The Langham Letter, which describes Leicester's entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth in the summer of 1575, is a brilliant tour de force which purports to have been written by a bumptious court official, one 'Robert Langham or Lanham'. Scholarly consensus now rejects the notion that the Letter was written by the fictitious Langham, and Penny McCarthy, in Pseudonymous Shakespeare, has recently proposed Shakespeare as the author. In fact, the vocabulary of the Langham Letter is indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s, as has been established in a comparison of the Letter’s vocabulary to over 2100 lines from Shakespeare’s plays, in each of which a vocabulary word used in the Letter is used in the same sense, and as the same part of speech, as it is used in Shakespeare’s plays.

Click here for documents related to Humphrey Martyn, the real-life addressee of the Langham Letter. For a discussion of Oxford's authorship of the Langham Letter, see issues of the Edward De Vere Newsletter on this website.