Michael Billington says Shakespeare’s romantic comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor offers clues to the Bard’s identity (Need proof who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? See The Merry Wives of Windsor, 20 May). “It could only have been written by someone who understood the intricacies of a close-knit, provincial community,” Billington writes.
We wholeheartedly agree. The action in Merry Wives centres on an inn in Windsor, the only town in England with a whole Shakespeare play devoted to it. Local geography and lore are faithfully reported, including accurate references to the nearby village of Frogmore, the laundry place at Datchet Mead and Windsor Castle’s Great Park.
This, we suggest, is for good reason. The author of The Merry Wives of Windsor is drawing from personal experience of having once lived in Windsor.
When he was a young adult in 1570, the downwardly mobile Elizabethan court poet and playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, recuperated from an illness at an inn in Windsor. Around the same time, he was wooing Anne Cecil, the daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s chief adviser William Cecil. Around that time an overachieving young go-getter in Cecil’s orbit, Philip Sidney, was also seeking kindly Anne’s hand. But De Vere ultimately got the girl. And his 1571 marriage to Anne soon spiralled into fiery disarray, brought about in part by the outraged De Vere jealously accusing her of infidelity.
And it’s all right there in The Merry Wives. The author of this play, relentless in his own self-satire, had a more modern artistic consciousness than critics traditionally allow. It’s as if he split portions of his life story into three and set these triplet strands of memory and clashing personality traits chaotically into motion.
The author’s three protagonist avatars – Fenton, Ford and Falstaff – represent the wooer, the jealous husband, and the wild gadabout. In Merry Wives, Fenton’s chief rival for the hand of “sweet Anne Page” is a milksop called Slender, whose pointed correspondences to the historical Philip Sidney zing with specificity. Sidney, like Slender, had a power broker of a kinsman who pressed Anne’s family for the marriage; Sidney, like Slender, could lay claim to a £300 annuity; Anne in Merry Wives as well as the historical Anne Cecil both had £700 inheritances awaiting them.
Ford spends much of the play wrestling with wild jealousies that he foists on his bedraggled wife. Falstaff, meanwhile, paralleling De Vere’s libertine youth, spends much of the play partying and sowing mischief. Falstaff’s boast “I fear not Goliath with a weaver’s beam!” references an obscure Old Testament verse. In De Vere’s personal copy of the Bible, now in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, he even underlined the words “weaver’s beam”.
Merry Wives features a Welsh playmaster called Hugh Evans who leads a troupe of child actors; in the historical Elizabethan court, De Vere sponsored one such real-life troupe, led by a playmaster called Henry Evans. In Act 3 of Merry Wives, Evans comically riffs on Psalm 137. Next to Psalm 137 in De Vere’s personal metrical psalter, he drew an ornate pointing hand.
Edward de Vere’s life story – resonant with numerous familiar Shakespearean characters and storylines – yields at times staggering connections and insights that heighten the comic and tragic poignancy of the Shakespeare canon. It’s why the case for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the Bard has persisted for more than 100 years.
Derek Jacobi
Patron, De Vere Society
Margo Anderson
Author, “Shakespeare” By Another Name
