John Donne, "a man for all seasons."

Donne in 1591, one year after the three books of The Faerie Queene were published. He was then nineteen years old. 

I. A call to all Elizabethan scholars.

John Donne was born in late 1571 or 1572, his last biographer John Stubbs informs us, although there is no register of his birth in any document.

He was a genius, a precocious one, a child prodigy. His uncle Jasper Heywood, another great poet and first translator of Seneca's plays in English literature, said of his Wunderkind nephew: "This time has sent us another Pico della Mirandola." Of this italian philosopher was said that he had been born wise rather than having turned wise by study. 

We know nothing of John Donne's life from 1572 to 1598, when he entered the post as chief secretary of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. The year 1598 is important: mark it. And it is important because it marks the term ad quem. It is the date that marks the enigmatic disappearances of Edmund Spenser and Thomas Nashe.

In 1576, the father of John Donne died. His mother married then a physician with connections at Court, John Symingers. As we know nothing about the education of this genius, for it is kept in the secret compartments of Elizabethan history, it will be better, now, to talk about how the young genius entered into the life of the Court. As John Donne considered himself a gentleman, he has talked to us about his infancy and adolescence through literary pseudonyms, just what Oxfordians know Edward de Vere did by publishing the work of the school in London he leaded as Eufues, a school of "university wits" which published the works we now know bear the names of Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and, finally, William Shakespeare.

II. The year 1579: John Donne enters the scene "ab extrema pueritia."

In 1592, one writer known afterwards to all London as "the monarch of wit," Thomas Nashe, published a pamphlet called Strange Knews. In that work Nashe criticized the pompous Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey who had been a friend of Immeritô.

Thomas Nashe dealt there with Gabriel Harvey's Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters, published in 1580. In that work Harvey had laughed at the Tuscanism of "Galateo," no other person than Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the leader of English culture as Ronsard had been the one in France. Nashe says to Harvey why that "exiled" Edmund Spenser had chosen the posie "Immeritô" back in 1579 with the publication of his work The Shepheardes Calender (not my emphasis):

"Signor Immerito (so called because he was and is his friend undeservedly) was counterfeitly brought in to play a part in that his interlude of epistles that was hissed at, thinking his very name (...) was able to make an ill matter good.

I durst on my credit undertake Spenser was no way  privy to the committing of them to the print."

Nashe is telling us two important things here. The first one is the reason why Immeritô was chosen as a posie: it was because he was and is the friend "undeservedly" of some high personage. Probably that E.K. who had commented the first work of the "new poet" Immeritô. And these comments of Nashe against Harvey tell us another thing: he informs us that the letters of Immeritô published by Harvey were "hissed at," were wrongly taken and published by his friend Harvey, without Immeritô's consent or permission.

I know no other instance of an Elizabethan poet mentioning the meaning of the posie Immeritô, apart from Nashe himself, except John Donne. In the very first Sermon he wrote in 1615, Donne is explaining what Christ do for us, how he save us "undeservedly" because of our sins, and he writes (http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/JohnDonne/id/168/rec/1; page 3):

"(..) And in another place, Frustra, to no purpose; for it is a void bargain, because we had no title, no interest in our selves, when we sold our selves; and it signifies, temere, rashly without consideration of our own value, upon whom God had stamped his image; And then again it signifies, Immerito, undeservedly, before God, in whose jurisdiction we were by many titles, had forsaken us, or done any thing to make us forsake him."

One great clue that Nashe is Immerito is that Edmund Spenser never helped Gabriel Harvey against Nashe's attacks; if Spenser existed in real life as that poet we know, we might believe he could have sided with Harvey against Nashe and Greene. But, interestingly, he never did: the Spenser that was (so said the tale) in Ireland, remained muted.

