July 6, 2021
My affinity for Shakespeare began when I was eight years old, while visiting Anne Hathaway’s cottage, where I purchased a small leather-bound book, Tales From Shakespeare for young readers, by Charles and Mary Lamb, and also “Shakespeare’s Birthday Book” with quotes from the Bard for each day of the year.
My birthday, August 30, had this quote: “Young gentlemen, your spirits are too bold for your years.” I took that to mean “Precocious” was and is my middle name, and “Curious” my first!
Years later, reading books like Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), Richard Whalen’s Shakespeare: Who Was He? (1994), and Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” by Another Name (2005) (my favorite), set me on my quest to delve deeper into the authorship question.
More books, lectures, and investigations into this mystery stirred me to weigh the evidence, facts, and speculation. With my focus on Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, I wrote a cheeky “What if” comedy called “Cocksure: A Comedic Take on the Authorship Question,” full of fact plus imagination.
This is its premise: “What if Edward de Vere and William Shakespeare actually met, plotted, and planned the grandest ruse in literary history? A brilliant authorship scheme ….”
I approach the “authorship mystery” from an oblique angle, creating “buddy” characters (two wannabe thespians, Peter and Phil), lost in London. At the Mermaid Tavern, they witness the chance meeting of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (departing London to France) and unknown William “Shakspur” (sipping whiskey at the tavern) — a serendipitous meeting to be sure, as there is no record of de Vere and Shakespeare having ever met … yet who knows?
How might E.D.V. and W.S. have set about creating their grand ruse, this authorship puzzlement? Lives change, careers take off (well, some), misadventures multiply, and theatre will never be the same. The game’s afoot!
In my mind’s eye, “Cocksure” mixes the audacity of The Big Lebowski, the imagination of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the bawdiness of Tony Richardson’s comedy Tom Jones, and the heart of Shakespeare in Love.
— Barbara Rosson Davis
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