An introduction to the Shakespeare Authorship Question, and to the Oxfordian theory that "Shakespeare" was the a pen name of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
I am an Oxfordian ...raised in Castle Hedingham and lived in the lodge to the Castle for a few years! No doubt in my mind that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare...a true master of his craft. :) Great to listen to your chat...thank you guys x
I think you're right. But I think Shakes-speares was a cabal of writers. De Vere, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon all edited each other's work and so many Shakespeare plays have touches of these authors in them. I think since it was beneath their rank to write these plays so they lucked out and found an actual man named William Shaksper and he agreed to pretend to be the author to protect the real writers. Cause the plays are about what was happening in the royal court. Almost tabloids. Which could have caused major problems for Bacon, De Vere, Marlowe, and Jonson; the writers behind the nom de plume Shakes-speares.
This is great. I have my students write a research paper backing Stratfordian/Oxfordian/Bacon etc. every year so I am familiar with a lot of this, but your presentation makes things so clear. Saving it to use next year.
Hi Steve, so glad to hear that you use the authorship question as part of your pedagogy. This site may also be interesting to you: www.shake-speares-bible.com
this has now been settled by Alexander Waugh. I'm no pretender, I just learned about this recently. Waugh's work is beyond definitive. He visually clarifies the coding that De Vere used in his works. Waugh's work is staggering and leaves the lay viewer (like myself) both in awe and overwhelmingly convinced. One leaves as certain that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare as I am now certain that Billy Shears is still playing his "role" of Paul McCartney. #SageOfQuay #2Fer
While I do agree Alexander has an incredible spiel and I agree with most of what he says after watching him many many times he does take certain things for granted as in just States things without proof "this is how they did that in those days, this was common then" type of stuff at times but I love the way he speaks with such authority also the ideas that he does not just blatantly state as true are typically borrowed from either previous oxfordians or actually some of his stuff is very similar to some baconian works especially the parallels to John D again I love the guy and he got me fired up about this stuff but I think Hank whitmore is dead on the nose and his theory is somewhat original when you read the sonnets as a father to son love rather than homosexual sorry LGBTQ 🤷) it's extremely beautiful especially considering the circumstance of the young nobleman trapped in the tower as his father sentences him to death but pleads with his mother for his life crazy better than any Shakespeare play.... As always just IMHO
Waugh is just making it up. Everything he "decodes" requires his added context. Try fact checking some of them sometime, but don't bother asking Waugh. He won't cite his sources.
@@njuham It's not just his symbolism. It's all of the context he adds to make his codes work. He shows an old engraving of an obviously 15th Century tomb which has 17 of something on it and declares that it was Edward De Vere's, despite it being recorded that the impoverished De Vere was buried in the churchyard. The engraving has been closely cropped in order to delete any label which would tell us whose sarcophagus it really was. He won't tell you where he got the engraving. He spends a lot of time on the "Fourth Cross" which he says is well known as St. Peter's cross. Aside from St. Peter's cross never before being known as the "fourth cross", St. Peter was crucified upside down. That one about John Gerarde Knew? Literally everything Waugh claims about the title page of Gerarde's 1597 Herball is made up and demonstrably wrong. I could go on all day about the things Waugh just makes up, but I'm guessing you don't care, so long as you like his conclusion.
I can’t say this made me an oxfordian but I enjoyed it a lot, you two have a fun dynamic and I’d love to hear more from you about de vere and the elizabethan era in general.
Look up Alexander Waugh and I can't remember the other guys last name but his name is Hank he has a great tutor Prince theory paper and website look for his 100 reasons DeVere was Shakespeare) they have amazing stuff it'll blow your mind.... IMHO anyways
Excellent job. I look forward to your take on "Shakespeare's" early retirement and the fact that 18 of the plays weren't published until 7 yrs after his death in 1616. That is a favorite Stratfordian argument as to why Vere couldn't have been Shakespeare since Othello, King Lear, Macbeth , and Antony and Cleopatra were published after his death in 1604.
