory.
For instance, Arundel claims that on numerous occasions he has heard
Oxford express commendation of the patriotism of "Dr. Sanders and
Lord Baltinglas."
Both of these men were prominent in the Irish "holy war"
that seriously threatened English control during 1579 and 1580.
James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald raised the banner of revolt. He was accompanied
by the famous Dr. Nicolas Sanders, who bore a papal legate's commission.
For several months this rebellion caused keen anxiety to the English
overlords. It was finally put down with much bloodshed.
In her Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays, Mrs. Clark argues
that Dr. Nicholas Sanders is the original of the miracle-worker referred
to by Shakespeare under the nickname of "Saunder Simpcox"
in 2 Henry VI (II.1).
Soon after the Fitzgerald-Sanders abortive attempt to throw off English
rule, during the summer of 1580, James Eustace, Third Viscount Baltinglas,
took up arms against Elizabeth's Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey. Baltinglas
issued a vigorous protest against "the severities and injustice
inflicted by Elizabethan officials on the people of Ireland. He repudiated
recognition of a woman as head of the Church." Baltinglas and his
followers put up a determined but hopeless fight which finally ended
with the leader's escape to the Continent. His estates being confiscated
by the Crown, one house in Dublin was granted to Edmund Spenser who
then served the Lord Deputy Grey as secretary.
The objections of Lord Baltinglas to English rule were based on humanitarian
and constitutional grounds. He has always been considered an Irish patriot
of high principle and stainless character. Lord Oxford may have known
him personally. In any event, according to Arundel's testimony, the
playwriting Earl admired Baltinglas as a man of heroic mold despite
the latter's enmity to the English government. This attitude fits
the Healey Shakespearean thesis perfectly. It is a fact, moreover,
that one of Shakespeare's marked characteristics is his ability to recognize
heroic qualities in the opponents of his dramatic protagonists. The
inexplicable treatment of Joan of Arc, who is pictured as a harlot,
is the outstanding exception that proves the rule. Is it just another
"mere coincidence," as Oscar James Campbell and other orthodox
pundits would have it, that the poetical nobleman here is accused of
displaying the same admiration for the valor of an official enemy which
Shakespeare so frequently expresses?
The Healey analysis from other angles is equally suggestive of Lord
Oxford's creative hand in the plays. The knowledge of Irish folklore
and music which Mr. Healey proves to have been among the Bard's accomplishments
cannot be verified, through any Stratfordian clue. But here again, Lord
Oxford is known to have been in close personal touch with repositories
of such knowledge.
Edmund Spenser, who secured his first leasehold in Ireland as a result
of the attainder of Lord Baltinglas and who lived in the land long enough
to become a recognized authority on its customs and folklore, enjoyed
the familiar acquaintance of the poet Earl. Spenser's dedicatory sonnet
to Oxford in the 1590 edition of The Faery Queene not only enlists
the nobleman's good will because Spenser needs patronage, but most significantly
hails the nobleman as himself a great poet, a beloved initiate of the
Muses:
And also for the love which thou cost bear
To th' Heliconian imps and they to thee,
They unto thee, and thou to them most dear...
We may with reasonable assurance picture Edmund Spenser as a frequent
dinner guest of "the passing singular odd"
1 Earl of Oxford during Spenser's visits
to London. And as the two poets linger over their apples, cheese and
wine, we can visualize the bohemian nobleman, famous throughout England
for his love of the curious and the outlandish, "as well the histories
of ancient times, and things done long ago, as also of the present estate
of things in our days," 2
lending eager ear to Spenser's tales of the wild Irish kerns who worship
the moon and do use to make the wolf their gossip." 3
The author of As You Like It displays just such familiarity
with Celtic folklore when he has Rosalind mock the lovesick chorus of
Phebe, Sllvius and Orlando with:
Pray you, no more of this; 'tis like the howling of
Irish wolves against the moon.
