Word: vered
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...coup attempt. As a result, the Latin left has less anti-Yanqui fodder to ignite. Shannon's nominated successor, Arturo Valenzuela, should have an easier time as a result. Still, even if the Honduran crisis has made them temporary allies, making U.S.-Venezuela relations permanently chévere - or swell - will be one of Valenzuela's toughest tasks...
...education would be familiar with. As the Declaration says, "scholars know nothing about how he acquired the breadth and depth of knowledge displayed in the works." And so doubting scholars look to well-traveled writers and aristocrats - essayist Francis Bacon; poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe; theater patron Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford - as the more likely candidates...
...Shakespeare (or maybe Bacon or possibly De Vere) asked, "What's in a name?" The star-crossed lovers still die, there will always be something rotten in the state of Denmark, no matter who wrote the plays. So why all the fuss? Both sides argue that knowing the identity of the man behind Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest is essential to understanding them. "Our interpretation of Shakespeare's works would be entirely different if we knew who wrote them," says Bill Rubinstein, history professor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and an academic adviser for the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition...
...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...