EDWARD DE VERE
Next on my list of leading alternative candidates is Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford. As we have previously seen, he was advanced by J. Thomas Looney. Looney deduced from Shakespeare’s writings that their author had to have been:
1. A mature man of recognized genius
2. Apparently eccentric and mysterious
3. Of intense sensibility a man apart
4. Unconventional
5. Not adequately appreciated
6. Of pronounced and known literary tastes
7. An enthusiast in the world of drama
8. A lyric poet of recognized talent
9. Of superior education classical—the habitual associate of educated people
10. A man with feudal connections
11. One of the higher aristocracy
12. Connected with Lancastrian supporters
13. An enthusiast for Italy
14. A follower of sport including falconry
15. Loose and improvident in money matters
16. Doubtful and somewhat conflicted in his attitude to women
17. Of probable Catholic leanings but touched with skepticism
Needless to say, Looney found indications of all these in the biography of his candidate, and absent from that of Shakespeare of Stratford’s. To support his case, he found parallels between Hamlet and Oxford—but, mercifully, no secret messages. Oxfordians have since enthusiastically expanded on his list of parallels—and some, of course, have found secret messages.
Almost all anti-Stratfordians focus largely on the idea that The Oeuvre must reflect its author’s life—and they contend that we of the opposition do not believe that as well, which is ridiculously false. We merely believe that The Oeuvre, being imaginative rather than journalistic literature, need not precisely reflect the details of its author’s life, only his general sense of human existence, and fragments of his personal experience generally too complex to be traced, especially from a life as little-known as Shakespeare’s. Be that as it may, Oxfordians contend that Oxford was extremely like Hamlet, Shakespeare of Stratford not at all like him, and that it therefore follows that Oxford was Shakespeare. Hence, they enthusiastically find ways to match characters in Hamlet to Oxford’s family and close associates. Michell gives a rundown of them: “the king who poisoned Hamlet’s father and then married his mother is an exaggerated version of Oxford’s stepfather. Polonius, Lord Chamberlain in the Court of Denmark and Hamlet’s tedious counsellor, is a caricature of Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, who was Oxford’s guardian. The daughter of Polonius was Hamlet’s Ophelia, while Burghley’s daughter, Anne Cecil, was the partner in Oxford’s troubled marriage. Anne’s brother, Thomas Cecil, was Oxford’s rival, as Ophehia’s brother, Laertes, was the rival to Hamlet. Horatio, Hamlet’s loyal friend, and the soldier Francisco are reminiscent of Sir Horace and Francis de Vere, Oxford’s cousins,” and so forth.
To support the idea that Polonius was based on Burghley, the Oxfordians claim that “Polus” was Burghley’s nickname. The only evidence they’ve ever offered for this is a Latin tribute to Burghley in Gabriel Harvey’s Gratulationes Valdinenses (1578), a four-part collection of poems (most but not all of them Harvey’s), each part of which honors some courtier. According to Terry Ross, however, “Harvey never uses the word “polus” in any poem in the Burghley section of Gratulationes Valdinenses, and while the word appears in other poems in the volume, it is never used as Burghley’s or anybody else’s nickname.”
No matter. The Oxfordians can jump to the fact that the original “Polonius” in the first Quarto of Hamlet was called “Corambis.” This is a stunning coincidence, for Burghley’s motto was “cor unum via una.” Near-proof that Burghley was being referred to by “Corambis” is that the name was changed by the time the next quarto of Hamlet was published the following year—to “Polonius.” This was done, according to Oxfordians, to reduce the chance people would take the character now called Polonius for Burghley. Since “Polonius” is equally a giveaway as to whom the character was based on, for Oxfordians, this makes little sense.
Be that as it may, the Oxfordians have strained to produce a multitude of translations of the warped Latin of “Corambis” that include “double-hearted.” However, as Tony Morris pointed out at HLAS, “if W.Sh. set out to play on Burghley’s motto – and was willing to sacrifice the rules of both Latin and English grammar to achieve this result – there are other, much more obvious, ways it could have been done. Eg.: Coruncus = Cor + uncus = crooked heart; Coruncia [or Corunciola] = Cor + uncia [or unciola] = a tiny heart (a [mere] twelfth part); Corunctus = Cor + unctus = greasy or slimy heart;” etc.
