The Oxfordian Stance
The Oxfordians claim that Edward de Vere (1550–1604), the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, wrote all of Shakespeare's plays and poems. The Oxfordians base their claim on de Vere's aristocratic background — he descended from a long line of earls that were close to the English monarchy — and his education, ability, and world experience.
Unlike Shakespeare, his biography is well documented. He spent a lot of time in Italy, which gave him the knowledge to write about that country in the plays of Shakespeare. He was also interested in drama and was a patron of Blackfriars Theatre.
Thomas Looney's (an unfortunate name for a researcher — he pronounced it Lawney) book Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the first work to claim de Vere wrote Shakespeare's plays. Looney didn't start with de Vere; he first made a list of the qualities that Shakespeare should possess, then matched those qualifications to de Vere.
Writing under his own name, Edward de Vere was recognized as a poet. Yet, nobody thought of him as a great poet, let alone a playwright. He did stop writing poetry to be able to — his champions say — spend his creative time writing great plays, the plays of Shakespeare.
David Bevington, a noted Shakespeare scholar, writes, “If Edward de Vere was so eager that someone should ‘Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied,’ why did he leave such enigmatic clues? Was the stigma of being a playwright so huge that he could tell no one, not even write it down for his friends? Ultimately the case collapses on lack of motive as well as lack of evidence, for it presupposes a social history of how playwrights got to be playwrights that is simply not in keeping with historical reality.”
Why would de Vere hide the fact that he had written the plays?
According to the Oxfordians, it would be unimaginable for a well-known earl of England to write for the common theater: The Elizabethan social code would have been violated if an aristocrat wrote plays under his own name. Oxfordians also claim that, due to the dangerous political metaphors and moralizing in the plays, he would put himself and his name in jeopardy.
Oxfordians feel strongly about their claims and say that those who support Shakespeare are blinded to the evidence by a vested self-interest. More extreme Oxfordians claim that Stratfordians are engaged in an active conspiracy to suppress pro-Oxford evidence.
The truth is far more mundane. Oxfordians are not taken seriously by the Shakespeare establishment because most Oxfordians do not follow basic standards of scholarship, and the “evidence” they present is either distorted, taken out of context, or flat-out false.
Sigmund Freud: “I am almost convinced that the assumed name [William Shakespeare] conceals the personality of Edward de Vere. The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.”
The Stratfordians maintain that one of the greatest difficulties with the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays is the fact that de Vere died in 1604, yet still managed to produce some of his greatest plays postmortem. These plays include King Lear (1605–6), Macbeth (1606–7), Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7), Coriolanus (1608), Cymbeline (1608–10), The Winter's Tale (1609–11), and The Tempest (1611).
Most Oxfordians concede that these plays postdate de Vere's death but argue that de Vere wrote the plays before he died and that they were brought out as needed for performance, sometimes with added contemporary references to events after 1604 in order to make them look timely.
The problem with this argument is that when you examine the body of Shakespeare's plays as a whole, it is possible to trace a definable stylistic development. As David Bevington, professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, said in a 1989 PBS Frontline documentary about this issue:
“The argument [that de Vere wrote Shakespeare] has to posit a conspiracy of staggering proportions. Shakespeare, according to this scenario, agreed to serve as a front man for Oxford because the writing of plays was below the dignity of a great man. Shakespeare's friends in the company agreed to serve up his plays in the years after Oxford's death, publicizing the plays as by Shakespeare. Persons who knew Shakespeare well, like Ben Jonson, went along with the fiction, writing economiastac verses for Shakespeare after his death in 1616. The acting company, especially Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, supervised the publication of all of the plays (except Pericles, Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which are regarded as collaborations) in a handsome folio volume in 1616, essentially the first of its kind to recognize a dramatist. Many writers poured out their praise for England's great national poet and playwright, and some of them knew Shakespeare personally. All of these people had to be either deceived by the presumed cover-up or, in many cases, accessories to a hoax.”
The contest, summed up by Frontline correspondent Al Austin, comes down to this: “Those who believe de Vere was Shakespeare must accept an improbable hoax as part of it, a conspiracy of silence involving among others, Queen Elizabeth herself. Those who side with the Stratford man must believe in miracles.”
Or, it might be added, accept the nature of genius for what it is — a rarity of generational proportions.
