Mladen Dolar, one of the Slovenian philosophers I enjoy reading from time to time, published a short work called Rumors (2025), navigating from the destructive nature of libel to the liberating function of gossip. Among the authors sampled to explicate his theory are Shakespeare and Cervantes, who some say were the same person(s). Dolar, however, never touches on this rumor, nor the one about William Shakespeare being Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The latter is in fact no longer a full-fledged rumor, and has emerged into the realm of truth through the work of the late Alexander Waugh and the De Vere Society, United Kingdom, and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, United States. I recently used their work to help riddle the gist of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), a 1000+ page cryptology game inspired by Charlton Ogburn’s tome The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality (1984). Curious if Wallace picked up on the “Will is Quixote” controversy, I did a search and found this phrase, strangely offset by two colons: “they bow to your quixotic will [italics mine]” (p. 690). Encouraged, I set off on a knight-errant’s quest, decoding the title pages and dedications for subsequent English editions (1612, 1652 and 1740; https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009707499), searching for De Vere autobiographical clues and addressing the historical and political context. Unless quoting from other editions or others’ research, I use the 1885 John Ormsby version of Don Quixote on Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996-images.html#ch41), which includes books one and two, the second originally released in Spanish in 1615 and English in 1620. Book I was supposedly first printed in multiple Spanish cities in 1605, but with different frontispieces and varying texts. I will refer to the Madrid edition only, said to be the most authoritative edition by Vicente Salvá, who emigrated to and did important work in England starting in 1824 (https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666762/, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Salvá). Below is Cervantes’ 1613 Madrid Novelas Examplares, which features the same frontispiece as the 1605 Don Quixote.
Waugh discovered the importance of the number 1740 in identifying De Vere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v_zkUv86Hs). To briefly explain the what without going too deep into why the 17th Earl of Oxford’s identity has been hidden, I will only say that 17 is his earl number, while 40 is a homophone for 4T, a cross composed of three “T’s” with an implied hidden fourth, which can be symbolized by a “TH”, with the T written over the crossbar of the H. This Triple Tau, a widely known Masonic symbol, was important to the belief system to which government-funded playwright De Vere ascribed through Elizabeth I’s mystic, John Dee, the original 007. Using gematria, a coding system of assigning numbers to letters of the Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets, T is 19, and as such, four 19s are 76, the same number arrived at when adding the letters in OXFORD (14+21+6+14+17+4=76). This number can then be used to decode elements of texts attributed to William Shakespeare, which itself is coded, with “W” being “VV (20+20)” or 40, followed by 17 letters (illiam Shakespeare). Other ways to arrive at 40 include using the Greek letter “M”, counting to the fourth “T” or “D”, using a “Y” or “thorn” to stand for a “TH”, using the combination DT (4T), and counting the letters in words, e.g. Thomas Shelton is composed of 6 and 7 letters, 76 backwards. Seventeen can be arrived at by counting 17 letters, characters, words or lines from a point indicated by peculiar typesetting. R is also 17, etc. I don’t know Hebrew, so I will miss any codes in that language, but decoding in Hebrew, from what I have encountered, is usually reserved for more mystical messages and derived from mechanics, like commas. It’s all a bit kooky, especially today, if one thinks we should be moving towards an open society without secrets or secret organizations, but perhaps I’m a bit of a romantic like Quixote.
Thomas Shelton (67 —> 76 —> 4T) is named as the translator of the 1612 Book I and 1620 Book II, the former of which oddly enough was not as similar to the 1605 Spanish edition as to a 1608 Belgian edition. Besides the name being the reverse of 76, Thomas means “twin” and Shelton could be interpreted as “shell/skeleton”, i.e. nom de plume. In De Vere studies, other pseudonyms have been attributed to him, including Thomas Nash, another twin, and Robert Greene, the French “vert” a homophone of “Vere”. In 1612, Shelton appears to dedicate his translation, which he claims he did in 40 days (How Biblical and De Vere of him!), to a Lord Walden and others, entitling it as follows: “TO THE RIGHT HO- / NOVRABLE HIS VERIE / GOOD LORD , THE / Lord of W ALDEN, &c.” The cumbersome wording, eccentric spelling and odd typesetting are all indications that something is aloof. For example, the break at “HO-“ is not only non-standard and unaesthetic but unnecessary, and the same goes for “VERIE”, which is spelled “very” elsewhere. A clue is that “T HO“ is typeset over “VERIE”, a common stand-in for Vere, and “T HO” could mean “4T Oxford” or “4T Rose”, a Tudor rose or perhaps of the Rosy Cross, a reference to the proto-Masonic Rosicrucians. In the typically spelled “honourable”, VR is just below another “O TH”. Though “V” and “U” were interchangeable in the Latin alphabet, the use of “VR” (a nod to the Semitic abjad Arabic, the supposed original language of the story) is purposeful. It signifies a second Vere, or “deux Vere”, a homophone for De Vere. From “TO”, it is also 24 characters, or “deux vier (a Dutch homophone),” to the second Vere. Next, with the unwritterly repetition of “Lord”, we are directed to start counting from “GOOD LORD”, arriving at the 17th character, “o” in “of” before “W” or double “V” for Vere. “Of” is the English for “de”, and so we have a third De Vere. There is a fourth, hidden Vere, a “fourth T” so to speak, if Walden is read backwards, “ned la VV (Edward the Vere)”, with Ned being another diminutive of Edward. Now we have our 1740. Finally, the repetition of “Lord” begs a third, a trinity, which is in “&c” or “&3”, and so “&God,” which with “LORD” and “Lord” forms a physical triangle. Finally, “ALDEN” is offset from the “W”, and means “old friend,” but to keep the balance of the upside-down equilateral triangle of coded text, there must be a message on the other side, as well: “Lord” is “rdoL” or “1740 11”. This is all topped off by two upside-down stars and the one right-side-up De Vere star in parenthesis, symbolizing twice 11 and 4T, which is arrived at by counting the 17 words, hypenations, and periods and commas from “TO”. Now, the dedication could read as follows: “To the right honorable Edward De Vere, 17th Lord of Oxford, 11 Friend, & God.” See the images below for other findings: 1740, in yellow and blue, which should appear three times, validating the code; key words or messages, in red, such as “4T” and “I the subject De Vere”; and items pertaining to the Rosicrucians, in green, such as “11 Friend” and “twice 11”. Note, I was unable to find online the page with the remainder of the dedication for this edition.
I opened the 1652 edition of Thomas Shelton’s dedication expecting to find most of the coding destroyed by a zealous editor; instead, I was shocked to discover it newly encoded in places to fit the new wording and typesetting, validating the 1612 findings and proving the presence of a fraternal group in the know, particularly writers safekeeping the memory and literary revolution of De Vere, which was set off domestically with Shakespeare and internationally with Cervantes. The dedication title typesetting has been cleaned up and yet messed up in a new way: “TO THE / RIGHT HONOURABLE, / his very good friend , the Lord of / VV alden , &c.” This reveals that “alden” does mean “friend”, as the latter is set over the former and serves, just as “Lord” repeating in the 1612 edition, to show us where to start counting. The phrase “his very good friend” is 17 letters and is over the “VV”, 40. On the left, there is at least a second and third 1740 to validate the code that could be achieved a variety of ways. On the right one can find twice 11 at least three times, one of which is made from “TO THE” or “TWO TEE (changing the O to WO and the Greek H to a Latin E)” or 2T. The dedication to the Sonnets is signed TT, and I’ve heard that this might mean twice 11. God is also validated three times, once with three words (“the Lord of”), the word “Lord”, “&c (c=3=God)”, and when counting eleven characters from the end, there is the hidden fourth T in “the (tee)”, who is De Vere, or the human. The dedication then is simply “To the right honorable 17th Lord Vere, 11 Friend, and God.” Again triangles can be derived from the shape of the text, right and left or up and down, with God again forming a hidden inner triangle. The message also focuses on “Vere”, and his motto “Vero Nihil Verius (Nothing is Truer than Truth)”, symbolized by the double “V”. But I noticed more obvious/playful mistakes marking where we should decode, including “I was content / to let it come to light conditionally, that some one / or other would perufe and and amend the errours”. The “and and” offset by an extra space and followed by the command “amend the errours”, lets us know that the typesetting should be reinterpreted. For example, “light”, offset by an extra space on both sides, is followed by the bolded “co”, i.e. “Light Rosy Cross”. This is over an offset “perufe (“f” and “s” using the same character)”, in which the “p” can be rotated and the letters rearranged: “def uer” or De Vere. And again we have the message “11 Friend De Vere” and “Twice 11 Friends”. I assume the year 1652 was also purposely chosen because you can do some meaningful math problems. The one I like is 1+6=7 and 5+2=7 for 77, which looks like TT or can be rotated for LL. L=11, and so you have twice 11. Another reason for this year is the end of the English Civil War.
Another edition was put out in 1740 (De Vere’s number), the same year a group of men under the direction of the second creation of the Earl of Oxford placed the monument of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey. Waugh has a video about the monument called “The Freemasons Who Knew Where Shakespeare Was Really Buried” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o_q9NtUnaU), which is interesting because the 1740 Thomas Shelton dedication feels noticeably more serious and Masonic. The title is “TO THE / RIGHT HONOURABLE / His very good LORD, the / Lord of WALDEN, &c.” For the first 1740, I counted characters backwards starting with “c” and arrived at the “th” in “the”. For the last two, I counted from the “E” in “HONOURABLE” to the “T” in “THE” and used the “TO (i.e. 2)” to double it. Counting eleven words backwards from “WALDEN” to “TO” gives me twice 11. Counting eleven characters backward starting with “N” in “WALDEN” to the “L (11)” in “Lord” gives me twice 11 again. And another is the “L” in “LORD” over the “L” in “ALDEN” for Twice 11 Friend. God is found in the triangle formed by “Lord”, “&c” and the “T” in “THE”. So we have “To the right honorable 1740, Twice 11 Friend, and God.” It is more difficult to see “Vere” without knowing, and the repetition of “Lord” is the only obvious quirk. The last line of the title is extended to align with the main text to provide 17 lines till the “w” of “was”, i.e. 40. There are two other 1740s in the text to validate the code. De Vere is also not the focus of the text, but there is a triangle formed with the capital “I’s”, two of which form IHS (Jesus) twice with a capital “H” and “S” and point to Friends, i.e. Twice 11 Friends. I’m sure there is more, but that is enough to prove the point.
Mysteriously, the name of Thomas Shelton or Cervantes does not appear on the title page of the 1612 and 1652 editions, and though I was not able to find the the entire 1612 version, the 1652 “The Author’s Preface to the Reader” is signed with the catchword “Certain”, not Cervantes. This can only mean “determined/resolved” or a “certain person”. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra can be picked apart etymologically. Miguel, born on Michaelmas, is Michael, Saint Michael, the knight-like archangel, and the St. Michael or butterfly cross was once carved into English buildings (https://rakinglight.co.uk/uk/saint-michael-the-archangel-in-pre-reformation-england-and-implications-for-the-butterfly-cross-graffito/). Cervantes appears to be Latin, cervus (deer, antler, or palisade spikes) and antes (rows or before), while Saavedra is Galatian for house (saa) and old (vedra). The “rocin” in Rocinante, Quixote’s horse, is also Galatian, for “old nag” (though in the 1652 version it is spelled “Rozinante”, suggesting “rose”, i.e. Tudor rose, Rosy Cross). Galatia was a kingdom at one time part of Portugal, and so Cervantes Saavedra is pointing us away from Spain toward the founding of the Portuguese nation, and in particular the 10th-century Castle of Guimarães, referred to as the Cradle of Portugal, an “old house” with walls topped with pointed merlons (cervus). Cervantes’ first name, Miguel refers to the church standing outside, Sao Miguel. It was here, Don Afonso I, “the Founder” defeated his mother at the Battle São Mamede on June 24, 1128, the same day De Vere died in 1604 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_São_Mamede). With the “de” removed, M. Cervantes Saavedra is 40 (the Greek M) followed by 17 letters, and following the “Certain” catchword after the author’s preface, we come to “Certain Sonnets” on the next page: William Shakespeare (another 4017) was the writer famous in his day for Sonnets. Unlike Afonso I, De Vere didn’t found a royal dynasty, but he seems to be the founder of a group of intellectuals and a literary revolution.
