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Entries tagged as ‘Edward de Vere’

Why Oxford hid his identity

February 26, 2010 · 2 Comments

Perhaps the hardest question that Oxfordians have to answer is why the author hid his identity.  No answer will satisfy a modern reader, who understands, quite rightly, that for today’s author, getting one’s name known is essential to success.  Was his anonymity forced on him by his rank?  By his family?  By the need to escape his enemies?  By the Lord Chamberlain Men as a business decision?  I believe all of these are true, but beyond all of these I also believe that right from the start, de Vere was an extremely private person.  Had he not had a reclusive streak from the start, he would not have been so easily erased from history.

This doesn’t mean that he was a recluse!  He had both a public face and a gregarious nature that enjoyed time with friends and admirers, but there was a shadow side to his nature, a hidden side, and he worked all his life to keep this side free from interference of any kind, as a child from Smith, as a teenager from Cecil, as a youth from the Queen, as a husband from his wives, as a man from various enemies and lovers, as a writer from tiresome grammarians, and as a genius, from everyone but persons with whom he was (briefly) in love or who provoked his interest in some way.

Raised in solitude, he was used to the kind of privacy that few Elizabethans enjoyed, so that when he entered the mainstream of public life at age twelve, and lost it, he became desperate to get it back.  To go from the solitude of Hill Hall to the hullaballoo at Cecil House, where he was viewed by all as the Lord Great Chamberlain of England and where his every move was monitored by Cecil’s household spies, must have been a profound shock, particularly to a budding writer whose greatest need was time alone.  Why was Cecil so quick to cover up the stabbing of the undercook in 1567?  Could it be because Oxford had freaked out at being spied upon, and like a lot of teenage boys, unused to the dangers of a deadly weapon,  he lashed out at one of Cecil’s spies in sudden fury?

Throughout his life we can see that he did everything he could to keep and protect his privacy.  Like the deer, the hare, and the snail, for whom Shakespeare had a depth of sympathy most unusual for his time, hiding was his most basic, gut-level response to life.  We see it reflected in many of his protagonists, who either hide, like Romeo, Timon, Duke Vincenzio, old Belarius, Orlando and the others who hide in the forest in As You Like It, or who, like Prospero, have been hidden through exile.  It may be that our lack of documentation of Oxford’s childhood is due to his having been virtually hidden by the Protestant community when placed with Smith during the period when Queen Mary’s ministers were about to begin their reign of terror.  Surely, like little Arthur in King John, he would have been aware fairly early that there was some kind of threat hanging over him.

What is the secret of successful hiding?  Never let anyone know where you are or what you’re doing.  In Oxford’s case, since he already had a persona handed to him at birth, it meant never letting the public know that he was responsible for what they were watching or reading.  It also meant never letting the Court community know exactly what he was up to.  Many knew something about him and what he did, but few had his entire confidence, perhaps only one.  That would have been Edward Manners, Earl of Rutland: Damon to his Pythias, Arcite to his Palamon, Valentine to his Proteus, Horatio to his Hamlet.  Among the few who knew him best would have been his “cousin Bacon”: Francis the Drawer to his Hal, Puck to his Oberon, Ariel to his Prospero.  Bitterest of his enemies would have been the friend who proved false, his cousin Henry Howard, Iago to his Othello, Iachimo to his Proteus, Edricus to his Ironside, Ateukin to his James IV.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare Authorship
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Merkel’s view of Titus Andronicus

February 17, 2010 · 6 Comments

Hi Marie: Having promised to read your material online (The First Mousetrap) and consider your theory that Titus Andronicus is an allegory for the fate of the Howard family, I am half convinced that you’re right, even more than half.  I have to hold off a bit because I don’t see the kind of clearcut connections between the play and the Howards, the kind we can see with some of the other plays, but that doesn’t mean you’re not right, or at least on the right track.  An early version of the play may well have been more clear.  As with plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet, plots and characters were sometimes revised to fit later situations, so the version of Titus that ended up in the First Folio could also reflect such revisions, not necessarily by Shakespeare.

I don’t see that you claimed anywhere in your chapters or introduction that the author was the Earl of Oxford (did you and I missed it?).  In fact, you make a few comments that seem to connect its creation with William of Stratford.  Once Oxford is seen as the author, a possible connection with the Howards becomes much stronger.  They were his family, he was in their camp from his early 20s to his early 30s, and with Sussex and then Hunsdon as his patron (1572-’82) he had every reason to write a play in their defense.  Also, with Oxford as the author, he would have no need of Holinshed.  His primary source would be his Howard cousins, who would have had their family history at the tips of their tongues.

You ask (rhetorically) if it’s possible to see Titus as Sir Thomas Smith.  Of course not, but it’s certainly possible to see in young Lucius’s notalgic wish to sit again on his grandsire’s knee a reference to how de Vere may felt at times during the five months he was left alone at Queens’ College.  In his first year or two with Smith, at age four and five he would still have been young enough to be taken onto his tutor’s lap for comforting or instruction.  I believe that the five months at Cambridge must have been a very lonely and stressful time for a little eight-year-old.  I think it’s entirely possible that when he wrote the part about Lucius he was recalling this moment. I also believe he was recalling this same time in King John when he visualized Prince Arthur living with a man who had been ordered to kill him, begging for his life, then trying to escape.  Not that de Vere’s Cambridge tutor, Thomas Fowle, had any such wicked intention, but it wasn’t his tutor he was recalling, only his own childish fears.

You point to the family relationships among the early patrons of the Court Stage, something worth repeating.  All three of the patrons who worked to get control of the Court Stage in the 1570s (and to keep it from then on) were direct descendants of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, your candidate for Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.  To repeat: these were the Earl of Sussex, Ld Henry Hunsdon and Ld Charles Howard.  Howard relations of lesser rank were also the first and second Masters of the Revels, Edmund Tilney and Sir George Buc, in short, almost everyone in charge of what got produced, both at Court and beyond, until the Pembrokes took over in 1615.