III. The year 1589: John Donne enters as Thomas Nashe.

The fact is that from 1579 to 1590 Immeritô is gone like smoke. Probably to the end of the world for a courtier poet as Immerito proves himself to be, and as it was considered to be Ireland back then for any English person. But in 1589 a new writer appears: his name is Thomas Nashe. In his Preface to Greene's Menaphon, Nashe writes from the start:

"Courteous and wise, whose judgements (...) enlarge the deserts of the learned by your liberal censures, vouchsafe to welcome your scholarlike shepherd, (...)." This shephered is no other than Immerito. And he continues thus:

"To you he appeals that knew him [i.e. Robert Greene] ab extrema pueritia, whose placet he accounts the plaudite of his pains, thinking his day-labour was not altogether lavished sine linea if there be anything at all in it that doth olere Atticum in your estimate."

For Nashe, Robert Greene's plaudite or applause is the only sanction he estimate above all. And Nashe says that he has known this Robert Greene from extreme infancy. This Robert Greene is no other than the green Ver(t), Edward de Vere, Euphues, the Master of John Lyly and Antony Munday, Master Apis Lapis, "the most copious carmenist" of the times. As many Oxfordians have already seen (lately demonstrated superbly by Roger Stritmatter), the commentator E.K. of The Shephearders Calender is no other than Edward de Vere, hence the posie of the young poet: Immerito, "undeservedly" protected and received as friend by E.K. or Edward de Vere. Very well, here Nashe is confirming that he knows him from his infancy, from the times when Greene-Oxford protected him in 1579. 


Alexander Grossart tells us that, strangely, we know nothing of Gabriel Harvey, even though he lived up to a very long age. I think the secret identity of Harvey is related to the secret identity of Immerito--Nashe. Could Harvey have been a catholic? Why did he hide? Why the silence of the registers about him? Why there is no portrait of this Cambridge famous scholar?


How do we know John Donne is Thomas Nashe and a friend and literary protégée of Edward de Vere?

IV. Evidences gathered already on "Jack" Donne being "Thomas Nashe."

All evidences I have been able to gather in just three months since I discovered this possibility will be exposed now. They might as well increase dramatically if Elizabethan scholars without prejudices follow the matter of those "wild years" of "Jack" Donne:

1º.- John Donne studied in Oxford and Cambridge, although he did not take degrees there, as it seems it happened with Nashe from Richard Lietchild's comments on The Trimming of Thomas Nashe. Donne entered Oxford in 1584 and left Cambridge in 1589, same date we see in Nashe's first pamphlet, his Preface to Greene's Menaphon.

2º.- In 1593 Nashe wrote a theological pamphlet called Christ's Tears over Jerusalem , and in 1593 is the year we know that Donne started to think seriously about theology. In Donne's Satire I (ca. 1593) we read at the start:

"Away thou fondling motley humorist,

Leave me, and in this standing wooden chest,

Consorted with these few books, let me lie

In prison, and here be coffined, when I die;"

3º.- Nashe dedicated to Lord S. The Choosing of Valentines, also known as Nashe's Dildo . In Donne's Satire II  (ca. 1593) we read (23-32; my emphasis):

"And they who write, because all write, have still

That excuse for writing, and for writing ill.

But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw

Others' wits' fruits, and in his ravenous maw

Rankly digested, doth those things out spew,

As his own things; and they are his own, 'tis true,

For if one eat my meat, though it be known

The meat do me no harm, nor they which use

To out-do Dildoes, and out-usure Jews ;"

4º.- In Nashe's Pierce Penniless (1592) he writes:

"Faith, I am very sorry (sir) I am thus unawares betrayed to infamy. You write to me my book is  hasting  to  the second  impression;"

And C.S. Lewis remarks about this: 

"The opening words of the epistle, 'Faith, I am verie sortie, Sir,' establish at once an intimacy between the performer and the audience: it is the same technique that Donne often uses in verse."

And it is true, for in Donne's Satire II (ca. 1593), for instance, the opening verses say:

"Sir; though (I thank God for it) I do hate

Perfectly all this town, (...)."

