Richard Whalen has released his Oxfordian edition of Hamlet, which he calls the most personal and “autobiographical” of the Earl of Oxford’s Shakespeare plays and the play that Stratfordian editors have found enigmatic and the most intellectually puzzling. The reason, no doubt, is because Stratfordians have the wrong man as its author. The Oxfordian Hamlet is available on Amazon.
Like the three other plays published so far in the Oxfordian Shakespeare Series and available at Amazon.com, Hamlet is fully annotated from an Oxfordian perspective. An Overview section includes a concise biography of Oxford and a description of the controversy over the identity of the author of the Shakespeare canon. An introduction to the play details the many and striking correspondences between Oxford’s life story and what happens in Hamlet. Extensive line notes expand on the parallels.
The other plays in the series so far and their editors are Othello from Ren Draya of Blackburn College and Whalen; Anthony and Cleopatra from Michael Delahoyde of Washington State University; and Whalen’s Macbeth, now in a second edition. He is the founding general editor and publisher of the series, a past president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society and so far the most prolific contributor to Oxfordian publications, including a dozen research articles.
Central to this Oxfordian edition of Hamlet are the resemblances of the leading characters to significant people in Oxford’s life. Polonius, the principal adviser to King Claudius, is a satirical portrait of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, principal adviser to Queen Elizabeth. In the past, Stratfordians recognized the satire, but modern-day editions of the play have chosen to ignore it. Cecil was the father-less Oxford’s surrogate father and guardian during his teens and later became Oxford’s father-in-law. Polonius’s only daughter Ophelia was inspired by William Cecil’s only daughter, Anne. For years, she and Oxford were raised in the Cecil household almost as sister and older brother. Both Anne and Ophelia, in the play, feared pregnancies and sought drugs to abort. When Anne was fifteen and Lord Oxford turned twenty-one, they were married and she became a countess. Just months before, the Queen had elevated the commoner Cecil to the title of Baron Burghley.
King Claudius, the charming but villainous poisoner in the play, was no doubt inspired by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, a charming, handsome courtier and the Queen’s favorite. The ambitious Leicester was widely believed to have had anyone standing in his way poisoned, and Oxford would have had good reason to suspect that when he was twelve Leicester had his father poisoned in a scheme to gain control of the revenue of Oxford’s vast estates. In the play, the ghost of Hamlet’s father enjoins him to exact revenge on King Claudius, who poisoned him for his estate. Hamlet’s revenge, however, takes a surprising and generally unremarked turn at the end of the play.
Another important parallel described in this edition is that between the re-marriage of Oxford’s mother, the widow of the 16th Earl of Oxford, soon after his sudden and unexpected death, as if by poison, and the “hasty” marriage of Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, widow of the poisoned King Hamlet, to Claudius, the poisoner. Claudius contrives to marry her and succeed old King Hamlet, his brother, on the throne of Denmark. The teenage Hamlet was too young to claim the throne, just as the teenage Oxford was too young to claim his inheritance.
Whalen also shows that throughout the play the many knowledgeable references and subtle allusions to law and astronomy point to Oxford as the dramatist. He credits Tom Regnier, an appellate court lawyer and former president of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, for relating his analysis of the law in Hamlet to Oxford’s reading law at the Inns of Court. He cites Peter Usher, emeritus professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, for the extraordinary number of references and allusions to astronomy in Hamlet, nearly all unremarked by Stratfordians. Many of them reflect the emerging awareness at the time among mathematicians and astronomers of the just-emerging and revolutionary Copernican astronomy, overturning the Earth-centered astronomy of Ptolemy. Living in the Cecil household, a center of learning, Oxford would have heard about Copernicus. It would have been most unlikely, Whalen argues, for Will Shakspere of Stratford to have learned about all the law and astronomy found in Hamlet.
In the Note on the Play Text and in his Acknowledgements, Whalen credits Brig. Gen. Jack Shuttleworth (USAF ret.) for his transcription of the play text from the second quarto of Hamlet. Shuttleworth was head of the English department at the U.S. Air Force Academy for two decades before his retirement. His PhD in English literature is from the University of Denver. He also wrote a draft of the line notes and began a draft of the introduction before he had to leave the Hamlet project for personal reasons. His scholarly paper of 1998 first proposed an Oxfordian Shakespeare Series.
The Oxfordian Hamlet is most readily available from Amazon.com. It is in soft cover and ebook formats. (To date, the ebook format and screen size do not allow for the line notes to appear side-by-side on pages facing the play text pages, as they appear in the soft cover print edition.) You can buy your copy of the Oxfordian Hamlet here.
[posted October 25, 2018]