Oxfordians have other arguments for equating Bughley with Polonius. A prominent one is the similarity (for them) of Polonius’s famous precepts to maxims Burghley passed on to his son, Thomas. Amusingly, they count John Lyly’s Euphues and his England (1580), one of the many possible sources of Polonius’s precepts, in Oxford’s favor since Lyly was for a time Oxford’s private secretary—and, thus, must have gotten them from Oxford.
Most Shakespeareans, by the way, are quite willing to acknowledge the possibility that Polonius may have been based in part on Burghley but prefer a bishop named Goslicius as the major model for Polonius, if there was one. Goslicius, the wordy author of The Counselor, a book of advice on affairs of state published in English translation in 1598, was Polish—hence the character’s name: Polonius.
My own favorite candidate for underlying model for Polonius is Shakespeare’s father, since I see him as a somewhat dopey but well-meaning father-figure in the vein of Juliet’s father and other such figures in Shakespeare. I have no problem with his having been based in part on Burghley, though, and even meant to be (in part) satirical. As David Kathman points out: “we have abundant evidence that court gossip was extremely popular at all levels of Elizabethan society, and that Burghley was one of its most popular topics. For example, John Manningham’s Diary, written in 1602-3, has several unflattering anecdotes about Burghley, and the man had been dead for four years. (The diary of Manningham, a commoner, is full of court gossip, as are the letters of John Chamberlain, another commoner.) Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale, published in 1591, contained a vicious parody of Burghley in its fable of the Fox and the Ape, and we know from external evidence (a letter dated March 19, 1591) that Burghley was widely known to be the target.”
Thomas Nashe is also known to have written satirically of Burghley, and Robert Greene may have. It is absurd, therefore, to assume that Shakespeare, another commoner, could not have done the same, particularly considering the access to court gossip an actor in a company that put plays on at court would have.
Whether or not Polonius truly represented Burghley, Oxfordians are sure Hamlet represented Oxford. Michell gives the parallels between the lives of the two: “Hamlet was a royal prince of Denmark, Oxford a premier nobleman at the English court. They both lost their beloved fathers and felt dispossessed by the men who married their mothers. They both stiffered under the tyranny of father-figures, the usurping king and Lord Burghley; and they were sensitive and rebellious, seeing through other people’s pretensions and having faith in women. Like Hamlet, Oxford maintained a company of actors, was skilled in music, knew Italy, fought a duel and killed a man in his guardian’s house. Hamlet stabbed Polonius whereas Oxford’s victim was one of Burghley’s servants, but with the help of Freud it can easily be supposed that he fantasized about murdering Lord Burghley.” (Note: Hamlet did not maintain a company of actors but did hire one.)
Before going too far with this, let’s turn to another fanciful speculator, this one a woman named Lilian Winstanley who believed that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but found interesting parallels in Hamlet to support a non-Oxfordian thesis, one having to do with Shakespeare’s heavy involvement in the Essex conspiracy and in James I’s eventually gaining the crown of England from Elizabeth I. In her book, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, she finds the following parallels between Hamlet and James I:
1.) Hamlet’s father was a king.
James’ father was a king.
2.) Hamlet’s father was murdered.
James’ father was murdered.
3.) Hamlet’s father was found dead in an orchard.
James’ father was found dead in a garden.
4.) Hamlet’s mother married the murderer of his father.
James’ mother married the murderer of his father, or at least the man widely believed to have been the murderer.
5.) Hamlet’s mother married the murderer shortly after the death of her first husband.
James’ mother married the (alleged) murderer shortly after the death of her first husband.
6.) There is a character named ‘Guildenstern’ in Hamlet.
According to Winstanley, someone named Guildenstern was in the Scottish Court.
7.) There is a minor character named ‘Francesco’ in Hamlet.
According to Winstanley, someone named Francesco was in the Scottish Court.
8.) There is a character named ‘Rosencratz’ in Hamlet.
According to Winstanley, someone named Rosencratz was among those who dealt with the captured Bothwell in Denmark.
