“…the fact that it always struck when mosquitoes were plentiful could not have passed unnoticed for the centuries…”

My idea was that if enough people with welts on their bodies came down with malaria, the connection might have been made earlier. I suppose, however, that future generations will be amazed that twenty-first century idiots did not see the obvious connection between bee stings and autism…

I was not trying to tie this at all to the de Vere case and only added the “warbles” crack as a nod to Professor Nelson.

Who would there be to comment on de Vere’s welts, or if they did, who would have left a record of it? What is “curious” about us not knowing something like this when there are so many things we don’t know, and can’t know?

The most likely cure would be prevention, ordering the boy to stay indoors when the river left the marsh a breeding ground for insects, but who has ever had charge of a strong-willed boy and succeeded in preventing him from going where he wants to go if he wants to go bad enough? Not every mosquito was a carrier, not every mosquito bite a sign that malaria would follow. The Thames at Ankerwycke was quite a ways from the deadly swamps closer to the ocean, which may have caused Smith and household to relax their vigilance.

All I can do in this and in everything is offer the fruits of my investigation. We know Oxford had spells of sickness, that at least twice these involved fever, that, as Spurgeon shows, Shakespeare used malaria symptoms as metaphors for things he feared, and that Ankerwycke was located close to a river that was frequently in flood, leaving the meadow across from it a marshy breeding ground for insects, something that Shakespeare also describes. We know that marshes on English rivers were badly infested with malaria in areas closer to the ocean than Ankerwycke, so badly infested that few dared to live in those regions, and common sense should tell us that such infestations could certainly move upstream when the weather was conducive. We also know that many English at the time suffered from recurrent bouts of malaria. All these together suggest that de Vere could easily have contracted malaria while living at Ankerwycke.

I think its important to offer this suggestion as a counter to those who would explain his later illnesses as syphilis, which Nelson and even some Oxfordians would like to imagine, God knows why.

There were two things that Shakespeare was so afraid of that he couldn’t refrain from showing it, one was being cuckolded, the other was venereal disease. When someone is this unrestrained about revealing a particular fear, it’s a lot less likely that he actually suffers from the thing he fears than that he goes to lengths to avoid it.