Word: vered
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...those plays aren't really Shakespeare's!" That is the rebel yell of a hardy band of amateur historians as they catch the wave of the bard's new vogue to resplash their thesis: Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare; Edward de Vere did. What's more, an ivory-tower conspiracy is keeping their views from being taken seriously. "We're into something called bardgate," says Peter Dickson, a CIA official turned revisionist Elizabethan scholar. Shakespeare is not a crook, reply the defenders of the glover's son from Warwickshire. And each side casts the other as devils citing Hamlet...
That is some of the circumstantial but rather sexy evidence surrounding Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, in a contention that began in 1920 and has gathered steam through the '80s and '90s. De Vere led a life that was a veritable mirror of Shakespeare's art. Why then did he not write under his own name? It would have been unseemly, his advocates point out, for a courtier to attach his name to public wares. And De Vere was a truly uncommon nobleman: he was the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain and a sometime favorite of Elizabeth...
...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...