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AUTHOR'S NOTE
Welcome to this adventure into Shakespeares Sonnets, the 154 consecutively numbered verses printed originally in 1609. This artistic masterwork has thrilled and moved millions of readers over the centuries, but the verses have been an enigma in terms of their meaning as well as their relationship to the author's life and contemporary history. In these pages I'd like to offer a new way of reading the Sonnets that brings them alive as a clandestine chronicle of political intrigue, passion, betrayal and commitment, leading to the royal succession and the end of the Tudor dynasty. My hope is that, whatever you may think about the conclusions described in these pages, you will come away with an increased appreciation of the poems; and for young scholars setting forth into classrooms to teach the works of Shakespeare, here is another perspective to offer students as they begin to look at the Sonnets and explore them.
This book is the result of unexpected discoveries. I began my journey as a playwright, author and actor with great love for Shakespeare and many unanswered questions about his motivation to write the plays and narrative poems. Most particularly I was drawn to the tortured lines of the Sonnets, which appeared to be the author's own version of Hamlet's soliloquies, using the personal pronoun "I" to express his deepest thoughts and feelings. My view was that the world's greatest writer must have drawn upon his own life experiences, particularly for these little poems that seemed to be entries of an intensely intimate diary.
I started with a series of assumptions and hypotheses that had been shared by many scholars and critics over the past few centuries. These premises included, for example, that the Sonnets are autobiographical and chronological; that the verses relate to real circumstances of real life; and that the original edition itself is "authorial" or printed according to the author's intentions. These hypotheses were confirmed, but what then emerged was a very different result involving the structure and time frame as much as the actual content of the poems. Suddenly the pieces of the puzzle began to move into place to form a clear picture; and once the verses were placed as "stencils" over the contemporary events and their dates on the calendar, what unfolded was a flesh and blood story that challenged the standard or "official" versions of the history and the traditional or "orthodox" interpretations of the literature.
The most startling aspect of the new picture was the emergence of exactly eighty chronological sonnets (more than half the collection!) addressed to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton during the more than two years (1601 to 1603) he spent imprisoned in the Tower of London as a traitor to the Crown, after which, following the death of Queen Elizabeth, he was inexplicably released by the new monarch, James I of England.
Then it became clear that the next twenty sonnets match the twenty days from Southampton's liberation to the day immediately following the Queen's funeral, when she was "officially" dead and the Tudor dynasty was no more. And this string of precisely 100 emotion-laden sonnets -- recording Southampton's crime, disgrace, treason trial, death sentence, reprieve, continued imprisonment and liberation, leading to a new phase of his life in the next reign -- is positioned at the exact center of an elegantly structured monument.
Since these findings came into view, I have often wished they could be presented initially without the implications they necessarily raise about the identity of the author, his relationship to Southampton and the political history of the Elizabethan reign. Sometimes a basic solution to a problem can trigger such heated debate over its ramifications that the solution itself is discarded along with its postulates.
The point to be made first of all is that, regardless of the implications, all the elements of the sonnets can be seen at last as working in harmony, not only with each other but also within a detailed historical context -- something that has not been possible before now. What I hope to communicate at the outset is an operational solution to how the numbered verses are designed and how they work as a unified whole. Many suggestions by others turn out to have been correct, but added to these are some crucial additions or modifications, transforming what appears to be a fictional story into a biographical and historical reality.
SOUTHAMPTON & ELIZABETH
The evidence of the monument eliminates any lingering doubt that Southampton was the younger man known as the Fair Youth of Sonnets 1-126 and the primary subject of all the other verses as well. And the evidence also makes clear that the powerful, deceitful Mistress known to us as the Dark Lady, whom the poet addresses in Sonnets 127-152, could only have been Queen Elizabeth, the Sovereign Mistress of England.
The crucial element is the context of time and circumstance: Her Majesty was keeping the Southampton in her royal prison fortress for having played a lead role in the failed Essex Rebellion of February 8, 1601, when he joined Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, in an attempt to gain control of the government and determine the royal succession.
