A year ago, lucky enough to live near Titchfield Abbey, home of the Earls of Southampton, I wandered around the deserted ruins reading aloud from Shake-speare’s sonnets, in spite of my English reserve. I’d chanced upon sonnet 55, which seemed apt:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these conténts
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
Two white doves watched from the nearest hollow tower as I paid my homage to Shake-speare — and possibly even to his son — another step on a journey which began at school and continues to this day.
I’d always been ambivalent about Shakespeare. His picture looked oafish to my young self; I’d already decided that plays that old must be boring and irrelevant. Until I sat down at sixteen to read Othello, one of my two exam texts. I read it all through in one hit, completely mesmerised. About the other, The Winter’s Tale, I was not so sure. I couldn’t quite see a context. Even then I wondered how a man born and brought up in Stratford, who’d never been abroad, could write of foreign lands so well. A school visit to Stratford only compounded my confusion. The plays at the theatre were magnificent, but I gained no feeling of the man himself in an over-commercialised town. And so I took my exams and moved on, to read Ancient History at London University and then the world of work followed.
A chance viewing of the film Last Will. & Testament set my brain alight. I read voraciously every text I could find – starting with Ogburn and culminating with The Monument, Hank Whittemore’s extraordinarily detailed tome. And that’s why I was there, at Titchfield Abbey, that early March day.
Whilst my research was easy, it made me realise just how few books there were in Shake-speare’s time; those that there were, ruinously expensive. How could the man from Stratford have gained so much knowledge about so many things in such a short space of time? Edward de Vere’s poignant journey through life as scholar, nobleman, courtier, poet, playwright, patron, husband, lover, father, son-in-law, winner and ultimate outcast — that’s his résumé surely, for being our greatest playwright of all time? A recent study by the British Library showed that more than half of English teachers felt that their students found it hard to relate to Shakespeare’s plays. Surely by not teaching in schools even the possibility of the Earl of Oxford being Shake-speare, children are deprived of linking up the greatest literary work of an age with the true events of that age and therefore rendering Shake-speare’s works so much less than the sum of their parts?
So, although humbled by the names on it, I have now dared to sign the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. One more (albeit tiny) voice.
— Wendy Fitzgerald
“How I Became an Oxfordian” is 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., “John J. Smith is a businessman in San Francisco.”)
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