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1) Introduction to the Shakespeare authorship problem
What is the authorship question? Why does it exist?
A vivid animated history in flash of some historic comments -- by Leslie Howard, Sigmund Freud, Sir John Gielgud and many others -- on the authorship question.
3) History of the Shakespeare Question
A more detailed html synopsis of the history of the controversy.
4) Doubts of the Orthodox view
Why have so many prominent intellectuals doubted the orthodox account of authorship?
5) Why not Bacon, Marlowe or Derby?
Theories supporting these three "alternative Shakespeare's" are all flawed and lack the conclusive detail found in the case for Oxford.
6) The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as "Shakespeare"
A synoposis of the case for Oxford's authorship. For the slide-show version of the case for Oxford's authorship, please visit our 25 Questions section.
7) How Edward de Vere's life illustrates "William Shakespeare"
Ten thematic elements in the Shakespearean plays which resonate with de Vere's life-- extracted and updated from J.Thomas Looney's "Shakespeare" Identified.
1) Introduction to the Shakespeare Authorship Problem
The Shakespeare Fellowship argues two related propositions:
1) It is highly improbable that the works were composed by the person to whom they are traditionally assigned, William Shaksper of Stratford-upon-Avon (1564-1616)
2) The theory first proposed by John Thomas Looney in 1920, identifying Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is far more plausible than any other contending alternative to the orthodox view.
The Folger Shakespeare Library, which PBS Frontline once referred to as the "High Temple" of Shakespeare orthodoxy, has recently adopted -- at least for public relations purposes -- a nuetral policy with respect to the first of these two propositions and has actively endorsed the second.
Although powerful voices at the library remain unalterably opposed to full public discussion of the question, others clearly believe that the question remains an open one, and that the evidence for de Vere is substantially more persuasive than the evidence for Marlowe, William Stanley, or any of the many other candidates who have been proposed over the years.
To confute these poropositions Orthodox Shakespeare scholars -- sometimes referred to as "Stratfordians" -- rely principally on force basic points:
1) the prefatory "testimony" of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works published in 1623, seven years after the Stratford citizen's death,
2) The monument erected at Stratford-on-Avon c. 1623 which praises the Stratford-on-Avon "Shakspeare" as a distinguished poet;
3) The tradition of "ancient witnesses" who wrote about "Shakespeare" and -- presumably, according to orthodox conviction -- believed Shaksper was the author (including the name "Shakespeare" on the title pages of quarto publications of the plays).
4) the alleged lack of any challenge to this attribution during or shortly after the author's lifetime.
We believe that these points, although worth consideration, constitute an insufficient barrier to the major piece of negative evidence on which so many authoritative voices have commented: the complete misfit between the character of the literary work and the man who supposedly authored it.
Orthodox scholars try to rule out the second proposition --that Edward de Vere is most likely the true author primarily -- on two counts:
1) that his death in 1604 bars him from writing several plays they believe (but cannot prove) were written later, and
2) that the quality of de Vere's published early poetry is inferior to that of Shakespeare.
For now, we will let the respected orthodox scholar, Sir Edmund K. Chambers, rebut the first argument when he concedes that the entire dating process of Shakespearean composition is "conjectural" (Chambers 1930 1: 269).
For more details please consult the forthcoming Chronology page in our Virtual Classroom.
As for the alleged "inferiority" of Oxford's acknowledged verse, this is a (superficial, we fear) value judgment motivated by the revisionist ideology of a late 20th century Shakespeare industry which is desperate to stem the tide of public interest in Oxford. 19th century scholars writing before the advent of the Oxford theory considered him one of the finest poets of the Elizabethan age.
We hope to shortly publish some commentary on these poems; for now, readers can judge for themselves whether these "early poems" have a Shakespearean sound and tone to them by visiting the page The Poems of Edward de Vere.
In the sections that follow we provide a brief history of this issue, and an outline of the reasons that we believe that the direct and circumstantial evidence from Elizabethan days weighs against the Stratford attribution and for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
4) A summary of the doubts surrounding the Stratfordian attribution
Shakespeare, alone of all the great writers in Western civilization, presents a unique enigma. Despite two hundred years of scholarly attempts to establish the Stratford man's credentials, doubts about the author's identity refuse to go away and are getting stronger daily. As Henry James said, "The facts of Stratford do not 'square' with the plays of genius...":
-The life documented in conventional biographies is inconsistent with the life revealed in the plays and poems. William Shaksper was the pefect bourgeois businessman, a man of worldly wealth and upward mobility. The plays express a consistent pattern of contempt for the values and attitudes necessary for success in the social milieu in which the alleged author lived. Instead they reflect a distinctively aristocratic social view, as Walt Whitman recognized when he postulated that "only one of the Wolfish earls" would seem to be the true author of the history plays.