Thanks Thea! I think the issue is not so much that some plays were published after the author's death (this would be the case for both de Vere and William of Stratford) but that Stratfordians argue that some of the plays had to have been written after the date of de Vere's death. I have no special knowledge about the dating of the plays, but I think the best Oxfordian website on this topic is: datingshakespeare.co.uk/ It's got a pdf file for each play, with information relevant as to when it might've been written, things like source materials, references in the plays, and performance dates. In many cases they argue that the plays were probably written much earlier than the Stratfordian interpretations argue for.
There is plenty of evidence that these plays were in existence before 1623, including Stationer's entries, performances, allusions to current events, etc. There are none of those things to date any of them to before 1604.
John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage, three actors of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, a famous acting company that included William Shakespeare, were given money by William Shakespeare of Stratford in his Last Will and Testament in 1616. Two of these actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were responsible for having 36 of Shakespeare's plays published in the First Folio in 1623. Ben Jonson's eulogy in the First Folio clearly praises Shakespeare as a great writer. He states that "thy writings to be such, /As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much." Heminges and Condell also praise Shakespeare as a writer, stating that "he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him." These are "his works" and "his papers" that they are publishing. He is clearly presented as the writer of these works in the First Folio. The Last Will and Testament of William Shakespeare of Stratford clearly connects him with the 1623 First Folio through Heminges and Condell and it is clear that Shakespeare is presented as the author of the plays.
Nearly all authorship skeptics believe that William of Stratford was associated associated with the Lord Chamberlain's Men / Kings Men, Burbage, Heminges, Condell. I think it's unanimous among authorship skeptics that the front matter in the First Folio presents William of Stratford, on a surface reading at least, as the author of the plays, and Heminges and Condell as organizing the publication. They interpret these facts differently than you do
I understand the clause you're referring to in Shakspere's will was wriien in between the lines at a later undetermined date with another hand than the will proper.
@@avlasting3507 It was, along with the one for his second-best bed to his wife and a couple of other bequests. As he was well documented as being a fellow of the King’s Men, a bequest to the three surviving members was perfectly reasonable. The bequest for money to buy memorial rings shows up in the probate copy made two months later, in any event.
A woman living in stratford was interviewed and when asked about de vere said if de vere was shakespeare then it would ruin tourism in stratford. No doubt she's right.
Shakespeare refers to the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth. He mentions "equivocation" and "equivocator" and this refers to the Catholic Priest Henry Garnet who was associated with the plot. There are also other allusions to the plot in the play. The date of the Gunpowder Plot was November 5, 1605. Therefore, the play Macbeth must have been completed after this date and most likely finished in mid to late 1606. Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, died on June 24, 1604, which obviously makes it impossible for him to have written the play Macbeth which has been attributed to Shakespeare and later published in the 1623 First Folio. It is difficult to write a play after you have died and there is obviously no way for Edward to have known of the Gunpowder Plot and the trial of Henry Garnet before his death.