Meanwhile, zealous supporters of the Earl of Essex have found equally close parallels between their candidate and Hamlet. David Kathman succinctly summarizes them in an essay at his and Terry Roth’s authorship website:
Rumor had it that the Earl of Leicester had poisoned Essex’s father, the first Earl, in order to live in sin with Essex’s mother, Lettice Knollys. Essex was married to Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, head of her secret police (thus Polonius’s spying), and rival to Burghley for the title of her chief advisor; the match was opposed by the bride’s family (unlike in Oxford’s case). Essex was highly educated and addicted to learning, a moody, brilliant, and unstable man who liked to wear black, a notorious procrastinator, sometimes abusive to women (including the Queen), an excellent poet and a patron of players. If you want to consider Polonius a composite of Burghley and Walsingham (very reasonably), then I could add that Essex was an enemy of Burghley.
What’s more, in 1591 Essex banqueted with Navarre, Biron, and Longueville, the real-life namesakes of the characters in Loves Labours Lost; Dover Wilson’s Cambridge edition of 1 Henry VI persuasively argues that Talbot is modeled on Essex at the siege of Rouen; many commentators have pointed out persuasive parallels between Essex and Bolingbroke and Henry V; Robert Cartwright argued very plausibly in 1863 that Essex is Romeo, Antonio in Merchant of Venice, and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, among others. Taken together, I find the Essex parallels in Shakespeare considerably more striking than the supposed Oxford parallels; I haven’t even gone into the parallels to King James, or Sir Philip Sidney, or others. (By the way, “E” mentions the bed-trick in All’s Well and Measure for Measure as though it’s something unusual, but this was an extremely common device of Elizabethan theater; see the recent book The Bed-Trick in Elizabethan Drama for many examples.)
Then there’s Amleth, the Dane who first showed up in the Historia Danicae by Saxo Grammaticus around 1200, and whose life history is almost universally accepted by scholars as the basis of Hamlet: he
1.) was the son of a king who is murdered by his brother, who becomes king
2.) was the son of a queen who quickly marries his father’s murderer and is accused of incest fro having done so
3.) feigned mental illness.
4.) cryptically hinted that he was out to revenge his father’s death
5.) was considered witty
6.) kills a counsellor of his uncle who had concealed himself under a quilt in his mother’s room in order to eavesdrop on a conversation between him and his mother, dispatching him through the quilt with a sword
7.) is sent to England by his evil uncle with a letter telling the King of England to kill him
8.) escapes death by discovering the letter and altering it so that it asks the King of England to kill his two compainions instead
9.) eventually kills his uncle in a sword fight, exchanging swords in the process
We might also consider such anti-parallels between Oxford and Hamlet as:
1.) Oxford’s not having been the son of a king
2.) his father’s not having been murdered
3.) his mother’s not necessarily having married very soon after his father’s death (the date of her second marriage is uncertain)
4.) his not having killed a counsellor of his uncle’s or his uncle
5.) his having married
6.) his never having pretended to be mad that we know of
In short, there’s no reason to spend more than a few pages arguing about alleged parallels between the lives of Oxford and Hamlet. The fictional character was clearly based on Amleth, and any traits or other features he had in common with Oxford are most probably coincidental. Not that there’s no reason the author of Hamlet couldn’t have picked up tidbits here and there about Oxford, or Burghley, or James, or any other noble, if he enjoyed gossipping with people knowledgeable about the court, and used some of what he found out in his plays.
But there’s also a Bible that many scholars believe belonged to Oxford. Oxfordianism’s first Ph.D, Roger Stritmatter, analyzed the passages someone he considers to have been Oxford underlined in this, and has decided (through a standard process of oxtraction) that so many of them also showed up in The Oeuvre that the underliner was almost certainly Shakespeare. David Kathman, however, has convincingly shown that (1) most of the matches are of passages anyone of the time would probably have underlined and (2) the many non-matches make it unlikely that the idiosyncratic matches are due to anything other than chance.
