“Shakespeare” & The Ornaments of Virtue

Part I

Copyright 2023, Jonathan Jackson

Five time Emmy award actor-writer Jonathan S. Jackson is a poet, author, and actor and winner of The Royal Literary Magazine Award Distinction of Excellence. He serves as an Associate Dean and Primary Lecturer at Theoria School of Filmmaking. Learn more at his website.

Comparing the poetry of Oxford with that of the Sidney group, we are struck with the contrast which the strength and reality of the one presents to the feebleness and unreality of the other. Each poem of his is an expression of actual experience either internal or external. [i]

Let him first study carefully all the various parallels, noting how these extend not merely to turns of expression and literary style, but to definite conceptions, sequence of ideas, figurative associations, qualities and moral dispositions. [ii] (Italics mine) – J. THOMAS LOONEY

For most of my life, I had no idea there was a question around who wrote the works of Shakespeare. Around thirteen years ago, I stumbled upon Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” By Another Name, and I was immediately intrigued. The main reason I was captivated (other than the superb writing) was intuition—an intuition which reaches back to my childhood.

When I was eleven years old, I began working on the daytime soap opera, General Hospital. The actress who played my mother, Genie Francis, gave me an antique copy of Hamlet. Although I could barely understand a word, I instinctively knew this was an important treasure, which I held in my hands. I began reading Shakespeare over the next few years, forcing myself to try and comprehend the plays, with little to moderate success. Even still, something was being imparted to me, as a young artist. A few years later, I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet and for the first time, glimpsed the dramatic and spiritual power within these works.

The next logical step was to get to know the author of these seminal works. As soon I attempted to do this, a strange feeling came over me. Artists tend to live in the land of intuition, instinct, and mystery. Oftentimes, we feel things about a story, or a character before the facts bear them out. Sometimes these instincts are correct, other times they’re not, but the process is essential.

There is a faculty within artists that must remain childlike, throughout the maturation process, otherwise the “divine spark” may be diminished by the acquisition of (left brain) information, devoid of (right brain) imagination and inspiration. Interestingly, one finds a similar dynamic in the Christian tradition, when Christ says, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3-4).

With nothing but intuition, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I approached the great author’s biography—the man from Stratford-upon-Avon. What came next was unsettling and bewildering. “This is the man who wrote these towering works of art? There’s nothing there. It’s like a shell. Who is he? I don’t feel anything from this man, which corresponds to his works. What is going on here? This is truly bizarre and inexplicable.” Even his portrait (the Martin Droeshout Engraving) felt strange and off: “That’s the face of the greatest writer in history?”  

Again, having no concept of the Authorship Question, I was forced to accept the traditional Stratfordian narrative, which intuitively felt, not only disappointing, but somewhat disturbing. Around this time, I also became fascinated with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and eventually investigated his biography.

In contrast to the Stratford man’s biography, Dostoevsky’s life increased the profundity of his works, harmonizing tragically and poignantly. This furthered the unsettling feeling around the man from Stratford, but I simply let it go.

This all changed, however, when I read “Shakespeare” By Another Name, and even though I was fairly convinced after reading Anderson’s book, I was not yet willing to fully embrace Edward de Vere as the true author of “Shakespeare”.  I was not comfortable making this leap, based on one author’s findings, no matter how compelling they were. I put the whole thing aside for years, until had I time to investigate more thoroughly.

In recent years, the Authorship Question came back into view, as I was developing the screenwriting course for Theoria Film School, in which a large portion is dedicated to Shakespearean Tragedy. I have since read several books by Roger Stritmatter, including his groundbreaking dissertation on Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible, along with other Oxfordian scholars. I have also enjoyed numerous lectures online from The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Eventually, the weight of evidence was simply too much to ignore, and I happily signed the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt.

