ALIAS SHAKESPEARE

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Summary: A Fantastic Read that Should Stir Your Own Interpretations
Review: "Alias Shakespeare" is one of those books that very subtly alters your perspective on history, literature, and how greatness can come from misinformation just as often as from fact. I held a relatively open mind about the Who Wrote Shakespeare discussion until I read this completely believable, unerringly well-presented and well-documented argument that Shakespeare, as we know him, is actually no one we know at all.

By the end of the book you truly won't know what to think-Mr. Sobran has taken a volatile, passionately contested topic and presented his ideas clearly, concisely and with sincere conviction. He uses very straightforward logic and circumstantial evidence to demonstrate the great number of similarities in the Earl of Oxford's life to the topics and themes of Shakespearean plays and poetry, and then goes on to examine how the circumstances of William Shakespeare's life argue against his authoring the plays. There's also a wonderful appendix featuring the Earl of Oxford's early poetry (he stopped publishing at his peak-which is curious) to help you `get a feel' for his similarities to Shakespeare's published works. It's fascinating and great fun to delve so deeply into what is a great puzzle of style and authorship. What a great way to exicte a new reader about the plays!

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Summary: Thought Provoking, but...
Review: From the outset I was very intrigued by this book for its bold take on the authorship question. Sobran presents his evidence in a very scholarly and concise way that does not alienate the lay reader or the Elizabethean scholar. However, I must say that Sobran makes the same mistake that all Shakespearean scholars seem to make when writing or doing research on the works. These stories were plays and need to be viewed in that light and not as novels or as poetry. In performing Shakespeare's plays, I have noticed uses of certain words and phrases that are consistent across many of the them, showing that they were written by the same person. Shakespeare was a child of what would be considered today the middle class and attended a Stratford school that among other things taught Latin. Hardly the education or social background of "country bumpkin". The issue of the will not being up to the standard of the plays is ridiculous. The will served as a means to protect his youngest daughter's inheritence from a man he despised and for the settlement of his estate, not as a theatrical project to which he loved. The issue of Shakespeare's lack of knowledge of far away lands is as well ridiculous, because the settings of many of the plays were patterned after a typical English town or city with a foreign name slapped on there for the setting. If the Earl is the author, where did he learn to write plays? In this time acting was considered an extremely lowly profession. Why would a man trained in leading arts of his day and in an age where nobles were known and encouraged for writing great works, choose to write in secret and in such a lowly form? Also to use Sobran' own arguement: "How would a nobleman know so much about regular townspeople?" The plays are full of well formed and interesting non noble characters. How would a man so removed from the daily lives of these people know so much about them? Sobran's book while interesting and thought provoking fails to provide an adequate substitute or cast considerable doubt upon the man from Stratford.

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Summary: Excerpt from paper by Dr. Alan Nelson
Review: I quote his conclusions verbatim. Nelson's negation of the Oxford claim are AT LEAST as conclusive as Sobran's claims (moreso, in my opinion:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1) If Oxford wrote any professional plays at all between 1580 and 1602, he would logically have written for his own company, and not for the rival Lord Chamberlain's men.

2) The late Shakespeare plays were performed by the King's men; but Oxford died in 1604, after the King's men had been in existence for little more than a year.

3) Oxford died several years before the registration at the Stationer's Office of King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, and Pericles, before the publication of King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles, and almost certainly before the composition of The Tempest, which seems to recall events of 1610.

4) The Winter's Tale was first licenced for the stage by Sir George Buc, who did not become stage-licencer until 1610.

5) Oxford's letters betray a faulty command of legal Latin, and are characterized by eccentric orthography and distinct traces of an East Anglian dialect. Thus Oxford spelled likelihoods "leklywhoodes," with the e-for-a and wh-for-h East-Anglian substitution, and he invariably wrote"ofte" for ought - a speech habit mocked as rustic in the Cambridge play of Gammer Gurton's Needle. He wrote "impodent" or "impotent" for impudent, and is the only person in my experience who put an "l" in Wivenhoe, spelling it "Wiuenghole." Oxford's spelling of his own name reflects the three-syllable pronunciation: if Edward de Vere had been their author, Shakespeare's earls would have been not Oxfords but Oxenfords.

6) Oxford's known verse at its worst is pretentious doggerel. He is at his best when translating Italian poetry into English tetrameter.

7) Numerous minor points mesh perfectly with Shakespeare's life but not at all with Oxford's. I would argue, if I had time, that Robert Greene's "upstart crow" of 1592 has a 95 percent chance of referring to the historical William Shakespeare, that A Funeral Elegy of 1612 has a 50-50 chance of being Shakespeare's authentic late work, and that the Passionate Pilgrim fracas of 1612 refers with a 99-44/100 percent certainty to a living - and irate - author whose name was William Shakespeare.

[Nelson ends] on a note of irony: since evidence concerning the historical William Shakespeare is scanty, as they themselves proclaim, Oxfordians cannot prove the historical Shakespeare incapable of having written the plays and poems in the Shakespeare canon; contrariwise, literary historians are swimming in evidence that the 17th earl of Oxford was positively deficient in linguistic skill and high poetic talent.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

While someone else other than Shakespeare MAY have written Shakespeare's works, I prefer to use Occam's Razor here, cutting through the subterfuge and accept that Shakespeare STILL deserves credit of authorship until conclusively proven otherwise. Sobran fails to do so.

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Summary: Another, almost convincing, case for Oxford
Review: If I were a betting man, I still wouldn't bet on any of the possible answers to the "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" question. There are just too many gaps in our knowledge. But there is surely a mystery to be solved, and "Alias Shakespeare" by Joseph Sobran lays out an effective case that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, is the most likely solution to that mystery.

The book dispenses with the usual ad hominem attacks, amateur psychology, and farcical searches for hidden anagrams that have too often characterized all sides' arguments. He instead approaches this third-rail subject with refreshing objectivity and an apparently sincere search for the truth.

Marshalling a series of arguments and associated facts that point to Oxford, the book is well-organized at the macro level. It fails at times however in structuring the particulars. Threads of the argument are sometimes introduced, developed to a certain level, dropped, and then picked up again at a later point.

For example, Sobran [speaking of an introductory letter Oxford wrote to a friend's translation of "Cardanus Comfort"] writes "The whole letter, which especially foreshadows the [Shakespearean] Sonnets, is of utmost importance to the authorship question." Having raised our utmost curiosity, he abandons this argument with the parenthetical "See Appendix 3."

But his logic, when ultimately reconstructed, seems unassailable. The aforementioned Sonnets are at the core of this logic, and he convincingly lays out the parallels between their content and the well-documented course of Oxford's life. He effectively exposes the circular reasoning used by the defenders of the man he calls Mr. Shakspere - that is, the actor from Stratford-on-Avon. Those defenders deny the obvious autobiographical nature of the Sonnets, on the basis that they don't match with the flimsy autobiography we have of Mr. Shakspere. In fact, this type of circular reasoning pervades their entire defense, whether dealing with the purported dates of the plays or the importance of the early long poems.

There are, of course, legitimate counter-arguments. The problem is that arguments and counter-arguments in this matter are almost always qualitative and very difficult for the non-expert to evaluate. Sobran takes a stab at what is probably the only possible relevant quantitative approach: that of linguistic analysis. But here his use of such an approach amounts to no more than extensive word listings that he has found in common between Shakespeare and Oxford.

The problem for his case is that a more sophisticated, computer-based linguistic analysis has already cast serious doubt on the possibility of Shakespeare's works having been written by Oxford. (Elliott and Valenza, 1991.) Of course, the specific methods used in that analysis are also very difficult for the non-expert to assess. But at least such an analysis takes us closer to a scientific approach with a testable hypothesis.

Nonetheless, given an open mind, it would be hard to read "Alias Shakespeare" without agreeing with Sobran's conclusion. At a minimum, I doubt if any such reader will be laying odds on Mr. Shakspere being the true author.