-As Charlton Ogburn and others have argued in the past, and as Diana Price's new book documents in detail, all of the literary references allegedly made to the man from Stratford are in fact ambiguous and may just as easily refer to some unknown person writing under a popular and often-recognized "nom de plume"; conversely the many documents which do exist relating to the Stratford Shakspere fail to indicate that he was even literate and suggest the life of someone who is unlikely to have been anything but a talented shill and front man for the real author.
-In an age of copious eulogies, none was forthcoming when William Shakspere died in Stratford.
-Among the leading figures of the day who strangely take no notice of the Stratford man's fame is the antiquarian, classical scholar and heraldic expert William Camden. In his list of Stratford Worthies of 1605 William Camden omits the Stratford man's name, even though Camden had previously passed on Shakspere's application for a family coat of arms. In his Annals for the year 1616 Camden omits mention of the Stratford man's death. In his Remains Concerning Britain Camden lists the name "Shakespeare" as one of the common names of England, but makes no remark at all about the then-famous author. (The inference is that it did not occur to Camden that the author, "Shakespeare", and the Stratford man were the same person.) The first memorial verse to "Shakespeare" appears in the 1623 Folio.
-William Shakspere's son-in-law William Hall, who kept an extensive journal, including notice of the "excellent Poet" and Warwickshire native Michael Drayton, fails to mention his father-in-law's association with the theatre, with drama, or with literature -- an astounding and troubling lacuna.
-As Charlton Ogburn points out, the conditions for the survival of books, manuscripts or other documents definitively linking the Stratford man to the works of Shakespeare could not have been more ideal. New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon remained in hands of Shakspere's descendents until the 1670s, after the social upheavels of the revolution, and less than fourty years before Nicholas Rowe wrote the first biography of the alleged author.
-The first person (apparently) to ever conduct a sustained and principled investigation of the Stratford-upon-Avon area for documents relating to the alleged author, the Rev. James Wilmot, not only found nothing -- in horror he forcefully repudiated the orthodox account of Shakespearean authorship, as if he had discovered positive evidence that the Stratford man was not the real author (on Wilmot's orders, all his papers were burned after his death).
- Aside from one curious and now lost or surpressed document once at Wilton House refering to "the man Shakespeare," there is no mention in the documents of the time of the supposed author's intimate acquaintance with the inner circles of the Jacobean or Elizabethan courts, in striking contrast to Ben Jonson and other contemporary writers.
-The author of Shakespeare's works had to be familiar with a wide body of knowledge for his time -- law, music, foreign languages, the classics, and aristocratic manners and sports. There is no documentation that William Shakspere of Stratford had access to such information. Unlike other major playwrights of the period he did not attend college.
-Shakespeare accurately employs as many as six hundred legal terms in the play, indicating the necessity of a formal legal training in his background, which in Elizabethan times was not likely to have been obtained outside the Inns of Court. No record exists of the Stratford man attending an Inn of Court; Edward de Vere graduated from Grays Inn circa 1567.
-Despite a massive man-hunt going back more than two centuries, not a single authenticated letter written in his hand or book from his library has ever been found.
-No legitimate portrait of him exists. [An analysis of the Droeshaut engraved prefixed to the 1623 folio is forthcoming -- ed]
-The plays reflect an intimate knowledge of mid-late 16th century international affairs and diplomacy, court life, etc. Yet the supposed author moved in the exalted circles where such information was available without leaving a trace. Ben Jonson, a real-life middle-class poet and playwright, displays a similar knowledge but his copious interaction the aristocratic power elite of the day is documented in many extant sources.
-Shakspere's will, noteworthy for its detailed disposition of household furniture, there is no mention of books, library, manuscripts, or of any literary interest. The only theatrical connection is an interlined bequest, quite possibly a spurious later edition to the will, to the actors Hemminges and Condell who are also mentioned in the 1623 folio as "friends" of the author.
-The only specimens of William Shakspere's handwriting to come down to us are six almost illegible signatures, each formed differently from the others, and each from the latter period of his life (none earlier than 1612). Three of these signatures are on his will, one is on a deposition in someone else's breach of promise case, and two are on property documents. None of these has anything to do with literature. The first syllable, incidentally, in all these signatures is spelled "Shak", whereas the published plays and poems consistently spell the name "Shake".
-We submit that this list of problems with the orthodox account constitutes more than sufficient grounds to open the inquiry into whether or not the official account of Shakespearean authorship, although propped up by the formidable authority of many distinguished experts, can any longer be maintained with equanimity by anyone.
