1. See the introduction to Robert Chester’s ‘Loves Martyr, or Rosalins Complaint’ (1601), ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Trübner & Co, 1878), lvii, and William H. Matchett, The Phoenix and The Turtle (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965), 110. Matchett strangely speculates that Love’s Martyr is a pro-Essex tract so dangerous that it was suppressed, even though its meaning had been sufficiently obscured ‘to avoid outspoken treason’ (160).
2. Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare: National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 175.
3. See also Cheney’s ‘The Voice of the Author’ in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11–12, and Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 276, where ‘the most durable candidates’ are said to be Elizabeth and Essex.
4. Matchett’s theory is endorsed by G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 251–2, and Walter Oakeshott, ‘Loves Martyr’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 39 (1975): 35. Ian Donaldson even annotates the poetry of Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 675, n10, by writing that ‘Matchett argues plausibly for a return of Grosart’s identification of the phoenix and the turtle with Elizabeth and Essex’,
5. and Arthur Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 325, n45, agrees that ‘Loves Martyr connects the phoenix with the deceased Essex’. David Riggs in Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 364, n6, recommends Matchett for understanding Salusbury’s bond to Essex. ‘If the couple really were Elizabeth and Essex’, Gerald Hammond teases readers of Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 101, Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s verses in Love’s Martyr ‘would be doubly important’. John Roe, in The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 42, observes that the theory ‘continues to command a small following’, yet cites only Anthea Hume, ‘Love’s Martyr, “The Phoenix and Turtle”, and the Aftermath of the Essex Rebellion’, Review of English Studies 40 (1989): 48–71, who reckons the English people to be the ‘true’ and Essex to be a ‘false’ turtle. Surveying the theory’s broader contemporary acceptance, we should mention Alzada Tipton’s ‘The Transformation of the Earl of Essex: Post-Execution Ballads and “The Phoenix and Turtle”‘, Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 57–80, which traces the glorification of Essex to Shakespeare’s poem. It presents one of the most detailed examinations of Love’s Martyr on record. The study that has done most to keep the Grosart-Matchett hypothesis alive is Richard C. McCoy’s ‘Loves Martyrs: Shakespeare’s “Phoenix and Turtle” and the Sacrificial Sonnets’, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 188–208. The Year’s Work in English 78 (1997): 327 especially praised McCoy’s essay for its ‘historically specific local readings’.