Posted on 09/29/2005 10:22:07 PM PDT by Plutarch
Scholar’s new book fingers Edward de Vere as the true author of great literature
“It was like marveling at the Taj Mahal,” Mark Anderson says of the first time he ever read a Shakespeare play. “Clearly one of the great wonders of the world.” But although he enjoyed reading Shakespeare in high school and college, it wasn’t until Anderson graduated with a master’s degree in astrophysics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993 that he began an earnest study of the works of the Bard.
On staff at a local paper, Anderson got an assignment to write a story about another UMass graduate student, Roger Stritmatter, who was the first scholar to posit that William Shakespeare was actually Edward de Vere — and who wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject.
That assignment got Anderson hooked on detective work that would last a decade. “[I wondered] where’s the human story or stories behind this?” he says. “I found that the answer almost always boiled down to three words: Edward de Vere.”
The result of 10 years of meticulous work is Anderson’s just released hardback book called “‘Shakespeare’ by Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who was Shakespeare” (Gotham Books, 2005). The book, which includes voluminous appendices and footnotes, is a biography of Edward de Vere, the man Anderson is sure wrote the plays we still revere today.
Earl Showerman, the local organizer of this weekend’s upcoming Shakespeare Conference, is convinced that Anderson is right, and invited Anderson to be the conference’s keynote speaker on the first day.
“Mark has been coming to conferences that I’ve been attending for number of years while he’s been doing research,” says Showerman, a retired physician living in the upper Applegate Valley who will be giving a talk about the Greek origins of Hamlet. “He’s written an advanced, highly scholarly book that is a wonderful map to how the plays might have been created if Edward de Vere had been the author.”
Like a scientist testing out a theory, Anderson starts with the hypothesis that the man we know as William Shakespeare was actually the Earl of Oxford. In the book’s introduction, he mentions that this search is right in keeping with three of the greatest artistic minds who also doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the plays accredited to him: Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud.
“If it were true, then Vere’s life story should match up to the Bard’s works kind of like the northeast coast of South America lines up so precisely with the west coast of Africa,” says Anderson.
And, according to Anderson’s research, it does. Anderson says King Lear is actually based on de Vere’s own life experience, dividing up his wealth among his own three daughters. He points out that de Vere traveled widely (though the man we know as Shakespeare did not) to the places that figure so prominently in the plays, including Venice, Sicily, Illyria, Naples, Milan and Padua, and that de Vere had an extramarital affair that went awry and led to a Montague-and-Capulet-like street war in London.
“This is just a tiny sampling of the astonishing array of connections between the life and the works that is readily made once one at least considers the possibility that Edward de Vere was the author,” says Anderson.
Showerman hopes Anderson’s book will shake up the existing order and make many in the orthodoxy mad. “In the academic community is the last place you will find an honest scholarship question because of the investment the scholars have in the existing order,” says Showerman.
“There are some who are extremely vocal in their opposition to any questioning of the authorship of what they see as the ‘Divine Will’s’ works,” agrees Anderson. “But most people, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find, are interested in hearing the arguments of both sides, hearing the stories that each side has to tell, and making up their own minds. Perhaps that’s what angers the staunch defenders of orthodoxy so much.”
Anderson says for the last five years he has worked almost exclusively on the book. Though he is planning to move on to other projects — and his wife is expecting their first child in January — he says there are still a lot of unanswered Shakespeare authorship questions.
“These are some of the greatest works of literature in human history,” says Anderson, who adds that Americans, Australians, South Africans, Poles and Japanese all love Shakespeare’s work for the very human element in it. “For me, it’s that human part of human history that really gets me motivated to learn more about the man who bequeathed such an amazing artistic legacy to the world,” he says.
I've never paid the matter much attention but tend to lean, largely from inertia, toward the Stratfordians. But I've always wondered: did de Vere publish much under his own name and, if so, how does the language -- the vocabulary, sentence structure, phrasing, etc. -- line up with that of "Shakespeare." I thought there were computer programs that could compare two texts (of reasonable length) and estimate the probability that they were written by the same person.
There are. And they have been very successful in making attributions and solving literary mysteries. One of these programs demonstrated that Christopher Marlowe made some contributions to some of the "iffy" works in the Shakespeare canon that scholars have been arguing about for years but did not contribute to any of the principal, widely-accepted plays and poetry. If the supporters of de Vere are confident, they'll submit his works to this type of analysis as well.
Personally, I think the subject is fascinating, and I'd love to know who the real author of the Shakespeare plays was. I can't believe it was an uneducated, untravelled guy from a two-bit village who left not a single book, manuscript, or paper in his will. But the mystery is endlessly enchanting, isn't it?
Actually, I think the writer of Shakespeare's works were little green men from Mars. My source is George Noory's Coast To Coast AM program.
He read a book by Thomas Looney advocating Oxford's authorship that he was really taken with. Why, though, continues to baffle his biographers.
Few think that Christopher Marlowe had anything to do with the works in the Shakespeare canon, except as influence. I do know that not one program has "demonstrated" Marlowe's hand in any of these plays. At best, it could only provide compelling evidence, but I don't think even that much has been done. The most widely accepted contributors to the Shakespeare canon are John Fletcher (in "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen"), George Wilkins (first two acts of "Pericles"), and Thomas Nashe (first act of "Henry VI, part 1").
I can't believe it was an uneducated, untravelled guy from a two-bit village who left not a single book, manuscript, or paper in his will.
And how do you know Shakespeare was uneducated and untravelled? As for the will, we have other wills from fourteen different playwrights of the time, and only three mention books. Sir Francis Bacon never mentioned books in his will either. It just doesn't mean anything.
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