August 2, 2021
When I was ten, my mother took me to Franco Zeffirelli’s ground-breaking Romeo and Juliet on the big screen. I begged for the film’s album and memorized every line. Then I discovered that my local public library had Old Vic recordings of Shakespeare’s plays. One by one, I carted the weighty three-record albums home and played them on my record player. I knew the stories from a children’s version, but I wanted the author’s extraordinary language. I started with the comedies, then moved to the tragedies.
When I came to Macbeth, the first of three bells struck. Act I, scene 3: “Thane of Glamis … Thane of Cawdor.” I lifted the needle. What was a “thane”? Not a king. Maybe a duke or earl? My Webster’s Student Dictionary confirmed my guess.
At that moment, I wondered why, while others’ works centered on kings, queens, and princesses, this author wrote repeatedly about the social layer just below: dukes, earls, thanes. It was as if this Shakespeare saw the world from their societal level.
How did a tradesman’s son from a remote town know such detail about the nobility, royal courts, battles, wealthy households, Italy, France, Scotland? Had he ever left England? The plays dwarfed the biographies I found in the library.
While I kept these thoughts to myself, they lingered, making me unable to write my Amherst College English honors thesis on Shakespeare. I wrote on Elizabeth Bishop instead, securing a summa cum laude. In my last semester, I took a third Shakespeare course, still trying to answer my childhood questions.
Professor Richard Cody assigned the first 17 Sonnets. He opened the next class asking for our interpretations.
Crickets.
I finally raised my hand, thinking “Here goes,” and said: “The poet is urging his adult son to marry immediately and father a child for an important but unstated reason. He says it 17 times. Shakespeare dedicated these very personal Sonnets to the Earl of Southampton, so presumably the Sonnets themselves are personal to the Earl and the poet. Is it possible that Shakespeare fathered the Earl of Southampton?”
Professor Cody smiled. “No one knows what the Sonnets mean, Dorothea. But your interpretation is as good as any.”
The second bell rang, as clearly as the first: Academe had a Shakespeare problem and did not know what to do about it.
The third bell sounded in Stratford-upon-Avon when a “Birthplace” tour guide stated that if Shakespeare had gone to school, it was to the local grammar school. I jumped on one word: “What did you mean by ‘if’ Shakespeare went to school? Is there no proof?” The guide responded: “No. The Stratford grammar school records are missing for the years he would have been there.”
Confirmed: The Shakespeare canon had been attributed to the wrong man. After researching several candidates, the only one who fit all my criteria, like a custom-made glove returned to the hand of its original owner, was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
— Dorothea Dickerman
“How I Became an Oxfordian” is a series edited by Bob Meyers. You may submit your essay on this topic (500 words or less in an editable format such as MS Word), along with a digital photo of yourself, to: communications@shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org. Also include a sentence about yourself, e.g.: “John Smith is a business owner in Dallas.” You must be an SOF member to submit an essay.
To join the SOF see our membership page. To read other essays in this series, click here.
