[Classic: 4/13/2000] April 12 marked the 450th birthday of the writer we know as William Shakespeare. Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was born on April 12, 1550.
Oxford adopted the name Shakespeare in 1593 when he published the poem Venus and Adonis, which he dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton. Oxford had fallen in love with the handsome teenager, who was being urged to marry his daughter Elizabeth Vere. Southampton is also the lovely boy to whom most of the Shakespeare Sonnets are addressed.
When I argued this in my book Alias Shakespeare (published by The Free Press in 1997), I expected to get quite an argument from the academic Shakespeare experts. To my surprise, they put up no real resistance; without exception, all those who attacked the book tacitly admitted that the Sonnets do indeed describe Oxford much more closely than they describe the legendary William of Stratford.
Of course, being scholars, they tried to disguise this admission with lots of scholarly bluster, but there it was: nobody bothered trying to prove that you can make a case for William of Stratford from the Sonnets, for the very simple reason that you cant. The poet of the Sonnets fits Oxford to a T: his ruined reputation, his rumored sexual attraction to boys, even his lameness. Not quite the wholesome Shakespeare we heard about in English class, but facts are facts.
The Shakespeare plays bear witness to Oxfords authorship in many ways. Polonius and his children in Hamlet are clearly modeled on Lord Burghley, Oxfords father-in-law, and his children. These characters dont appear in the Danish legend the play is based on. Oxfords wife died young in 1588; the first known reference to the play occurs in 1589. This date has puzzled the Shakespeare scholars, since 1589, though the natural moment for Oxford to write such a play, would be far too early for William of Stratford to have written it.
The scholars try to get around these problems by positing that the 1589 reference alludes to a different Hamlet play, though no trace of this hypothetical play has ever turned up. They deal with the Sonnets by positing that the poems are merely fictional, though this is not at all the impression the anguished Sonnets make on candid readers: why would an Elizabethan poet feign homosexual love for a boy, thereby risking not only disgrace and ridicule but capital punishment?
In addition, the greatest Shakespearean comic creation, Sir John Falstaff, bears witness to Oxfords paternity. Falstaff quotes the Bible constantly; and as a scholar named Roger Strittmatter has discovered, several of the verses he quotes are marked in Oxfords personal copy of the Bible!
If William of Stratford created Falstaff, how did he happen to cite so many of the same scriptural passages Oxford had singled out? In fact, as Strittmatter also notes, the Shakespeare plays contain hundreds of biblical citations corresponding to Oxfords markings, particularly in the rather obscure book of Ecclesiasticus (now deleted from Protestant editions of the Bible).
Even the names of people and places Oxford visited in Italy and France are echoed in the plays. Baptista Minola in The Taming of the Shrew seems to combine the names of Baptisto Nigrone and Benedic Spinola, who are mentioned in Oxfords letters from the Continent. Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice takes his surname from the Gobbo di Rialto, a statue in Venice. Alls Well That Ends Well mentions a local war that occurred while Oxford was in Italy. How could William of Stratford have known all these things?
The Shakespeare works were dedicated to three men by name the Earls of Southampton, Pembroke, and Montgomery. Each, at one time, had been slated to marry one of Oxfords three daughters, and Montgomery did marry Oxfords youngest daughter, Susan Vere.
As Orson Welles remarked, there are far too many coincidences favoring Oxfords authorship to explain away. And no similar details connect the Shakespeare works to the life of William of Stratford.
Its quietly sinking in that Oxford was the real Shakespeare. Sooner or later the academic experts are going to have to fess up to the most egregious blunder in the history of literary scholarship.
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This column was published originally by Griffin Internet Syndicate on April 13, 2000.