5) Why not Bacon, Marlowe or Derby...?
For many an understandable question arises, even if one does begin to doubt the Stratford story: "Granted, there does seem to be a problem with the Stratford man as the author. But why are there so many candidates? Why should I choose the Shakespeare Fellowship's candidate over such illustrious figures as Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe? Haven't these Elizabethan writers had as many, if not more, passionate adherents than the more obscure Earl of Oxford?"
The sheer number of candidates proposed for the august position of "William Shakespeare" is indeed noteworthy. The situation is unique; such doubts exist for no other writer of Shakespeare's historic importance. Orthodox scholars would have us believe that the number of alternative theories invalidates the entire inquiry. To them, since it is obvious that all of the candidates substituting for William Shakspere of Stratford cannot be the author, therefore none of them can be.
Actually, of the more than eighty Elizabethans put forward as the "true Shakespeare," only four merit serious consideration: Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam), Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley (Sixth Earl of Derby), and Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford).
Following is summary of the arguments against the first three.
Bacon
Though possessed of much learning, sophistication, and keen intellect, Francis Bacon expressed these qualities in a different manner from Shakespeare's whose work is charged throughout with "imagination, passion and idealism" in the words of two commentators. Though both Bacon and Shakespeare had wide knowledge of the law, Shakespeare's usages of legal terminology, unlike Bacon's, are richly metaphorical.
The known verse that has come down to us of Francis Bacon's, such as his metrical settings of the Psalms, is stilted and as unlike Shakespeare's as is possible. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine that Francis Bacon, with the full life he led and his other numerous literary and official preoccupations, could have also composed thirty-six plays, 154 sonnets and two long narrative poems of the quality these works exhibit. Finally, since Bacon lived through the period of the "definitive" First Folio (1623), one wonders why he didn't use the opportunity to correct the cornucopia of textual problems left unresolved in that publication.
Marlowe
This talented, bohemian dramatist from the Elizabethan era died in 1593 --at the age of 29 (the same age as the Stratford man in that year) and on the eve of the publication of Shakespeare's works. To overcome this obstacle, Marlowe's supporters point to irregularities in the coroner's inquest, and they suppose that Marlowe did not really die in that year but lived on to write the works of "Shakespeare," a subterfuge necessitated by the "official coverup" of his documented activities as a spy for the Crown.
But the inquest irregularities do not prove that Marlowe didn't die; conceivably they have been fabricated to cover up the true cause of his death, but not the fact that he did die, a scenario which is wholly void of any positive evidence let alone conclusive proof.
The assumption that Marlowe survived for an unspecified number of years to write plays under a pseudonym seems a mighty fragile hook on which to hang an authorship theory. But there are many other objections as well --stylistic discrepancies, certainly, not being the least of them, despite the numerous "borrowings" cited by supporters of Marlowe's candidacy.
Marlowe enthusiasts also point to the year 1593 as the first publication of "Shake-speare," but overlook the fact that no Shakespearean play appeared in print other than anonymously until 1598. The earliest of these Shakespearean quartos were of plays that must have been on the boards during Marlowe's lifetime and could safely have been ascribed to him when they were published --especially since all accepted plays by Marlowe were published posthumously and attributed to on original publication -- this latter fact destroys any conceivable motive for attributing some of Marlowe's plays to "Shakespeare".
Derby
The case for William Stanley as Shakespeare rests primarily on two 1599 documents, one describing him as "busied only in penning comedies for the common players," and the other, by his wife in a letter to Robert Cecil, as "taking delight in the players."
It is worth pausing to notice that the wife in this instance is Elizabeth Vere (1575-1627), the 17th Earl of Oxford's oldest daughter. The certain knowledge of these documents that de Vere's son in law was one of the closeted aristocratic playwrights of the period serves to confirm how secretive much literary activity associated with the theatre remained. Despite the two letters which record his theatrical activities, no public documents of any sort acknowledge that Derby was a closeted playwright.
In 1922 the distinguished French literary historian and editor of Rabelais, Abel Lefranc, published an impressive brief for the Derby candidacy. The involvement of Lefranc, a towering figure in French literary studies, in the authorship question is one of those important historical facts which some proponents of the orthodox theory of authorship conveniently omit when constructing the fictional claim that no "scholars" have considered the subject worth dignifying.
In fact, Lefranc was one of the most important literary scholars of his generation. Although the Shakespeare Fellowship disagrees with Lefranc's specific conclusions with respect to Derby, we endorse his important contribution, in À La Découverte De Shakespeare, to the dialogue on the authorship question.