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Summary: Great Book! Intriguing Subject. Get your feet wet.
Review: Joseph Sobran has written an elegant and persuasive condensation of the case for Edward de Vere's authorship of the Shakespeare canon, updating the previous efforts of passionate and intelligent students of the Shakespeare question such as Charlton Ogburn Junior, Bernard M. Ward and John Thomas Looney.

The book deserve five stars for cogently and persuasively presenting a much-maligned theory which counts among its recent adherents such intellectual lights as Derek Jacoby, Michael York, John Gilgud, Mortimer Adler and Supreme Court Justices Blackmun, Powell and Stevens.

As other reviewers have noted, it does not matter so much whether Sobran's arguments are correct -- this reader finds many of them persuasive -- as that the subject itself warrants serious and sustained attention. At present champions of the orthodox Shakespeare retain their intellectual monopoly within higher education primarily by means of excluding non-specialists such as Sobran from the debate over the Shakespeare question and vociferously denying, against a host of contrary evidence, that the subject even exists.

On the contrary, anyone who cares for the future of literary studies should acquaint themselves with the arguments made in this book. Not all of them are, in my opinion, equally valid. But that is no cause to ignore or belittle Mr. Sobran for tackling an important question which (sorry) ain't going to disappear just because a few powerful Shakespeare industry insiders insist on feeling threatened by it rather than seeing it as one of the greatest boons which could befall a shrinking intellectual discipline.

"Shakespeare" has never been more interesting or more real than he is in this book.

For readers in search of a compact, intelligent, entertaining introduction to the authorship question -- a question which is only now, after many years of suppression and neglect, beginning to come into its prime as one of the great questions of our day -- this book is a great place to begin.

Roger Stritmatter

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Summary: A Test of Sobran's Method
Review: Joseph Sobran rests much of his case on his self-proclaimed ability to detect resemblances between the phrasing of the Earl of Oxford's small corpus of undisputed poems and the works conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare. He claims that these run into the "hundreds", "far too many to be dismissed as insignificant". Critics have asserted, to the contrary, that the number of parallels is not at all surprising, because Mr. Sobran's methodology is entirely subjective: He looks into the clouds and sees the shapes that he wants to find.

Recently I discovered that "Alias Shakespeare" itself contains an inadvertent experiment that provides evidence concerning the acuteness of the Sobran method. Appendix 2 reprints all of the poems certainly or with some degree of probability ascribed to Oxford. The edition is based on Steven May's (first published the journal "Studies in Philology" (1980) and conveniently reprinted in Professor May's book, "The Elizabethan Courtier Poets"). Mr. Sobran accompanies these texts with his lists of Shakespearean parallels, of which he does indeed find hundreds.

Through some oversight, however, he has included, as part of the poem beginning "In Peascod time when hound to horn gives ear while buck is kill'd", sixteen lines that were written not by Oxford but by Thomas Churchyard, a hanger-on at Elizabeth's court. Professor May prints these verses as "Poem IVa" in his edition. Twelve lines (probably) by Oxford ("Poem IV") continue Churchyard's piece.

We have, therefore, a passage that Mr. Sobran believes to be Oxfordian but that is really from a different pen. If his method is reliable, one would expect him to find few Shakespearean resemblances here. If it is mere wishful thinking, alleged echoes of Shakespeare should be discovered about as densely here as elsewhere.

What is the result of the experiment? In sixteen lines, Mr. Sobran finds sixteen parallels to Shakespeare. In the next twelve lines, really written by Oxford, he uncovers ten. Looking more widely, I cannot find any Oxfordian passage of comparable length where Sobran finds as much "Shakespeare" as he does in Churchyard. The one poem that the Earl had printed under his own name has fifteen parallels in nearly twice as many (26) lines.

