Jens Münnichow is a historian and German philologist, lives in a small town in the Mannheim/Heidelberg region of Southern Germany and works as a tutor.
Since I was born, raised and schooled in Germany, it was by no means natural for me to get in contact with Shakespeare. In Germany, he isn’t a national hero of mythic proportions and neither is he the greatest writer in our language. Therefore, I reached the author and the question of his identity by a circuitous route.
When I had to choose courses relevant for my high school degree back in the late 1990s, I chose English as an advanced course. This kind of course has the highest requirements the German school system has to offer. Unfortunately, in the two years when I was attending this course, Shakespeare wasn’t part of the curriculum. I read authors like Emily Bronte, Walt Whitman and John Steinbeck instead. Shortly after leaving high school, I started to see the absence of Shakespeare from my school education as a deficiency.
Despite this feeling, I didn’t get into Shakespeare during my university studies of Modern and Socio-Economic History and German Literature and Linguistics. Although I took seminars that dealt with theatre and saw a Shakespeare play, I wasn’t allowed to work on it because I was part of the German Literature department and not of the English Literature department.
Nonetheless, back then I read John Mitchell’s “Who wrote Shakespeare?” in a German edition. It was interesting, but I didn’t stick to the authorship question, so my “lost years” of authorship interest followed.
After leaving Mannheim University with a Magister Artium degree, I started working as a tutor – which is what I still do today. Around 2020, I worked with students who read “Othello” and did what my students did – searched YouTube for “Shakespeare.” The first clip that really stuck with me was Alexander Waugh’s presentation on the deciphering of the Sonnets’ Dedication that he had given at Brunel University in 2018. It was fascinating and mind-blowing!
I continued watching online presentations of various authors and channels until 2021. Then I started reading literature about the authorship question. At first, I read books that weren’t committed to one specific alternative authorship candidate, like Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography and the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition’s Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?
The more I saw and read, the more the name Edward de Vere showed up, so I read the seminal works of J. T. Looney (“Shakespeare” Identified), B. M. Ward’s biography of the writer, Richard Roe’s book on Shakespeare in Italy, and Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name. I read select articles by various authors like Roger Stritmatter, Tom Regnier and Bonner Miller Cutting.
The academic standard of these works and the sincerity of the members of the Oxfordian community led me to the conclusion that the gap between the Stratford Man and the works of Shakespeare is too big to be bridged, and that the coincidences between the life of Edward de Vere and the works are too manifold to exist just by chance.
That I came into contact with the Shakespeare Authorship Question was incidental, but that I have then become an Oxfordian was inevitable.