A centerpiece of Lefranc's argument is the strong evidence connecting Love's Labour's Lost to events of the court of Navarre, c. 1578, when the young William Stanley was an ambassador.
There is no question that this unmistakable stratum of topical reference in the play constitutes an embarrassing complication for orthodox academicians. William Shakspere was at the time 14 years of age, and seems unlikely, to say the least, to have taken much interest in the minutiae of diplomatic history reflected in the play, or had access to the arcana of international politics of the late 1570s, to which the play makes frequent joking reference.
De Vere, however, could easily have learned what he did not know from firsthand experience about Navarre of 1578 from his known contacts with Stanley, his friend Henry IV (then King of Navarre), or others in his internatinal circuit of associates. Hence Eva Turner Clarke, in her 1933 book The Satirical Comedy of Love's Labour's Lost, converts Lefranc's most persuasive evidence into a compelling brief for Oxford's authorship.
Most of the other arguments put forth by Derbyites apply to likewise Oxford.
Oxfordians concede that Derby may have had a hand in the composition of the Shakespeare plays, and that such a supposition could account for the evidence of collaboration in some of the "late" dramas. But the facts of Derby's life do not fit the autobiographical implications of the Sonnets and of many plays as do the facts of Oxford's life. Derby, after all, was de Vere's son-in-law, and his literary association with the theatre, although clearly a secret at the time, is well documented in surviving testimony.
We suggest that the most useful approach to Derby's acknowledged life as a closet dramatist would be to examine the hypothesis that he wrote some of the still unattributed works of Elizabethan drama, such as the three "W.S." plays included in the Oxford Shakespeare Apocrypha.
Oxford
As we noted earlier, one objection which has been vigorously advanced to contest the Oxford theory is the allegedly poor quality of his known verse. Though far superior to Francis Bacon's, de Vere's poems hardly reach the lyric benchmark established, e.g., in Shake-Speare's Sonnets. It would be foolhardy to pretend otherwise. On the other hand, striking resemblances to Shakespeare's verse abound in de Vere's early work, as J. Thomas Looney originally argued in 1920.
Tellingly, this denigration of Oxford's poetry is revisionist in character: it is clearly not an objective assessment, but one motivated by the anxiety of 20th century English professors, in the post-Looney era, to deflate public curiousity about Oxford and the Oxfordian case.
A broad historical perspective reveals the revisionist nature of the effort to denigrate Oxford's lyrics. Numerous pre-Looney commentators from Webbe in the 16th century to Alexander Grosart in the 19th or Sir Sidney Lee in the 20th praised Oxford as a superlative poet. Grosart, who first collected Oxford's known poetry and prose in 1877, regarded him, as didWilliam Webbe in 1586, as one of the finest poets of the Elizabethan age and believed that "an unlifted shadow lies over his memory."
Oxford's reputation as a playwright is also attested to by a number of his contemporaries, including Francis Meres in 1598. It is noteworthy that among all the dramatists Meres praises, Oxford is the only playwright whose plays are unknown (at least under his own name), and for whom not even a title survives!
Also as noted earlier, we believe the traditional Stratfordian chronology is not a barrier because (as many Stratfordian scholars also note) it is conjecture, not fact. There is no extant document from the Elizabethan era attesting to any given play having been written in any given year.
Thus we to have two halves of a single riddle: a man (from Stratford) supposed to be a playwright with 36 plays credited to him, but with no documentation of a literary life or even extant proof of literacy, and on the other hand a known playwright (Oxford) whose literary life is abundantly documented, but with no surviving plays credited to him.
6) The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as "Shakespeare"
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was a recognized poet and playwright of great talent, a patron of literature, the theatre and music, and close acquaintance will all of the personalities whose brilliance infuses the Shakespearean canon with its own distinctive Elizabethan character: Arthur Golding, Bartholomew Clerke, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Watson, Gervase Markham, Robert Greene, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Churchyard, William Byrd, Thomas Bedingfield, and many others less well known to students of Elizabethan cultural history fell within his orbit and left their mark on the mature works of "Shakespeare".
It is impossible in this short summary to do justice to the myriad reasons why, in the 20th century, both the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Shakespeare Folger Library as concluded that de Vere is the most plausible alternative candidate to the official dogma of Shakespeare's identity, and why so many informed and independent thinkers have concluded that he was, in fact, the true mind behind the mask of the the bard.
Here are a few of the most salient points:
1) In the Renaissance period in England a powerful stigma was attached to the publication of poetry and, epsecially, drama by courtiers--this was an unwritten honor code of the court. Sir Phillip Sidney's collected work, for example, only appeared in print after his untimely decease in 1586. Numerous published commentary from the Elizabethan period documents the existence of the taboo.
