For the Bard, Slings and Arrows : British Earl Argues His Ancestor Really Wrote Shakespeare’s Works

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday (his 428th), but Charles Vere isn’t celebrating.

The 27-year-old Earl of Burford thinks a terrible injustice has been done in Shakespeare’s name.

For centuries, the young lord argued Tuesday at Santa Monica College, the greatest poems and plays ever written have been attributed to the wrong man. Vere believes that the real author of Shakespeare’s work was not the “Stratford man” but Vere’s illustrious ancestor, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

This year, Vere is taking his up-with-Oxford message on the road, visiting cities throughout the United States, building the circumstantial case that has made Oxford the leading challenger to Shakespeare among the vociferous minority who believe someone other than the Bard of Avon wrote the matchless canon.

Although the scholarly Establishment tends to regard the anti-Bardians as literary flat-earthers, the authorship question continues to fascinate. Atlantic magazine recently ran a cover package pairing the cases for Shakespeare and Oxford. And interest in the Oxford theory is only heightened by the fact that it would have required a conspiracy of silence at the highest levels of English society for Oxford to have pulled it off. In America, a good conspiracy theory never hurts.

Anti-Stratfordians, as they are properly called, have been around at least since 1857. In that year two books were published suggesting that Francis Bacon was the actual author of Shakespeare’s work. Mark Twain was a convert to the now discredited Baconian theory, and, in this century, celebrity anti-Stratfordians have included Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles.

Vere, who was in publishing before he became a full-time Oxfordian, says that one of the most compelling arguments in the case against the Bard of Avon is that both his parents and his children were illiterate. “There is no evidence he had a day’s education,” Vere says of the Stratford man, and yet the works of Shakespeare show sign after sign, not only of genius, but of erudition about everything from the Greek classics to botany.

The case for de Vere’s authorship was first made in 1920 in a book by J. Thomas Looney called “Shakespeare Identified.” The argument resurfaced in 1984 in Charlton Ogburn’s “The Mysterious William Shakespeare.”

Unlike the Bard of Avon, the Earl of Oxford was a man whose superb education has been documented. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth, at least on occasion, de Vere experienced firsthand court intrigues of the kind that appear over and over again in the Bard’s plays. Elizabeth’s court “was the greatest show on earth,” says Vere. And theatrical skills were constantly in use there. “No one in the court couldn’t act,” Vere says. “You had to pretend to be in love with the Queen, for a start.”

Vere argues that no nobleman of the period would have published work written for the public theater under his own name. To do so would have violated all the rules of his caste. The de Vere crest includes a lion shaking a spear, and some Oxfordians argue that de Vere began writing under that name even before he found a mediocre actor from Stratford with a similar name to front for him.

Vere, whose blond, aristocratic good looks would be nicely set off by a ruff, shrugs off the slings and arrows of critics who say the case for Oxford is elitist wishful thinking. In the Age of Elizabeth, only a nobleman would have had the leisure and the money to dedicate his life to writing, Vere says, citing “Virginia Woolf’s notion of 500 a year and a room of one’s own.”

Vere also argues that it would have been relatively easy for a nobleman to do the slumming (a la Prince Hal) that underpins Shakespeare’s low comedy, but that it would have been virtually impossible for a man of Shakespeare’s modest station to move up into court circles, whose motives and values seem to be reflected in so much of his work.

In Vere’s view, the orthodox position that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is populist wishful thinking. Most academics, especially in the United States, “identify with the Stratford man as someone who came up from nothing,” he says. “It is absolute nonsense that every genius is lower class.”

As Vere points out, non-aristocrats tend to be given short shrift by the Bard. “People have this dewy-eyed vision of Shakespeare as a man of the people,” says Vere. But characters such as Bottom and Malvolio suggest that Shakespeare’s sympathies were with his social superiors, not his peers. “If the Stratford man was the author, he was the most appalling snob of all time.”

Like other Oxfordians, Vere bolsters his case by pointing out parallels between de Vere’s life and specifics of the plays. De Vere traveled extensively in Italy, one of the Bard’s favorite locales. The man who wrote the plays had a visceral knowledge of Italian life that would have been hard to acquire secondhand, Vere says. “He evokes the evening air in Italy, with the moon and the scent of lemon blossom, better than any Italian writer. You just can’t fake that kind of thing.”

Vere is touring the United States under the aegis of the national Shakespeare Oxford Society. Locally, his weeklong visit, which includes a talk at the Huntington Library, is sponsored by the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable, a decade-old forum for debating the authorship question, based in Santa Monica.

According to founder and president Carol Sue Lipman, the roundtable has about 85 members who meet six times a year to consider all aspects of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theater. Members hold varying views on who wrote the plays, with Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe and a group of writers among the candidates. Some even think it was Shakespeare, which is fine with Lipman. “I have always been interested in exploring the question, not selling an answer.”

Being an Oxfordian is no bed of roses, a slightly jet-lagged Vere explains. “It’s not easy, let me tell you. You have to have more of the missionary about you than the lecturer.”

Vere says the fact that he has a title opens doors that are closed to less-well-born Oxfordians. And though he usually makes the Oxfordian case systematically and dispassionately, he is sometimes moved to pique by the mainstream’s persistent enthusiasm for that “glib, petit bourgeois grain merchant from Stratford.”

The same glib, petit bourgeois grain merchant who most people believe wrote like an angel and whose birthday is today.

The Case Against Shakespeare

For centuries, Charles Vere argues, the greatest poems and plays ever written have been attributed to the wrong man. Vere believes that the real author of Shakespeare’s work was not the “Stratford man” but Vere’s illustrious ancestor, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Among the points he makes: Both of William Shakespeare’s parents and his children were illiterate. “There is no evidence he had a day’s education,” Vere says of the Stratford man. Yet the works of Shakespeare show signs of not only of genius, but of erudition about everything from the Greek classics to botany. The Earl of Oxford was a man whose superb education has been documented, however.

Edward de Vere experienced firsthand intrigues in the court of Queen Elizabeth, the kind that appear over and over again in the Bard’s plays.

In the Age of Elizabeth, only a nobleman would have had the leisure and the money to dedicate his life to writing. Moreover, it would have been relatively easy for a nobleman to do the slumming that underpins Shakespeare’s low comedy, but it would have been virtually impossible for a man of Shakespeare’s modest station to move up into court circles.

The Earl of Oxford traveled extensively in Italy, one of the Bard’s favorite locales. The man who wrote the plays had a visceral knowledge of Italian life that would have been hard to acquire secondhand.