Seeking the Bard at Oxford

Did Shakespeare write “Hamlet” and the other plays? Or was it really Edward DeVere, earl of Oxford? Does it even matter? According to playwright Jerry Fey, six years ago it mattered so much to a woman that she offered a prize for a play proving that DeVere was the true Bard. So Fey wrote “Oxford’s Will.” Fey didn’t win, but he took a liking to the subject and worked on rewriting the play. Saturday at 8 p.m., it will be premiered at the Colony Studio Theatre.

Some scholars question whether Shakespeare actually wrote the works attributed to him, doubting that a grain merchant’s son who spelled his name five ways could write so eloquently about kings and the like. “How could this uneducated guy write these things?” Fey asked.

Fey based his play on a fictional scenario: That DeVere “gave Shakespeare the means to write the plays” by educating young Will in the ways of the rich and powerful. “Oxfordians will hate it,” Fey said with a chuckle. “Shakespeareans will hate it. It satisfies neither side.”

The case, as Fey presents it, citing actual facts, is that nine years before the first plays appeared in London, about 1592, William Shakespeare dropped from view, leaving no record of any activity, but some evidence of debt problems. So Fey speculated that Shakespeare went for protection to DeVere who was then banished from London society.

“Actually, he was in the Tower, but I put him at Hittingham,” Fey said, admitting that he was tinkering with history by placing DeVere on one of his estates.

The play is anything but a dry debate, however. “It’s quite a moving story about a relationship,” said the play’s director, Jules Aaron. “(Fey) has created an Elizabethan language and characters that we can believe in.”

After Saturday’s premiere, “Oxford’s Will” runs through June 26 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at 8 and Sundays at 3 p.m. The Colony Studio Theatre is at 1944 Riverside Drive, Silver Lake.