Suck a Donkey: the libel of Don Quixote (OR Where is the rhubarb?)
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.
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. Printed the same year Shakespeare makes his debut with Venus and Adonis, the title page of R. Doleman’s A Conference about the Next Succession, or “A CONFERENCE / ABOVT THE / NEXT SVCCESSION / TO THE CROWNE OF ING- / L A N D , D I V I D E D I N T O / T VV O P A R T E S.” has 1740s, twice 11s and wording/typesetting similar to the 1612 Don Quixote dedication title: “…TO THE RIGHT HO-“. If the last “H” is taken as Greek for the Latin “E”, this could be read “EO”, Edward Oxford. What is more, the “st” of “conquest” is centered on the page directly over the word “more”, spelling “St. More”, a variation of the Seymour name, and “England” is spelled “Ingland (in gland?)”, giving weight to another rumor that De Vere committed incest with his mother, Elizabeth I. As such, the bird on Jonson’s hilt in the 1620 Quixote illustration 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, printed for a Thomas Thorppe (67 —> 76). There is a copy Ben Jonson inscribed to John Florio, hypothesized Shakespeare candidate and possible De Vere alias and/or collaborator, whom Jonson calls “his Father” and “ayde of his Muses”. 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 (to which De Vere as Lord Chamberlain held the keys) and the throne at Whitehall, the English government.
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”.
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). But perhaps Don Quixote is clever enough to have evaded the Inquisition by cloaking English culture in Spanish. For example, in 1652 Book I, Part 4 Chapter 13, when the captive talks of getting a “Runnagate of Murcia” to translate a letter, Cervantes may be actually referencing the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and perhaps employing the language of Archbishop of York Ecgberht (732-766) and his Excerptiones, canon law instituted by him for the Northumbrian church: “Whatever brother, contrary to the prohibition of the venerable canons, receives a runagate clerk or monk, without pacific letters … let him pay what is appointed, viz., thirty sicles” (Trans. John Johnson, A Collection of the Laws and Canons of the Church of England, 1850, vol. 1, p. 165, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hw3dtw&seq=5). De Vere, a polyglot and trained lawyer, would have been familiar with Ecgberht’s original text, or whatever ecclesiastical text he may have been quoting. Some of these may have been Reformation canons, among which could have been injunctions, articles and orders issued during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, such as the Book of Advertisements. One post Reformation text includes the Canons of 1604, compiled by Bishop Richard Bancroft, probably for the reign of King James.
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 another mancha or “stain”) with De Vere and Penelope Rich, sister to the rebellion leader and A Conference about the Next Succession dedicatee 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 scientist Francis Bacon, betrayed by James I favorite, the aforementioned Buckingham. Buckingham also brought down the Don Quixote dedicatee, Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk.
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.
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 3 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. And the word “rumour” appears twice in Ormsby, while in the 1652 Quixote, “rumour” appears at least four times, and “rumor”, twice.
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 official 11 Brethren symbolism as the same imprint can be found on a 1613 publication of John Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. 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.
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.
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. Hence, the dark, hollowed-eyed appearance of Don Quixote in the 1620 illustration. 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. And there are many references to the sea throughout Quixote, such as the Shakespearean “tempest” (five times, Ormsby) and “Neptune” (four times, Ormsby). Like the Johns, these Tom pseudonyms join the long line of other Thomases, the greatest among whom is Doubting Thomas, and if you, the reader of this, are still wanting greater wounds to probe, “doubt” appears 200-plus times (Ormsby). And 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, and Seneca is mentioned in Hamlet.
