Anonymous SHAKE-SPEARE - The Man Behind

8. Mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare (S. 143-144)

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe both addressed the Earl of Oxford with “Master William”- and meant William Shakespeare. Other literary contemporaries make veiled references to Shakespeare’s being a man who sits “in an idle cell” or remains “amid’st the Center of this clime”. Did they mean the Earl of Oxford?- What about Francis Meres who places the dramatists Shakespeare and Oxford side by side ?

8.1 Edmund Spenser (1579 & 1591)

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), one of the most independent, articulate and knowledgeable poets of Elizabethan period, didn’t neglect the opportunity to feature the Earl of Oxford in one of his first works: “The Shepheard’s Calender” (1579).

In the “Aegloga Octava” (eclogue of August), the young shepherd Cuddie recites a poem from Colin Clout (=Spenser): “The wastefull woodes beare witnesse of my woe” etc. This poem is an obvious parody on Oxford’s laments in “The Paradise of Daintie Devices” (1576). We recognize Oxford’s dramatic alliterations in passages such as: “Thus like a woeful wight I wove the web of woe” which becomes: “The wastefull woodes beare witnesse of my woe” in Spenser’s hands. The trickling tears flow, the wails and the sobs come back as an empty echo.

The summary of the “Aegloga decima” (eclogue of October) begins: In Cuddie is set out the perfect pattern of a Poet, which finding no maintenance of his state and studies, complayneth of the contempt of Poetry, and the causes thereof. Later on, Spenser is referring to Oxford’s first poetic statement in the foreword to “Cardanus Comforte” in which the poet compares himself to a common labourer who is cheated out of his pay: “For he that beats the bush the bird not gets,/ But who sits still and holdeth fast the nets.”

Spenser lets Cuddie (=Oxford) say: CUDDIE. To feed youthes fancy, and the flocking fry, Delighten much: what I the bet for thy? hey han the pleasure, I a slender prise. I beat the bush, the birds to them doe flie: What good thereof to Cuddie can arise? Another shepherd, Pierce answers: “Cuddie, the praise is better then the price,/ The glory eke much greater then the gain.” Cuddie, however, will not let it go at that: “Sike praise is smoke that sheddeth in the sky,/ Sike words been wind, and wasten soon in vain.” At this point, Pierce launches a surprising counter attack:

PIERCE. Abandon then the base and viler clown,
Lift up thyself out of the lowly dust:
And sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of jousts,
Turn thee to those that bear the awful crown.