With this condensed biography somewhat conveyed, I shall now continue with the theme of this blog: The Ornaments of Virtue, The Moral and Spiritual Vision of Edward de Vere. In the spirit of the artist and the child, I wish to ask some questions about the inner life of the great poet and dramatist—questions about virtue, conscience, beauty, faith, spirituality, and the most visceral elements of his psyche.

As Looney said in the opening quote, de Vere’s works correspond to an “actual experience either internal or external,” and a careful, sincere study of his poems reveals certain intangible “qualities and moral dispositions,” in perfect harmony with the “Shakespeare” corpus. The reflections of this essay form some of the initial questions and themes of my forthcoming book, Shakespeare and The Prophetic Soul of the Wide World, (research is ongoing and the book itself will be co-authored by Peter Strayer).      

Edward de Vere lost his father at the age of twelve and became a ward of the state. A few years later, at the age of seventeen, he killed Thomas Brincknell, while fencing. It was officially ruled an accident, although the details of the incident remain a mystery. What effect might these traumatic experiences have had on the young poet’s psychology?

When we look closely at the poems and dramas of “Shakespeare”, alongside Edward de Vere’s early poems and biography, we find the harmony of one soul and one mind; a man, a poet, an artist, keenly haunted by the highest standards of virtue, mercy, and truth. His fidelity to these transcendental realities (if not always in practice, certainly as his ideal) held him in a heightened state of awareness of his own sins—of his conscience.

J. Thomas Looney has observed that these qualities are unparalleled in Elizabethan poetry. One may find something similar in Robert Green’s repentance, perhaps, but this is not poetry, and even this has a very different quality than Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s wrestling with conscience is not puritanical; it carries the spirit of a poet—there’s nuance, subtly, exceptions, divine economy, paradox.

All these traits reveal a man of a different age; a man untimely born, for the polemical and violent Protestant-Catholic epoch of the 16th Century. There is something not quite of the ilk of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica or John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion about the Shakespeare canon. It stands outside, and even above, both reductionist traditions. Why is this the case? What influences led Edward de Vere to seek deeper expressions, mysteries, and contradictions of the human experience, both artistic and spiritual?

Robert Sean Brazil’s book Edward de Vere and the Printers reveals a pertinent clue to de Vere’s spiritual awareness: Valentine Simmes apprenticed with Henry Bynneman during the era in which Bynneman produced several books for Oxford which were presented to his wife Anne. Golden Epistles, by Geoffrey Fenton, 1582, was the third and final edition of a well printed book dedicated to Countess Oxford.

St. John Chrysostom… upon the Epistle to the Ephesians, dated Dec. 24, 1581 on the title page was another religious work dedicated to Anne Oxford. [iii]

St. John Chrysostom is one of the most revered Fathers of Greek Orthodox Christianity. De Vere’s knowledge of Ancient Greek would have made it possible for him to become acquainted, not only with Greek Philosophers and pagan literature, but also the Greek Fathers of Christianity, even those not yet translated into English.

The dedication of Chrysostom is evidence that de Vere and his wife Anne had some familiarity with Eastern Christian thought. The Greek Orthodox ethos, over the centuries, had became more distinct from the Systematic Theology of Roman Catholicism and the various Protestant Reformers in ways that would have appealed to the author of the Shakespeare works. This Eastern Christian thought is summarized by a Greek Saint of the twentieth-century, Saint Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia: “Whoever wants to become a Christian, must first become a poet.”[iv]

It’s not difficult to imagine how this ethos would resonate with the mind who wrote the works of Shake-speare.

The young Edward de Vere wrote in, Love and Antagonism:

She is my joy, she is my care and woe,

She is my pain, she is my ease therefore;

She is my death, she is my life also,

She is my salve, she is my wounded sore;

In fine, she hath the hand and knife,

That may both save and end my life.

This is a vibrant example of the ease and comfort the young poet has with paradox. Poetry, by its very nature is foreign to ideologies. The presence of ideology, propaganda, or polemics frightens poetry, as a deer in the forest is alarmed by intruders.

