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 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 1 was supposedly first printed in multiple Spanish cities in 1605, but with different frontispieces. I will refer to the Madrid title page only. 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 Don Quixote Book 1, 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 Rosicrucian reference. 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 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” 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 is Michael, Saint Michael, the knight-like archangel. 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”. 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 X, 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 the 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. With the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, James I and Phillip III signed the Treaty of London at Somerset House August 1604, 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).
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 II, 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 (which is six letters long like ‘Hamete’, explaining the misspelling)”. 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 (see “Q” in 1620 illustration above). It is probable 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. 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 (another rumor that involves Thomas Seymour and a 14-year-old Elizabeth) but that the throne was given to James I, while 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 over a helmet (one 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 by his enemies (a libelous story for another time). 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 must have tagged on “del Toboso” later. 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).
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 Phillip 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.
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 Phillip II of Spain and probably continued as he kept Phillip 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).
Don Quixote might have had an easier 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 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)). Perhaps the book, 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.
That doesn’t mean, however, Don Quixote wasn’t a perfect chance to spread Reformation ideas through seemingly innocuous old stage entertainment, 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).
Giorgio also shows that the line taken from Matthew 7:13-14 around the margin of the emblem, “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, sounds the same as “es Sancho el (Sancho is he)”. The old man, in turn, is wearing a cap not unlike Don Quixote’s makeshift helmet, a barber’s basin, but what’s more he is pointing to a laurel in the sky above him, signifying he’s a man of letters, a poet like De Vere.
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 government assigned official authorship. Or did he just exist on paper? Perhaps the others named on the Madrid 1605 title page, the bookseller Francisco de Robles (17 letters long) and the printers Juan de la Cuesta (John of the Coast, though it sounds like “John of the Quest”) and his wife María de Quiñones (very like “Quixote” and is a name of the father of Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3rd Duke of Alba), were pseudonyms for the real publishers back in England. The fact is that during the Reformation, an international group of men among the aristocracy and merchant class were interested in new learning and formed 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 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 (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, to procure Oxford a male heir (and/or perhaps in memory of Essex, who was beheaded). De Vere, like Quixote, was without a male successor, though he supposedly had an illegitimate one, Edward, by lady in waiting Anne Vavasour. The gossip behind this whole Soap Opera are opaque and have 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 who wanted a more democratic government at home, and hence the need for secret coding. Three 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.
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.
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. 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’” (II, XLI, p. 2703-4). This seems to be a reference to the Italian War of 1521-1526, 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 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. 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, 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 XXII, in which a young man guiding Quixote claimed 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 XVI, 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 him as King James I master pen.
As I come to the end, 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. The only true education is developing a questioning, curious mind. 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 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.
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 Cardanas Comforte, published by commandment of De Vere in 1573 and said to be the book Hamlet carries. In Book I, Quixote and Sancho encounter a mad love-sickened man called Cardenio just after Sancho discovers a bag of gold, 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, 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 Cide Hamete Benegeli (Shakespeare Oxford 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 references criticizing the recent wars in the Middle East, lampooning the upper classes, making fun of religious parochialism, 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, as the Will of De Vere’s project has passed into the world. We are all Quixote. We are all spear shakers. We are all on an errant quest.
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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