5º.- Donne knew who was Oxford-Shakespeare and what he did as a writer, for in his Essays on Divinity he remarks in passing (Essay VI, "On the name of God"; my emphasis):

"Names are either to avoid confusion, and distinguish particulars (...), but such a name, God, who is One, needs not. Or else names are to instruct us, and express nature and essences. This Adam was able to do. And an enormous pretending wit of our nation and age undertook to frame such a language, herein exceeding Adam , that (...) he named everything by the most eminent and virtual property (...)."

"Pretending wit" meaning a wit "in disguise," a dissimulating wit, a hidden wit, what Oxford was. As Essays on Divinity were written before he entered the Church (ca. 1614-15), when Donne writes that the "enormous pretending wit of our nation undertook to frame such a language" he is speaking in the past, that is, the genius is already dead. Shakspere of Stratford had two more years still to live in his rural and dark retirement.

The Preface to Menaphon of Nashe gives Robert Greene the same high distinction concerning Greene/Oxford's superior achievement: 

"I come (sweet friend) to thy Arcadian Menaphon, whose attire (though not so stately, yet comely) doth entitle thee above all  other  to  that  temperatum  dicendi  genus which  Tully in  his Orator termeth  true eloquence."

6.- Nashe's Strange News (1592) is dedicated as well to that genius of the nation:

"To the most copious carminist of our time, and famous persecutor of Priscian, his very friend, Master Apis Lapis (...)."

Donne's first dedicated sermon (1619) is dedicated to the Countess of Montgomery, Susan de Vere. In that sermon Donne writes to Susan de Vere that "in writing this sermon which your Ladyship was pleased to hear before, I confessed I satisfie an ambition of my own...". Later on he writes that Christ is a Stone, a lapis fundamentalis, a poor link with Master Apis Lapis  of Thomas Nashe, anyway, but let me tell you this impression of mine: both Immeritô and Master Apis Lapis of Nashe point to a monarch, an anointed personage, a King, hence our being Immeritô before Christ, the lapis fundamentalis, as Donne preaches in his sermons of 1615 and 1619.

7º.- If Nashe is Donne, it makes sense that Donne should have written his lyrical poem "The Bait" as a variation to the Marlowe-Ignoto poem "Come live with me and be my love," and that would explain why Dido, Queen of Carthage was written by Marlowe-Nashe, a work which contents are related with Aeneas and his son Ascanio being recognized as royal by Dido. See my essay dealing with it:

http://shakespearemelodijo.blogspot.com/2011/01/ensayo-1-eliza-queen-of-carthage_5003.html

The Lord Keeper, Egerton, said that Donne was a secretary worthy of a king, which would make sense if Donne was Nashe and colleague of de Vere--Southampton. Katherine Duncan-Jones asks herself: "Why did Nashe want to dedicate The Unfortunate Traveller to Southampton?" By the way, Grossart says that Dido shows more linguistics traces of Nashe than of Marlowe. I have discovered already that one of Donne's Sermon to King Charles I uses the same religious image of the blood of Christ in the firmament that appears at the end of Dr. Faustus, an example of Nashe-Donne's collaboration with Marlowe-Oxford.

In vol. 28 (2009) of the John Donne Journal, Chanitta Goodblat tells us (pag. 90): “After considering all this evidence of the deep impression made on Donne's mind by his early play-going, is it fanciful to detect a reminiscence of the final tragic scene of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus in the macabre picture with which Donne closes the sermon, which he preached before King Charles (1 April 1627)?” And she compares Donnes words there, “then when thou shalt see, or seem to see his hand turning the streame of thy Saviours bloud into another channel,” with Dr. Faustus final ones, “See where Christ bloud streams in the firmament,/ One drop of bloud will save me: Oh my Christ,/ Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ,/ Yet will I call on him: Oh spare me Lucifer.” 

This anguish, fear and spiritual morbidity of Donne (similar to the final one of Dr. Faustus)  is studied by Kathleen Quiring in the same vol. 28 thus (pag. 32): “Donne's experiences of religious grief [equates] with “what modern psychiatry understands as a form of 'affective disorder.'” And she continues: “[Donne's] religion is in part responsible for—and even encourages—his fellings of fear and sorrow. Donne often associates his fear and sorrow with his religious devotion.”

