CHAPTER 29.
For a poet to instruct the reader, as Shake-Speare does in Sonnet 72, to entomb his memory
and to refuse to "rehearse" his name because of the shame which poetry confers on him, is not a
Renaissance convention. Some elements of the present study could be rationalized and rejected
by making a simple shift in logical typing. Perhaps the alleged connections between de Vere
and Shakespeare are an illusory consequence of the fact that the two hypothetically distinct
individuals belonged to the same "culture." The experience voiced in Sonnets 71-72
demonstrates the superficiality of this line of reasoning; these sonnets contradict not only the
poetic norms of the day, but also those of the golden and silver ages of Latin literature in which
Horace and Ovid first celebrated the memorializing function of poetry. Apotheosizing "Cynthia"
in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, Edmund Spenser articulates the post-Armada energeia of a
generation of poets, fed by the literary revival of the Renaissance and celebrating their own
immortality in verse, in conscious imitation of Ovid and Horace:
And while after I am dead and rotten,
Amongst the shepheards daughters dancing round,
My layes made of her shall not be forgotten,
But sung by them with flowery gyrlonds crowne.
(640-43)
Spenser's speaker, ironically, is Cuddy --
previously identified in this study as "Shepherd
Oxford." The sentiment, however, is classical -- and in its classical form in Ovid and Horace the
promise of immortality is claimed not only and not primarily for the objects of the poet's art, but
for the poet's own self.
In a previous chapter we have seen much evidence for the bard's deep concern for the
existential problem of the "putting out" of the author's name. We have seen that in his Geneva
Bible, de Vere marks several Biblical pretexts for this problem which are echoed in Shakespeare.
We have seen how at least three texts, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and the Sonnets, can be
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