For instance, according to Kathman, “The annotator was very busy from 1 Samuel to 1 Kings, marking 135 verses in 1 Samuel (far more than any other book), 71 in 2 Samuel, and 61 in 1 Kings, plus many marginal notes in all three books. Over a quarter of the total marked verses in the entire Bible, by my rough count, are in these three consecutive books. Yet according to Naseeb Shaheen’s work, Shakespeare didn’t make particularly much use of those books; he made much heavier use of Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah, all four Gospels, and Revelation, among others. The annotator was for some reason drawn to the Apocrypha, marking 96 verses in Ecclesiasticus (used only moderately by Shakespeare), 64 verses in 2 Maccabees, 60 in 2 Esdras, 35 in Wisdom, 20 in Tobit, and 11 in Baruch (all virtually ignored by Shakespeare). Several of the annotator’s other favorite books were also seldom used by Shakespeare, such as 2 Corinthians (37 verses marked), Hosea (26 verses), and Jeremiah (13 verses). On the other hand, most of the books Shakespeare drew on most heavily for his Biblical references were hardly touched at all by the annotator. Shakespeare drew very heavily on all four Gospels, especially Matthew (arguably his most-used book), but the annotator has left the Gospels almost alone: 23 verses marked in Matthew, 2 in Luke, 1 in Mark, and none in John (unless one counts the pencil crosses at the beginning of John 5, 6, and 17). Shakespeare also drew very heavily on Genesis, Proverbs, and Acts, in each of which the annotator has marked only one verse. To be fair, there are a few books — notably Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Revelation — which both the annotator and Shakespeare seem to have been fond of, but these are very much the exception rather than the rule. In general, the annotator(s) of this Bible and Shakespeare appear to have had very different interests.”
It happens that our learned doctor has singled out 29 of his parallels as what he calls “diagnostics.” These are the underlinings in the Bible he says is Oxford’s that he thinks match four or more texts in Shakespeare’s plays. He therefore considers them central to his premise that the underliner was the True Author of Shakespeare’s works. Here’s the first, which I consider characteristic of them all:
Underlined in Exodus 22:22: “Ye shal not trouble any widowe, nor fatherles childe.”
“Matches” in Shakespeare: “To God, the widow’s champion and defence” (Richard II)
“Turns he the widow’s tears, the orphan’s cries” (Henry V)
and three more.
My response: (1) References to widows and orphans have no necessary connection to the Bible. (2) That picking on widows and orphans is exceptionally not nice has been a commonplace for thousands of years, and that God looks out for widows and orphans has been part of all Christians’ thought then and now, so neither of those ideas have any necessary direct connection to the Bible, either.
Note: when I look for verbal parallels, I look for something near a direct quotation.
Still, I can’t say that the ultimate source of the text from Richard II is not Exodus 22:22. The problem is what its immediate source was for Shakespeare. Was is a conscious memory of a passage he had read or even directly from the Bible itself, opened to the page the Exodus text is on? Or from a sermon he had heard? Or from some other writer’s having quoted it—perhaps in a play Shakespeare had acted in? Or from conversation—yes, in a tavern? We can’t know.
Common sense would suggest Shakespeare had certainly heard the story of Exodus, and probably read it. But he would have been otherwise exposed to it more than once, probably in every way I‘ve mentioned. Conclusion: where the words he used worked, he would have drawn automatically on the Bible, whether or not he’d ever underlined the Exodus passage or not.
es
The next I’ve purposely chosen to show Stritmatter at his worst, in my opinion:
Underlined from 1 Samuel 16:13: “Then Samuel toke the horne of oyle, & anointed him in the middes of his brethren. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon David, from that day forwarde: then Samuel rose up, and went to Ramah”.
“Matches” in Shakespeare: “The balm washed off wherewith thou wast anointed,” “I was anointed king” and “Of England’s true-anointed lawful king” (3 Henry VI)
“The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans” and “Anointed … thy royal sweet breath” (Love’s Labours Lost)
My response: this is one of Stritmatter’s most ridiculous supposed parallels. References to “anointing” or to “anointed kings” have no necessary connection to the Bible. Much better is a marking of Psalm 137, which begins, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion” and includes the line, “If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” Stritmatter’s five Shakespearean parallels to these range from “There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady . . .” (Twelfth Night) to “Forever may my knees grow to the earth./ My tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,/ Unless a pardon ere I rise or speak.” (Richard II) I count the first of these close to being completely worthless, but the second indicating Shakespeare was definitely intimate with Psalm 137. But how rare would that have been at the time, even among commoners? It’s a wonderfully moving poem about one of the most famous stories in the Bible. In short, it was solidly in the Public Domain of the time (I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bible were not then responsible for as much as half of the average person’s literary knowledge back then). As I can’t say too often, their refusal to credit the Public Domain with any significant ability to transmit knowledge is one of the principal flaws of anti-Stratfordians.
