Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare's Co-Author

Mark Bradbeer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000567212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents original material which indicates that Aemilia Lanyer – female writer, feminist, and Shakespeare contemporary – is Shakespeare's hidden and arguably most significant co-author. Once dismissed as the mere paramour of Shakespeare's patron, Lord Hunsdon, she is demonstrated to be a most articulate forerunner of #MeToo fury.

Building on previous research into the authorship of Shakespeare's works, Bradbeer offers evidence in the form of three case studies which signal Aemilia's collaboration with Shakespeare. The first case study matches the works of "George Wilkins" – who is currently credited as the co-author of the feminist Shakespeare play Pericles (1608) – with Aemilia Lanyer's writing style, education, feminism and knowledge of Lord Hunsdon's secret sexual life. The second case-study recognizes Titus Andronicus (1594), a play containing the characters Aemilius and Bassianus, to be a revision of the suppressed play Titus and Vespasian (1592), as authored by the unmarried pregnant Aemilia Bassano, as she then was. Lastly, it is argued that Shakespeare's clowns, Bottom, Launce, Malvolio, Dromio, Dogberry, Jaques, and Moth, arise in her deeply personal war with the misogynist Thomas Nashe. Each case study reveals new aspects of Lanyer's feminist activism and involvement in Shakespeare's work, and allows for a deeper analysis and appreciation of the plays.

This research will prove provocative to students and scholars of Shakespeare studies, English literature, literary history, and gender studies.

1Shakespeare’s Patron and Female Friend

DOI: 10.4324/9781003221203-1

William Shakespeare is enigmatic. Is he the brooding Prince Hamlet or the self-serving, garrulous Falstaff; the hapless Lord Berowne or the hero-in-love Romeo Montague; the lost Pericles or the loyal bastard, Falconbridge; the witty, prickly Beatrice or the metrosexual Rosalind? We don’t know. But in the first attempted biography of Shakespeare in 1709, Nicholas Rowe acknowledged Shakespeare’s “favour and friendship from the Earl of Southampton,”¹ and evidence suggests that “Shakespeare had only one known patron, namely Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.”² Whereas William Shakespeare’s life as a writer is opaque,³ we know a lot about Wriothesley and he might offer some insight into the writer.⁴ With a focus on Shakespeare’s patron and his contemporaries, and not Rowe’s impoverished standard biography of 1709, one might discover more about Shakespeare.

Henry Wriothesley (1573–1624), Earl of Southampton, was nine years younger than William Shakespeare (1564–1616). According to peerage records, the name Wriothesley was traditionally pronounced “Wrosely,” or “Rose-ley,”⁵ and contemporary scholars agree.⁶ Later, when their son, Thomas, was baptised on the 2nd of April 1607, the parents were recorded as “Henry and Eliz. Wroseley, Erle and Countess of Southampton.”⁷ In this book also, this Henry Wriothesley will be referred to as “Wroseley,” and considered to be pronounced as Roseley.

When Henry Wroseley, himself, was only four years old, Wroseley’s parents became estranged.⁸ When his 36-year-old father died in 1581, there were no grandfathers or uncles on his father’s side to help. But his mother, Mary Browne Wriothesley, was supported by her own Browne family. Her father was the Lord Montague, Sir Anthony Browne (1528–1592), and Henry Wroseley was his first grandson. Lord Montague had a distinguished horseman’s heritage, as suggested by his name-sakes in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 The Tudor Heritage of Lord Browne and Henry Wroseley

Wroseley’s Ancestors	Position	Wroseley’s
Sir Anthony Browne (d.1506) Sir Anthony Browne (c.1500–1548) Sir Anthony Browne (1528–1592)	Standard Bearer of England Standard Bearer of England/Master of Horse Standard Bearer of England/Master of Horse	GGG-father GG-father G-father

When his father died, Wroseley became the 3rd Earl of Southampton at the age of seven years. The Lord High Treasurer, William Cecil, who from 1571 was styled Lord Burghley, became Wroseley’s guardian (losing one’s father even if not one’s mother, accounted one an orphan). Henry Wroseley was schooled at Cecil House in The Strand until he was 12. There, he probably met other orphan boys, some of whom, with Wroseley, would come to be involved in the Essex Rising of 1601 (such as Roger, Francis, and George Manners). He spent four years at Cambridge from 1585 to 1589. In 1586, the 13-year-old Earl sent a letter to his guardian demonstrating his skill at Latin and writing: Igitur laboriosa juventutis studia sunt, jucunda senectuti otia, meaning “study hard in youth and enjoy leisure in old age.”⁹ If this might be taken as a sign of happy compliance with his guardian’s wishes, it was a situation that would change.

During the Armada crisis of 1588, Wroseley’s grandfather, Sir Anthony Browne, mustered, mounted, and armed a cavalry of 200 horsemen who paraded before the Queen at the Tilbury Army Camp. This cavalry included Anthony Browne (1552–1592), who was Wroseley’s mother’s twin brother, and his fourteen years old son, Anthony Browne (1574–1629). Wroseley was five months older than his cousin. Wroseley also wanted to be a soldier.

