ALAS, POOR GHOST!
A NARRATIVE SERIES OF EIGHT PAINTINGS
UPCOMING EXHIBITION - Ah Haa Arts Center Telluride, CO
Opens September 7, 2023
For questions about sales please contact Kristin Kwasniewski, Exhibitions Manager, Ah Haa School for the Arts: kris@ahhaa.org
An Introduction
Shakespeare, the “soule of the age” and the most revolutionary voice of his day, has in the centuries since become ubiquitous. After the Bible, the Shakespearean canon is the second most widely read text in the English language. Not only that, but those plays, poems, and sonnets have served as the inspiration for the creation of myriad books, plays, musicals, operas, ballets, songs, films, sculptures, and paintings, demonstrating that Shakespeare transcends medium, and has become an unsurpassed font for adaptation. While reading his plays and poems, a sense of Shakespeare betraying his role as playwright can be felt; as if he’s talking directly to the reader [an aside] from across the centuries through the words of his characters - giving clues as to who he really was and what motivated him to tell the specific stories he did.
Why Shakspere Was Not Shakespeare
William Shakspere (pronounced Shax-per) of Stratford upon Avon died, leaving behind no books or manuscripts in his will, nor any instructions about a literary legacy (even though he famously saw fit to bequeath his second best bed to his wife). He did not even write his own will, calling upon his solicitor to scribe what he dictated, most of which was a complicated web of multi-generational bequests - one long run-on sentence without a single piece of punctuation in the entire document. The only documentary evidence that William Shakspere ever even held a quill, are six signatures in shaky script, with several different spellings, and each nearly illegible. Beyond that, there are no letters, no business documents, no ledgers, and certainly no poems or manuscripts in his hand left to posterity. Shakspere’s children were also presumably illiterate, as deduced by a lack of any words written in their hands, save a single extant “signature” mark on a bill of sale by his daughter Judith, comprised of two loops in a halting hand.
There is no documentary or contemporary colloquial record of Shakspere ever having been educated in the local grammar school in Stratford, even though this is commonly touted as an important part of the mythical narrative of his life. Shakspere, a moneylender and grain merchant, spent his entire life in England, never traveling outside the island. There is no contemporaneous account or mention of Shakspere from Stratford as being a playwright, much less the most well known of them all. In fact when the Stratford man died, there was no outpouring of remembrances from his neighbors or countrymen, and aside from death records, no written mention of his passing at all.
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
Why Edward De Vere Was
A man that too few people have likely heard of - Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford - lived a life with uncanny similarities to a litany of Shakespeare’s characters and plots. Though intriguing circumstances surround the sudden marriage of his father and mother as well as the events of his birth, Edward de Vere spent his youth peacefully in Hedingham Castle in Essex, seat of the Earls of Oxford, the second oldest earldom in England at the time.
At the age of twelve, Edward’s father unexpectedly died, and as an underage peer, de Vere became the first-ever ward of the court of Queen Elizabeth. The wardship system, was really nothing more than a corrupt scheme devised to rob hereditary peers, who hadn’t reached majority age, of large swaths of their inherited lands and estates. The Queen (and William Cecil as Master of Wards) had complete control of the young heirs’ fortunes, and Queen Elizabeth would reappropriate these lands and monies to curry favor and create alliances within the aristocracy, leaving these fatherless children with less of their inheritance, and most often in crippling debt. Oxford’s wardship was purchased by Wiliam Cecil (the future Lord Burghley), Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor, who was paid handsomely from de Vere’s inheritance for his upbringing. Once of majority age, Oxford reclaimed what was left of his inheritance after the Queen and Cecil had taken large shares to bolster their own coffers and those of other courtiers. As a result of his father’s premature death, Oxford was indebted to the Court of Wards for the majority of his adult life, not repaying his substantial debts until he was forty one.
In the Cecil household, de Vere continued his studies, drawing upon the massive Cecil library. He was well educated by tutors, one of whom was his uncle Arthur Golding, who translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses during those years. This text would later become a primary literary source of inspiration for many of Shake-speare’s plots and tropes. He received his bachelors degree from Cambridge at age fourteen and his masters from Oxford at sixteen. He then went on to Gray’s Inn to study law at seventeen. He was begrudgingly coerced into marrying William Cecil’s only daughter Anne (someone whom he’d grown up with almost as a sibling), ensuring that William Cecil would receive a Barony because of this marital connection to an Earl.
