I am writing in responce to Marie Muirhead Escher’s comments on my article on remembering Dr. Pope. I am so pleased she enjoyed it. I think I know what what Libby would say to the speculation that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. First there would be that heavy breathing sound she made when she was moved. Then there would be the “Ffft,” sound. Then she would fix you with her gimlet eyes, eyes like basilisks when she had a point to make. And then, the argument.
First, the question of Shakespeare’s authorship never arose until nearly two hundred and fifty years after his death, and it came from the belief that no low-born son of a glover could have had the genius to write all those plays. Shakespeare must have been a gentleman, and not only a gentleman, but the most brilliant man at Queen Elizabeth’s Court, Sir Francis Bacon. Not only that, but Francis Bacon would have to have had the most brilliant parents of his age, and thus Francis Bacon was the secret bastard son of Sir Francis Walsingham (Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster) and Queen Elizabeth herself, and that’s how he could have written all those plays. That was the first proposal for alternative authorship. And so the game began.
There is a towering problem with the claim that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and that is that he died in 1604, before Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and possibly Measure for Measure, Othello, and All’s Well that End’s Well.
Another problem is Edward de Vere himself; a drunkard, a wastrel, a brawler, a pedophile, and an incompetent. Queen Elizabeth I ran the oligarchy that was Tudor Britain using the gentlemen and nobility of her court as her administrators. The lords of her court had posts. Edward de Vere is the only nobleman of her court to whom she never gave a job (however many times he begged for one). In fact, she ended up imprisoning him in the Tower, or placing him under house arrest, or exiling him from court, numerous times for various offenses. On the other hand, he was good at jousting. On the other, other hand, he succeeded in dissipating his entire inheritance. No one knows how he managed that: there’s no indication of what he spent the money on. My guess is he was being blackmailed, as homosexuality was a capital crime in those days. (There are two official accusations of sexual abuse made against him by male teen-aged servants in his household).
De Vere was praised as a poet and playwright by sycophants writing dedications to him, but there is no evidence that he ever wrote a play. He is credited with authoring 15 poems in seventeen years, between 1573, when he was 23, and 1593, when he was 40. Shakespeare wrote two or three plays a year for twenty-five years, from 1588, when he was 24, to 1613, when he was 49, which means he was working on them all the time. Every time one of his plays was produced, the company made more money. He was highly motivated to work that hard. As a shareholder, his theater company made him rich, and he retired to Stratford on Avon the second richest man in town.
Edward de Vere’s poems are about eighteen lines long. Shakespeare’s plays are between two and three thousand lines long. The plot, the scenes, the characters, the story arc, the climax, the tension level of every moment of stage time, has to work, for the play to succeed before an audience. Making all this come out right thirty-six times, represents the kind of skill, craft, and unremitting hard work which Shakespeare exhibited all his life, and of which Edward de Vere was demonstrably incapable.
If you have any doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship, go to the First Folio. These days, you can read it online. The First Folio is the collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published by his friends Henry Condell and John Hemmings, in 1623, at their own expense. Note, first of all, that in the list of players for their company, they put Shakespeare’s name first, even above that of Richard Burbage. They esteemed him as an actor. Then, read their letter, “To the Great Variety of Readers Reader.” See if you can read this letter, (excerpted here) and be left with any doubt as to the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays:
“It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to haue bene wished, that the Author himselfe had liu’d to haue set forth, and ouerseen his owne writings; But since it hath bin ordain’d otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to haue collected & publish’d them; and so to haue publish’d them, as where (before) you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters, that expos’d them: euen those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued them. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our prouince, who onely gather his works, and giue them you, to praise him. It is yours that reade him. and there we hope, to your diuers capacities, you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no more lie hid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: and if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him. And so we leaue you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you neede them not, you can leade your selues, and others, and such Readers we wish him.”
There are innumerable primary sources for Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays, this being one of them. There is no direct primary source evidence for any other authorship. The alternate-authorship speculation was born of classist bigotry. Maligning Shakespeare first for his birth, and now for the fun of it, is a way for some people to come to terms with genius. But genius comes from the work. It isn’t the idea, but the execution, that proves its worth.