In March of 1591, the 17-year-old Wroseley wrote a letter to the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, who was about to lead an army to France in support of the King of Navarre. The relevant part of the letter begged to be party to the adventure:

… the profession of service which I have heretofore verbally made unto your Lordship, which howsoever in itself it is of small value, my hope is, seeing it wholly proceed from a true respect borne to your worth, and from one who hath no better present to make you than the offer of himself to be disposed of by your commandment.¹⁰

Wroseley had escaped his guardian’s supervision and this letter was sent from Dieppe, France, where he was awaiting the arrival of the gallant Essex and his army. The impetuous youth was an impatient five months too early for the arrival of the Essex. The Queen herself intervened and had Wroseley recalled to England.

According to his biographer, Charlotte Stopes, the teenage Wroseley’s “first love came in the shape of a man: his heart had no room as yet for the love of a woman.”¹¹ That man was Essex, who had also been an orphan and former pupil of Cecil House. The Queen expressly forbade Wroseley from fighting alongside Essex at Cadiz (1596), but by 1597, he was allowed to join him on the military voyage to raid the Spanish outpost on the Azores Islands, and then also to accompany Essex on the military campaign in Ireland in 1598. When Essex appointed him to be the Master of the Horse, Wroseley was no doubt pleased to be continuing a Browne tradition.

Another report from Ireland mentioned that Southampton was seen affectionately embracing another soldier in his tent.¹²

Wroseley’s sexuality was not straightforward, but he was England’s most eligible bachelor in all other respects. His wife would be a Countess. Henry Wroseley would inherit great wealth and many estates when he turned 21 in 1594, but as an only son, he needed children to inherit it. In 1592, as if to highlight “never-resting Time” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 5, line 5), Wroseley’s world was shaken by the deaths of his mother’s father and her twin brother.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the canny William Cecil planned with Wroseley’s mother for the young earl to be married to Cecil’s granddaughter. But in 1590, Wroseley’s mother reported to Cecil that she did “not find a disposition in my son to be tied as yet.”¹³ By the time Wroseley attained his majority in 1594, he asserted his independence from his interfering guardian by declining to marry his granddaughter. Cecil’s attempts to ingratiate himself to Wroseley as his guardian, headmaster, and potential future grandfather-in-law, had failed. Wroseley’s adamance was to cost him: he is reported to have paid Cecil a fine of 5000 pounds.¹⁴

Wroseley was rich, very handsome – some might say androgenous – and he patronised the theatre, where he would be everywhere known and noticed. The original, calculating Polonius of Hamlet (1603), called Corambis in the early quartos, is thought to be a parody of William Cecil, Wroseley’s boyhood guardian. Cecil’s Latin motto was Cor unum una, meaning “one heart, one way,” whereas Corambis pointedly suggests “double-hearted” or duplicitous.¹⁵

From 1595, he also began courting Essex’s cousin, Elizabeth Vernon, who was also a Lady-in-Waiting for the Queen. As noted by a contemporary, Rowland Whyte, “my Lord Southampton doth with too much familiarity court the fair Ms Vernon.”¹⁶ The Queen did not approve of the match. The situation exploded in 1598. In March, just before leaving on a Grand Tour of Europe, Vernon became pregnant to Wroseley. Six months later, when the pregnancy had become visible, he discreetly returned to England and, on the 30th of August 1598, secretly married her. The marriage was without Royal consent, and he fled back to Paris to escape the Queen’s wrath, deserting his new wife to face her Majesty alone. In November, 1598, he returned to face the music and join his new family (Elizabeth and the new-born, Penelope), now in the Fleet Prison.

While perhaps bringing Wroseley and Essex closer, this marriage not only exacerbated the antipathy between Wroseley and the Queen, but also between Essex and the Queen, as he had had foreknowledge of the secret marriage. Wroseley and Essex were in disgrace even before they were sent on a military campaign to quell rebellion in Ireland the following year (i.e. 1599), and this was further exacerbated by his appointment of Wroseley as Master of the Horse in Ireland, in defiance of the Queen’s explicit orders.

Essex’s unpopularity in the Royal Court may be attributable to his popularity with the common people, as suggested by passages in Shakespeare’s Henry V, which likens him to the heroic English King of Agincourt (e.g. 3.6.78 and 5.0.29–32). When he returned from Ireland having negotiated a settlement with the Irish rebels, Essex was generally ostracized from the Royal Court. This growing alienation of the Essex (and Wroseley) faction in the Royal Court culminated in the abortive Essex Rising of the 8th of February 1601, with the consequent execution of Essex. Wroseley’s execution sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower of London. Happily, on the death of Queen Elizabeth in early 1603, King James I of England immediatel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Shakespeare's Patron and Female Friend
• Part I Collaboration Case Study #1: A Late Romance
• Part II Collaboration Case Study #2: Rewriting Rape
• Part III Collaboration Case Study #3: Immortalizing An Ass
• Part IV A Woman's Imagining
• Index