The Dark Side of Shakespeare: an Elizabethan Courtier, Diplomat, Spymaster, & Epic Hero: Volume Ii of Iii

The Dark Side of Shakespeare

An Elizabethan Courtier, Diplomat, Spymaster, & Epic Hero

Volume II of III

Appendix F features excerpts from Anthony Munday’s 1588 translation of Palladine of England (= of the Spear-shaker)

W. Ron Hess

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The Dark Side of Shakespeare

An Elizabethan Courtier, Diplomat, Spymaster, & Epic Hero

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by W. Ron Hess

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Contents

Foreword To Volume II Of III

Preface To Volume II:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Chapter 10:

Chapter 11:

Chapter 12:

Appendix B:

Appendix C:

Appendix D:

Appendix E:

Appendix F:

Bibliography

About The Author

As with Volume I, this book is dedicated to the memories of Morse Johnson (the editor who encouraged me to write Shakespeare-related articles for publication), Tal Wilson (my mentor in uncovering Shakespeare’s travels in France and Italy), Prof. Howard Bloch (my co-author, along with Dr. Winston Chow, in our 1999 article tackling the difficult problems of dating Shakespeare’s plays; who urged me to write this trilogy), and Vincent J. Mooney Jr. (the Baconian polymath who shared with me the dream of setting-up a Shakespeare research group in the Washington, D.C. area). If this book is a success, it will owe much to their vision.

I add a man who I regretfully never met, but whose book makes me feel I know him well. The late Edward Holmes’ 2001 Discovering Shakespeare is much cited from here, especially in Appendix B’s dating of Shakespeare’s works. After corresponding with his widow Jean, I’ve been much impressed by the Holmes’ family of excellent scholars. My esteem for Holmes’ contribution is as great as my appreciation for Adm. H.H. Holland and the younger Charlton Ogburn, which says a great deal indeed!

Those who were impacted the most, provided me support, encouragement, small but necessary favors, and abided my humors throughout my efforts, were my wife Dorothy and my daughters Wendy and Laura. My thanks also to my good friend Beorn S. Hall, especially for providing me with a remote place to retreat to for my labors; I am hoping that he will someday publish his own works.

But most of all, this is dedicated to my grandson, John Michael Woodchuck Adams, who as I write is just two and a half years old and now can actually say Shakespeare, but not yet understand him (though he can count to 30 and say his ABCs). John represents the coming next several generations around the world, who may be able to view the Shakespeare authorship question with unbiased eyes. Perhaps one of the first converts to the Dark Side of Shakespeare was a young man named Jaren P. Doherty Jr., whose father is a good friend of mine. It is my hope this book will give those new generations something to think about, not just to force themselves to endure sitting through Professors’ jawing on about the great advantages accrued to an insufficient man in an insufficient environment 400 years ago.

W.R.H., August 2003, BeornsHall@earthlink.net

My desire is that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book.

—The Bible

__________

Phooey! Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book.

—A&E Cable Telev. Detective Nero Wolfe (The Mother Hunt episode) when asked if he would publish his sleuthing memoirs

__________

Haste in every business brings failures.

—Herodotus

__________

To every complex question there is a simple answer, and it is [nearly] always wrong.

—H.L. Menken

__________

Reality is what I see, not what you see.

—Anthony Burgess

__________

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

—Albert Einstein

__________

All the business of war, and indeed, all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don’t know by [extrapolating from] what you do [know].

—The Duke of Wellington

__________

Nothing’s so hard but search will find it out.

—Robert Herrick

FOREWORD TO VOLUME II OF III

BY PROF. GORDON C. CYR FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SHAKESPEARE OXFORD SOCIETY

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,/The gods themselves throw incense.

—King Lear IV.iii.22-23

The Universe is so vast and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice.—The Bible

It is a pleasure (and an honor) to be asked to write this Foreword to Volumes II and III of Ron Hess’ monumental summa of Oxfordian research, The Dark Side of Shakespeare. In his trilogy, Mr. Hess has brought together a bewildering array of sources from both Oxfordian and orthodox Shakespearean scholars, but also from a wide-ranging list of historians’ treatises on British, European, and Asian politics, even of centuries preceding the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods—the principal focus of his studies. Hess’ impressive, extensive published bibliography represents but a fraction of the materials he uses to buttress his case.

The dark side of the title refers to what Hess finds to be Oxford-Shakespeare’s somewhat schizoid persona: outwardly foppish, Italianate in artistic tastes, manners and dress, but also a gallant jouster, graceful dancer, musician, gifted poet, and playwright, and beloved patron of poets, actors, and writers of learned treatises and entertainments alike.

Hess shows, however, that behind the scenes Oxford’s activities as spy, intriguer, betrayer, smuggler, and gun-runner (possibly even assassin), can be documented. Gabriel Harvey alludes to some of these in his 1580 Mirror of Tuscanism (as examined by Hess in his Section C.3):

.. .For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour, A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England. Not the like discourser for Tongue, and head to be found out, Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States, Eyed like to Argus…fittest of a thousand for to be employ’d; This, nay more than this, doth practise of Italy in one year.,

and in his Chapters 8 and 9 Hess delves into the mirky waters of how Oxford applied these Machiavellian activities both at home and abroad, arguing that Oxford seemed most pernicious when he was really ferreting-out and overthrowing conspiracies as intricate as Cataline’s.

In truth, as sort of a Scarlet Pimpernel, but more sinister than the fictional character, perhaps owing to the similar attributes of his enemies: those who would destroy England, from either without or within and make her subservient to the Pope (or to Catholic Kings), or on the other hand, those extreme Puritans who were equally anti-Catholic and anti-Church of England.

According to Hess, a key figure in Oxford’s international struggles was Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate half-brother of Spain’s King Philip II. Alternately the Earl’s nemesis and/or role model, Don Juan appears (in modified form) as various characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Inasmuch as Don Juan died in 1578 (poisoned, Hess believes by the Earl of Oxford, or by Oxford’s henchmen), if even half of Hess’ Shakespearean references to Don Juan are correct (suggesting much earlier origination dates than orthodoxy allows), then Stratford Will’s candidacy is knocked out of the ball park on those grounds alone.