Most place Titus early, but in my view never early enough.  I’ve long seen it as the one early play that made it into the canon unrevised (at least, unrevised by Shakespeare).  We have other unrevised plays from that time, but they’re considered anonymous or are attributed to other writers.  The stilted, pompous language of much of it, the unreal female characters, the exceedingly  impressionistic treatment of history and use of Senecan horror tropes all suggest a very early origin.  (Some of what deconstructionists like to attribute to Peele was really early Oxford, never revised.)  These factors suggest that it was written by Oxford no later than his early 20s and possibly even in his late teens.  If written when he was 17 or 18, the reference to Lucius’s mother giving him Ovid would have been in time for Oxford’s mother to have seen the play.

It’s been suggested (by others?  by you?) that Tamora, Queen of the Goths, represents Mary Queen of Scots.  If this is about the Howards I don’t see how she could be anyone else.  Black Aaron could represent Bothwell and his baby represent the future James I.  Mary’s marriage to Darnley, the birth of James, the murder of Darnley, her marriage to Bothwell and flight to England all took place when Oxford was 17 and probably still living at Cecil House where Mary was feared, hated and demonized, possibly to an extent that doesn’t come through in the records.  (English history is still confused about Mary;  as of now, the most detailed and trustworthy version of her life and fate is John Guy’s 2004 biography.)

It was what to do about Mary Queen of Scots that was the over-riding subject of political concern just as Oxford entered the adult world of Court politics and Inns of Court theater (The Supposes and Jocaste at Gray’s Inn 1566-’67).  So it makes perfect sense that among his first attempts to entertain this community with something original it was this issue that he chose to dramatize.  That his close connection to Cecil House reflects William Cecil’s embroilment in Scottish affairs at this time, not only in Titus, but also in first versions of Macbeth and James I, also makes sense.

Other parts of the play may reflect later events.  Oxford’s writing for the Court and Inns of Court went into high gear in 1572 when Sussex took over as Lord Chamberlain and began his push to take the Court Stage away from Leicester.  A rewrite of Titus may show his reaction to the execution of  his cousin Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk that same year.  In any case, his involvement with the play, and with the Howards, would necessarily have ended in 1580-’81 when he broke with Norfolk’s brother, Henry Howard.

This fight was no tiff between friends, but a deadly duel in which Oxford accused his cousin of treason and Howard accused Oxford of pederasty.  Once Oxford saw his cousin as the Iago who had broken up his marriage and so deeply damaged his wife’s reputation, most of his nastiest villains would be based on Henry Howard, something that could not have escaped the man’s acute paranoia.  Even if we could somehow account for the old-fashioned style, it’s unlikely that ever again he’d write anything that might seem in any way to promote the family that seemed determined to destroy him throughout the early ’80s.

I do not believe this play was written for performance at Court.  If it was, then it was not about the Howards.  To have performed such a crudely violent play before the Queen, one that ripped open painful early wounds, would have been sheer lunacy.  It is said that no one ever mentioned her mother in Elizabeth’s presence.  No one, least of all Oxford, would have dared to touch her deepest and most personal anxieties in this way.  Most likely he wrote it for his favorite audience, the “gentlemen of the Inns of Court.”  Many early versions of his best plays can be seen as pleading a case to this audience of lawyers.

I don’t agree that the author would have changed character personas in midstream, having Titus represent Thomas Howard at one point and Henry VIII at another.  If this is what’s happening it must have been done by some later reviser. I believe Shakespeare did sometimes conflate historic noblemen with their descendants, not only for dramatic purposes, or because peers and their heirs were known by the same titles, but because, at that time,  men and women were still seen less as individuals than as limbs of a single ongoing entity, the Family.  In this way kings could be addressed as “England,” or “France.”  However, to conflate a character with his enemy  or his moral opposite would be to utterly lose the message, something no dramatist would ever do, not even one still learning the ropes, as Oxford was in the ’60s and early ’70s.

The problem may be with rewrites.  In my view, Oxford would not have cared about this play after 1581, but anything by him would have been valuable later.  It may be that Henslowe had one of his writers do some surgery on it that left it making very little sense in terms of finding the original source.  If the original reflected the kind of political dynamite that you suggest, there would have been more than one reason for such a revision.

Your material is very well-written and easy to follow, difficult where such a complicated story is concerned.  I know how hard it is to make a complex narrative clear for readers.  Shakespeare turned to drama, but we can’t do that, can we?

My hope is that someday we’ll be able to see how and where every play fits into the true story, not only of Oxford, his tutors, patrons, and the other writers, but of the entire Elizabethan period.  So I’m happy to see that you are on the case.  More power to you.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Shakespeare Authorship · Shakespeare's sources · the Court Stage · the London Stage · theater history
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Evidence for Oxford’s childhood with Smith

February 9, 2010 · 8 Comments

Why is it so important to know exactly when de Vere came to live with Sir Thomas Smith?

Sometimes a single fact can become the key to an entire period in history, with an inverted pyramid of evidence demanding a single fact to connect it to the rest of what we can take for granted.  Current discussion over when Oxford came to Sir Thomas Smith makes it clear that this is that sort of key, that at least one solid fact is required, not just to complete our picture of Oxford’s life, but much more, completing our picture of Oxford as Shakespeare, and beyond that, of Shakespeare as central to the history of England at what may be seen as the most crucial period in her history.

By establishing Smith as Oxford’s surrogate father, the Aristotle to his Alexander, the Plato to his Aristotle, the Leopold Mozart to his Amadeus, we have the riches of Smith’s library where dozens of titles provide the sources for some of Shakespeare’s most valued works.  We have, through Smith, the source of Shakespeare’s legal and distilling metaphors, his ascetic attitude towards food, his lack of religious bias, his stoic philosophy.  Through his years at Ankerwycke we have the source of his river, gardening, and hawking metaphors (as noted by Caroline Spurgeon), his sympathy for animals, the forest’s deer, the meadow’s rabbits and birds, the garden’s snails.  In Smith, we have at least three of Shakespeare’s characters, Holofernes from Love’s Labour’s Lost, Thomas of Woodstock from Richard II Part One, and, greatest of all, Friar Lawrence from Romeo and Juliet.

