Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Edward de Vere (1550-1604), 1575. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The Earl of Oxford
Born	12 April 1550 Castle Hedingham, Essex
Died	24 June 1604 (aged 54) Kings Place, Hackney, London
Title	Earl of Oxford
Tenure	1562-1604
Other titles	Viscount Bulbeck
Nationality	English
Locality	Essex
Offices	Lord Great Chamberlain
Spouse(s)	Anne Cecil Elizabeth Trentham
Issue	Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby Bridget Norris, Countess of Berkshire Susan Herbert, Countess of Montgomery Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford Sir Edward Vere (illegitimate)
Parents	John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford Margery Golding
Signature
File:Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford Signature.jpeg

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (12 April 1550 - 24 June 1604) was an English poet, playwright, peer and courtier.

Life

Overview

Oxford was a courtier of Queen Elizabeth, who lost his friends by his insolence and pride, and his fortune by his extravagance. He m. a dau. of Lord Burghley, who had to support his family after his death. He had some reputation as a writer of short pieces, many of which are in the Paradise of Dainty Devices.

He was noted for his literary and theatrical patronage, and between 1564 and 1599 some 33 works were dedicated to him by authors including Arthur Golding, John Lyly, Robert Greene and Anthony Munday. From 1580 up to his death, Oxford was the patron of a company of players. In 1583 he bought the sublease of the 1st Blackfriars Theatre and gifted it to poet-playwright John Lyly, who operated it for a season under Oxford's patronage. Oxford was an important courtier poet and was praised as a playwright, although none of his plays survive. Since the 1920s he has been the most popular alternative candidate proposed for the authorship of Shakespeare's works.

Youth and education

Edward de Vere was born on 2 April 1550, the only son of John de Vere, 16th earl of Oxford, by his 2nd wife, Margaret, daughter of John Golding and sister of Arthur Golding, the translator of Ovid. Until his father's death Edward was known as Lord Bulbeck.

He matriculated as an ‘impubes’ fellow-commoner of Queens' College, Cambridge, in November 1558. Subsequently he migrated to St. John's College. Bartholomew Clerke is reported to have acted as his tutor at Cambridge, and Thomas Smith, an illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577), seems to have studied with him.

When his father died in 1562, Edward succeeded to the earldom of Oxford and other hereditary dignities, which included the office of lord great chamberlain of England. His father, who left a large estate, nominated his son an executor; but Edward was only 12 years old, and consequently became a royal ward.

Sir William Cecil, the master of the court of wards, drew up special orders for his exercises and studies, and he became an inmate of Cecil's house in the Strand. There his uncle, Arthur Golding, joined him in the capacity of tutor and receiver of his property. The youth was thoroughly grounded in French and Latin, but at the same time learnt to dance, ride, and shoot. While manifesting a natural taste for music and literature, he developed a waywardness of temper which led him into every form of extravagance, and into violent quarrels with other members of his guardian's household.

Oxford became a prominent figure at Elizabeth's court during his boyhood. He accompanied the queen to Cambridge in August 1564, when he stayed at St. John's College. He also attended the queen on her state visit to Oxford in September 1566. He was created an M.A. of both universities (cf. Elizabethan Oxford, Oxford Hist. Soc. pp. 115, 173, 177).

Meanwhile his guardian Cecil found his perverse humour a source of grave embarrassment. In July 1567 Cecil narrated in his diary how the earl inflicted a wound which proved fatal on Thomas Bryncknell, an under-cook at Cecil House. Luckily a jury was induced to deliver a verdict of felo de se, the man's death being attributed to his ‘running upon a poynt of a fence sword of the said erle.’ On 24 October 1569 Oxford begged his guardian to obtain for him some military duty.

Courtier

Oxford took his seat in the House of Lords on coming of age on 2 April 1571, and on the earliest 3 days of the following May he greatly distinguished himself in a solemn joust at the tilt, tourney, and barrier, which took place in the queen's presence at Westminster. In August he was appointed to attend the French envoy, Paul de Foix, who came to England to discuss the queen's projected marriage to the Duc d'Anjou. Burghley wrote hopefully at the time that "he found in the earl more understanding than any stranger to him would think" (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. p. 95). In December he married, with the queen's consent, Burghley's eldest daughter, Anne. The queen attended the ceremony, which was celebrated with much pomp.