The Eastern Christian Tradition, which never accepted the supremacy of the Pope, maintained an essentially different emphasis or character from the West, especially following the Great Schism of 1054 AD. Whereas the Roman Church became more militaristic, juridical, and punitive, the Greek East maintained a more Semitic, experiential, paradoxical vision of Christ and the Church. These are of course, generalizations, but nevertheless, they bear some truth. In many ways, the rise of humanism and the Renaissance were attempts to recover the paradisaical vision of ancient Christianity, as John Strickland suggests in Paradise and Utopia. [vi]

For centuries, Western religious thought had been moving in the direction of dualism and rationalism, leaving behind an earlier vision universally upheld by First Millennium Christianity. Mystery, poetry and paradox was being slowly forsaken, and replaced by other influences, such as the pagan Franks, Normans and Germanic tribes, who by converting to Christianity, in many ways, influenced Western Christianity as much as Christianity influenced them.  The people at large, living in the West, still thirsting for mystery, were instead offered superstitions, to quench this desire. Mystery was upheld in the West as a weapon of power, while the ancient poetic purpose of mystery, as an experience of man’s humility, was fading.

Eastern Christianity remains the most poetical and art-affirming of Christian traditions, developing an ethos that is much closer to the spirit of Shakespeare than seen in the western Churches. Was there significant influence from this earlier Christian tradition that helped the poet transcend the most polemical elements of the Catholic-Protestant conflict? More research needs to be done around this question. We know that de Vere went to the Greek Orthodox Church while he was staying in Venice. [vii] With his knowledge of ancient Greek, he would have been able to understand the Divine Liturgy and even dialogue with the priest or parishioners there.

Often, significant realities remain unnoticed simply because we do not know what we are looking for. How significant was the influence of the Greek Fathers in the thought and formation of the poet Edward de Vere? There is plenty of evidence of Calvin’s influence, but this mountain of evidence makes it even more astounding how lacking the works of Shakespeare are in polemical Protestant propaganda. One would have to make a conscious decision to express spiritual truths that are more timeless and universal than those of the Elizabethan zeitgeist. 

The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the first Millennium are, in essence, a rejection of heresies rooted in dualistic rationalisms, and by contrast, affirmations of theological revelation, proclaiming transcendent Poetical Truth. Crucial examples being that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man and the Holy Trinity is One in Essence in Three Persons. These dogmas can only be received in the same way someone receives a transcendent work of art. Although the East and the West share these foundational dogmas about the nature of Christ and the Trinity, the spirit of poetry and paradox was incrementally marginalized in the West in favor of Systematic Theology and the Germanization of Roman Christianity.[viii] An example of this duality would be the intense polemic around salvation through faith vs. works in the Catholic-Protestant West.

This apparent dichotomy does not exist in the East. Rather, there is a poetic embracing of mystery, which enables the Christian to see more than one thing at a time. The instinct towards monovision, as Chesterton deemed it, has no place in the ancient Christian ethos. The obsession with reductionist thinking is absent, while the Roman Church reduced ecclesiology to one bishop (the Pope) being the spiritual monarch and Vicar of Christ on earth, and the Reformers reduced salvation by repeatedly adding the word “alone” after many phrases: by faith alone, Scripture alone, grace alone. Ironically, if one places alone after more than one tenet of faith, each proclamation undermines the previous one.

A poet, such as Edward de Vere, would struggle mightily to embrace such reductionism. Did he feel more akin to the poetic fathers of the Greek East, (and indeed, all the first millennium fathers) when he encountered them? Without yet possessing very much hard evidence around this question, it is safe to say that Shakespeare’s works themselves reflect at least an intuitive affinity with the theological ethos and poetry of the East. As Looney observed:

Protestant sectarianism was as contrary to his outlook upon life as it is to the wide genius of Shakespeare. On the other hand we cannot say confidently of Edward de Vere, any more than we can of Shakespeare, that he was an orthodox Roman Catholic. With the exception of the remark which we have quoted from Green we cannot discover any further evidence of his connection with the ancient Church. It is much more likely that his was the Catholicism of a universal Humanity, with large discourse “looking before and after,” taking into itself the culture of Greece and Rome on the one hand, and on the other the visions that belong to a “prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come.”