A Thomas Newton was responsible for the editing of the Seneca plays printed by Thomas Marsh. Five years later in 1586, Newton adds a prefatory poem to a herbal translated by a Henrie Lyte (also Lite) and printed by a Ninian Newton, with a title too long to mention here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lyte_(botanist); https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/30660#page/50/mode/1up). The herbal, however, appears to be a source for John Gerard’s as it has exactly the same structure. In his message to reader, Lyte’s language and its typesetting is very Quixote-esque from the very first line: “If thy be ignorant ( gentle Reader ) and desi- / rous to knowe, either how profitable this Hi- / storie of Plants is,or how woorthie to be stu- / died… [Quixote-like words bolded].” There is also a “more” and “Seeing” farther down the page. Thomas Newton’s poem, likewise, has one possible Seymour anagram with “The worke” printed over “For feare”, with “fear” appearing perhaps 180 times in Ormsby’s Don Quixote. Stronger evidence of Cervantes’, i.e. De Vere’s, presence is in Thomas Newton’s use of the phrase “Argus eyes”, which are mentioned in Book II, Chapter 65, p. 2821: “all our schemes and plots, importunities and wiles, being ineffectual to blind his Argus eyes”. A character that appears in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Argus is a many-eyed giant tasked by the jealous Hera to guard Io, to prevent her from meeting Zeus. Zeus in turn sends Mercury to slay the giant, and Mercury, in the very fashion of Don Quixote who believes the wine bags at the inn to be giants, cuts off Argus’ head. “Head” in some form appears quite often in Quixote, as well (perhaps 370+ times in Ormsby), including this from the 1652 Book II, Chapter 1: “Cap a pie [head to foot]” printed over “to behead-sleep”. More similarities to Don Quixote can be found in Lyte’s additional message “To the friendly and indifferent Reader”, which ends with a very democratic commonweal-type message that adheres to the theory that De Vere was for the empowerment of his fellow man: “for I seeke / not after vaine glorie, but rather how to / benefite and profite my Coun- / trie. Fare well.” This triangulation of text ends with the same three stars within parenthesis that appear on the 1612 Don Quixote. And below that is a horned man flanked by two birds, perhaps the Seymour phoenixes or perhaps peacocks, upon whose tail feathers Hera placed Argus’ eyes. A similar horned head, this time like the goatish Seneca frontispiece figure, is flanked by similar birds on the 1652 Book II header illustration (below). The Argus symbolism is also captured in paintings of Elizabeth, such as the “rainbow portrait” (circa 1600), in which she appears to have peacock feathers in her horn-like headdress and is draped in a cloth impressed with eyes, ears, and folds in the shapes of mouths, like Quixote’s wine-bag giants, and the rainbow on which she has her hand appears to be a scimitar disappearing into her privates. Perhaps the painting should be retitled the “Gyant portrait” or the “See more portrait” (see below). There is also the 1620 “Argus and Mercury” by Jacob Jordaens, in which Elizabeth is probably the white cow behind a drowsy bearded Argus, i.e. Seymour, whom a young fleshy Mercury, De Vere, is about to behead (see below). Jordaens was a Flemish painter that had converted to Protestantism, and his painting shows that the English royal scandal became a wider myth for a socio-political movement, perhaps through the Rosicrucians and/or trade guilds and later Masonic groups.
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 a similar phrase appears in the 1652 Book I, Part 4 Chapter 20: “And therefore they deserve ( as most idle / and frivolous things) to bee banished out of all Christian Common-wealths.” Perhaps this letter 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.
At the end of Chapter 9 (1652 Book I, Part 4), there is description of the character Luscinda, one of the stand-ins for Elizabeth I, and like Elizabeth, Luscinda escapes from Don Fernando, a stand-in for Thomas Seymour, and Cardenio, a stand-in for De Vere, to a religious house, variously described as a “Monastery”, “Abby” and “Cloyster” with a “Nunne”. They seem to describe the places Elizabeth may have convalesced during her pregnancies. The most likely for De Vere’s birth is Ashridge Priory, which is where Elizabeth was staying and which fits Don Quixote’s description: “the / Monastery was seated abroad in the Fields, a good way from any Village”. A possibility for Robert Devereaux, if her son by Robert Dudley, and Henry Wriothesley is Reading Abbey, or possibly Audley Inn, now Audley End but was once known as Walden Abbey and belonged to Don Quixote’s dedicatee. However, Elizabeth is noted to have visited Audley only in 1571 and 1578, while Reading Abbey, destroyed during the English Civil War, was one of her favorite places and might have once contained a portrait of her possibly sponsored by Robert Dudley c. 1575, just after Wriothesley’s birth, in which she is situated in front of a chair back carved with roses, two open, and a Welsh dragon, while in her hand she holds another two roses, perhaps symbolizing her current possible heirs, Devereux and Wriothesley. The painting now hangs in the museum of Reading, located inside a nexus of Oxford (De Vere), Southampton (Wriothesley) and London (Elizabeth I). But none of these former monasteries belonged to nuns, as Don Quixote notes, and Hamlet tells Ophelia, who along with Gertrude is possibly a stand-in for Elizabeth, “Get thee to a nunnery”. In 1652 Book I, Part 4 Chapter 13, the captive, a possible De Vere stand-in, tells the story of how he was kept in a Turkish prison called “Bathes”, which may be a reference to Bath, England, where there once was a monastery originally founded as a convent. Elizabeth made a significant visit to Bath in August 1574, months after Wriothesley’s birth, and in Chapter 13, the captive exchanges letters with a hidden Moorish lady who wants to make him her husband. Another former nunnery that Elizabeth frequented was Charterhouse, Smithfield London, again like Audley owned by Thomas Lord Howard de Walden, where she stayed just before she was crowned and again January 17, 1603, just before she died. And still another is the aforementioned Syon House, possibly important to the 11 Brethren.
