by Bart Casey
Book lovers should note that although the British Museum was indeed the repository for most of Britain’s rarest books when Stephen went there in 1992—including the Elizabethan State Papers, and the letters of the Earl of Oxford and Sir Henry Lee—that all changed with the opening of the British Library in 1998. Today’s home for those items lies about a half mile north at the library’s new campus located just between Saint Pancras and King’s Cross stations. And, sadly, most of the rare bookshops next to the British Museum have closed by now after high rents and internet bookselling cut into their trade.
Margaret’s apartment on Welbeck Street, behind Selfridges, is, in fact, in the building I grew up in back in the day. And, if you go museum-hopping in London, make sure you include a visit to the Tudor section of the National Portrait Gallery to say hello to Sir Henry Lee’s portrait and, next to it, Queen Elizabeth I’s picture showing her standing in splendor on the carpet map of Oxfordshire to memorialize the Ditchley entertainment put on for her and the court in 1592. Make sure you have lunch there, too, in the wonderful Portraits restaurant on the top floor of the NPG, with its unique panoramic views of Westminster’s rooftops, domes, and battlements.
If you investigate Oxford, you’ll find the university continues to offer popular degree courses in both Classics and English (Stephen), and English and Modern Languages (Margaret), and those degrees often land their graduates in teaching, journalism, and writing careers. And walk around the stately grounds and cloisters of Magdalen and Brasenose Colleges, both of which would be likely homes at Oxford for the students lucky enough to be studying for their degrees in languages and classics.
Finally, if you go to Stratford-upon-Avon in search of Shakespeare, you should be able to find a hotel like the one described near Trinity Church and the imposing Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, where the Royal Shakespeare Company does indeed run school workshops to let students experience what it’s like to perform one of Shakespeare’s plays.
2. About Sir Henry Lee and Anne Vavasour. Unlike fictional Stephen and Margaret, Sir Henry and Anne are very real historical characters.
Sir Henry Lee. The details of Sir Henry’s story are all true as told in the book. Officially, he was the son of Anthony Lee and Margaret Wyatt, born in 1533. However, in the 1680s, the sensationalist antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey included in his notebooks (later published as Brief Lives) the rumor that Sir Henry was the “supposed brother of Queen Elizabeth,” implying he was actually an illegitimate child of King Henry VIII.
His more scholarly biographer, Sir Edmund Chambers, later thought this connection “unlikely,” although he did not totally dismiss the possibility. Instead, he allowed that Sir Henry was extremely “lucky.” First, when he inherited his family’s properties at age fourteen, he left his schooling by his uncle Sir Thomas Wyatt, and went directly into the service of the king. No doubt his manly skills of hunting and riding in knightly splendor had their beginnings in those days. As he grew, he seemed immune to the dangerous twists and turns that bedeviled the English aristocracy and gentry as King Henry went through six wives and made a chaos of state religion, alternating between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. Then, his immunity continued as King Henry’s children Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth followed their father onto the throne. Through it all, Sir Henry remained on center stage, unwavering in his service of whichever monarch happened to be in power. He even made a smooth transition as power shifted from the House of Tudor to the House of Stuart when James VI of Scotland came to London as King James I of England after Elizabeth died. And it was very unusual for a “commoner” knight to be admitted to the Order of the Garter as something of an equal of the aristocrats and monarchs who were the ones usually honored as Garter knights, such as King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway.
In 1590, when he was a widower about age fifty-seven, he did indeed retire as Elizabeth’s personal champion at the joust, and he invited Anne Vavasour, then about age twenty-seven, to join him as his mistress and de facto wife, a situation which would have been well known to Queen Elizabeth, who had banished Anne from court about nine years before. And historians agree that his Ditchley entertainment of the queen and court in 1592, with its famous commemorative portrait of Elizabeth standing on Oxfordshire, was designed to seek the tacit approval of Elizabeth for his unusual housing arrangement, which he did achieve. Furthermore, it is true that King James I and Crown Prince Harry were frequent guests of Sir Henry for hunting at Ditchley, and James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, liked to chat away there with Mistress Anne, commemorating one well-documented visit by sending a precious jewel to Sir Henry’s “dearest dear” as a token of their friendship.
I could not verify that Sir Henry (and Anne) were at the special Order of the Garter investiture service for the queen’s brother, King Christian, which took place on August 7, 1606, but it is at least plausible since Sir Henry was a current Garter knight and was frequently in the company of the King and Queen. In addition, he had missed the annual Garter ceremonies in April of that year due to an illness that he had recovered from by summer, and he may have wanted to reassert his place at court. The actual attendees of King Christian’s investiture are not listed in the record of that event in the Garter archives at Windsor Castle, but it is noted that the royal party retired for the evening to Hampton Court that very day, and many Shakespeare scholars believe the first performance of Macbeth took place on the same evening, although others disagree. It is, of course, fiction that Anne actually edited and performed in that performance, but I like to think it is perhaps just within the realm of possibilities.