We find no trace of medieval theologism in his poetry, nor any religious pietism such as that we have mentioned as appearing in the poems of Raleigh. Oxford’s attachment was probably to the human and social sides of Catholicism and Feudalism, which he saw crumbling away and being supplanted by an unbridled individualism and egoism. [ix]

What does this mean that de Vere was “looking before and after” the Catholicism of his day? Of course, this could simply mean that he possessed an intuitive prophetic mind, but in addition to this, with the extent of his education, one must wonder what exposure he had to the Eastern fathers of Christianity. Although the Schism of 1054 had enormous ramifications on Christendom, the mystical, paradoxical, and poetical temperament of the first millennium was not annihilated. Edward de Vere may have been able to glean enough paradoxical beauty from certain writers in the West, who maintained this earlier Christian vision, despite the theological, ecclesiastical, and political disturbances of his milieu. In short, he need not have been consciously or directly influenced by the Christian East, for the remnants of this patristic worldview to influence him.

One way or another, “Shakespeare” was viewing the world with a broader lens than his contemporaries, and this lens happens to share greater clarity of vision with an earlier Christian ethos. Stritmatter confirms this when he writes:

Of course it would be a reduction of the worst sort to treat Hamlet as a Puritan. His expression encompasses the entire range of religious feeling – from the deepest iconoclastic misanthropy to the most sublime, Catholic appreciation for God’s glorious handiwork – which an Elizabethan could experience… His philosophy is more reminiscent of the Florentine neo-Platonists than the severe doctrines of the anti-theatrical reformers. Like Pico or Ficino, Hamlet thinks syncretically, reconciling rather than banishing paradox. [x]

Thinking “syncretically, reconciling rather than banishing paradox” is central to the Greek patristic writers. De Vere’s obsession with Italy was most likely rooted in an experience with beauty, mystery, poetry, and paradox, as all of these were still being upheld and lauded in the Roman Church to varying degrees—even though this ideal of beauty was also becoming tragically mixed with a vision of power, military might, guilt and fear of punishment, especially since the Papal Reformation of 1054. But such is the power of beauty, that even amidst the innovations, which led to the Crusades and Inquisitions, its divine power (and the corresponding need in the human soul) continues to be present for those “who have ears to hear” (Matthew 11:15).

As mentioned before, artists are born with a peculiar intuitiveness, a strange sensitivity to the world around them. They often sense and feel when something is discordant before the rest of society begins to see the consequences. Edward de Vere was at the center of power in 16th century England. He was witnessing the radical, revolutionary changes taking place all around him, with a prodigious knowledge of history. This poetic, and prophetic soul was living through violent times, with the intuitive wisdom to recognize evil and corruption, but also the historic knowledge to observe the changing tides with watchfulness and divine prudence.   

With the depth of education, the 17th Earl of Oxford had, what insights lay behind Ulysses’ observation in Troilus and Cressida, as it relates, not simply to political power, but also to religious fidelity to truth:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe: 


Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong, 


Between whose endless jar justice resides, 


Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 


Then every thing includes itself in power,

        And appetite, an universal wolf

       So doubly seconded with will and power

       Must make perforce an universal prey,

      And at last eat up himself.

On one side, there was the consolidation of power in the Papacy, (unrecognized not only by Protestants, by also by the Christian East) and on the other, the tyrannical state, with the king or queen, not only as head of the state, but now, also the head of the church. So where is the sacred balance of grace and truth the Apostle John speaks about in his gospel? Where is the ancient voice of beauty amidst this advancing “universal wolf”?