Oxfordians are of course aware of this argument - I'd say it's the most common argument that is raised about the dating of plays, along with William Strachey's letter and The Tempest Oxfordians argue that the Jesuit use of the Doctrine of Equivocation was topical in trials of Jesuits prior to Henry Garnet in 1606 - the primary examples being Edmund Campion in 1581 and Robert Southwell in 1595. The doctrine of equivocation was brought into prominence in the 1560s by Martin d'Azpilcueta, Professor of Canon Law at the University of Valladolid, and formally laid out by him in 1584. ---- From Gilvary's "Dating Shakespeare's Plays": "Following Elizabeth’s excommunication in 1570, the presence of the Jesuits in England gradually increased, resulting in an Act of Parliament in 1585 banishing all Jesuits. Jonsen & Toulimin note that 183 catholics were executed under Elizabeth, including 123 priests. Of these, the Jesuit priests, Edmund Campion (executed in 1581) and Robert Southwell (executed in 1595), were the most prominent. Campion was accused of using “verbal equivocation” among other means to gain access to people all over England, as reported by the contemporary pamphleteer, Anthony Munday, in A Discoverie of Edmund Campion, and his complices. Similarly, Robert Southwell used equivocation at his trial in 1595. After his execution, a pamphlet circulated anonymously, entitled A Treatise of Equivocationn(probably written by Henry Garnet)." The anonymous "A Treatise of Equivocation" was quoted in part by Robert Southwell in his trial, and was in circulation during the 1590s. Robert Parson printed a defense of equivocation in 1602, " A Treatise tending to Mitigation towards the Catholike Subjects in England." "The best printed defense of equivocation is that published by Robert Parsons, S.J., in 1602, and again in 1607; its title, A Treatise tending to Mitigation towards the Catholike Subjects in England" ... Parsons begins the second part, on equivocation, by distinguishing between equivocation and lying..." (Huntley, "Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation") (I couldn't find a copy of the 1602 edition of Parsons to verify that the earlier edition of the text uses the word equivocation, but Huntley's article seems to suggest it.) ------ I think one of the most interesting discussions of Jesuits and equivocation is Thomas Bell's "The Anatomie of Popish Tyrannie" (1603). It contains a reference to Jesuits as "porters." In the preface Bell mentions he had finished the book in October 1602. Bell "wrote it to warn against Jesuit plots against Queen Elizabeth. But he reminded his readers that the Jesuits had already tried to remove James from the Scottish throne, indicating that his book was also relevant to England’s new king. He said the Jesuits’ profession “is linked inseparably with treason”. He refers repeatedly to “equivocation” in connection with Jesuit duplicity, linking it with their treasonous plots against the throne." (Waugaman, “A 1603 Source for ‘Equivocation’ as an Alleged Gunpowder Plot Allusion in Macbeth) The book was published well before the gunpowder plot, and contains over 700 mentions of Jesuits, and 21 references to equivocation. The interesting passage about Jesuits as porters: "Of these Jesuites some bee Priestes, and some lay-brothers; which lay-brothers make also the said triplevow, & thereupon they are called religious fathers, though they be but porters or doore keepers..." ----- Whoever wrote the Shakepeare plays, he obviously had the concept of equivocation in mind before the Gunpowder Plot, as evidenced by the second quarto of Hamlet (1604): "We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us” ----- "Look like th’ innocent flower, But be the serpent under ’t." Macbeth "You, picking flowers and strawberries that grow So near the ground, fly hence, boys, get you gone! There's a cold adder lurking in the grass." Virgil, Eclogues "And remember that the serpents hidden lie, where grass and flowers are hie" John Florio, "Second Fruits", 1591
DEBUNKED : another alleged allusion of the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth It is claimed by Stratfordians that Shakespeare references a Medal that King James had minted to celebrate his escape from the Gunpowder Plot. They point to this line which seems to describe the Medal: "Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it." But it turns out that Shakespeare had used the same imagery years earlier in Romeo & Juliet. Juliet O God, did Romeo's hand shed Tybalt's blood? Nurse It did, it did, alas the day, it did! Juliet O serpent heart hid with a flow'ring face! The line from R&J is far more beautiful than the line from Macbeth, arguing that Macbeth is actually far older than Romeo & Juliet. Oxfordians date the play to the 1570s.
What about John Florio who gave Shak-sper all his information and details and Italian and Latin about Italy and Sicily? Doesn’t that prove that the man from Stratford had access to all of this information even though he didn’t know how to read or even though he didn’t have access to any books? What he did is go down to the pub and talk to the world travelers, maybe buy them drinks and ply them for ideas, so he could write his plays and sonnets? And Florio may have even written some of those plays?