We also have a number of smaller though tighter connections, such as the metaphor of a haggard hawk for a wayward woman, something Smith touches on twice in the few quotes provided by his biographers, or, in the advice Polonius gives Laertes, the advice to noblemen written by Smith during the period that Edward was living with him (Strype 53-5).  With all of this securely in place, ipso facto: Oxford was Shakespeare––evidence that comes later is simply icing on the cake.  And with Oxford confirmed as Shakespeare we can also complete our puzzle of the entire period, of all of the missing literary history, and even much of the mainstream history, for Shakespeare and his works are as central to the history of the Elizabethan era as is Elizabeth herself, or Burghley, Bacon, Raleigh, or Drake.  Thus while Smith is the biggest missing piece of the Shakespeare puzzle, Oxford is the biggest missing piece of the Elizabethan Court puzzle.

This is what makes it crucial that we ground our view of Oxford’s childhood with Smith in provable facts.  And although I didn’t see it so clearly in this light at the time, it’s also the reason that, driven by what I’d read in Mary Dewar’s biography, I went to England in 2004 to see his notebooks for myself.  These, two in the library at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and one in the archives at the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, seemed at first to offer nothing.  I didn’t realize until later that one did in fact hold one of the clues that I was seeking.  Not all clues are of equal weight, but as it happens, this one’s a pip.

In each of the two notebooks at Queens’ College are inventories, the same except in minor wording, one written in 1561, one in 1569, in which he notes the 20 rooms at Ankerwycke, listing the contents of each.  In the first, #49, a room on the upper floor between his father’s room and the maid’s chamber is labeled “In my L. Chambre.”  In the 1569 inventory in notebook #83, page 123, a similar list is headed with the words: “In my Lorde’s Chambre.”

1561 inventory of Ankerwycke rooms, "In my L's Chambre"

By “My Lorde” Smith must mean de Vere, who, born “Viscount Bulbeck,” was a “lord” from birth.  De Vere was still with Smith when the first list was written, and although the family had moved to Hill Hall by 1561, the winter holidays may have been spent at Windsor Castle that year.  Ankerwycke would also have been closer to Hampton Court, where some Royal holidays took place.  As for the 1569 inventory, although Oxford was no longer a member of Smith’s household, that Smith would continue to use his name for the room is seen by how he continued to call the room next to de Vere’s “my father’s chambre,” although Smith’s father died the summer of 1557.

Strype “supposes” that by “my Lorde” Smith meant the Duke of Somerset (170), but that’s impossible since Ankerwycke wasn’t finished until 1553, by which time Somerset was dead, nor would someone as self-righteous as Smith have wished to memorialize a master with whom he had had such profound differences.  It could not be Cecil, since from 1550 until Elizabeth’s accession Cecil kept his own household at The Parsonage at Wimbledon not far from Ankerwycke, nor did Cecil become a lord until 1571, long after Smith drew up these inventories.  Other than these, there is simply no lord other than de Vere who could possibly have had a room to himself in Smith’s home.

When we add this evidence to the phrase “brought up in my house” from the 1576 letter to Cecil, we should have enough to place Oxford with Smith for the better part of eight years, and in so doing, add to his story the riches of experience he gained as a child in a traditional country manor with all that that implies, as I’ve detailed in a number of blogs, pages, lectures, and articles.  Among many other puzzle fits, this scenario provides a reason for de Vere’s placement at Queens’ College for five months in his ninth year, Queens’ being Smith’s alma mater, and Smith needing that time to assist Cecil with preparations for Elizabeth’s accession, a hard fact for which we have more than enough evidence.

By examining an actual document, its visual appearance can add to what its text and authorship have to tell us.  For instance, in the letter in which Smith finally turns to the issue of Oxford’s treatment of Burghley upon his return from Italy, that Smith was more emotional at the end than he was anywhere else in the letter is obvious from the condition of the paper at this point.  The pen was pressed so hard on the paper that the ink is darker here and the stroke thicker than anywhere else in the letter, so hard that the acid in the ink had eaten away the paper at that spot to a degree that it threatened to render a few of the words unintelligible.  I showed it to the librarian in the Manuscript Room at the British Library, suggesting they do something to preserve it before it crumbles completely.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Elizabethan era · English Literature · English history · Oxford's education · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · Shakespeare's education · Shakespeare's sources · Sir Thomas Smith
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What? No such thing as Santa Claus?

December 11, 2009 · 1 Comment

When we discover  at age six or seven that it isn’t really Santa who provides the toys under the tree, but our parents, questions that were becoming ever sharper to our developing sense of reality––How can he get in when we keep all the doors locked?  Why do they say he comes down the chimney when we’ve got no chimney?  How can he possibly take care of all the children in the world in a single night?  How come his reindeer can fly?––are suddenly resolved.  A world that was becoming ever more mysterious in problematic ways returns to making sense.  And so it is with one myth after another throughout life.  And so it must be, eventually,  with the Stratford biography.

Just as no fat man in a red suit could get himself down a million chimneys in a single night, no son of an impoverished, illiterate yeoman from a beer swilling market town two days ride from London could possibly have revolutionized English letters at a time when 90 percent of the population was illiterate.  And just as Santa’s miracle is created by parents sneaking downstairs when the kids are asleep, so the English Literary Renaissance was (mostly) created by educated courtiers and their patrons working silently behind the scenes to provide a depressed nation with a replacement for the mummings and disguisings, the Church Ales and parades so harshly condemned by the Reformation.

The Renaissance, the rebirth of interest in Art and Science that began in Italy in the 14th century with the rediscovery of ancient texts and artifacts from the ancient  civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, was delayed in reaching the northern and western areas of Europe by physical and cultural barriers.  When it finally reached  England in the late 16th century, it only did so because a politically weak monarch who desperately needed some inexpensive glamour to hide the fact that she had no wealth to speak of, was persuaded by some of her councillors to allow it to burst into life, first at Court, then in the public arena.

The English Literary Renaissance was not, uniquely, created by clever members of the working class any more than Christmas mornings are created by Santa’s elves.  It was created by the same social group that created it in most of the southern nations of Europe, members of the Courts of kings, queens, and princes.  In Spain, where a long connection with Islamic culture separated it from the rest of Europe, the “Golden Age” was largely created by men of a class much closer to that of William of Stratford, but this is an exception that can only prove the rule, for, unlike William (or Greene, or Nashe, or Watson, or, or, or), the two greatest Spanish writers of the period, the novelist Cervantes (born two years before Oxford) and the incredibly prolific genius Lope de Vega (born two years after Bacon) both show trustworthy and substantial paper trails that fit well with the dates and themes of their works and de Vega at least was assisted and supported by courtiers.