Hess knocks Mr. Shakspere out on other grounds as well—very ably in the first two chapters, while disposing of six other candidates. In Chapter 2, Figure 2.A, a valuable two-page long chart lists the number of points in which Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Dyer, Bacon, Marlowe, and Mr. Shakspere fit the authorial profile for Shakespeare’s works, with Oxford scoring 97% of the available points at one end and Mr. Shakspere of Stratford only 19% at the other. The closest to Oxford was his son-in-law, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, at 83%. Georges Lambin’s arguments for Stanley appear in Hess’ Appendix A, part of Volume I, and therein Hess has interspersed notes and analysis showing that in many ways Lambin’s arguments fit Oxford as well, or better, than they did Derby (actually strengthening the Oxfordian cause).

Let us admit from the start that most of Ron Hess’ work here is conjecture and speculation built upon a foundation of facts available from the widely dispersed records. The question is, are his conjectures reasonable? In my opinion many of them are. His early origination chronology squares with the findings of Oxfordians such as Eva Turner Clark and the British Admiral-astronomer, H.H. Holland, both of whom Hess cites frequently in his Appendix B, Volume II.

He is also right, I believe, in finding that Oxford’s L1000 annual grant from the Crown cannot have been for literary or theatrical activities, pace B.M. Ward. Hess’ battlefield for Oxford is far wider than the London theaters. Hess also shows that the L1000 was the Earl’s cut from the L5000 promised James VI of Scotland by the Treaty of Berwick in 1586, recognizing James’ rights of succession in return for his promise not to move against Queen Elizabeth during her war with Spain. She, on her part, was too parsimonious to grant James the whole amount, and he agreed to take the L4000. These facts support Hess’ hypothesis of Oxford’s role as King-maker in English and European politics (not just from his own power, but as a mover within a plausible alliance)!

We need not concern ourselves with how Stratfordians will receive this book. The world is slowly-but-surely coming to the realization that orthodox so-called scholarship is bankrupt—anchored only in airy nothings. Hess’ Appendix T (Vol. III) overturns their sacred temples!

Not all Oxfordians will agree with many of Hess’ speculations, particularly on the Sonnets and/or the role of the 3rd Earl of Southampton. Not to worry! These can be taken with several grains of salt, while accepting the central core of the author’s argument: that the Earl of Oxford was an internationalist in his politics, playing on a field that crossed continental boundaries, dancing with Don Juan, consorting with foreign monarchs, queens, and mistresses.

So, Oxfordians should get ready for a paradigm shift equal to that of J. Thomas Looney’s in 1920, if Hess is right. If he is not, enjoy a rollicking good read! For such, Ron Hess is a well-informed and widely-read guide.

G.C.C. 10/2002

PREFACE TO VOLUME II:

CAN ELIZABETHAN HISTORY BE COMPARED TO EMPIRICAL ARCHAEOLOGY?

Archaeology is the science of digging a square hole and the art of spinning a yarn from it.

—Anson Rainey (Near East Archaeology, Sept. 2001)

Those who do not stop asking silly questions become scientists

—Physicist Leon Lederman (Discover, Feb. 2003)

Imagine if Elizabethan History was as empirical as Archaeology is. The archaeologist discovers a widget in layer x of site y and can compare it’s stratigraphy to similar widgets found elsewhere throughout the region to fix date z onto this widget, or perhaps use the widget and other widgets to fix a date on the whole layer. And Archaeology draws on a whole host of other empirical disciplines to help validate its assertions. So, why is it that Archaeology is in such ferment over so many debates? There are disputes about claims that: a) the Troy VI citadel destroyed circa 1260 B.C.E. had a much larger suburb associated with it; b) the city of David at Jerusalem didn’t really exist during the supposed period of the reigns of David and Solomon; c) instead of at Qumran, the Dead Sea scrolls were written in Jerusalem or Ein Gedi; d) Masada wasn’t really a place of mass Jewish suicide as described by Josephus Flavius; e) the Anasazi and Aztec practiced cannibalism; f) there are native American finds which pre-date Clovis of 9,000 B.C.E.; g) pre-Columbian explorers of America included the Norse, Irish, Egyptian, or Chinese; and many other assertions for which for many the orthodox replies aren’t quite satisfactory. So, empirical doesn’t necessarily mean unchallengeable, does it?

One more excellent example of a dispute within Archaeology, which also draws in Geology, Epigraphy, Philology, Biblical scholarship, and modern Politics, is the King Jehoash Inscription (pgs. 22, 23, & 69 of the March-April 2003 Biblical Archaeology Review). Many epigraphists and philologists are convinced the plaque with the inscription is a forgery, based largely on some howlers in mixing together Moabite, Phoenician, and Hebrew script in what is supposed to be a 7th cent. B.C.E. Jewish artifact. Yet, geologists have pronounced it genuine after focusing on the oxidative patina which always accretes on the surface, and inside cracks and carvings, on all archeological objects. They especially focus on microscopic carbon particles and gold globules that appear to have been burned into the patina (as if the plaque had hung in the wooden Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple, said to have been sheathed all over in gold, and then was severely scorched in the 586 B.C.E. Babylonian burning). Biblical scholars have long theorized that archaic language used in a list of repairs to the House of Yahweh in 2 Kings 12:12-13 derived from a written predecessor, so this plaque may solve that mystery. The real question is whether forgers have found a way to dupe geologist’s previously solid processes of examining and analyzing patina, or whether the smug certainty and ridicule of epigraphers and philologists may need to be updated about an era for which there are very few epigraphal or philogical examples, when it’s possible multiple scripts really were coexisting. Is it possible that, as with Piltdown Man, some forger has found a way to mimic patina through chemical treatment of evidence? Inevitably, this debate gets touched by the dispute between Jewish and Palestinian claims of authority over the Temple Mount, since the plaque may be among few physical proofs that Solomon’s Temple really existed, otherwise supported only by Biblical text. Two amateurs, a Jew and a Palestinian, discovered the plaque in a heap of fill from illegal recent excavations by the Palestinian Authority, done to support tourism interests inside the sacred precinct. The plaque’s suspect unprovenanced manner of discovery only increases vagary about its origins and meaning.

The reasons for each of these disputes (plus disputes in the related empirical fields of Anthropology and Paleo-anthropology), [1] are that each piece of evidence must be evaluated, put into a context, then interpreted, and finally conclusions are derived about a wide range of evidence based on patterns and themes uncovered. So, not only is the devil in the details, but he’s also in the minds doing the analysis and interpretation from those details and from the patterns they form. As editor Hershel Shanks said in ending the above article (69):

…It is certainly true that unprovenanced finds [those not supervised & documented by noted professionals] always come to us with the suspicion of forgery. We are properly skeptical. Sometimes, however, our investigation leads us to conclude that the find is almost certainly authentic. In other cases, we are convinced that a find is almost certainly a forgery. And sometimes the conclusion is uncertain, as it seems to be in this case—at least for the moment. . Uncertainty is by no means an unusual characteristic in the study of ancient history or in archaeology. Dates are sometimes uncertain because of varying understandings of stratigraphy or the dates of parallels. Interpretations of the evidence also often widely differ, as do reconstructions of inscriptions, buildings and other artifacts. And in some cases the issue of authenticity of unprovenanced objects will add another element of uncertainty…. What the profession should do is hone its skills in detecting forgeries.. The profession should be at least as smart as the forgers—and certainly better organized. [2]

The same is true in Shakespearean scholarship, as Vol. I has abundantly demonstrated. Orthodox scholars adopt a set of constraints for interpretation of every piece of evidence, and unorthodox scholars (particularly Oxfordians, those who believe that the 17th Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare) adopt different constraints. As there is wide diversity among orthodox scholars, there is even wider diversity among Oxfordians. Still, which side has been more rigorous, unbiased, and correct? In this trilogy, Chaps. 4 & 5 and Appens. A, B, & O all argue that the orthodox pretense of rigorousness, non-bias, and correctness has more often than not been smokescreens for obfuscation, deception, false argument, and fuzzy logic in supporting theories that a man who almost certainly was illiterate was really the great Shakespeare (Sh. hereafter). This trilogy proposes that we put a stop for good to orthodox deception, no longer allowing them to get their woefully insufficient candidate a free ride or to take the position of legitimacy. There should be no more presumptions of literacy, travels, enriching experiences, education, strategic relationships, or even a connection to the theater world without rigorous examination, analysis, and challenge to the evidence hitherto used by orthodoxy! All we need to drive the stake through Mr. Shakspere’s heart is to establish a superior paradigm, one wholly defensible, from recognizable themes of that time. I believe this trilogy has done that with the knight-errantry theme proposed for Oxford, Don Juan of Austria, and Sh.!

Oxfordians have been long overdue in presenting a comprehensive explanation for Sh.. Many of the sonnets and some of the poetry can be explained by wild theories wrapped in unprovable sexual matters (typically involving speculations about royal bastardy, incest, or bisexuality); but even if true, those only would get us part of the way to finding Sh.. What we have needed was a theory to incorporate all the pertinent evidence (or as much as possible), and to explain it all, as I trust this trilogy does. Even the apocrypha needed to be explained by such a theory, especially the brilliant epic poem Willobie His Avisa, which most serious scholars have acknowledged as likely written by Sh.. That’s what’s been done here: an explanation for everything about Sh. worthy of explanation, and a great deal about other 16th and 17th century mysteries as well. Plus, it’s in a comprehensive context of politics, alliances, trends in art and literature, noted citations from contemporaries, and a rational reconstruction of details from many key lives to throw light on things that have been mysterious across a wide range of disciplines. Even if this trilogy has missed the boat about Sh. (not likely), I hope its findings about Don Juan, Molina, Cervantes, Spenser, Munday, and Chapman, among others, will help revitalize study of those great men.

I’ve been amazed at how Elizabethan scholarship in general and Shakespearean in particular have been immune to lessons from other disciplines. While Prof. Alan Nelson has been pointing to sanctimonious orthodox denials that a living person could be satirized in Elizabethan England, he’s ignored Harvey’s 1580 Speculum Tuscanismi which clearly satirized the 17th Earl of Oxford, and the satirizing of other literati by Nashe, Greene, and others. Meanwhile, Spenserian scholars have long promoted the idea that a whole stratum of Elizabethan society, virtually everyone who was anyone, were allegorized-satirized in The Fairie Queene (see Appen. K). So, why haven’t orthodox Shakespearean scholars been able to recognize much satire or allegory of Elizabethans? Appen. B argues it was because most of the satire and allegory in Sh. were instead about 1570s and early 80s personalities, and so orthodoxy chooses to pretend that it doesn’t exist!

One lesson from Archaeology that Elizabethan scholarship should take to heart is that if a dig has been bungled by early examiners (or by looters), all finds and conclusions from it should be held suspect thenceforth. For example, in the last half of the 1800s, Heinrich Schliemann bungled his famous excavation of Troy in many respects, digging an immense trench right through the Hisarlik site and destroying all sedimentary evidence that would have helped to date and explain many mysteries. It was our misfortune that Schliemann believed Homeric Troy was in the bottom layers and thus he ignored stratigraphy in upper layers, irresponsibly digging right where any royal palace of Troy would have been located, where the best evidence might have lain. And now there are allegations that Schliemann even salted the site with gold trinkets he’d bought in Athens and Istanbul, trying to raise funds and gain fame through fabulous finds where there really were none, or at least by obscuring the realities (in fact, the place he claimed to have found the gold later turned out to have been the layer of Troy II, or about 1,000 years older than the most probable Homeric levels at Troy VI or VII). In many respects, Schliemann was more like a freebooting adventurer and grave robber than an archaeologist. It has often been said that what remains of Troy today is like the ruins of a ruin. And yet, Schliemann had the intelligence to later admit his errors and the grace to have tried to correct many of them with the help of his able assistant Wilhelm Dorpfeld. The two helped bring scientific discipline to the wild and wooly study of Archaeology. Still, even in the Troy untouched by Schliemann, controversy reigns, with many theorizing a larger Troy VI of the Homeric-Mycenean age lies buried in vast areas adjacent to Hisarlik, earlier overlooked by others. And Troy is just the most famous controversy of bungling adulteration in Archaeology.

Similar to the misfortunes at Troy, Elizabethan History, particularly Shakespearean studies, has been afflicted for centuries by droves of Schliemann-types, such as William Henry Ireland and John Payne Collier (Chambers-1930 II, 377-93, discussed 13 of the most significant forgers who did their dirty work from 1727 to 1869, during much of which time the official records likely were themselves open to adulteration). One pertinent example of Collier’s wake of destruction was the fact that when he was still a very well-respected scholar, Collier discovered in 1831 that Anthony Munday had authored (or loosely translated) the 1585 play Fedele and Fortunio, almost universally believed to have been a source for Two Gentlemen and Much Ado. After Collier’s forgeries were exposed, this (like so much else he had touched) fell into disrepute. It was only after the 1923 fortuitous discovery of a new and independent copy of the play (this one buried in the archives of the Huntington Library) that resuscitation of this particular Collier discovery could be made. And this was most egregious to our cause, for even some orthodox scholars state that a priori the play company associated with this play should be Oxford’s Men (Hosley, 15-32,93-4) and had this been established earlier it might have given us the entre to Munday’s bridging connection of Sh. to Oxford (see Appens. E, F, P, & V).

