21 March 2012

Book Review: 'Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?' by James Shapiro

One of the greatest challenges for a modern historian is to remove the filter of Romanticism and Victoriana when we look backwards through time. Modern society has inherited a lot of inaccurate notions about the pre-Industrial world from our more immediate forebears, creating an assumption that the medieval and early modern worlds shared the same values, the same culture, the same societal structures, the same goals as the Victorian world – an assumption that is, in many ways, far off the mark. To achieve greater understanding of anything early modern, a historian – professional or recreational – must first clear her eyes of the haze which the nineteenth century imposed on them.

Lifting this veil is, to my reading of it, the major triumph of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?. Both history and historiography, this book examines the case both for and against Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to his name – and comes down, quite definitively, on the side of Shakespeare. Shapiro notes, in the opening pages of the book, his interest, which lies "not in what people think – which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms – so much as why thy think it. No doubt my attitude derives from living in a world in which truth is too often seen as relative and in which mainstream media are committed to showing both sides of every story." Noting the prevalence of opposing viewpoints in modern society – such as those on creationism vs evolution, whether or not man walked on the moon, and "more disturbingly," those who deny the Holocaust deniers – Shapiro states, "I don't believe that truth is relative or that there are always two sides to every story. At the same time, I don't want to draw a naïve comparison between the Shakespeare controversy and any of these other issues. I think it's a mistake to do so, except insofar as it too turns on underlying assumptions and notions of evidence that cannot be reconciled. Yet unlike some of these other controversies, I think it's possible to get at why people have come to believe what they believe about Shakespeare's authorship, and it is partly in the hope of doing so that I have written this book."

Shapiro begins with the first attempts, in the eighteenth century, to expand knowledge of Shakespeare's life and works, with George Steevens and Edmund Malone arguing their various perspectives. This idea of construction, of needing to find reasons in Shakespeare's life for the events and viewpoints in his plays, led to a somewhat desperate search on the parts of Samuel Ireland and his son, William-Henry, for new evidence about Shakespeare's life. Unfortunately, these gentlemen came to the idea several decades too late; any evidence not already preserved was long gone. William-Henry, motivated in Shapiro's depiction as somewhat pathetically frantic to bolster his father's deflated confidence, embarked on an orgy of forgery, creating numerous documents in "Shakespeare's hand": deeds, letters, inscriptions, even entire plays. Briefly celebrated, then proved false under William-Henry's own confession of fraud, these documents nonetheless opened the door to the search for biography in Shakespeare's plays. Even Malone, who vigorously attacked the Irelands for the fraud, still entertained:
the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers, or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier a countess, and so on. By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn't support – his knowledge of falconry, for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands, or the ways that the ruling class behaved – should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.
Delia Bacon, c. 1853Shapiro also positions these early days of the search for authorship evidence in light of the early attribution studies for the Bible and the works of Homer; for the first time, literary monoliths were subject to question and interrogation. Shapiro then moves through the first seeds of the anti-Stratfordian argument to its full-blown manifestations in the propositions of first Francis Bacon and then Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as alternate candidates. The Baconian theory, for instance, began with Delia Bacon (no relation) in the mid-19th century. Shapiro explains how Delia's ideas about Francis Bacon connected to the notion of a grand conspiracy, focused on the polymath English courtier as the center of a radical proto-republican political movement. The evidence for these claims, she determined, was present in a close reading of the plays as biographical in nature. Shapiro demonstrates how the logic of such an association is inherently flawed, thanks to the limited scope both of Delia's historical awareness and of the plays which she examined:
The framework within which [Delia Bacon] imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers, and writers. The rest were written off as ignorant masses. […] It was history from the top down and limited geographically to London and the court. Her Shakespeare canon was no less restricted and also typical of nineteenth-century readers: at the center of it were Hamlet and The Tempest, and it extended to the plays meatiest in philosophical and political content – Othello, Julius Caesar, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Richard the Second, and, unusually, Coriolanus – but not much further. While she had surely read the other thirty or so plays, as well as the poetry, they didn't serve her purpose, and for the most part she passed over them in silence.
Delia Bacon published, to moderate success, though most people who supported her initially came to regret it, because of the mental instability she developed following a very public jilting. Shortly after the release of her book, she was institutionalized, and spent the last two years of her life in an asylum. Despite this tragic end, her ideas caught fire in the decades following her death, earning the attention, if not always the outright endorsement, of celebrities including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Henry James. Delia Bacon also introduced the notion of a secret cipher embedded in the texts of the plays, an idea picked up and popularized by Ignatius Donnelley – and an idea risible under even the lightest scrutiny for several reasons, not least of which is that a tweak of the cipher could yield any result the seeker wanted, but also because, as Shapiro points out, "Donnelly didn't have a clue about how compositors worked in Elizabethan printing houses, where such a scheme would have been unimaginable and the layout he describes impossible to reproduce."