What does this mean? That Thomas Churchyard was the real mind behind "Shakespeare"? He has never been a candidate before, and the fact that "Venus and Adonis" appeared when he was in his 74th year might tell against him, but he lived, like Oxford, until 1604 and strikes me as at least as plausible a pretender to Shakespeare's bays.

That will not, I'm sure, be Mr. Sobran's solution. No doubt he will simply annex Churchyard to Oxford's oeuvre. He has already shown signs of becoming an Oxfordian imperialist, claiming the sonnet cycle of one "E.C." for his hero and announcing last year in his newsletter that "a thousand Petrarchan sonnets ascribed to others were actually Oxford's, as I will argue in a future book".

If Mr. Sobran continues on this path, the study of Elizabethan literature will be greatly simplified. I eagerly await word that the busy nobleman ghosted Marlowe and Kyd and Nashe and Peale and Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher and Sidney and Donne and Spenser. Indeed, since he was able to create a third of the Shakespearean canon from beyond the grave, why should he not also be the true Dryden and Pope? One does hope that Mr. Sobran has the time and energy to pursue his parallels whithersoever they may lead.

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Summary: The one to read if you read only one about this topic
Review: Most people accept the tradition that the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were indeed written by him, and they assume that doubters of the Stratford man's authorship (anti-Stratfordians) must be irrational elitists. They might also assume that anti-Strats have nothing to offer those who simply wish to understand and enjoy the plays. But all of these assumptions are either debatable or wrong. In any case, though both sides of the authorship debate have been known to engage in circular arguments based on questionable evidence and to hurl childish ad hominems at one another, this is not true of Joseph Sobran who is reasonable in his arguments and civil toward his opponents. (Reviewers here who accuse Sobran of mudslinging, bashing etc. merely betray the fact that they have not read this book!) Rather than ask whether anti-Stratfordians are elitists, Sobran suggests that we ought to be asking if Shakespeare was one. For example, Shakespeare often makes cruel, unfair fun of social-climbing commoners exactly like Will Shaksper (a common variation of his name in contemporary legal documents). Arguing from evidence in the plays and poems, Sobran also demonstrates that the authorship debate can and ought to be relevant to the enjoyment and understanding of the Works.

While I am not wholly on the side of the underdog anti-Strats, I believe that Stratfordian scholars (which too often means mainstream scholars) have done such a disservice to the general public's enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare that I must take them to task. Some are so fanatical in their defense of the Stratford man's claim to authorship that they seem to believe that if there were no tradition that he wrote the Works, they could conclusively prove from scratch that he did; but they could not for the same reason that anti-Stratfordians can never prove beyond a shadow that he didn't or that one of their alternative candidates did: The trail is old, and the case is cold. If ever there was a smoking gun it has long since turned entirely to rust. The strongest and best evidence that the man from Stratford wrote the Works is the tradition that he did, which, while not being conclusive, is simply difficult to dismiss.
But this tradition is not much. Anxious to uncover any details to fill out his biography, overzealous Stratfordians have accepted and taught many dubious legends and read a fanciful biography of the Stratford man into the plays and poems. The anti-Stratfordians see through this mess because they have no desire to add more to the Stratford man's biography than the documentary record will bear or to connect the biography to the Works where such a connection is based on pure guesswork. (Of course, they have motive to see other things that are not there, but here I speak only of how the anti-Strats are right.) For example, it was an anti-Stratfordian who realized that the famous "upstart crow" quotation has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare, but instead clearly refers to an actor who did not write plays but was merely guilty of adlibbing. (More often, each side is equally at fault. I know of at least one instance where both sides used the exact same piece of evidence to prove their opposite conclusions. Upon further examination, it turned out that the evidence in question proved nothing whatsoever regarding authorship, yet each side had found in it proof of what it wanted to believe.) Meanwhile the Stratfordians reject the clear evidence from the plays that Shakespeare had far more learning than could have been provided by any formal education available to the Stratford man. In and of itself, this might not rule out the possibility that he was self-taught-except that the mainstream scholars HAVE ruled this out. They long ago boxed themselves into a corner by declaring that Shakespeare could not have had a vast education and any evidence that he did, no matter how compelling, cannot be admitted. (Once they assume that the Bard had little formal education, many orthodox Shakespeare scholars underestimate Shakepeare's learning and assume that a degree in literature somehow makes them Shakespeare's betters in matters such as, of all things, sixteenth-century Italian geography where it actually turns out that Shakespeare is the master.) Students are misleadingly told that they should readily understand Shakespeare because he wrote in ordinary language, aside from archaic words and grammatical constructions (as if these were not formidable enough). This is belied by the demonstrable fact that Shakespeare employed abstruse legalistic metaphors, used idiomatic Italian phrases (that he only partially translated) and demonstrated arcane knowledge of such subjects as heraldry. This and much more is explained in Sobran's book.