One nagging question is whether the incest was itself a Hermetic ritual, or was Hermeticism a way to rationalize the trauma of the event. It is possible that someone like John Dee, who is known to have engaged in unorthodox sexual activity by switching wives with a colleague, could have advised Elizabeth to seduce her own son, to secure an heir with the greatest blood right to the throne. Incest was practiced in many monarchical dynasties, such as Ancient Egypt, from which Hermeticism draws much of its inspiration. The Greek gods were also very incestuous, Zeus himself married to his own sister, Hera. If De Vere is the T King coded in the early mention of Cervantes, it is possible he already knew his true identity, and there is a painting supposedly of a Swedish lady-in-waiting done in the same year (1569) that looks like a young man, of Cervantes’ age, done up like Elizabeth in face paint and a template dress of Tudor roses (see below). However, many of the Hermetic references seem to come post-Wriothesley’s birth, such as references to St. Johns, including the Gospel of John, with which the Corpus Hermeticum shares similarities. And De Vere, Seymour and 11 friend references consistently appear on many different publications attributed to various authors. One is a treatise on the first flush toilet, “a jacks”, supposedly by John Harington, a godson of the queen and whose father served Thomas Seymour: “A NE VV DIS- / COVRSE OF A STALE / SVBJECT, CALLED THE / Metamorphosis of A I A X :” (1596, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019805988&seq=5). While it is supposed to be a coded attack on the monarchy, I suspect the “discourse” is another Don Quixote-like “stale” history, as “A I A X”, decodable as “VII (AIAX —> IIIX —> VII)”, was the son of Telamon (“the bearer”, a column in the figure of a man) who, like Seymour with Elizabeth, raped Periboea, which means “surrounded by cattle”, as on the Boleyn coat of arms. The author is listed as “MISACMOS”, with an “M (40)” followed by seven letters, i.e. Oxford, Edward VII. “MISACMOS” could also be an anagram for “SCIMOAS M (Seymour’s Oxford)” or “MIASMOS C (miasmos)”, the latter which is biblical Greek for “defilement”, i.e. stain, with the leftover “C (3)” elided or possibly standing for the trinity of God or acting as a homophone for “see”, i.e. see the stain. It may be Elizabeth, already traumatized by rape and then Seymour’s execution, may have been aware but not in her right mind, while De Vere’s reaction in his Shakespeare writings and in Don Quixote is indicative of ignorance, a word appearing 16 times in Cervantes’ novel (Ormsby) while “ignorant” appears 29.