This Donne's morbidity is also in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). C.S. Lewis comments about this work:

"I mention it here only to notice that its long scene of torture deepens the impression of something in Nashe which is the reverse of comic, though also closely connected with his peculiar kind of comedy. The grotesque is a ridge from which one can descend into very different valleys."

It should be remembered that Donne's brother died in 1593 in jail. C.S. Lewis also comments about Nashe's The Terror of the Night (1594):

"It is a rambling attack on demonology and oneiromancy. As usual, Nashe is quite indifferent to consistency. He starts off by regarding night as Spenser regarded it and dwells, movingly enough, on the horrors of nocturnal conscience and solitude, when we are 'shut separately in our chambers' and Satan (who rules the night, as God the day) 'reuealeth the whole astonishing treasurie of his wonders'."

8.- Some parallelisms between Donne and Spenser now. Raymond-Jean Frontain in the same volume 28 of the John Donne Journal tells us: "Donne's conflation of divinity, love and wonder in the mind of the speaker of "Valediction of the booke" (stanza 4) recalls Artegall's first seeing Britomart's face (...) [in] 4.6.22.1-3."

Another one from the same source above: D. Audell Shelburne comments about Donne's poem "Valediction of a Booke" where the word "eloyne," "esloyne," and "essoyne" occurs in several manuscripts of the poem:

"I admit the words "esloyne," "eloyne," and "essoyne" were not familiar to me. I located "essoin"/"essoign" in the Oxford English Dictionary (...), and both "esloyne" and "essoyne" within a three-line span in The Faerie Queene."

9.- In The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, the writer Richard Litchfield says (my emphasis):

"Then I began to mark the note which you adjoined to your notes that they might be noted; there, tossing and turning your book upside down, when the west end of it happened to be upward, methought  your note seemed a D.  Ah, dunce, dolt, dotterel, quoth I, well might it be a D, and for my life for the space of two hours could I not leave railing of thee all in D's."

And pages later, he writes: 

"Thou art as  many  ciphers without an I, which they wanting are of themselves nothing, and thou hast much apparency of wit which is as ciphers, but thou hast not this same I.  Iota is wanting to thy ciphers, thou hast not one jot nor tittle of true wit."

The Iota and the D. being I.D., or Iohne Donne. And Litchield adds a simile here (in 1597) that is just correct for Donne, who was with Essex's in Cádiz in 1596:

"Again, as some soldiers that were at Cadiz, breaking into a shop for pillage and there seeing many great sacks ready trussed up, they with great joy made haste away with them, and so with light hearts carried away  their  heavy  burdens,  and  when  they  brought  them  into  the streets, opening them to see their booties, found in some of them  naught  but red  caps,  of which  afterward  they  made  store  of  fires,  and  in  the  rest  naught  but  earthen  pitchers, chafing-dishes and piss-pots and suchlike, so whosoever shall see  thee  trussed  up  and  in thy clothes might happily take thee for a wise young man, but when thou shalt be opened, that is, when he shall see but some work of thine, he shall find in thee naught but rascality and mere delusions."

10º.- Nashe knew Ben Jonson and they wrote The Isle of Dogs together. Donne was a friend of Jonson as well. Of course, Nashe was considered the monarch of wit, just what Donne was known for.

11º.- Nashe disappeared around 1598 (viz. his last work Nashe's Lenten Stuff), and Donne was at that time entering his post with the Lord of the Great Seal in his house in the Strand. 

12º.- Edward Allen married Donne's eldest daughter Constance in 1623, and due to some problems with her dowry, Allen said to Donne that (mutatis mutandis) he sure would not talk to him like that 30 years ago (ca. 1590s) when Donne should have answered him. This is evidence that Donne knew the famous actor of Marlowe's and Greene's plays back then.