Similar to parallel-hunting in its vacuousness is the work of the anti-Stratfordian code-breakers. Every candidate has at least one such code-breaker who has found some coded text that proves beyond doubt that his candidate was The True Author, including the Oxfordians. One of them, John Rollett, has found the secret message, “The ensuing sonnets by e ver the forth,” in the introduction to Shake-speare’s Sonnets. (If “ever” were not so common a word, the Oxfordian code-breakers would be lost.) Rather than spend time demonstrating the flaws of this and the many other attempts at revealing Shakespeare-denying secret messages anti-Stratfordians have made, I will–as I previously said–later attack a single typical speciman of the genre, one favoring Marlowe I consider the least idiotic I have come across. Till then I will only assert that the anti-Stratfordian code-breaking I’ve seen is worthless, and that the authorities in the field agree with me, principally–as I’ve also already said–William R. and Elizebeth Friedman.
Oxfordians also make much of Gabriel Harvey’s writing in a verse to Oxford that “Pallas striking her shield with her spear-shaft will attend thee . . .” and, later, in the same verse, that Oxford’s “countenance shakes a spear.” This, coupled with the fact that the crest of Bolbeck, one of Oxford’s titles, showing a lion holding up (but not shaking) a broken spear, is enough to convince them Oxford was Shakespeare. Unfortunately, the verse was in Latin, and the English given inaccurate, as I indicated in my second chapter. Moreover, as I also indicated in that chapter, the crest with the lion was that of a different branch of the Bolbeck family than the one associated with Oxford’s family. Not only that, but the crest with the lion did not gain a spear until some two centuries after Oxford died (which I forgot to mention in my second chapter).
Nor is there any evidence that Oxford ever used a pseudonym although the Oxfordians claim that The Arte of English Poesie (published in 1589 and believed by most scholars to have been by George Puttenham) said he was. Here are the two, widely-separated passage from it that Oxfordians have made much propagandistic use of:
I know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have written commendably, and suppressed it again,. or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it: as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned. . . .
***
….. And in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of Courtly makers [poets], Noblemen and Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would appear if their
doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford.
Whatever this confused passage was intended to mean, it could not have been calling Oxford a concealed author, for earlier the book twice refers to Oxford’s writings, once quoting a poem of his. Moreover, Oxford had works in print under his own name before The Arte of English Poesie. So did all those but Paget whom the author of The Arte names in a list right after Oxford’s name in the second of the passages quoted, but which Oxfordians usually truncate, as I did. They were “Thomas Lord of Bukhurst, when he was young, Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Rawleigh, Master Edward Dyar, Maister Fulke Grevell, Gascon, Britton, Turberville.” So, Puttenham makes a poor witness for Oxford’s being a concealed writer. Nor does he necessarily rank him the best of the poets listed, as many Oxfordians contend, for the list is by social rank from Oxford, the Lord High Chamberlain, down to Tuberville, apparently a wretch hardly more of the right sort than the Stratford man.
Some Oxfordians even forward the reference by Ben Jonson to Shakespeare as “sweet swan of Avon” as evidence that Oxford was Shakespeare, because of the estate, Bilton, that Oxford owned on the Avon River. Since there is no evidence that he ever lived at Bilton, and since there is evidence that he leased it to another in 1574, then sold it in 1580, believing Oxford would have been strongly enough associated with Bilton to warrant Jonson’s epithet seems just more strained thinking on the part of the Oxfordians.
Since nearly everything we know about Shakespeare and Oxford has to be made evidence for The Truth, Oxfordians even bring in the fact that Oxford died without a will as an indication that he was Shakespeare: it couldn’t be that he was too broke to have a will; it had to have been that he did make a will but that it was destroyed because it revealed . . . The Truth.