Even “SIR P. S. HIS / ASTROPHEL AND / STELLA” by De Vere’s rival Philip Sidney may be another version of the stale story of rape/incest. Sidney’s name is not even spelled out and appears as part of the title, like Willobie His Avisa and Seneca His Tenne Trajedies. Perhaps this is because Sidney was already dead five years when the work was printed in 1591 by a Thomas Newman, with contributions by De Vere himself as well a musician Thomas Campion and others. The title page smacks of quirks, though, and seems to have an underlying message, with “astro (celestial [Greek])” and “phel (orb, world [Welsh])” suggesting a Tudor planet circling a star or sun, “stella”. It is both a personal statement of De Vere’s life story as well as his philosophy, as the heliocentric model was a newly discovered scientific fact upon which neo-Platontic Hermeticism based its ideology. The texts throughout are amazingly full of the same Quixote-esque language: “see” (80 times, including “seek” and “seem”), “more” (48), “eye” (80), “most” (47), “fear” (13), “desire” (15), “inward” (7), “impart” (5), “imbrace” (3), “intendeth” (2), “imploy” (2), “impute” (1), “mark” (6), “stain” (3), “marde” (2), “fame” (13) and “shame” (10). The fifth sonnet, verse 12 particularly contains Quxiote’s key words in the line: “I now then staine thy white with blackest blot of shame” (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56375/pg56375-images.html). There is also a mention of Diane in this verse and in three other places, along with the use of “hart” (80), usually for “heart” (which also appears 26 times). And the main “moorish” references are “his Turkish hardened hart / were no fit marke” and “Sylent and sad in moorning weeds doth dight” (bold mine). I could make an infinite nitpicking examination, but I think my point is made that if their is not a common author, there is certainly a common vocabulary. “Eyes” particularly feature large, here, of which the orbs “astrophel” and “stella” are metaphors. That language, again, extends to paintings, and here, I will defer to the “Armada” portrait (circa 1588), in which Elizabeth wears a dress imprinted with suns and rests her right hand on a globe of the Earth that sits below a crown, perhaps De Vere, i.e. Shakespeare, if the Globe Theatre guy.
This would be a good spot to revisit John Florio, the Italian tutor of Henry Wriothesley and friend of Ben Jonson who made an Italian-English dictionary and, as noted above, translated Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, of which the third book contains the same title-page header of the winged De Vere as John Minsheu’s multi-language dictionary. John Florio was also closely connected to William Herbert, one of the dedicatees of Shakespeare’s plays, even bequeathing the Earl of Pembroke a substantial portion of his 340-volume library of Italian, French and Spanish tomes. Some even theorize that Florio was Shakespeare, but it could be that Florio was another De Vere collaborator and cover name. One indication is that the cover page of the 1603 printing of “THE / ESSAYES” contains the same three stars in parentheses as the 1612 printing of Don Quixote. The 1613 cover page, “THE / ESS A Y ES”, and third book title page, “THE / ESSA YES”, are much more idiosyncratic and so more suggestive of De Vere’s coded presence as “SEEmore” or “SAYmore”, as the “S’s” are printed upside down. Another possible message is in the spelling of “politic”: “POLITIKE”. A “tike”, a word used by Shakespeare, is a mongrel dog, and so a “poly-tyke” is a many-headed mongrel like Cerberus, the twelfth labor of Hercules. In the same vein, the dedication-page title begins exactly like the 1612 Don Quixote, “TO THE RIGHT HO-”, and the dedication is likewise imbued with “amendable errors”, signified by the illustrated “S” being printed upside down. The most telling phrase is “I in this / serve but as Vulcan, to hatchet this Minerva”. “I in this” printed over “I yet”, suggests “incest”, while “Vulcan, to hatchet this Minerva” printed over “a fondling foster-father” directly relates the rape of Elizabeth by her foster-father Thomas Seymour, as Vulcan raped Minerva (Athena). It may be that De Vere had translated portions of Essays when writing his plays, such as the The Tempest, as well as Don Quixote. Like Quixote’s musings on the Garden of Eden with its Commonwealth of bees (1652 Book I, Part 2, Chap. 3), Montaigne writes of the ideal country, “It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superior type; no use of service, or riches or povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would hee finde his imaginarie commonwealth from this perfection?” (1603, p. 258). In turn, Shakespeare writes in The Tempest: “GONZALO: I’th’commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things. For no kind of traffic / Would I admit, no name of magistrate. / Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty, / And use of service, none. Contract, succession, / Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none. / No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil. / No occupation: all men idle, all / …. / … Treason, felony, / Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine / Would I not have” (Act II, Scene 1; https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/). The word “tempest” appears five times in Don Quixote (Ormsby), and the number 11, pairs of “A’s”, appears on the top and bottom of the Essays dedication page. It is highly possible that Michel de Montaigne is an inspiration for the name Miguel de Cervantes.
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; Marlowe was sponsored by Robert Greene, who may have been De Vere, as well; and De Vere’s personal secretary, John Lyly, supposedly wrote many plays for the Children of Paul’s. What is more, the people who would be primarily 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 buy and abuse 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 Hamlet: “Use every / man after his desert and who shall ’scape / whipping? Use them after your own honor and / dignity” (Act II, Scene 2). This echos in an episode of 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.