Oxford did not prove a complaisant son-in-law. A few months after his marriage he hotly remonstrated with Burghley on the government's prosecution of Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk, who was distantly related to him through his kinswoman, Lady Anne Howard, wife of John de Vere, 14th earl of Oxford. He projected a hare-brained plot which came to nothing to rescue the duke from the Tower (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, p. 478), and he was currently reported to have threatened to ruin his wife by way of avenging himself on his father-in-law for helping to ruin the Duke of Norfolk (Dugdale, Baronage, i. 200). Next year (on 22 September 1572) he entreated Burghley to procure him naval employment. But Burghley kept him at home in the belief that the queen, who admired his gallant bearing, was likely to make more adequate provision for him. "My Lord of Oxford," wrote Gilbert Talbot to his father, the earl of Shrewsbury, on 11 May 1573, "is lately grown into great credit; for the queen's Majesty delighteth more in his personage, and his dancing and valiantness, than any other. I think Sussex doth back him all that he can; if it were not for his fickle head, he would pass any of them shortly." (Lodge, Illustrations, ii. 16)

Court life continued to prove irksome, and in July 1574 he escaped to Flanders without the queen's knowledge or consent. Elizabeth was enraged at his contumacy, and gentlemen pensioners were despatched to bring him back. He returned by July 27, and in August he and his father-in-law waited on the queen at Bristol to offer apology. The queen was conciliatory and showed the earl renewed attentions (cf. Wright, Elizabeth, i. 504, 507; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, pp. 484–5).

In 1575 Oxford realised his ambition of foreign travel, and, with the permission of the authorities, made his way to Italy. In October he reached Venice by way of Milan (ib. p. 504). He returned home in the following March laden with luxurious articles of dress and of the toilet. To him is assigned the credit of introducing from Italy into this country embroidered gloves, sweet-bags, perfumed leather jerkins, and costly washes or perfumes (Stow). He ingratiated himself with the queen by presenting her with a pair of perfumed gloves trimmed with tufts or roses of coloured silk. A temporary alienation from his wife followed his Italian tour. He "was enticed," wrote Burghley in his Diary (29 March 1576), "by certain lewd persons to be a stranger to his wife." Although the difference was arranged, his domestic relations were not thenceforth very cordial.

Oxford's eccentricities and irregularities of temper grew with his years. He attended the queen to Audley End on 26 July 1578, and was present next day when a deputation from the University of Cambridge offered verses and gloves to her and her attendants. Some of the verses were from the pen of Gabriel Harvey, who in his official poem (‘Gratulationes Valdenses’) paid the earl conventional compliments, but there was a suspicion that Harvey, at the same date, held the earl up to ridicule in his satiric portrait of an italionated Englishman, with his affected apparel and gesture, which formed the main topic of Harvey's Speculum Tuscanismi. According to Nashe, Harvey moreover circulated privately some "very short but yet sharp [jibes] upon my Lord of Oxford, in a rattling bundle of English hexameters:"

A little apish hat, couched fast to the pate, like an oyster;

French cambric ruffs, deep with a witness, starched to the purpose:

Delicate in speech; quaint in array; conceited in all points;

In courtly guiles, a passing singular odd man.

Nash's story that the earl was so angered by Harvey's lampoons as to cause his libeller to be imprisoned in the Fleet is not confirmed, and was warmly denied by Harvey (Harvey, Works, ed. Grosart, i. 183; Nash, Works, ed. Grosart, passim).

In September 1579 Oxford grossly insulted (Sir) Philip Sidney in the tennis-court at Whitehall by calling him a "puppy." Sidney had previously circulated a sensible reply to a melancholy "epigram" by the earl. He now sent the earl a challenge, but the queen interposed in the earl's behalf, and, while forbidding a duel, ordered Sidney to offer an apology on the ground of Oxford's superior rank. Sidney declined to obey and retired from court (cf. Wright, Elizabeth, ii. 100–1). To avenge himself on Sidney, Oxford is said to have deliberately planned the murder of his antagonist, and he very reluctantly abandoned what he affected to regard as a "safe" scheme of assassination (Fulke Greville, Life of Sidney, 74-81; Fox-Bourne, Life of Sidney, pp. 242–50).

At the ensuing new year the earl presented to the queen a splendid gift, consisting of ‘a fair juell of golde, being a shippe garnished fully with dyamonds and a meane perle pendant.’ Soon afterwards he received from the queen's hand a prize for the prowess that he displayed in a grand tilt at court.