Afonso is a variant of Alonso, as in Alonso Quijano, Don Quixote, the hero of our story. Quixote’s sidekick, Sancho, whose last name Panza (spelled Pança in Portuguese fashion in the 1612 edition) means Paunch, was actually the name of Don Afonso I’s son, Sancho o Povoador (the Populator). Afonso I won his son a kingdom just as Don Quixote promises to make Sancho Panza the king of an island, or possibly Denmark (Book I, Chapter 10, p. 339), a very Shakespearean reference (i.e. Hamlet). In this context, Don Quixote is now a standin for England and Sancho Panza is Antonio “the Determined”, the claimant to the Portuguese throne (image below). During the 1580 dynastic crisis, Antonio and his supporters were defeated by the Spanish Hapsburg forces led by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3rd Duke of Alba, and Antonio fled to Angra do Heroísmo in the Azores, where he tried to establish a government. Antonio’s fleet, a confederation that included the English, as well as Dutch and French, was defeated by Spain’s Álvaro de Bazán y Guzmán off the coast of São Miguel Island in 1582, and the wouldbe king fled to France and was left without a kingdom. The frontispiece of the Madrid 1605 features a cartoonish lion, symbolizing England, and falcon, a bird found on the coat of arms of Angra do Heroísmo (image below).
The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance dates to when Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt and sister of Henry IV, married John I of Portugal, a time period with which De Vere as writer of the History Plays would have been very familiar. From this marriage came Henry the Navigator, who started the Age of Discovery, beginning with the Azores, and who, rumor has it, was uncle to the part-Jewish Christopher Columbus from Cuba, Portugal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcVrNLChR5A). The illustration for Book II of the 1620 edition, the very first likenesses of Quixote and Sancho in English, recognizes this alliance by featuring the knight-errant holding a flag with the English lion while his squire has a sword with a hilt in the shape of Antonio’s falcon (image below). The illustration represents another ally as a windmill, one of the most famous characters of Don Quixote: a Dutch windmill. We are not in La Mancha, Spain, or in the Azores, also famous for its windmills, but on the other Mancha (Spanish for the English Channel) flanked by the Mont-Saint-Michel, La Manche, France and St. Michael’s Mount Cornwall, England (i.e. two Miguel de Cervantes Saavendra), the sight of the 1588 naval battle between England and Spain, during which De Vere was not allowed by the Queen to fight but stationed near Harwich, just as Don Quixote is thwarted in his quest for noble battle by enchanters. With the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, James I and Philip III signed the Treaty of London at Somerset House August 28, 1604 (the day before the death of John the Baptist), bringing an end to the Anglo-Spanish War. This treaty likely enabled the Spanish printing of the Don Quixote stories in 1605, though Cervantes had already been published in Spain. Don Quixote Book I may have been a peace offering, but the illustration in Book II suggests a subterfuge toward the Spanish hierarchy. Don Quixote is not Spanish, but an Englishman with a Portuguese-spelled name: “qui” is “chi” for Christ and “xote (pronounced ‘chote’)” means “shoo/drive away”, as one would in shaking a spear. In Spanish, the message is otherwise, which the 1620 illustration subtitle “Don-Quichote”reveals: Don-key chote (Suck a donkey). This is not a stretch of modern imagination as chotar is an archaic verb reserved expressly for the suckling of animals. And the “quix-” of Quixote could also be derived from the Galician “queixa (complaint)” or “queixoso (querulous)” — i.e. Shake-speare.
In Don Quixote there is a story-within-a-story moment, like Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, in which the narrator finds pamphlets containing the story written by a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli (Book II, Chapter 2, p. 1546), which is not unlike Sir Hamlet Son of England. Count 17 letters backwards to “Ci (a pun on ‘see’, i.e. look here)”; “Cide” has four letters and a “de (D)”; and you have 4D17 (1740). Translated from Old English “Cide” and “Hamete (Hamette)” mean “I chide / rebuke / quarrel” and “I bring home / provide a house / give refuge”, which seems Christ-like and seems to describe De Vere’s two roles: “Shake-speare” and “Oxford”. England’s other allies under Elizabeth were the Ottomans and the moors of Morocco, and it is likely that the writer of Othello had fun giving the author of Quixote (himself) an Arabic name to lambast the Spanish Inquisition, which persecuted Jews and Arabs as well as heretical Christians, who like De Vere perhaps viewed themselves as early Roman Christians etching walls with the Greek code for the name of Christ, which is similar to the last letters of QUIXOTE: ἸΧΘΥΣ. This is pronounced ichthys, “fish”, and so the typeset “Q” of Quixote is printed with a swash-like fish tail, while the “U” falls silent (though the “Q” could also be donkey genitalia, see the 1620 illustration above). At this juncture, I muse that De Vere wrote episodes of the Don Quixote narrative to entertain the English court during quixotic campaigns against the Spanish in the Netherlands and Portugal or after finally defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. In fact, Elizabeth I gave De Vere a stipend of 1000 pounds per annum, according to Waugh and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, to run a scriptorium for the production of patriotic plays and other texts. If one looks again at the two characters in the 1620 illustration, one recognizes English faces, De Vere as Quijano (“that Janus”, comedy and trajedy) with his sidekick Ben Jonson, who was known to have had a good-sized panza. Quijano almost looks like a corpse, and De Vere was supposed to be dead at this time. (See a possible image of De Vere over one of Ben Jonson below)
In the illustration, the flag with the lion is blowing in the wrong direction, perhaps signifying that De Vere is dead or is in distress some other way. Perhaps he could have been the rightful Tudor prince, the “Hamete” in Cide Hamete Benengeli, a rumor that involves Thomas Seymour and a 14-year-old Elizabeth, but the throne was given to James I. The bird on Jonson’s hilt may be in reference to the character Peregrine (a type of falcon, meaning “wanderer” or “pilgrim”) in his play Volpone. Peregrine is like the youthful Edward de Vere (Prince Edward?), an English traveler in Venice, and the play was featured along with a dedication to Oxford in a 1607 quarto. De Vere is then very much like Antonio of Portugal, a pretender without a kingdom, and as elements of Cervantes life are reflected in Antonio (such as imprisonment in North Africa), many elements are reflected in De Vere, including imprisonment (in The Tower, not North Africa), travel in Italy (many of the same cities), and being taken by pirates (on the Mancha, the English Channel, not the Mediterranean). Cervantes (horns in front?) is like the “ox” in Oxford, while Saavedra (old hall) might refer to Hedingham Castle, the seat of the Oxford earls, who date back to the time of William the Conqueror; or the entire name could refer to the spires of Westminster and the throne at Whitehall, the English government.
There’s another one about how De Vere may be the illegitimate son of a lower class woman, Joan Jockey (just as Antonio was one of a Jewish convert), who later had her nose cut up by offended relatives of the 16th Earl’s wife; certainly emancipatory gossip that might help explain De Vere’s politics seeming to come down on the side of Parliament rather than the whims of the monarchy and conservative aristocracy. However, the whispers that De Vere was a bastard of Elizabeth I and/or that he had secretly married Elizabeth and/or fathered a son by her, namely Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, may help to explain the decorative imprints of the 1612 book. For example, on the title page there is an illustration (below) of two cherubs, who are usually associated with unearthing truth over time, holding up a crowned Tudor rose flanked by the heads of two calygreyhounds, a mythical creature only used by the Oxford earls. Perhaps the word “mancha” not only refers to the English Channel but to also a “stain”, perhaps a blemish on De Vere’s reputation. Though royals were notorious for being inbred (Isabel I of Spain was twice related to John of Gaunt), incest, even by mistake, would be a very great stain, i.e. sin. Whatever the truth, Don Quixote is suggestive in the same way Shakespeare’s and other writers’ works of the era were, and if De Vere were the son of Elizabeth, a “Virgin” chosen by God, he would have had a very Christ-like narrative like Quixote. Then again perhaps this title-page imprint only means that De Vere wrote Don Quixote for Elizabeth I, and on the bottom, the name of the printer “William Stansby” over the name “W. Barret” seem to be puns on William Shakespeare (Will stand by) and Ed de Vere (Et VV Barr) (See Alexander Waugh’s video on the Stratford monument for the explanation of cherubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRDX5wIx_8I).
On the 1612 dedication title page, the header contains a Tudor Prince crown: three ostrich feathers over a Tudor Rose. This crown was first attributed to Edward VI, though ostrich feathers were used since the time of Edward III, and this lineage of Edwards, seems to lead to Edward de Vere. The crown is on the righthand side, and perhaps signifies he (or his son) has the right to the English throne. Underneath this is the “T HO” that we identified previously as “4T Rose” or “Rosy Cross”, but here it perhaps means “Tudor Henry Oxford/Rose (as in Wriostheley)”, or perhaps the “H” is Greek and should be an “E”, and so “Tudor Edward Oxford”. I did find two paintings of Wriostheley with ostrich feathers, one with nine over a helmet, perhaps indicating his king number as Henry IX (below). On the left, is a crowned thistle, the national flower of Scotland, symbolizing the usurper, James I. Under his crown is “TO T”, which could spell the insult “tot”, a madman or fool in 17th century English and “vainglory” in Old English. Finally, in the center over “THE RIGHT” is the fleur de lis, which was incorporated into the English coat of arms by Edward III and which appears on the crown of Edward the Confessor, St. Edward. This elevates Edward de Vere, or Wriothesley, as the rightful Tudor Prince and English King, and makes James the butt of a joke. Dulcinea del Toboso, muse of Don Quixote’s exploits, translates as Sweetness of the Thistle or, perhaps, Sweetest of the Thistles (in particular the Scottish thistle). James is being libeled here in discriminatory fashion, as scuttlebut had it he was gay, and gays were persecuted at that time. Even De Vere was accused of diddling boys (a libel that sprang out of De Vere’s apparent betrayal of Catholic nobles). And Jame’s favorite, lover and political ally, the self-serving George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, is insulted in a dedication tacked to the 1740 edition (even though he had been long dead, assassinated), which opens with the word “Your”, in which the “o” in “our” appears to have been printed too close to the illustrated “Y” but is actually a backwards “c”: “cur”.
Perhaps James was part of the joke, coming out of the wardrobe so to speak, and he did give a speech to his government on the matter, but then again, “Donkey chote (Suck a donkey)” could be directed at him, as well as the Spanish with whom he signed that 1604 treaty that some might have found despicable. As Don Quixote’s exploits probably precede James’ ascension to the throne, the original Dulcinea was the Helen of the English court, Elizabeth I, and De Vere or Jonson, et al might have tagged on “del Toboso” later, or just merely intended a double meaning. Shakespeare loves an insult: “Brass, cur? Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat, offer’st me brass?” (Pistol to a French solider in Henry V, Act iv, scene iv, line 18-19). And the dedication of the King James Bible, which might have been worked on by De Vere for Elizabeth and which was printed the year before Don Quixote in 1611, opens with the following two lines: TO THE MOST HIGH AND MIGHTIE / Prince, IAMES by the grace of God…”, which, if the second line is reduced to the first capitalized letters, then reads, “To the most high and mighty pig” (image below; see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXOl7kNqg-4). Similar messages can in fact be found coded in the 1652 sonnets that follow the author’s preface, in particular Rozinante’s strange rant against Don Quixote and Sancho: “Babieca (‘sissy’ in Spanish)” printed over “of Spain” printed over “Don Quixotes”, i.e. “Sissy of Spain, you suck donkey”, and “Jades my Lord and Sancho (‘pig’ in Spanish) be“, i.e. “James my Lord and Pig be”. James I could be seen as Don Quixote leading Philip III as Sancho on his ass, or more likely James is the ass.