There were many more forgers, meddlers, bunglers, and nincompoops who destroyed, manufactured, or mis-classified evidence, so we often have difficulty coming up with positive and definite evidence to prove the Oxfordian case (so much of what we have is circumstantial, and yet the accumulation of vast amounts of high-quality circumstantial evidence, such as is seen in Appens. B, F, & V, should allow us some inferences, and when the evidence that those inferences point to has been either lost or adulterated, our task is made all the more difficult, and our scoffing opponents encouraged). Many forgers were never adequately exposed for the freebooters they really were. Evidence about Sh. has been liberally salted all through the records (both official and unofficial), with the result that even before the 1800s had arrived, Sh. studies were already every bit as much the ruins of a ruin that Schliemann was later to inflict onto Troy. And those freebooters didn’t have a Dorpfeld to turn them honest (Ireland confessed his crimes, or at least a few of them; but Collier went to his grave a bitterly unrepentant man, whose primary defense was to accuse his accusers of having done worse than he did in the matter of adulterating the Sh. evidence!). So, by the time that in 1840 Delia Bacon began her challenge to orthodox scholarship (just about the same time that Schliemann began his assaults on Troy), the freebooters had already wrecked any presumption that the evidence was not tampered with and altered. Many 16th and early-17th century books were obtained and the hypothetical signature of Mr. Shakspere forged inside them for profitable resale; paintings were tampered with (such as the Ashbourne portrait at the

Folger Library); and much else besides. Moreover, because the Baconians were coming up with silly cryptograms, otherwise sober scholars like E.K. Chambers felt obliged to contrive the equally silly science of stylistics in order to date the plays through wacky codes that Sh. inadvertently salted through his works just by writing in the style he did (in Appens. S & T, as I did in Hess-1999, I argue that because some of the types of line ending evidence contradicts other types, all types should be suspect, and absurd arguments such as those of Elliott & Valenza should be dismissed as so much smoke and mirrors!). The residue of that ruination of the ruins remains today, with occasional sober insights such as Jane Cox’s 1985 pronouncements against the six signatures of Mr. Shakspere (see Sect. O.2), and Donald Foster’s recent confession that his Shaxicon stylistics system was not all he had claimed it had been (see Appen. S). But, these continue to be drowned out by the steady drum-beat of zombie-like scholars who prefer to accept an illiterate man as Sh. than to do responsible thinking and sound research for themselves!

In the face of that mess, as with today’s Troy, the only sensible thing to do is to give up on the heavily damaged prime site and go well beyond our Elizabethan Hisarlik, to look for evidence in the suburbs of our Troy. And that’s where Sh.’s internationalist bent becomes our guide. Because, inside of the plays and poetry themselves, and in foreign archives, we find evidence not touched by the Irelands and Colliers before us. Anything found in foreign archives related to Oxford or Sh. will be very likely to have been the unadulterated smoking gun than anything in England, such as Danish archives that Derran Charlton tells me contain correspondences related to Oxford and others in several languages. Yet, for the internal evidence, listed in Appen. B, Sh. widely devastated it himself. As he wrote, he would originate a work, then add to and modify that work over years and decades, adding topical allusions from the 1590s and earliest 1600s to works begun in the 1570s and early 80s. In a sense, what I call the Don Juan origination phases of Sh. are very similar to Troy I to V in Schliemann’s and Dorpfeld’s discoveries, and the 1590s to 1600s were similar to the Troy VI and VII levels, with later Graeco-Roman and Byzantine levels on top of them analogous to the altering and collecting of Sh.’s works after 1604. Sh.’s works were in many ways the ruins of a ruin even while Sh. lived and continued to write!

We shall see that despite this ruin, Sh.’s persistence and clarity in giving us clues to the time-frame of his authorship allow for a reasonable reconstruction of his authorial processes. And once we’ve re-excavated our Shakespearean Hisarlik, examined evidence from the suburbs of Sh.’s continental travel allusions, and reconstructed much of his personality and world, astonishingly what we are left with is a rather comprehensive biography of the 17th Earl of Oxford. What more could we ask for?

Originally, that biography of Oxford (with necessary digressions about Don Juan, Cervantes, and others) was to be depicted in one volume, my Chaps. 1 to 12, followed by a few short appendices. But, my chapters grew fat with evidence from researches, and my appendices too numerous and lengthy for just a one-or two-volume presentation. So, quite without intending, I’ve written a trilogy. To complicate things, because I had contracted rights to translate and use my Appen. A (Lambin’s book), with the rights set to expire toward the end of 2002, I was forced to alter the intended order and make sure Appen. A was published in Vol. I. With apologies to my friends who’ve long indicated a great interest in reading my book, they’re now faced with my trilogy. Hopefully they’ll find my efforts and their wait worthwhile.

But, there have been some advantages. The day after I submitted Vol. I to my publisher, the long-requested but inextricably missing Calendar of State Papers (Foreign) for the last half of 1578 up to 1582 was suddenly delivered to my study shelf at the Library of Congress. When I tried to request more volumes, to my surprise I didn’t receive what I requested, but instead got the C.S.P. (Venetian and Northern Italy) (H.F. Brown ed.) for 1581 to 91, a series I hadn’t even thought about looking into. For example, I was able to quickly pick out a few items from its deteriorating pages to support Prof. Lambin’s contention in Sect. A.7 above that Francesco, the 2nd Grand Duke of Tuscany, was very closely linked to the Catholic League and to Philip II of Spain. Just a few months before Francesco’s Oct. 19,1587 death (possibly of poison) these two coded and decoded despatches were sent to Venice from the Venetian

ambassador in Madrid:

#344, pg. 159-60, May 1, 1586, "…the King [of Spain, in the Armada enterprise against

England] has received two offers recently, one from Tuscany, the other from Parma.

Tuscany offers 12,000 infantry and his own person as commander-in-chief."

# 538, pg. 290, June 27, 1587, They do not pay much attention here to the offers of the Grand Duke of Tuscany for the expedition against England, for it seems that the Grand Duke asks, as a recompense, the fortresses which Spain holds in Tuscany.