A central influence in the thought and inspiration of Edward de Vere is Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. De Vere wrote the preface (in Latin) to Bartholomew Clerke’s Latin translation in 1572. This is a vast and holistic work, but for our purposes, I wish to focus on the spiritual vision expressed in The Courtier. This vision is steeped in an early patristic ethos and expresses a theological revelation in striking harmony with the Greek Orthodox Eastern tradition, with its emphasis on divine beauty and the transformative, ontological consequences of encountering the light of God. 

I say that beauty springs from God and is like a circle, the centre of which is goodness. And so just as one cannot have a circle without a centre, so one cannot have beauty without goodness. [xii]

One of the most central books in Eastern Christianity after the Bible, and perhaps St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent, is a four-volume theological collection called, Philokalia, which means “love of beauty”, or “love of the Good, the Beautiful”. The great Russian Orthodox novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky famously wrote in The Idiot, that “Beauty will save the world”. There are many things about the genius of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare that synchronize, especially the paradoxical portrayal of human psychology, but strikingly, in addition to that is a particular vision of divine beauty, and its importance in the salvation of mankind. Again Castiglione, through the character of Petro Bembo, speaks of Sacred Love and Divine Beauty:

The kinds of beauty which every day we see in corruptible bodies with these clouded eyes of ours (and which even so are only dreams and faint shadows) appear to be so lovely and graceful that they often kindle in us a most ardent fire and cause such delight that we count no happiness the equal of what we sometimes feel because of a single glance we may receive from the eyes of the woman we love, so what happy wonder, what blessed awe must we think is that which possesses the soul when it attains the vision of divine beauty! [xiii]

If an experience with beauty in corruptible bodies can cause such delight, imagine what an encounter with divine beauty must impart to the soul. A puritanical ethos views beauty with suspicion, for fear of dishonorable passions, but Castiglione (through Bembo) sees lower beauty as a potential wooing of the soul towards a higher beauty. This is in alignment with the patristic view of the whole world being a sacrament of God. We are to be wary of idolatry, making an idol out of lower beauty—but we are not to be wary of beauty itself, for its source is the Creator:

What sweet flame, what ravishing fire must we believe that to be which springs from the source of supreme and true beauty, the fountain of all other beauty which never increases or diminishes! Always beautiful; most simple of itself and equally in all its parts; like only to itself and sharing in nothing other than itself, it is yet so beautiful that all other beautiful things derive their beauty from it. And this is the beauty indistinguishable from the highest good, which by its light calls and draws all things to it and which not only gives intellect to intellectual beings, reason to rational beings and the senses and the desire for life to sensual beings, but also transmits to the very plants and rocks, as an imprint of itself, motion and the instinct of their own particular nature. [xiv]

Again, this is a lofty rhapsodizing of beauty, which includes all of creation. One is reminded of Christ’s words, as he entered Jerusalem on a donkey, when he was admonished by Pharisees to silence his disciples for crying out to him as king—he responds by saying, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” The beauty envisioned by Bembo, “transmits to the very plants and rocks, as an imprint of itself,” it encompasses all of creation.

The Akathist Hymn, “Glory to God for All Things,” expresses the Eastern Orthodox ethos regarding the holistic, sacramental mystery of beauty:

In the wondrous blending of sounds it is Your call we hear; in the harmony of many voices, in the sublime beauty of music, in the glory of the works of great composers: You lead us to the threshold of paradise to come and to the choirs of angels. All true beauty has the power to draw the soul toward You and to make it sing in ecstasy: Alleluia! [xv]

Castiglione continues to build his symphony of Divine Beauty and Sacred Love:

This love, therefore, is as greater and happier than the others as the cause that produces it is greater. And thus, just as material fire refines gold, so this most sacred fire consumes and destroys everything that is mortal in our souls and quickens and beautifies the celestial part which previously, because of the senses, was dead and buried. This is the pyre on which the poets write that Hercules was burned on the summit of Mount Oeta and through whose fire he became divine and immortal after death; this is the burning bush of Moses, the parted tongues of fire, the fiery chariot of Elias, which doubles the grace and happiness of those souls worthy to see it, when it leaves the earth below and flies towards heaven. [xvi]

We hear this echoed in Venus and Adonis, “Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled,”. Sacred love is “the burning bush of Moses,” where the prophet encountered the, “I AM that I AM”; he encountered the personal God, who shares with us the mystery of self-consciousness. This mystery (being made in the image of God) allows us to relate to the divine, not theoretically, but directly. 