Don Quixote has many levels of interpretation due to the need for subterfuge, and on the surface, for the Spanish, Alonso Quijano could refer to Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y de Zúñiga-Sotomayor, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia (image below), the failed commander of the 1588 Armada and a patron of the arts — a claim, I have read, was also made by Daniel De Foe. Alonso Perez was a relative of the Madrid 1605 version’s dedicatee, Alonso Diego López de Zúñiga Sotomayor y Guzmán, who doesn’t seem to have had any dealings with the alleged Cervantes, according to a 2014 paper by Massimiliano Giorgini (The Quixote code: Reading between the lines of the Cervantes novel, p. 210, https://www.academia.edu/64942173/The_Quixote_code_Reading_between_the_lines_of_the_Cervantes_novel). Giorgini explicates texts possibly available to Cervantes, whom he doesn’t attempt to identify as De Vere. For example, he indicates that the dedication to Alonso Diego was largely plagiarized from Fernando de Herrera’s dedication to the Marquess de Ayamonte in his 1580 anthology of the works of Garcilaso de la Vega (Giorgini, p. 199). Then, he mentions that Alonso Diego’s great-grandfather, Francisco de Zúñiga was the sponsor of a work of chivalry Don Florisel de Niquea by Feliciano de Silva, mentioned in the second paragraph of Don Quixote (Giorgini, p. 211). Finally, there is Los Quarenta Libros del Compendio Historial de las Chronicas y Universal Historia de España (The Forty Books of the Historical Compendium of All the Histories of the Kingdom of Spain), a monumental work detailing Spain's history from ancient times that was completed by the Spanish chronicler and historian Estaban de Garibay y Zamalloa (1533-1599) (p. 299-300). Some of the past kings of Spanish history were named Alonso and Sancho. Also, John of Gaunt once styled himself as King of Castile when he married Constance of Castile, and the dedicatee Alonso Diego as well as Philip II were both descents of John through Portuguese princesses. Referencing Spanish elitist culture, De Vere and Jonson perhaps performed their antics as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza originally to humor Spanish diplomats and envoys to Elizabeth I’s court. And yet, translated from the Spanish, Don Quixote can mean “Don who suckles (Don qui chote)” and Sancho Panza, “Pig stomach”.
De Vere himself could have collected or found the above source texts in the library of his guardian and later father-in-law, William Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary of state and Polonius in Hamlet, who began collecting Spanish tomes during the reign of Mary and Philip II of Spain and probably continued as he kept Philip in suspense over a possible betrothal to Elizabeth (RJ Roberts, Two Early English-Spanish Vocabularies, The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3/4 (1970), pp. 86-91). Elizabeth was trained in Spanish, and De Vere, as her ward after the 16th Earl of Oxford’s death, was likely trained as well, especially, if rumors are true that he spied on Catholics for Francis Walsingham. De Vere would have known of such Spanish expats as Cipriano de Valera, who taught at Cambridge and published a Bible (image below), and would have known writings of past resident Spaniards, such as the Spanish New Testament of Francisco de Enzinas (1518?-1552), translated from Erasmus’ text and dedicated to Charles V, which got him arrested by the inquisition. After escaping to Wittenberg (think Hamlet again), Enzinas married another religious exile and moved to England, where he was tutor in the household of Catherine Willoughby, mother of the Peregrine Willoughby who married Mary, De Vere’s sister (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Enzinas). Enzinas brother was not as lucky, and he was arrested and burned at the stake for his works on John Calvin.
Enzinas’ Spanish New Testament is particularly significant because it demonstrates how books were published and smuggled into Spain, a method that De Vere’s Cervantes writings could have used. Giorgini tells how a former theology professor in Seville, Juan Perez de Pineda based his The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on Enzina’s work: “Printed in 1556 in Geneva, its cover states that it was published in Venice — a typical subterfuge undertaken during the Inquisition so that such banned books could find easier entery into Spain (Menendez y Pelayo 459). It also featured among its prefatory pages a false declaration of approval by the Office of the Holy Inquisition — yet another common maneuver used by publishers in the hopes of evading the strict Inquisitorial enforcers (Adolfo de Castro 154)” (p. 222). Pineda’s efforts were smuggled by barrel into Spain by courier Julian Hernandez, but Hernandez was caught and burned at the stake, and the Pineda New Testament was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (p. 221-2).
It should be noted that the Inquisition in Spain did not particularly target nobles, some of whom had Reformation leanings, but mainly conversos, Muslims and Jews who had openly converted to Christianity but practiced their original faiths in private. Don Quixote might have had an easy time, perhaps printed and published in Spain under Spanish pseudonyms with even the help of the government when Lord Admiral Charles Howard, who had repelled the 1588 Spanish fleet, arrived in Valladolid in 1605 with an entourage of 500 to put the finishing touches on the Treaty of London; otherwise, the books could have already been printed in London and brought as a sort of gift, or Trojan Horse. Also at this time, Don Pedro de Zúñiga, who is from the same Toledo, La Mancha extended family as the Spanish Commander Alonso Perez and the book’s dedicatee Alonso Diego, was appointed ambassador to England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_London_(1604)). And another Zúñiga, Luis de Requesens y Zúñiga had been a more moderate forgiving governor of the Spanish Netherlands who was replaced in 1576 with John of Austria (John the Bastard in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_Requesens_y_Zúñiga). Perhaps Don Quixote, a coded history in which all sides are the object of fun, was an informal agreement of the treaty, which would explain the sudden appearance and universal acceptance of the novel. The 1605 version, Book I, is more lighthearted, about farcical adventures and the pure comedy of Don Quixote's delusion.
Claimed by Waugh to be a Templar (a group whose last grand master was burned at the stake in 1314), De Vere seemed to have a catholic outlook and, when in Venice, attended a Greek Orthodox Church and sent his wife Anne a book of homilies by St. John Chrysostom, an early Church Father of Constantinople. Chrysostom appears as a recently deceased student-shepherd in Don Quixote, Book I, Chapters 12-14, and his funeral and memorialization by his fellow shepherds may actually be De Vere’s by his fellow Rosicrucians (also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wrxFjNwtE). Don Quixote may have been a perfect chance to spread Reformation ideas through seemingly innocuous reworked old stage entertainment (if that is what it had been). In Book I, Don Quixote attacks two Benedictines in an area of La Mancha that belonged to the Knights Hospitaller (Chapter 8, p. 304), and the Spanish Book I paved the way for the English “translation” and Book II, the more serious and philosophical part, with characters often aware of the first part's events. De Vere, who kept and annotated a copy of the Geneva Bible, might have had the Pineda New Testament or at least knew of its cover image, which must have been just one of a family of Reformation symbols used for the subversions of Don Quixote. In the emblem is a tree of life in the shape of a “Y”, which I have already said could be used as a “TH” and can stand for the Triple Tau with its hidden fourth T, a symbol important to the Rosicrucians and part of De Vere’s code number 1740. From the left-side fork of the tree a stout man hangs upside down over a fire while standing under the right is a taller, thinner, older man: “In Chapter 34 of Don Quixote II, a frightened Sancho Panza climbs a tree, breaking the branch under his weight and causing him to scream for help. Shortly thereafter, Don Quixote ‘saw him hanging from the oak tree upside down’” (Giorgio, p. 227). Giorgio later notes that “Enzinas”, the source of the Pineda text, means oak (image below).
Oaks, such as the holme oak, are mentioned often in Don Quixote, and plants, all of which can be found in an English herbal of the day, are used throughout the story to communicate information. In the 1652 printing, six mourners on their way to Chrysostom’s funeral are wearing garlands with “Enula Campana”, elecampane (changed to “oleander” in other versions), a flower that blooms June to July, the same time as the birth of St. John the Baptist, June 24, De Vere’s supposed death date (John Gerard, Herball, 1597, p. 649; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elecampane). Oaks can symbolize wisdom, strength and everlasting life. Giorgio also shows that the line taken from Matthew 7:13-14 around the margin of the emblem above, “estrecho el camino dela vida y es ancho el dela perdicion (narrow is the path of life and wide is that of perdition)” is very similar to a passage from Don Quixote Book II, Chapter 6: “when the protagonist defends to his niece the variety of reasons for having chosen the path of knight errantry, he also states: [S]e que la Senda de la virtud es muy estrecha, y el camino del vicio, ancho y espacio… ([I] know that the path of virtue is very narrow, and the road of vice broad and spacious…)” (p. 226). Playfully, Giorgio says that “es ancho el (wide is that)”, beside the man hanging from the tree, is pronounced the same as “es Sancho el (Sancho is he)”. The old man, in turn, is wearing a cap not unlike Don Quixote’s imagined helmet of Mambrino, a barber’s basin, but what’s more he is pointing to a laurel (etymologically associated with the oleander) in the sky above him, signifying he’s a man of letters, a poet like De Vere. And the helmet is a reference to the poem Orlando Furioso, an epic poem De Vere was familiar with. Returning to the 1652 version of the Chrysostom funeral: the mourners garlands are mainly “Cypresse” and they carry truncheons of “Elme”. Cypress is noted to grow in many places in England, including Greenwich Palace and Sion, “a place neere London” that is a word for an old convent near Westminster (where De Vere is supposedly buried under the Shakespeare monument) and that is another spelling of “scion”, heir to a throne (Herball, p. 1185). Elm leaves make good fodder “especially for kine and oxen”, pointing to Oxford and his ox, as well as Queen Elizabeth’s mother, the Boleyn bulls (Herball, p. 1296).
The question remains if there was a Cervantes, who supposedly sometimes signed as Cerbantes, someone like Shaksper of Stratford (who could barely write), to whom the Spanish assigned official authorship. Or did he just exist on paper? Perhaps the others named on the Madrid 1605 title page were pseudonyms for the real publishers back in England: the bookseller Francisco de Robles (17 letters long and “Robles” is Spanish for “English oaks”) and the printer Juan de la Cuesta (the Spanish for João da Costa, “John of the Coast”, the name of a Portuguese humanist imprisoned by the inquisition in 1550). One early mention of Cervantes, before his famous works were published, is by Juan López de Hoyos, a Madrid professor and admirer of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Scholars claim Hoyos “calls [Cervantes] his ‘dear and beloved pupil.’ This was in a little collection of verses by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second [sic, third] queen of Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form of a sonnet” (Introduction, “Cervantes”, p. 70). However, that Cervantes was Hoyos’ student is a misinterpretation. In Historia y relación verdadera de la enfermedad, felicísimo tránsito y suntuosas exequias de la Serenísima Reina de España Doña Isabel de Valois, nuestra señora..., the original Spanish is “…Miguel de Cervantes nuestro charo y amado discipulo”, “…Miguel de Cervantes, our dear and beloved disciple”. The “our” indicates that Cervantes, as an incognito representative of Protestant England, is not a student but belongs to an international group of elite, disciples with the same, I suspect, humanist political beliefs. And Cervantes’ elegiac poem seems a veiled celebration of the death of Isabell, friend of James I’s mother Mary Queen of Scots and a daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, one-time regent of France and matron of the notorious powerful Catholic family and whom De Vere probably met as a young man when visiting the French court. In one of the four “redondillas”, he writes, “And though pain desolates us, / one thing comforts us: / to see that to the sovereign kingdom / is given early flight / our very dear Isabella (Y aunquel dolor nos desuela / una cosa nos consuela / ver que al reyno soberano / a dado un buelo temprano / nuestra muy chara Isabella)”. Catherine de’ Medici’s other daughter Margaret married and divorced the moderate Henry IV of France, an inspiration for Shakespeare’s Loves Labors Lost, and Catherine was probably instrumental in his and a number of other assassinations, as well as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in an attempt to eliminate Protestants.