Occasionally, it is true, the taboo was violated. For example, William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, in 1603 published a play, The Tragedy Darius. But as late as the Caroline court (1625-1649), William Selden wrote: "'Tis ridiculous for a Lord to print Verses; 'tis well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public, is foolish" (Selden's Table Talk, f.p. 1699, 116).
2) Both because of the stigma associated with print, and because publication of controversial material constituted a political risk, the use of pseudonyms and other forms of veiled publication was very common during the period in question, according to Taylor and Mosher in their standard reference work, The Encyclopedia of Anonyms and Cryptonyms.
Even the use of living "front men" was, apparently, a common strategy, if we may trust the reaction of Queen Elizabeth herself to the publication of the inflammatory 1599 tract, The first part of the life and raigne of king Henrie IIII, published under the name of the historian John Hayward.
In a July 11 1599 interrogation of Hayward, the Queen "argued that Hayward was pretending to be the author in order to sheild 'some more mischievous' person, and that he should be racked so that he might disclose the truth" (DNB on CD-Rom: emphasis added). The fact that Elizabeth so easily assumed that a living person, thought by all historians of the period to be the actual author of the work in question, was only serving as a scapegoat for a "more mischievous" concealed author certainly seems to indicate her knowledge of a common practice.
3) Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Oxford was known in the Elizabethan court as a prominent patron of the theatre -- who, like Hamlet, used the theatre to to advance his own, frequently controversial, political agenda. He was also known as a closeted poet and playwright, "the best for comedy," as Francis Meres describes him in 1598. The Arte of English Poesie, the leading (and anonymous) work of literary criticism of the Elizabethan reign, lists Oxford first in a list of Noblemen "who have written commendably well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest" (Arber 75).
4) The Shakespeare plays and poems show that the author had specific knowledge of certain works of literature, prominent persons and events in Elizabeth's court, which de Vere had intimate knowledge of:
-Venus and Adonis (1593), the first work to bear the name "William Shakespeare," is dedicated to the 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom Oxford's daughter Elizabeth was then engaged, on the obligation of her grandfather William Cecil. Southampton is also thought by most scholars, orthodox and Oxfordian alike, to be "fair youth" of the Sonnets.
-Oxford's father-in-law and guardian, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, is satirized knowingly in Hamlet as Polonius. All historically astute and honest scholars concede this point, which is bolstered by a huge range of comparative detail. The parody is perhaps the most daring use of the stage for satiric purposes during the Elizabethan period. It is one of the strange anomolies of the Stratfordian paradigm that the author of such "slander" against the most powerful man in England, whose son Robert inherited his power on his death in 1598, should apparently escape even a slap on the wrist when other playwrights such as Tom Nashe or Ben Jonson were called before the inquisition of the Privy Council or imprisoned for less daring uses of the stage.
-Oxford epistle dedicatory to Thomas Bedingfield's Cardanus Comfort (1573), a major source book for Hamlet, is strikingly Shakespearean in character, as Charles Wisner Barrell -- in a 1946 article which we shall shortly reprint to this site -- was the first to observe.
-Christopher Hatton, Vice-Chamberlain, is satirized as Malvolio ("ill Wil to e.o.") in Twelfth Night. Hatton was one of Oxford's most highly placed enemies and a competitor for the romantic attention of the Queen c. 1574. The poesie employed by Maria and Toby to entrap Malvolio into his fantasy that Olivia loves him, "The Fortunate Unhappy" (2.5.164), as Bernard M. Ward first documented in 1928, is a stinging satiric inversion of Hatton's motto, as applied by Gabriel Harvey in his 1578 Audley End encomium, "Foelix Infortunatus" ("happy, although unfortunate").
5) The sonnets and the plays contain frequent references to events that are paralleled in Oxford's life.
-Oxford is the only "Shakespeare" who -- as part of his ceremonial prerogatives as the Great Lord Chamberlain -- actually "bore the canopy" (to which sonnet 125 alludes) over Queen Elizabeth.
-Oxford is the only Elizabethan writer-- other than "Shakespeare" in Sonnet 121 -- who is known to have used the striking audacious phrase, "I am that I am," in reference to himself.
-Polonius in Hamlet refers to "young men falling out at tennis," which most likely refers to the infamous Oxford-Sidney tennis-court quarrel.
-The Sonnet writer several times refers to his own lameness (37, 66, 89), as in "speak of my lameness and I straight will halt" (89: 3). A tradition that Shakespeare was lame originated very early, and is discussed extensively by George Russell French in his 1866 Shakespereana Genealogica (569-571). Because of injuries suffered in a duel c.1583 Oxford was "a lame man" -- which just might explain the lameness mentioned repeatedly by the author of the sonnets.