It’s been a year now since I began outlining this scenario, and although I’m still nowhere near getting even short versions of all the information that needs sorting out, a start has been made.   Now that we are embarked on the great holiday season of the year, the one that started “Shakespeare” on his career, may you all find peace and relaxation in whatever form of “merry-making” brings you pleasure.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Early Modern literature · Edward de Vere · Elizabethan era · Shakespeare Authorship · entertainment · mumming and disguising · theater history
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Crammed like a Strasbourg goose

December 2, 2009 · 1 Comment

In writing about the education of the nobility in Oxford’s time, American historian H.J. Hexter quotes Sir Thomas Elyot on the reasons for educating the nobility, “which is to have authority in a public weal,” adding, “Sir Humphrey Gilbert has a scheme whereby gentlemen’s sons will be crammed like Strasbourg geese with knowledge and skills, the better to serve in Parliament, in council, in commission and other offices of the Commonwealth” (1979, 63-4).  That this was Sir Thomas Smith’s aim in educating the future Earl of Oxford seems beyond dispute.  It should be added that Gilbert was one of Smith’s closest friends.

When I first began my study of the authorship issues many years ago, one of the first questions that I sought to answer was, what was Oxford doing before he was placed with William Cecil?  Back then, nothing that had yet been published dealt with Oxford’s early childhood.  I began putting it together from bits and pieces gleaned from a variety of sources: things said in passing by Smith’s biographers, a note in one of Smith’s household inventories, and, as always, by comparing the recorded timing of events, chiefly those surrounding his Cambridge stay at eight and his departure for Cecil House at twelve.  Since then much more has accrued that contributes to this scenario, with nothing so far to contradict it.

Now that his childhood with Smith has been revealed, our view of Oxford as creator of the Shakespeare canon has taken on new weight.  Revealed are: 1) the fact that those areas in which Shakespeare shows an unusual level of expertise are all areas in which his tutor was deeply interested; 2) Smith’s library contains most of the books that Shakespeare relied on as source material, often in the inexact way that we do when recalling early memories; 3) in his treatises, Smith often used dialogues so he could explore arguments on both sides of an issue, a form often found in the inner debates of Shakespeare’s soliloquies as well as the general form of all drama; and 4) Smith’s “lukewarm” attitude towards religion are echoed by Shakespeare’s seeming lack of adherence to a particular branch of Christianity.

For some weeks now I’ve been preparing essays on his education based on the information I’ve been collecting over the past fifteen years or so (much of it due to Dan Wright and the 40 or so Oxfordians who contributed to the fruitful six weeks I was able to spend researching in England in 2004).  These essays are up now as pages under OXFORD, and once I get some more up on Shakespeare’s sources, you should find it interesting to compare them in some detail.  The conjecture that Oxford may have attended several semesters at Christ Church College Oxford is something that hasn’t been discussed before.  There are several other new pages as well.  Their titles should appear on your screens in color.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Oxford's education · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · Shakespeare's sources · Sir Thomas Smith
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The Rule of Law: Jude Law IS Hamlet

October 27, 2009 · 5 Comments

During a three month London adventure in 1999, I got (thanks to Dan Wright) the opportunity to see Jude Law in John Ford’s T’is Pity She’s a Whore at the Young Vic.  Impressed by Law’s ability to express the most intense anguish, I’ve been hoping ever since, first, that he’d do Hamlet (instead of one lame movie role after another) and second, that I’d be able to see him do it.  Both wishes just came true: not only has Jude Law done Hamlet, but (once again, due to the kindness of friends) I got to see him do it on Broadway!  And I was right.  What a Hamlet!

Hamlet is tricky, even for the best actors.  It’s become such a museum piece, there are so many famous sililoquies, every avid Shakespeare fan has a favorite performance to which they match each new approach, so that watching the play runs the risk of turning into a sort of Olympics of the Stage, where the actor playing Hamlet is not so much enjoyed as he is rated, in the same way that Olympic figure skaters get rated during their performance, feat by feat, by TV commentators.

Law sweeps this away with the utter naturalness of his style.  Sililoquies flow from him as easily as he greets his old school friends or rants at Ophelia.  Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language runs as trippingly off his tongue as if it were his own most natural form of expression, yet there’s none of that jack-hammer rat-a-tat-tat that some use when reciting Shakespeare, apparently in an effort to spew out the bloody awkward stuff the way they do their own native slang.

I think this is largely because Jude Law is as much a dancer as he is an actor.  He expresses the beautiful but strange language as much with his body as he does with his voice.  Together the two, the voice and the body, create a satisfyingly complete whole in a way that I can’t remember ever seeing before.  Anger possesses him utterly.  Anguish torments every fibre.  How perfectly Shakespeare has captured these emotions in words and how perfectly Law renders them, his gestures flowing, not from the words themselves, but from the emotions they are meant to express.  Today, thanks to television, we have all seen, over and over, how real people respond to disasters or the deaths of people they love, and so we can’t help but know how at such moments, words failing, it’s the body that reacts.  With his dancer’s sense of timing, Law also knows how to pause before reacting, something many actors either never learn or tend to forget in production.  It’s such an energetic performance, I can’t imagine how he can do it, not only night after night, but twice on matinee days.

Unfortunately there’s little good to be said for the rest of the production.  Law’s gutsy approach was not echoed by a single other member of the cast.  Apart from the King, who did prove a strong and convincing match to Hamlet’s energy, the rest simply entered, exited, stood or walked about as though waiting for something exciting to happen.  Horatio was particularly disappointing, less an antique Roman than a pool hall shark.  The set and lighting are good, providing some interesting accents to the action, but the costumes, modern suits in shades of gray, not only disappear into the gray walls and black floor of the castle set, but seem totally out of place. With no chairs or benches to relieve the need to stand, what group of twenty-first century people would choose to spend more than a minute or two in this cold, empty, castle foyer?

