Venus and Adonis: A Stratfordian VS. An Oxfordian Perspective
Sleepy Hollow, New York
Introduction
Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare was one the author’s bestselling work during his lifetime-going through ten printings until 1617 (Wood 149). It was a poem of over sixteen-hundred lines: each of which was in pentameter and each ended with a couplet. The book began with a very powerful dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Scholars have often noted that Shakespeare’s source material was Ovid’s Metamophoses. An English translation was published by Arthur Golding in 1567.
Attempting to connect William Shakspere of Stratford to any of the subjects mentioned above can be very challenging. The following will examine numerous Orthodox scholars attempts to do so. Following that, it will attempt to connect Edward De Vere to the above source material. In so doing, it may well be a smoking gun for the Oxfordian heresy.
Chapter I: Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton
Venus and Adonis begins with a dedication to the Earl:
TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,
and Baron of Titchfield.
Right Honorable,
I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to
your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so
strong a prop to support so weak a burden; only if your Honor seem
but pleased, I account myself highly praised and vow to take advantage
of all idle hours till I have honored you with some graver labor.
But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it
had so noble a godfather and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it
yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honorable survey, and
your Honor to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer
your own wish and the world’s hopeful expectation.
Your Honor’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare. (Folger)
In his book, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, A.K. Akrigg gives many hypotheticals about how Shakespeare and Southampton met. He does not provide any documented evidence, however, that they ever did. There is not even a single letter in the Wriothesly family archives showing that the two ever corresponded. The author himself admits to the suppositious nature of his book:
In the past an incredible amount of fever thinking has gone into elaborate theories about Shakespeare’s relations with Southampton. Much of what has been written is labyrinthine, improbable, and wildly partisan. Some of it is simply lunatic. But probability (even a strong degree of probability) supports some of the hypotheses that have been advanced. It is with the latter that I have concerned myself, adding at times some new ideas or pieces of evidence. Speculation, properly conducted, can be an exhilarating and exciting pastime (Akrigg xiii).
Such is the orthodox mindset.
Chapter II: Ovid’s Metamorphoses
“William Shakspere is a man of no recorded education.”
Elizabeth Price
Numerous scholars have noted the importance of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the works of Shakespeare.
As it was with the Earl of Southampton, De Vere’s connection to Golding was much more personal and documented:
In view of this profound and pervasive influence of Golding on Shakespeare, it may be relevant to mention that Golding served as Oxford’s Latin tutor during the critifal formative years of the 1560s, the same period during which this translation, which Shakespeare is said to have retained “by heart,” was being prepared. This, at any rate,is the conclusion of Golding family historian Louis Thorne Golding in his 1937 biography on the classicist.
(Stritmatter, 17).
Chapter III: Edward De Vere and the Earl of Southampton
Both De Vere and Wriothesly, although a generation apart, grew up in the household of Lord Burghley (Looney).
Akrigg, convinced Stratfordian though he was, had the following to say about Southampton and De Vere:
No information survives concerning the studies prescribed for Southampton at Cecil House. Probably these were much the same as those which Burghley had prescribed years earlier for the Earl of Oxford:
7–7:30 Dancing
7:30–8 Breakfast
8–9 French
9-10 Latin
10-10.30 Writing and Drawing
Then common prayers and so to dinner
1–2 Cosmography
2–3 Latin
3–4 French
4-4.30 Exercises with his pen
Then common prayers and so to supper (Akrigg 26).
It was ironic that in a book meant to strengthen the orthodox argument of there being a relationship between Southampton and Shakespeare, Akrigg used B.M. Ward’s The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford as part of his research material.
Akrigg interestingly drew parallels between Southampton and Adonis:
Moving on to Sonnet 53, we find the friend being identified with Adonis:
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you.
Since, as we noted earlier, one of Shakespeare’s purposes in writing Venus and Adonis was to draw a Southampton-Adonis parallel, this becomes one more piece of evidence that Southampton and the sonnet friend are the same person (Akrigg 235).
De Vere’s and Southampton’s relationship was commented on in Frontline’s The Shakespeare Mystery,
“De Vere had a more intimate relationship with Southampton, who at one time was set to be engaged to his daughter.”
Al Austin
Following the failed Essex Rebellion, De Vere stood on the tribunal which saved Wriothesly from execution, communting his sentence to imprisonment in the Tower of London (Looney).
Chapter IV: The Origins of the Stanza Employed in Venus and Adonis
Except for the fact that “Shakespeare” has proved too blinding a light for most men’s eyes we should long ago have rejected the idea that he actually “led off” on his literary career with so lengthy and finished a work as Venus and Adonis . At any rate the facility with which he uses the particular form of stanza employed in this poem pointed to his having probably used it freely in shorter lyrics. I decided, therefore, to work, first of all, on the mere form of the stanza. This may appear a crude and mechanical way of setting g about an enquiry of this kind. It was, at any rate, a simple instrument and needed little skill in handling. All that was necessary was to observe the number and length of the lines-six lines each of ten syllables-and the order of the rhymes: alternate rhymes for the first four lines, the whole finishing with a rhymed couplet (Looney 107).
Thomas Looney
An example of this follows:
Even as the sun with purple-colored face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
5 Sick-thoughtèd Venus makes amain unto him
And, like a bold-faced suitor, gins to woo him.