By the 1920s, however, Shapiro points out that "Philosophy and politics were out, Oedipal desires and mourning for dead fathers in," giving rise to the new Oxfordian theory. Psychoanalysis imagined a link between the writer of Hamlet and the character of Hamlet, based on repressed sexual urges and dysfunctional family relationships. Sigmund Freud questioned Shakespeare's identity but did not embrace Bacon as the alternative; John Thomas Looney (pronounced "loany", despite temptations to the contrary) picked up the psychoanalytic thread and proposed Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare's life did not mirror the required narrative; the Earl of Oxford's could, especially if you layered on other theories about de Vere being Queen Elizabeth's lover and/or son. From a secret political group under Bacon's direction, the anti-Shakespearean case now rested on a more lurid narrative: a conspiracy tinged with sexual misconduct, succession anxiety, and disrupted inheritance.

For decades, the Oxfordians plagued themselves with divisive conclusions about this reading, however: nobody knew about the conspiracy; everyone knew and didn't think it worth mentioning; everyone knew but was kept silent by Queen Elizabeth's totalitarian state; a select group knew and kept it quiet to protect the Queen; and so on. Never mind that Oxford died in 1604, before many of Shakespeare's plays were written; in the scope of such an all-encompassing conspiracy, Oxfordians find that small matter to explain away. They were written earlier, and released after his death, as a way of perpetuating the myth of William Shakespeare as the front man. Shapiro details how, in more recent years, the Oxfordian theory has gained traction due to the public's increasing fascination with conspiracy theories of all sorts. From moon landings to who shot JFK to the vast circulation of conceptions about secret government involvement in nearly every act of tragedy or terrorism of the past three decades, modern culture has propagated a pervasive suspicion of authority. "In such a climate," Shapiro says, "a minor act of conspiratorial suppression on the part of Tudor authorities made perfect sense."

Overall, the impression this book leaves a reader with is that the anti-Shakespearean case is one stuffed with tragic figures and ulterior motives. Its very earliest characters are among the saddest: poor William-Henry Ireland, desperately seeking a father's approval, and jilted Delia Bacon, who clung to her theories as a way of reclaiming agency over her life, but with a paranoid mania that drove her to madness and death. These are the figures often left out of the Baconian and Oxfordian narratives; they prefer, naturally, to tout the support of such grand figures as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. As Shapiro demonstrates, however, the rationale of the great figures is not untainted, either. They all require vast constructs, additions and suppositions to the historical record. Freud's support of the Oxfordian case is deeply tied to his own theories about Oedipal desire; he had to read Hamlet in terms of Oxford's own familial-sexual-philosophical entanglements, because to suppose that the story came from any other origin was a strike against the psychological theories on which he made his living and his fame.

Mark Twain's book questioning Shakespeare's identityIt's Twain's rationale, and Shapiro's dissection thereof, that I find most interesting and most telling. Twain echoes Malone in supposing it impossible for a writer to draw from anything but experience; "For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life – rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined – was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked." It is, in many ways, a very strange idea, taking imagination so entirely out of the equation, but it was a product of its time; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, more and more writers were publishing memoirs, and biography was a popular genre. The close association between fiction and experience was deeply embedded in the culture, providing fertile ground in which the anti-Shakespearean attitudes could take root. This is one of the more difficult veils to penetrate when looking back at the early modern period through modern eyes – the idea that the early modern writers simply did not view their craft in the same way that the Victorian tradition has convinced us all writers must.

Shapiro asserts that this legacy lives on in writing today, that modern readers retain assumptions that "novels necessarily reveal something about a writer's life." I would argue that this is more true in so-called "literary" fiction than it is of genre fiction. Readers of science fiction and fantasy novels (or viewers of those movies) -- and to an extent, of mysteries, thrillers, and romances as well -- have no more expectation of a creator's personal experience with the subject matter than Shakespeare's original audiences had. We need no more assume that Shakespeare had first-hand knowledge of Italy than that George Lucas had of Tatooine, J. R. R. Tolkien of Middle-Earth, or J. K. Rowling of Hogwarts. While "serious" fiction often retains a more autobiographical bent, I think it is in genre fiction that writers operate more like Shakespeare did: indulging freely in the realm of imagination, drawing off of previous stories, history and mythology, and timeless tropes for their inspiration. There you find writers more interested in telling a good story than in talking about themselves – which is not to say that glimpses of a writer's viewpoint won't peep through from time to time, but they don't dominate in the way that post-Romantic assumptions would indicate. (It is in many ways ironic that the very people who disdain the use of imagination in writing are so wonderfully and copiously imaginative themselves, at least when it comes to creating the fantasy narratives necessarily to support alternate authorship candidates).

The final chapter of the book is a tour de force in defense of Shakespeare – though Shapiro acknowledges the absurdity that Shakespeareans should even be on the defensive, that the burden of proof has somehow shifted to us to prove there is no conspiracy, rather than on the Oxfordians to prove that there is. After entertaining the anti-Stratfordians and exposing their flaws, Shapiro comes down unquestionably (and refreshingly unapologetically) on the side of Shakespeare of Stratford:
When asked how I can be so confident that Shakespeare was [the plays'] author, I point to several kinds of evidence. The first is what early printed texts reveal; the second, what writers who knew Shakespeare said about him. Either of these, to my mind, suffices to confirm his authorship – and the stories they tell corroborate each other. All this is reinforced by additional evidence from the closing years of his career, when he began writing for a new kind of playhouse, in a different style, in active collaboration with other writers.
Shapiro then defends Shakespeare with a barrage of real, concrete evidence – text-based evidence including examples of speech prefixes, the process of printing plays, the relationship of typesetting to the variant spellings of Shakespeare's name, his demonstrated familiarity with actors, and so forth. The proof of such deep association with the playing companies, the theatre building, and the workings of the shareholders effectively eradicates any validity to the presumption that the plays could have been written by someone who did not inhabit that world.

Shapiro also engages with the testimonies of so many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, identifying the man from Stratford as the man who wrote the plays: George Buc, Master of the Revels; Robert Greene, vitriolic pamphleteer; Francis Meers, whose Palladis Tamia lists all of Shakespeare's plays which had been acted by 1598; Gabriel Harvey, poetry critic; William Camden, historian; playwrights John Webster, Francis Beaumont, and Thomas Heywood -- the list goes on and on, but the trump card is fellow playwright, rival, and friend, Ben Jonson, who "left the most personal and extensive tributes to Shakespeare. For many, his testimony alone resolves any doubts about Shakespeare's authorship of the plays." Consider me one of them. Even if we did not have the voluminous other evidence that we do have, Jonson alone would convince me. He comments both so prolifically and so personally on Shakespeare's writing that I find it a violation of Occam's Razor to imagine that he was either ignorant or part of a vast conspiracy – and knowing what I know about Jonson, I really can't believe he could have kept a secret of that magnitude. From Ben Jonson's epitaph to Shakespeare, in the preface of the 1623 First Folio

Finally, Shapiro draws a connection between Shakespeare's plays and the playing spaces he wrote for, discussing how the space affected what kind of story Shakespeare could tell and how he could tell it, particularly thanks to a distinct change towards the end of his career:
We have also had drummed into us that he was Shakespeare of the Globe – though that playhouse was built only in the closing years of Elizabeth's reign. Long forgotten are the other playing spaces in and around London in which he had built his reputation over the previous decade: the Theatre, the Curtain, Newington Butts, the Rose, Richmond, Whitehall, perhaps a brief stint at the Swan. … But had you asked anyone on the streets of London in the winter of 1610 where you could go to see Shakespeare's latest play, there would have been only one answer: 'Blackfriars.' The Blackfriars Theatre means little today to most admirers of Shakespeare; so far as I know, only a single replica of it has ever been erected, in rural Virginia, which attracts both spectators and scholars. The story of the Blackfriars Theatre is also the story of the Jacobean Shakespeare, and of the particular challenges he faced toward the end of his playwriting career. And that, in turn, helps explain why only Shakespeare could have written his late plays that were staged there.
Shapiro's recognition is apt and accurate, and that close relationship between writer and playing space is one we frequently refer to in our educational materials and workshops. A different kind of theatre demanded a different kind of plays, and Shakespeare's latest works reflect that shift, making a reconstruction of the plays' timeline to fit a 1604 death date absurd. I hope this spatial connection becomes a stronger part of the narrative of the "controversy" – perhaps it will help the Blackfriars Theatre and its descendent, our Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, earn greater recognition as one of Shakespeare's prominent theatrical homes.

The final chapter of Contested Will ought to hammer home, once and for all, that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, setting the matter entirely to rest. Except, as Shapiro ably points out, there is no arguing with a conspiracy theorist. Any evidence just gets twisted to support the idea of a vast cover-up. Nonetheless, Shapiro's book is a veritable armory of weapons, both offensive and defensive, for the Shakespearean set. What's more, he delivers all of his information with felicity and wit; the book is a wonderful read as well as an intellectual triumph. I highly recommend it to anyone with a dog in this fight, as it were, but also to anyone who is simply interested in writing and in how ideas about it have evolved over time. Shapiro provides us not only with a rousing defense of Shakespeare, but also a valuable peek through the veils of time, rolling back our assumptions and laying bare the reality, insofar as it is knowable.

If you're interested in further thoughts on this topic, please join the ASC on March 31st at 10:30am at the Blackfriars Playhouse. Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen will be delivering a lecture featuring his own dissection of the authorship matter, entitled "Knock, Knock: Who Wrote Shakespeare?"

14 comments:

  1. Thanks for an engaging description of Shapiro's thought and writing. He will lecture at the University of Texas at Austin tomorrow night, March 22. I've featured the opening paragraphs of Ms. Morris' essay on the front page of www.AustinLiveTheatre.com with a link to the full text at the ASC blog. Best regards -- Michael Meigs

    Direct page link:http://tinyurl.com/ALTRCW

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    1. That's fantastic! Glad you enjoyed the review, and wish I could be there for the lecture. Thanks for the linkage.

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  2. Shapiro's book is little more than an ad hominem attack on some of the greatest writers and thinkers in history because they hold a view contrary to his.

    Rather than deal with the evidence, Shapiro decides to apply psychology. Since the writers and philosophers he denigrates have a position other than that of the academic establishment and The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, there obviously must be something wrong with them.

    On the contrary, the weight of the evidence strongly supports the authorship of Edward de Vere.

    Concluding that a man who had little or no education, whose children were illiterate, who never left any writing other than six unreadable signatures with his name spelled differently in each one, who never traveled outside of London, who spent much time and effort engaging in petty lawsuits, who could not read books in French, Italian, or Spanish yet used untranslated material as his source material, who never left any books in his will, who left no letters, no correspondence, who did not elicit a single eulogy at his death was the greatest writer in the English language is not about imagination. It is about one word and that word is: FANTASY

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    1. Thanks for your input, Howard. We appreciate you taking the time to comment. Because of details about the plays, the period, printing processes, and early modern theatrical culture that the scholars and staff at the ASC have studied, we strongly affirm Shakespeare as the author of the plays attributed to him. Shakespeare was in no way incapable of writing these plays; entirely to the contrary, no one *but* Shakespeare (a man of the theatre, known to his peers and colleagues) could have written them.

      Shapiro's book does not include ad hominem attacks, in fact, he goes out of his way not to denigrate the people who hold anti-Stratfordian views on any matters of character; he simply states the facts, as history shows them to be.

      If you would like a succinct summary of the proof for William Shakespeare, which very much exists in the historical record, I recommend Paul Edmonton and Stanley Wells's 'Shakespeare Bites Back': http://bloggingshakespeare.com/shakespeare-bites-back-free-book. This free PDF demonstrates what scholars absolutely know about the period. Perhaps it will help to clear up some misinformation and logical fallacies.

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  3. I find your tone to be arrogant and condescending and I do not need to read any more from the academic establishment who are interested in protecting their reputations and indeed their careers by maintaining adherence to the status quo and refusing to deal with the evidence for Edward de Vere.

    There is no historical record that proves William of Stratford was the author. If there was, there would be no authorship debate. I have been studying this issue for fifteen years and there is no doubt in my mind that the weight of the evidence points to Edward de Vere as the true Shakespeare.

    The fact that some works were published under the attribute of William Shakespeare does not identify the man behind the name. There is nothing in his handwriting ever discovered except for six almost illegible signatures. There are no letters, no correspondence, no manuscripts, no paper trail at all to identify the man behind the name, not a single word. Nobody claims to having ever met the man. When contemporaries refer to William Shakespeare, they are referring to the name on the title page and nothing else.

    The Sonnets are written by a man who is clearly much older than William of Stratford. Conventional chronology dates the sonnets to between 1592 and 1596. At this time, William of Stratford would have been in his late twenties and early thirties (Oxford was 14 years older). Even if we up the date to 1599, William of Stratford was still in his thirties.

    The sonnets tell us that the poet was in his declining years when writing them. He was "Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity," "With Time's injurious hand crushed and o'er worn", in the "twilight of life". He is lamenting "all those friends" who have died, "my lovers gone". His is "That time of year/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs that shake against the cold."

    The sonnets that most contradict Will of Stratford's life story are those about shame and disgrace to name and reputation. Here Shakespeare's biographers have nothing to go on. There are many arguments against the Stratfordian attribution and there is not enough space provided to discuss ¼ of them. Here are a few:

    Many books that were used as source material for the plays were not translated into English in Shakespeare’s time. For example:

    Francois de Belleforest Histories tragiques
    Ser Giovanni Fioranetino’s Il Pecorone
    Epitia and Hecatommithi
    Luigi da Porto’s Romeus and Juliet (Italian)
    Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (Spanish)

    Shakespeare's reliance on books in foreign languages puzzles the experts, so we can suppose all sorts of things rather than conclude the obvious. If the man who was Shakespeare regularly relied on books not yet translated from Italian, French, and Spanish, then he must have been able to read in Italian, French, and Spanish. We know specifically that Oxford was fluent in four foreign languages, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French.

    The assumption behind the support for William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author has to be that he was no ordinary mortal because otherwise there is no accounting for the detailed knowledge of the law, foreign languages, Italy, the court and aristocratic society, and sports such as falconry, tennis, jousting, fencing, and coursing that appears in the plays. I do not have any doubt that genius can spring from the most unlikely of circumstances. The only problem here is that there is in this case no evidence to support it. Would the greatest writer in the English language have allowed his daughters to remain illiterate?

    For a complete rebuttal to the views of Mr. Stanley Wells and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, I invite you to read the following point by point response to the SBT's 60 Minutes broadcast.

    file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Howard/My%20Documents/Howard/Shakespeare%20Authorship/sbt_rebuttal.pdf

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    1. We invite you to attend Ralph Cohen's lecture, "Knock, Knock: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" on March 31st, at the Blackfriars Playhouse, if you would like to hear his thoughts on the matter and his refutation of anti-Stratfordian assertions. Everything in Dr. Cohen's lecture is grounded in the facts of the historical record. Thank you for your interest in this subject matter.

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    2. Dear Howard,
      Your document will not open.

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    3. This link works for me when I enter it into my browser: Try this one.

      file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Howard/My%20Documents/Howard/Shakespeare%20Authorship/sbt_rebuttal.pdf

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    4. Sarahe, if none of the links I've sent open, send me an e-mail to hschumann@shaw.ca and I will attach it as a .pdf file.

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  4. Don't patronize me by thanking me "for my interest in this subject matter."

    Your reply, typical of the majority of Stratfordians, avoids dealing with any of the issues. Pointing to some pro-Stratfordian publication or lecture and some non-existent "facts of the historical record" is simply an evasion.

    Name one person who, during the lifetime of William of Stratford, claimed that he was a writer. Name one person who, during he lifetime of William of Stratford, claimed to have met the man.

    Don't worry, I have heard all the so-called facts and, after any kind of examination, they turn out to be supposition and speculation. On the other hand, how many books have you read on the life of Edward de Vere and the case for his authorship? Did you read the point-by-point responses in the link I sent? I can guess the answer.

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    2. Dear Howard,

      I hope you will forgive my interjection in this discussion, just a few thoughts.

      1. Tone is a difficult thing to pick up on online. Where you see arrogance and condescension, I see respect and a statement of belief. Where you see patronizing, I see an invitation. I hesitate to believe that you would speak to anyone in person as you have spoken in this forum.

      2. It is unfortunate that you have "studied" for "fifteen years" "this issue" when there are so many wonderful texts and poems to consider completely apart from the controversy. Can one see their beauty when one is hunting for evidence of a person (or lack of evidence for another person) in them?

      3. When we, as researchers, consider evidence, we do not have the luxury of placing an order, per se, but must take what we are able to find. Thus, I can not, nor can Cass, nor Professor Shapiro, conjure a contact citing a meeting with Shakespeare. Meetings and other human actions, such as reading, are often invisible to history. You accuse the Stratfordian movement, in this case Professor Shapiro and Cass, of making supposition and speculating. What, then, is your sonnet argument but supposition and speculation? Someone is too young to imagine being older? Someone is not feeling older by comparison to a subject about whom he is writing? Speaking as someone in my 30s, I can say that I look around me all the time and feel great capacity to bemoan my age and decrepit state compared to those I see. Why is what you say fact, when others are speculating?

      4. What have you read that the Stratfordians claim? What with an open mind? Why should Cass honor your request when you do not do the same? Perhaps a conversation, instead of accusation and tone insinuation would go further to create discussion.

      In general, I find commenting on blogs to be useless, because people will misread tone and not see what they want to see. Perhaps this exchange will prove me wrong.

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    3. Yes, tone is a hard thing to pick up unless you do. When someone offers me a book by a Stratfordian academic as one that will “clear up any misinformation or logical fallacies,” I take that as being condescending, not giving me any credit for knowing anything about the subject.

      I didn’t say this was the only subject I studied for fifteen years. I have read or seen 36 out of 37 of Shakespeare’s plays plus 154 sonnets. In addition to Shakespeare, I read four books a month, some fiction and non-fiction and have done so for 40 years so, with all due respect, please don’t tell me how “unfortunate” it is that I spend so much time on this issue.

      I spend time on this issue for only one reason, because I have a passion for the truth and the orthodox Shakespeare theory does not provide it.

      I have read pro-Stratford books by Ian Wilson, Bill Bryson, and James Shapiro as well as listening to talks and reading articles by Stanley Wells and numerous other Stratfordian spokespersons and viewing the Kathman-Ross website. I am very familiar with the Stratfordian arguments.

      On the other side, I have read:
      The Shakespeare Guide to Italy by Richard Roe
      Shakespeare’s Unauthorized Biography by Diana Price – both non-Oxfordian

      And the following pro-Oxford books:

      The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn
      Shakespeare by Another Name by Mark Anderson
      Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom by Charles Beauclerk
      Oxford, Son of Queen Elizabeth by Paul Streitz
      Alias Shakespeare by Joseph Sobran
      Shakespeare Suppressed by Kathleen Chiljan
      Shakespeare and the Tudor Rose by Elisabeth Sears
      De Vere as Shakespeare by William Farina

      In addition to many websites including:

      www.politicworm.com
      http://shake-speares-bible.com/bible-faq/
      http://hankwhittemore.wordpress.com/

      and many others.

      You can interpret the Sonnets as a literary exercise if you choose. To me it boggles the mind to think that anyone can see these poems of searing passion and pain, all written in the first person from an aristocratic point of view, as a literary exercise. I would sooner believe that the Psalms of David was a literary exercise.

      Do you think someone writing as an exercise would write 17 personal love poems addressed to a man urging him to marry? Most scholars agree that the “fair youth” of the sonnets was the Earl of Southampton. At the time most scholars agree that the poems were written 1590-92, William Cecil was urging Southampton to marry Elizabeth Vere, daughter of Edward de Vere. No commoner could have gotten away with urging a member of the nobility to marry anyone.

      The only reason Stratfordians claim that the works of Shakespeare are a literary exercise is because, unlike Oxofrd, William of Stratford has no biographical connection to the plays. If even one was found, you can bet that it would be shouted to the high heavens as “proof.”

      I could go on and on for pages, but this is obviously not the proper venue. I think if you read some of the books I mentioned above, the Oxfordian evidence will become clearer (though you may still disagree).

      Of course, all the evidence is circumstantial. There is no smoking gun, no direct evidence on either side. That is why there is a debate. To me, it the preponderance of the evidence as a whole is strong that the author is Edward de Vere.

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