V. Evidences gathered already that John Donne was "Edmund Spenser."

If Thomas Nashe is Iohn Donne, his literary fight with Harvey shows that he had been a friend of Harvey in the past (before 1580), but that later (from 1580) they have fallen apart and become enemies, because of Harvey using Immerito's letters in a publication where Harvey insulted Galateo-Oxford and his new Tuscanism. Nashe-Harvey's literary pamphlets show us a certain kind of jealousy in Harvey towards Nashe; their pamphlets read thoroughly, give the reader the impression that there was a kind of feeling of love-and-hate among them; the one, for instance, that is recognized when one listen to some friends disputing and arguing. Or not. 

Maybe it was just a game between them both, albeit a perilous one, and that could have been the cause for the public ban of their "naughty" game of pamphlets. For Thomas Middleton writes in The Nyghtingale and the Ante (1604), inspired by Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penniless (as Adrian Weiss informs us in the First Folio of Middleton, Oxford University Press, 2007), the following comment (610-15):

"'At dice? At the devil!', quoth I, 'for that is a dicer's last throw!' Here I began to rail like Thomas Nashe against Gabriel Harvey, if you call that railing; yet I think it was but the running a tilt of wits in booksellers' shops on both sides of John of Paul's churchyard, and I wonder how John [Donne?] escaped unhorsing." 

The fact is that Harvey could have known who was, in fact, the real Robert Greene, for he knew perfectly well that Venus and Adonis was written and published by Oxford. In his poem Gorgon, or the wonderfull yeare (1593), Harvey shows us that he knew who was behind Venus and Adonis, due to be published immediately after this poem of his:

"A Stanza declarative: to the Lovers of admirable
Works.


Pleased it hath, a Gentlewoman rare,
With Phenix quill in adamant hand of Art,
To muzzle the redoubtable Bull-bare,
And play the galiard Championesses part.
Though miracles surcease, yet Wonder see,
The mightiest miracle of Ninety Three."


Yes, Harvey knew that the miraculous poem was written by the Bull-bare (i.e. Ox--ford), although the Gentlewoman rare or Championesses (the Phenix), the Queen, had muzzled and bounded the poet (or the Turtle). If Harvey knew that, if he knew that Shakespeare was Ox-ford in 1593, he sure knew who was Robert Greene and made no mistakes about his "sensational" death that made the sales of his, Greene and Nashe's pamphlets go skyrocketing. 

Now, Spenser knows so much more about de Vere (viz., how Spenser cries that "our poor Willy is dead of late" in 1591), because he is living side by side with him, in London, not in some remote part of Ireland.

Spenser's works are a collaboration between de Vere-Donne. That would explain why Spenser knows so much about de Vere, as Hank Whittemore already had seen and even gave a lecture at the University of Concordia about this question of the revealing contents that the works of Edmund Spenser offer to the Shakespeare authorship question. The friendship of Spenser with Raleigh and Essex is explained when one realizes that Donne was a friend of Raleigh and Essex, whom Donne called "our Earl," as John Stubbs informs us. When Essex fell in disgrace after coming from the Irish expedition in 1601, he was kept in Sir Thomas Egerton's house in the Strand. Donne was living then in that house.

Immerito was received by the Queen, Sidney and E.K. around 1579 because when Donne was 4 years old (1576), his father died, and his mother married Dr. Symyngers, a physician with connections in the royal Court. Arundel and Donne as catholics are another connection with Oxford. Moreover, one of Donne's relatives ran the tavern The Blue Boar, the very family crest Edward de Vere possessed.

Now, from 1580 to 1590 the boy Donne was with Sidney (until 1586) and de Vere. In 1589, Nashe comes and says that he admires Spenser before this poet comes with his magnum opus one year later. If there was a manuscript of Spenser running in London, it must have traveled by force of magic from Ireland. Nashe's Preface to Astrophel and Stella is another link between Nashe-Immerito, for Nashe-Immerito shows the same love for Sidney. And Nashe says that he has known Greene/Oxford "ab extrema pueritia," that is, from extreme infancy, that is, from his seven years old, from The Shepherdes Calender of 1579. To this "most early wit" of John Donne refers Ben Jonson in 1616, when he wrote to his friend Donne thus (my emphasis):

"Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse

Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse;

Whose every work of thy most early wit

Came forth example, and remains so yet;

Longer a-knowing than most wits do live;

And which no affection praise enough can give!