This may have had little to do with the story in Sect. A.7 above, but it is a fact that there were many Italian volunteers for service against England in the Spanish Armada. So, I believe England would have wished to destabilize Italy before the 1588 Armada (which originally was supposed to sail in 1586 or 87, but was delayed by Drake’s Cadiz raids). And, though I’m sure Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici was capable of performing poisonings of his own, it’s interesting to suppose England feared the Spanish were taking Tuscany’s offer seriously. If so, English agents would wish to destroy Francesco’s pro-Spanish capabilities by a strategic assassination or two, to allow his relatively anti-Spanish brother to take charge in Tuscany. For that, it would have been natural to seek advice or even assistance from Oxford, who had actually lived in Florence for a time (see Sect. C.3.14), and would have been familiar with Francesco and Ferdinando from a decade earlier. Perhaps even in Tuscany Oxford was the King-maker of his time.

Material like the above that scholars likely have known about for centuries but never saw a potential connection to Sh. may hold keys to the authorship question. Each piece to the puzzle comes in unpredictable sizes and shapes, and only after we’ve put together as much as we can from known pieces can we see the outlines of other pieces yet unidentified. Then it’s a matter of searching for those shapes and sizes to identify more fitting pieces, until we’ve gotten the whole puzzle completed (except for the few pieces that are lost forever, for which only outlines may vaguely be found). This trilogy exists to describe what we have.

Another unexpected dividend of having submitted Vol. I separately from its two sister volumes is that in the interim I’ve been able to discover material which challenges a few side issues of what was said in Vol. I. So, these can be corrected or compensated for in Vols. II and III. One was my misunderstanding of Dr. Magri’s 1998 article, which did not propose Don Juan as imperial as I implied in Sect. 4.A.2’s discussion of Two Gentlemen (one reason I tried to describe Don Juan as demi-imperial in most places). Another was my previous misreading of Derbyite literature, when I incorrectly believed the 4th Earl of Derby made his special embassy to Paris in 1578-79. In fact, as my examination of the C.A.P. Venetian showed me (#s 256, 259, & 263 on pgs. 107-8, 110), the future 6th Earl of Derby’s father was in Paris in Feb. to Mar. 1584/5, during which time the French arrested the English expatriate Morgan whose extradition was being sought by Derby on behalf of England, and then when Derby had conveyed the Garter knighthood to Henri III and departed Paris, the next day on March 15 Morgan was moved to a less rigorous prison and eventually continued his spying and conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth in connection with the exiled Scottish Bishop of Ross and Mary Stuart. So, in Chaps. 2 & 4 and Appen. A, my indications there was a possibility that William and Ferdinando Stanley accompanied their father on a 1578-79 expedition to Paris would be in error. Lambin’s conclusions on this point must have been about the later 1584/5 period, though the important connection with Morgan and thwarting of the extradition by Bernardino Mendoza (by then the Spanish ambassador in Paris) and by various members of the French Catholic League (who often followed Mendoza’s lead more readily than they did their own King) would seem to be strengthened. This relates to characters and allusions inside of All’s Well, and helps date it to a mid-1570s origination (because of the allusion to our cousin Austria) and various revisions in the 1580s to early 90s. In short, in the 1602-03 time-frame for MFM claimed by orthodox scholars, why would Morgan’s 1584/5 jailing have been enough of a topical item to insert allusions to an off-stage character of that name? If this was isolated, perhaps we might say Mr. Shakspere was referring to something that happened in his teens. But, when we find allusions to Henri III’s apprehensions about Don Juan of Austria’s entry into the Spanish Netherlands in 1576, it’s hard to pretend Mr. Shakspere was at all involved in AW’s origination!

But, perhaps the biggest correction, or let’s say avoidance of embarrassment, was Nina Green’s timely identification for me of Dr. Morrice as Maurice Clenocke (or Clynog) a Welsh divine, in Rome as an officer of the English Hospital 1567-78 and rector of the English College 1578-79. In Vol. I, I hadn’t yet been able to identify him, and since I had arrived at the conclusion that both Oxford and Don Juan had reasons to attend the Feb 1575/6 convocation of English Expatriates in Rome, most likely in disguise, I felt obliged to propose a possibly fictional Dr. Morrice was Oxford in disguise (see Fig. 11 above, Fig. C.1 below, and entry in legend of Fig. C.2 below). Since Dr. Morrice was identifiable, the potential that Oxford and Don Juan were secret observers at that convocation remains strong, but just a bit less sweet, since I had unearthed some really nice Sh.-like word-play that might accompany such a made-up name. [3] But, as I said to Nina, this shoots down a nice balloon, but better now than later, when I might have overplayed this conjecture.

This matter of Dr. Morrice illustrates the contrast between Oxfordian and orthodox scholarship. The orthodox lack any semblance of reality or depth to their candidate, thus many shallow suppositions have been generated, then more suppositions on top of those, and so forth until great straw palaces have been built up in the air. By contrast, when I follow a logical lead and then take a jump or two into conjecture from the evidence, even when the specifics turn out to be not exactly right, there’s still plenty of substance, depth, and logical consistency to my view of the Oxfordian theory. Why? Because my Shake-speare was a real-life man of proven immense capabilities, talents, and evidences. Meanwhile, the orthodox Stratfordian theory (or better yet, myth!) is a pile of conjectures built on top of the most basic one of all: their conjecture that their man could write at all (see Sect. O.2 below). Remove that straw, or the Groatsworth straw, or any of lots of other straws, and their whole house of straws just gets blown away!

Another find was an intriguing sideline to history that Oxford may have been at least vaguely aware of. There were circles around Philip II and Don Juan who discussed plans to kidnap 11-year-old James VI of Scotland in 1577 in order to take him to Spain and head-off a similar plot by the French through the French agent Killigrew. Marriage to the Infanta (=Spanish princess) was part of their plans as reported by their spy Antonio de Guaras, boasting to his King of his ability to freely pass to and receive letters from James’ mother, the imprisoned Mary Stuart. In the same letter, de Guaras also noted discussions between Philip and Henri III for Alencon to marry the Infanta (Hume, 546)! She was apparently a most busily-used Princess; as with Chess, in royal marriages the threat or promise in many directions was often more powerful than any single actual move would have been (Q. Elizabeth proved that!).