The strongest link in the Oxfordian chain is Shake-speare’s Sonnets, whose only link to Shakespeare of Stratford, the anti-Stratfordians snort, is his name on its title page, and elsewhere (forgetting the sonnets with ”Will” in them, and the possible pun on Ann Hathaway’s name in one of them).
The Oxfordians argue that the Sonnets make Shakespeare too old, but many of them could have been written, or revised, as late as 1609, when Shakespeare was 45—and there is always the possibility that the Stratford man, as a prematurely-bald young man, may have felt old in his twenties (as I, with the same problem, did). He could also simply have exaggeratedly exploited a convention the few times he referred to his advanced years in the Sonnets.
The Oxfordians also somehow mangle Sonnet 76’s line about how “. . . every word doth almost tell my name” from being an expression of how closely the poet’s words capture his very identity to being a hint of . . . The Truth.
Before we leave the sonnets, there is one more among them I’d like to discuss because the Oxfordians consider it important, and because it nicely demonstrates their tortured manner of making texts testify for their delusional system. The sonnet is Sonnet 125:
Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy, With my extern the outward honoring, Or laid great bases for eternity, Which proves more short than waste or ruining? Have I not seen dwellers on form and favor Lose all and more by paying too much rent, For compound sweet forgoing simple savor, Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent? No, let me be obsequious in thy heart, And take thou my oblation, poor but free, Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art But mutual render, only me for thee. Hence, thou suborned informer! a true soul When most impeached stands least in thy control.
The Oxfordian take on this ignores grammar to claim the “the act of carrying the canopy was in the past, not conditional. But “were’t” is clearly subjunctive. Many examples of Shakespeare’s use of “were” as subjunctive occur in the plays, such as the following, from 2 Henry VI, when Gloucester says, “Were it not good your grace could fly to heaven?” Gloucester is obviously not asking here, “Wasn’t it good that in the past the King could fly to heaven?” He is asking, conditionally, “Wouldn’t it be good IF he were able to do so?”
As for “bore,” which the anti-Stratfordians also take as being in the past tense rather than the subjunctive present, if it were not subjunctive, the question would read, “Would it mean anything to me that I bore the canopy?” This dangles. On the other hand, if we take it as the subjunctive present, we get, “Would it mean anything to me if I bore the canopy?” This makes perfect sense (as a rhetorical question the answer to which, the rest of the poem shows, is no, and there is no similarly reasonable answer to “would it mean anything to me that I bore the canopy?”) If the poet wanted to use a rhetorical question to show it doesn’t mean anything to him that he actually did bear the canopy, why would he not have said either, “Is’t aught to me I bore the canopy?” or “Was’t aught to me I bore the canopy?”
For one last example of Oxfordian straining to torture support for their side out of the most innocent material, I’m going to turn to a story about Shakespeare and the Queen. According to Ogburn, it seems that there was “a performance at the court in which Shakespeare participated as an actor. During the course of it, the queen dropped her glove on the stage and Shakespeare picked it up, saying impromptu, ‘Although engaged on this high embassy,/ Yet stoop we to pick up our cousin’s glove.’” About this Ogburn (who scorns other anecdotes about Shakespeare when they indicate that he wrote the Oeuvre) says, “It may be remarked that the life-expectancy of a commoner who called Queen Elizabeth ‘cousin’ whether in play or not—indeed of anyone much under the rank of earl—would have been about ten minutes.” He also adds that this is “the only recorded incident involving Shakespeare’s appearance on the stage”—but doesn’t mention the several times that he was mentioned as having played some role or other, nor the voluminous evidence—hard evidence, not anecdotal evidence (and Ogburn doesn’t even say where his “cousin’s glove” story came from)—of his having been an actor.
But to get back to the incident, the idea that if Shakespeare had ever called the queen “cousin,” he would have been summarily executed is just nonsense. That isn’t the way the world works. Context does mean something. Underlings can break taboos with their superiors and get away with it at times. Generally in real life, insults are punished only when intended as insults–by persons the insulted party would just as soon punish for one reason or another, anyway. And even if the queen had been offended, surely a clever fellow like Shakespeare could have wormed his way out of his predicament by claiming merely to have made a slip of the tongue, or accidently grabbed “cousin” out of thin air for the sake of his meter.