I think John Florio is an important figure to study as part of understanding Shakespeare and dealing with the authorship. I also think it's important for people to develop theories as to how John Florio contributed to and influenced the Shakespeare plays and poems. I think it's possible that, if William from Stratford was the author of these plays and poems, that John Florio could've been a conduit for a lot of information relating to languages and literary sources that informed the Shakespeare works. I also think that if another of the authorship candidates was the actual author of the works, John Florio could well have interacted with and influenced that person. There are other aspects of the case for de Vere that, unrelated to education and travel, that I think have to be considered. For example, his connections to important source texts like Golding's Metamorphosis, Castiglione's The Courtier, Cardano's Consolations, the works of John Lyly and Thomas Nashe, etc. Also events of the 18th C., such as George Vertue incorporating an image of de Vere for Alexander Pope's edition of the Shakespeare plays, or details about the Westminster monument to Shakespeare, erected in 1740. Ultimately, I think it pays to look deeply into the cases for all the major candidates: traditional, academic Shakespeare scholarship, the cases for Oxford, Bacon, Marlowe, Mary Sidney, Thomas North, etc., as well as that of John Florio's involvement.
I'm nearly convinced...especially with the sonnets...after confronting Alexander Waugh's work on the codes contained in the first printing; but I do think that there must have been other authors behind the curtain in the plays. Bacon for sure . The problem for me is Macbeth; unlike most of the plays this can be pinned down to a particular moment in time. Oxford died in 1604 shortly after James VI of Scotland became King James I of England. This play, supposedly premiered in 1606, apart from its Scottish subject matter, has undoubted references to the new king's' fixation with Scottish witchcraft. Hard to explain this as coming from Oxford's pen?
The cover also has a conspicuous blank space where the writer's name should be. The name of the writer is hidden in the phrase Never Before Imprinted which sits above the blank space. Never Before Imprinted = Be In Print For M. E De Vere
You're talking about the Title Page of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS -- not the 1st Folio. You're right about the title not having an apostrophe, but wrong in the spelling of the name: it has that final '-e'.
@vetstadiumastroturf5756 I can do you one better. I went to Early English Books Online and found every example. Of course I was also looking for "Neuer before Imprinted" because that's what was on The Sonnets. There were many. Stev-o even agreed that if I could show that it was a common formulation, it could not possibly have been an intentional anagram, and he would retract the claim. You know how that turned out.
Saw another great presentation that intimates his annuity may have something to do with his association with Francis Walsingham and his Office of Propaganda as part of Elizabeth’s Secret Service?
Yet his grant says specifically that he needs to do nothing in order to get his welfare payment, and that it's ongoing until he can be "otherwise provided for."
@@Jeffhowardmeade It says he'll receive the annuity "until such time as he shall be by us otherwise provided for to be in some manner relieved" I don't think the warrant necessarily reads as charity for a down & out Earl... not sure Elizabeth tended to hand out monetary aid to nobles in financial trouble... could just as well be read that Oxford had incurred expenses for some service to the crown, and those debts are being recompensed with the annuity, until such time they'd be relieved in some other manner (like being granted a monopoly) The warrant refers to de Vere as "our right trusty and right well-beloved cousin," implying he'd been faithful to the crown in some capacity... Where does it say specifically that he needs to do nothing in order to get the payment?
@@sixdaystheatre "relieved" means charity. Until recently, the dole was referred to as "poor relief". Coming as this did on the heel of De Vere's well-documented profligate spending, admonishment by the queen about it, and his financial ruin, I don't see how anyone can view this as some sort of payment for service. It is structured to prevent him from selling it off as he might an annuity, and which anyone knowing his history would reasonably expect him to do, and it says he needs to do nothing to get it. It just couldn't be any clearer if it tried. As Lord Great Chamberlain, De Vere had ceremonial duties, and Elizabeth couldn't exactly have the preeminent earl showing up in pauper's weeds. There's no question that De Vere was a court favorite in his youth, but his profligacy and his numerous offenses stripped him of that favor. I can't imagine his welfare charter would have referred to him as "trusty" had it been drafted after De Vere refused to serve during the Armada. Being "trusty" didn't get him into the Order of the Garter. Between his known poetry and his defective personal characteristics, I can't understand how anyone could pick Edward De Vere for the "real Shakespeare". At least Marlowe was a demonstrably good poet and Bacon was an accomplished person. De Vere? Aside from some jousting and dancing chops, he was generally a failure of a man.
