July 16, 2020
In the mid-1980s, while attending university, I was “formally” introduced to the works of Shakespeare. During one lecture our instructor, Dr. James Black, expressed amazement and wonder that a glove maker’s son from a provincial town was able to write such superb works. In another lecture, he implied there were doubts that the man from Stratford actually wrote the plays and poems.
This suggested questions: How could this man write such things without having a university education, and where was the evidence that he attended university?
These questions bothered me for decades. I could not reconcile how a middle-class merchant could know so much about court life, law, and other topics found in the plays and poems. Then I read the book Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom (2010) by Charles Beauclerk.
An anecdote within its pages sealed the deal for me. In Henry IV, Part 1, there is a “throwaway” scene: the Gad’s Hill prank. The scene adds nothing to the play’s narrative except as a footnote to further illustrate Prince Hal’s extreme sense of humour. As described by Beauclerk, the incident is an account of a prank Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) and his men played on servants employed by Sir William Cecil (Lord Burghley), de Vere’s father-in-law and his guardian when he was a child.
It is an inside joke added to the play, nothing more. It is an event which comes from life, not written from the imagination, and only the people involved could have known of it.
The grain merchant from Stratford could not have known about it except through the play after it was performed, since there is no evidence that he knew anyone at court, let alone the most powerful man in England. Therefore the odds are exceptionally good that de Vere wrote Henry IV, Part 1, and the other “Shakespeare” plays.
I learned at a seminar long ago that hidden within old texts are clues that some events described within them may have really occurred. They contain small details of veracity (pun intended): that sense one has that what you are reading actually happened.
This feeling of truth is precisely what the Gad’s Hill incident provides.
In the end, Beauclerk’s book left me with hints that there is far more to the connections between de Vere’s life and the Shakespeare canon than what could be put down in one volume. That led me to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship website and the irrefutable evidence there.
Keep up the fight for academic honesty.
— Ron Roffel
“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.