But to Ogburn, the incident proves that Oxford acted under his pseudonym–without giving away his identity, of course, although who he really was—or at least that he wasn’t Shakespeare–would have been plain to all the actors in Shakespeare’s acting company, and everyone in the audience, including many who weren’t supposed to know who Shakespeare really was. Such are the loopy conclusions an Oxfordian is forced into to maintain his rigidniplex (or fixed delusional system).
Against the Oxfordian rigidniplex is Meres’s listing Oxford as a separate person from Shakespeare. There are also several references to Shakespeare as an actor on the public stage, which Oxford could not plausibly have been (and some of these postdate 1604, when Oxford died). Most lethal to the Oxford case are the references to Shakespeare as an author later than Oxford’s date of death that indicate that the author was then still alive. These include the anonymous Preface in certain copies of the quarto edition of Troilus and Cressida, published in 1609; Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612); the John Davies of Hereford epigram of 1610, “To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shake-speare,” which not only makes Shakespeare a living poet then, but refers to him as both an actor and a gentleman (as opposed to an aristocrat); and the John Howes 1615 list of “Our moderne, and present excellent Poets” in John Stow’s Annales. Several records indicate that Shakespeare the actor was alive after 1604, too, which further kills any idea that Oxford was the actor as well as the author Shakespeare.
Certain plays are assigned dates after Oxford’s death, as well—particularly Henry VIII. Two witnesses, Sir Henry Wotton and Henry Bluett, stated in letters about the burning of the Globe in 1613 that a performance of Henry VIII was under way at the time and that it was a new play (“which had not been acted 2 or 3 times before,” according to Bluett). A Winter’s Tale was almost certainly not written before 1610, the earliest date at which it could have been registered for performance according to the research of Irvin Matus. The Tempest, too, was almost certainly written after 1610 when its chief source, a letter by William Strachey about a shipwreck at Bermuda in 1609 was written and circulated (though not printed till 1625, which allows anti-Stratfordians to claim it was a forgery, or—even more idiotically—a first-person narrative of a true event that its author based on Shakespeare’s play); the first mention of a performance of The Tempest was in 1611, which neatly fits the scholars’ view that it was composed in 1610.
The final significant point against Oxford-as-Shakespeare is the clumsiness of, and lack of solid evidence for, the dating schemes Oxfordians have to invent to allow him to have gotten all the plays written by 1604, plus the fact that if he did indeed write his plays starting around 1580, he would have been the originator of the kind of high comedy Lyly has been given credit for, the first true master of the use of blank verse in drama rather than Marlowe, and the creator of English Tragedy instead of the host of other playwrights like Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, etc., who are now honored for that accomplishment. He would have single-handedly initiated the sonnet fad, too—with sonnets superior to any of his imitators. The idea of one man’s being responsible for all the great accomplishments of a great age of literature seems unlikely, to understate it. It would not only mean Oxford aka William Shakespeare was a double super-genius, but that none of the other writers of the era was original in any consequential way, which would be . . . unusual. It also seems counter-intuitive that Oxford’s plays would be performed a decade or more after their writing in the exact or approximate order of their composition: for instance, if both Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night had been available, why would an acting company have put the lesser of these on instead of the other simply because it had been composed earlier? And why wait ten years or more to put on Hamlet and Macbeth while putting on several far inferior plays?
Conclusion: I don’t see how anyone can take Oxford-as-Shakespeare seriously.
Next Chapter here.
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Marton Koppany
This all sounds like a personal war for you where you see anti-Stratfordians as the enemy and you as the Defender of the Faith. I wonder what it is about Shakspere of Stratford that you identify with. Is it his humble origins and his (alleged) rise to genius? Perhaps this is what you aspire to as well. It’s your own dream that you are defending. It’s difficult to fairly weigh evidence once one is personally involved, that is, if one has a stake in the result of the investigation.
Hi, Robert.
I’m relatively new to blogging at this site so wasn’t aware of the two or three dozen comments it has drawn in the six months or so that I’ve had it, yours among them. According to where I’m reading your post, you were responding to something of mine in the “About” section of my blog–probably my response to Diana Price’s book. Anyway, I do see myself somewhat as the defender of the “faith” that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Emotionally, I do strongly identify with his relatively humble background. Mainly, I identify with his having managed to become a great writer without a great deal of formal education. Self-reliance is an important ideal for me. He was also like me in coming from the middle class and in having been born outside a major city–and in having a bald head!