Since Vol. I, I’ve stumbled across much evidence of the depressing morals of Shake-speare’s time, both English and foreign. For the latter, I’ve seen ample evidence that what we would call war crimes today were being committed everywhere then too. In Appen. U there will be a 1569 letter from Don Juan to Philip II in which DJ casually mentioned allowing his men the sport of murdering 2,500 men, women, and children in the aftermath of the capture of a mountain fortress in Granada. And we will see that after Don Juan’s miraculous victory over the fleeing forces of the Estates and capture of the fortress of Gemblours, he wrote to Spain with reports of showing mercy to his captives, when in fact the journals of one of his subordinates showed that some 800 captured Scotsmen were bound and thrown into a nearby river to drown. Then there are records of Walter Raleigh’s involvement in some horrendous war crimes in the Irish campaigns in the early 1580s. In the Washington Post book review section for 5-18-2003 (3-4), George Garret reviewed Harry Kelsey’s Sir John Hawkins biography, subtitled Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader. And I’m reminded that the American tradition of effective genocide against native Americans actually descended from the Elizabethan policies toward the Irish: build forts throughout the countryside (e.g., Jamestown was built on the Irish fort model), sally forth with raids that demoralize, drive out, and then starve into extinction all native opposition so the void can be filled with English settlers (i.e., the English Pail in Ireland and the 13 Colonies in America). Any cruelties or abominations done by the opponents, and there were many, would justify the cruelties and abominations done by the English side, etc. And all this intensified tremendously during the 30 Years War from 1618 to 48 and the English Civil Wars from 1640 to 49 (which helped define how the Shakespeare enterprise came down to us today). History is full of demonizing and destroying of opponents without remorse. So, as we explore the Dark Side of Sh., keep in mind that Oxford’s morals were spotty but not really beyond the times.

In Sects. 7.C to 7.D above (Vol. I, pgs. 325-26 in particular), I had argued that the English Madrigal form had originated in private performances in the homes of the nobility and wealthy long before Sir Thomas Morley first published any of them in 1592-3. Imagine how much more forceful of an argument I would have made had I noted that the very first book of English

Madrigals had been published in 1590 by none other than Oxford’s sometime secretary, Thomas Watson, entitled The first sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished (Bateson, 482)! And then Watson was to die in 1592 or else he no doubt would have published even more and become known as much for Madrigals as for his 1580s sonnets and other works (431) that supposedly were closely studied by Sh. (Concise DNB), as opposed to vice versa. As it turns out, I had already noted this in my herein published Appen. E, but neglected to connect the two in Chapt. 7.

I was also able to watch the PBS Frontline special of Jan. 2, 2003, which began where an earlier special left off a decade ago, but replaced the Oxfordian theory with the Marlovian one featuring believers that Christopher Marlowe’s 1593 murder was faked and he was spirited away to Italy to write the works of Sh. and then have them smuggled back to England by Sir Thomas Walsingham (1568-1630), brother of spymaster Sir Francis. Apparently the name Walsingham is today so sinister and powerful that some accept about the younger brother things that the older was unlikely to have done. Marlowe’s skills in writing 7 plays, reams of poetry, pioneering use of blank verse in his mighty line, spying, and getting his Master’s degree (in 1587) were impressive. So I’ve assumed Marlowe may have had some role in the Shakespeare enterprise. But I naively thought it would have been in the mid-1580s to early-90s when Marlowe was still alive!

My skepticism about the Marlovian view draws on Appen. B below, which provides a detailed Oxfordian analysis of dates for Sh.’s works, showing that each originated before Marlowe had left Cambridge U. The Marlovians failed to explain why it was that so many of Sh.’s allusions to Italy are from a 1570s to early-80s time-frame, not the 1590s when a resurrected Marlowe hypothetically sheltered in Italy, when many characters inextricably would have been based on Alencon, Don Juan, participants in the French Civil Wars, etc., all long-dead. The Marlovians continually harped on the many Sh. works set in Italy, and somehow that became the great foundation of their whole argument vs. the homebody Mr. Shakspere. Yet, they provided no credible evidence that Marlowe ever traveled beyond northern France, other than that there was a Duke in Mantua who sheltered poets (but, I doubt Mantua sheltered Atheists, as Marlowe was alleged to have been!). Rather than accept

Oxford, the candidate with ALL the Sh. qualifications, the Marlovians have joined orthodoxy in using the invalid circular reasoning that since their man CERTAINLY was Sh. for whatever reasons, then their man CERTAINLY visited Italy, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. That invalidity must be replaced with the valid argument in Sect. 2.C above, that because Oxford WAS in Italy at the right places and times, he WAS the best Sh. candidate!

Why sew together a string of preposterous must have beens or might have beens with threads of whimsy when the perfect candidate was Oxford (and Derby coming in not too far behind; see Figs 2.A and 2.B), and Marlowe, Bacon, Dyer, Rutland, and Mr. Shakspere were simply eliminated altogether by significant things that they lacked in their biographies? After gross debilitations have surfaced (e.g., no travels to Italy at the right times), why don’t intelligent scholars look in the right direction? In defense of Frontline’s program, even if it offered the wrong alternative candidate, it did amplify somewhat more on many disabilities of Mr. Shakspere. The orthodox scholars interviewed in that program projected that they were quite familiar with the limitations of their orthodox candidate, and were generally aware of the many advantages of the Oxfordian candidate, but they prefer to hiss an invalid Gospel of deceit than to breath the truth!

My special thanks to Dr. Noemi Magri for collaborating with me in her translation of the 17 Don Juan letters to the Duke of Savoy in Appen. U (plus adding her commentary and valuable corrections to my text, though I promised to make it clear that this still remains entirely my personal research and opinion and is not to be construed as hers unless otherwise indicated!). She is also cooperating with me in matters for Appen. H. I’d also like to thank Prof. Gordon Cyr for his thoughtful Foreword and a review he did of my entire trilogy (SOS News, Winter 2003,19). A similar review has been done by Richard Desper and Derran Charlton has spread the word in European gatherings, for which I’m also grateful. I’d like to thank dear Marilyn Gray, a retired English teacher, who despite her infirmities had volunteered to help me proof until her eyes gave out. A special thanks to Victor Kabia, a political refugee and English scholar from Sierra Leone, who volunteered to write a Foreword for my Vol. III and provided me with his thesis from which I have written much of my Preface to Vol. III. And thanks to Peter Rush and Alan Tarica for assisting me with some parts of this trilogy and with helping to keep an Oxfordian Chapter of the Shakespeare Oxford Society running while I’ve been concentrating on this trilogy. If we Oxfordians prevail, it will be through collaboration and cooperation. Even though strictly-speaking he isn’t an Oxfordian, and had no direct input into this trilogy, I thank William Causey for persuading the Smithsonian Resident Associates to follow last year’s Whalen-Paster debate with a broader panel debate on April 19, 2003, in which Joe Sobran, Katherine Chiljan, and I faced a panel of Prof. Alan Nelson, Prof. Steven May, and Irvin Matus, with introduction and follow-up by Diana Price (not a Ph.D. despite my granting her that title at times!). To his credit, Peter Dickson was the one who persuaded Dr. Causey of the value of our event. From my perspective, we got our message across (I was allowed to distribute an extensive handout to the audience), our opponents got theirs out, and although nobody won, our side eventually will win as word gets shared!