Now that my wishes have been fulfilled I have a new one, that Jude Law will repeat his performance on film, with costumes and sets that match, a Horatio whose body language speaks of his strength and dependability , a sober Gertrude who knows deep down right from the beginning that she’s damned, so that her son has only to remind her of it, and . . . and . . . oh, Michael Palin and Terry Jones as the gravediggers!   Hey, let’s shoot for the moon!

Unfortunately when it comes to Ophelia, it seems the role is unplayable.  Since it’s very likely that the Countess of Montgomery had a say in the publication of the First Folio, she could well have had something to say about the final version of her own mother’s unhappy fate and death.  For whatever reason it seems impossible for any young actress (or director) to actually bring her to life, at least, I’ve never seen it done. With Jude Law directing, maybe we could see an Ophelia who really cuts loose.  Wishes do sometimes come true.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Hamlet · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · entertainment · the London Stage · theater history
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Shakespeare’s patrons-who were they?

October 14, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Born as the crest of two waves, the German Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, crashed into each other at right angles, the great poet and playwright blended these two not always compatible energies into the culture that has been England ever since.  Under the constraints of the Reformation, the passionate energies that went into painting, sculpture, and architecture in the Southern European Renaissance, in England went into language: a bare stage, good costumes, superb actors, and the glorious stories we know as Shakespeare.  One way of tracking the author through the theater scramble of the 1580s, is by following his changes in style and his need to create the perfect team for the play he’s writing at the moment.

Oxford’s development and survival is largely due to his patrons, surely among the best an artist ever had.  He sank low at times, but not so low that he ever had to quit writing, at least, not for long.  The next important piece of scholarhip that needs to be done will be on these patrons.  We know who they are, many of them, we haven’t yet put into order just how and when they interacted with him and with each other.

Burghley, Sussex, Walsingham, Hunsdon, Charles Howard, Southampton, the Pembroke brothers, are the leading figures, but there were others as well who contributed to his survival in various ways.  Even when they were disgusted with him, as Hunsdon must have been when the bum took up with his mistress, they kept him afloat because they knew his value.  For the great ministers of that time who had the dreams and aspirations of both Italian and Reformation humanism alive within, he was the great instrument of their policy, though this would be fully realized only when he was gone, as so well expressed by Ben Jonson in his dedicatory Ode in the First Folio.

Oxford too played the part of a patron to other artists, hiding his identity in that endeavor almost as thoroughly as he hid his writing.  Today the Press has overwhelmed the Stage in impact, but it was so unimportant then that the so-called conspiracy to hide his identity was little more than an afterthought, a problem that had to be resolved in whatever way worked at the time, one that kept coming back as those members of the audience who were not members of the Court community pushed to find out who was writing this terrific stuff.  Oxford tried to run a theater from behind several sets of curtains, but inevitably there were critical moments when he was forced to show himself.

Historically Oxford’s role in Early Modern theater is as a patron, a role that tends to get lost in the argument over his role as a writer.  Nobody disagrees that he was one of the foremost patrons of his day, not so much in the importance of the companies to which he lent his aristocratic name as in the longevity of his presence, first appearing as an entertainer of his Court community in the early ’70s and last when Oxford’s Men combined with Worcester’s Men in 1602. That’s an official presence of 30 years, which is actually about average for one of these patrons, who often took up the responsibility for an acting company or other entrerprise as soon as they came of age, often of the company patronized by their parent before them, passing it on to their own heirs when they died.

Oxford’s involvement as patron of the arts and sciences went a good deal deeper than what shows on the historical surface.  He patronized musicians and composers as well as other writers, and was praised by them as one of themselves.  When looking for a model for Oxford within our own times, the composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein comes to mind, an entertainment genius of the same all-encompassing nature, only, shall we say, considerably less fearful of recognition.

One question that hasn’t been dealt with yet, so far as I know, has to do with the company maintained by Oxford’s father.  Were they, perchance, the one we know as Leicester’s Men in the 1560s?  When Earl John died in 1562, Elizabeth gave Leicester control of the Oxford estates.  Did that mean that he also became the patron of what had been the sixteenth Earl’s acting company?  Unlike our world today, the arts community was very small.  Leicester’s Men were a handful of Court actors, essentially the same men who later became the core of the company that called themselves Hunsdon’s Men and operated out of Burbage’s Theater, just up the street from Fisher’s Folly.  Were some of them the same men who, decades earlier, had performed John Bale’s King Johan in Ipswich in 1561, just prior to the Queen’s entertainment at Hedingham Castle?

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Elizabethan era · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · entertainment · music · the Court Stage · the London Stage · theater history
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Why we need a scenario

September 16, 2009 · 3 Comments

Recent questions have raised the enduring issue of fact vs. fiction.  I’ve been asked to make it (more) clear where I depart from a structure of known fact to fill in missing areas with a scenario in which areas can’t be supported by the kind of cited facts that historians rely upon, or are supposed to rely upon.  I’ve been considering how to deal with this ever since reading Ogburn’s The Mysterious William.  Deluged with facts, what was missing was the story.  Obviously Oxford was the true author, but how to perceive the living being within this mountain of argument and data?

The problem lies with the difference between facts and story, or truth and fiction, as this dichotomy is so often portrayed.  It’s almost impossible to mix them and come up with something that isn’t seen as untrue on the one hand, boring on the other, or both.  One touch of supposition and those interested only in so-called hard evidence toss the whole thing in the waste basket as unsupported theorizing.  Burden it with documentation and those in search of the story lose interest because it lacks drama.  Truth, however, is more than fact.  There’s truth in story that can never get relayed from just the facts alone.  No one knew this better than the author of the Shakespeare history plays.

At a certain point in researching the period it became clear that the lack of facts––not just on Shakespeare but on all the writers and works from that period––wasn’t simply due to entropy, the dictum that “things fall apart,” or any lack of interest in him in his own time.  Facts were missing on purpose, either burned in fireplaces or never exposed to begin with.  Confusion was not always due to missing data, but was often intentional.  The sources of information relied upon by scholars tracking the stories behind the literature of the period, title pages, entries in the Stationers Register, Revels records, etc., were either purposely ambiguous or flat out false.

