April 11, 2018 — What makes a person change from being a Stratfordian to being an Oxfordian? What are the stages in this shift? And more importantly, does this shift in viewpoint enhance a person’s appreciation of Shakespeare’s works? These are the kinds of questions tackled by University of Winnipeg librarian Michael Dudley in his lecture, “The Bard Identity: Becoming an Oxfordian,” recently posted on the SOF YouTube Channel:
Dudley’s study is based on an analysis of fifty essays published online in the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s popular series, “How I Became an Oxfordian,” edited by Bob Meyers. Dudley finds that these essays:
provide a rich and remarkable window into the lived experience of those who question the Shakespeare of tradition and have embraced instead an Oxfordian Shakespeare. While there are of course variations in the narratives of the Oxfordian experience, we can draw some generalizable characteristics. The Oxfordian essayists initially feel alienated from an intellectual and cultural environment characterized by what they feel to be ritual, inert knowledge which is maintained and reinforced by a dominant majority. Faced with such a significant discontinuity regarding something they otherwise treasure, they suffer cognitive and emotional dissonance.
Eventually some catalyzing event, most often an encounter with a key Oxfordian text helps them gain a critical awareness that they can no longer tolerate the status quo, and so they begin to move away from this Stratfordian model towards the Oxfordian one. Eventually (and sometimes all at once) a threshold point is reached and the previous unsatisfying, dissonant state is irreversibly abandoned as the essayists find a rewarding, transcendent experience with their authentic selves and a community of similarly-motivated individuals. The Shakespeare canon takes on new significance and coherence, and in their renewed enthusiasm for the poet-playwright, the Oxfordian is inspired to discover all they can and to contribute to the cause of promoting De Vere as the author, often through creative means….
What is most significant in this analysis is that the coherence and sense-making afforded by the Oxfordian model unleashes a level of empathy unavailable to the reader wedded to the Stratfordian mythology. In the place of the remote, god-like paragon of “natural genius,” the national poet against whom all must be compared and whom none can approach, the Oxfordian reader comes to know, understand and profoundly empathize with the author.
Michael Dudley is the librarian for history, politics, Indigenous Studies, and theatre & film at the University of Winnipeg.