Let’s have a final word about fair use. I admire the approach of Prof. Alan Nelson in making his research findings open to the world and giving generous permission to use it in the works of others, so long as proper permission and credit are observed. If anyone wants to use anything in my trilogy in their works, all they need to do is contact me and we’ll quickly and easily make arrangements. But, I want to discourage haphazard pirating that Oxfordians have unfortunately done too much of in the past. In turn, if I’ve trampled on anyone else’s toes (such as in my lavish use and paraphrasing of parts of Adm. H.H. Holland’s out-of-print works), please let me know and in future editions I’ll surely make amends. Oxfordians should note that a published work (even one apparently out-of-print and hard to obtain) almost always has costs, rights, and fair use issues accompanying it. Most of these can be easily satisfied; and you’ll find I’m easy about others citing from me. Today we’re all connected by the internet, so ignorance of what others are doing or what rights they have is less defensible than before. Thus, being a pirate publisher or pirate researcher should be frowned-on. Please try to give others all the credit they deserve to the greatest extent possible and we’ll all benefit!

W. R. Hess, May, 2003

(http://home.earthlink.net/~beornshall/index.html)

Endnotes to Preface Vol. II:

[1] Another empirical science having a surprising but illustrative problem is Chemistry-Mineralogy. In the April 26, 2003 issue of Science News (www.sciencenews.org), pg. 263, Sid Perkins’ article Eye of the Tiger: Discovery about gem’s structure overturns old theory, reported that a theory propounded in 1873 by respected German mineralogist Ferdinand Wibel had essentially been embraced without question ever since, with tiger’s-eye cited in all the textbooks as a classic example of a pseudomorph, which supposedly was a mineral in which crystals of one material take on the form of another, which it replaces atom by atom. However, Peter J. Heaney at Penn. State U. decided to examine the mineral and discovered Wibel and all the textbooks were wrong, as reported in the April 2003 Geology. As Perkins concluded:

So, why did it take 130 years for scientists to replace Wibel’s tiger’s-eye theory? After all, the techniques that Heaney used—optical and electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction—aren’t new. The short answer, says Heaney, is that nobody had bothered to look. ‘Scientists merely accepted the old explanation, as I had,’ he explains. Also, because tiger’s-eye is only a semiprecious stone, it hadn’t attracted enough attention to merit a detailed investigation, he notes…’It tickles me how [this finding] counters the longstanding assumption about how tiger’s-eye forms,’ says Jeffrey E. Post, curator of gems and minerals at the Smithsonian…’Sometimes an explanation is so pat that no one thinks to challenge it.’

It’s easy to see that paraphrasing the above citation would yield a very instructive analysis of the current status of the Sh. authorship question:

So, why did it take over 400 years for Professors of Elizabethan History and Literature to replace the dysfunctional and contradictory orthodox Stratfordian theory? After all, the resources and documents that the Hess trilogy has used—the travels of Sh. and Oxford, the hundreds of early dating allusions, frequent allusions to Don Juan of Austria and others long-dead by 1590, the Palladine woodcut with its Oxford-related attributes, the absurdity of Mr. Shakspere’s supposed signatures and of the Groatsworth of Wit material used for his supposed biography, etc.—aren’t new. The short answer, says Hess, is that nobody had bothered to look. ‘Professors merely accepted the old explanation, as a more comfortable, lazy, easily digested way to inculcate their fanciful wish-fulfillment onto their students,’ he explains. Also, because the detailed biography of Sh. has often been argued to be less precious than enjoyment of the magical plays and verses, it hadn’t attracted enough attention to merit a detailed investigation, he notes.’It tickles me how [this finding] counters the longstanding assumption about Sh.’s biography,’ could reasonably have been the words of Diana Price as she first introduced and then summarized a panel debate of Katherine Chiljan, Joe Sobran, and Hess vs. orthodox Professors Alan Nelson and Steven May, and author Irvin Matus before an audience of about a hundred on April 19, 2003 at the Smithsonian…’Sometimes an explanation is so pat that no one thinks to challenge it.’

I might add that near the end of the Smithsonian event, when we were asked to state what the smoking gun might be, I gave a three-part answer. The first part was a direct response to Prof. Steven May’s claim that he fervently wished to become an Oxfordian, except that he was unable to find good examples of Oxford’s verses that would enable him to see Oxford as plausibly Shakespearean. As I challenged him then, and a few days later in an open letter addressed to Worthy Opponents, he should take a look at the sixty-stanza, 7 lines per stanza, epic poem Another Rare Dreame, which resides in the 1593 Phoenix Nest before another poem signed E.O. and already assigned universally to Oxford’s authorship, which begins What cunning can expresse. As I said in the open letter, the two poems share a surprising number of themes (as are listed in Appen. L, in Vol. III):

a) a worshipped lady with attributes of the virgin goddess Diana (goddess of the silver moon, also called Cinthia or Sylvia; another virgin goddess of note was Pallas Athena, or Roman Minerva, goddess of war, knowledge, the arts, and literature, where Pallas in Greek means Spear-shaker);

b) emphasis on flowers, especially the Lily, Carnation, and Rose (see Appen. J, with similar emphasis in some of the Sonnets);

c) classical imagery;

d) the whiteness of her skin;

e) the red gold of her glowing hair;

f) her position as prominent among the stars;

g) allusions to Phoebus (or Phoenix, Phaeton, or other fiery mythical entities);

h) her alternate description as a sea nymph (as in Thetis, mother of Achilles in the Iliad);

i) the author’s blindness from her brilliance;

j) although cloying at times, the author’s intention to die for the sake of beauty and love (a ploy historically responded to favorably by Queen Elizabeth in the case of Sir Christopher Hatton, and Sir Edward Dyer); and

k) most important, the lady as the author’s Queen or sovereign! And, the best point is that the author of Another Rare Dreame was described as a Master of both Universities, as was Oxford and only a few others in that time!

My open letter referred Prof. May and his colleagues to the theory of Sid Lubow (Sect. J.8 below noted his webpage www.rrlinks.com/internaltriangle/index.html and e-mail DotSid55@aol.com), that the poem A Lover’s Complaint followed and helped to complement and provide the key to the Sonnets in the same 1609 publication, just as these two poems may have been intended to go together.