Was De Vere a crypto-Catholic? Or a double agent? Was Hoyos De Vere’s humanist contact in Spain? In Hoyos’ quote and Cervantes poem, “charo/chara (dear)”, which today is “caro/cara”, does not seem to have been standard Spanish or Portuguese, and I could only find a “charo” in Welsh (the language of the Tudors) that approximately means “beloved”. In Hoyos’ quote, it also bothers me that “dear” and “beloved” mean the same thing, and the oddly broken and unhyphenated “charo” with the “ro” on the following line next to “y” makes it look like it could be read “Miguel de Cervantes, nuestro cha roy, amado discipulo”, “Miguel de Cervantes, our tea (i.e. T) king, beloved disciple”. The Portuguese elite incorporated the word “cha”, green or black tea, when their ships reached Japan in 1543. Was De Vere already known as 4T? In Don Quixote, the Biscaine Don Sancho de Azpetia that the knight errant fights might be Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who were connected to assassins of Henry IV. And the name Miguel de Cervantes could be a play on Michael Servetes, a Spanish polymath who was the first to describe the circulatory system and who was burned at the stake in 1553 for his Reformation leanings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus)
. Or perhaps it is a reference to the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, someone whom De Vere probably read. The fact is that during the Reformation, an international group among the aristocratic, merchant and academic classes were interested in new learning and formed protective groups to share and spread their ideas. Among the first seems to be the neo-Platonic, hermetic Rosicrucians. They looked to the future while also seeking lost knowledge from the past. This is portrayed in the image from a 1618 Rosicrucians text, mentioned by Ben Jonson in a poem, that shows a moveable castle with Tudor Rose and cross and wings and wheels. There are three men with quills, authors or men of learning per chance, standing in the parapets. In the sky is a naked man, an Adam (De Vere), entwined with a crowned snake, an Eve (Elizabeth I, who fostered the English renaissance), issuing from a star, Kepler’s supernova, which appeared in 1604, the year of De Vere’s rumored death and the year after Elizabeth I’s. Alexander Waugh explains the image in “Kepler’s Supernova Explodes the Stratfordian Myth!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dtXf0XzDdA) (image below).
In my decoding of the 1612, 1652 and 1740 dedications, I noted the presence of 11, which is often doubled as 22 (twice 11), and the appearance of 4T Rose and Rosy Cross; these are all markers of the Rosicrucians. Another researcher, John Anthony, explains the use of double “A’s” to symbolize twice 11 in an image purported to be De Vere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GMh4FRDoXU). The man wears a cap with a feather, perhaps indicating he is a man of the pen; holds a hand emerging from a cloud while making two “A’s” with his fingers; and is flanked by lines of text beginning with another two “A’s”, to make twice 11 (image below). The hand extending from the cloud (Elizabeth’s?) is reminiscent of the one extending from the cloud and holding the falcon on the title page of the Madrid 1605, and it is worth noting here that Henry Wriothesley, dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, had falcons on his coat of arms like Antonio’s Angra do Heroísmo, and so could be the real Sancho, for whom Quixote (De Vere) will win a kingdom. As I have already indicated, Wriothesley, who was also a ward of the state and raised by William Cecil, might have been Elizabeth I’s son by De Vere, but there is more. He was also involved in the Essex Rebellion in 1601 (from which he was mysteriously spared execution) as well as involved in a scandal (perhaps the true mancha or “stain”) with De Vere and Penelope Rich, sister to the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux (possibly the son of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley), to procure Oxford a male heir, who became Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford. De Vere, like Quixote, was without a truly legal male successor, though he supposedly had an illegitimate one, Edward, by lady in waiting Anne Vavasour. The gossip behind this whole Soap Opera is opaque and has yet to be cleared up (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPl-L_j1GO4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KBUrAM2odI). It’s just that in supporting my argument that De Vere is Cervantes, I can’t help returning to this hearsay, that De Vere or Wriothesley or both of them were true heirs to the throne and had the support of those who despised the tyranny of Catholic Spain and/or who wanted a more democratic government at home, and hence the need for secret coding. Three or more 1740s can be decoded on the Madrid 1605 title page, and four “A’s” are wrapped around the frontispiece frame (twice 11), similar in style to the “A’s” in the header of the Sonnets (images below). The Rosicrucians appear to have formed from those in De Vere and Wriothesley’s political camp, one of whom was Francis Bacon, betrayed by James I favorite, the aforementioned Buckingham.
If De Vere were Edward VII but settled for being leader of the Rosicrucians, it may be that twice 11 refers to his king number: “E” equals 5, which is the Roman numeral “V”, so “EVII” could be “EEll” or “elel” or “LL” or “twice 11”. Or, the number “VII” could be 20 (the letter V) + 2 (II) = 22, twice 11, or 20 x 2 = 40, 4T, which makes 4011 or VVII or EVII. De Vere is known to have used the phrase “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14) in a letter to William Cecil, and “I am” can be converted to “AAM” to “1140” to EVII, who if the son of Thomas Seymour, would make him the second Seymour king after his uncle Edward VI. This would also make De Vere a descendant of Don Afonso I “The Founder”, our Alonso Quijano, through Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, which would certainly explain the T king (cha roy) reference in regards to Cervantes. Outside politics and personal beliefs, the Rosicrucian references demonstrate the importance of De Vere’s membership in a supportive group of writers and thinkers. Two stylized “A’s” appear in the arrangement of the foliage in the 1612, 1652 and 1740 dedication headers, and the 1740 doubles it with an “A2” at the bottom of the page where the 1612 and 1652 put versions of twice 11, “¶ 2” and “)( 2”, respectively. The header of the 1740 dedication is more Masonic and has a lamp, which echos the message of the Latin on the frame of the Madrid 1605 image: “Post Tenebras Spero Lucem (After Darkness I Hope for Light).” This light of knowledge and truth was kindled when Christopher Columbus, the great-grandson of John of Gaunt, discovered a whole new hemisphere, when Nicolas Copernicus posited that the Earth went around the Sun, and when Giordano Bruno preached that the stars are other suns, that the universe is infinite and God is in everything. And I can’t help think that this was the inspiration for The Globe Theatre with the dome of the heavens as its roof.
De Vere was part of a group of intellectuals that included Bruno, when he sought sponsorship in England and served as the spy Henry Fagot for Francis Walsingham, resulting in the entrapment and execution of James I’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and her accomplices, including Thomas Howard, the father of the apparent Don Quixote dedicatee “Walden”, Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk, who was raised by his uncle Henry Howard, pictured in the 1604-treaty portrait. From what I can see, Bruno wrote De Vere into his philosophical dialogue On Cause, Principle and Unity (1584) as the fool Gervasius (“ger” means “spear”), who acts as foil to the pedantic Polyhymnius, possibly William Cecil. Bruno plays Filoteo (Lover of god) and elucidates ideas that predict the first two laws of thermodynamics, dialectical materialism, quantum mechanics and space travel. In one episode, Don Quixote rides blindfold to the Moon and on to the Sun, exclaiming, when Sancho wants to uncover and see where they are, “ ‘Do nothing of the kind.… [R]emember the true story of the licentiate Torralva that the devils carried flying through the air riding on a stick with his eyes shut; who in twelve hours reached Rome and dismounted at Torre di Nona, which is a street of the city, and saw the whole sack and storming and the death of Bourbon, and was back in Madrid the next morning, where he gave an account of all he had seen’” (Book II, Chapter 41, p. 2703-4). This seems to be a reference to the Italian War of 1521-26, which culminated in the Treaty of Madrid. A licentiate, however, is someone with learning or who acts at liberty, both apt descriptions of Bruno, who was captured in 1593 and held prisoner in the medieval tower Torre dell’Annona (perhaps a white tower, “torralva”, like the Tower of London), the papal prison on the Tor di Nona. Seven years later, his tongue was pinioned and he was burned in the Campo de’ Fiori. And what had been Bruno the Nolan went on to take another form of the universe or God, as he might have put it.
Book II, from which I quoted above, comes after and criticizes an intercining apocryphal Don Quixote by an Alonso Fernández de Avellaned. It could be that some Spaniard (or political rivals at home) penned a rebuttal to De Vere’s original efforts and then his Rosicrucian disciples came out with Book II in a short literary war that erupted in real war again, 1625-30, in addition to the Thirty Years’ War 1618-48 and the English Civil War 1642-51. The apocryphal text could have been a diversion tactic, a way for De Vere’s group to validate and protect Book II, and it wasn’t put into English until the 1700s. Book I and II appear authentically of De Vere and his sidekick Jonson. One of Shakespeare’s favorite authors, Ovid, whose Metamorphoses De Vere probably translated as a youth with or under the name of his uncle Arthur Golding (1567, but 1593 John Danter printing below), is mentioned at least five times throughout the text, notably in the author’s preface, in which our Cervantes plays a Gervasius-like fool claiming ignorance of the Classics. Another comes in Book II Chapter 22, in which a young man guiding Quixote claims he “was by profession a humanist, and that his pursuits and studies were making books for the press, all of great utility and no less entertainment to the nation” and goes on to say that he has a book he calls “Metamorphoses, or the Spanish Ovid” (p. 1933). Ben Jonson was known as the English Horace, who is also mentioned in the author’s preface and then again in Book II Chapter 16, p. 1801. Though the author fanes ignorance of these Classics, he would still have to be educated enough to know of them and have read them to even care to mention them or apply them to the story. De Vere was one of the best read men in Europe at the time, and Ben Jonson succeeded as master pen — to King James I.
In the 1652 Book I Chapter 6, the Curate and Barber are going through Don Quixote’s library and determining which books of chivalry are the greatest cause of his madness and should be thrown in the courtyard and burned. Here, as Cervantes, De Vere gets to go through his own library, having some Spanish tomes destroyed (e.g. a book on Philip III’s grandfather Charles V) and making fun of some of his own probable work. One of the latter is the Italian Don Belianis, of which the Curate claims “the second, third and fourth part thereof have great needs of some Ruybarbe to purge his excessive choller”. Translated into English and published anonymously as The Honour of Chivalry, or The Famous and Delectable History of Don Bellianis of Greece in 1598, the book, I suspect, was De Vere’s. Rhubarb’s medicinal attributes that De Vere uses to criticize his book of knighthood are found in another book he sponsored, John Gerard’s 1597 The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (printed by a John Norton), on which De Vere is pictured as Apollo holding a snake’s head fritillary and a cob of corn: “The purgation which is made of Rubarbe is profitable and fit for all such as are troubled with choler” (p. 318). And Shakespeare in Act V Scene iii has Macbeth ask, “What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug / Would scour these English hence?” (Are we in lambasting King James I territory again?) But that is not all. After the books of chivalry, the Barber and Curate come to the poetry section and, determining it harmless, are corrected by Quixote’s niece, who proclaims the poetry should be burned as well, concluding, “[W]hat is more dangerous then to become a Poet? which is as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.” De Vere as Cervantes is lampooning himself as Shakespeare writing his Sonnets, etc. and the Barber soon finds a book entitled The Treasure of divers Poems. The author is not named, but the uncapitalized and misspelled “diverse” (though this may have been a common spelling at the time) is implying it should be read “De Vere’s”. The Curate, who reminds me of Feste duping Malvolio as Sir Topas in Twelfth Night, claims the book has much hidden in its conceits that needs to be purged but concludes that the prolific author “bee kept, both because the Author is my very great friend, and in regard of other more Heroicall and loftie works hee hath written.” By heroical, perhaps he is referring to the History Plays, or maybe Don Quixote, and just down the page is a book by Cervantes himself, whom the Curate also claims is an old acquaintance and whose book should not only be kept but “closely imprisoned in your lodging” until the more revelatory second part. And the Curate and Barber address each other as “Gossip” as if they were spreaders of rumor.
Another book in De Vere’s library and/or repertoire as author, editor and/or sponsor may have been George Gascoigne’s 1573 “ ¶ A Hundreth sun- / drie Flowres bounde / vp in one small Poesie.” The book claims to contain translations of Ovid and Ariosto, both mentioned in Don Quixote. Gascoigne is said to have attended Cambridge and Gray’s Inn, just as De Vere, and have been involved in plays. De Vere would have known Gascoigne, whose last name is an old spelling of Gascony, the home of France’s Henry IV. I’m starting to wonder if Cervantes or Shake-speare had other identities, if De Vere had a series of alter egos in his early years as he practiced the craft of writing. The book is printed by a Richarde Smith; De Vere’s primary tutor was Thomas Smith, whom he had accompanied to France. As a writer myself, I know that one doesn’t just burst on the scene. A writer develops over many years of reading and internalizing vocabulary, ideas and experiences. An aristocratic writer like De Vere would have borrowed and reformed what he pulled from other sources, working and reworking material. For the falcon on the Madrid cover page and for the seven times falcons are mentioned in Don Quixote (Ormsby), Cervantes perhaps drew on George Turberuile’s 1575 “The Booke of Faulconrie or Hau- / KING, FOR THE ONELY DE- / light and pleasure of all Noblemen and Gentlemen:”, which goes on to say it was translated from Italian and French sources, languages known by De Vere. This book was also reprinted in 1611 by a Thomas Purfoot, which like Thomas Shelton is six and seven letters for 67 —> 76 —> Oxford. There is a danger of seeing Shake-speare everywhere, but these two Georges would have been in De Vere’s purview, and possibly on Don Quixote’s shelf. Perhaps the reason someone and/or De Vere (re)published so many of his and/or others’ tomes was to encode his secret identity: “KING, FOR THE ONELY DE-” —> “For the one and only King, Ed”.
