Word: vere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that he didn't leave clues. De Vere's copy of the Geneva Bible has been discovered in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and to the delight of advocates, words are underlined that reappear in the masterpieces. For example, the declaration "I am that I am" from Exodus 3: 14 is found not only in a letter De Vere wrote to his father-in-law in 1584 but also in "Sonnet 121." In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a Falstaff speech refers to a "weaver's beam," two words highlighted in the Bible (II Samuel 21: 19). Oxfordians...
...book, Alias Shakespeare, Joseph Sobran posits another reason for De Vere's alleged secrecy. The sonnets, he says, may have started as a playful artifice in courting the Earl of Southampton to marry De Vere's daughter, but they evolved into a dense homoeroticism. All the more reason to keep his authorship secret. (In this context there is a telling silence in Richard II. The historic King was notorious for a homosexual affair with the earl's ancestor Robert de Vere. Shakespeare's play begins after that affair is over, with no mention of the relative.) Thus while the earl...
...critical weakness of the Oxfordians is that De Vere died in 1604, before several of Shakespeare's masterpieces were published or performed. The Winter's Tale, as Bate points out, was licensed by Sir George Buc, who began licensing plays for performance only in 1610. The Tempest may have been inspired by a shipwreck off Bermuda in 1609. The Oxford faction offers tightly argued explanations for the discrepancies, along the lines that the plays are misdated or that the earl had already written the plays (based on alternative sources) and kept them private. According to Dickson, only the panic that...
...Oxford camp can go into admirable contortions explaining why Shakespeare's friendly rival Ben Jonson, in an encomium in the 1623 First Folio, calls the deceased Bard "the swan of Avon" (a conspiracy, they say). But their gravest problem is the existing poetry of De Vere himself. It is competent yet uninspired. The 20 or so poems may be juvenilia, but there is neither spark nor promise to the lines, too full of alliteration, all too devoid of depth. "Fram'd in the front of forlorn hope past all recovery,/I stayless stand, to abide the shock of shame...
...that may weaken the case for Oxford. But what a life De Vere led, an existence more Shakespearean than Shakespeare's! Of the man from Stratford we have only a sheaf of facts slimmer than a Gospel redacted by atheists. He is a man about whom it is impossible to write the literary biography as we know it today--kiss, tell, stab in the back, keep the codpiece, and don't dry-clean the doublet. And thus De Vere tantalizes. He may not have been the Bard, but--with apologies to whomever--was his life the stuff of which Shakespeare...