As of today (three weeks later), none of our Worthy Opponents has yet deigned to so much as acknowledge my open letter. I’ve no reason to believe that such normally-polite scholars would have found my open letter so rude as to deserve stony silence, so why should I not regard their silence as instead abject, groveling, surrender? Prof. May, shall we henceforth count Another Rare Dreame as Oxford’s work?

Before we forget, what were the other two parts of my smoking gun? That foreign archives will yield important information not previously recognized, as described in Appen. U below, featuring very revealing, previously never-Englished letters of Don Juan of Austria. And, that an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) system, such as described in Appen. S below, will be used to definitively allocate anonymous and pseudonymous poetry (such as Another Rare Dreame) to probable Elizabethan authors, thus ending the debate convincingly.

[2] As of the Sept.-Oct. 2003 issue of Archaeology Odyssey (14-15), the debates over the James Ossuary and the Temple Tablet still raged on. But more detailed scientific examinations had been done of both (with electron microscopy, examining the appearance and chemistry of the inscriptions, etc.), and very serious questions of the authenticity of both items had been raised. This doesn’t alter the validity of using them as examples here.

[3] At first I had INCORRECTLY decided the following should be the entry in Appen. C, endnote # 7:

Dr. Morrice unidentified; not likely Dr. William Mowse (or Mosse, d. 1588) LLD Cambridge 1552, deprived 1553, reinstated 1555, deprived 1558, prebendary Southwell 1559 and York 1561 (Concise DNB II, 2115).

Since Dr. Morrice has been identified as a real person, I’ve clipped out from Appen. C the following delicious exposition, though the reader might still enjoy it for the insight it provides into philological, cultural, and ritualistic matters. I’m remain partly enchanted by the unlikely but possible scenario in which Oxford earlier met the real Dr. Morrice in Rome, then decided that if he was to attend the convocation of English expatriate conspirators, then he would choose to do so while portraying Dr. Morrice.

Aside from mirth over the personality and appearance of Dr. Maurice Clenocke, was there anything specifically about the name Dr. Morrice itself that might have tickled Oxford’s Shakespearean irony (note that Oxford’s servant Deny the Frenchman used the name Capt. Morris Denys for his alias when he joined Oxford in fighting in the Netherlands in 1584/5; see Chapt. 8, note # 13)? Consider the following word-play:

If we had no good match for Dr. Morrice, and Oxford really did attend the convocation in disguise, he may have portrayed Dr. Morrice (Marier=to marry off, to match and Marieuse=matchmaker, perhaps combined with Moricaud=blackamoor in French. This could have reflected the tradition that Queen Elizabeth referred to Oxford as her little Moor (where morus=fool) or the fact that Don Juan was known to disguise himself as a blackamoor. If he did decide to become a stand-in for Dr. Morrice, likely Oxford would have pretended to argue the Marianist view and/or facilitate a marriage of Don Juan to the imprisoned Mary Stuart. Other translations from Latin would be Morior=to die off,

to whither, Morosum=particular, stubborn, crabby, Morsa=little pieces, and Moror=to delay, detain, distract, which may have also been Oxford’s agenda (if so, he would have made sure the convocation would come to no firm agreements, which it did not!). Whether Oxford was truly a Marianist or just pretending to be one is discussed in Chap. 12. See Fig. 11 above and Fig. C.1 below.

Since Sh. often used double-meaning/allegory in names, another line of analysis for Dr. Morrice may be even more promising than the above. Ency. Brit. VIII, 338-39, has a description of the Morrice Dance (also Morris, Moresgue, Morisque, or Morrisk) as a:

…ritual folk dance performed in rural England by groups of specially chosen and trained men…a variety of related customs, such as mumming…A feeling that the dances have magic power or bring luck persists wherever they are traditionally performed. The further description of the dance is reminiscent of the festival at the end of Merry Wives of Windsor, when the victim Sir John Falstaff was tricked into donning staghorns, and around him the costumed villagers danced while pretending to be fairies and sprites pinching at and burning him with tapers.

"The central figure of the dances, usually an animal-man, varies considerably in importance. In some cases, he may dominate the rite; in others—as in many English Morris dances—the young men in the corps d’elite may dominate, with the animal-man [=the Whicker-man?] and other dramatic characters either relegated to the subsidiary role of comics or omitted. The name Morris is also associated with the horn dance.This dance-procession includes six animal-men bearing deer antlers, three white and three black sets; a man-woman, or Maid Marian, and a fool, both carrying phallic symbols; a hobby horse; and a youth with a crossbow who shoots at the leading ‘stags’ whenever

possible….The name Morris is also associated with groups of mummers who act, rather

than dance, the death-and-survival rite at the turn of the year. . The word Morris apparently derived from ‘morisco,’ meaning ‘Moorish.’.. .it might have arisen from the dancers’ blacking their faces as part of the necessary ritual disguise. . The few solo Morris dances are called Morris jigs."

The comedian Will Kemp did a 20-mile long solo Morris dance celebrated in his 1600 booklet Kemp’s Nine Days Wonder. But, the real importance of this might be that Oxford, as a Morrice dancer, through his disguise as Dr. Morrice, seems to have been preparing the ritual sacrifice of some animal-man, Whicker-man, or a duped and cuckolded wooer of Queens during that 1575/6 convocation of English expatriates. In Sect. 5.A.12 above and Appens. B & N, we see the potential that Oxford did just that to Don Juan, and chortled about it in play after play, even to the point of providing gruesome details of the death of Sir John in HenV (where Sir John in Spanish=Don Juan) and of Mr. Henrico Willobego, Italo-Hispalensis in Willobie His Avisa!

Despite the fact that we now know a real Dr. Morrice existed, and likely was available to attend the convocation, we still have serious reasons for suspicions about Don Juan, Oxford, and the Feb 1575/6 convocation in Rome. Oxford would have been familiar with the deep potential connotations of the name Dr. Morrice, and who knows what dramatic elements it would have suggested to him? He would have also known that Don Juan was responsible for responding to the 1573 Papal Bull formally deposing Q. Eliz., elevating Mary Stuart, and marrying her to Don Juan (Coloma-Moreton, 335-36).

Don Juan’s responsibilities and capabilities were under discussion at that Feb 1575/6 convocation, and so he almost certainly needed to be there, most likely in disguise in order to objectively determine for himself how real the English expatriate support would be if he tried to depend on it. Thus, when Don Juan mysteriously went to Loreto and then briefly disappeared from history we must be suspicious that Rome was his destination. Likewise, Oxford was very likely pretending to be a leading Marianist during his 1575-76 excursion into France and Italy. And Don