Anne Vavasour. I did have to take more liberties with Anne’s own history, because she has not attracted the same degree of biographical attention as Sir Henry through the years. Quite simply, all the biographies are about him, and not about her.
As a result, I had to speculate that Anne would have been tutored according to the precepts of Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s own tutor. This is plausible, however, since the Knyvet family who sponsored her to court made careful plans for Anne to be shaped as a companion to the queen, and Ascham’s techniques had just been published when Anne began her schooling as a child.
It is, however, sadly true that in 1581 Anne did give birth to a boy in the “maidens’ chamber” provided for Elizabeth’s closest attendants at court. She was seventeen years old, and instantly became the delicious scandal of the season. Making it even better was the fact that the father was the pretentious Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who was then estranged from his wife Anne Cecil, the daughter of Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley. As a result, the earl was mocked and Anne was roasted and ridiculed as the Monica Lewinsky of her time. Meanwhile, the Knyvet family remained fiercely loyal to Anne, and took revenge on the Earl of Oxford by inflicting a wound on him during a duel. That kept Edward de Vere lame for life.
Nine years later, when Sir Henry retired in 1590, he completed Anne’s rescue from what must have been a difficult life as an unwed mother, treating her as his wife with love and luxury for the next twenty years. And when he died, at almost age eighty, he tied up his considerable fortune so Anne could have the use of it (and several of his estates) for the period of sixty years, or until her death, the exact date of which is not known but is rumored to be 1654. He had no surviving close relatives.
Anne would have still been in her forties when this bequest occurred in 1611, and for years she fought off the unsuccessful attempts by distant family members of Sir Henry to grab the money, as legal records attest. But, no one has followed the trail of Anne and her money past the 1620s, when she was fined for bigamy. I did, however, find the path for learning more, starting at the imposing National Archives facility at Kew outside London and at New College, Oxford—and I may resume following Anne’s trail at a later date. That process will not be easy, however, since the relevant legal documents are composed in both Elizabethan English and Latin, and most are written in the difficult-to-read secretary style of ha
ndwriting. And I have already learned it is an expensive business to hire today’s paleographic scholars to translate and interpret these records since the files sit all mixed up and out of order in boxes undisturbed for the last 400 years
or so.
But both of Anne’s illegitimate sons did well. Edward Vere, her scandalous son by the Earl of Oxford, kept in close touch both with his mother and the de Vere family, and went on to distinction as a soldier. He first surfaces in records at the University of Leyden at age fifteen. Two or three years later, he served in the Netherlands under the command of Sir Francis Vere, the Earl’s cousin. He was knighted by King James I in 1607 for his military service and was a witness to the will of Sir Henry Lee in 1611. Later he was a renowned scholar and Member of Parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1623. A letter from the period describes him as a soldier and scholar, noting he was “all summer in the field, all winter in his study.” Unfortunately, he was killed when he was shot through the back of the head with a cannonball after showing the Prince of Orange around the fortifications at the Siege of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands in 1629. English troops were supporting the Dutch there against the Spanish.
And Thomas Freeman Vavasour—Anne’s natural son with Sir Henry—became a Yeoman at the Tower of London by 1607, went on to be knighted by King James, and received an annuity of forty pounds per year in Sir Henry’s will, as well as some silver-plated pieces that had been given him as a gift at his christening.
Finally, I have to admit that it is pure fiction that the location of Anne’s tomb is known, or that any buried manuscripts were discovered there. Sadly, all of that is fiction.
3(a). About Shakespeare. In most bookstores, Shakespeare is the only author with his own section. Schoolchildren throughout the world have been made to read one or more of his plays, all of which have been translated into every language. Probably everyone reading this now has seen at least one or two of his plays performed. And each year, scholars grind out hundreds, if not thousands of articles about him.
That’s why many people find it surprising to learn that there remain questions about who actually wrote the works attributed to “the Stratford Man” William Shakespeare. It was no accident that Sir Edmund Chambers entitled his masterful 1930 two-volume biography of the bard William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Indeed, the topic of the “Shakespeare authorship question” is perhaps the most curious and colorful corner of English literature studies, filled with insane conspiracy theories, name calling, and loud shouting.
The main stumbling block seems to be that the few solid facts remaining from the records of Shakespeare’s life are not what one might expect to be the pedigree of the world’s greatest author. He was neither well-born nor well-educated. In fact, he was the son of what might be called “middle class” parents in a small country town. His father signed documents with an “X,” and although in mid-career John Shakespeare rose to the high office of bailiff in Stratford, he then encountered difficulties and, at the end, avoided church because he was in danger of being arrested there for his debts.
There is no record of William’s schooling, but speculation continues that he probably went to the local school in Stratford, which would have been a very good start. However, there are reports that he was taken out of school early so he could help out at home, which Chambers thinks may have been true, based on his father’s difficulties. William appears next in the local records applying for a marriage license when he was eighteen years old and christening his first child six months later. Twins followed in 1585 when he was aged twenty—and then things go quiet for a little over seven “lost” years, about which many unsubstantiated theories have been constructed to help explain his later achievements.