@@sixdaystheatre I don't have the exact text of the welfare grant in front of me. Why don't you guys have a De Vere Documented site like Shakespeare has?
As I've looked through the cases of Oxfordians, Stratfordians, Baconians, and the cases for Thomas North, Henry Neville, John Florio, Mary Sidney, group theorists, etc. - one thing that's clear is that almost everyone is sure of their candidate. People who think their case is obvious are a dime-a-dozen. Some of the researchers I respect most in this field are the ones who can spend years immersing themselves in the question, and yet still hold room for doubts about their own theories. I don't really trust the judgment of people who have no doubts about their own theory, who can't recognize any room for uncertainty. They're not thinking carefully enough about the issue. To me, how sure someone is of their theory, how obvious it seems to them, is kind of irrelevant. It's about how well they can marshal evidence for their arguments, and how well they can deal with the arguments that critique & contradict their own theories.
This is not convincing at all. Lots of talking about why the man known as Shakespeare was not the real Shakespeare (Which I agree with) but no proof at all that Edward De Vere was Shakespeare. Only circumstantial links with family ties and travels etc... However if you look more carefully at Francis Bacon's and the fact that his brother Anthony Bacon had a printing shop and the fact that Francis Bacon travelled to France and Italy and had inside information and close relationship in France with the main character in Love's Labour's lost and the fact that all of the names in the play were on Anthony Bacon's passport (which is an impossibility to be a coincidence statistically considering some of the weird unusual names) and the fact that many of the words and unusual lines including the longest word in his play are found in Francis Bacon's notes .. one need not look elsewhere. It is obvious that the Shaker of the Speer, lord chancellor and Rosicrucian leader Francis Bacon was the real Shakespeare.
Thank you for listening and for your comment. I definitely think that Frances Bacon was closely connected to the intellectual circle from which these plays emerged, and from which the Rosicrucian manifestos emerged, I just don't think that Bacon was the poet of this circle, at this point anyways. (Though I agree the case for Bacon is very interesting, and I have a lot more to learn about it. I also try to keep track of the cases for the involvement of John Florio, Thomas North, Thomas Sackville, Mary Sidney... even if I'm not entirely convinced, I learn a lot from hearing about these various candidates.) My main problem with the case for Bacon, is 1) he already has a large body of work, that seems to me distinct from Shakespeare's. Connected, but different. De Vere has some early poems, and a large lacunae in his portfolio, though he's mentioned as a great poet and playwright by people like Francis Mere and Henry Peacham. And, 2) It seems clear that the editors of the First Folio did not have all the manuscripts for the plays, and were forced to work from bad quartos in some cases. If Ben Jonson is editing the folio, and the author of the plays is alive and well and working with him, why do they need to work from bad quartos? It seems to me the actual author had passed away well before the First Folio was being edited and published. De Vere was also in France and Italy in the 1570s, and could well have met Henri of Navarre, as he represented the English court at the coronation of Henri III. The main characters of Love's Labour's Lost were all names of prominent families involved with various political factions in France. Anyone who was following the French political scene in this era could've known of them. Not to mention, I believe de Vere could well have been close with the Bacon brothers in this period: de Vere was a ward of William Cecil and married his daughter Anne Cecil. Her mother, Mildred Cooke, was sister's with Bacon's mother, Anne Cooke, so they were cousins. Both de Vere and the Bacon brothers had a strained relationship with William Cecil, as did other closely connected wards of Burghley's, the Earls of Southampton and Essex. I think there are a lot of close connections between all these figures. Not even to mention Walter Raleigh's circle / "the school of night." Overall though, I tend to agree with a lot of the Baconian conceptions of the plays and the connections to Bacon's philosophy, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Royal Society. I just tend to believe there was more people involved in this circle than they tend to.