Oxford personally arranged and funded the publication of a long list of translations of classical texts, and the publication of literary and scientific volumes. Oxford himself was well-known as a courtier poet, and many of his juvenelia poems survive intact. And though as he aged, it became less socially acceptable for him (as an Earl) to publish his works, there are mentions of him in literary journals of the time as being “best for comedy amongst us“ as Francis Meres stated in Palladis Tamia, likely a reference to court performances of early versions of his comedies. Oxford was also well known at court by the name Spear-shaker, a reference to his many jousting victories in the tilt-yard. This nickname also was a translation of an historical moniker for Athena - Greek goddess of wisdom and philosophy - Hasti-vibrans, which also means spear-shaker.
At the age of twenty five, Oxford was given permission by the queen to travel to the continent, where (by way of France and the then Bohemian coast) he spent over a year in Italy - namely in those cities in which Shake-speare’s Italian plays are set - Venice, Padua, Mantua, Verona, Milan. In fact, he lived mere steps away from Shylock’s house in Venice (an actual building that still stands) which he later wrote about in The Merchant of Venice. On his way home to England from the continent, Dutch pirates overtook his ship and looted all of the art, furniture and gifts he purchased on his Italian sojourn and left him naked save his shirt on the shores of southern England - much the same terrifying maritime experience Hamlet undergoes on his way home to Denmark from England.
Although he is not mentioned often by mainstream historians and Elizabethan biographers, Oxford had an unusually close relationship with the queen, at times having been known as her favorite at court, her dancing partner, even rumored as her lover. Starting in 1586 and continuing for the last eighteen years of his life, Oxford received a yearly annuity of one thousand pounds sterling from the crown - roughly equal to one million dollars today. The grant was issued through a privy warrant dormant, meaning that it continued in perpetuity. Within the text of that document the Queen specified that there was to be “no accounting” for what Oxford used the money for, indemnifying him from future retribution from elements of the government, the Cecils or from the next monarch. Modern Oxfordian researchers postulate that this annuity was used by Oxford to write and produce the history plays as tools of propaganda to unify the English under a common national identity and ethos, so that the people would be energized to fight against the oncoming Spanish Armada. More personally though for Queen Elizabeth, these plays in chronicling the Yorks and Lancasters, served to bolster the House of Tudor’s (and thus her) legitimacy to the throne.
Throughout his life, Oxford was either the employer or the known associate of many of the playwrights and poets of the day: Lyly, Kid, Munday, Nashe, Jonson and others. In his Bishopsgate home called Fishers Folly, and later in his Hackney home King’s Place, researchers think he operated what would now be known as a writers workshop. It would have been during this time he would have written the history plays in exchange for his 1000 Pound annuity, but also when he would have revised, edited and expanded the comedies and tragedies he had written for court performances.
After Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, de Vere lived only one year longer. He died on the evening of June 24, 1604 - coincidentally Midsummer’s Night. In the last two years of his life, the first quartos of Hamlet and several other plays were published under the name William Shakespeare. Nineteen years later the First Folio was dedicated to (and financed by) two brothers - The Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. The first, William Herbert, had been a suitor to de Vere’s daughter Bridget. The second, Phillip, was actually de Vere’s son-in-law, having wed his favorite daughter Susan. The only other dedicatee of a work by Shakespeare was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southhampton, who happened to be engaged to De Vere’s third and eldest daughter, Elizabeth.
These are but a few instances, from the veritable mountain of circumstantial evidence directly from the biography of Edward de Vere, that illustrate the many similarities between him and the characters and plots in the Shake-speare plays - not even mentioning the Sonnets and long form poems, which are equally rife with parallels.
BECOMING an OXFORDIAN
After becoming fascinated by the the authorship debate over ten years ago, I began reading every book on the subject, every article or blog I could find on the internet, watching every video, lecture and documentary. I delved deep into the exhaustive research, writings and lectures of JT Looney, Charlton Ogburn, Charles Beauclerk, Alexander Waugh, Nina Greene, Hank Whittemore, Roger Stritmatter, DL Roper, Mark Anderson, Bonner Miller Cutting and many others. It became clear to me from very early on that Edward de Vere was the most logical authorship candidate based on his life experience, the contemporaneous mentions of him by fellow writers (direct and oblique) and his personal knowledge of the queen. The most granular details of court life appeared as moments of lampoon in the plays, and only an insider would have known those stories and the actual people who were behind the characters telling them.
My earlier professional career, before beginning to paint full time several years ago, was as a costume designer in the theatre. I’ve worked with dozens of the most produced playwrights in America and have a comprehensive understanding of what it means (and what it takes) to produce a new play. Upon learning about the authorship debate and the dispossession of Oxford’s life’s work, especially when so much of it seems to be autobiographical in nature, I felt a deep sense of injustice and sadness for his legacy - and for our own understanding of the work, which would be far richer if we associated it with the context and intention of its creation and it’s autobiographical connections. I began thinking of ways I could contribute to righting this historical wrong using my own artistic skills and perspective.
