Shakespeare Authorship Essay, Research Paper
For a host of persuasive but commonly disregarded reasons, the Earl of
Oxford has quietly become by far the most compelling man to be found
behind the mask of “Shake-speare.” As Orson Welles put it in 1954, “I
think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some
awful funny coincidences incidences to explain away.” Some of these
coincidences are obscure, others are hard to overlook. A 1578 Latin
encomium to Oxford, for example, contains some highly suggestive
praise: “Pallas lies concealed in thy right hand,” it says. “Thine eyes
flash fire; Thy countenance shakes spears.” Elizabethans knew that
Pallas Athena was known by the sobriquet “the spear-shaker.” The hyphen
in Shake-speare’s name also was a tip-off: other Elizabethan pseudonyms
include “Cutbert Curry-knave,” “Simon Smell-knave,” and “Adam
Fouleweather (student in asse-tronomy).”(FN*).
The case for Oxford’s authorship hardly rests on hidden clues and
allusions, however. One of the most important new pieces of Oxfordian
evidence centers around a 1570 English Bible, in the “Geneva
translation,” once owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de
Vere. In an eight-year study of the de Vere Bible, a University of
Massachusetts doctoral student named Roger Stritmatter has found that
the 430-year-old book is essentially, as he puts it, “Shake-speare’s
Bible with the Earl of Oxford’s coat of arms on the cover.” Stritmatter
discovered that more than a quarter of the 1,066 annotations and marked
passages in the de Vere Bible appear in Shake-speare. The parallels
range from the thematic–sharing a motif, idea, or trope–to the
verbal–using names, phrases, or wordings that suggest a specific
biblical passage.
In his research, Stritmatter pioneered a stylistic-fingerprinting
technique that involves isolating an author’s most prominent biblical
allusions–those that appear four or more times in the author’s canon.
After compiling a list of such “diagnostic verses” for the writings of
Shake-speare and three of his most celebrated literary
contemporaries–Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edmund
Spenser–Stritmatter undertook a comparative study to discern how
meaningful the de Vere Bible evidence was. He found that each author’s
favorite biblical allusions composed a unique and idiosyncratic set and
could thus be marshaled to distinguish one author from another.
Stritmatter then compared each set of “diagnostics” to the marked
passages in the de Vere Bible. The results were, from any perspective
but the most dogmatically orthodox, a stunning confirmation of the
Oxfordian theory.
Stritmatter found that very few of the marked verses in the de Vere
Bible appeared in Spenser’s, Marlowe’s, or Bacon’s diagnostic verses.
On the other hand, the Shake-speare canon brims with de Vere Bible
verses. Twenty-nine of Shake-speare’s top sixty-six biblical allusions
are marked in the de Vere Bible. Furthermore, three of Shake-speare’s
diagnostic verses show up in Oxford’s extant letters. All in all, the
correlation between Shake-speare’s favorite biblical verses and Edward
de Vere’s Bible is very high: .439 compared with .054, .068, and .020
for Spenser, Marlowe, and Bacon. Was “Shake-speare” the pen name for
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or must we formulate ever more
elaborate hypotheses that preserve the old byline but ignore the appeal
of common sense and new evidence?
One favorite rejoinder to the Oxfordian argument is that the author’s
identity doesn’t really matter; only the works do. “The play’s the
thing” has become the shibboleth of indifference-claiming doubters.
These four words, however, typify Shake-speare’s attitude toward the
theater about as well as the first six words of A Tale of Two Cities
express Charles Dickens’s opinion of the French Revolution: “It was the
best of times.” In both cases, the fragment suggests an authorial
perspective very different from the original context.
“The play’s the thing,” Hamlet says, referring to his masque “The
Mouse-trap,” “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Hardly a
pr cis for advocating the death of the author, Hamlet’s observation
reports that drama’s function comes closer to espionage than to mere
entertainment. Hamlet’s full quote is, in fact, a fair summary of the
Oxfordian reading of the entire cannon. If pressed, Shake-speare, like
Hamlet, would probably deny a play’s topical relevance. But, as an
ambitious courtier, he would have valued his dramaturgical ability to
comment on, lampoon, vilify, and praise people and events at Queen
Elizabeth’s court. It is hard to deny that Hamlet is the closest
Shake-speare comes to a picture of the dramatist at work.