I admit I haven’t even read Don Quixote all the way through (yet), though I borrowed a Spanish version from the library in high school, where it sat in my desk all year. And like Cervantes in his preface, I won’t apologize for my ignorance of the Classics or my failure to cite sources here and there. Citing proof for a rumor is inhibited by the limits of Wikipedia and the wall of dubious official narratives managed by PhDs; besides, the only true education is developing a questioning, curious mind, and the ability to read. I will only apologize for this whole errant ramble. Blame Mladen Dolar for spreading Rumors. His discussion of Cervantes’ “Dialogue of the Dogs” made me recall the play on which, rumor has it, Jonson and De Vere collaborated: The Island of Dogs, which landed Jonson in jail. The play has since gone missing, but maybe it lives on in Cevantes’ collection of novellas (Novelas ejemplares 1613). Other Shakespeare and Elizabethan and, later, Jacobean plays can also be tied to Don Quixote. For example, The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again, written by Thomas Kyd circa 1582-92, has a story within a story and a mad main character, of whom Alonso Quijano could be a parody. Also a play within a play, Francis Beaumont’s 1607 The Knight of the Burning Pestle was performed five years before Don Quixote was “translated” and was named after the main character in Feliciano de Silva’s Amadis de Grecia (1530), Lisuarte, Knight of the Burning Sword, also mentioned in Don Quixote (Book I, Chapter 1, p. 181 and Chapter 18, p. 496). The character in Beaumont’s play who imagines himself a knight-errant is Rafe, apprentice to a grocer, and he talks of fighting giants in Portugal (again, not Spain) and how good knights, “neglecting their possessions, wander with a / Squire and a Dwarf through the Deserts to relieve poor / Ladies” (https://emed.folger.edu/sites/default/files/folger_encodings/pdf/EMED-KBP-reg-3.pdf). Short and fat, Sancho appears to be that squire and dwarf.
De Vere’s scriptorium lost its funding in the early 1590s, and in need of funds, he remarried, to Elizabeth Trentham, who died in 1612. It may be that Don Quixote is entirely original post-government work, and De Vere, who might have spent the remainder of his days exiled, perhaps on an island in the English Channel, is inventing the Western, in particular, the Spaghetti Western, riding off into the distance like Clint Eastwood at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. In the 1652 Book I Chapter 1, the narrator ponders what had been Don Quixote’s real name and presents us with Qixada, Quesada and Quixana, except that the “Q’s” are in the shape of curlicue “2’s” indicating we are being presented with numbers: 2IX, 2V and 2VIX, or 29, 25 and 24. Two and nine make 11, the Rosicrucian number. Two and five make 7, De Vere’s king number if he had been Edward VII. And “24” again stands for “deux vier”, the De Vere homophone, but is also the letter “Z”, found in Elizabeth I’s monogram, and is her code number. De Vere’s exile and erasure may have been a condition for the peace with Spain, because of the Essex Rebellion, or for his Penelope scandal. But it may be that he had in fact been fortune’s fool and had Wriostheley with his own mother. If one looks at the paintings of Wriothesley, none of which really resemble each other, one sees his history seemingly explained: in one he looks like the teenage Elizabeth, in another he looks like a young De Vere, and in yet another he looks like Mary Brown, his mother in name, which was painted after the Essex Rebellion, when he was stripped of his titles. There is also one more in which, I hypothesize he, not identified, is pictured with Mary’s twin brother’s sons, his cousins. Of the same age, Anthony Brown is on the left while Wriothesley is on the far right, set off from the brothers by ticks in the wall moulding (reversed: II IIII, 24?, Elizabeth?, and IIIIII IIIIII III, 663, 66/3=22?, De Vere?). The cousins stand arms around each other under the Latin phrase “Figurae conformis affectus (Shape-conforming affection)”. Wriothesley is alone, cut off, and appears to have a black stain (mancha) on his left legging. He is also pictured with a sword he has in another painting where there is a helmet with six ostrich feathers, rather than the usual three, perhaps meaning he is twice Tudor prince, once through his mother and once through his father, or perhaps because he is not the first prince, with De Vere and/or Robert Devereaux being the first. Wriothesley is nothing like the Catholic Browns, also known as Montagus; he wears a cape, he’s a Protestant Capulet, and Juliet (a form of Julius Caesar, i.e. Elizabeth) is his mother, while Romeo (the catholic De Vere) is his father. Then again, in my musings, I’m thinking that there is a chance De Vere fathered Wriothesley by Mary Brown (who was as young as Elizabeth had been when seduced by Seymour) and then, since De Vere was not Elizabeth’s recognized son, married her to legitimatize his own or Wriothesley’s claim to the throne — in a legal fiction. On the other hand, in Don Quixote, De Vere takes on the Moorish name Benengeli perhaps because his father had been Seymour, which comes from Saint Maur, with Maur meaning “moor”, or “dark”, and the origin of which is Saint Maur-de-Bois, today in La Manche, France, an area from which the Vere name also originates, according to William Camden (1551-1623, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Camden).
By absconding the throne and his name, De Vere perhaps sought absolution of all his past vanities, erasure of his stain, redemption. In the 1605 Madrid Chapter XLIV (which corresponds with the same chapter in the Ormsby translation), Sancho refers to the the Helmet of Mambrino as “yelmo de malino”, the “helmet of evil”, with “malino” being a poetic and now obsolete form of the Portuguese “malingo (malignant)”, and in the 1652 Book I, Part 3, Chapter 5, in relation to the mention of “sinne” in “sport with the Queen” with “Moore” printed over “Quixote”, the helmet is of “Malandrino”, “the rogue”, “the dishonest” or “the scoundrel” (in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian), and could be a reference to the vain pursuit of the corrupting crown from Thomas Seymour (rape?) to Edward de Vere (incest?). If he were a humanist, De Vere, and the Rosicrucians, must have wanted to free the people from the tyranny of the throne, as the tutor of James I, the humanist George Buchanan had suggested in his De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579). Shakespeare is not averse to regicide and kills off a whole line in Hamlet, including himself as Hamlet. James I, on the other hand, is said to have published a tract in 1598 on the divine right of kings over their subjects, and yet his publisher must have been in Buchanan’s and De Vere’s camp as the the typesetting of the title page has many quirks: “THE / TRVE LAW E O F / free Monarchies: / THE RECIPROCK AND / MVTV ALL DVTIE BE- / twixt a free King, and his / natur all Subiectes.” The message “free all” appears twice and “King” is purposefully printed over “Subjects”, as if “all” were their own masters. The code 1740 appears a number of times as do references to De Vere as “Monarch” or “Majestie”, particularly in the publisher’s last name, which is again oddly typeset: “VV alde- / grave”. Taking what I learned from “VV alden” on the Quixote dedication pages, I conclude the text here should be reinterpreted: “ed la VV (Ed the Vere) - grave”, i.e. death to the king, and “Majestie” is printed under Ed the Vere and opposite “grave”. In the 1652 author’s preface, Cervantes says to us readers, “though hast thy soul in the body, and thy free will therein as absolute as the best, and though art in thine own house, wherein thou art as absolute Lord, as the King is of his subsidies, and though knowest well the common Proverb, that Under my cloak a fig for the King [i.e. Fuck the king], all which doth exempt thee, and makes thee free from all respect and obligation”. In the end, the verity of bloodlines doesn’t really matter as De Vere blasphemes, self-deprecates, undermines James I and Philip III and all hierarchy, and empowers the people, even giving us free rein (or reign) to say what we might about him and his hero Don-Quixote — without retribution or reward.
If he wasn’t just trying to encode his name and exert his right as king, De Vere gives more evidence that he was more for the commonwealth than the monarchy in a 1609 reprint of Thomas Smith’s “THE / COMMON- / VVEALTH OF / ENGLAND, / A ND T HE M A NER OF / Gouernement thereof.” Thomas Smith is described as “principall Secretaries unto two most worthy / Princes, King E D VV A R D , and Queene / E L I Z A B E T H.” There is a glaring error here, however: Thomas Smith came to prominence under the boy King Edward VI, was out of government under Mary due to his Protestantism, and Elizabeth supposedly had no sons; hence, there were no princes. Smith was secretary to Edward VI and guardian and mentor to De Vere. So if we are to “amend the errors”, as we are told in the dedication to Don Quixote, then we must assume at the very least that Edward VI was the one prince and De Vere was the second, and that the “King E D VV A R D” stands for them both but more for De Vere with its “VV” and with it being printed over “E L I Z A B E T H”, as her son and, perhaps, husband. De Vere’s king number can be found by counting in seven letter from both sides of the line “A ND T HE M A NER OF”, which gives you “M”, i.e. “40” and “IVI —> VII”, “Oxford” and “EVII”. In the line below that, “Gouernement thereof”, there are seven “e’s”, including the Latin “e” and Greek “n”. Under that is “THE // Knight”, perhaps “4T Knight”, “Earl of Oxford”. And under that, and right over “King E D VV A R D” is “Secretaries”, which could be read “Secret aries”, i.e. “Secret ram/kid”. Thomas Seymour is possibly present in “two most worthy”, with “two” being employed this time to indicate “Thomas” while the “most” implies “more more (s’more)”, and you can see “Thomas St. Maur” in “most worthy”: “Thoms. St. Mory”. De Vere then appears to take on the names of his guardians John de Vere and Thomas Smith as the publisher “Iohn Smethwicke”, though “smeth” variously means “smooth/ level” and “artist/ creator” while “wicke” can be “house”, “bay” and “spring”. If De Vere is the “wicke” or offspring of Thomas Seymour, then “Smeth” is the abbreviation “Th. Sme.” “Smethwicke” is not unlike “Shakespeare”, too, and one probably should not be surprised or indignant that William Shakespeare’s father was John. In this world of meaningful pseudonymity, it is not an accident.
There is one once lost Shakespeare or should I say De Vere play, called Cardenio, that is said to borrow from Don Quixote since it was performed in 1613, but the play appears to be named after Cardanvs Comforte by Jerome Cardan, published by commandment of De Vere in 1573 (I could only find the 1576 below) and said to be the book Hamlet carries. In fact, Cardan is noted to have “taught Oxford and King Edward Greek” around 1552-3, meaning De Vere had to be at least four or five, born closer to Cervantes’ 1547 birthdate than 1550 (J. Cardan, The Book of My Life, Trans. Jean Stoner, Dutton, 1930, p. xii). Cardan muses upon grief, “Deep grief was grief’s own medicine” (The Book of My Life, p. 282); not unlike Shakespeare, “Would I were dead, if God's good will were so, / For what is in this world but grief and woe?” (Henry VI, Part 3, Act II, Scene 5); not unlike Quixote, “there is no remembrance which time will not end, nor grief which death will not consume” (1652 Book I, Part 3, Chapter 1); not unlike De Vere, “What plague is greater than the grief of mind?” (England’s Parnassas, 1600). In the 1652 Book I, Part 3 Chapter 10, Quixote and Sancho encounter a mad sorrowing man called Cardenio, and Quixote embraces him like an old friend. At one point Cardenio exclaims: “It cannot bee taken out of my minde, nor is there any one in the world / that can deprive me of the conceit, or make me beleeve the contrary ; and hee were a bottle- / head, that would think or beleeve otherwise then that the great villain Mr. Elisabat the / Barbar kept Queen Madasima as his Lemman.” This seems to say that Queen Elizabeth was De Vere’s lover (lemman), and also that De Vere was Edward VII. There are 17 letters in “Elisabat the Barbar”, and we can use the “M” in “Mr.” for 40 if “Mr (4017)” is flipped “RM (Royal Majesty, 1740)”. “Elisabat” is very close to “Elizabeth” but is a stand-in for De Vere. The love interest Queen “Madasima” is an anagram for “I am Adam’s” queen (Eve was made from Adam’s rib, which is explicated later in Don Quixote), and the name can be incestuously decoded as 40 (M) followed by 7 letters (adasima), i.e. Edward VII. “Barbar” could be a misspelling of “Barber” but more likely of “Berber”, i.e. “moor” as in Thomas (“twin”) Seymour, and the Spanish “b’s” can be pronounced as “v’s”, ie. VerVer, or VV, which is why De Vere often uses an “M” rather than a “W” to stand for “40” (He is a Mour placed in the house of Vere). Quixote gets into a Fight Club-type scuffle with Cardenio over the accusation, getting his barber-basin helmet broken in the process. And yet, in the end, he emulates Cardenio’s madness by stripping naked and doing penance in the Sierra Morena (“Sie-More”). There is a message that appears down the bottom right-hand side of the page: “Quack-salver,and / under- / liketh / Cardenio”, perhaps “Shake-speare and de unr (ver) liketh Cardenio”.