-In 1573 Oxford as a young man, along with his companions, was reported as playing pranks and tricks on travellers along the same stretch of road "between Rochester and Gravesend" where Prince Hal's pals from the Boar's Head Tavern did likewise in Henry IV, Part 1. (The famous pub was connected to the Vere family symbolically, since the family crest featured a blue boar; furthermore de Vere's own players, according to surviving documents, customarily performed at the Boar's head).
-Oxford's "Echo" poem, written to his mistress Anne Vavasor c. 1581, bears a strong resemblance to the echo verses in Venus and Adonis and certain passages in Romeo and Juliet. Other poems by Oxford, for example his "kingdom, cottage or a grave" epigram, show similar uncanny resemblances to passages from Shakespeare.
-The details of Hamlet, one of "Shakespeare's" greatest achievements, are so similar to those of Oxford's life that students of Oxford's life regard the play as inherently autobiographical. As Washington Post reporter Don Oldenburg wrote, Oxford's life reads like a "rough draft" of Hamlet.
-Numerous passages from the Sonnets and plays make pointed punning reference to Oxford's heraldic motto, "Vero nihil verius" ("nothing truer than the truth"), for example Troilus: "After all comparisons of truth, as truth's authentic author to be cited"
6) Although no play published under Oxford's name has come down to us, his acknowledged early verse and his surviving letters contain forms, words, and phrases characteristic of Shakespeare.
-The six-line pentameter stanzas in Venus and Adonis described by "Shakespeare" as the "first heir of my invention," uncommon in the English verse of the 16th century but occur in early poetry of Edward de Vere in poems thick with Shakespearean idioms and figurative constructs.
-Extensive and persuasive studies of Oxford's and Shakespeare's word parallels in books such as William Plumer Fowler's Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford's Letters confirm a strong suspicion that Oxford had the most "Shakespearean" lexicon, linguistic patterns, and philosophy of any correspondent whose works survive from the period.
7) For a controversial author-courtier such as Oxford, writing scandalous satiric drama for the public stage, a pseudonym would have been essential. Consider the name: "William Shake-speare," and how fitting it was as a nom de plume for Oxford:
-Pallas Athena, patron goddess of ancient Athens, home of Greek theatre, and Renaissance goddess of the arts and literature, was proverbially associated, in the iconography and literature of Renaissance Europe, with the action of of "spear-shaking." As Henri Estienne explained the popular belief in his Thesaurus Linguae Graecas (Geneva, 1572): "dicitur enim pallas quasi Vibratrix dea. & quidem hastae vibratrix, utpote bellicosa" = for Pallas is said (to be) like a shaking goddess. and indeed a shaker of the spear, inasmuch (as she is) warlike" (III.29.D.1-2).
-At court Oxford was known as "Spear-shaker" because of his skill at tournaments and his crest showing a lion brandishing a spear. In his 1578 Audley end address to Oxford in front of the court, Gabriel Harvey refers to him as one whose "vultus tela vibrat" -- his "will shakes speares."
-Thomas Nashe refers to his patron Oxford as "Gentle Master William" and a "Sacred ox" in 1592. In the same pamphlet, Nashe also mentions "his very friend Master Apis Lapis" (stoned bull or ox) and "Will Monox" -- references which Charles Wisner Barrell as long ago as 1944 analyzed as being to Oxford (as of March 2002, Barrell's work has never been refuted or even contested).
8) The events of 1604-1623 and circumstances of the posthumous publication of the Shakespearean oeuvre in the 1623 folio lend strong support to the Oxfordian theory.
- With the exception of a spate of publication of plays, and the Sonnets, in the years 1608-9, when the Countess of Oxford sold her estate at Hackney, no new Shakespearean plays were published after 1604 until 1621, when Othello appeared in quarto.
-Following Oxford's death in June 1604 King James had eight Shakespeare plays produced at court, apparently as a final tribute to the deceased author. Moreover, David L. Roper has recently observed a curious contradiction related to this episode:
"In that same year, with de Vere having recently died, the King turned to Ben Jonson, and commissioned him to write masques for the Court's entertainment. In the years that followed, and by collaborating with Inigo Jones for scenery, Jonson went on to produce upwards of thirty more masques. The man from Stratford contributed nothing - nor was he asked to. Furthermore, despite the interest and enjoyment derived by James from Shakespeare's plays, the King never sought, nor even once singled-out the man from Stratford."
The reason, we submit, for the failure of King James to patronize the bard should by now be readily apparent: unlike Ben Jonson, he was already dead.
