Time's Shadow

—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Visuals

…[O]ne of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works… I am firm against Shaksper. I mean the Avon man, the actor.”
                                    —Walt Whitman   

LOOK UNDER MY SHAKESPEARE NAME

A sonnet knavishly rhymed, in which Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, or Oxenford, bewails his inability, by high birth and impolitic disclosure of politics, to claim what plays he hath writ, under the pen name, William Shakespeare, whereupon cometh an ordinary Stratford man, happily named William Shakspere, under whose seeming authorship, the aforesaid plays may be published. The sonnet containeth our true author’s name, but in such a manner as may chance with courtiers, which do both rise and fall.

Evil stars in bad courses blast me dead,
Desiring silenced all that I work for.
Whatever I ache to speak, they chide me no:
A partless actor must all speech leave off,
Resentful-mute. What my love stood upon,
Designs of an English stage, in me alone
Originate, yet to one who signs his X,
X or what scribble he can make, must go
Eternal lines and name. This comes as dread
Nonsuits the great who rise and rule, yet fear
Faint semblances which satire out loud—la!—
Oily deceits and policies they speak low.
Reward avoids players and plays that lend the grand
Dark mirrors of darker deeds, that they may see.

(Previously published in the chapbook, Sinfonietta, from Rattlesnake Press, 2009) 

NOT “BORN IN A TRUNK”

Raised in a castle, Hedingham its name,
Brought up in “silk diapers”; tight-swaddled noble youth,
Inheritor of a family’s grandeur, fame,
Bred on the admonition to tell truth;

Delightfully made aware of truth by jesters,
“All-licensed fools” at table in midwinter;
Born with an ache that must be addressed or fester:
A “rage to master” poetry, sharp as a splinter,

Which finds him boarded out to Sir Thomas Smith,
A sometimes choleric, yet oft loving, patient
Mentor in multiple subjects to contend with;

Admiring a warm-spoken, distant parent
Who keeps actors, owns play-scripts writ by John Bale.
Father seems fine one day; next day, health fails…

Hedingham’s Great Hall, its long-ago emblem the Boar,
Now ready to rent for weddings. Uncork and pour! 

FORTINBRAS

Not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain.
                                             —Hamlet

In Shakespeare’s greatest play, a Danish prince
Whose name’s as meek as any English town
Confronts his alter ego: strutting frown
Whose “delicacy” and “tenderness” are chintz,
Brocade stretched over bombast. Thunder sounds
In his Norwegian name whose stride leaves dints
Befitting seven-league boots too big for hints,
Wisps, “shreds and patches” of scant wintry ground
His “resolutes” will “shark up” where peasants bleed.

While drafting his “Shakespeare” Identified,
A troubled scholar ponders the Great War,
High-water-mark of materialistic greed:
Squabbles for “eggshell” Serbias to entomb
Young unknowns—Europe’s vast charnel strips lack room.
Devoutly he hopes for the blood flood to recede
Though the ground thus exposed shows all one scar;
Hopes facing sin will restore our wiser side;
Prays Shakespeare, true-named, remains our spirit guide.

This is the man Stratford “Heads of Knowledge”† puny
Still ridicule for being surnamed Looney.*


* J. Thomas Looney, British schoolmaster, researcher and author of “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. March 4, 2020 is the centenary of publication for this book, rightly termed “the most revolutionary book on Shakespeare ever written” by James A. Warren, its modern editor.

† Yes, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust does employ an officer titled the Head of Knowledge. 

 AND SOMEDAY, MAYBE THE TITLE
 

(For Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, forced to renounce all title to the authorship of the Shakespeare plays)

“Sometimes the title is the last to come.”
      —Observation often made for students 
          by poet James Merrill


Sometimes the title is the last to come.
What need have you of title? Every day,
From lightning lines you gave us our ears hum.

Just think: “To the manner born,” “Husband, I come.”
Snatches: “things nothing worth”; “give o’er the play.”
Sometimes the title is the last to come

Or the first to go. So intricately dumb,
To dispense with lands and power as one sells plate,
But you gave us lightning lines, and our ears hum.

Your rod can reach still darker, deeper to plumb
Than world exists to be thrust through, crossed by stain:
Time’s Shadow. Sometimes the title’s the last to come,

But come it must, someday. Truth must enter, sun
Stunningly crowbar the grate of the dungeon brain.
The ears you gave those lightning lines still hum

And buzz: King Lear with mad self-knowledge numb,
That old busybody by the Dane’s sword slain,
Yet sometimes the title is the last to come.

The everlasting title taken from
You, we would restore—but that, you did convey.
Though lightning lines of yours make our ears hum,
Sometimes the title is the last to come.


(Previously posted on Medusa’s Kitchen, and published in the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Newsletter)
 

BASTARD

Help gods, help saints, help sprites and powers that in the heaven do dwell,
Help ye that are to wail, ay wont, ye howling hounds of hell…
            —Edward de Vere, from The Loss of My Good Name


The “shock of shame and infamy”
Comes early, naturally, to “Shakespeare.”
Accusing an earl of bigamy
(The 16th of the De Veres),
An unsisterly half-sister
Connives with her Baron husband
To singe the heir’s crest with a blister.

Declaring himself half-dungeoned
In dire despondency,
Young Edward de Vere must bewail
Threats to his legitimacy
From kindred unkind canaille.

Obscurely he writes of the scandal;
In verses that summon all hell
And all heaven to rout out the vandal-
Scrawled slur Dame Rumor must tell,
De Vere’s poem declaims raw emotion.
From this slander will stem fascination,
Shakespeare’s, with “bastardy,”
In King John; in King Lear, that summation
Of evils done dastardly
Yet with something of reason provoking.

In Henry the Fifth, what contempt
Reeks from the Dauphin who’s invoking
The specter, in his most verklempt
Outcry, of those rank “Norman bastards”
Just itching, he thinks, to impregnate
Virgin French girls, fresh from hazards
Conquered storming Harfleur’s gate.
Note the political context:
At least in the plays we remember,
Bastardy’s less like a subtext,
More live-glowing family ember.

CHOOSING A PROP

“I know not how the world* will censure me for choosing so strong a prop [as your lordship] to support so weak a burden…”
            —“William Shakespeare” to the Earl of Southampton,

                 prefatory letter to Venus and Adonis, 1593


He proffers his “invention’s” first-born “heir”†
To young Southampton: though censure may attach
To this weak burden, shouldered in the dare
To “choose” a noble prop on whom to latch.
That impudent word, “choosing”!...Yes, of course,
All beggars choose the rich on whom they call,
Wheedling favors they can’t hope to force.
Plead unctuously, you suitor, or appall:
Abrupt speech never cupped the clinking coin.
Yet “Shakespeare,” exempt from snub, flaunts that one taint.
Suave words, true; still, his “choosing” must bluntly join
—Too brash by half!—with a beseeching patron-plaint.
Most poets cry for help from the crème de la crème!
But will the great come when they do cry for them?


* the world = England
† invention = the “Shakespeare” name itself?

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Today’s LittleNip:

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

—George Orwell

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—Medusa, with thanks to Tom Goff for more of his poetic musings about whether Shakespeare actually wrote all those works—or was it Edward de Vere?

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