Counter Oxfordianism: Part II, Revenge of the Bard
A Piece of My Correspondence with the Great Man
What I think of the "Stratford deniers" (my apologies if I used this loaded term) is that they suffer from a sort of presentism themselves: Shakespeare seems more educated than he, in fact, was simply because some aspects of the standard grammar school curriculum of his time involve reading that only a classics major would do today; reading Ovid in 1580 was tantamount to reading "A Seperate Peace" now or the novels of David Fennimore Cooper when I was in school; knowledge of these rather tired books will likely be seen as signs of erudition in later generations once some “masterpiece” embodying the transexual experience, maybe Stone Butch Blues, overtakes them.
I think they underestimate how educational the experience of the Elizabethan theatre itself was. If you are being exposed to the works of Marlowe, Peele, and Thomas Kyd, you are likely learning from them as much as Yale English majors of the 1950’s did---there is no reason to think their educational value was lower for contemporaries than it is for people now, esp. if those contemporaries worked alongside them as an actor and later as a writer. In fact, if we esteemed John Webster as much as we do Shakespeare (and the Duchess of Malfi really is a fine play that is certainly superior to Shakespeare’s lesser works like Titus Andronicus)
You seem to be pushing me, with the "glove doesn't fit" line, to give you a more general argument regarding just how Shakespeare had sufficient education to write those plays and likely did---and to stop giving you arguments involving dates, likely collaborators, etc. I could retort that it seems the Oxfordians don't have blood splatter or DNA for their candidate either.
I will attempt to prove to you how “an ignorant actor” could have written those masterpieces and that the earl, if anything, was too educated to have done so. It pains me to argue about the limitations of the genius whom I love and admire so much, but if called upon to do so I will. In addition to being taught to “focus on the text” as modern literary critics of the non-Marxist sort are, I think this is the reason so many arguments you have with Stratfordians don’t focus on the general question of Shakespeare’s education. We do not want to focus on the fragilities of the man who produced the works we love.
But before I turn to that, the Oxfordians have a very difficult question to answer: We do not have any extant copies of the earl’s plays, but we have sources that refer to plays he wrote under his own name: Indeed, a work called the Palladis Tamia ranks the playwrights of the time. It refers to De Vere as “the foremost in comedy.” So, why did Oxford forsake taking credit for the tragedies, the histories (filled with ass kissing he would certainly want the queen to know came from him), and the comedies attributed to Shakespeare but allow himself to be known as a writer of other comedies. The gig was up. The secret out. Why pay for a rent boy and let him take credit for your best works---while keeping the credit for your lesser works.
In fact, the earl’s poems appeared in The Paradise of Dainty Devises. Oxfordians can use the highly erotic subject material in Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, as well as the biographical detail in some of the sonnets, to explain why those poem’s might be published under a pen name, but there are plenty of sonnets that do not discuss forbidden or personally revealing topics. The earl should have been as happy to see them published as he was those that showed up in The Paradise of Dainty Devises (Or the Phoenix’s Nest or England’s Helicon).
The key source of the Oxfordian contention is that the plays demonstrate learning the simple playwright could not have possessed. Well, putting that point aside for now, one thing that is certain is that they contain mistakes the earl never would have made.
Let’s consider this litany of mistakes:
1. In a Winter’s Tale, the play describes Bohemia as having a coastline. It does not.
2. Elsinore does not have cliffs.
3. The timing of the journey in Hamlet is about half as long as it should be.
4. He shows nobles wearing red and white roses long before that form of political signification came into being.
5. Shakespeare mentions turkeys in Henry VI. As you know, turkeys are a new world animal. Unlike the famous clock anachronism in Julius Caesar, this is a mistake that cannot be given a poetic justification. Oxford certainly knew that turkeys were new world birds.
6. There are references to Machiavelli in Henry VI. Obviously, Oxford would have understood that Machiavelli was two or three years old when Henry VI died. The Prince was being privately distributed in 1513, but it was not printed until 1532: The first copies quite likely being brought to England in 1540 by Thomas Cromwell after his visit to Italy.
7. In Coriolanus, he describes Delphi as an island when it is not.
8. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine talks about getting to Milan by ship. As you and I both know, that beautiful city is not accessible by ship. The earl was a talented jouster who travelled throughout France and Italy and almost certainly visited Milan. He could not have made this mistake. Perhaps turkeys in Henry VI’s time can be defended as artistic license, though it seems chicken would work just as well in the scene, but what poetic meaning could be attached to this geographical incompetence?