-When Oxford's widow died nine years later (1612) a group of Shakespeare plays (fourteen in this case) were produced, again apparently in tribute to the deceased author.
-When the Sonnets were published in 1609, they refer to the author as "ever-living" -- an epithet which is applied almost exclusively as an honorific to a deceased person.
-All scholars agree that the Sonnets, although not published until five years after de Vere's death, were completed before 1604. They refer in very pointed ways to the imprisonment of the fair youth, the Earl of Southampton, in the tower of London following the aborted 1601 Essex Rebellion and to the death of Queen Elizabeth in spring 1603. No such references to events after 1604 can be found in the Sonnets.
-In Sonnet 107, which alludes to the passing of the Queen, the author states that "death to me subscribes," indicating his awareness of his own imminent death. Oxford died June 26 1604, slightly more than a year later that Elizabeth.
-The Shakespeare Folio was patronized by Oxford's son-in-law Phillip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and his brother, Lord Chamberlain William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The folio was an expensive and risky publication, which was most likely subsidized by these two powerful and wealthy patrons.
-Ben Jonson's verses in the folio pun on the name "Shakespeare" and praise the author's
Well-turned and true filed lines
In each of which he seems to shake a lance
As brandisht in the eyes of ignoranceThe verses indicate Jonson's conscious awareness, indicated in many other subtle ways in the prefatory matter to the Folio, that the entire publication was an elaborate and well-contrived political hoax engineered by the three closely allied families of Pembroke, Montgomery, and Vere. More information on Jonson's role in the folio hoax will be forthcoming shortly -- Ed.
7) A comparison of Edward de Vere with "William Shakespeare"
Some general and special characteristics of the author "Shake-speare" revealed in the poems and plays, as adduced by J. Thomas Looney in "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, with a comparison of these characteristics to the matching characteristics of Edward de Vere 17th Earl of Oxford.
1) Mature man of recognized genius. A lyric poet of recognized talent.
Edward de Vere was praised by the author of the Arte of English Poesie (1589) "for Comedy and Enterlude": by William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry (1586): "...the right honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among the rest"; and by Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598): "The best for comedy among us be Edward Earl of Oxford,...(and others)"
[we will deal with the role Palladis Tamia plays as a document purportedly confirming the orthodox view of authorship in due time--ed. 3/14/02].
2) Of pronounced and known literary taste.
Edward de Vere was the most prominent patron of writers in the 16th century. Among those literary figures who dedicated works to the Earl are Spenser, Robert Greene, Anthony Munday, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, Arthur Golding, and many others. Oxford arranged for the publication of books by Thomas Bedingfield and Bartholomew Clarke and contributed dedicatory prefaces to each.
3) An enthusiast in the world of drama.
Oxford is known to have written, produced and acted in plays and masques -- none of which survive, at least under his own name. He was lease-holder of the BlackfriarsTheatr during its critical first phase of operation during the 1580s. He operated his own theatrical company, Oxford's Boys, as well. In 1580 players from the Earl of Warwick's company transferred to Lord Oxford's service. John Lyly, at that time Oxford's private secretary, was probably also appointed manager of the company.
Henry Evans, who operated the Blackfriars when it re-opened in 1600, was another associate of Oxford's in this early phase in the development of the English theatre. Evans is satirized as the Welsh parson in Merry Wives of Windsor.
Circumstantial evidence also connects Oxford very closely with the flourishing Queen's Men (1583-92)-- in several records his secretary and close theatrical affiliate John Lyly occurs as payee for this influential company, which a growing number of scholars regard as the origin of a number of plays supposed to be Shakespearean juvenalia.
In 1602 the Earls of Oxford and Worcester amalgamated their companies and were licensed to play at the Boar's Head, which is described in extant documents as their accustomed theatrical venue. A tavern of this name is of course the hangout of Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV.
4) Of superior education.
As a boy, De Vere was tutored in political philosophy by Sir Thomas Smith. Lawrence Nowell, the antiquarian scholar who then owned the sole existing manuscript copy of Beowulf, apparently tutored him in languages.
Shakespeares's knowledge of the English language is enlarged by this versatile command of both Latin and --arguably--Anglo-Saxon, a language he could not have learned without the assistant of a specialized tutor such as Nowell.
De Vere was apparently tutored in Latin by his uncle Arthur Golding, the most talented Latin tutor in England, who dedicated three books to him. Golding's translation of The Metamorphoses (1565, 1567) was done during the years the young Earl was perfecting his Latin. Sir Sidney Lee says that "the phraseology of Golding's translation so frequently appears in Shakespeare's page, especially by way of subsidiary illustration, as almost to compel conviction that Shakespeare knew much of Golding's book by heart" (1909 119: emphasis added).