To it, thy language, letters, arts, best life,

Which might with half mankind maintain a strife.

All which I meant to praise, and yet I would;

But leave, because I cannot as I should!

This is crazy..., but:

"The Tale of Mother Hubbard" (1591), a satirical poem, seems another mark by Donne as "Edmund Spenser." In that poem he laughed at the Cecils as the fox and the ape. Greene/Chettle said to "the young Juvenal" (i.e. Nashe) in Groatsworth (1592; mutatis mutandis): Beware of creating enemies, our young Juvenal.

This have been already exposed in my book Ver, comienza, an English version of which I pretend to publish in some six months. If we put John Donne in London around Shakespeare's times, we will discover more about Spenser, Nashe and Oxford for sure.

This is a call for all Elizabethan scholars; to all Oxfordians and Donnians and Spenserians scholars. Researches done on this question may reveal more about that Edmund Spenser that was all the time away in Ireland and is until the present time escaping our grasp, although he knew all the families of the nobility in London, and seems to live in fact in London: he is a Londoner. If we know that he died in 1598 "for lack of bread," as Ben Jonson said, it was for no other reason but John Donne entering as chief secretary for Sir Thomas Egerton in that year. Jonson and Donne were friends.

The mystery of John Donne's "dark years" of instruction and apprenticeship are explained with this theory because he was at Court and was Immeritô, later on Thomas Nashe, the friend of Master Apis Lapis, that Euphues of Mount Silexedra, that English Ronsard that, as he wrote with another pseudonym in Pandora (1584), "will rayse the English language to the Skies."

This is "the enormous and pretending wit" that Donne is talking about in his Essays on Divinity of 1614, just before entering the Church of England:

"And an enormous pretending wit of our nation and age undertook to frame such a language, herein exceeding Adam, that (...) he named everything by the most eminent and virtual property (...)."


Donne knew Marlowe-Greene-Oxford as Spenser knew the last one. In Spenser's dedication to Oxford he says that he has told his life in a "veiled" form (in Book I), which I have been able to verify in several readings of The Faerie Queene. Spenser tells at the start of Book II, just after he has described the life of Prince Arthur (a changeling) and the Queene Vna:


Right well I wote mighty Soueraine,
That all this famous antique history,
Of some th'aboundance of an idle braine
Will iudged be, and painted forgery,
Rather than matter of iust memory. 
(...)
The which O Pardon me thus to enfold
In couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light.


Book I dedicated to Prince Arthur and Vna explains what Spenser writes to Oxford in his dedicatory poem of 1590, as well as confirms that Spenser knew that Oxford had helped poets in Mount Silexedra as the leader of that school, as Eufues (emphasis mine):

To the right Honourable the Earle of 

Oxenford, Lord high Chamberlayne of

England, &c.

Receiue most Noble Lord in gentle gree,

The vnripe fruit of an vnready wit:

Which by thy countenance doth craue to bee

Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit.

Which so to doe may thee right well befit,

Sith th'antique glory of thine auncestry

Vnder a shady vele is therein writ,

And also for the loue, which thou doest beare

To th'Heliconian ymps, and they to thee,

They vnto thee, and thou to them most deare:

Deare as thou art unto thy selfe, so loue

That loues & honours thee, as doth behoue.


VI. The "Shaker of Spears" enters the city of London in 1562.

When Edward de Vere lost his official father in 1562, he entered the city of London to be tutored by Sir William Cecil, the "spirit" of Queen Elizabeth, Polonius. If you try to understand this scene from the point of view that the boy in black was just an Earl, you will feel what Ogburn felt in 1984:

"A contemporary diarist records that 'on the 3rd day of September came riding out of Essex from the funeral of the Earl of Oxford his father (...), the young Earl of Oxford, with seven score horse all in black, through London and Chepe and Ludgate, and so to Temple Bar (...) between 5 and 6 of the afternoon.' The report that the [boy] was accompained by 140 horses of any colour is one I think we might treat with reserve."