My only criticism of Sobran is that he gets so caught up in his persuasive case for the candidacy of the Earl of Oxford (which understandably persuades him) that he leans too far toward assuming Oxford's authorship to be a proven fact. In this, Sobran is like other participants in the authorship controversy. The authorship debate is a good example of my maxim that wherever there are only two sides to an argument both are usually wrong. Just because there is reason to doubt that Will Shaksper authored the plays and poems does not prove that he did not, and just because a case can be made that someone else might have written them does not prove that he or she did. The anti-Stratfordians are correct to point out that the biography of the traditional candidate does not fit the apparent biography of the author of the Works, and the Stratfordians are right to point out that the anti-Stratfordians cannot prove that one of their alternative candidates is the true author. Part of the argument of each side is correct, but neither side is free of error.

That being said, Sobran's contribution to the anti-Stratfordian cause is extremely readable and thought-provoking. He sums up the best evidence as it stands. If the average reader ought to read only one book by an anti-Strat, this is the one.

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Summary: Great place to start on The Question
Review: The numerous anagrams, synonyms, and puns on the name Vere that appear in Sonnet #76 should suffice to convince any reasonable person of the true identity of Shakespeare.

The pseudonym itself, "Will Shakespeare," is an obvious joke, and a fitting emblem of defiance in anti-Catholic Elizabethan England. If the world's greatest dramatist had passed himself off as "Flip Finger," or "Will Flipfinger," would anyone be so stupid as to believe that to be his real name?

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Summary: Another Oxfordian Dirge
Review: The very premise of this book should make anyone do a double-take: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, moneymaking boor, and mediocre versifier, was actually the late, great William Shakespeare. For this there is no believable evidence, despite all of the author's incessant babbling and paper-thin research. His only true intention is to attribute the Shakespearean canon to an unremarkable, grammatically-challenged noblemen rather than that "illiterate bumpkin" from Stratford-upon-Avon, who, it should be mentioned, has ALL the evidence in his favor. That "illiterate bumpkin" had a monument dedicated to him, bequeathed money to the actors of the Globe Theatre (including the two, Heminges and Condell, who edited the First Folio), was the subject of numerous contemporary poetic tributes (including one by fellow writer William Basse that clearly reads: "William Shakespeare, he died in April 1616" ) and was a close friend of Stratforder Richard Field, the publisher of both "Venus and Adonis" and the "Rape of Lucrece." If you are interested in fairy tales and fantasies, read doggerel such as "Alias Shakespeare" and continue to believe that men of non-noble birth cannot be geniuses; if you are interested in reality, read books such as Irvin Matus' "Shakespeare, In Fact" and Alan H. Nelson's "Monstrous Adversary."

Few things display the human proneness to madness quite like Oxfordianism. Peddled by otherwise intelligent people, it is more akin to a fervent religion than a rock-hard science: its firmest roots are distortion, mangled evidence, and, as critic Harold Bloom has previously stated, a none-too-concealed jealousy directed at William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Surely, they ask, Shakespeare's works are the products of a "learned" noblemen and world traveller and not some "third-rate," "illiterate," "dumb," "greedy," and "vulgar" play-actor from a country town? My answer, much like the one any logical person can glean from the historical record (not the pseudo-history concocted by Oxfordians), is a resounding 'no.'

