March 5, 2019
The traditional biography of Shakespeare never made sense to me. On a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, I picked up a biography with the Bard’s portrait on the cover, and found a mishmash of “perhapses” and “must haves” and “presumablys.” The little that was known about the Stratford man didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t imagine such a man creating my favorite character, Cleopatra.
In 1992, when I was a graduate student in English at the University of Massachusetts, I went to a talk given by Roger Stritmatter on Oxford’s Geneva Bible. I brought my mother along to the talk. I found Roger’s evidence profound, and was surprised by the surging pushback he got from the audience, primarily from professors in my own department. Roger was pursuing his Ph.D., focusing on the authorship question, in our neighboring Comparative Literature Department, which had much more daring faculty on this issue.
Roger comported himself admirably, and my mother’s response to the grilling he endured was that she had witnessed “the elaborate ritual of a strange tribe.” I did not realize how apt her description was in describing ardent Stratfordians until much later.
About ten years ago, I did an independent study on Shakespeare with some English majors over the summer. Since I was teaching out of my specialty, I drew on my experiences as a college actress studying Shakespeare with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In this small group, I mentioned my skepticism about the traditional authorship story, and because of my students’ interest, began reading in earnest.
I dabbled in what I could find online, slowly becoming aware of the extent of the controversy, and after the course was finished, dove into Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” By Another Name (2005). Geography seems to be the most convincing evidence for me. Anderson’s discussion of the fact that there actually was a small parcel of Bohemian seacoast, mentioned in The Winter’s Tale, and that Oxford passed by it on his continental travels, might have been the detail that firmly established me as an Oxfordian. Shakespeare’s presumed ignorance of continental geography was shattered.
When I read Richard Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (2011), I thought, “This is it!” How can anyone deny those dormant canals Roe discovered, that make boat travel between various Italian cities in Two Gentlemen of Verona, once considered absurd, now entirely plausible?
I kept reading — Ogburn, Looney, Price, Sobran, Beauclerk. I joined a Facebook group, “ShakesVere,” moderated by Mark Anderson and others. Six of us from the ShakesVere Facebook page met in person at the exhibit of Shakespearean manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Library in 2010. Seeing my first First Folio, along with various quartos and some fascinating apocrypha, was all the more satisfying in the company of other Oxfordians.
This spring I am teaching the Shakespeare seminar for the first time, Oxfordian style.
— Alice Knox Eaton
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