De Vere may have started his everlasting incognito existence as the girl Mary Seymour, Thomas Seymour’s and Catherine Parr’s supposed daughter, placed in the previously mentioned Willoughby household that hosted Enzinas — until disappearing from history and reappearing in 1550 as Edward de Vere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seymour). At one point in Don Quixote, Cardenio and others come across the young woman Dorothea, whom they mistake for a beautiful young man. Cardenio whispers to the Curate, “As this is no Luscinda, it is no human creature but a divine being” (Book I, Chapter 28, p. 807). This perhaps could be Oxford, who was once a Mary, or perhaps Wriothesley, who was famous for his lovelocks, or even Elizabeth I, who had then a very male role. In any case, the Thomas Seymour - De Vere - Elizabeth rape-and-incest saga continues to be re-addressed in the various episodes and tales-within-tales of Don Quixote. As such, rhymes of “Seymour”, like “honour”, “humour”, “amourous” and “more”, continue to reappear, as well as discussions of the virtues of women. In one, a chaste and virtuous woman is compared to an ermine (Book I, Chapter 33, p. 970), which alludes directly to the “ermine portrait”, in which a small ermine with a crown around its neck, perhaps De Vere, has his paw on and is looking up at Elizabeth I. Ermine was also used in the coat of arms of the Worshipful Company of Skinners (connected to the Muscovy Company founded under Edward VI), which alternated between sixth and seventh place among the livery companies or guilds, and Edward VI, the apparent namesake of De Vere (Edward VII), is pictured wearing an ermine-fringed mantle in one royal portrait. In the 1652 Book I (Part 4, Chapter 6), the hunting of a male ermine is described as follows: “they persue him towards those places which are defiled ; and the Ermine espying the mire, stands still, and per- / mits himself to be taken and captived in exchange of not passing thorow the mire, or / staining of his whitenesse,which it esteems more then either liberty or life [bold mine]”. Note the very precise use of the word “stain (mancha)”, which has been altered in the Ormsby edition to “spoil and sully”, while “esteems more”, i.e. “Tms. Seeemore”, becomes “values more”. In the modern Spanish edition, “mancha” is first used as a verb, “manchase el sombrero”, which Ormsby translates as “spoil his hat”, but “manchar” also means “to besmirch” and “to deflower” (Book I, Chapter 21, p. 580). De Vere (Quixote) appears to have been deflowered by his own mother, and words that begin with “in-“ and “im-“, like “incest”, also continue to appear here: “integrity”, “incumberances”, “impeachment” and “importunate”.
In the following chapter, a sonnet is introduced in the same manner as the dedication to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “these ensuing sonnets”: “…this ensuing. // A SONNET”, which again seems to encapsulate some kind of love/ sex story. “Stain”, needless to say, appears in most of Shakespeare’s plays and most obviously in his poem Rape of Lucrece, who is mentioned in the 1652 edition but changed to Lucretia in Ormsby (Book I, Chapters 25 and 34, pp. 727 and 1027). Since I don’t want to spend my entire life researching this topic and have not and will not read all of Sonnets or Rape of Lucrece, which some say are more about the Wriothesley/ Penelope Rich affair, I may be completely wrong about the rape/ incest and who represents who in Don Quixote. There are some characters called “the Rich” in Cervantes’ story. But that still proves the author appears to be the same person as Shakespeare; doesn’t disprove the presence of Seymour; and doesn’t negate the nagging problem that a simple sex affair, which were common along with murder, is not enough to have one’s real name erased and then encoded into texts. The latter might’ve begun around 1576, when Wriothesley was about two years old and Penelope, only 13. In that year, decode-able as “I E. Oxford”, De Vere, newly returned from an escape to Italy, probably put himself to work with the building of The Theatre and writing and publishing, including the poem “Loss of Good Name” in Paradyse of Daynty Devices, part of “The Treasure of divers Poems” Quixote’s niece wanted burned. Amazingly, the title page of this early collection already has codes and word puzzles. The main author is “M. Edwards”, 407, i.e. Oxford Edward VII. The printer “Henry Disle” appears to be “Henry d’isle [of the isle]”, i.e. Henry of England, the son of Elizabeth I. Even Seymour, whose presence is hinted at by words that mean “more”, e.g. “sundry” and “most”, can be found in the word “woorshippe” (printed under “her Majesties” and “Gentlemen” [bold mine]) by flipping the “w”: “sihmoore” with the twin “pp’s” implying “Thomas”. The “w” can be used again as a “VV (De Vere)” and the “pp” can be transformed into “Oxford” via “dd —> 4D —> 40 —> 4T —> 76”. The “4T”, i.e. “TH”, could also stand for “Thomas”, and so “woorshippe”, via Oxford, is “Tho. Sihmore”. Another De Vere/ Seymour combination can be riddled from “vvith others”: “VV I Th. S’more”. And the presence of Thomas Seymour in Vere is further confirmed by the text around the illustration from John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth (Ego sum via et veritas)”, which Jesus speaks to his apostle Thomas, the name that is the truth (veritas) of De Vere.
Epigram 22 (twice 11), Ad Gulielmum Shakespear (About William Shakespeare), in the weave of Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (1599, https://archive.org/details/epigrammesinolde00weevuoft/mode/2up) by a “John W eever”, is supposedly about the Wriothesley/ Penelope affair portrayed through the rape of Lucrece (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu4FD4Zii8c). But perhaps it could also be about De Vere/ Elizabeth. Lucrece was raped by Tarquine, the seventh and final king of Rome, which sounds like another Edward VII allusion, and the epigram contains the same Seymour markers as found in Don Quixote: “Proud lust-stung Tarquine seeking still to prove / Romea Richard; more whose names I know not [bold mine]”. Here, I think “Romea Richard” could mean “the love of King Richard” (not Penelope Rich); Queen Elizabeth I’ve heard compared to Richard II, hence the feminine “Romea” instead of “Romeo”. And further down, the subjects of the poem are referred to as “Saints”, which seems to suggest, again, Saint Maur, Seymour. It’s important to note that Shake-speare’s “William” means “will helmet”, i.e. the Helmet of Mambrino, which I’ve already deemed as a symbol of the ruinous pursuit of the English Crown. By bringing together and comparing such various texts and etymologies, I hope to provide a macroscopic overview and to achieve some workable frame in which I can begin to glimpse some likeness of fact behind the rumors and, as an English major and teacher and a writer, at least not be ignorant of the roots of our language, as these narratives and their coding probably forced certain idioms and word combinations onto the language. I think, De Vere’s hand is in these epigrams, as the “W” in “Iohn W eever” is separated by a space from “eever (E. Vere)”, and in his prefatory address to the reader, Weever’s first name is abbreviated as as “Ioh:”; Io, a symbol for Elizabeth used in illustrations, was a mortal impregnated by Zeus and then turned into a cow by Hera. The title page again exhibits 1740s, 11s and hints at Seymour. One hint is the name of the person paying for the publishing, Thomas Bushell, which like Thomas Seymour is 6 and 7 letters, 67 —> 76 —> Oxford, and could be another pseudonym like Thomas Shelton.
Other words of Don Quixote are code, I think, for places, people and events in De Vere’s life. “Wardrobe”, for example, refers to his life as a ward in William Cecil’s house. And the “Inn” is a stand-in for the Inns of Court, particularly Gray’s Inn, where De Vere learned law and first performed his Shake-speare plays. From the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote (the experienced lawyer De Vere) commissions Sancho to deliver a message to Dulcinea, asking him to have it set down in writing as soon as he is able but to “beware in any sort that thou / give it not to a Notary or Court-Clearke to bee copied, for they write such an intan- / gling-confounding processe Letter, as Satan himself would scarce bee able to reade it” (1652 Book I, Part 3, Chapter 11). Later in the story, back at the Inn, Quixote, in another one of his deliriums, attacks the keeper’s wine bags. Blinded by his want of an earldom, Sancho imagines that his master has indeed cut off a giant’s head and that the wine is blood and says to the “Princess” Dorotea “that hee himself had seen the Gyants head cut off ; and for a / more certain token thereof, hee said, That hee had a beard that reached him down to / his girdle ; and that if the Head could not now bee found, it was by reason that all the / Affairs of that house were guided by inchantment [bold mine]” (1652, Book I, Part 4, Chapter 8). Again, we have the “see” and “more” markers, and giant is spelled with a “y”, instead of the “i” often used elsewhere in the text, to point us toward Seymour, who, as described in this fantastical scene, was beheaded for treason and had had a very long beard. Likewise, Thomas Seymour’s execution in 1549 won Elizabeth her honor back and got her son Edward the De Vere earldom the following year. And the Sey Mour became a De Vere, “M —> IVI —> VII —> VV”. But that Seymour’s head cannot be found by reason of “inchantment” points toward some new dishonorable scandal, such as incest, or some other inconvenient fact. There is another rumor, promoted by Henry VIII himself, that Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn might have conceived her by one of a series of men, some of whom had their heads cut off, such as Francis Weston (who’s uncle was the last leader of the Order of St. John) and Henry Norris, while rumored lover the poet Thomas Wyatt just spent time in the tower. This would make neither Elizabeth nor De Vere arguably rightful monarchs, except through the Seymour connection with Edward VI. And it might explain the rumor that De Vere had Wriothesley sire his son Henry, 18th Earl Oxford, by Penelope Rich; her grandmother was Catherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn and possibly Henry VIII. Whatever the case, all of this would definitely have given Shakespeare/ Cervantes a reason to write and something to be concealed in poetry, plays and a novel.
It appears that De Vere, the infinite jester and etymological fanatic, may have been already encoding his unfortunate story and beginning his work on Don Quixote by 1599, when a “IOHN MINSHEU” issued an expanded version of Richard Percivale’s 1591 Spanish grammar and dictionary Bibliotheca Hispanica. John Minsheu does not seem to have a biography beyond his publications, and his last name, seven letters long, seems to be alluding to “Moorish” and “Spanish”, also seven letters, on the title page, which contains a number of 11s and 1740s, including by using the publisher’s name, Edm. Bollifant, another suspect pseudonym, e.g. Ed the offspring of Boleyn. The Folger Shakespeare Library has a hand-annotated version of the 1599 book (https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/a-dictionary-for-don-quixote/), which suggests it has everything to do with De Vere and Shakespeare and his hermetic group of Rosicrucians, who is/are represented on the title-page frontispiece by the winged helmet of Hermes on a spear point, which is encircled by two snake-like phoenixes, i.e. Elizabeth I. Thomas Seymour also had wings as part of his coat of arms, and the title page says the book holds an alphabetical table of “Arabicke and Moorish [sih-Moor] words”. What is more, this Spanish resource was included in the “eleven Language” dictionary Ductor in linguas, which includes Portuguese, put out, again, by “Iohn Minshev” in 1617, just before the 1620 publication of Don Quixote Book II. As spelled here, Minsheu’s last name can now be read “min shev”, “from seven” in Aramaic, John the Baptist’s language, while the pivotal language on the intro pages is Italian, De Vere’s favorite. The title page illustrated header features two cherubs pulling up someone who appears to be De Vere, or Shakespeare, perhaps the “Phoebus” and “Sunne” mentioned in the Quixote sonnet and the “Apollo” on the Herball and in Epigram 22: a ray-ringed winged man holding a book and rising from a skeleton.