To reach a better understanding of Oxford's candidacy, one needs to examine his life objectively and free of Shakespearean trappings, unlike the methods utilized by hagiographers Charlton Ogburn, B.M. Ward, Daniel Wright, and the author at hand, Mr. Joseph Sobran. Since it is this man's life that Oxfordians find so closely "connected" to Shakespeare's works, a thorough examination thereof, rather than a blind canonization, is in order. The final results, as I shall demonstrate, reveal a misogynistic man of slight learning who was invariably consumed with moneymaking schemes, not imaginative writing and attentive reading. Like any good fairy-tale, Oxfordianism has conveniently buried the true details of the Earl's life and replaced them with outrageous fictions (including Streitz' insane claim that he was the son of Elizabeth I). Oxfordians, it should be noted, are the grand champions of out-of-contex musings, all with the intention of inflating the image of their weak candidate, including their oh-so-clever clipping of George Puttenham's list of Elizabethan dramatists, which, while mentioning Oxford as "the best for comedy among us" (along with a host of other obscure and average writers) goes on to mention, in a more prestigious category, an entirely separate author named Shakespeare, who Puttenham calls the best for both tragedy AND comedy. They also like to neglect all the listings of Shakespeare's name in poetic registries, all of which call him both "master" and "gentleman" (both middle-class titles).

Oxenforde (the name under which de Vere signed his letters) was, as one scholar has already said, "born great, had more greatness thrust upon him, and achieved obscurity." He was extremely wealthy, he was the son-in-law of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and he enjoyed a life of high privilege. Such characteristics are often utilized by Oxfordians to peg him as the man Shakespeare "should have been," never mind the vast evidence to the contrary. Throughout his 54 years, Oxford was perennially unpopular--he quarreled with the polymath Sir Philip Sidney, abused Italian teenagers, and pestered both Burghley and Queen Elizabeth for an endless string of noble offices. Thus, it seems that he is not the glowing, admirable "genius" constructed via Oxfordian fantasy, nor is it likely that he is the incredibly empathetic mind behind Shakespeare's work (it is worth noting that no one crafted a believable heroine quite like the Bard--yet if one reads Oxford's own "Sitting Alone in My Thought In Melancholy Mood," he/she will find that the Earl's portrayal of women falls shorts of Shakespeare's). Likewise, his poetry is wildly uneven, often unreadable, and dum-dee-dum in an undeniably commonplace way. Sure, Oxfordians have spliced them with the Sonnets to exhibit "similarities"--such absurd methods do not qualify as research, and could be just as easily used to "prove" that Coleridge wrote the Wordsworthian canon or that Francis Bacon authored "Don Quixote."

It is true that virtue does not need to coincide with genius--was Oxford actually a disgruntled Earl who vented his frustration with the world via Shakespeare's tragedies (namely, Hamlet)? Again, the answer is no. As vigorous biographers such as Nelson have shown, Oxford's life is not the mirror of Hamlet, as so many Oxfordians like to believe. He was on amicable terms with stepfather Charles Tyrrel (the Oxfordian model for murderous Claudius), was literally begged by Burghley to marry daughter Anne (Oxfordians like to think that the mild-mannered Burghley is the model for the conniving Polonius--yet remember that Polonius never invited Hamlet to wed Ophelia, rather he did quite the contrary), and so on. As David Kathman has said before, one can find Shakespearean parallels in the life of any Elizabethan man or woman, and Oxford's merit no special attention--his father, unlike Hamlet Sr., died of natural causes, and none of his general parallels match those of either King James I or the Earl of Essex, both of whom had fathers who died via poisoning. Also, in regard to the supposed autobiography in Shakespeare, remember authors such as Rudyard Kipling and Stephen Crane, both of whom wrote strikingly of war and military affairs; according to Oxfordian methodology, they would have to have been soldiers, yet neither served a single day.