Edward de Vere graduated from St. Johns College at Cambridge at age 14, and was created master of arts at Christ's Church at Oxford at the age of 16. His masters degree project is unknown, but Queen Elizabeth visited both Universities in the years he matriculated, and was lavishly entertained with dramatic productions.
The year after his Oxford education, de Vere was admitted to Gray's Inn to study law. His extant letters display a precocious and sophisticated knowledge of law among other subjects-- many of the six hundred legal terms with occur in the plays and poems of "Shakespeare" occur in his extant correspondence, as first documented by William Plumer Fowler.
An early account book (1569/70) shows Edward de Vere to be the possessor of a Geneva Bible, Amyot's French Plutarch, and Chaucer.
Another account describes his purchase of Plato and Cicero, and "paper and nibs" for writing (Ward 32-33).
Plutarch, Chaucer and the Geneva Bible are three of the most important source works for Shakespeare; a fourth is Ovid's Metamorphosis, translated by his uncle Arthur Golding.
5) Of probable Catholic leanings but touched with skepticism.
Contemporary documents kept by Catholic partisans describe Oxford as sympathetic to the Catholic faith. It seems likely that during his 1576 trip to Italy he was reconciled to the Church. However, in December 1580 he revealed the plot of his Catholic associates Henry Howard and Charles Arundel to murder Queen Elizabeth and establish Mary Queen of Scots to the throne.
After this time Oxford apparently made his peace with the Anglican settlement; politically, he remained an Anglican. Such a loyalty to the Anglican cause would certainly be inferred fromthe persistent Anglican bias of the Shakespearearean history plays which Daniel Wright has recently documented in his Ball State PhD dissertation. Aesthetically and philosophically, de Vere remained under the influence of much Catholic doctrine and belief -- just as Hamlet, although schooled at Wittenburg where Luther published his thesis on the Cathedral door in 1517 -- is haunted by the splendor of a fading but romantic Catholic past.
6) A man with feudal connections, a member of the higher aristocracy, and connected with Lancastrian supporters.
Edward de Vere was an heir to one of the oldest earldoms in England's history, originating in the Norman Conquest. The de Veres were strong supporters of the Lancastrian faction in the Wars of the Roses, and as every student of the plays knows, "Shakespeare" displays the same bias. Furthermore, as Daniel Wright has recently argued, the historical bias in the plays is actually more specific than this: in many peculiar instances the author displays an idiomatic bias in favor of certain aristocratic families, among them the houses of de Vere and Stanley.
Peter Saccio, in his very fine book on the history plays, wonders why the author did not memorialize the successful Yorkist King Edward IV. The anwer may lie in fact that Edward IV preserved his power by executing two earls of Oxford.
7) An enthusiast for Italy.
Oxford travelled to Italy in the mid-1570s and even tried to make the trip surreptitiously when Queen Elizabeth intially denied him permission.
He later became notorious as the most Italianate Englishman of his generation. Strong tradition records that he built a house in Venice to which he returned at intervals long after his well-documented 1576 journey.
Six comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare are set in Italy; these display a minute and accurate knowledge of Italian topography, history and custom.
8) A follower of sport, including falconry.
Edward de Vere was quite accomplished in jousting and participated in tournaments. Some of his early verse has images drawn from falconry which is echoed in the Shakespearean plays and poems, as J.T. Looney initially observed.
9) Lover of music.
Composer John Farmer in his dedication of The First Set of English Madrigals (1599), says "that using this science [music] as a recreation your Lordship have overgone most of them that make it a profession."
The musical substratum of the plays is well known to scholars who have studied this question. It is impossible to think that the author of the Shakespearean canon was not a trained and skilled musician. (references forthcoming -- ed 3/14/02)
10) Improvident in money matters and contemptuous of thrift.
Oxford alienated many of his estates to his father-in-law, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, for which he has been criticized by historians. As J.T. Looney was the first to note, Oxford's legendary improvidence, for which he earned the nickname "Pierce Penilesse" from Gabriel Harvey and Tom Nashe, is one of the strongest confirmations of his identity as Shakespeare, for in the Shakespearean plays "almost every reference to money and purses is of the loosest description and, by implication, teaches an improvidence what would seen involve any man's financial affairs in complete chaos" (98).
Roger Stritmatter's study of the many marked verses in the de Vere Bible which record the annotator's financial anxiety, and also show a powerful concurrence with Shakespeare Bible references on the same subject, has recently confirmed the validity of Looney's analysis of this issue.