Sonnet 60B: Thoughts at 467

20 April 2017

· For my recent birthday, a cloak of folly and a rewritten Sonnet 60 ·

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley

— Robert Burns, from Tae a Moose [To a Mouse], on
    Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, 1785

The complications of postlife occasionally interfere with blogging and birthdays. Alas, my 467th on the 12th has been and gone. Wouldn’t you know it, I missed the parades and the prosecco. I hope everyone had a good time.

Before I get to the sonnet: I was given this book as a humorous birthday gift. It’s a rousing, romanticised tale about yours truly, published in 1949. Nowadays you’d call it historical fiction, with much more of the latter than the former. Hilary Mantel it is not.

Did I look anything like that? I had fair hair, but otherwise no. And the book’s title surely refers to the ghastly orange tarpaulin the artist has pinned to my shoulders. I wouldn’t use a rag like that for a horse blanket.

The dust jacket is in poor shape, but at least it’s still there. The pages have tanned. This was an inexpensive book-club edition, made from materials not chosen to hold up over time. I put the jacket into a mylar cover.

Is the inside better than the outside? Here’s the blurb from the jacket flaps:

He was soldier, lover, courtier, swordsman, wit, an actor and a writer. He was brilliant and foolhardy as well as the handsomest man in England. His wayward tongue got him thrown into the Tower, his charm and talents won him time and again the pardon of his queen. He had fame and position and fortune, and he hazarded them all —

He was the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, Great Lord Chamberlain [sic] at the court of Queen Elizabeth.

In this full, rich, lusty novel, Burke Boyce has brought to life one of the fascinating men of history against a fierce and turbulent era. The story begins when a lonely child, recently orphaned, rode to London to become the ward of the queen. Nine years later he was the darling of the court, the butt of gossip, the desire of half the women of the kingdom, and affianced to the lovely Anne, daughter of one of England’s richest and highest nobles.

The years that followed were stormy for Oxford as for England. The Spanish Empire was falling, locked in a death-struggle with England; in the north, Mary of Scotland was defying Elizabeth’s authority; a pock-marked duc of France was angling to share Elizabeth’s throne; in the court itself, plots and counterplots abounded, favoritism and treachery linked arms, while a monarch jealous of her power played one faction against another in a giant chess game. And through it all Oxford moved, a dazzling but disturbing figure, restless and unhappy in his marriage and his career — a man of great gifts who was bedeviled into posing as a wastrel until driven by the ambition of one woman and the love of another to put those gifts to the use of his country. With his pen and rabble of players, he rallied all Englishmen into consciousness of their privileges and destiny as free men.

The story of Oxford and Elizabeth’s England has color, pageantry, human drama — and Burke Boyce has caught all of it with stirring fidelity. Cloak of Folly is further evidence that he is a writer of unusual versatility and a most accomplished novelist.

Well then.

Aside from the hyperbole and abuse of semicolons, I take issue with two inaccuracies. First, what got me thrown into the Tower may have been wayward but it was not my tongue. Second, half the women in the kingdom is an understatement.

The story is what one might expect in an Elizabethan pot-boiler from 1949. I’d like to see Boyce’s notes. He commands detail in some areas, for instance he knows his Italian swordsmanship and he’s good at sea, much like his protagonist. Then there are things he ignores or doesn’t seem to know, and utter flights of fancy that made me laugh out loud. That’s not a complaint, though. The book is a novel, not a biography. Even so it holds more essential truth about me than all the fiction put out as fact can ever do for Willy.

Cloak of Folly falls far short of literature, but it’s entertaining escapism, or if you’re curious to read an imagined depiction of my life that doesn’t have to play by scholarly rules. You don’t need to wait for your 467th birthday, either. The book can be borrowed, for an hour at a time, at the Internet Archive.

As for the second depiction on the right-hand side of the post banner– that’s from the cover of a 1967 Lancer paperback reissue of Cloak of Folly that turned up at almost the same time. I may as well include the blurbage from it too:

In the gusty, lusty Golden Age of England under the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, life was debonair and harsh by turns, but always crowded to the hilt with living!

Among the courtiers, captains, dandies and plotters around the throne, one man stood out– Edward de Vere, Lord Oxford. The boon companion of those laughing rogues, Raleigh and Drake… The battler against court cabals, Oxford knew the lash of Elizabeth’s tart tongue as well as her favor, the grim dungeons of the Tower as well as the gaudy, bawdy palaces. A fighting man, in a tournament with lances, a tavern brawl or a desperate stand against the formidable Spanish Armada… A poet who touched glory to the English tongue and spirit with his quill, he hobnobbed with and inspired a strolling player named Will Shakespeare… A man of storm and passion for the flighty Anne, the alluring, unknowable Nan, the dainty lady-in-waiting, Eliza. Here is a man among men. Here is a time of gold and glitter, sham and greatness, re-created in all its spendor.

It’s just as silly as the other one, but least the girl in the picture is no longer a cross between Snow White and Mrs Danvers.

For my birthday gift to myself, I wrote a new sonnet– or I re-worked an old one for the occasion. So many of those poems dealt with the passage of time, and I thought it would be something to try. I don’t pretend that #60B comes close to #60, but it’s more difficult to adapt something already in existence, trying to maintain a connection to it, than it is to start from blank paper. My best days for poetry are long behind me, but I still get the itch now and then.

If you need to refresh your memory, here’s Sonnet 60 in modern orthography and the original 1609 quarto text.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS