Jeremy Crick - Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

The Shakespeare Authorship Question
- an open letter

The following piece was written on 7 October 2005 following a couple of articles in The Times. The first was a piece by their Arts Correspondent, Dalya Alberge, about a 'new candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays'. This piece was followed closely by an op-ed piece two days later by Ben Macintyre. It's not often that the Authorship Question gets in the newspapers and I was keen to push the debate in the direction of Edward de Vere. Sadly, The Times not only didn't print my piece, they published nothing further about it at all.

An intersting piece (Oct 5) about Sir Henry Neville, the latest candidate to emerge in the long-running debate over the authorship of the ‘Shakespeare’ poems and plays. And an entirely predictable response from the Stratfordians. Really, Peter Ackroyd should be ashamed of himself - he claims to be an historian and yet says, “I don’t want to know the evidence”, before blithely stating that the man from Stratford, “went to a very good school and had a good education” when there is, in fact, no evidence at all that the Stratford Shakespeare ever went to school let alone university. Ackroyd should know, he’s written a biography of the man, but as this is no doubt filled with ‘may-haves’ ‘almost-certainlys’ ‘we-can-assumes’ and ‘in-all-probabilities’, no-one should be too surprised. Indeed, everything that we know for certain about the Stratford man, which is negligable, actually suggests that he was illiterate.

The usual suggestion that snobbery is at the heart of the rejection of the Stratford man, rehearsed once again in the quote from Jonathan Bate, and also where Ben Macintyre (Oct 7) says, “The identity issue originated in Victorian intellectual snobbery, the assumption that a man educated at a provincial grammar school [sic] could never have amassed Shakespeare’s learning”, is very far from the truth. The identity issue did arise in Victorian times when, with Literary Biography being a relatively new academic pursuit, Shakespearian scholars for the first time began to take an interest in the life of the Stratford man complimentary to their study of the texts of the great plays. And when they found absolutely not one scrap of evidence from the lifetime of the Stratford Shakespeare that identified him as an author or even as an actor, two things happened. The mainstream academics weren’t going to compromise their reputations by challenging the orthodox wisdom and so carried on propounding conjecture and guesswork as fact; while academics of greater integrity in a genuine search for the truth began to ask the question: well if Shakespeare didn’t write the stuff, then who did?

Ben Macintyre goes on: “...there is no direct evidence to suggest the authorship of anyone else.” Actually this is true of all contenders including Shakespeare - no-one has ever discovered any manuscripts or any literary correspondence that would prove the matter beyond doubt. Which is why the debate rages today.

I repeat that nothing about the known life of Shakespeare suggests that he was an author - indeed, his lack of a classical eduction (no Ovid, no Shakespeare - at its most basic), the fact that he never travelled to Italy (many of the plays display first hand knowledge of Italian cities and source material only available at the time in Italian), his complete ignorance of courtly life and privy council policy making which lie at the very epicentre of every one of the plays - all this and much more mark him out as completely unfit to be considered the author of the ‘Shakespearian’ canon.

When Ben Macintyre states: “To accept that Shakespeare was an impostor requires belief in a cover-up of inconceivable complexity”, it sounds like a winning argument. Yet this is precisely the situation we are faced with - the archive record has indeed been swept clean of ALL documents that must once have existed identifying the true author. The archive record has also been swept clean of all knowledge of the Stratford man during his so-called ‘lost years’ thereby ensuring that no direct evidence ever comes to light which might damn the Stratford claim.

Before the announcement of the Sir Henry Neville claim (which I shall devour with relish when the book comes out), there remained only one serious contender: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. With regard to the alleged ‘cover-up’, with Oxford as the author, the matter is not nearly of such ‘inconceivable complexity’ as Ben Macyntre suggests. Edward de Vere, heir to the noblest Earldom in England (automatically conferring the title Lord Great Chamberlain of England), was orphaned at the age of twelve and was brought up as a ward of court by William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Oxford also married Burghley’s daughter Anne. Between them, Burghley and his son Robert Cecil held all the principal levers of power during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Historians have established beyond doubt that Burghley filleted the archive record of Oxford his son-in-law in the matter of the latter’s disaterous marriage to Anne - all of Anne’s pleading letters to her estranged husband Oxford have survived yet none of Oxford’s replies (presumably giving his side of the story) have survived. If they had a mind to, the Cecils could easily have swept the archive record clean of Oxford’s literary papers.

Everything that does exist in the archive about Edward de Vere from his precocious talent as a classical scholar and poet, the fact that he maintained a company of actors, that he leased a theatre, our detailed knowledge about his European travels (especially his long stay in Italy), his lifelong patronage of writers, the fact that he was an intimate of the Queen and member of the privy council, to say nothing of the countless allusions to his known life found within the plays (could the Stratford man ever have had the knowledge or nerve to create the withering portrait of Burghley in the character Polonius?), when placed in the balance with the archive material relating to the Stratford man actually tilts the scales overwhelmingly in Oxford’s favour.

The oft cited dismissal of the Oxford claim because “eleven of Shakespeare’s plays appeared after” he died (Oct 5 - A Comedy of Confusion) is an entirely spurious argument that, if believed, would also condemn the Stratford man. Various editions of eighteen of the plays first appeared in print in quarto format (many anonymously) up to 1609. De Vere died in 1604 and Shakespeare died in 1616. The remaining nineteen plays only appeared in print in the First Folio printed in 1623.

And when Professor Rubinstein, co-author of the new Sir Henry Neville claim, states, “The coincidences of Neville’s dates and the chronology of the plays are so overwhelming they are compelling in themselves” I’m afraid he’s falling into the trap of accepting the Stratfordian chronology of the writing of the plays which has been forced to the point of absurdity to fit the known dates of the Stratford man’s life. This chronology has him arrive in London as a complete greenhorn around the age of twenty-four to begin his literary and acting apprenticeship and a mere six years later these Stratfordians are forced to admit that at least nine of the great plays including Hamlet and Lear had appeared.

Edward de Vere was fourteen years older than the Stratford man and would have had no problem at all in writing and having his own company of players performing the mature ‘Shakespeare’ plays in the years when they are known to have been performed.

Once again, I’m very much looking forward to reading this new claim on behalf of Sir Henry Neville - I can only hope that it also stimulates some interest in Edward de Vere.