Asking why, I began to see a pervasively phobic attitude towards literature, i.e. fiction, i.e. storytelling, that infected the entire culture.  Asking why again, it seemed that in rejecting the supersitions and folk tales of medieval Christianity, the reformers in power were doing all they could to throw the baby out with the bath, just as they were doing with the beauties of Renaissance Italian painting out of a Reformation mistrust of Italian sensualism.  Poetry was dangerous––the better, the more beautiful the language, the more dangerous.  And then there was the age-old threat of dissident voices, so often those of the best writers.

Just the facts, M’am.

None of this is new.  All of it has been mentioned, usually in passing, by literary historians, who may question the truth of a title page or two and then go right on repeating the standard account based by earlier historians on those very same title pages!  It’s as though archaeologists who discover the bones of a prehistoric human simply leave them lying in the order in which they find them, never making any effort to arrange them so they reveal the shape of a human being.  As a result, all we have is a pile of facts, no story, no humans struggling to make their way through the difficulties of their lives, loving and hating each other, just a bunch of names without connections to each other or to the stories told by their works.

When I say “not one” has tried to tell the story behind this pile of real and phony facts, that’s not quite true.  Those who’ve tried to make sense of it in human terms (I’m thinking in particular of T.W. Baldwin and Penny McCarthy) have been thrown off by the biggest falsification of all, the substitution of the true author of the primary works of the time with someone of an altogether different, even opposite, nature.

The archeology metaphor works well here, where two bodies having been buried together ages ago, their bones becoming mixed through some earth disturbance so that a pelvis, a set of shoulder blades and bits of both spines have gotten lost.  Later, when scientists attempt to sort them out, the result is a single two-headed monster with two sets of arms and legs which they then attempt to sell to an ignorant world as the missing link.  In Shakespeare’s case, the historians either doll up the monstrous Stratford grain hoarder cum literary genius with anecdotes and conjectures, or they ignore him and describe the flowers that “probably” grew in his garden.

At a certain point intelligent readers became sick of this paper monster and began to look for something a little more real.  They could just manage to make out a shape out there, moving around in the bushes, but it was hard to define. (Francis? Is that you?)  Eventually J.T. Looney gave it a name and Charlton Ogburn a wealth of detail, but we’re still stuck, first with the desire to pin the blame on a group, now with the nonsense that almost anyone alive at the time could have tossed off these erudite masterpieces.

My kingdom for a story!

By blogging there seemed the possiblity, finally, of having it both ways.  I could tell the story I had begun to perceive some time ago, with links to articles that provide the kind of citations that give at least a minimum of support.  With readers able to ask for specifics directly without waiting for an answer to a letter sent through the publisher or finding a booksigning somewhere within driving range, I could finally (I hoped) provide the key to the insight or the missing bit of information that would suddenly (perhaps) bring the scene to life, set the story in motion, for that reader and perhaps others as well.

I’ve only been at this blogging for a few months now and so the story, while complete in my mind, is far from complete here.  I’m still working on background material for the 1580s, the most difficult decade partly because there’s so little documentation, but also because it’s then that the heart of the story, the drama, begins to take shape.  Because I have to conjecture so much for that decade, I need more supportive material than was required for the 1570s or will be for the 1590s.

If it seems that much of what I write is directed to those readers who have already read the biographies (Anderson, Ogburn, Miller, Nelson), it’s because for you I don’t have to repeat so much, simply filling in a few areas that they ignored (chiefly Oxford’s childhood and education). This way I can concentrate on those areas that provide the reasons why he and the actors and their patrons, hid his authorship, reasons of culture, tradition, politics, and religion, and beyond these, the connections to the important figures of his time that he portrayed and satirized in his plays, points that can’t be made without showing why he would do such a thing and how he managed to get away with it.

If I can reach you, then together we can find ways to communicate the Authorship Issue, not just as a series of talking points, arguments, and facts, but as a story that, motivated by the life force that is our common heritage as humans, simply tells itself.  Surrounded as I am by all the stuff I’ve accumulated, it’s hard for me to see the forest for the trees.  By telling it this way in bits and pieces, and by answering your questions, it helps put things in perspective.

So please bear with me, and do ask for clarification of those points that, to you, seem little more than wild surmise.  My idea of support may be somewhat different than those historians who, when the paper is lacking, simply skip over the anomalies, but be assured, nothing I suggest is spun purely from thin air.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Elizabethan era · English Literature · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · theater history
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Why the cover-up continued after Oxford’s death

September 9, 2009 · 2 Comments

John Shahan pushed me hard in his comment on my response to Alex McNeil’s question. Sometimes an exchange that follows a blog gets lost in the drift, but this is too important to let that happen, so I’ll respond here to some of his more pertinent points.  If you missed it in full, it follows Alex’s question.

John: Why was the cover-up maintained after his death?  It’s a separate question that you haven’t answered.  It’s a good question, and one that many people ask when they come to the controversy for the first time.  We should have a good answer at the ready, and providing an explanation of why he would have kept hidden during his lifetime doesn’t cut it.  It sounds evasive to answer a question other than the one that was asked.

I wasn’t being evasive, I was being too general.  His authorship would have been kept a secret after his death for exactly the same reasons that it was kept a secret during his lifetime, the same reasons that all the covers he used throughout his life remained in place, the same reasons that Mary Sidney’s descendents never revealed all she wrote or that Francis Bacon never revealed himself as a “hidden poet.”  And for some of the same reasons that got Christopher Marlowe murdered or transported.

If I got lost providing background it’s because it’s so difficult for people today to understand the realities of Shakespeare’s time.  However, there is one that might stand out a little better than most: namely the fact that so many of his characters satirized respected and high ranking members of the Court community, some portrayed as buffoons, some involved in scandalous love affairs, some even accused of murder!  That they might possibly be identified with these infamous characters would have had these highly status conscious people, their retainers and descendants, in a real tizzy.