However, all that’s irrelevant. I’d love to find that Oscar Wilde did not write The Importance of Being Earnest because I’m not homosexual, or that Einstein’s theory is poppycock, because I’m not Jewish. Nonetheless, I go with the facts. The facts in the Shakespeare authorship controversy are entirely on the side of my Will. So much so that my real major interest in the question is in determining why apparently sane people believe Oxford or Marlowe or Bacon or someone else wrote the works of Shakespeare. I believe that they are psitchotics, or “psituational psychotics”–sane in most of their lives but insane when it comes to the authorship question. I have a complex neurophysiological theory to explain how their brain works and how it forces them psitchotically to refuse to accept self–reliance and imagination, neither of which they are capable of, as sufficient means to make a man a genius, so write books like Diana Price’s . . . or send Internet messages to those who are sane about Shakespeare suggesting that belief in him is a “faith” grounded on a dream the believer is defending as you have done.
No hard feelings, though. Everyone is defending an outlook on life. Some do it with solid evidence, some with fantasy. Which is more likely right takes a while to sort out, depending as it does on a consensus of knowledgeable persons–like the one that has remained on Shakespeare’s side for the 150 years or so that
anyone has seriously expressed doubt as to his having written the works attributed to him.
–Bob G.
Most of us defend with facts, it’s how the facts are interpreted that is the issue. Often people leave out facts that contradict their argument. I’m wondering which books on the authorship question you have read (I suspect only Shapiro’s “Contested Will”), in order to justify categorizing all anti-Stratforians as “psitchotics”. For example, what do you know about Bacon, his life, his aims, his connections with drama, his proximity to certain source documents for certain Shakespeare plays? If the answer is “not much” then I’m afraid your sweeping psychological diagnosis has no basis in fact. By the way, the Groatsworth IS a charge of plagiarism against Shakspere (Aesop’s crow is connected to plagiarism). Sorry.
Robert, I suggest you go to humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare. It’s a Shakespeare authorship discussion group. I often post there. I don’t want to carry on an authorship discussion about it here, but might there. As to what you say above:
1. the facts that I interpret are things like a monument, a picture of an author in a book, countless names of an author on title-pages, documents written by eye-witnesses–that sort of thing. Your side mainly interprets these facts as forgeries, willful frauds, mistakes, irony, etc. The other “facts” your side comes up with do nothing explicitly to establish anyone other than Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. That Bacon may have read some work believed to be a source of some Shakespearean play is meaningless, for example. Too many other writers could have read it, or heard enough about it to use it; other it may not be a necessary source. It does not objectively explicitly establish Bacon as the author of any Shakespeare play. On the other hand, the fact that the First Folio states explicitly that the author of the works the book contains was dead at a time when Bacon was still alive objectively, explicitly establishes (although it does not prove) that Bacon did not write those works.
2. If you really wondered what books I’ve read about the authorship question, you ought to have done a little research. Indeed, if you only know about me because you stumbled on this blog, you prove that you yourself must not know much about the subject. I’ve published a book on the authorship question and been active on the Internet for twenty years or so debating it. I was even a member of an Oxfordian society for five or ten years debating Oxfordians. I haven’t read all the books on the subject, but many of them–more I suspect than you have. But guess what: it doesn’t matter what books I’ve read; what matters are my arguments. Shakespeare and the Rigidniks is the name of my book. I believe it’s available on the Internet. That’s where you’ll find my arguments.
3. I don’t classify all anti-Stratfordians as psitchotics, only those who have actually studied the issue and thus can not be excused as simply ignorant. I give the reasons for my classification in my book.
4. Many scholars argue that Greene’s Groatsworth accuses the upstart Crow of plagiary. However, there are sound arguments against that. The use of the term, “Crow,” is far from conclusive as evidence that Greene considered the Crow a plagiarist since it was standard to call all actors crows–because they made a living from the use of others’ feathers, not because they were plagiarists. Finally, it is near-certain that the Crow was not merely being accused of plagiarism. Read my essay on Greenes Groatsworth for more details. It’s here at my blog.