An angelic De Vere resurrecting and rising to the heavens in the 1617 language book could imply a recent death, perhaps in the month and year of Shakespeare and Cervantes, April 1616, or perhaps it was just a official Rosicrucian commemoration of his death. The publication of Don Quixote Book I in 1612 suggests De Vere might have been still around after 1604, and the political rhyme “The Farts Epitaph”, circa 1607, could be self-effacing rather than someone critical of a Tudor prince bequeathing his kingdom to the people, the “Common-wealth”, with the phrase “in the Senate lost his breath” a reference to the 1603 Succession to the Crown Act making James king:
Reader I was borne and cry’d
Crackt soe, smelt so & so dy’d
Like Julius Cesar was my Death
For he in Senate lost his breath
And not unlike Intoom’d doth lye
The Noble Romulus & I
And alsoe like to Flora fayer
I make the Common-wealth mine Heyer.
Found on a wonderful site called Early Stuart Libels (https://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/parliament_fart_section/C1b.html), the poem’s footnote explains “the Romans believed Flora was once a wealthy courtesan in the early years of the Roman republic, and left her fortune to the people, making the Republic her heir on the condition they celebrate her birthday with feasts”. Even if defamatory and not De Vere’s, the insulting verse is complimentary to the impermeable self-effacing fools of Shakespeare and Cervantes, whose true identity was reduced to a fart in the wind while in actuality he must have been, by all Quixote’s indications, Elizabeth I’s son and lover and most loyal poet and propagandist. He was a would be Julius Caesar to his queen, his Flora, or is it the other way around? As much is captured in an engraving of Elizabeth circa 1600, in which she doesn’t appear her old womanly self but a middle-aged man brilliantly dressed in monarchical drag. And the flanking coat of arms rounded with the Order of the Garter reads: “Honi soit qui mal y pense (Shame on him who thinks evil [i.e. Evill] of it)”. De Vere never was elected to the Order of the Garter, and Elizabeth was no “Virgin Queen (Virginae Reginae)”, as is engraved below her dress. And what appears to be De Vere’s Geneva Bible sits on the table over the arms, a book published in 1570 by a John Crispin, a name that is very much like John Minsheu and makes me think of the famous speech from Henry V. The frontispiece features those enigmatically hands protruding from clouds, like on the 1605 Madrid Don Quixote, as well as a snake and seascape, in somewhat similar fashion to Minsheu’s Spanish dictionary. The original publisher of the Geneva Bible (1557-60) was Rowland Hill, whose name is on De Vere’s Paradyse of Daynty Devices and who was a close associate of Thomas Seymour and was a member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers like Anne Boleyn’s paternal grandfather.
The 1599 play The Shomakers Holy-day (1610 printing) perhaps is one of the most defining roots of the Don Quixote project. Nothing in the play has anything to do with Spain, and yet everything. Shoemakers, or the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers were licensed to make expensive new shoes for the gentry from Cordova leather, namely tanned goatskin, while cobblers were restricted by law to repairing shoes, and the play was put on by Charles Howard (of Armada and 1604-treaty fame) and his Admiral’s Men. Dutchman Thomas Dekker (Dickers in Henslowe’s diary) supposedly wrote the comedy, though his name doesn’t appear on the 1600 or 1610 title pages, and the 1610 printing was done by G.Eld, the same as the Sonnets, for I. Wright, which sounds like a pun on “I write” or “I VV, right (I Vere by right)”. What is more, the play draws from Henry V, again famous for its speech on the Feast of St. Crispin, who happens to be the patron saint of shoemakers. These shoemakers and other characters of the play point to the Protestant intrigues of Thomas Seymour. For example, the hero, Rowland Lacie (aka Hans the shoemaker), probably a stand-in for De Vere, shares a first name with Geneva Bible publisher Rowland Hill. Likewise, Rowland Lacie’s cousin Askew is named after Anne Askew, a relation of the Seymours who was tortured and burned at the stake by Henry VIII for her Protestant preaching and writing. De Vere’s adopted father, John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford, employed the playwright John Bale, who published Askew’s autobiography, The Examinations, in 1546 and 47. And De Vere, I suspect, also had access to Askew’s poetry, some of the first verse published by a woman, while Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last queen, Thomas Seymour’s wife, and Elizabeth’s stepmother, was likewise a writer. It is probable the shoemakers, a Protestant guild as all guilds, were specifically used by the play’s writer because of their connection with Moorish Spain and can be used to encode the name “Thomas Seymour”. As a hint, the title page variously spells “shoemaker” as “shomaker (K[ing] Seamohr?)” and “shoomaker”, the latter of which is printed under “the humorous”, or “Tho. Sehmouur”. The Lord Mayor Simon Eyre (printed “Symon Eyre” in the 1600 play’s prologue) reveals another “Seymore” by replacing the “i” and “n” of “Simon” with the “ey” and “re” of “Eyre”; or a “Saymoor” by using the “ay” and “or” in “Mayor” printed below, another pun used in the 1652 Don Quixote. In 1601, Charles Howard’s sister Frances married Edward Seymour, De Vere’s, I suppose, cousin and the son of the Lord Protectorate under Edward VI. Elizabeth, only three years older than Howard, was now more closely connected to her admiral. She may be represented in the play by Rowland Lacie’s love interest, Rose Otley, daughter of the mayor of London, a position held by Rowland Hill (during Edward VI) and Anne Boleyn’s paternal grandfather. And Rose Otley, when pronounced “Roseotley”, sounds like “Wriothesley”. As such, the first and last names would stand for “Rose —> Tudor Rose (Elizabeth)” and “Ot ley —> Oxford/ Rose T King (De Vere)”; Wriothesley and De Vere are both part of Elizabeth, are her sons. And it is fitting that one of the symbols of the Cordwainers was a girl spinning shoemaking thread with a distaff, the compliment of the man with a spear.
Published in 1594, the same year that Comedy of Errors was performed and started a riot at Gray’s Inn, “Willobie / HIS / AVISA / OR / the true Picture of a mo- / dest Maiden, and of a chast and / constant wife.” is the first text in which Shake-speare is mentioned (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175035205536&seq=43). It is mainly a series of verses explicating an Elizabethan sex scandal. In a three-part video Alexander Waugh, explains that the book is, again, about Penelope Rich, as Avisa, and her various loves, including her husband Lord Rich; former secretary to Philip II, Antonio Perez; Charles Blount, who fathered many children out of wedlock with Penelope and is one of those seated in the painting of the 1604 treaty; Shakes-peare and De Vere; and Henry Wriothesley (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf3yU7L0lJ0). Perhaps it might be helpful, however, to see Waugh’s explanation as the “cover” hidden scandal concealing the second more scandalous truth: that Elizabeth I was not a virgin queen and, as the Avisa of the title, was raped by T. Seymour and committed incest with the resulting son, De Vere, fathering Henry Wriothesley. The title, idiosyncratic in its wording and typesetting, is arranged so that three 1740s point to important parts, such as “mo-“, “dest Maiden” and “wife”, which seem to suggest “more/ Oxford”, “De Vere’s/ St. Maur’s Maiden”, and so “Elizabeth as wife”. “Willobie” itself could be “Will/ OV [Shake-speare/ Oxford Vere]” while “AVISA” has De Vere’s double “A’s” and suggests a number of interpretations with the offset “HIS” and “OR” above and below, including “IS HVAA [EVII]” and “A VIR SAMOR [A Vere Seymour]”. Avisa, as Elizabeth, is his, Willobie’s (love/ wife) but Willobie, also, is his Avisa (her blood, her son). The original title page illustrations, with those revelatory cherubs, again, also point to a De Vere/ Elizabeth I scandal. At the top are the Boleyn bull horns and the Oxford oxen horns; along the sides, De Vere/ Seymour as the helmeted/ masked Athena/ Minerva, aka William Shake-speare, and Elizabeth as the pregnant Diana, with her arrows, but also a horned Io, the lover of Zeus turned into a cow and sometimes associated with the Moon, and hence pregnancy; and at the bottom, the story of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag by Diana as punishment for seeing her naked and subsequently torn apart by his own dogs, a direct allusion to the suspected “pregnancy” portrait of Elizabeth, in which she’s dressed in Turkish or Persian, i.e. Moorish-like, garb and De Vere is a stag. Note the rabbits, symbols of fecundity, turning away in shame from the Acteaon scene. The simile of “running like a deer” is used four times in the Ormsby Don Quixote, including when the barber drops his basin, the Helmet of Mambrino, and scurries off, and Quixote claims it.
The title of Willobie His Avisa’s prefatory poem “In praise of Willobie his Auisa, Hex- / ameton to the Author” is broken so that the first line ends with “hex”, i.e. “an evil curse” or “witch”, while the next line picks up with “ameton”, perhaps “a metonym”, a word or thing used to represent something else. And the poem uses archetypes to stand in for the various roles Avisa has played: Lucrece, raped by “Tarquyen” as written by Shake-speare, which I think is about Thomas Seymour; Susan, or Susanna in Daniel 13 of the Old Testament, who is arrested and accused by two older men of having sex with a youth (perhaps Robert Dudley or another) under a tree, said by one of them to be a holm oak, the tree throughout Don Quixote; and Penelope, an oft-courted but chaste woman while her husband Odysseus is away, Elizabeth I’s official image. Avisa herself is the fourth (the hidden fourth T, if you will) and is described in the following couplet: “To think the Truth, and say no lesse, / Our Auisa shall make a messe”. We are to think “Truth”, i.e. Vere, and “say no lesse”, a Don-Quixote-esque pun on “say more”, i.e. Seymour. The writer then calls Avisa “This English Eagle” and “This Brytan Bird” with “Britain” strangely spelled with a “y”, which points to the phoenix, the bird incorporated into the royal repertoire with Jane Seymour. Interestingly, “avisa” in Spanish is “He tells/ warns” or “Tell!”, so “Willobie his avisa” could mean “Willobie’s telling”. The English bishops did not approve of this telling, however, and in Inquisitorial fashion, the books were collected and burned. As such, Don Quixote, structured in chapters similar to Willobie His Avisa’s cantos, could be viewed as another attempt by De Vere, or someone of his class, to tell his and Elizabeth’s history and save it from oblivion — either out of spite or fidelity. I would like to think, and the texts seem to indicate, it was De Vere out of fidelity. The printer of Willobie His Avisa, “Iohn Windet” seems to be De Vere and joins the string of other Johns: John Chrysostom, Juan de la Cuesta, John Danter, John Gerard, John Norton, John de Vere, John Smethwicke, John Shakespeare, John the Evangelist, John Minsheu, John Crispin, John Weever, the Order of St. John and, of course, John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert that prepared the way of Christ but who was ultimately beheaded like Thomas Seymour. 
One might ask, why didn’t De Vere just do Sophocles Oedipus Rex? In high school English class, I remember watching Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson, and our instructor pointing out the Oedipus-like nature of the Hamlet/ Gertrude bedroom scene, and indeed, the word “incestuous” is used four times to describe the mother’s bed and once more using “incest”: “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (Act I Scene 5). While Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s later more accomplished works, I think De Vere had Oedipus in mind from the very beginning of his personal tragedy. His 1576 “Loss of Good Name”, previously mentioned, is perhaps based on the Medieval lament tradition, which includes such Latin “planctus (plaints)” as of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross as well as the anonymous “Lament of Oedipus” (Hahn, Thomas. “The Medieval Oedipus.” Comparative Literature 32, no. 3 (1980): 225–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1770772). De Vere is not merely softly bemoaning the loss of reputation but violently bewailing with “piercing plaints” some heaven-and-hell rendering event that shall erase his name completely:
And since my mind, my wit, my head, my voice and tongue are weak,
To utter, move, devise, conceive, sound forth, declare and speak,
Such piercing plaints as answer might, or would my woeful case,
Help crave I must, and crave I will, with tears upon my face,
Of all that may in heaven or hell, in earth or air be found,
To wail with me this loss of mine, as of these griefs the ground.