Nowadays, assertions that one can recover the author’s perspective from
his own dramatic self-portraits are often ridiculed as naive or
simplistic. Yet the converse–that Shake-speare somehow evaded the
realities and particulars of his own life in creating his most
enduring, profound, and nuanced characters–is absurd on its face. Of
course, the infinite recesses of the imagination make an appealing
refuge to the savvy debater. Shake-speare was a creative genius (a
claim no one would dare dispute); ergo, he could and did make it all
up. Following the same reasoning, though, Hamlet’s own masque holds no
political purpose either. Rather than seeing it as a ploy to “catch the
conscience of the king,” a strictly Stratfordian reading of “The
Mouse-trap” would be compelled to see it as little more than a fanciful
Italian fable divorced of its obvious allegory to the foul deeds
committed at the court of Elsinore. The fact that, just like Hamlet,
“The Mouse-trap” stages a king’s poisoning and a queen’s hasty
remarriage becomes just another “awful funny” coincidence.
In the history of the Shake-speare authorship controversy, every
claimant to the laurels has queued up offering the promise of
mouth-watering connections to the canon. Justifiably, skeptics have
countered that if you squint your eyes hard enough, any scrap or
biographical datum can be made to resemble something from Shake-speare.
With Oxford, however, everything seems to have found its way into
Shake-speare. Gone are the days when heretics would storm the ramparts
whenever some thread was discovered between the character Rosencrantz
and Francis Bacon’s grandpa. Today it’s more alarming when a
Shake-speare play or poem does not overflow with Oxfordian connotations
and connections. The problem for any Oxfordian is the perhaps enviable
task of selecting which handful of gems should be brought out from the
treasure chest. In what follows, then, I will touch on five
Shake-spearean characters–Hamlet, Helena, Falstaff, King Lear, and
Prospero–and will briefly point out a few parallels with Oxford.
Hamlet. More than a mere authorial specter, the Prince enacts entire
portions of Oxford’s life story. Oxford’s two military cousins, Horace
and Francis Vere, appear as Hamlet’s comrade-at-arms Horatio and the
soldier Francisco. Oxford satirizes his
officious, bumbling, royal adviser Lord Burghley (nicknamed “Polus”),
as the officious, bumbling royal adviser Polonius. The parallels
between Burghley and Polonius are so vast and detailed that even the
staunch Stratfordian A. L. Rowse admitted that “there is nothing
original” anymore in asserting this widely recognized connection.
Furthermore, like Polonius, Burghley had a daughter. At age twenty-one,
Oxford was married to Anne Cecil, and their nuptial affairs were
anything but blissful. The tragically unstable triangle of
Hamlet-Ophelia-Polonius found its living parallel in
Oxford-Anne-”Polus.” In short, from the profound (Oxford’s mother
quickly remarried upon the untimely death of her husband) to the
picayune (Oxford was abducted by pirates on a sea voyage), Hamlet’s
“Mouse-trap” captures the identity of its author.
Helena. Just as details of Oxford’s life story appear throughout each
of the Shake-speare plays and poems, Anne Cecil’s tragic tale is
reflected in many Shake-spearean heroines, including Ophelia,
Desdemona, Isabella, Hero, Hermione, and Helena. In All’s Well That
Ends Well, Helena seeks out and eventually wins the hand of the
fatherless Bertram, who is being raised as a ward of the
court–precisely the situation Oxford found himself in when Anne was
thrust upon him by his guardian and soon-to-be father-in-law. Like
Helena, Anne was rejected by her headstrong new husband, who fled to
Italy rather than remain at home with her. Both Oxford and Bertram
refused to consummate their vows–and both eventually impregnated their
wives by virtue of a “bed trick” (the strange and almost unbelievable
stratagem wherein the husband thinks he is sleeping with another woman
but is in fact sleeping with his own wife).
