November 16, 2019
Since early high school in 1960s California, I read Shakespeare in and out of class. I had a facility for languages, and Elizabethan English was second nature to my eye and tongue, largely due to the King James Bible I also read in me youth (though I’m an atheist now).
In my early 20s, I traveled to Oxford, then Stratford to see “the birthplace” of the Bard, like every fan, toured the house, and even canoed on the Avon, in some fuzzy warm assurance that I was in the neighborhood of greatness. I thought, like millions, that I knew this man, the greatest writer in the English language … this star of poets.
Fast forward 40 years or so, to me glancing at a British book in a Goodwill store rack that explored the authorship question, limning the cases for Bacon, Marlowe, and Oxford — don’t even remember the title, but upon reading the fact of Falstaff’s fearless “weaver’s beam” allusion in The Merry Wives of Windsor, this old English major was struck to the core to learn that Oxford had underscored this verse about Goliath’s spear in his Geneva Bible!
The odds of this being coincidence seemed to me about as high as DNA other than O.J.’s — another hero I thought I knew — at the crime scene ….
I soon realized with a little chagrin how little I actually knew about the Stratford hero with the goofy haircut and the insipid expression. How little ANYBODY knew for sure, beyond, as Mark Twain wrote, the CONJECTURE — the four bones of this tired dinosaur to which were added a thousand pounds of plaster of Paris.
From this book, I jumped into Looney’s book, then Ogburn’s classic, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, which was like watching a hundred sundry tumblers fall into place in a literary padlock that suddenly went “click,” and opened up the plays and the sonnets in a whole new canopy of understanding, fretted with golden fire!
Did it really matter who wrote Shakespeare? YES, it did. I watched the brilliant lectures of Tom Regnier, growing stronger and stronger in the conviction that Oxford was the Bard. I became rather something of a pest to unsuspecting friends and family when they asked what I’d been up to lately!
But THIS story was astonishing, in the extent and success of the whitewash … after all, we all know that avuncular gentle scribe and his beneficent half-smile from the statue in Westminster, right? The English would never allow deceit or scandal to stain the Star of England, would they?
Then, I read Hank Whittemore’s The Monument, which reinterprets the sonnets, especially Sonnet 76 wherein lies an almost perfect anagram for Oxford in the line “every word doth almost tell my name” (“every” = “e ver” … “almost”). And that blew the wig right off that dorky bust in the Stratford church that’s missing the bag of grain it once had in favor of a writer’s pillow (like many authors, my portable “desk of choice” if I can’t be on a laptop).
Have you ever tried writing on a pillow????
Finally, in 2016, the quadricentennial of Shakspere’s passing, I tuned into a C-SPAN broadcast of the festivities and programs from the Folger Library, which has Oxford’s Geneva Bible as well as many First Folios, and listened in amusement as they celebrated the wrong guy. The viewers were invited to raise questions toward the last of the four hour extravaganza, and to my surprise, no one attending live or from the broadcast audience had raised the authorship issue, in the same warm fuzzy reassurance that I had once felt in my college days.
In a long-shot, I decided to try the live call-in number, and to my utter astonishment, I got through, and told the director live that my personal belief was that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, had been the actual Shakespeare, and asked the panel if his works “would have smelled as sweet by any other name.” They smiled at my allusion, waffled a bit about two suspect collaborations with other authors, but left no one satisfied with their conclusions — more plaster of Paris.
I wish I could say I lifted Oxford’s fallen Speare, and tried to lift his real name from where his body buried be, but I felt proud, nevertheless, to have sounded his name where it needed to be heard — whether by some college professor, some grad student imagining a dissertation, or someone dreaming of things yet to come, a time when Oxford’s rime will be correctly assigned its true author and claim ascendancy over the heir of invention. Time is out of joint, but o delightful light, that we must use, to set it right ….
— Will Shaw
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