Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Edward de Vere, 1575

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (born April 12, 1550 at Hedingham Castle , †  June 24, 1604 in Hackney Wick , Middlesex ) was an English nobleman and Lord Great Chamberlain at the court of Elizabeth I from 1562 to 1603.

In the context of the debate about the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare , which is conducted outside of traditional scholarly Shakespeare and Renaissance research , Edward de Vere is often viewed as the actual author.

Childhood and youth

He was the only son of John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford from his second marriage to Margery Golding († 1568). As his father's apparent marriage , he had carried the courtesy title of Lord Bulbeck from birth . When his father died unexpectedly on August 3, 1562, at the age of twelve he inherited his title of nobility as Earl of Oxford and the state office of Lord Great Chamberlain of England. Edward's mother married a retired gentleman named Charles Tyrell, a former stable master of the Dudley family, within the next fourteen months .

While the Earl of Oxford was still a minor, he became a royal ward and came into the household of Sir William Cecil , later Lord Burghley , who at that time was already Lord High Treasurer and member of Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council and her closest adviser. Under William Cecil's guidance, Edward de Vere was taught French , Latin , writing and drawing, cosmography , music and dancing, horsemanship, fencing , falconry and hunting .

Among his well-known teachers were the classical philologist and diplomat Sir Thomas Smith and Laurence Nowell .

At the court of Queen Elizabeth

Oxford came to the royal court in the late 1560s. Contemporaries report that he soon trumped all other courtiers in the queen's favor and emerged victorious at various court tournaments. In 1564 he received a bachelor's degree from Cambridge University , in 1566 his master's degree from Oxford University , and from around 1567 he completed a legal education at Gray's Inn . The legality of the degrees is controversial among historians. According to the writer Alan Nelson, Edward de Vere received his university degrees “undeservedly”.

On July 23, 1567, seventeen-year-old Oxford killed an unarmed cook named Thomas Brincknell while he was practicing fencing with Edward Baynam, a tailor, in the back yard of Cecil's house near the beach . In the subsequent criminal proceedings, it was alleged that the victim ran into the point of Oxford's sword and thus committed suicide.

After Oxford came of age in April 1571 at the age of 21, he was given control of his inherited large estates. On December 19, 1571, he married the fifteen-year-old daughter of Sir William Cecil, with whom he had grown up, Anne Cecil . It was a surprising choice as Oxford came from one of the oldest noble families in England, whereas Anne was of middle-class origin - her father had only been raised to the nobility by Queen Elizabeth as Lord Burghley in February 1571 to make this marriage possible. His marriage to Anne Cecil had five children, three of whom survived childhood.

In the years 1575 to 1576 Edward de Vere traveled extensively in France , Germany and especially Italy . He stayed for a long time in Venice and Verona , and during this time it was said that he, like many members of the nobility, sympathized with Catholicism .

On his return across the English Channel , Oxford's ship was hijacked by pirates who robbed him of his clothes and apparently wanted to kill him - until they were found out who he was. He was then released, albeit without his belongings. After his return to England a falling out ensued with his wife Anne Cecil, because Oxford had mistakenly assumed, on the basis of rumors he had given, that the daughter his wife had given birth during his long absence was not his.

In 1580 Oxford accused some of his Catholic friends of high treason and reported them to the Queen, at the same time pleading for leniency for himself and denying his own Catholicism. The same friends, in turn, charged Oxford with a long list of crimes, including planned assassinations of a number of courtiers including Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Leicester . Although the allegations were never taken seriously, Oxford was unable to fully regain the Queen's favor and its reputation was now damaged.

In 1581, Oxford had an illegitimate child, Edward Vere, with a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, Anne Vavasour , who was his mistress during the quarrel with Anne Cecil . He and Anne were then briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London . The forbidden meetings with Anne Vavasour led to a long-running rift with her uncle, Sir Thomas Knyvett , which resulted in three deaths and several injuries. Oxford himself was seriously injured in a duel, possibly leading to the "lameness" he later became. a. mentioned in some of his letters. The feud only ended when the Queen threatened everyone with jail.

At Christmas 1581, Oxford had finally reconciled with his wife Anne. From then on they not only lived together again, but also had four other children. The only son of Oxford and Anne Cecil and a daughter died in childhood.

The later years

In 1585 Oxford received military command in the Netherlands and in 1588 served in the battle against the Spanish Armada . Anne Cecil, his first wife, died that same year at the age of 32. In 1591 Oxford married Elizabeth Trentham , one of the Queen's Maids of Honor. From this marriage came his heir, Henry, Lord Vere, who later became the 18th Earl of Oxford. The earl's three daughters married nobles: Elizabeth the Earl of Derby ; Bridget the Earl of Berkshire ; Susan the Earl of Montgomery , one of the "Incomparable Paire of Brethren", to which William Shakespeare's First Folio was dedicated.

Financial inadequacies brought Oxford to the brink of poverty. In 1586 the Queen promised him an annual pension of £ 1,000 , a sum that her successor, King James I , continued to pay.

Oxford was a sponsor of a number of well-known writers, including Edmund Spenser , Arthur Golding , Robert Greene , Thomas Churchyard , Thomas Watson , John Lyly and Anthony Munday , the latter two of whom had served as secretaries for many years.

Oxford in the Shakespeare authorship debate

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

See also: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford in the main article William Shakespeare Authorship

The English school teacher Thomas Looney (1870–1944) was the first to propose the thesis in 1920 that the works of William Shakespeare came from Edward de Vere. Among the numerous theses in the debate about the “true” author, this attribution has since been the most widespread. One argument is that there are a number of similarities between events in Shakespeare's plays and the life of the Earl of Oxford. Since Edward de Vere died in 1604, but eleven of Shakespeare's dramas are usually dated later, proponents of the “Oxford thesis” have made extensive changes to the dates for these works. In addition, according to the previous reading, the recognition of Oxford's poetic and dramaturgical abilities by his contemporaries should have been modest.

literature

Works

• Steven W. May: The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex . In: Studies in Philology. Chapel Hill 77.1980, pp. 1-132. ISSN  0039-3738
• Robert Detobel: Edward de Veres poetry. Translation by Kurt Kreiler . Laugwitz, Buchholz 2005. ISBN 3-933077-13-3

Scientific biographies

• Bernard M. Ward: The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. John Murray, London 1928 ( archive.org ).
• Alan H. Nelson: Monstrous Adversary. The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 2003, ISBN 0-85323-678-X .
• Kurt Kreiler: the man who invented Shakespeare. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 3458357157 .
• Mark Anderson: Shakespeare by Another Name; the life of Edward de Ver, Earl of Oxford, the man who was Shakespeare. Gotham Books, New York 2005.
• Sidney Lee : Vere, Edward de . In: Sidney Lee (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 58, Smith, Elder & Co., London 1899, pp. 225-229.

Web links

Commons : Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford on thepeerage.com

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alan H. Nelson: Monstrous Adversary. The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. P. 424.

predecessor	title	successor
John de Vere	Earl of Oxford 1562-1604	Henry de Vere