Falstaff. The comic conscience of the Henry IV plays, Falstaff can be
read as an authorial self-parody embodying two of Oxford’s more
notorious qualities: a razor wit and a wastrel’s worldview. In The
Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff also provokes Master Ford’s jealousy,
lampooning the author’s own hypocrisy in flying into a jealous rage at
his wife when he suspected her of infidelity. And the romantic subplot
involving the daughter of the other “merry wife”–Anne Page–so
specifically skewers the marriage negotiations between Oxford, Anne
Cecil, and her onetime prospective husband, Sir Philip Sidney, that the
dowries and pensions mentioned in the play match precisely those of the
play’s historical counterparts. In the same play, Falstaff brags to
Master Ford that he “fear s not Goliath with a weaver’s beam.” This odd
expression is in fact shorthand for the biblical Goliath’s spear as it
is detailed in II Samuel 21:19: “Goliath the Gittite: the staff of
whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.” Not only did Oxford mark the
verse in his Bible; he even underlined the words “weaver’s beam.”.
King Lear. In a play whose dramatic engine is the family dynamics of
two tragically flawed patriarchs (Lear and the Earl of Gloucester),
Shake-speare stages the exact familial relationships that Oxford faced
in his twilight years. His first marriage to Anne Cecil left him a
widower, like Lear, with three daughters, of whom the elder two were
married. His second marriage produced only one son, whose patrilineal
claims could conceivably be challenged by Oxford’s bastard son–a
mirror of the gullible Earl of Gloucester’s situation. As if
highlighting one of the thematic underpinnings of King Lear, in his
Bible, Oxford marked Hosea 9:7 (”The prophet is a fool; the spiritual
man is mad”), which Lear’s daughter Goneril inverts in her venomous
remark that “Jesters do oft prove prophets.”.
Prospero. The Tempest’s exiled nobleman, cast-away hermit, and
scholarly shaman provides the author’s grand farewell to a world that
he recognizes will bury his name, even when his book is exalted to the
ends of the earth. Oxfordians, in general, agree with scholarly
tradition that The Tempest was probably Shake-speare’s final play–and
many concur with the German Stratfordian critic Karl Elze that “all
external arguments and indications are in favor of the play being
written in the year 1604.” Before he takes his final bow, Prospero
makes one last plea to his eternal audience. Drawing from a contiguous
set of Oxford’s marked verses at Ecclesiasticus 28:1-5 concerning the
need for reciprocal mercy as the precondition of human freedom,
Prospero delivers his farewell speech with the hopes that someone will
take him at his word:.
R elease me from my bands With the help of your good hands! Gentle
breath of yours my sails Must fill or else my project fails, Which was
to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending
is despair, Unless I be reliev’d by prayer, Which pierces so that it
assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would
pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.
Like Hamlet, The Tempest’s aristocrat cum magus begs those around him
to hear his story and, in so doing, to free him from his temporary
chains. The rest, as the academic ghost-chase for the cipher from
Stratford has ably demonstrated, is silence.
At the end of The Tempest, Prospero uses the metaphors of shipwrecks
and stormy weather to deliver his closing salvo against the desolate
island he called home. During the final year of his life, the Earl of
Oxford clearly had such imagery on his mind, as can be seen in his
eloquent April 1603 letter to his former brother-in-law, Robert Cecil,
on the death of Queen Elizabeth: “In this common shipwreck, mine is
above all the rest, who least regarded, though often comforted, of all
her followers, she hath left to try my fortune among the alterations of
time and chance, either without sail whereby to take the advantage of
any prosperous gale, or with anchor to ride till the storm be
overpast.” The alterations of time and chance have been cruel to Edward
de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. But the last five years of discoveries
and developments have made two things increasingly clear: the tempest
has broken, and Prospero’s indulgence is finally upon us.
Added material.
FOOTNOTE* Another intriguing reference comes from the satirist Thomas
Nashe, who included a dedication to a “Gentle Master William” in his
1593 book Strange News, describing him as the “most copious” poet in
England. He alludes to “the blue boar,” Oxford’s heraldic emblem, and
roasts “William” with the Latin phrase Apis lapis, which translates as
“sacred ox.”.
I am “a sort of” haunted by the conviction that the divine William is
the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient
world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me.
But that is all–I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry
it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express
my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to
conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from
Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.