Likewise, Shakespeare lived over 200 years before Romantic poet William Wordsworth would define poetry as "the recollection of emotion in moments of tranquility"--before then, literature was seldom overtly autobiographical. Shakespeare's works, like so many others of his era, are constructed upon ancient tales, many of them not original to the Bard (Hamlet has a history, documented by Saxon Grammaticus, the "Histories Tragiques" and Thomas Kyd, that precedes Shakespeare by decades). Even the bed-trick in "All's Well that Ends Well" is a Medieval creation, referenced in countless other dramas, and not unique to Oxford's life. And even if the plays and sonnets were autobiographical, there exist no clear parallel with Oxford, and the shadowy nature of William of Stratford's life doesn't eliminate him from being the alleged autobiographer (one sonnet, the only one written in eight-syllable lines, includes the words "hate away," which, according to a host of vigorous scholarship, is almost certainly a pun on the Warwickshire pronunciation of Anne Hathaway's surname). The Sonnets' dedication describing "our ever-living poet," often found so significant by Oxfordians, is a religious term used only to describe God, not a man, and thus it is likely that the poems are dedicated to the Lord Almighty--similarly, the mysterious "Mr. W.H." is thought by many scholars to have not even been a real person, and certainly not the Earl of Southampton (who is the subject of many strained Oxfordian connections and fantasies).

Any Oxfordian ought to take a few hours one day and peruse Oxford's copious body of letters, none of which, it should be said, mention a literary life, a marked interest in the theater, or a pseudonym remarkably similar to the name of a middle-class London player. He never mentions an interest in learning or in further travels to Italy, a nation he said, in a letter dated 24 Sept 1575, that he would never care to see again, a far cry from Shakespeare's passionate love for that peninsula. Furthermore, Shakespeare often made glaring geographic errors when describing the continent, calling Bohemia a coastal nation and several landlocked Italian cities "seaports." A supposedly exuberant traveller like Oxford could have made no such mistakes. The Oxfordian claims that Shakespeare must have toured the world--and in the unlikely even that this claim has merit, there is no evidence that William of Stratford didn't travel--perfectly coincide with their dour image of Shakespeare as a man of knowledge rather than of imagination. Many authors, including Ben Jonson, were more erudite that Shakespeare, yet they never matched his imaginative prowess, which, as everyone knows, is the sole reason he endures in our hearts even until the present day.

Rather, Oxford's letters concentrate on such unremarkable and unliterary things such as tin-mining (yes, you didn't misread that): he was virtually consumed with this affair throughout the 1590s, the time period in which Shakespeare supposedly penned some of his greatest works (it is perhaps worth noting that Shakespeare, in his vast 25,000 word vocabulary, found absolutely no room for the word "tin," which appears not once in the entire canon...what say you, you peddlers of Oxford's-autobiography-is-in Shakespeare?). Oxford was always lobbying for some new promotion or financial gift--it seems that he was the actual "money grubber" that Oxfordians so often call William of Stratford-upon-Avon. Furthermore, Oxford's letters exhibit a deficient literary skill--he is a rather clumsy speller, he misquotes all legal Latin (even adding 'y' to the Latin alphabet), and he is swamped with a thick Eastern dialect (Shakespeare's work are written in crisp, London English with a hint of Yorkish). For a supposedly trained lawyer, he doesn't know how to spell either "suit" or "attorney" and rarely drops any phrase that could be called even remotely Shakespearean (the only one Oxfordians can find is the mundane "I am that I am," a rather popular passage available to anyone with a copy of that rare book called the Bible).

The Earl's education--often cited by Oxfordians as being unparalleled and of remarkable quality--is deficient. The only college he attended was Queen's College at Cambridge, at the tender age of 8, and he soon dropped out, having never attained a B.A. He later received degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, both of which were honorary and awarded to him as a member of Elizabeth's entourage, which frequented the nation's universities. His law education is similarly weak--a mere three years at Gray's Inn, no law book purchases, and no cases. Couple all this with William of Stratford's almost-certain attendance at the King's New School in Stratford (a rigorous, classically-oriented institution within walking distance of his house, offering free attendance thanks to John Shakespeare, William's father, who was the town Bailiff...17th century documenter Nicholas Rowe says Shakespeare was "bred at a free school") and the supposed disparity between the two men's education is suddenly not so great. Anyway, genius cannot be simply learned--writers such as Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes never received college degrees, and yet their genius far supercedes that of any Harvard or Oxford graduate.

