This section provides a concluding overview of the Introduction to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship presentation of early poems by Edward de Vere. You may return to the previous section here. The poems themselves (and a printable pdf version of the entire presentation) may be accessed from the Introduction.
Introduction, Part 6: Overview
We reiterate, despite our good-natured sparring, that we truly do respect Professor May and the scholarly work he has done. He himself has written respectfully of Oxfordians — for example, as having “made worthwhile contributions to our understanding of the Elizabethan age” (1980, 10), noting that while other orthodox scholars “tend to belittle … the Oxfordian movement, yet its leaders are educated men and women … sincerely interested in Renaissance English culture. Their arguments for De Vere are entertained as at least plausible by hosts of intellectually respectable persons ….”
At the same time, it must be noted that Professor May overstates the extent to which the Oxfordian theory — even as originally framed by Looney, much less in its vastly more developed present form — relies upon the poetic parallels explored here. On the contrary, these echoes exist within a far wider and more comprehensive assemblage of evidence, perhaps best reflected in James A. Warren’s Index to Oxfordian Publications, which cites hundreds of books and thousands of articles contributing to the Oxfordian synthesis.
One may reasonably debate whether the many Shakespearean echoes of de Vere’s poems are sufficient to pinpoint him conclusively as Shakespeare. Yet they are, at the very least, highly suggestive of common authorship — especially in combination with the vast array of biographical and other circumstantial evidence supporting the Oxfordian theory (see, e.g., Ogburn’s 1984 book, Stritmatter’s 2001 dissertation, and Anderson’s 2005 book). They form an important part — but only part — of that evidence. As Looney observed (1920, 160), “first one thing and then another fits into its place with all the unity of an elaborate mosaic the moment we introduce Edward de Vere as the author of the Shakespeare writings. Is this too the merest coincidence?”
Sobran, writing seven years before May’s 2004 article, put it well in terms that neither May nor any orthodox writer has yet rebutted. (May missed an excellent opportunity in 2004.) Sobran fully grasped the argument briefly suggested by May in 1980 (11-12) and elaborated in 2004 (223-30): that the Oxford-Shakespeare parallels might allegedly “be assigned to coincidence and poetic convention” (Sobran 232).
But May’s 2004 article totally missed (failed even to cite) Sobran’s 40-page comparative analysis of de Vere’s poems (1997, 231-70) — the central issue addressed by May’s article — even though Sobran’s study was by far the most extensive of its kind (until now) and was issued by a major mainstream publisher (Simon & Schuster) at a time when Sobran was a nationally known political columnist. Ironically, Sobran graciously credited May with unspecified assistance in the preparation of his book (301): “I have yet to ask a favor … that [May] has failed to grant instantly ….”
Perhaps May was unaware of Sobran’s book, as suggested by May’s inaccurate comment that “[a]fter the publication of my edition of Oxford’s verse in 1980, reference to the Earl’s poetry all but disappeared from Oxfordian polemic” (2004, 232). In any event, May’s 2004 article followed the all-too-common orthodox tendency in failing even to respond to important skeptical scholarship.
As Sobran summed up in 1997 (231-32):
[S]ome critics rank [de Vere’s poems] as brilliant and accomplished … [though] [f]ew would call them works of genius. How, then, can they be Shakespeare’s? Perhaps because they are early poems. …
The crucial question is whether the parallels … are more numerous than can reasonably be assigned to coincidence and poetic convention. These poems bear hundreds of resemblances to Shakespeare’s phrasing, far too many to be dismissed as insignificant. The kinship is evident in these poems’ themes, turns of phrase, word associations, images, rhetorical figures, various other mannerisms, and, above all, general diction.
Not all of the parallels are of the same order.… But, while we may disagree over particular cases, the sheer number of examples is overwhelming.
We suggest readers may best appreciate the weight of the evidence by just plunging into the poems and their parallels. We suspect most, after doing so, will have difficulty swallowing the idea that all these resonant echoes might be explained away as mere poetic “commonplaces” recycled by “hundreds” of Elizabethan writers.
Do “hundreds” of other writers (or several, or even one?) exhibit the remarkable thematic and verbal convergences leaping out from many of these poems? (Poem No. 4 is just one very telling example.) Was it “common” for multiple (or any other) Elizabethan poets to craft entire phrases and scenes (not just a word or image here and there) eerily similar to those found in Shakespeare? We suspect most open-minded readers will emerge feeling strongly, as we do, that the same mind produced these two bodies of work.
As Looney always stressed, it is only through the accumulation of evidence that we approach verification of a theory. As quoted earlier, Looney embraced a principle on which we also rely to guide this entire presentation of de Vere’s early poems and their echoes in the Shakespeare canon (1920, 145): “[W]e are not here primarily concerned with the mere piling up of parallel passages. What matters most of all is mental correspondence and the general unity of treatment which follows from it.” The density and quality of so many parallels of thought, diction, and poetic idiom, between these poems and the later works of “Shakespeare,” suggest that the former constitute an essential part of Shakespeare’s literary juvenilia.
We invite you, dear readers, to venture onward and explore or rediscover these poems for yourselves, to enjoy them as we have on their own merits and for what they can tell us about the development of Shakespeare’s creative genius.
Return to the previous section or return to the Introduction (with access to all poems).
[published June 22, 2018, updated 2021]