Paul Streitz gives us these impressions of his in 2001:

"Was this the entrance of an earl’s son or was it the entrance of a Prince of the Realm? One hundred and forty men was a sizeable number considering only a small number of palace guards protected the Queen. When Elizabeth entered the city of London as a princess to become Queen, 200 men accompanied her. By any standard of the day, Londoners knew that a person of considerable importance had entered. His final destination in London was the large house with the imposing gardens of Sir William Cecil, where he would live as a ward of the Crown."

And Mark Anderson writes in 2005:

"On Thursday, September 3, 1562, the London diarist Henry Machyn recorded that between five and six o'clock in the afternoon, the (...) earl of Oxford came riding out of Essex 'with seven-score horse all in black through London and Cheap and Ludgate and so to Temple Bar.' The child's parade was hundreds of feet long as it progressed over the drawbridge and through the arches of London's Aldgate, on the eastern side of the city. With 140 horsemen riding behind the youth bearing the colorless cast of mourning, de Vere took his entrance onto the worldly stage as the boy in black."

And Charles Beaclerk informs us in 2010:

"According to diarist Henry Machyn, Oxford rode into London after his father's funeral 'with seven score horse all in black'; in other words, he entered the capital like a Prince of Wales, with no fewer than 140 retainers (the Elizabethan historian John Stow puts the number at 180). He was accompained by the soldier-poet and future laureate George Gascoigne. His new home was Sir William Cecil's palatial residence on the north side of the Strand (...)."

In The Faerie Queene (Book I, Canto X, 51-68) we read that Spenser mythologizes this entrance of Oxford with this resumed epigram on the head of it: A chronicle of Briton kings,/ from Brute to Vthers rayne./ And rolles of Elfin Emperours,/ till time of Gloriane. He sings:

"Thrise happy man, said then the father graue,

(...)

Who better can the way to heauen aread,

Then thou thy selfe, that was both borne and bred

In heauenly throne, where thousand Angels shine?

(...)

Yet since thou bidst, thy pleasure shalbe donne. [i.e. nice "signature" of Immerito.]

Then come thou man of earth, and see the way,

That neuer was seene of Faeries sonne,

That neuer leads the traueiler astray,

(...)

Fair knight (quoth he) Hierusalem that is,

The new Hierusalem, that God has built

For those to dwell in, that are chosen his,

His chosen people purg'd from sinfull guilt,

With pretious bloud, which cruelly was spilt [i.e. note the morbidity of Donne here.]

On cursed tree, of that vnspotted lam,

That for the sinnes of all the world was kilt:

Now are the Saints of all in that Citie sam,

More deare vnto their God, then younglings to their dam. 

(...)

Then seeke this path, that I do thee presage,

Which after all to heauen shall thee send;

Then peaceably thy painefull pilgrimage

To younder same Hierusalem do bend,

Where is for thee ordaind a blessed end:

For thou emongst those Saints, whom thou doest see,

Shalt be a Saint, and thine owne nations frend

And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt be called bee,

Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree. [this is Shake-speare as later hero.]

(...)

For well I wote, thou springst from ancient race

Of Saxon kings, (...)

There as thou slepst in tender swaddling band,

And her base Elfin brood there for thee left.

Such men do Chaungelings call, so chaunged by Faeries theft.

These she thee brought into this Faerie lond,

(...)

To Faery court thou cam'st to seeke for fame,

(...)

So came to Vna, who him ioyd to see,

And after litle rest, gan him desire,

Of her aduenture mindfull for to bee."

VII. The occult linage of the Virgin "Britomart" Queene revealed. 


As Shakespeare did in Venus and Adonis (1593) when he said that Queen Elizabeth (Venus) had had a royal child that was "the next of blood, and 'tis thy right," Spenser will say the same when he publishes the second part of The Faerie Queene (1596). In Book V, Canto VII, stanzas 2-3 and 21-23, we read that the Queen of England is hiding her "linage" from public view:

"That Iustice was a God of soueraine grace,

(...)