Oxford's early death alone eliminates him as a possible Shakespearean candidate. He died in 1604, before 14 of Shakespeare's plays were even written. Oxfordians casually dismiss this by redating the plays according to their own whims, not to any tangible evidence; they fail to account for the Jacobean flavor of the later dramas, the influence of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot on "Macbeth," the influence of Richard Strachey upon "The Tempest," and the collaborations with Jacobean playwright John Fletcher on "Henry VIII." One reviewer says that Oxford had an "unparalled, creative body of work," a rather abrasive hyperbole for a man who wrote a mere 368 lines of mediocre lyric poetry (including the laughable "Were I King," parodied by Sir Philip Sidney for its shortcomings and more lazy alliteration that one can shake a spear, er, stick, at). But this hasn't stopped Oxfordians from attaching, with not a shade of evidence or sensibility, the Earl's name not only to the works of Shakespeare, but also those of Marlowe, Lyly, Greene, Golding, Kyd, and others. The madness, once ignited, cannot be quenched, and yet I know that I'm preaching to the Oxford-choir, people who honestly believe that the universal dramas of the Bard "have a cosmopolitan flavor" and an intimate knowledge of court-life, never mind the remarks of 17th century poet John Dryden, who said that he can find no evidence that "Shakespeare was ever conversant in a court."

Oxfordians love to say that orthodox scholars are corrupting our "appreciation" of Shakespeare, as if instituting the chequered and very un-literary Oxford as the author would open new doors in that regard. The parallels everyone claims to find to the Earl's life are myths, concocted by those who have already made-up their minds and are thus reading with the sole intention of bolstering his case. If anything, the mystery and mystique of the true Shakespeare would be lost with Oxford wrongfully placed as the author.

Oxfordians love to ridicule William Shakespeare of Stratford as an unlettered "grain merchant" incapable of writing immortal dramas, an ad-hominem claims backed by absolutely no substance. Yet Oxford's life speaks for itself: he was no Shakespeare, and his "case" has been inflated and cobbled together by amateur historians and susceptible readers. This is unsurprising to anyone who has dedicated serious time to the authorship debate--Oxfordianism is, by definition, one of the world's most visible (and deconstructible) paper tigers, bullet-proof on the surface but all mush underneath. As so many scholars (including Irvin Matus, David Kathman, Alan Nelson, and others) have demonstrated, Oxford was not, is not, and never will be a Shakespearean polymath, he has no connection to the Bard's works, and he is not much more that an unremarkable nobleman. Oxfordians do not love Shakespeare--they love pipe-dream fantasies and elaborate vendettas directed at the canon's true author. Nothing proves that William Shakespeare DIDN'T write his own works--yet everything, preeminently the Stratford Monument, his will, the First Folio, the dating of the works, and the poetic tributes proves that he DID write them--, and as such I'm much inclined to agree with the establishment in discarding Oxford's rather weak candidacy on the primary basis of his life.


Rating:
Summary: A Compelling Case
Review: This is a fascinating book that makes an very solid case for Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford, as the true author of Shakespeare's works. Sobran breaks down all the myth and reverential pseudo-biography that exists around Shakespeare into a list of known facts. There is a temptation to bill anyone who questions the authorship of the man from Stratford as a member of the lunatic fringe, however Sobran is a careful journalist. He uses documented evidence to build a case against the curiously personality-less figure of the historic William Shakespeare being the author of such works. He convinced me, on literary and sociological grounds, that it was far more likely that Oxford is the author of the works. Fascinating and easy to read.