The Bard's Beard?

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Nowadays nothing succeeds like Shakespeare. I acknowledge borrowing from Dumas for that phrase, just to keep out of trouble. You see, the trouble with Shakespeare--and success--is that everyone wants a cut, kind and unkind. Not only is Hollywood ransacking the bard's works for the play that might be the next big thing, but the question has arisen of who really wrote Shakespeare in Love. The London press pointed out last week that the screenplay of that very palpable hit has remarkable similarities to the plot of No Bed for Bacon, a 1941 novel by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon. A spokesman for Miramax, the film's distributor, could only respond, "Nothing is truly original. Shakespeare borrowed and adapted plots himself." To borrow (a bad habit) from T.S. Eliot, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"But those plays aren't really Shakespeare's!" That is the rebel yell of a hardy band of amateur historians as they catch the wave of the bard's new vogue to resplash their thesis: Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare; Edward de Vere did. What's more, an ivory-tower conspiracy is keeping their views from being taken seriously. "We're into something called bardgate," says Peter Dickson, a CIA official turned revisionist Elizabethan scholar. Shakespeare is not a crook, reply the defenders of the glover's son from Warwickshire. And each side casts the other as devils citing Hamlet to their own purposes.

But what if we've actually been tracking the wrong Englishman? What if the real Shakespeare had led another life, one tingling with clear parallels to his sonnets and plays? (See chart.) What if he were really a nobleman, an earl who could trace his roots to a time before William the Conqueror? And what if, unlike the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, we had an undeniable record of his education--a degree from Oxford University and a solid grounding in the law that would explain the plenitude of Tudor legalese in the plays? Again, unlike the Stratford man, this nobleman would have once resided in Venice, the site of several plays. An able soldier, our earl would also be the nephew of a pioneer in the form of sonnet we now call Shakespearean; another uncle translated Ovid's Metamorphoses, the source of much Shakespearean allusion. He would be hailed as poet and playwright and become patron of an acting troupe. Finally, what if our nobleman had on his crest a lion that holds out a paw and, ah yes, shakes a spear?

That is some of the circumstantial but rather sexy evidence surrounding Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, in a contention that began in 1920 and has gathered steam through the '80s and '90s. De Vere led a life that was a veritable mirror of Shakespeare's art. Why then did he not write under his own name? It would have been unseemly, his advocates point out, for a courtier to attach his name to public wares. And De Vere was a truly uncommon nobleman: he was the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain and a sometime favorite of Elizabeth I's.

Not that he didn't leave clues. De Vere's copy of the Geneva Bible has been discovered in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and to the delight of advocates, words are underlined that reappear in the masterpieces. For example, the declaration "I am that I am" from Exodus 3: 14 is found not only in a letter De Vere wrote to his father-in-law in 1584 but also in "Sonnet 121." In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a Falstaff speech refers to a "weaver's beam," two words highlighted in the Bible (II Samuel 21: 19). Oxfordians can cite scores of other examples linking De Vere's Bible to Shakespeare's texts.

In his 1997 book, Alias Shakespeare, Joseph Sobran posits another reason for De Vere's alleged secrecy. The sonnets, he says, may have started as a playful artifice in courting the Earl of Southampton to marry De Vere's daughter, but they evolved into a dense homoeroticism. All the more reason to keep his authorship secret. (In this context there is a telling silence in Richard II. The historic King was notorious for a homosexual affair with the earl's ancestor Robert de Vere. Shakespeare's play begins after that affair is over, with no mention of the relative.) Thus while the earl lived, he hid behind the name of a semiliterate hick turned actor; and Shakespeare of Stratford became the literary beard of the Earl of Oxford.

Mere prattle without practice, say the incensed Stratfordians, who form the vast mainstream. "The idea that you have to go to Oxford to be a great writer is snobbish," says Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare. Bate points out that Shakespeare, as the son of a local merchant and town official, would almost certainly have attended the Stratford Free School. And Elizabethan grammar schools offered a formidable education in Latin, including oratory and letter writing in the style of characters from classical myth and history. Students also had to be able to expand and embellish on existing literary works, much as Shakespeare did with Henry V and Julius Caesar. People shouldn't be surprised that a commoner should write so knowingly of the nobility. All playwrights wrote about aristocrats. Says Bate: "What is much harder to imagine is an aristocrat like Oxford reproducing the slang of the common tavern or the technicalities of glovemaking."

A critical weakness of the Oxfordians is that De Vere died in 1604, before several of Shakespeare's masterpieces were published or performed. The Winter's Tale, as Bate points out, was licensed by Sir George Buc, who began licensing plays for performance only in 1610. The Tempest may have been inspired by a shipwreck off Bermuda in 1609. The Oxford faction offers tightly argued explanations for the discrepancies, along the lines that the plays are misdated or that the earl had already written the plays (based on alternative sources) and kept them private. According to Dickson, only the panic that Protestant England would revert to Inquisitorial control propelled the earl's heirs, in 1622, to rush a set of plays into print and posterity as the First Folio. That edition, Oxfordians note, was dedicated to two noble kinsmen--one brother married to a daughter of the earl, the other having come close to marrying her sister.

The Oxford camp can go into admirable contortions explaining why Shakespeare's friendly rival Ben Jonson, in an encomium in the 1623 First Folio, calls the deceased Bard "the swan of Avon" (a conspiracy, they say). But their gravest problem is the existing poetry of De Vere himself. It is competent yet uninspired. The 20 or so poems may be juvenilia, but there is neither spark nor promise to the lines, too full of alliteration, all too devoid of depth. "Fram'd in the front of forlorn hope past all recovery,/I stayless stand, to abide the shock of shame and infamy..." The praise Oxford received as a poet may simply have issued from the mouths of sycophants hungry for patronage. Says Alan H. Nelson, a University of California professor who is writing books about Shakespeare and De Vere: "The Earl of Oxford was perhaps the most egotistical and self-serving person of his day in England. It would have been out of character for him to write the plays and then keep authorship a secret. Many Elizabethan noblemen wrote and published."

All that may weaken the case for Oxford. But what a life De Vere led, an existence more Shakespearean than Shakespeare's! Of the man from Stratford we have only a sheaf of facts slimmer than a Gospel redacted by atheists. He is a man about whom it is impossible to write the literary biography as we know it today--kiss, tell, stab in the back, keep the codpiece, and don't dry-clean the doublet. And thus De Vere tantalizes. He may not have been the Bard, but--with apologies to whomever--was his life the stuff of which Shakespeare's dreams were made on?

--With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, Jeanne McDowell/ Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York