Bembo continues:

So let us direct all the thoughts and powers of our soul towards this most sacred light which shows us the path that leads to heaven; and following after it and divesting ourselves of the human passions in which we were clothed when we fell, let us ascend by the ladder whose lowest rung bears the image of sensual beauty to the sublime mansion where dwells the celestial, adorable and true beauty which lies hidden in the secret recesses of the Almighty where profane eyes may not see it. And here we shall find a most happy end to our desires, true rest from our labours, a sure remedy for our miseries, a wholesome medicine for our infirmities, a most safe harbour from the raging storms of the temptestuous sea of this life. [xvii]

Was Edward de Vere of the mind that mankind should seek to direct all his “thoughts and powers of our soul towards this most sacred light which shows us the path that leads to heaven…”? And if so, was this belief more than hyperbole? Were these ornaments of virtue, which de Vere so greatly lauded, more than ethical and religious abstractions, or even external obligations; were they of a different quality all together? One of transfiguration and partaking of the divine nature? 

In Part II of this blog, we will continue to explore these questions and synthesize a cohesive vision from the early poems of Edward de Vere, the works of “Shakespeare”, The Book of The Courtier and the writings of Eastern Christian poets, theologians and mystics. 

[i] THE POEMS OF EDWARD DE VERE, SEVENTEENTH EARL OF OXFORD (Shakespeare Edition) With Biographical Notice, Introduction to the Poems and Notes BY J. THOMAS LOONEY Author of “Shakespeare Identified” “‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of Songs and Sonnets here.”- Merry Wives 1. 1. 164670. 9 a LONDON: CECIL PALMER, OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, W.C.1. Pg. pg. lxviii

[ii] Ibid., Looney, pg. lxxi italics mine

[iii] Robert Sean Brazil, Edward de Vere and the Printers, pg. 107

[iv] Elder Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, John Raffan, trans. (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2005) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/196072-whoever-wants-to-become-a-christian-must-first-become-a

[v] Ibid. Looney, The Poems of Edward de Vere

[vi] Paradise and Utopia, The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was, by John Strickland, Ancient Faith Publishing (August 9, 2019) Four Volume History

[vii] Stritmatter reference, awaiting source material

[viii] The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation, by James C. Russell, Oxford University Press, Published June 20, 1996.

[ix] Shakespeare Identified by J Thomas Looney, Centenary edition James, A. Warren, editor. Published by VERITAS PUBLICATIONS, second printing by Veritas Publications, Cary, North Carolina, January 2019. First printing by Forever Press, Somerville, Massachusetts, September 2018. Original 1920 Cecil Palmer edition. Pg. 299

[x] The Marginalia of Edward De Vere’s Geneva Bible: Providential Discovery, Literary Reasoning, And Historical Consequence A Dissertation Presented by Roger A Stritmatter, Pg. 191

[xi] Troilus and Cressida, by William Shakespeare (I.III.113-128)

[xii] The Book of the Courtier, by Baldesar Castiglione, Translation by George Bull 1967, reprinted with revisions 1976 and 2003. Penguin Books, Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England, Pg. 30

[xiii] Ibid. Castiglione, Pg. 340

[xiv] Ibid. Castiglione, Pg’s 340-341

[xv] The Akathist, Glory to God for All Things, by the Metropolitan Tryphon, (1861-1934)  

[xvi] Ibid. Castiglione, Pg. 341

[xvii] Ibid. Castiglione, pg. 341