He next seems to be mentioned by a satirist in 1592 as an actor called “Shake-scene” in London, and in the following year his actual name starts appearing regularly in the lists of players and authors active on the Elizabethan stage. A Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice all most likely appeared (along with several others) between 1592 and 1597.
It is universally agreed that the sonnets, longer poems, and plays attributed to him show great familiarity and skill with the technicalities of the legal profession, and also provide startling insights into the characters, behaviors, and oratory of soldiers, aristocrats, and rulers. Oddly, while some of his fellow writers had academic and professional credentials—for example, Christopher Marlowe had six years at Cambridge and Thomas Dekker was a lawyer—Shakespeare had none, which is a problem for many.
In spite of all that, he must have been doing well financially at his writing because by 1597 his name is also back at home in the Stratford records as having to pay a fine related to his purchase of one of the finest houses in the town, which was called New Place. Then, for a dozen more years he wrote more of his greatest hits—including Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and more—apparently dividing his time between London and Stratford. Around 1610, biographer Chambers writes that he seemed to return to his hometown more permanently, and there he is actively recorded as paying fines, pursuing people to repay their debts to him, and making land transactions while writing about one play per year until 1613, followed by two years of silence. Then, in 1616, came his final illness, will, and death. No letters or correspondence from him have ever been found; no one wrote down stories about visiting or interacting with him; nor were any books ever mentioned among his belongings.
As a result, several differing opinions as to the real author of Shakespeare have been expressed over the years. Most people seem to accept “the Stratford Man” William Shakespeare as the author, while admitting that it is remarkable his writing scaled such heights from his humble beginnings. I tend to agree with this, even though the achievement does seem amazing. One distinguished professor said that it was as if Shakespeare arrived here on a spaceship from another planet, and then transformed his period drama from wooden religious morality plays into full-scale psychological stream of consciousness exposés of the inner workings of our minds.
Others have doubts. Henry James said he was “haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.” Along with Mark Twain, James thought the well-born, well-educated, and highly credentialed Sir Francis Bacon was just as likely a candidate to be the true author. Sigmund Freud thought so as well. Yet others have argued that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford—and Anne Vavasour’s seducer—is the true author, and a society called “The Shakespeare Fellowship” began publishing mountains of material to support this view back in 1922. Several books by members in support of de Vere by the American Ogburn family, parents and son, have more recently contributed over 2,000 pages of explanations, and the debate continues. Personally, I think the most damning evidence against Oxford as Shakespeare are the few poems that are factually known to have been penned by him, since they are not nearly up to Shakespeare’s mark.
Then, there are the ongoing investigations in search of Shakespeare’s handwriting. In The Vavasour Macbeth, I describe the only proven examples of Shakespeare’s writing—the six signatures taken from his will and a few real estate related transactions. I also explain the excitement that really does exist around the manuscript of the old play Sir Thomas More, which many believe contains 140 lines of text written by Shakespeare himself amid all the other improvements attempted by the collection of play doctors trying to whip the play into good enough shape to be approved by the censors—which ultimately did not happen.
I included all of these uncertainties to suggest to you, the reader, just how important and valuable the fictional examples of Shakespeare-related materials from Anne Vavasour’s tomb would be today—certainly valuable enough for murder. And, having seen some of the mountains of unread Elizabethan period manuscripts stored in various archives and libraries in Britain, I can promise you more documents and facts a
bout Shakespeare might very well surface someday, so stay tuned for that.
3(b). About Macbeth. We are very fortunate that in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, two of the bard’s friends and fellow actors—John Heminge (or Heminges) and Henry Condell—decided to collect and publish thirty-six of his plays in a large oversize edition that has come to be called Shakespeare’s First Folio. While most of the plays in that collection did have earlier solo editions, Macbeth did not—and the version of the play in the First Folio is the only version to have survived.
Describing the surviving text of Macbeth, Sir Edmund Chambers called it “unsatisfactory” because of “rehandling” and “interpolation.” In other words, someone had been fiddling around with the text. Noting that it is exceedingly short—2,106 lines compared to Hamlet’s more than 4,000 lines—he goes on to explain how it shows signs of being abridged and adapted from a lost version which perhaps was longer and more complete. In addition, two songs have been lobbed into the scenes with the witches (only their titles are indicated in the First Folio—you have to look elsewhere in search of the complete words to the songs). Also, a stage direction to “ring the bell” has been incorporated into the spoken lines of the play, possibly due to typesetter confusion. Finally, some readers—such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge—believe that someone other than the original author added the scene with a drunken porter mumbling around while answering knocking at the castle’s gate after King Duncan’s bloody murder as comic relief.
Because of these observations by reputable authorities, I decided to make the missing longer version of Macbeth the most important fictional document discovered in the tomb of Anne Vavasour. To bolster this invention, I also had Margaret and Stephen come across the real surviving prompting scroll for Orlando Furioso (a play contemporary to Macbeth) from the papers of period actor Edward Alleyn. That real scroll does show evidence that a longer version of Orlando Furioso was lost compared with the shortened version, which is the only one surviving today.
