Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere & Personal Clues in Shakespeare Poems and Sonnets: Two Books by Gerald H. Rendall in One Volume

Gerald H. Rendall (1851-1945) may not be a familiar name to modern-day scholars in England or America (unless they’ve read carefully through Oxfordian books like Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare), but in his day, Rendall was a giant among Oxfordians and among scholars of the classics in general. His translations of Marcus Aurelius, Julian the Apostate, and Minucius Felix were published by Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. Rendall was a founding faculty member (and Gladstone Professor of Greek) at the University of Liverpool, Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University, Manchester; and Headmaster of Charterhouse School, whose tutors and students included mountaineer George Mallory and poet Robert Graves.Rendall’s high standing among educators meant that when he became interested in the Oxfordian Shakespeare theory, then published books expressing his belief in the new paradigm, people took notice. Blessed with a long, healthy life, extending from before the Crimean War almost till the end of World War Two, Rendall was invited by Colonel Bernard R. Ward to give what amounted to keynote remarks at the Shakespeare Fellowship’s first annual dinner, April 12, 1930, shortly following publication of his Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere. (Rendall was nearly eighty years old by the time of both events.) It was Rendall's book that convinced Sigmund Freud to “go public” (to some extent) with his own pro-Oxfordian beliefs, first arrived at upon reading Looney’s Shakespeare Identified.It should be no surprise (yet remains astounding) how quickly big reputations dissolve rather than crystallize in our 24/7 Internet world; so even Rendall’s books fell out of print and out of collective memory. Thanks to James A. Warren’s untiring efforts, Rendall’s two principal Oxfordian books, Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere & Personal Clues in Shakespeare Poems and Sonnets, are republished and revitalized in one volume, from Veritas Press. We learn from Warren’s meticulous editing–and especially from his comprehensive introduction–how Rendall’s writings champion Edward de Vere as Shakespeare. We also learn how the Sonnets and other poems, with the great dramas form a coherent whole.As always, James Warren delivers an eloquent introduction, defining precisely what makes Rendall’s books on the Sonnets extra special, even apart from their championing the Oxford-Shakespeare case. Warren points to “the grandeur of Rendall’s writing, the sweep of his knowledge of the Elizabethan era [and] the persuasiveness of his evidence and reasoning.”Rendall’s good reasoning is due in part to exceptional skill at close reading of the Sonnets and other works. Here is a sample:[On Sonnet 30:]When to the sessions of sweet silent thoughtI summon up remembrance of things past.The exquisite overture admits us to the background of the experiences out of which the sonnets grew. To the plain man it supplies the key of authorship. To those who explain this and the rest of the sonnets as dramatic fiction, invented [solely] for the exercise of creative skill…instinct has the right to turn an incredulous ear, but if that is not enough, it may put the plain questions: Why? To what end? For whom, or what audience, were they composed?...Read as a sincere and moving cri-de-coeur, they reveal a man past middle age, whose weather-beaten life had outlived the storms of passion, loss of friends, bereavements of his dearest, who looking back could number up wastes of expenditure, squandered resources, the loss of much that was most prized, and whose relief from sad brooding upon past mistakes and grievances and woes lies in his identifying himself with his whole heart in the fortunes and well-being of the friend he loved. [This sonnet] is a faithful transcript, not weakened by reproaches or self-pity, of the life of the Earl of Oxford, up to the time when he passed into the quiet backwaters of his sheltered period, intended to express how much this new opening in the affections meant for his own happiness in life.If the while I think on thee, dear friend,All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.Warren also explains Rendall’s larger conception of what such faithful transcripts reveal: a unity of sequence, placing the sonnets in a timeline of events, Oxford’s own life events and those of the Elizabethan world. Second, a unity of authorship: “the author of the sonnets was also the author of the plays and poems. Whoever wrote any of them wrote all of them.” Third, linkages between the sonnets and Oxford’s early poems plus, fourth, their sense of “fit” into the early stages of the biography that foreshadow the sonnets’ accomplishment (if I understand the argument). What we perceive is a “fourfold unity” that makes Rendall’s analysis potent for us, as it convinced many readers in 1930.Warren’s introduction also serves as the analytical outline of this first book and Rendall’s second book on the Sonnets, which examines the later sonnets in more detail than the first book allowed. What makes Warren’s intro so effective is that he tempers his abundant praise for Rendall’s passion and scholarship with indications of where Rendall could have gone further. Having established that the Sonnets are in a sense a veiled autobiography, and that, say, Sonnet 107 comments on Queen Elizabeth’s passing in 1603, or that Sonnet 26 points directly to “Shakespeare’s” 1593 dedication of Lucrece, how much farther could Rendall have extended his tabulation of the events behind each sonnet, or worked to grasp a possible organizing scheme to the sequence?Warren believes recent work by Hank Whittemore demonstrates that the Fair Youth of the Sonnets was the royal offspring of a relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Oxford, with a direct claim to the succession (his illegitimacy notwithstanding). Moreover, writes Whittemore, the entire sequence of sonnets amounts to a fully designed, quasi-pyramidal hidden narrative of Southampton’s thwarted career as a potential “Henry the Ninth”—and Oxford’s futile efforts to undo the consequences of his son’s failings.This belief in a royal love-child’s birth and sovereign prospects, underpinning the Sonnets, was a matter Rendall was deeply unwilling to investigate, also a matter that provoked great dissent with Oxfordian ranks. Yet Rendall was fully convinced that the Fair Youth was the Earl of Southampton, something not agreed upon by all early Oxfordians (many, such as Percy Allen and Bernard M. Ward, came around to that view later), and Southampton is the person usually connected with the very real court whispers about a hidden prince of the blood.One mystery surrounding the book: despite his intransigence on what Warren has called in places, Rendall exhibits a notable lack of censoriousness about Elizabethan sexual practices, whether of Shakespeare-Oxford, the Fair Youth, or the Dark Lady, and this enlightened attitude is remarkable in a scholar born a Victorian. It is also evidence that Rendall had what Warren calls an “informed imagination,” the trait of historians who know the past is a place where people do things differently.Warren’s new edition of Rendall’s masterpieces will be especially useful to readers connecting that edition with other republished Oxfordian books. At the time, Stratfordian Muriel St. Clare Byrne disputed Rendall’s assertion that the Sonnets’ references to chests of household “treasure” or wardrobes of sumptuous garments were unique to noble families, and in this she may have had a decent point. Yet Rendall is looking for evidence, patterns of noble behavior, high social standing, and proud possession, pointing to De Vere as Shakespeare. Taken as a whole, Shakespeare’s household images, at least for me, seem to tip over into an aristocrat’s lifestyle, at least when augmented by the references to spirited horses and falconry. Nothing here suggests Will Shakspere’s New Place in Stratford, which only boasts a mulberry tree and a silver-gilt bowl–and second-best bed for poor Anne.Moreover, St. Clare Byrne, whose review is printed in Warren’s new edition, seems especially off base when commenting on “Shakespeare’s” references to perfumes, claiming rightly that every middle-class woman was likely to have a “still room” stocked with perfumes to cover up unhygienic smells and too-infrequent baths—but peremptorily rejecting other implications.But this is where other Oxfordian books from Warren’s Veritas Press can help. In Educating Shakespeare, Stephanie Hopkins Hughes gives a succinct discussion of “Shakespeare’s” scientific knowledge. That knowledge overlooks nothing, embracing awareness of exactly where the perfume “stilleries” were located, with their cutting-edge “alembic” vessels in which crushed aromatic flower petals were chemically converted into sweet liquid scent, employing the latest Paracelsian pharmacology. The terms are wielded with easy confidence in the Sonnets–with a nobleman’s assurance, or “sprezzatura.”Taken together, Rendall’s great works, Hughes’s Educating Shakespeare, Percy Allen’s multiple takes on who Shakespeare was and what he knew, Captain Bernard M. Ward’s pioneer biography of Edward de Vere, and the founding Oxfordian book, J. Thomas Looney’s Shakespeare Identified, reveal an Elizabethan world utterly unknown to the orthodox thinkers who invented the cozy Stratford-on-Avon theme park and its gossamer-thin mythos.