Francis Bacon was Lord Chancellor until May 1621. The first folio was published 2 years later in 1623 when he had time to devote to get them published. He subsequently kept improving upon them which explains changes. Interesting that you mention Ben Jonson in your reply because Ben Jonson directly wrote in the first folio commentary verse and I quote ' To the memory of my beloued The Avhtor Mr. William Shakespeare ... 'Leave thee alone, for the comparison Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome sent forth, or since did their ashes come.' The words that Ben Johson then used to describe Francis Bacon in his Timber and Discoveries were: He (Bacon) who hath fill'd all numbers, and perform'd that in our tongue, which may be compar'd, or preferr'd, either to insolent Greece, or haughty Rome.
I forgot to mention that Edward de Vere, having passed away, could not possibly have made the changes to the plays that appeared after 1623 which proves he couldn't have been the author.
It's possible that someone else prepared the plays for publication. Susan Vere, the wife of one of the men that the First Folio is dedicated to, has long been suspected of being the woman who finished Shakespeare's Works. @@gregart6645
The only poetry we have published under Oxford's name is from the 1560s & 70s, decades before the first writings published under Shakespeare's name. Oxfordians take these to be Shakespeare's juvenalia. Many were intended as song lyrics for specific events, and published without Oxford's consent.
@@Stonerville1 Oxfordians would argue that most of his work survives, published under various pen-names like Shakespeare, and very likely others. Robert Prechter's new book argues that de Vere employed over 150 pen names during his life
@@Jeffhowardmeade Awesome, I beginning to think there were two Shakespeare’s, metaphorical at least. One. London one and a somewhat wealthy one in Stratford. A London one: actor/playwright/playboy, who a jack of all trades so to speak.
The breezy exchanges are so full of non sequiturs I feel like the older generation missing your point, puzzled, unable to follow the argument. And I am an experienced commentator on this topic. Try marshalling your view, present it, give a moment to how the traditional conformists glosses over the utter contradictions in the narrative, list your strong points and chronology, and sum up. Factually the assertions are spotty. For example you claim de Vere's 1000 pound annuity was from revels? It was from the Secret Service, making his playwrighting a national propagandistic priority. You have spunk ,and it is heartening that an X generation (whatever that connotes) would tackle this neglected and suppressed inquiry. Did you know that an American graduate student questioning the Stratford Shakespeare catechism loses his standing and reputation? As well as any recommendations for advancement. I am well disposed to your attempts to grapple with the issue. It requires a great effort getting the context and reviewing the complex history, so that you understand the plight of a nobleman who broke the taboo against being an artist and a theater producer and defied the most implacable aristocrats in English history.
Thank you kindly for your reply. We made this video when we were fairly new to the Oxfordian theory, basically just to explain our obsession to friends, and it was our first podcast on the subject, so we kind of all over the place. Phoebe is now posting her videos at on the Phoebe de Vere channel, and if there are anymore videos on this channel, they will definitely be more disciplined & clearly voiced! I think I still stand by most of the information contained in the video however. For example, regarding the £1000 annuity, as far as I'm aware it was simply a payment from the Exchequer by order of a Privy Seal Warrant from Elizabeth. I'm not sure there was an organized Secret Service in Elizabethan England that payments could be made from, I'm under the impression that intelligence activities were funded privately by various courtiers like the Cecils, Walsingham, Essex, etc. I believe we got the idea that the £1000 was rerouted from the Revels Office from the De Vere Society webpage: "From this year (1586) payments from the Exchequer to the Revels’ Office, traditionally responsible for court plays, drops by £1000 per annum." deveresociety.co.uk/edward-de-vere-as-shakespeare/chronology/ Thank you again, your recommendations are noted for any future videos!