“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 Claudius can be taken as a trinity, three persons in one. King Hamlet could be the ghost of Thomas Seymour, who seems to haunt De Vere’s life story, but also likely represents John de Vere and the death of De Vere’s good name. Hamlet the son, just as De Vere is named after John, shares the King’s name. And in the guise of Claudius, De Vere becomes brother to his father, Seymour, and 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 kingdom which Quixote promises Sancho. 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 “Claudius” 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 Claudius, 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. The “4T” is more obvious in the 1603 First Quarto, with Fortinbras sometimes spelled “Forten Brasse”. Some deem this version deficient (https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=3SNAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP11&hl=ja&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=true), but the funky typesetting and spelling reminds me of the 1652 Don Quixote. The word choices, “see”, “more”, “eyes”, “fear”, “honor”, “desire (de Vere sire?)”, “air (heir?)”, and even “choler (Get out your rhubarb)” are also consistently common. And there are typos pointing to important reveals, such as the following Seymour reveal: “Hor. The king is mooved my lord. // Hor. I Horatio, I’le take the Ghosts word / For more than all the coyne in Denmarke.” The second line should be by Hamlet, not Horatio, and it is in the First Folio, changed to “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for / a thousand pound” (Act III, Scene 2). The Folio destroys the wordplay — “a mark (monetary denomination)”, “the mark (the stain)” and “Mark! (see more)” — and so the reveal: One of the accusations that led to Thomas Seymour’s beheading was for fiddling with the kingdom’s coinage, perhaps a metaphor for the minting of royal heirs, i.e. De Vere.
The Folio preserves some of the First Quarto’s playfulness, such as a riddle-like exchange between Hamlet and Polonius/ Corambis comparing a cloud successively to a camel, a weasel and a whale. The whole exchange is exhorting us to see more than what is there: e.g. “a Moor on a camel”, “a weasel on the moor” and “a whale in the dark sea”. However, a simple comparison of the First Quarto and Folio bedroom scene shows an evolution between the two. The Quarto, perhaps like the apocryphal Quixote by a libeling enemy of De Vere, is blunt in laying out the rape and incest. Claudius, i.e. De Vere as his father Thomas Seymour, is compared to the bearded fire god Vulcan with “A looke fit for a murder and a rape”, which is possibly referencing Andrea Mantegna’s “Parnassus”, a painting De Vere probably saw in Mantua, Italy (think Romeo and Juliet). Hamlet then demands of his mother, “What Divell thus hath cosoned you at hob-man blinde? …. To live in the incestuous pleasure of his bed?” Claudius is now De Vere as the incestuous son. While the Folio is more subtle, its condemnation of Gertrude, i.e. Elizabeth, intensifies, with Claudius demonized less, the Vulcan comparison and rape mention removed. Instead, Hamlet lionizes himself, i.e. De Vere, in the noble visage of King Hamlet, whom he compares to a litany of gods culminating in the De Vere signature god Mercury, again in “Parnassus”. Then Hamlet demands of his mother, “Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed / And batten on this moor? Ha! Have you eyes? …. What devil was ’t / That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind?” Here, the language is more coded, with the use of the Quixote-esque “moor” combined with “eyes” to stand for the combined sins of Thomas Seymour and his son De Vere, the “Divell/devil”, while Gertrude exhibits as great a remorse as Claudius praying for forgiveness: “O Hamlet, speak no more! / Thou turn’st my eyes into my <very> soul, / And there I see such black and <grained> spots / As will <not> leave their tinct” (Act III, Scene 4). The stain, the mark, la mancha, sits upon Elizabeth’s soul, as well as De Vere’s. After his mother’s death in 1603, and probably after the burial of his De Vere name in a church dedicated to St. John in 1604, De Vere continued to live at his Hackney residence Brooke House (re)writing and (re)editing and (re)publishing, including Don Quixote, perhaps until the 1616 deaths of his pseudonyms Shakespeare and Cervantes. Though the plays of the Sweet Swan of Avon (the river), many first performed at court and in the theaters on the banks of the Thames, a word also meaning “dark”, i.e. moorish, wouldn’t be collected until 1623.
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.
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