In March 1581-2 his violence involved him in new difficulties and jeopardised his hold on the queen's favour. He engaged in a duel with Thomas Knyvet (afterwards Lord Knyvet), a gentleman of the privy chamber. Both were wounded, the earl dangerously. During the period that the earl was disabled the warfare between him and Knyvet was pursued by their respective retainers. A man was killed on each side. The queen's attention was called by Knyvet to the series of hostilities which he and his dependents suffered at the earl's hands. Oxford was peremptorily ordered to confine himself, as a prisoner, to his own house.

Burghley's equanimity was seriously disturbed by the queen's anger. He appealed to Hatton and Raleigh to intercede with her in his son-in-law's behalf. Raleigh had been treated with characteristic disdain by the earl since he appeared at court, and, while expressing his readiness to help Burghley in rehabilitating the earl at court, declared that he was helping to cure a serpent which, on recovery, would sting his benefactor. At length, in May 1583, Raleigh persuaded the queen to pardon the earl his past offences, and the queen received him in audience when she visited Lord Burghley at Theobalds at the end of the month (Edwards, Ralegh, i. 59, ii. 21; Birch, Memoirs of Elizabeth, i. 22, 37).

Subsequently Oxford was given some dignified official employment. In October 1586 he was appointed special commissioner for the trial of Mary Queen of Scots, and he took part in the proceedings at Fotheringay and in the Star-chamber at Westminster. In 1588 he joined, as a volunteer, the fleet which repelled the Spanish armada, and he was in the procession when the queen went to return thanks at St. Paul's on Sunday, 24 Nov. (cf. Laughton, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, Naval Records Soc., vol. i. pp. lxxvi–vii). He was one of the peers who on 14 April 1589 sat in judgment on Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, and joined in convicting the earl of high treason.

During these years Oxford's continued extravagance involved him in pecuniary difficulties. He initially "sent his patrimony flying" (to use Camden's phrase) by alienating to Burghley soon after his marriage his property of Hedingham. In September 1583 he parted with the ancestral estate of Earl's Colne to his steward, Roger Harlackenden, for £2,000, and from that point on he seemed to take delight in selling every acre of his land at ruinously low prices.

Oxford's 1st wife, Anne, elder daughter of William Cecil, lord Burghley, died at the queen's palace at Greenwich on 6 June 1588, and was buried in state at Westminster Abbey on 25 June. A Latin epitaph is preserved in Cottonian MS. Julius F. x. f. 132. She was a woman of notable cultivation, and was author of Foure epytaphes, after the death of her young sonne the Lord Bulbecke, &c. which, together with ‘the fowre last lynes of [two] other that she made also,’ were printed in the volume of poems by John Soowthern [q. v.] called Diana, 1584. By her the earl had issue: Elizabeth, born 2 July 1575, who married at Greenwich, on 26 Jan. 1594, William Stanley, earl of Derby, and died at Richmond on 10 March 1626–7; a son, born in May 1583, who died a few hours after birth (Birch, Memoirs, i. 32); Bridget, born 6 April 1584, who was married to Francis, lord Norris (afterwards earl of Berkshire); Frances, buried at Edmonton 12 Sept. 1587; and Susan, born 26 May 1587, who was 1st wife of Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery, and died 1628-1629. Burghley made ample provision for Oxford's wife and children. But after the countess died he showed little inclination to relieve his son-in-law's necessities.

Oxford had squandered some part of his fortune upon men of letters whose bohemian mode of life attracted him. Among men of letters who acknowledged Oxford's patronage the chief were John Lyly, who dedicated to him Euphues and his England (1584), and Edmund Spenser, who addressed a sonnet to him in the opening pages of his Faerie Queene (1590). Of books of smaller account that were dedicated to him mention may be made of the translation of Justinus's abridgment of Trogus Pompeius by his uncle, Arthur Golding (1564), Underdown's rendering of Heliodorus (1569), Thomas Twine's translation of Humphrey Lhuyd's Breviary of Britayne (1573), Anthony Munday's Galien of France (1579? lost), Zelauto (1580), and Palmerin d'Oliva (1588), Southern's Diana (1584), and John Farmer's song-books (1591, 1599). He was also patron of a company of players who gave performances at Ipswich, Cambridge (in 1581), and other places.