Earlier in the comedy, Rosalind—who, in her disdain for love-rhymes
displays the same unusual characteristic that distinguishes Spenser's
Rosalind of The Shepheard's Calendar—has laughed Orlando's
forest-strewn verses to scorn:
I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras' time,
that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.
Here is not only a reference to transmigration, but to the claim of
such Irish historians as Gerald de Barry that rats had been expelled
from the Isle of Saints by the Bishop of Ferns, whose books they had
probably gnawed and who used rhymes to effect his spells upon the rodents.
We can well imagine both Edmund Spenser and the witty and learned Earl
of Oxford mulling over such bits of Irish legend as these. But it is
difficult indeed to assume that the Stratford businessman would acquire
similar curiosa from nowhere in particular.
"One may ask," says Mr. Healey, "where Shakespeare got
his knowledge of Irish mythology, legend and literature. It formed a
phenomenally exceptional knowledge in the England of his day, where
it was not even known that it existed. Not to speak of Irish songs and
ballads found in the plays. Indeed, the subject of Shakespeare's
knowledge of Irish music alone holds much more than the merit of mere
novelty to the ripe Shakespearean scholar. ...There are ten...Irish
folk-lore songs alluded to in the Plays, but every song is concealed
under an alias."
As the partisan and well-wisher of such Irish patriots as Sanders and
Baltinglas and the personal friend of Spenser, Oxford was well circumstanced,
it would seem, to acquire just such knowledge. Moreover, he had one
outstanding advantage here which made it possible for him to evaluate
and utilize for dramatic purposes the so-called "hidden music of
Eire."
For Lord Oxford was himself a musician of outstanding talent. He
even figures in English political history in a musical interlude on
the occasion of the execution of Essex for high treason. The story is
too well known to repeat in detail here. But all of the Earl's biographical
commentators stress his addiction to music, as well as to poetry and
the drama.
By the same token, every musical authority who writes on Shakespeare
reaches the conclusion that the Bard had so thorough an appreciation
of musical technique that many of his finest stage effects are achieved
by the scientific application of this knowledge. Louis C. Elson's Shakespeare
In Music gives many instances in point. His discussion of the wonderful
subtlety with which music is employed to characterize Ophelia's mental
collapse is illuminating. Of Scene 2, Act I, in The Two Gentlemen
of Verona, Elson says: "This scene could easily give rise to
an entire chapter of musical comment and elucidation."
It seems certain that no creative artist possessing technical ability
of this high order would be able to conceal it in his person as effectively
as the citizen of Stratford did. His most assiduous biographers have
been unable to trace a single contemporary reference to their man which
offers any musical connotation whatever. To claim for such a will
o' the wisp every personal accomplishment that the author of the plays
and poems exhibits, without bothering to substantiate such claims with
bona fide documentation, may be acceptable practice in the realm
of scholarship presided over by Prof. Campbell and his fellow obscurantists,
but it will hardly pass muster among serious students of the Shakespeare
problem.
Here again Lord Oxford is the one great concealed poet of his age who
can be definitely shown to have embodied in his own person the knowledge
and innate ability to meet the musical requirements of "Mr. William
Shakespeare's" creative role, as both Messrs. Healey and Elson
define them.
During the 1590 decade the Earl who already numbered among his proteges
such Shakespearean "source" writers as Thomas Watson, Anthony
Munday, Thomas Churchyard, John Lyly and Robert Greene—not to mention
his uncle Arthur Golding—became the acknowledged patron of the
famous Anglo-Irish composer John Farmer.
Farmer held the post of organist and master of the children of the
choir in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, according to the Chapter Acts
of that church, reprinted in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians
(3rd Edition). He was one of the most gifted composers and musical
arrangers of the Elizabethan era, a pioneer in the fields of the madrigal
and counterpoint of different orders.