My grandfather’s copy of Hamlet
A yellowed copy of Hamlet
I take no credit for the brilliant research I pored through obsessively while learning about this subject and am offering mere summaries of here, and I do not pretend this written interpretation of the series is an academic document. I am an autodidact and a visual artist and designer, not an historical literary scholar. Working in the theatre, I became adept at synthesizing and visually interpreting the written work of others. So I decided that I would translate everything I’d learned about Oxford and the authorship debate (facts and theories) into a series of paintings, each holding symbolic clues about my own views and opinions about the true authorship of the Shake-speare canon. I had originally thought that each painting might be centered around a different play or maybe even the sonnets, but that idea changed when I helped clean my grandparent’s house after my grandfather passed away. I found an old yellowed copy of Hamlet that had my grandfathers name written in it - likely from his high school days. It was an odd thing to find in their house, as my grandfather was a lifelong farmer in rural Eastern Kentucky, and I would have never believed he’d read Hamlet, much less owned a copy. This was a catalytic moment, and I felt like perhaps my grandfather may have left behind an unwitting clue for me to find, as to how to proceed with my idea. With Oxford as author, Hamlet can be seen as the most autobiographical of all the plays, so I decided it would be the ideal vehicle for telling this story visually. This New Hudson Shakespeare copy of Hamlet is the blue book seen in the foreground of the first two paintings, as it was the edition I used in conceptualizing this series. I’ve read this copy dozens of times.
It’s incredibly telling that Hamlet’s first line in the play is an aside, and contains a play on words, telling the audience to perceive something deeper than what’s on the surface: “A little more than kin, and less than kind”. This is an implied instruction about how to interpret the play as an autobiography told through allegory, in addition to its meaning that Claudius is both Hamlet’s uncle and stepfather, and has betrayed his kind (or nature), by murdering his brother and committing legal incest with his wife. I decided that I wanted each of these paintings to be an aside of sorts; a symbolic wink to the viewer encouraging them to look deeper and question what they see and what they’ve been told about Shake-speare.
Autobiography, Allegory, Symbolism and Wordplay
The paintings are telling several different narratives at once. On the surface level they depict theatrical scenes of a play being produced - the design process, the costume fitting, technical rehearsal etc. But if the viewer looks closer at the characters portrayed and at the compositions of the scenes themselves and the theatrical ephemera contained therein, they will see that the play is Hamlet and that the composition of each painting is an allegorical depiction of a specific scene of the play. The titles also are lines of dialogue from each of those same scenes. For those seekers familiar with the Oxfordian theory of authorship and it’s associated imagery and iconography, they will know that this is actually a production of Hamlet being presented as the autobiography of Edward de Vere. There are symbolic allusions, wordplay and riffs on the names Vere and Oxford throughout - much in the same way Shake-speare himself used plays on words, and imbued his verse with parallel meanings, both the dramatic and the autobiographical.
In order to give the viewer the most intimate vantage point, and to stress the idea that any work of theatre is the result of collaborating - by artists, makers and theatre staff - I’ve placed the viewer directly inside the action, and broken the picture plane with hands performing various theatrical tasks. While theatre is collaborative, painting is solitary, so all of the hands are mine, as if to say that this autobiographical production of Hamlet is a singular vision - not collaborative. As the director and designer of this production and painter of the series, I’m the vessel through which de Vere’s legacy is given visual space to be portrayed in this modern context.
Bear Hamlet, Like a Soldier, to the Stage
This introduction is designed to present and describe this series - and the context of its content - to a wide audience: Oxfordians, Shake-speare and theatre enthusiasts, cultural institutions, gallerists etc. In the pages that follow, I’ve interpreted each painting, describing my motivation for compositional and symbolic choices. I’ve provided numbered schematics with captions for any of the paintings featuring Elizabethan era portraiture, research images or heraldic devices. I discuss how the specific moment depicted from each scene relates to a parallel occurrence in Oxford’s life. I also talk about the visual and textual easter eggs hidden within each composition.
I’ve spent years learning about this subject, and several more years developing, planning and executing this series of paintings. I was compelled to do so because I believe in the power of Shake-speare to remain relevant - to transcend medium, time period, and the changing English language. And as an artist, I can’t begin to imagine the anguish of losing the right to claim a life’s work as one’s own. History isn’t only written by the winners, because the winners eventually die and the social conventions that encourage the need for secrets, diminish over time.
These paintings are my ode to Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the true author of the Shake-speare plays and poems.