Not sure I agree with you in judging the poems that were ascribed to de Vere in his lifetime to be "poor" poetry. As I understand it, we have about 28 poems which were published along with the initials / names of: E.O., L.OX, LO.OX, Vere, Earle of Oxenforde in several Elizabethan collections of songs and poetry: The Paradise of Dainty Devices, England's Helicon, and England's Parnassus, The Arte of English Poesie. They were never issued in dedicated book poetry, arranged and authorized by the author, but in the collections and miscellanies of others. I'm not sure that de Vere consented to the inclusion of these poems in any of these collections. People compare these poems ascribed to de Vere to the great speeches from plays, but a lot of these were not poetry per se, but song lyrics. The majority of these writings are from The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576). This was an anthology of lyrics, introduced as "ditties... made to be set to any song in five parts or sung to instrument." They were collected by Richard Edwards before his death in 1566, so any works of de Vere's which were included in this collection were written before de Vere was 16 years old. Two of the finest Elizabethan composers set de Vere's lyrics to music: William Byrd composed music for "If Women Would be Fair" and John Dowland for "Faction that ever Dwells" I have to ask: if we took the songs from the Shakespeare plays, and set them against de Vere's acknowledged lyrics, do these early verses of de Vere's seem incongruous in the development of an artist, over the span of several decades? Also not sure that de Vere's acknowledged body of work is devoid of literary talent at all, some of it seems really well written to me: "The Labouring Man", "Whenas the Heart at Tennis Plays", "Winged with Desire, I Seek to Mount on High" There is a single poem we know for sure that was intended to be published by de Vere, under his own name, and not as a song lyric. It was in the preface of a translation of a work of the Italian polymath, Giorlamo Cardano, the same work which has been called "Hamlet's Book", from which Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy seems to be derived. I think that's a fine poem, that seems to be the key to much of de Vere's subsequent work. Some lines from that, "the labouring man that tills the fertile soil, and reaps the harvest fruit," "he that takes the pain to pen the book" and the closing couplet: For he that beats the bush the bird not gets, But who sits still and holdeth fast the nets. Those lines stick in my memory. When the poems ascribed to de Vere are being judged as poor poetry, I have to wonder, how much of that judgement is being motivated by antagonism towards the Oxfordian theory? For myself, as I've delved deeper into reading more obscure Elizabethan literature, I have to wonder: how much of my judgements about literary quality are based on my own lights, how much of it is just repeating received opinion, parroting other people's opinions as to what is good & bad? I've seen Stratfordians mock de Vere's lines: What cunning can express The favour of her face ? To whom in this distress, I do appeal for grace. A thousand Cupids fly About her gentle eye. Do they also mock Marlowe's lines?: Ten thousand Cupids hover in the air, And fanne it in Aeneas louely face If I was given early and obscure lines from William Blake, or Percy Bysshe Shelley, or W.B. Yeats, would I be able to recognize the art of their greatest lines in their early incidental works?
Oxford spent 10 years obsessing about taking over tin mining in Cornwall, since he was a complete idiot spendthrift sending annoying letters looking for preferment. Tin! And the word does not appear once in Shakespeare from Stratford's entire bloody opus!
@@seansean6604 Not sure what Oxford's interest in the tin monopoly has to do with assessing the quality of his acknowledged poetry. Also not sure that you're characterizing de Vere's interest in the tin monopoly correctly. He seems to have first expressed interest in the monopoly in 1594, and his final letters on the matter were written in 1599, when the monopoly was granted to Sir Bevis Bulmer. It doesn't seem like a 10 year obsession. Most of the letters were written in 1595, and a few were written in 1596 - 99. Petitions for monopolies were of course not unusual for nobility and courtiers during Elizabeth's reign, many relied on them for survival, and they were her chief method of granting favors (which Parliament would complain about.) Revoking a monopoly could be disastrous for a nobleman, like it was for Essex when his monopoly on sweet wines was revoked. Petitions to William Cecil were entirely common-place -- nearly every Elizabethan biography I read includes the subject writing petitions to Cecil, his correspondence was filled with them, of a wide variety of kinds. Not sure why petitioning for the tin monopoly would obviously disqualify a person from being a great writer: Sir Walter Raleigh was eventually granted the tin monopoly, and he was a fine poet, and his History of the World was one of the most influential prose works in 17th C. England. Also not sure why, if de Vere was the author behind a great corpus of plays & poems, we'd expect to see a mention of tin in them. He was never granted the tin monopoly, and it wasn't something he knew intimately, he wasn't a miner. I wouldn't expect to see Raleigh write a poem about tin mines, or Essex to write a poem about sweet wines. Not sure that being a spendthrift disqualifies a person from being a great artist. If I had to guess if most great artists were more spendthrift or miser, I'd guess spendthrift. Great artists tend to have different priorities than great businessmen. This kind of point seems more like motivated polemic to me than dispassionate scholarship. I haven't read de Vere's tin letters yet, but I plan to, and to compare Alan Nelson's treatment of them to Bonner Cutting Miller's presentation on the topic. I might also get the audio recording of them, read by Derek Jacobi, that's available from the De Vere Society.
