The Prince Tudor theory (also known as Tudor Rose theory) is a variant of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, which asserts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works published under the name of William Shakespeare. The Prince Tudor variant holds that Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I were lovers and had a child who was raised as Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The theory followed earlier arguments that Francis Bacon was a son of the queen. A later version of the theory, known as "Prince Tudor II" states that Oxford was himself a son of the queen, and thus the father of his own half-brother.
This hidden history is supposed to explain why Oxford dedicated the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to Southampton and to explain aspects of the poems' contents. The content of Shakespeare's sonnets has also been used to support the theory, as, to a lesser extent, have episodes in the plays.
The Prince Tudor theory has created a division among Oxfordians. Many orthodox Oxfordians regard the theory as an impediment to Oxford's recognition as Shakespeare, whereas the Prince Tudor theorists maintain that their theory better explains Oxford's life and the reasons for his writing under a pen name.Helen Gordon, The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare's Sonnets, second edition. Philadelphia: Xlibris Publishing Co., 2008; Hank Whittemore, The Monument, Meadow Geese Press, Marshfield Hills, MA, 2005; Paul Streitz, Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, Oxford Institute Press, 2001
Background
The theory that the author of Shakespeare's works was connected to a secret romance and child of the queen dates back to the writings of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who believed that Francis Bacon was the true author of the plays. In his book Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893–5), Owen claimed to have discovered a secret history of the Elizabethan era hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works. According to Owen, Bacon revealed that Elizabeth was secretly married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who fathered both Bacon himself and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the latter ruthlessly executed by his own mother in 1601.Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: the meeting of two myths, Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 157–60 Bacon was the true heir to the throne of England, but had been excluded from his rightful place. This tragic life-story was the secret hidden in the plays.
Elizabeth Gallup developed Owen's views, arguing that a bi-literal cipher, which she had identified in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, revealed concealed messages confirming that Bacon was the queen's son. This argument was taken up by several other writers, notably C.Y.C. Dawbarn in Uncrowned (1913) and Alfred Dodd The Personal Poems of Francis Bacon (1931).Michael Dobson & Nicola J. Watson, England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004, p. 136. In Dodd's account Bacon was a national redeemer, who, deprived of his ordained public role as monarch, instead performed a spiritual transformation of the nation in private through his work. As he later wrote, "He was born for England, to set the land he loved on new lines, 'to be a Servant to Posterity'".Alfred Dodd, Francis Bacon's Personal Life Story, London: Rider, 1950, preface.
J. Thomas Looney founded Oxfordian theory in his book Shakespeare Identified (1920). Looney did not include any arguments about secret marriages or hidden children. However, his theory soon gained adherents who adapted the earlier Baconian arguments to the new Oxfordian position. Looney expressed his disapproval of the development in a letter from 1933, which states that his followers Percy Allen and Bernard M. Ward were "advancing certain views respecting Oxford and Queen Eliz. which appear to me extravagant & improbable, in no way strengthen Oxford’s Shakespeare claims, and are likely to bring the whole cause into ridicule."Christopher Paul, "A new letter by J. T. Looney brought to light", Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 8–9. PDF Ward's father had been an early supporter of Looney; Allen was a theatre critic.
Prince Tudor Part I Percy Allen
Ward did not develop the argument in his biography of Oxford, or in other published works.Ward, B.M. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550–1604. London: John Murray, 1928. Allen, however, did. He published his initial views on Oxford and Shakespeare in 1932,Allen, Percy, The Life Story of Edward De Vere as "William Shakespeare", London: Cecil Palmer, 1932. The suggestion that the queen had a son by Oxford appears in an appendix. The child is not identified. but did not develop his full theory until 1934 in his book Anne Cecil, Elizabeth & Oxford. In this he argues that Elizabeth and Oxford had an illegitimate child, who was given the name William Hughes, and who became an actor under the stage-name "William Shakespeare". He adopted the name because his father, Oxford, was already using it as a pen-name for his plays. Oxford had borrowed the name from a third Shakespeare, the man of that name from Stratford-upon-Avon, who was a law student at the time, but who was never an actor or a writer.