When the earl was himself in distress he had no scruple in seeking assistance of his poor literary friends. About 1591 poet Thomas Churchyard the poet, hired lodgings in London for the earl at the house of a Mrs. Penn, giving his own bond for payment. Oxford left Mrs. Penn's lodgings without meeting his bill, and Churchyard, in fear of arrest, sought sanctuary. From there he wrote to the landlady protesting his honesty and told her that he had informed the queen of the earl's faithlessness. (Wright, Elizabeth, ii. 414)

A 2nd marriage soon afterwards with Elizabeth Trentham, of the queen's maids of honour, seems to have temporarily restored Oxford's tottering fortune. In 1592 he petitioned for a monopoly to import into the country certain oils, wool, and fruits, but appears to have met with no success.

The rest of his life was mainly spent in retirement. But he sat on the trials for high treason of Robert, earl of Essex, and Henry, earl of Southampton, on 19 February 1600-1601. He subscribed the proclamation of James I, and at James I's coronation (25 July) he officiated as lord great chamberlain.

Towards the end of his life he lived in Cannon Row, Westminster, from which he moved before his death to a house at Newington, Middlesex. There he died on 24 June 1604; he was buried in Hackney church on 6 July. His 2nd wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Trentham of Rocester Priory, Staffordshire, was buried at Hackney on 3 January 1612-1613. By her he was father of Henry de Vere, 18th earl.

Writing

Oxford, despite his violent and perverse temper, his eccentric taste in dress, and his reckless waste of his substance, evinced a genuine interest in music, and wrote verse of much lyric beauty. Puttenham and Meres reckon him among ‘the best for comedy’ in his day; but, although he was a patron of a company of players, no specimens of his dramatic productions survive.

A sufficient number of his poems is extant, however, to corroborate Webbe's comment that he was the best of the courtier-poets in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, and ‘that in the rare devises of poetry, he may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among the rest.’ 23 lyrical pieces have been identified as his work. Most of them originally appeared in poetical anthologies signed ‘E.O.,’ or ‘E. of O.’ 7 were published in the Paradise of Dainty Devices.’ 3 poetic fragments are in England's Parnassus (1600); 2 of these, ‘Doth Sorrow fret thy Soul?’ and ‘What Plague is greater than the Grief of Mind?’ together with another beginning ‘Faction that ever dwells,’ figured in the appendix to the publisher Newman's surreptitious edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591). Others are found in Phœnix Nest (1593) or in England's Helicon, 1600 (‘The Shepherd's Commendation of his Nymph’). The earl is noticed as one of the poets from whose works unspecified extracts figured in Bodenham's Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses, 1600. The most attractive of his poems, a dialogue between the poet and Desire, was first printed imperfectly in Puttenham's ‘Art of Poesy’ (1589), and then perfectly in Breton's ‘Bower of Delights’ (1597).

Verses by Oxford ‘To the Reader,’ together with a prefatory letter from the earl's pen to the translator, were prefixed to Bedingfield's translation of Cardanus's ‘Comfort,’ 1576, which was ‘published by commandment of the right honourable the Earl of Oxenford.’ A few others of the earl's poems have been recovered by modern editors from the unprinted collection in the Rawlinson manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (No. 85). Hannah printed 5 of the earl's poems in his Courtly Poets (1885, 142-147). Dr. Grosart printed all the extant verse that has been assigned to Oxford in his Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library, 1872.

Steven W. May writes that Oxford was Elizabeth's "first truly prestigious courtier poet ... [whose] precedent did at least confer genuine respectability upon the later efforts of such poets as Sidney, Greville and Raleigh." He describes Oxford as a "competent, fairly experimental poet working in the established modes of mid-century lyric verse" and his poetry as "examples of the standard varieties of mid-Elizabethan amorous lyric". May says that Oxford’s youthful love lyrics, which have been described as experimental and innovative, "create a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court up to that time" by virtue of being lighter in tone and metre and more imaginative and free from the moralizing tone of the courtier poetry of the "drab" age, which tended to be occasional and instructive. and describes one poem, in which the author cries out against "this loss of my good name", as a "defiant lyric without precedent in English Renaissance verse".