As long as William of Stratford was known as the author, the originals of these characters were protected, but had the Pembrokes and the Kings Men revealed the truth about the authorship they would have had an extremely serious situation on their hands.  This is one of the reasons why the publication of Oxford’s collected plays took as long as it did.  It had to wait until the Earl of Pembroke achieved  the Court position where he finally had the power to take the matter of its publication into his own hands, overpassing the wishes of some who would have preferred that everything Oxford ever wrote be destroyed.

Most agree that Polonius was a demeaning portrait of Lord Burghley, something that would certainly have been as obvious to members of the Elizabethan Court community as it is to us today.  If, as I believe, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and other of his more serious and philosophical plays were written, not for the Court or the public, but for his Inns of Court audience, it could mean that Elizabeth never saw them, or if she did, not in the versions that we know from the First Folio.  Thus it’s possible that Burghley never saw himself derided as Polonius, or his daughter portrayed as a lunatic and a suicide.  For who would tell him?  There were no newspapers, so there were no reviews.  All publication was tightly controlled.  By whom?  By Lord Burghley.

Were it ever to become public that it was the Earl of Oxford who had created these popular characters––so popular that they made the Lord Chamberlain’s-King’s Men a fortune––how long do you think it would have taken the public audience to connect Oxford’s father-in-law with Polonius, his wife with Ophelia, his political adversary the Earl of Leicester with Claudius, or his Queen with Gertrude?  How long to connect Richard III with Robert Cecil, Mildred Burghley with Volumnia in Coriolanus, Southampton with the Fair Youth, Philip Sidney with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Emilia Bassano with Cleopatra, and so forth.

Oxford’s own daughters were the daughters of Ophelia, the granddaughters of Polonius. That, plus the fact that his youngest had married a Pembroke, shows that however you look at the cover-up, by 1615 when Pembroke finally got the office of Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, putting him officially in charge of the Court Stage and the King’s Men, publication of the First Folio was as much a family affair as it was a literary event.  Pembroke wanted the plays published, but he also wanted to protect his family and his community from scandal and, not least, himself from the odium that would be inevitable were he to allow these connections to be revealed.

If it’s a good talking point you’re after, maybe this will do.  Yet even here we run into the problem of readers not understanding enough about the period to get it.  Again the main problem is our inability to grasp how small were these communities, and how static.  Where our communities today consist of thousands, many of whom are no more to us than names, theirs consisted of a dozen, two dozen names, in positions that may have changed only once or twice over a lifetime.  During Elizabeth’s reign the number of peers went from 60 to 25!  Our communities are in continual flux; as one worker, neighbor, merchant leaves for greener pastures, retirement, or intensive care., another takes their place.  The only way that things changed in Oxford’s time was through death.

We can say these things, but do they sink in?  Do we really understand what it meant to live in what to us would seem intolerable constriction while under the constant threat of death for ourselves, our children, our loved ones, whether by disease (no doctors) or by violence (no police)?  Added to the equation must be their ignorance of science, of medicine, even of their own history––a problem that Oxford’s history plays were intended to address.

The closest thing we have to their peers, their kings, queens, earls and countesses, knights and ladies, are celebrities.  Of these we have so many that, as happened a few days ago, I can see someone introduced to an audience on television, an audience of cheering thousands,  as one who has sold millions of platinum records and received a cartload of important awards, someone I’d never heard of before.  And while their handful of important persons changed only when one died and was replaced by another, ours are continually changing, usually simply by disappearing into anonymity, beauty queens into middle-aged matrons, sports stars into businessmen, some onto the pages of history, a history already jammed with names and faces.

The problem isn’t only of numbers and stasis, it’s one of attitude.  We have no respect for our celebrities.  Largely due to their numbers, their lack of background, the ephemeral nature of their importance, they seem to exist largely as vessels for our scorn.  Their very renown calls forth efforts to bring them down, to expose them, to show the world their weaknesses.  These Elizabethan celebrities had no photographers with telephoto lenses to catch them with their pants down, they were known to their people only from a dignified distance, dressed in crimson, ermine, and gold, or from copies of stately portraits. Descended from the heroes of past glories, they came as close to living gods and goddesses as humans could. Their lessers might hate them and blame them for hard times, but they did not, they simply could not, disrespect them.

When Shakespeare came along and revealed these gods and goddesses as human beings with problems and weaknesses like themselves and their neighbors it was fascinating, yet for all their speculation, they did not know, they could not know, how closely based they were on the real thing.  To have known who among those distant and admired figures were the real models of these fools and villains was simply more information than the culture could bear.  As a general statement, that may be putting it a little too strongly, but not by much.

John: Lots of authors use pseudonyms to conceal their identities during their lifetimes without the cover-up continuing after they die.  So why was Oxford different?

Lots?  Who?  Who of Oxford’s social stature?  Who in his time, or the time before his, or the time after his?  Not all statements have to be substantiated, but this is crucial.  Who else of his status in the Elizabethan era published works of the imagination under his (or her) own name?  I don’t know of a single one.

John: There’s a difference between knowledge and belief, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we fail to make the distinction. That’s what Stratfordians do.

Having repeated this twice I assume you’re taking me to task for making unsupported statements.  I’ve made it clear from the start that my purpose with this blog is to provide a scenario that accounts for what facts we have, not just a few here and there, clustered around one or two circumstances (such as the writing of the Sonnets), but as many as possible.  I did a lot of substantiating of statements while I was editing The Oxfordian.  That was important, but this, however different, is just as important.

We’ve had most of the facts on Oxford for decades, and where have they gotten us?  Facts are to story as flour, water, salt and yeast are to bread; the ingredients, not the thing itself. We can eat bread, we can’t eat flour, water, salt and yeast.   Creating a story out of facts is like mixing, kneading, and finally, baking.  We are not inventing the bread, what form it takes depends solely on the ingredients.  All we’re doing is assembling them, giving them a thump or two, and letting them rise into a living story.

To be convinced, hearts must be touched as well as minds, something that can’t be be done without characters and a plot.  What’s most real about us are not the facts of our lives, but our stories.  To understand the past, we need more than dates of battles, we need heroes and villains, tyrants and underdogs, damsels in distress.  Without these, the audience leaves at intermission.  No one understood this better than Shakespeare.

There’s another reason for what I’m doing.  The Stratford bio as generated by Ben Jonson and others has sent generations of Shakespeare enthusiasts on an utterly fruitless 400-year-old wild goose chase through the archives in search of something that will reveal a believable Shakespeare story.  While true stories must be based on facts, it’s also the case that the search for facts will go off-track quickly if there isn’t a logical scenario in place directing it where to look.  How do we get such a scenario?  By doing what I’m doing, filling in the blank areas with informed guesswork.

Hopefully there will be some, or at least one, who’s located close enough to the relevant archives who gets sufficiently intrigued by what I’m proposing to begin looking where I’m pointing.  Centuries of investigators have read the letters of Burghley, Walsingham, Alleyn, Pembroke, and others, looking for something, anything, about Shakespeare.  Nothing anywhere near this scale has yet been done for Oxford.  Who knows what he or she will find once they begin to look?

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Edward de Vere · Elizabethan era · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · the London Stage
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Who Wrote What?

August 12, 2009 · 2 Comments

Ockham’s razor is a slang term for the simplification that takes place when the truth is finally located at the center of a mélange of clues and complicated hypotheses.  We can be fairly certain we have the truth when whole cartloads of contradictions start vanishing, leaving a simply, believable story.  But of course, first it’s necessary to stop ignoring the contradictions.

In the tiny community that was the English Literary establishment in the 1570s-90s, there were not a dozen different men (and/or women) who, over this 20 year period, wrote for a time and then ceased to write.  There were two who for reasons of social propriety and privacy, used a number of different names, most of them the names of friends, family members, or retainers.  These two, the pioneers, are Edward de Vere and Francis Bacon.  The other two giants of Early Modern English Literature, Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe, who both died young, did not take pseudonyms, though for very different reasons. Raleigh probably makes a fifth, if we only knew which of the anonymous poems in the anthologies were his. (Raleigh wrote only for the Court community, he didn’t write pamphlets or dramas; his primary art was seamanship and adventure.)  Mary Sidney is a transitional figure, carrying the torch from the first, gifted amateur generation to the following, which, if not totally professional in todays terms, was closer.  And then came those who, again for different reasons, were far more free to write under their own names, writers like John Donne and Ben Jonson.    

Why so much hiding of identities?

All that needs to be said here is that they did.  Yes, we don’t have much hiding of identities today.  Yes, it seems bizarre to us today that anyone would want to hide their identity when getting their precious work published.  The reasons why these folks hid are complicated; I’ve covered some of them in other essays.  Other scholars have also dealt with this.  All that needs to be said here is that there is no doubt whatsoever that during this period the hiding of identities by poets, playwrights, satirists, writers of romance tales, novelists, and anyone who wrote any sort of imaginative literature was rampant. We may question this, but the readers, writers, and publishers of 16th and 17th-century England certainly did not.

How can we be certain that an identification is correct?

Well, we can’t.  But we can come awfully close, much closer than any of the guesswork that’s gone into turning the handful of prosaic facts we have about William of Stratford into the lifeless biography that haunts us today. Our methods include the following:

Treating the information on title pages and front material with the same sort of rigor that we question anecdotes and rumors.

Understanding how very small were these early literary communities, and so realizing that there could only be a handful of writers involved in the beginnings of the commercial Stage and Press.

Locating repetitive styles and themes:  There are habits and quirks that writers simply can’t eliminate and themes that they return to again and again.  When both of these continue to appear together in a series of works––no matter what their title page attributions––chances are we’ve located a hidden writer.  True, this was a period of experimentation, when styles came and went and when writers delighted in imitating the styles of others, either because they admired them or because they wished to satirize or annoy them.  Nevertheless, if there’s enough congruence of style and themes, a general profile will appear that goes beyond names. 

Locating connections between the names on title pages and the Court writers who had reason to hide their identities: Such connections include Oxford’s to John Lyly (secretary 1578-90), Anthony Munday  (secretary, 1576?-1580), Thomas Watson  (retainer 1583-92), Robert Greene (possibly Essex neighbor), Emilia Bassano (probably lover), William of Stratford (through Richard Field, his neighbor at Blackfriars), and Henry Evans (assistant); Mary Sidney to John Webster (her coachmaker, weak, but plausible) and to a fellow courtier (Fletcher); and Bacon to Spenser (fellow student at Cambridge), Nashe (student at Cambridge), Harvey (fellow at Cambridge), and Whitgift (tutor at Cambridge). 

Locating the connections between the themes and subjects of the works in question with the lives of these Court writers:  Most notably almost everything ever published under the name William Shakespeare can be connected rather neatly to persons and events in the life of the Earl of Oxford. Mary Sidney can be connected to Webster by the rather obvious reflection of her sons’ situation at Court in the events and characters portrayed in The White Devil and between her personal situation in 1601-1612 and the plot and characters of The Duchess of Malfi (and earlier by her personal knowledge of the events portrayed in Lady Jane, written for Philip Henslowe in 1602).  Bacon’s authorship of Nashe by his financial straits and the theme of Pierce Penniless, his authorship of Spenser by his relationship with Gabriel Harvey from days at Cambridge University and (as Nashe) their pseudo-pamphlet duel, and so forth.

And by connecting them in time:  It’s no coincidence that Robert Greene and Thomas Watson “died” just before Shakespeare appeared.  It’s no coincidence that Webster’s plays appear only at times in Mary Sidney’s life when she isn’t busy with family stuff.  It’s no coincidence that the works attributed to Spenser begin appearing just after Bacon arrives back in England but that Spenser’s name isn’t used for that or for The Faerie Queene until after Spenser departed for the distant wilds of Ireland.  It’s no coincidence that Nashe appears for the first time during the ferocity of the Mar-Prelate dustup, or that he suffers nothing for the Isle of Dogs, while Court outsiders like Jonson, Shaa, and Spencer go to jail.   The timing of these and scores of other events, set beside each other, form the pattern of a very interesting story, if we let them.

No single one of these points can stand on its own as evidence, but when we find that every item in every one of these categories points in a particular direction, we can be pretty sure we’re on the right track.

Categories: Earl of Oxford · Early Modern literature · Edward de Vere · English Literature · Oxfordian theory · Shakespeare · Shakespeare Authorship · theater history
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