OXFORD
The context also confirms the author's personal involvement in Southampton's tragedy and its aftermath, leading him to record his thoughts and feelings within the 100 intensely wrought verses of what he eventually fashioned as the centerpiece. In particular, this alignment with the history also confirms the longstanding theory that the poet was Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England and the most active patron of literature and the drama during the Elizabethan reign.
Educated from his early boyhood by the finest tutors, Edward de Vere received honorary degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford before studying law at Gray's Inn.
A writer for the stage, he was known as "best for comedy" in his day and deemed the "most excellent" of the courtier poets. Oxford's uncle, the Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), and Sir Thomas Wyatt had written the first English sonnets to become known as the "Shakespearean" form; and Edward de Vere himself wrote the first such verse recorded in the Elizabethan reign.
Oxford had a volatile relationship with the Queen and her powerful chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Treasurer Burghley, who was also his father-in-law. Based on the contents of the Sonnets, the only reasonable conclusion is that Edward de Vere was not only the Queen's lover in the early 1570s, as the Court gossip strongly suggested, but also that he fathered their unacknowledged royal son who was raised to become the Third Earl of Southampton.
Once Oxford is perceived as writing to and about Southampton as both the devoted father and the loyal subject of an unacknowledged prince, the tone and urgency of the verses is explained and a clear window is opened on events leading up to, and immediately following, the Queen's death and the succession of James in the spring of 1603.
In this light it becomes impossible to avoid the testimony of the Sonnets that the author himself sat on the jury of peers at the treason trial of Southampton and Essex on February 19, 1601 at Westminster Hall; and the highest-ranking, most prominent member of that jury was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. After having to join the unanimous verdict condemning both Essex and Southampton to death, he labored under extreme pressure to save his royal son and gain the promise of his release from the Tower.
"Thy adverse party is thy Advocate," he told Southampton in Sonnet 35, on the eve of the trial, after which he was forced to make a bargain with Lord Burghley's little hunchbacked son and successor, Secretary of State Robert Cecil, requiring him to bury the truth about his own and England's history.
After winning the power struggle behind the throne, Secretary Cecil made sure Essex went to his execution and then held Southampton hostage in the Tower until the Queen's death and the peaceful succession of James, thereby retaining his power in the new reign. The underlying truth of this story was kept out of the historical record; but Oxford, by means of the "dynastic" diary of the Sonnets, produced a "monument" for Southampton to preserve "the living record of your memory" that contains the truth of what really happened; and like a message in a bottle, it was set adrift on the sea of Time in the hope it would make its way to the distant shores of posterity.
"Who will believe my verse in time to come," he wonders in Sonnet 17, addressing his unacknowledged royal son, "if it were filled with your most high deserts?" And he goes on to predict that "your true rights" (to the throne as King Henry IX of England) will be "termed a Poet's rage and stretched meter of an Antique song" a forecast that has proved all too accurate, for far too long.
I trust that the following pages convey my reverence for the extraordinary creation of the Sonnets for the beauty and power of the verses, as well as for the duality that allows them to be both universal and specific at the same time. My experience has convinced me that, far from diminishing our ability to appreciate these poems, knowing the real-life story only serves to increase our recognition of their value on every level.
On May 7, 1603, just ten days after Elizabeth's funeral, Oxford wrote to Secretary Robert Cecil and reminded him:
"But I hope truth is subject to no prescription, for truth is truth though never so old, and time cannot make that false which was once true."
Edward de Vere was writing to his former brother-in-law, who, having engineered the succession of James, retained his position as the most powerful man behind the throne. The cunning Secretary had forced Oxford to sacrifice his identity, both as the father of the Queen's heir and as the author of the "Shakespeare" works dedicated publicly to Southampton, who had to renounce his own claim of succession in return for his life and freedom and a royal pardon.
Reminding Cecil that "truth is truth" until the end of time, however, Oxford was telling him in effect:
"You're the winner and therefore you get to write the history, but I've set down what really happened and your false official version will never be able to erase it. This truth is preserved in a monument for eyes not yet created and, in the end, it will be triumphant."
Such is the solemn promise that Edward de Vere, the "ever-living poet," made to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton:
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall oer-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead.
You still shall live (such virtue hath my Pen)
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Hank Whittemore
Nyack, New York
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