In 1980, I received a PhD in medieval studies, but during my subsequent teaching situation would describe myself as a non-practicing medievalist, as I only found work teaching introductory and composition courses in those years in Canada which were described as a black hole in university positions. I recall that at the joint Shakespeare Oxford Society/ Shakespeare Fellowship conference in Toronto in 2013 I had a lively conversation with someone about the Nowell Codex.
Being vaguely connected with the academic study of literature throughout my entire adult life, and teaching each year a prescribed Shakespeare play to first-year students, I had come to wonder about the breadth of knowledge of the court and of the highest circles of politics that the plays demonstrated.
And then I saw the Frontline episode on PBS in 1993. This made a lot of sense. It was a few years later when I stumbled across Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth & the Reality, in the university library. I was the first person to check out that book. It was compulsive reading. I became a de Vere devotee immediately, feeling keenly the tragedy of his situation and intuiting that this was the source of the depth of feeling evident in his works.
In subsequent years, I found my way to Margo Anderson’s biography, Shakespeare by Another Name; Alan Nelson’s Monstrous Adversary (ludicrous in its animosity but helpful in transcribing de Vere’s letters), and a few other works. But it was after attending a Shakespeare authorship conference in Toronto, organized by Don Rubin, that my desultory interest became a part of my life. Kelly Nestruck, the Globe and Mail critic who since that day I can’t read, foamed at the mouth in print at the monstrosity of holding such a conference, at the horror of York University’s spending a whole $4,000 on it, at the obvious lunacy of its participants. In my estimation, these were serious researchers who did not use the subjunctive in coming to their conclusions, who decidedly had not abandoned their senses of humor, and who lacked any sense of self-importance. I recall telling my sisters that I had found my people.
Since then, the Fellowship has provided for me notice of published research in the field, the excellent Oxfordian, and a sense of ongoing friendship among a diverse band of scholarly adventurers. I wish I were one of them, but it is not my ‘area’. When I do produce something on the poem we know as Beowulf (which I’ve long worked on), the Oxfordians will be the first I seek out as critics.