Loss of Good Name Excerpt from The Paradise of Dainty Devises (1576) Framed in the front of forlorn hope, past all recovery, I stayless stand to abide the shock of shame and infamy. My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways, My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days; My spirits, my heart, my wit and force, in deep distress are drowned, The only loss of my good name, is of these griefs the ground. Earl of Oxford, before 1576

May says that Oxford's poetry was "one man's contribution to the rhetorical mainstream of an evolving Elizabethan poetic" indistinguishable from "the output of his mediocre mid-century contemporaries". C. S. Lewis said that de Vere's poetry shows "a faint talent", but is "for the most part undistinguished and verbose." Nelson says that "contemporary observers such as Harvey, Webbe, Puttenham, and Meres clearly exaggerated Oxford's talent in deference to his rank. By any measure, his poems pale in comparison with those of Sidney, Lyly, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson." He says that his known poems are "astonishingly uneven" in quality, ranging from the "fine" to the "execrable".

Recognition

File:Paradise of Dainty Devices.jpg

Eight poems by Oxford were published in The Paradise of Dainty Devises (1576)

A stream of dedications attests to Oxford's intellectual reputation and his lifelong patronage of writers, musicians and actors. Stephen May terms Oxford 'a nobleman with extraordinary intellectual interests and commitments', whose biography exhibits a 'lifelong devotion to learning'. Of the 33 works dedicated to him, 40 percent (13) were original or translated works of literature, which May says suggest he was more sought out for patronage by literary writers—as opposed to religious or scientific writers—than other patrons of similar means.

Oxford also had a high reputation as a poet amongst his contemporaries, and his verses were published in several poetry miscellanies. Of his 16 canonical poems, his modern editor Steven May says that they are the "output of a competent, fairly experimental poet working in the established modes of mid-century lyric verse."

A portrait of Oxford is at Welbeck, and has been reproduced in Mr. Fairfax Murray's catalogue of the pictures there (1894, p. 147). Another portrait — a small bust — was lent by Dr. John Harley to the Tudor Exhibition in 1890.

Shakespeare authorship question

Main article: Shakespeare authorship question

In Shakespeare Identified, published in 1920, J. Thomas Looney, an English schoolteacher, proposed Oxford as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works. His theory was based on perceived analogies between Oxford's life and poetic techniques in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. It supplanted an earlier popular theory involving Francis Bacon. Academic consensus rejects alternative candidates for authorship, including Oxford.

Publications

Poetry

• The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (edited by J. Thomas Looney). London: Cecil Palmer, 1921.

See also

"In Praise of a Contented Mind" by Edward De Vere (poetry reading)