Calling him great Osyris, of the race

Of th'old Aegyptian Kings,

(...)

For that Osyris, whilest he liued here,

The iuest man alive, and truest did appeare.

His wife was Isis, (...)

A Goddesse of great power and souerainty,

And in her person cunningly did shade

That part of Iustice, which is Equity,

(...)

Vnto whose temple when as Britomart

Arriued, shee with great humility 

Did enter in, (...)

WIth that Crocodile, which sleeping lay

Vnder the Idols feete in fearlesse bowre,

Seem'd to awake in horrible dismay,

As being troubled with that stormy stowre;

(...)

Tho turning all his pride to humblesse meeke,

Him selfe before her feete he lowly threw,

And gan for grace and loue of her to seeke:

Which shee accepting, he so neare her drew,

That of his game she soone enwombed grew,

And forth did bring a Lion of great might;

That shortly did all other bests subdew.

(...)

Magnificke Virgin, that in queint disguise

Of British armes doest maske thy royall blood,

So to pursue a perillious emprize,

How coulst thou weene, through that disguised hood,

To hide thy state from being understood?

Can from th'immortal Gods ought hidden bee?

They doe thy linage, and thy Lourdly brood;

They doe thy sire, lamenting sore for thee; 

(...)

For that same Crocodile doth represent

The righteous Knight, that is thy faifthfull louer,

Like to Osyris in all iust endeuer. 

For that same Crocodile Osyris is,

That vnder Isis feete doth sleepe for euer [i.e. translate this as Lyly's Endymion]:

(...)

That Knight shall all the troubles storms asswage,

And raging flames, that many foes shall reare,

To hinder thee from the iust heritage

Of thy sires Crowne, and from thy countrey deare.

Then shalt thou take him to thy loued fere,

And ioyne in equall portion of thy realme:

And afterwards a sonne to him shalt beare,

That lion-like shall shew his powre extreame.

So blesse thee God, and giue thee ioyance of thy dreame."

Shake-speare's Sonnets will prove these words futile as Britomart, the Britain Queene with "British armes," the Dark Lady, will never disclose the fallacy of her propaganda. Elizabeth I had a linage, and was not the Virgin Queene, as Paul Streitz, Hank Whittemore and, lately, Charles Beauclerk have shown with a great, powerful and outstanding veracity.

Oxfordians are in need of John Donne's literary identities. "Mark the music."

Nota Bene:

* A Theater of Wordling of 1569 was written by de Vere, not Donne. The book had an epistle to the Queen. All Spenserians agree that "how Spenser got to write this book is not known." 1569 was the exact year he reached his 21 years old (he was born in 1548), and he was informed he was not going to be recognized as Prince of Wales. Hence, the symbols of the "Hinde" that is killed by those two dogs, one black, one white (in Epigram 1), which is a clear symbol of Elizabeth I's favorite colors and a clear example of the Shakespearean identity crisis' symbol, as Beauclerk has shown. Epigram 3 talks about a tree that is taken its roots from the ground (the Timon of Athens symbol). In 1569-1570 we know de Vere had an unknown and long sickness. Epigram 3's final couplet of A Theater says:

"And rent this royall tree quite by the roote.

Which makes me much and euer to complaine."

Let's put it this way: "Which makes me (much and) E.uer to complaine."

** As Paul Streitz has investigated superbly with great force and determination, the KJV of 1611 reveals the presence of a genius, not of 54 translators. Maybe we may one day know the "pretending wit" who did that translation if we read what Spenser prays in 1609, two years before the translation of the KJV of the Bible was made. The last stanza of The Faerie Queene intones to God asking Him for inspiration and grace before, what seems to the reader, a titanic task which will conclude in 1611 with a Bible that is considered to be the book that, in Melvyn Bragg's words, "set this language on its path to become a universal language on a scale unprecedented before or since":

"Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
  Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
  But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
  Vpon the pillours of Eternity,
  That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
  For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:
  But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
  With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight."