24. The dedication page
from the 1609
edition of Shake-speares
Sonnets.
“Ever-living poet”
means dead in
1609. (See, for
example, 1 Henry
VI IV.iii.51.)
25. The 46th Psalm
in the King
James version of
the Bible (1611).
29. To be, or not to be; that is the question.
[Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.]
Tobeo rnott obeth atist heque stion
B e s u r e
aaaab aabaa baaab baabb baaaa aabaa
Tobeo rnott obeth atist heque stion
To be, or not to be; that is the question.
30. William Stanley,
6th Earl of Derby
(1561?-1642) was
“penning comedies
for the common
players” in 1599.
37. Edward de Vere,
17th Earl of Oxford
(April 12, 1550 -
June 24, 1604).
38. "And in her Majesty's time
that now is are sprung up
another crew of Courtly
makers [poets], noblemen
and gentlemen of her
Majesty's own servants,
who have written
excellently well as it would
appear if their doings could
be found out and made
public with the rest, of
which number is first that
noble gentleman, Edward
earl of Oxford" (1589).
44. A Midsummer Night's Dream
"I have had a most rare vision. I
have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.
Man is but an ass, if he go about
t' expound this dream. Methought
I was -- there is no man can tell
what. Methought I was, and
methought I had -- but
man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say what methought I
had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart
to report, what my dream was ... and I will sing it in the latter end of
a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious,
I shall sing it at her death" (IV.i.204-219).
45. In 1586, the notably tight-fisted
Queen Elizabeth
granted de Vere an annuity
of 1000 pounds with no
accounting to be required by
the exchequer.
The sum of 1000 pounds
occurs roughly 18 times as
the most oft-cited sum in the
plays of Shakespeare.
46. William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby
(1561?-1642), who was
“penning comedies for the
common players” in 1599.
47. “The Incomparable Paire” --William
Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-
1630) and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl
of Montgomery and subsequently 4th Earl
of Pembroke (1584-1650).
The First Folio of 1623 is dedicated to them.
William was a contender for the hand of de
Vere’s daughter Bridget. Philip was de Vere’s
son-in-law, married to his third daughter
Susan. They have no known connection to
Will Shakspere of Stratford.
48. De Vere died June 24, 1604, sometimes
incorrectly reported as of the plague. The
same day saw a panic in the court of
James I, and Southampton and others were
called in for questioning.
49.
50. This Geneva Bible housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library belonged to Edward de
Vere, as the heraldic symbols affixed in silver on the cover show. The Court of Wards
purchased this bible for him in 1570. The hundreds of marked verses and underlinings
correspond to Shakespeare’s use of the Bible.
51.
52. It's not Shakspere:
Mark Twain
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walt Whitman
Charles Dickens
Henry James
Charles Chaplin
Malcolm X
Mark Rylance
It's Oxford:
Sigmund Freud
Leslie Howard
Orson Welles
Sir John Gielgud
Sir Michael York
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell
Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun
Sir Derek Jacobi
Jeremy Irons
Kristen Linklater
The only surviving handwriting of Shakspere: the six signatures: three on legal documents 1612-1613, three from the will, 25 March 1616. None are spelled Shakespeare. The shakiness of the latter ones are sometimes justified by speculation that Will was terminally ill or had suffered a stroke. Infirmity doesn’t account for the first three. None look like the writing of a literate person. How could Hamlet be deciphered if written in this hand?
William Shakspere’s father, John Shakspere of Stratford (d. 1601), signed his name with an X, as did Shakspere’s daughter and grandchild. Literacy was not highly valued in the Shakspere households.
Dugdale.
The monument in Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon of William Shakspere was sketched in 1656. This image was used for early editions of the works of Shakespeare well into the 1700s.
The Stratford monument, “repaired and beautified” in the mid-1700s.
The Martin Droeshout title-page engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio (1623),
twice altered during printing. Droeshout was 15 years old when Shakspere died in 1616.
Ben Jonson.
Michaael Drayton.
Drayton Poems.
John Florio.
George Chapman.
John Weever.
First Folio page.
Ben Jonson on the facing page (Michell 79)
First Folio page.
Eye.
• The portrait is oddly unembellished for the usually ornate style of Renaissance-era engraving in a work of the caliber of the First Folio.
• The head seems disengaged from the body.
• The right front of the doublet is actually the left back.
• The face may have two right eyes.
• A line from the bottom of the left ear and under the chin corresponds to no anatomical line and suggests a mask.
Whatever. Later portraits all appear to be based on the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford monument.
Yet we have Shakespeare: the writer who knew everything. Experts in these fields insist Shakespeare knows them, first-hand and well. No school records exist to show that William Shakspere attended even grammar-school in Stratford.
A 19th-century idyllic notion (Westall’s Dreams of the Youthful Shakespeare, 1827) of the boy Shakespeare, lolling about in Stratford instead of contributing to the gross national product. Peachy. But likely?
School.
Tavern.
Thomas Thorpe’s dedication to W.H. from the 1609 edition of Shake-speare’s Sonnets. W.H. = Henry Wriothesley, backwards? or William Hall, procurer of manuscripts (W.H. / All). Hall could have gotten the sonnets from de Vere’s widow at Hackney, where he also got the Jesuit Southwell’s MS after his execution. “Ever-living poet” means dead in 1609 (cp. 1 Henry VI, iv.3).
