Sharing my remarks from the Edward de Vere Winter Ball: A Toast to the True William Shakespeare in case anyone cares to hear!
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Good evening! My name is Phoebe Nir, and it’s my great pleasure to welcome you to the Edward De Vere Winter Ball: A toast to the true William Shakespeare! I’m sure to many of you, the idea that “William Shakespeare” could have been a pseudonym is the bailiwick of the tinfoil hat crowd. But if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, I will attempt to provide a different perspective.
Obviously, pseudonymity in the arts is hardly unusual, and boasts a proud tradition dating back to Homer and the Tao te Ching. Samuel Clemens, a passionate Shakespeare authorship truther who wrote an entire book on the subject, is far better known by his penname Mark Twain.
The strongest evidence Stratfordians have for attributing the works to a man named William Shakespeare is that, quite simply, his name’s on the books. Admittedly, this is a point in their favor.
However, consider the case of Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, a celebrated Stratfordian scholar who made it her life’s mission to debunk Will’s skeptics. She spent eight diligent years searching for evidence connecting Will of Stratford to the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare’s first publications are dedicated in extravagant, adoring language. After years of ransacking public records, she was able to produce zero evidence connecting the two men, and died feeling her life had been a failure.
On the other hand, the earl of Southampton had been engaged to Edward De Vere’s eldest daughter. And the only other two people to whom Shakespeare dedicates his works, the earls of pembroke and Montgomery, were engaged to Edward de Vere’s other two daughters. Three daughters, engaged to the three dedicatees.
Edward De Vere’s authorship in fact solves many Occam’s razer conundrums that have tied up Stratfordians for centuries. The truth is, the Stratford man has always been an awkward fit for the body of work attributed to him, leading biographers to construct what Mark Twain called “an Eiffel Tower of artificialities”, and what Henry James called “the greatest fraud ever practiced on a patient world”. Why is there not a single contemporary reference to anyone ever meeting a playwright named William Shakespeare? If Will never left England, then how can Shakespeare describe in detail the artwork inside royal palaces in Italy where Edward De Vere stayed? How did a man from an illiterate working-class household learn to speak Greek, Latin, Italian, Hebrew, and French? And why would such an amazing autodidact not have ensured his children could at least write in English?
Let’s discuss Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece. Scholars and theater lovers of all stripes have long suspected that the tale of the moody Danish prince has a whiff of the autobiographical. Stratfordians are delighted to point out that the name “Hamlet” is nearly interchangeable with “Hamnet”, the name of Will of Stratford’s son, who died young of the plague. A recent popular novel by Maggie O’Farrell imagines how a heartbroken Will channeled his grief over losing his son “Hamnet” into writing the play “Hamlet”. Very nice.
Now let’s see if Edward De Vere’s biography has any similarities with Hamlet.
Hamlet draws from Beowulf, the only existing copy of which was possessed by Edward De Vere’s tutor Laurence Nowell, who kept it in Cecil House, where De Vere grew up. Hamlet’s book from act two scene two is Cardanus’ Comfort by Giralomo Cardano, which Edward de Vere personally commissioned to be translated into English when he was 23. It’s accepted that Polonius, the interfering father of Hamlet’s love interest Ophelia, is a satire of Edward De Vere’s father in law William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster and one of the most feared men in England. Edward De Vere’s brother in law was an ambassador to Denmark in the castle Elsinore in the 1580s, where he met one official named Rosenkrantz and two named Guildenstern.
Hamlet is reported to have been captured by pirates, stripped naked, and left ashore. In 1576, returning from a tour of his beloved Italy, De Vere was captured by pirates, stripped naked, and left ashore. Polonius alludes to young men “falling out at tennis”, referencing a 1579 scandal in which De Vere and his literary rival Phillip Sidney had nearly come to blows on the Greenwich Palace tennis court, requiring the intervention of Queen Elizabeth....
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8 сен 2024