@sixdaystheatre Just check out Shapiro's Contested Will. The whole authorship business is utter nonsense. It's like arguing with someone about a fake moon landing. What anoys me is the slander against the greatest English man of them all ( I'm an Irish speaking Irishman!)and also the attempted theft of his work to offer it to any number of implausible alternatives. It would be harmless enough I suppose if there wasn't a whiff of snobbery about it all where people like Twain and Freud can project their own narrow agenda onto this nonsense, or more worryingly like Looney use it to justify his interest in a kind of medieval fascism.
@@seansean6604 I'm familiar with James Shapiro's work, I don't he has the clearest perception of the authorship question, and I think he mischaracterizes it a lot of it. I'm all for reading his work (and others like it, Wells & Edmondson's "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt" or the Oxfraud website) but I think these kind of books have to be weighed against the works of the authorship skeptics, and people can make up their own minds from there. I'm not interested in slandering William Shakespeare from Stratford at all -- I keep the possibility open in my mind that he actually was the author of the plays & that the orthodox understanding is correct. Even if the authorship skeptics are right, and someone else was the author of the plays, I could see even then William Shakespeare playing a key role in getting these plays to the public stage, I make it a point not to slander him. That said, for myself I'm not going to be deterred from looking into a historical / literary question because it might cast a less positive light on someone's name from the past. If I end up being wrong in my questioning, I hope I can get some understanding & a pardon. I've never thought of Mark Twain as a snob, from what I've read of his works he doesn't elitist at all, his depictions of common people seems understanding & warm. His father died when he was young, he came up working class, through the printer's trade & working on river boats. I've never thought of Freud as a snob either -- definitely more bourgeois than Twain from what I've read of his work -- I could be wrong, but never got the sense Freud was an elitist, or, if he was, that his elitism motivated his Oxfordian beliefs. I work as plumber myself, I've worked manual labour jobs my whole life, my political outlook is somewhat populist, democratic, and kind of anti-elitist. But my political outlook doesn't really affect my view of the Shakespeare authorship question, it is what it is, regardless of my worldview. I don't have any problem with people from humble backgrounds writing great literature -- I love Marlowe, Ben Jonson, William Blake, for instance. I also don't put much credit in Shapiro's depictions of people like Delia Bacon or J.T.Looney, my guess is Shapiro slandered them, and the historical record for each of them is clear enough to be able to avoid that. Not sure medieval fascism is a coherent idea, in my understanding fascism is modernist phenomenon. From what I understand, Looney had lost his Christian faith, and after that had been heavily influenced by the work of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Not sure if Looney believed in democracy, but being a secular rationalist, I don't think he could be described as advocating for medieval modes of governance, and living through WWII in Britain, doesn't seem like he was an advocate for fascism at all. I also think Looney's political beliefs are pretty much irrelevant in assessing his writing on the Shakespeare authorship question.
Sorry but you both talk too fast, you sound like you’re asking questions instead of making statements and you say “like” way, way too much. Also, you jump around from one idea to another and it’s hard to follow you. Lose the vulgarities. Ugh. This is unlistenable.
@@heartofjesusdj Thank you. I'm curious, what vulgarities did you object to? I must've listened through this a hundred times editing it, and I can't think what it would be.