The 46th Psalm in the King James version of the Bible (1611): the 46th word is “shake” and the 46th from the end is “spear.” 1611 was Shakspere’s 46th birthday. A committee of the most learned scholars of the kingdom were involved, probably including Sir Francis Bacon.
Stratford
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was proposed as a candidate for the real Shakespeare from the 18th century on, since he had the education: law, the classics, etc. He was a brilliant philosopher and essayist. And he liked boys. But there’s no evidence he was a poet.
The Baconian theory became encrusted with acrostics, ciphers, anagrams, buried manuscripts, and excavations by moonlight. Here is Francis Bacon’s big secret code: the Bi-lateral Cipher revealed in 1623 (to coincide with the First Folio?). A and B designate the two different fonts. The problem is that if the fonts are obvious, they’re obvious and it’s not a secret code; if they’re not obvious, then who’s to say what’s what?
Code.
William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby (1561?-1642). Had an interest in the theater and was patron to his own company of players. He was “penning comedies for the common players” in 1599, unless that’s a code phrase from the spy document it comes from. Aside from the W.S. initials, though, and a lot of biographical material in line with circumstances in The Tempest, he’s not a strong candidate.
This may be Christopher Marlowe (1564-April 1593). The portrait was discovered out back at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge -- the right school and dated from the right time. Marlowe, a government agent, died at the hands of other very sleazy government agents in an incident publicized as a tavern brawl over the bill. It’s not impossible that the death was staged. He would have been smuggled to France and Italy. This theory was the brainchild of a Broadway press agent.
Word-length analysis by Mendenhall the physicist in 1901 suggests the identity of Marlowe as the author of Shakespeare’s works.
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) included among the candidates. Computer matching shows ostensible similarities between her portrait and the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare. But shouldn’t she have been too busy?
Overlay.
The suspects are many, including groups of authors as responsible for the works, all putting out the plays under the pseudonym.
J. Thomas Looney
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (April 12, 1550 - June 24, 1604), is the strongest candidate since J. Thomas Looney ferreted his biography out in 1920. Looney made a list of attributes the author ought to have, based on the works, and found a match in de Vere.
Oxford.
The “lost” works of Edward de Vere.
The handwriting of Edward de Vere is legible. He was tutored by Arthur Golding, the first translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English (unless a young de Vere did it himself, since Golding preferred sermons). Another uncle was Henry Howard (Surrey), one of the two who introduced the sonnet form into English -- a form that now bears Shakespeare’s name. De Vere received degrees at Cambridge (1564) and Oxford (1566), and studied law at Gray’s Inn, known for its amateur theatricals.
Edward de Vere, the Welbeck portrait, a copy of an original probably from March 1575, painted in France. De Vere travelled in Italy in his twenties -- to the places serving as settings in the Shakespeare plays -- and was influenced greatly by the culture there.
A 16th-century portrait of Anne Vavasor, one of Elizabeth’s maids of honor. De Vere had an intense affair with her -- she may be the Dark Lady of the sonnets. When she gave birth to a son (Edward Vere, 23 March 1581), both Anne and Edward were imprisoned in the Tower by order of the Queen. A relative of Anne was responsible for street brawls with de Vere and his men, similar to the Capulet/Montague imbroglio. De Vere seems to have been wounded severly in the leg in one of these and the sonnets speak of the poet’s lameness (Sonnets 37, 66, 89).
The Earl of Oxford bearing the sword of state as Lord Great Chamberlain in front of Queen Elizabeth in 1572 (Michell 173).
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In 1586, the notably tight Queen
Elizabeth granted de Vere an annuity of 1000 pounds with no accounting to be required by the exchequer. Such extravagance isunmatched and unexplained.
King James continued the annuity, but did not do so for de Vere’s widow after the Earl’s death. The sum of 1000 pounds occurs roughly 18 times as the most oft-cited sum in the plays of Shakespeare.
William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby (1561?-1642), who was “penning comedies for the
common players” in 1599. Alone, he’s not a very strong candidate,but what if he was collaborating with his father-in-law, Edward de Vere?
“The Incomparable Paire” --William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630) and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery and subsequently 4th Earl of Pembroke (1584-1650).
The First Folio of 1623 is dedicated to them. William was a contender for the hand of de Vere’s daughter Bridget. Philip was de Vere’s son-in-law, married to his third daughter Susan. They have no known connection to Will Shakspere of Stratford.
De Vere died in June of 1604, sometimes incorrectly reported as of the plague. The same day saw a panic in the court of James I, and Southampton and others were called in for questioning. Was there a will that could have proved dangerous?
Thomas Thorpe’s dedication to W.H. from the 1609 edition of Shake-speare’s Sonnets. W.H. = Henry Wriothesley, backwards? or William Hall, procurer of manuscripts (W.H. / All). Hall could have gotten the sonnets from de Vere’s widow at Hackney, where he also got the Jesuit Southwell’s MS after his execution. “Ever-living poet” means dead in 1609 (cp. 1 Henry VI, iv.3).
This Geneva Bible housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library belonged to Edward de Vere, as the heraldic symbols affixed in silver on the cover show. The Court of Wards purchased this bible for him in 1570. The hundreds of marked verses and underlinings correspond to Shakespeare’s use of the Bible.
(Michell 186)
Doubters and Oxfordians.
A 19th-century idyllic notion (Westall’s Dreams of the Youthful Shakespeare, 1827) of the boy Shakespeare, lolling about in Stratford instead of contributing to the gross national product. Peachy. But likely?
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). Portrait by M. Gheeraedts.
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). Portrait by M. Gheeraedts.