In 1591 Farmer dedicated his first studies in counterpoint to Edward
de Vere, "Earle of Oxenford." Divers and Sundry Ways...to
the Number of Forty, Upon One Playn Song carries a significant statement
of its composer's relationship to the nobleman who, like his prototype
in All's Well, is known to have sold many "a goodly manor
for a song":
"Hereunto, my good Lord, I was the rather emboldened for your
Lordship's great affection to this noble science (i.e., music) hoping
for the one you might pardon the other, and desirous to make known
your inclination this way.... Besides this, my good Lord, I bear this
conceit, that not only myself am vowed to your commandment, but all
that is in me is dedicated to your Lordship's service."
At this time, as his volume states, John Farmer was living in London
"in Broad Street, near the Royal Exchange."
On August 10th, 1596, the records of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin,
tell us that Farmer was sworn in as "Viccar Corrall" in place
of Robert Jordan, "resigned." He held this position until
1599, when he appears to have returned to London to resume a close personal
relationship to the Earl of Oxford.
During the same year he published another work, which insures his immortality
in British musical history. This was The First Set of English Madrigals
to Foure Voices. Newly composed by John Farmer, practitioner in the
art of Musicque. Printed at London in Little Saint Helen's by William
Barley...Anno Dom. 1599.
Again Farmer dedicates his labors to his "very good Lord and Master,"
the Earle of Oxenforde." The wording of this dedication is so interesting
from the personal angle that it should be read at length:
Most honourable Lord, it cometh not within the compass of my power
to express all the duty I own, nor to pay the least part; so far have
your honourable favors outstripped all means to manifest my humble
affection that there is nothing left but praying and wondering. There
is a canker worm that breedeth in many minds, feeding only upon forgetfulness
and bringing forth to birth but ingratitude. To show that I have not
been bitten with that monster, for worms prove monsters in this age,
which yet never any painter could counterfeit to express the ugliness,
nor any poet describe to decipher the height of their illness, I have
presumed to tender these Madrigals only as remembrances of my service
and witnesses of your Lordship's liberal hand, by which I have lived
so long, and from your honourable mind that so much have all liberal
sciences. In this I shall be most encouraged if your Lordship vouchsafe
the protection of my first-fruits, for that both of your greatness
you best can, and for your judgment in music best may. For without
flattery be it spoke, those that know your Lordship know this, that
using this science as a recreation, your Lordship have overgone most
of them that make it a profession. Right Honourable Lord, I hope it
shall not be distasteful to number you here amongst the favourers
of music, and the practisers, no more than Kings and Emperors
that have been desirous to be in the roll of astronomers, that being
but a star fair, the other an angel's choir.
Thus most humbly submitting myself and my labours and whatever is
or may be in me to your Lordship's censure and protection, I humbly
end, wishing your Lordship as continual an increasing of health and
honour as there is a daily increase of virtue to come to happiness.
Your Lordship's most dutiful servant to command,
John Farmer
Here we have unimpeachable contemporary documentation regarding Lord
Oxford's ability as a musician which should convince the most skeptical
that he was fully capable of applying creatively all of the musical
technique, taste and feeling which Elson and other authorities find
throughout the Shakespearean plays.
The Earl's relationship to the scholarly choirmaster of the Dublin
Cathedral should also help make plain the avenues through which the
mysterious Bard acquired his intimate knowledge of the folk tunes of
Eire.
As invariably happens when new arguments, based upon bona fide
documentation and genuine logic, are presented to identify the actual
personality behind the professional mask of "Mr. William Shakespeare,"
Lord Oxford's Irish sympathies, together with his acceptance as a musical
colleague by the composer of The First Set of English Madrigals,
open up many interesting contributory lines of evidence that the playwriting
Earl was the center of the great Elizabethan creative enigma.
Charles Wisner Barrell
Notes
1. Gabriel Harvey's description of Oxford
in Speculum Tuscamismi (1580). back
2. Arthur Golding's reference to Oxford
in the dedication to The Histories of Trogus Pompeius (1564).
back
3. See Edmuch Spenser's View
from the Present State of Ireland (1596). back