Folger Shakespeare
Previously, this stanza was employed in numerous poems by Edward De Vere. The following poem on Women is but one example:
If women could be fair and yet not fond,
Or that their love were firm not fickle, still,
I would not marvel that they make men bond,
By service long to purchase their good will;
But when I see how frail those creatures are,
I muse that men forget themselves so far.To mark the choice they make, and how they change,
How oft from Phacbus do they flee to Pan,
Unsettled still like haggards wild they range,
These gentle birds that fly from man to man;
Who would not scorn and shake them from the fist
And let them fly fair fools which way they list.Yet for disport we fawn and flatter both,
To pass the time when nothing else can please,
And train them to our lure with subtle oath,
Till, weary of their wiles, ourselves we ease;
And then we say when we their fancy try,
To play with fools, O what a fool was I.
Earle of Oxenforde (Looney 137–8)
Chapter V: Shakespeare’s Source Material
The Stratfordian view of Shakespeare’s source material is best summarized on the Folger website,
“Shakespeare found the story of the encounter between the Roman goddess of love and the boy hunter in book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid, the beautiful Adonis is the willing lover of Venus, and his death is an accident of the hunt” (Folger).
An Oxfordian point of view, like all of the work in the canon, is much more rewarding.
Dr. Naomi Magri of Italy identified Titian’s Venus and Adonis as the pictorial source for Shakespeare’s poem:
Firstly, iconography analysis and textual analysis have established a parallel between the painting and the poem in terms of: theme or concept (in Titian and in Shakespeare the theme is a passionate Venus wooing a reluctant Adonis); gestural expressiveness ( the posture of the body, a gesture, a glance between the figures portrayed conveys emotions and reveals intentions and attitudes; they must correspond to the narrative description); content (which has to do with what the poet describes and is present in the painting, what the poet leaves out, what he adds to his poetical work and what is not present in the pictorial source) (Magri 80).
She identified five editions, still extant, which existed in the author’s lifetime. Only the one in Rome corresponded to the lines in the poem:
He sees her coming and begins to glow,
Even as a dying coal revives with wind,
And with his bonnet hides his angry brow,
340 Looks on the dull earth with disturbèd mind,
Taking no notice that she is so nigh,
For all askance he holds her in his eye.
“And therefore would he put his bonnet on,
Under whose brim the gaudy sun would peep;
The wind would blow it off and, being gone,
1090 Play with his locks. Then would Adonis weep;
And straight in pity of his tender years,
They both would strive who first should dry his tears.
Folger Shakespeare
William Shakspere of Stratford never left England, but Edward De Vere lived on the Continent for two years. For part of that time, he lived in Venice (Magri).
Version I: The Metropolitan Museum
Version II: The Getty Museum
Version III: The National Gallery in London
Version IV: The Prado in Madrid
Version V: La Galleria Nazionale in Rome
Reviled during his own lifetime, often, after his 1575–76 visit to Continental European states and extended stay in Tuscany, as the “diablo incarnato” of the Italianate Englishman…
(Stitmatter 16)
Dr. Magri had the following to say about the version at La Galleria Nazionale:
On the basis of the three conditions: content, date, and location, it is here argued that Shakespeare based his poem on Titian’s copy no. 5. Titian’s painting was his source of inspiration , the thing that stimulated him to write a poem about his subject though he also had a thorough knowledge of Ovid. The main feature of the painting is its sensuality and Shakespeare reveals himself to have been overwhelmed by the sensuousness radiating from Titian’s work and he filled his poem with it. Shakespeare describes the painting in detail: he portrays the painting in words and the description is too faithful to ascribe to mere coincidence (Magri 82)
Conclusion
“The predominating element in what we call circumstantial evidence is that of coincidences. A few coincidences we may treat as simply interesting; a number of coincidences we regard as remarkable; a vast accumulation of extraordinary coincidences, we accept as conclusive proof.”
(Looney 80)
There is no record of William Shakspere’s education; there is documented evidence that Edward De Vere was tutored by Arthur Golding, his uncle and the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
There is no evidence that William Shakspere ever met the Earl of Southampton; there is a vast amount of evidence detailing Edward De Vere’s relationship with the Earl of Southampton.
Venus and Adonis is the first work published under the name William Shakespeare; the poem uses a unique stanza previously employed by Edward De Vere.
Based on Dr. Naomi Magri’s research, the only known painting which includes the details mentioned in Shakespeare’s poem was in Venice during the author’s lifetime. William Shakspere never left England; Edward De Vere lived in Venice for a year.
Based on what the above scholars have discovered, it is very likely that future research related to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis will prove the Oxfordian Case for Shakespeare Authorship beyond a reasonable doubt.
Works Cited
Akrigg, A. Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton. Hamish Hamilton Ltd,
1968.
Austin, Al. The Shakespeare Mystery. Frontline, 1991.
Looney, Thomas. Shakespeare Identified. Cecil Palmer, 1920.
Magri, Naomi Dr. The Influence of Italian Renaissance Art in Shakespeare’s Works. Titian’s Baberini Painting: The Pictorial Source of Venus & Adonis in Great Oxford: Essays in the Life of Edward De Vere. De Vere Society, 2004.
Shakespeare, William. Venus and Adonis. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Stritmatter, Roger. The Marginalia of Edward De Vere’s Geneva Bible: Providental Discovery, Literary Reasoning, and Historical Consequence. Oxenford Press, 2015.
Wood, Michael. Shakespeare. BBC International Press, 2003.
