Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

WHO Wrote Shakespeare?  For many years I have put this question to my friends and acquaintances, and the answers are usually one of four.  1) Why not Shakespeare?  2) So you too are a Baconian?  3) Does it matter, when we have the plays?  4) Well, who did?

My answers to these counter-questions are as follows: 1) Because there is very little evidence indeed that 'Shakespeare' was Shakspere of Stratford, and silence where one would expect evidence.  Per contra, there is very strong evidence that others did write Shakespeare, and that William of Stratford did not.  2) I do not believe that Bacon wrote a line of the poems though he may, with others, have had a minor hand in the plays.  3) Yes, because it is offensive to scholarship, to our national dignity, and to our sense of fair play to worship the memory of a petty-minded tradesman while leaving the actual author of the Shakespeare plays and poems unhonoured and ignored.  Moreover, I have found the plays of far more interest when seen again as the work of a great nobleman and one very close to the fountain-head of Elizabethan England.  4) I am satisfied, with a number of scholars of far greater knowledge than I, that although the works attributed to Shakespeare may have come from several hands, the incomparable genius responsible for the greater part of them was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

My own approach to the problem is easily described.  Though I spend the greater part of my working day in 'detective stories' of real life I have ever an appetite for more, especially when there is a wrong to be righted and an historic mystery to be solved.  I find, for example, no reliable evidence that Richard III was responsible for the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and plenty to the effect that he did nothing of the kind.  If there is an answer to the late Josephine Tey’s A Daughter of Time, on the subject, I should like to hear it.

And who can seriously doubt that there is a Shakespeare mystery?  Nearly everything about that remarkable woman, Queen Elizabeth, is fraught with mystery, and remarkably little is known about the interrelations and motives of the brilliant group of men who graced her Court.  Why was the Earl of Oxford paid £1,000 a year from the Privy Purse while virtually exiled from the Court?  What was the truth of Bacon’s fall from grace, of Marlowe’s death, of Leicester’s relations with the Queen?  It is quite astonishing how little we know about this long and remarkable reign.  And the greatest mystery of all is the identity of William Shakespeare.

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The publication in 1984 of Charlton Ogburn’s 800-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare brought the question of Shakespeare’s authorship to widespread public attention.  In it Ogburn subjected the Stratfordian position to rigorous critical analysis, then went on to make a convincing case for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become “the leading candidate, next to William Shakespeare himself, for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.”  (The subsequent debate between Ogburn and Professor Maurice Charney of Rutgers, moderated by William F. Buckley Jr., exposed the conventional view of authorship as perilously flimsy.)  Ogburn’s work inspired Charles Beauclerk to set up the De Vere Society at Hertford College, Oxford, in order to stimulate debate at the university.  Guest speakers included Enoch Powell and Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre).  Then in 1989 PBS in America and Yorkshire TV in Britain collaborated in producing a highly influential Frontline documentary entitled The Shakespeare Mystery, which has been aired many times since.

The traditional response from the establishment has been to ignore the dissenters or dismiss them as unscholarly, in the hope that academic authority will carry the day.  Nevertheless, the pressure exerted by Oxfordians on the establishment view over the past 21 years has forced the academics out into the open.  Professor Alan Nelson of Berkeley, despite his loathing for his subject, wrote a 527-page biography of the Earl of Oxford entitled Monstrous Adversary (Liverpool University Press, 2003).  Although he avoided overt reference to the authorship question, the subtext of Nelson's character assassination was that Oxford was too nasty to have been Shakespeare!  In 2004 Stephen Greenblatt in his much-heralded biography of Shakespeare Will in the World made a valiant attempt to “sex up” the Stratford man by forcing connections between the man and the works and presenting him as an angst-ridden crypto-Catholic.  Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard, is angrily dismissive of the authorship question and thinks it should be banned from schools.  In August 2005 he wrote a letter to the New York Times comparing anti-Stratfordians to holocaust-deniers.  Greenblatt’s discomfort was in large part caused by the publication that same month of a biography of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare by journalist Mark Anderson entitled Shakespeare by Another Name (Gotham Books, Penguin USA).  A scholarly and impeccably sourced work, Shakespeare by Another Name has sent shock waves through the academic world. 

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