The Muse As Therapist by Wilkinson Heward;

The Muse As Therapist by Wilkinson Heward;

Author:Wilkinson, Heward;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge


Other highly relevant sonnets are Sonnets 36, 39, 71, and 72.

The whole situation of being a bastard son is explored in King Lear, as previously in King John. (Let us also remember that Elizabeth 1st herself’s legitimacy was permanently in question, and that Mary Tudor never accepted her as her blood sister—hence the long agony of Mary Queen of Scots!—as the blood daughter of Henry VIII. Why are the three “great” tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, all about usurpation or abdication?)

Oxford, when in early puberty, faced a legal challenge to his legitimacy, which, as a youthful poem on “Loss of good name”, Looney, 1921, indicates, highly sensitised him to such matters. His illegitimate son Edward, who went to University abroad in Leyden, Holland, and who was eventually knighted by King James 1st, established himself as a comrade in arms of Oxford’s cousins Francis and Horace/Horatio (Bowen, 1966), as one of the “fighting Veres”, who are then celebrated in Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” and then in turn in Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd, who significantly names his Napoleonic War Captain Edward Fairfax Vere (Oxford’s emblem was the star). This all suggests—with much other evidence—that Edward was not denied and neglected by his father. The relevant and significant passage in Melville (was there something Melville knew?) is:

In the navy he was popularly known by the appellation—Starry Vere. How such a designation happened to fall upon one who, whatever his sterling qualities, was without any brilliant ones was in this wise: A favorite kinsman, Lord Denton, a free-hearted fellow, had been the first to meet and congratulate him upon his return to England from his West Indian cruise; and but the day previous turning over a copy of Andrew Marvell’s poems, had lighted, not for the first time however, upon the lines entitled Appleton House, the name of one of the seats of their common ancestor, a hero in the German wars of the seventeenth century, in which poem occur the lines,



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