The
Third Annual Edward de Vere Conference
April 8-11
Concordia University 2811 NE Holman St., 288-9371
$55 regular admission, $30 graduate students, $20 undergrad
and high-school students, $20 day tickets.
Further
Reading:
Alias Shakespeare by Joseph Sobran (Free Press)
Shakespeare: Who Was He? by Richard F. Whalen (Praeger
Press)
I am a recovering bardolater. I started my intellectual life
as a firm believer in the Bard, William Shakespeare, and in
his genius. For 10 years I lived in England, where I regularly
made pilgrimages to worship in the temples of Stratford-on-Avon,
mouthing the creed of the faithful. I braved tube strikes
and IRA bombings to get SRO tickets for the Royal Shakespeare
Company's productions at the Barbican, and in 1989 I took
to the barricades to protest the destruction of the Rose Theatre's
site in Southwark. But throughout, something nagged at my
devotion. How did Shakespeare rise from rustic to genius?
And why was there nothing concretely connecting him to a writer's
life?
For the past 200 years, questions have been raised about
the true authorship of the plays and poems that we attribute
to Shakespeare. Though many candidates have been touted
as the author, none has appeared as promising as Edward
de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As quixotic as the question
of attribution may seem, there are many scholars, thinkers
and theater professionals who have taken up the Oxford cause,
from Sigmund Freud to Kenneth Branagh.
Here in Portland, the leading Oxfordian is Dr. Daniel Wright,
professor of English at Concordia University since 1991
and organizer of the annual Edward de Vere Studies Conference,
which takes place this week in Portland. "The more one studies
this issue, the more one realizes that blind tradition has
fanned smoke in our eyes," Wright told me. Wright, a fellow
anglophile, was also a bardolater well into his graduate
studies and felt uncomfortable analyzing the myth. "I was
upset by the challenges to the Stratford man's supremacy
until I began to seriously question the stale assumptions
that I'd been force-fed." For his heresy Wright has suffered
the slurs of colleagues and gotten a load of angry mail
(as I did when I wrote about the conference last year).
But his calm demeanor and wry humor disguise his serious
battle to bring Oxford justice.
In this month's issue of Harper's, Wright contributes
an article to a debate on Shakespeare. He begins by honoring
the first dissenting voice against the Stratfordian cause:
Reverend Dr. James Wilmot. In the 1780s Wilmot combed Warwickshire
hoping to find clues to the life of Shakespeare but found
nothing save dry legal documents and church records. Other
than passing references in literary lists and Ben Jonson's
poem in the First Folio, Wright reveals that information
about Shakespeare is scant and hardly warrants the fat biographies
that pack bookshop shelves, which are, finally, epics of
conjecture.
Defenders of Shakespeare maintain that an ill-schooled
and untraveled son of a provincial glovemaker could, in
a short time, gain an intimate knowledge of law, the aristocracy,
war, music, botany and Italy, as well as proficiency in
Latin, French and Italian. Mark Twain, an anti-Stratfordian,
pointed out that this backwoodsman would have had to find
the time to learn English properly, as his Warwickshire
dialect would have been incomprehensible to Londoners. In
short, we are asked to believe in what David Ignatius of
The Washington Post called "a literary immaculate
conception." For many of us, the forsaking of old Will has
had as much impact on our thinking as trashing the fictions
of Christ has. "Stratfordians cry the word 'genius' in defense,"
Wright tells me, "as if genius could manufacture knowledge."
Among the greats of literature--Euripides, Cervantes, Austen,
Melville, Dickinson, Proust--there's always a thread of
the life lived running through their work. With Shakespeare
there is nothing.
Richard Whalen writes in Harper's that a "deafening
silence marked the death of Shakespeare, allegedly the famous
playwright, on April 23, 1616." In an age of panegyrics
and eulogies by poets on the death of poets, no one noticed
that the greatest writer in English was being pressed into
an unmarked grave. In his will, Shakespeare bequeathed furniture,
clothes and bric-a-brac, yet he never mentioned books, musical
instruments or anything vaguely emblematic of an intellectual
life. This, to me, is the most damning evidence, and I sympathize
with Henry James, who wrote, "I am haunted by the conviction
that the divine William is the biggest and most successful
fraud ever practiced on a patient world."
The case for Oxford's authorship is compelling, I think,
especially by the manner in which his candidacy was first
formulated. Around 1918, an Englishman with the unfortunate
name of Looney (pronounced
Loan-ey) began a methodical search for the author
by employing the problem-solving scientific techniques of
Comte. Looney first created a profile of the writer from
close readings of the texts, then turned to The Dictionary
of National Biography to see if any Elizabethans fit.
He found the Earl of Oxford.
Born in 1550, Edward de Vere was of an aristocratic line
that dated back to the Norman Conquest. On his father's
death, Oxford became a ward of the crown and went to London
to live with Elizabeth I's trusted adviser, Lord Burghley.
Shakespearean scholars admit that the character of Polonius
in Hamlet is based on Burghley, and, as in the play,
the meddlesome royal adviser wasted no time in arranging
a marriage contract between his daughter and the young nobleman
of the house. They also find throughout the plays and poems
the profound impact made by Arthur Golding's translation
of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Golding was Oxford's uncle
and tutor, and the two shared an intense literary bond.
Still more facts pile up: Oxford studied law; he was a soldier
and a court favorite, and he lived in Venice briefly. He
was a noted poet and is often mentioned as an excellent
playwright, though no plays by his name exist. His secretary
was playwright John Lyly, whose work was also a major influence
on Shakespeare. In addition, Oxford's Bible, which was discovered
recently, contains notations that appear in the plays. As
for the name "Shakespeare," is it simply a coincidence that
Oxford's coat of arms bears the figure of a lion shaking
a spear?
The publication of the sonnets offers mysteries. The name
on them appears as "Shake-speare"--in an age when hyphenated
names primarily denoted pseudonyms. Rather than introductory
dedications by the author, the sonnets are prefaced by the
publisher, who hints that the author is dead; Oxford was
at the time, though Shakespeare was quite alive. Still more
puzzling is the voice in the poems, for the tone taken is
of an older nobleman speaking to a younger equal, widely
held to be the Earl of Southampton. The poet complains of
middle age and lameness, as does Oxford in many letters
of the period. But more importantly, as Joseph Sobran makes
plain in his book, Alias Shakespeare, the sonnets
are homoerotic. Stratfordians--believing their commoner
capable of penning intimacies to his social superiors--bristle
at the suggestion that Shakespeare was queer. Rumors of
Oxford's sexual tastes were rife, and there's evidence that
he had homosexual relationships. Oxford was also connected
with Southampton: No evidence exists of an association with
Shakespeare.
So why has Portland become an Oxfordian center? Perhaps
it's a logical extension of our unorthodox willingness to
debate and experiment with everything from urban planning
to the right to die. "The search for truth cannot be as
free in some communities," says Wright, who has found Portland
and Concordia congenial to inquiry. But much of the credit
is also due to Wright himself, who has helped establish
the conference and inspired the foundation of a new scholarly
journal, The Oxfordian. The conference provides a
forum for scholars and writers from all over the world to
share their ideas and discoveries that add to Oxfordian
studies, including new work on Oxford's musical and scientific
background. As with all true forums, there will be plenty
of debates and panel discussions. This week, Concordia offers
former bardolaters such as myself some answers to what might
lie in Stratford.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published April 7,
1999
|