In the end, Oedipus blinds himself. Cervantes uses variations of “blind” 36 times, in Ormsby, and constantly focuses on “seeing” and “eyes” to draw attention not only to Seymour but to De Vere in his prior blindness and the subsequent blinding of his name. In 1581, De Vere, who uses the exact same illustrations as his 1576 Cardanvs Comforte (https://photos.app.goo.gl/afFxDyxU25ne56z78), republished Alexander Neville’s 1560 translation “SENECA / HIS TENNE TRA- / GEDIES, TRANSLA- / TED INTO / Englysh.”, which includes Oedipus, based on Sophocle’s work. Seeming to be the model of the title “Willobie His Avisa”, this title is typeset to draw our focus to the last two lines: “TED INTO / Englysh.”, i.e. “Edward into Elizabeth”, and the page is bordered by two mythical monsters, with the Io or Boleyn horns over Elizabeth and with De Vere as a goatish satyr, which were portrayed in Ancient Greece with permanent erections but is shown here with breasts to indicate the in-relationship with Elizabeth. Their incestuous union is further symbolized in the snake-flanked coat of arms, a collage of Jane Seymour’s phoenix over the Boleyn bulls, replaced with what appears to be three bars of bullion, and chevron, with the addition of two Tudor roses and a bird, perhaps an allusion to Thomas Seymour’s wings or De Vere as the wing-helmeted messenger Mercury, named on the title page. Or perhaps the bird is Wriostheley, the union of Elizabeth’s and Edward’s roses. The period of the title is bolded to parallel that of the printer, again the same as Cardanvs Comforte, “Tho- / mas Marsh.” The moors of England and Scotland are sometimes marshy, and “mas” in Spanish means “more”, and so we have a “Thomas more Moor (or, Sammoor)”, which is just above a “Thomas Seymour / Vere / EVII” monogram. Thomas Shelton, the “translator” of Don Quixote, is a Thomas by the sea moor, by the Mancha, the stain of England. Like the Johns, these pseudonyms join the long line of other Thomases, the greatest among whom is Doubting Thomas, if you, the reader of this, are still wanting greater wounds to probe. I include, here, then another painting of Elizabeth (1585-90), this time with a fan of seven ostrich feathers, symbolizing De Vere, her little king. As such, perhaps the twice 11 we see so often, including on the Seneca title page below, partly symbolizes Edward VII once as husband and once as son.
From 1576, De Vere seems to have known of the incest, but he may have known from the very birth of Wriothesley. Wriothesley’s date of birth is given as October 6th, 1573, but I have heard that this was the date of conception, and there is no official record of his birth. In the previously mentioned portrait in which he might be portrayed opposite his cousin Anthony Brown, Wriothesley is supposed to be the same age, and Brown was born in 1574. Wriothesley may have been born June 1574, just before De Vere mysteriously ran away to Flanders without permission in July. Seeking more evidence, I perused the papers of William Cecil published in A Collection of State Papers in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the Year 1571 to 1596 by William Murdin in 1759, and I found a letter to Cecil dated June 26th, 1574 from the Bishop of London (p. 275, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000880889&seq=6). There are two idiosyncrasies with this letter that make it stand out. First, in the table of contents, the entry is without author and indented under the preceding entry, as if to hide it. Second, in the letter heading, Murdin or another has put in parenthesis the name “Ed. Grindall” (with other letters, the author is placed in a margin note), when Grindall was Archbishop of York at the time and not living in London. In the letter, the author signs as “Ed. London.”, which is followed by the large catch word “D.”, instead of “Dr.” This man writes in English, with only a few Latin phrases, complaining of some slight against himself: “Your Lordshipp’s last Speech unto me hath so troubled me, that I could not have endured thus long, if the Testimonie of a good Conscience had not greatly relived me. My Lord, no Man sustainith more Wrongs than I do. I well hoped that no Devil had been so impudent to have charged me with so great manifest an Untruth. Se aliquis incarnatus Diabolus, et qui non dormit (He is some incarnate devil, and does not sleep), hath wrought me this Wrong. Spiritus ille mendax revelabitur suo Tempore (That lying spirit will be revealed in its own time).” He goes on to say that if the accusation were true, he would think himself “unworthy to live in any Commonwealth”, a phrase more apt for the King of England than a bishop, and perhaps is the reason De Vere chose June 24 has his death date and not July 7, James I ascent. That said, in its use of Latin phrases and in the signature, the letter is similar to another of Grindall’s when Archbishop of Canterbury, and Grindall could have been in London staying with its current bishop, Edwin Sandys, a close companion who signed his letters similarly. And yet the accusation seems dire, name-ruining, possibly life-threatening, so even if not De Vere, I can imagine he might have had the same initial vehement denial. Such a personal tragedy as incest would no doubt explain Shakespeare’s anguished madness in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello, and yet De Vere must have come to see the humorous side of his situation as well, as he is noted by Francis Meres as the best for comedy. If De Vere were Shakespeare, Meres is talking of the mistaking of identities and sex in a Midsummer’s Night Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night. The Spanish novel Don Quixote, then, is the satirical answer to his lifelong personal tragedies and political intrigues and of spending the Vere fortune to publish and build up the library of English, which, if I am allowed one opinion, is one of the most democratic and forgiving of languages. And what is most interesting about the 1759 printing of Cecil’s papers is that the “Q” in the page header “of Queen ELIZABETH” is the exact same curlicue “2” used to print “Don Quixote” in the 1652 edition, over 100 years before. If “u” is taken as the Roman numeral “v” and “n” as Greek for an “e” and so also a five, 2(v+e+e+n) = 40, i.e. 4T. Again, De Vere is in Elizabeth’s name, and its being in the headers across the entire book implies that the time period was the reign of Edward VII and Elizabeth I.
In my want to be thorough, I can’t help recall that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, modeled partly on Hamlet, is rife with instances of pedophilia. And some rumors say that De Vere’s actual crime was his abuse of boys, a possible revenge-driven charge brought against him by rebellious Catholics Lord Henry Howard (De Vere’s “cousin” through John de Vere) and Charles Arundel. There is a review of Alan Nelson’s Monstrous Adversary on the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship website that puts the charges into its proper political context: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/alan-nelsons-monstrous-adversary-reveiwed-by-peter-moore/. In addition, the accusation came around 1581-83, at least five years after the poem “Loss of Good Name” and seven years after the birth of Wriothesley, and it may be that Howard and Arundel knew that they could not accuse Oxford of incest without implicating the Queen and so instead accused him of abusing his boy choristers and actors. Such exploitation of captive boys was occurring with the knowledge of the Queen, according to Shakespeare in Company author Dr. Bart van Es. Van Es claims that Shakespeare lampoons Christopher Marlowe’s abuse in Hamlet: “In the play, the actors have come to visit Hamlet in Denmark because competition from the boy players has driven them from London. They even perform a scene that parodies Dido, Queen of Carthage, which Marlowe originally wrote for the boys of Blackfriars” (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2013-06-19-exploitation-elizabethan-child-actors-revealed). However, “Thomas Nash, Gent.,” who worked with Marlowe on Dido, is rumored to have been employed by or have been De Vere; Marlowe himself may have done work for De Vere’s scriptorium at one point; and Marlowe was sponsored by Robert Greene, who may have been De Vere, as well. What is more, the only people who could possibly be at fault for systemic pedophilia (outside their own families) are members of the private audience entertained at Blackfriars, circa 1587-93: the wealthy with the power to abuse their poor servants. At the most, Dido calls the rich to account. In the least, the play satirically amuses them. But possibly the play is a metaphor, just as Arundel’s and Howard’s accusation, to broach the unbroachable: possibly the Jupiter/Ganimed relationship in Dido is the power equivalent of the Elizabeth/Edward one. And De Vere defends his reputation or shows his true nature in Don Quixote. In one of his very first exploits as knight errant, Quixote comes to the aid of the 15-year-old Andres (“manly”), who is shirtless, tied to a holm oak and being flogged by his master, Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar, a Spanish town named after the 1/5 tax placed on tenants’ harvest. Quixote challenges the farmer and commands him to release the defenseless boy and pay him his wages. Once the would-be knight rides off, however, the boy is whipped harder, flayed like St. Bartholomew (Book I, Chapter 4). De Vere is in some sense an idiot, trying to right a wrong but only making things worse. In the end, Charles Arundel died in France, but Henry Howard, whose father was a former enemy of the Seymours, became rich at the ascension of James I, and he lobbied the king to ally with Spain.
The funky typesetting of the 1603 First Quarto title page of Hamlet reminds me of the 1652 Don Quixote. “HAMLET”, which could stand for “AM TH EL —> I am VV 11 —> I am EVII”, doesn’t have the benefit of the Jupiter/Ganimed relationship in Dido. Instead, De Vere divides himself into the parts he plays in life, and so the characters of King Hamlet, Prince Hamlet and Claudio can be taken as a trinity, three persons in one. King Hamlet would be the ghost of Thomas Seymour that seems to haunt De Vere’s life story. Hamlet the son, just as De Vere is really a Seymour, shares the King’s name. And in the guise of Claudio, De Vere becomes father to himself, goes to bed with his mother, which is the only way to understand the bed of Denmark as incestuous, or of “Dee mark”, i.e. the stain, la mancha. The names seem to support this interpretation as “hamlet” means small home or village without a parish, like the modest Seymour seat of Wulfhall, which was abandoned by the family during De Vere’s lifetime. And “Claudio” comes from the Latin “claudus”, “to be lame”, as found at the beginning of Matthew 11 (KJV):
1 And it came to pass, when Jesus had made an end of commanding his twelve disciples, he departed thence to teach and to preach in their cities.
2 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples,
3 And said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?
4 Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:
5 The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.
De Vere, as rumor has it, was in fact physically lame in a leg from a fight involving the family of Anne Vavasour, but if I take De Vere’s lameness metaphorically, I might say that in the sins committed on the road to perdition in pursuit of the crown, he, like Claudio, must learn to walk again the narrow way, as described in Matthew 7:13-14, “which leadeth unto life”. And so De Vere, seeking solace in his Cardanvs Comforte, disappears behind Shakespeare, symbolized by Fortinbras in the play, “strong in arm” or “in arms, For t (4T)”, i.e. Oxford, and he tasks Horatio, a possible stand-in for Ben Jonson, with shepherding his story.
Just before encountering Cardenio, Sancho discovers his bag of gold and rotting donkey, a scene used in Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Quixote (2018). A book within a movie within a student film within a movie within a play within a movie within a dream within a movie within a hallucination within a movie, Gilliam’s film perfectly captures De Vere’s mad project, in which Adam Driver is a film director named Toby, a modern-day playwrite, who is mistaken as Sancho by an old actor, Javier, a shoemaker who once played Don Quixote in his student film. Toby tries to convince Javier that he’s not Don Quixote, that he wrote his part years ago. But after knocking Toby down with his lance and exclaiming God authored him, Javier proceeds to teach us the elementary facts by pulling out a copy of Don Quixote from his boot. Not in Spanish or even Arabic but in English, and not by Cervantes but by the Moor Cide Hamete Benengeli (the Seymour Shakespeare Oxford/Tudor Son of England):
Toby: Can I read?
Javier: (Laughs) A peasant like you should fane interest in a book he cannot read…
Toby: But I can read.
Javier: This is English, Sancho. Eeeengliish! (Wagging his finger) It’s a very difficult language. (With dignity) A Protestant language. But come, come come, sit with me, huh? We will read it together…. Now, I will sound the words, and yooou can look at the pictures.
Paying attention to every set and costume detail and every word uttered, we know this is more than a knightly romance, that there is more than the projected light that hits our eyeball; the movie is replete with humanist references criticizing the recent wars in the Middle East, lampooning the upper classes or monied, making fun of religious parochialism, challenging sexism, and championing the lives of the down trodden. And it challenges us to make a story of our lives, as if written by God, if not a bit floridly. In the end, Toby accidentally knocks Javier off a balcony and the spirit of Don Quixote passes into him. Regardless of what we have heard or what we imagine of Cervantes or Shakespeare, or the abuses or good committed in his name over the centuries, the Will of De Vere’s project has passed into the world. We are all Quixote. We are all spear shakers. We are all free to pursue our own errant quests and yet hopefully not miss-take each other too much along the way.
Watch Alexander Waugh’s elucidation of the geometry behind the Sonnet’s title page revealing the De Vere star, also found on the 1612 title page of Don Quixote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k460mQamZnE
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