• List of British poets

References

• Akrigg, G.P.V. (1968), Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, Harvard University Press 
• Beebee, Thomas O. (1999), Epistolary fiction in Europe, 1500–1850, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-62275-2, http://books.google.com/books?id=rFRWopIBqGwC 
• Bell, Sandra; Loughlin, Marie; Brace, Patricia (2011), "Anne Cecil de Vere, Countess of Oxford (156-1588)", The Broadview Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose, Broadview Press, pp. 605–607 
• Bennell, John (2004), "Hester, John (d. 1592),", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Bergeron, David M. (2007), "Stocker, Thomas (fl. 1563–1593)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Bergeron, David M. (2007), "Munday, Anthony (bap. 1560, d. 1633)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Bossy, John (1959), "English Catholics and the French Marriage, 1577–1581", Recusant History 5: pp. 2–16 
• Braden, Gordon (2005), Sixteenth-century poetry: an annotated anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-0116-5, http://books.google.com/books?id=VVrKcj1Ki2QC&pg=PA138 
• Chambers, E. K. (2009) [1923], The Elizabethan Stage, Volume 2, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-956749-2, http://books.google.com/books?id=6GfiLPVfrjEC 
• Chambers, E. K. (1936), Sir Henry Lee; An Elizabethan Portrait, Clarendon Press 
• Cokayne, George Edward (G.E.C.) (1945), The Complete Peerage, X, St Catherine Press, pp. 247–254 
• Greaves, Richard L. (2007), "Munday, Anthony (bap. 1560, d. 1633)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Gurr, Andrew (1996). The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812977-7. 
• Hurstfield, Joel (1958), The Queen's Wards, Longmans, Green, pp. 249–256 
• Jones, N.G. (2008), "Kelke, Roger (1523/4–1576)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Kennedy, Kathleen E. (2008), "Brooke, John (d.1582)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Larkin, James F. & Paul L. Hughes (1973), Stuart Royal Proclamations Volume I, Clarendon Press 
•  Lee, Sidney (1899) "Vere, Edward de" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 58 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 225-229 
• Loades, David (1989), Mary Tudor: A Life, Basil Blackwell, pp. 181–184 
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1984), The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham, Royal Historical Society 
• May, Steven W. (Winter 1980), "The Poems of Edward DeVere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex", Studies in Philology (University of North Carolina Press) 77 (5) 
• May, Steven W. (1991), The Elizabethan courtier poets: the poems and their contexts, University of Missouri Press, ISBN 978-0-8262-0749-4, http://books.google.com/books?id=2QRaAAAAMAAJ 
• May, Steven W. (2004), "The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford as poet and playwright", Tennessee Law Review (Tennessee Law Review Association) 72: 221–254 
• May, Steven W. (2007), "Earlier Courtier Verse: Oxford, Dyer, and Gascoigne", in Cheney, Patrick; et al, Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, Oxford University Press, pp. 60–69 
• Nelson, Alan H. (2003), Monstrous Adversary: the life of Edward de Vere,17th Earl of Oxford, Liverpool University Press, ISBN 978-0-85323-678-8, http://books.google.com/books?id=WcfiqlOjEKoC 
• Nelson, Alan H. (2004), "Edward deVere", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 13 Oct 2010., http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28208 
• Nichols, John (1828), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, I, J.B. Nichols 
• Paul, Christopher (September 2006), "Shorter Notices: Edward de Vere (1550–1604): The Crisis and Consequences of Wardship", English Historical Review 121: pp. 1173–1174, http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/CXXI/493.toc 
• Pearson, Daphne (2005), Edward de Vere (1550–1604): The Crisis and Consequences of Wardship, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., ISBN 978-0-7546-5088-1, http://books.google.com/books?id=Ep_GHLFWQXkC 
• Peck, Dwight (October 1978), "Raleigh, Sidney, Oxford, and the Catholics, 1579", Notes and Queries(new Series) 23 (nos.5–6): 427–431, http://www.dpeck.info/write/raleigh.htm 
• PRO (1966) [1939], Calendar of the patent rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Elizabeth [I]. Vol. 5, 1569–72., HMSO 
• Purnell, Edward Kelly (1904), Magdalene College, F.E. Robinson, pp. 67–72, http://books.google.com/books?id=bDI4AAAAMAAJ 
• Puttenham, George (1936, reprinted 1970), Willcock, Doidge Willcock; Walker, Alice, eds., The Arte of English Poesie, Cambridge University Press 
• Schoenbaum, S. (1991), Shakespeare’s Lives, 2nd ed., Clarendon, ISBN 978-0-19-818618-2 
• Shapiro, Michael (2009), "Early (Pre-1590) Boy Companies and their Acting Venues", in Dutton, Richard, The Oxford handbook of early modern theatre, Oxford University Press, pp. 120–135, ISBN 978-0-19-928724-6, http://books.google.com/books?id=VPhhpw6LLTIC&pg=PA120&dq 
• Smith, Alan G.R. (1977), Servant of the Cecils; The Life of Sir Michael Hickes, 1543–1612, Jonathan Cape, pp. 87–88 
• Smith, Irwin M. (1964), Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse; Its History and Its Design, New York University Press, http://books.google.com/books?id=LDRaAAAAMAAJ 
• Somerset, Alan (2009), "Not Just Sir Oliver Owlet: From Patrons to 'Patronage' of Early Modern Theatre", in Dutton, Richard, The Oxford handbook of early modern theatre, Oxford University Press, pp. 343–62, ISBN 978-0-19-928724-6, http://books.google.com/books?id=VPhhpw6LLTIC&&pg=PA343&dq#v 
• Ungerer, Gustav (2004), "Baker, George (1540–1612)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 
• Ward, Bernard M. (1928), The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550–1604: From Contemporary Documents, John Murray, http://books.google.com/books?id=pI5pAAAAMAAJ&q 

External links

Poems

• Index entry for Edward de Vere at Poets' Corner
• Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford de Vere at Poetry Nook (7 poems)
• The Poems of Edward de Vere, Shakespeare Oxford Society

Books

• Poems of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford at Amazon.com

About

• Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Edward de Vere at Biography.com
• Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604) at Luminarium.
• De Vere's Patronage of Theater at Patrons and Performances
• De Vere authorship argument at Absolute Shakespeare

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Vere, Edward de