September 24, 2020
After experiencing some of “Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits” throughout high school, I was eager to take every Shakespeare course that college had to offer. While working toward my B.A. in English in the early 1990s, I signed up for the available Shakespeare classes as well as an independent study of the history plays with my mentor (a founding member of a Shakespeare theatre company). But during all this time I never heard anything about there being an authorship question.
A few years after graduating, I decided to stay home to raise my two children, but also wanted to continue learning about “life, the universe, and everything,” and so I started doing some independent exploring of different religious faiths and philosophies. The local bookstore had many treasures on these topics and during this time I found a book called The Jesus Mysteries, an attempt by two scholars to prove the historicity of Jesus. These researchers ended up convincing themselves of the exact opposite: concluding that Jesus was a mythological figure who had been presented to posterity as an actual person.
Also armed by this point with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I was well prepared to notice the mythologizing of the Stratford Man when I eventually discovered Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” By Another Name (SBAN). The acceptance of de Vere as the writer Shakespeare was a simple transition once I saw the evidence presented by Anderson. After repeated readings of SBAN, J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified, Katherine Chiljan’s Shakespeare Suppressed, and Ros Barber’s Shakespeare: The Evidence, the more shocking part for me is how anyone can still think that Shakspere of Stratford could have been the writer. How any reasonable person can examine the evidence for “Strat-Man,” and come away thinking he is a plausible candidate for the authorship, is now the mystery to me.
After ten years of independent research, and attending Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship conferences and De Vere Society meetings, I feel the evidence shows Shakspere to be one of the least likely people in England at the time to have written the works, while de Vere is the most likely. I am delighted to be in such enthusiastic company as a member of the SOF, as we all keep asking questions and accumulating evidence proving Edward de Vere was the true author of the Shakespeare works.
— Heidi Jannsch
“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.: “Jane 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.