As an illegitimate child, Hughes/Shakespeare had a "bar sinister" and could never have inherited the crown, but was "a glorious future for England that remained unrealised", as Helen Hackett puts it. Had he been able to claim the crown, the boy would have founded a line of kings that would have excluded the Stuarts, and thus protected England from the disasters brought about by that dynasty. The story of events is contained in the sonnets, which were written by Oxford to his actor son, who is the Fair Youth. The queen is the Dark Lady.Percy Allen, Anne Cecil, Elizabeth & Oxford: A Study of Relations between these three, with the Duke of Alencon added; based mainly upon internal evidence, drawn from (Chapman's?) A Lover's Complaint; Lord Oxford's (and others) A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers; Spenser's Faery Queen..., Archer, 1934.
Allen's theory was not well received by many Oxfordians, including Sigmund Freud, a supporter of Looney, who wrote to Allen to express his disapproval. Oxfordian Louis P. Bénézet did pursue a modified version in 1937, but only accepted that the sonnets were written to an actor son of the Earl's, not that the boy was a child of the queen.Samuel Schoenbaum, "Looney and the Oxfordians" in Russ McDonald, Shakespeare: an anthology of criticism and theory, 1945–2000, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, p. 8. Allen's theory was later altered to the more acceptable view that the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, was the hidden child, not Hughes/Shakespeare. Allen later claimed to have contacted the spirits of Shakespeare, Oxford, Bacon and Elizabeth through a medium, Hester Dowden. Apparently, the spirits confirmed this theory, adding that Oxford was the leader of a collaborative effort among poets and scholars to create the works. It was also revealed that Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream was a portrait of Oxford's and Elizabeth's brilliant son.Shapiro, James (2010), Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, UK edition: Faber and Faber (US edition: Simon & Schuster), pp. 196–210.Helen Sword, "Modernist Hauntology: James Joyce, Hester Dowden, and Shakespeare's Ghost", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol 41. Issue: 2., 1999, p. 196. Alfred Dodd had previously consulted the same medium, who had confirmed Dodd's theories about Francis Bacon, but the spirit of Bacon now told Allen that Dowden had been innocently misled by another spirit on that occasion.Dowden was the daughter of Shakespeare scholar Edward Dowden. Dodd had published his discoveries via Dowden in The Immortal Master, London, Rider & Co., 1943. Dowden's biographer reveals that Allen's was the final and true revelation. Indeed, from his teenage years Allen had been destined to be the bearer of the ultimate truth: "a plan had been worked out by spirit people interested in his earthly life that he should be the means of finally unravelling the great mystery of Shakespeare's origin and work." Edmund Bentley, Far Horizon: A Biography of Hester Dowden: Medium and Psychic Investigator, London: Rider Company, 1951, pp. 147–50. For a more recent discussion of Dowden see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY., 2002. These events forced Allen to stand down as president of the Oxfordian organisation the Shakespeare Fellowship.
Allen published his discoveries in 1947 under the title Talks with Elizabethans. He stated that the son of Oxford and Elizabeth was born in 1575. Lady Southampton had also given birth to "an illegitimate child" while her husband was imprisoned. The queen "arranged for her own son to be substituted for Lady Southampton's baby, and to be brought up as the legitimate third Earl of Southampton". In this version of events, Shakespeare of Stratford was reinstated as an actor and even as a writer. He helped Oxford and the others to write the plays, generally adding comic material. Indeed, he and Oxford were close friends.
Later writers The theory was developed further by Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn in their biography of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, This Star of England (1952). They also adopted the view that Southampton was the child of the queen and Oxford.They assert that they discovered the truth independently, "we had arrived at the conclusion that Southampton was the son of Oxford and the Queen almost a year before we heard that anyone else had entertained the suspicion.", This Star of England, p. 297. They cited evidence from Shakespeare's plays and poetry that Oxford had drawn from his own life experiences to create the characters and events in the works attributed to "William Shakespeare." After his concealed birth Southampton was raised by parental surrogates. They asserted that the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, dedicated to Southampton, described the circumstances of his conception in the affair between Oxford (Adonis) and the queen (Venus). Southampton was also the "Fair Youth" of the sonnets and that the first 17 sonnets (often called the "procreation sonnets") were written by Oxford to his natural son, urging him to marry and produce an heir.Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn, This Star of England. New York: Coward-McCann, 1952 Like Allen before them, the Ogburns rejected the supposition that the poet and the Fair Youth were homosexual lovers, stressing instead the fatherly tone of the sonnets addressing the Fair Youth.