Origins of Literary Theory in the Repudiation of Autobiographical Readings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 

Thank you. As I told Roger Stritmatter when we were discussing my paper, Oxford's actual relationship with the Earl of Southampton isn't that relevant to my argument, since Sidney Lee and subsequent Shakespeare scholars clearly regarded the Sonnets as bisexual, so their homophobia led them to reject the Sonnets as autobiographical, until very recently. In turn, literary theorists turned away from the role of authors in literary works. This should be of interest to all literature professors who have been misleading their students about integrating authors into literary interpretation.

My wife and I just saw a fantastic Beatles/Shakespeare production of As You Like It yesterday. Among other things, I was struck by how easily Rosalind disguised herself from Orlando as "Ganymede." Wiki tells us that poets have used Ganymede as a symbol for a beautiful young male who inspires homosexual desire. That might explain why Orlando doesn't realize Ganymede is actually Rosalind, if his bisexual desires have been activated. In this and other productions, Orlando is clearly attracted to the cross-dressed Rosalind. I offer that as merely one example of the theme of bisexuality in Oxford's works, if we look between the lines.

Why do we try to credit people with doing things the evidence does not support. No plays in any Lords hand from that time have ever been found. The Baconians claim to have found a copy of Richard ll with revisions in the margin in Bacons hand. This only proves, in my opinion, that Bacon provided ideas and revisions to his scriptorium, which he is known to have had. As have other Lords and theater groups. Everybody who was anyone who sought to influence popular opinions of the day had a scriptorium. Plays were the newspapers of the day and scriptoriums were how the Lordly class had their propaganda inserted into the plays. Some characters in the plays were used to lampoon public figures in sly and subtle ways by borrowing lines and actions from real life. With new innovations constantly being inserted, the plays were in a constant state of flux. The plays of that time were intended to be a fluid manner of communication to the public which no single author could possibly keep up with. This form of public discourse was slowly replaced by newspapers and other printed material as literacy and wages improved. The First Folio is a beautiful homage to a unique moment in time. Good show.

I agree! I think this whole issue comes down to your acceptance (or not) of the "Prince Tudor" theory. If you reject it, the homosexual aspect comes to the fore. Personally I think there is a very good case for it...at least the Oxford/Southampton part of it. I find Charles Beauclerk's proposition that Oxford was Elizabeth's son rather far-fetched.

@@duncanmckeown1292 I have rejected the Prince Tudor theories and the Tudor Rose theory (the theory that Southampton was the illegitimate son of de Vere and the queen) and can still interpret the sonnets without dragging in speculation on the author's sexuality. I have found that some sonnets use the rhetorical figure of illeism in which the writer refers to himself in his works in the third person. Rhetoric was a subject drummed into the heads of those educated at universities, so many contemporaries of de Vere would have deduced that some sonnets use the figure. Armed with a cursory knowledge of the life of the real author can provide clues which poems use illeism and which do not. When you see the sonnets through that lens, the "fair youth" becomes de Vere since he punned on his surname Vere in the word "fair" many times. Some of my videos on the sonnets (enter Ron Roffel in the RU-vid search engine) examine them in light of de Vere's biography and I encourage you to watch some. You might find them revealing. But I also find Charles Beauclerk's idea that de Vere was the queen's secret son not just far-fetched but tinged with wishful thinking. If it were true, then Beauclerk is related to the Tudors since he is a descendant of the Veres. Perhaps that is what he wants. Just my two bits.

@@duncanmckeown1292 I agree. If Oxford were QE's unacknowledged secret son, then any child begotten by him would also have royal blood flowing through their veins -- i.e. the 3 daughters born to Anne Cecil (unless her first child actually WAS begotten by someone other than her husband, as he was led to suspect...), the son she bore who died in infancy, and the bastard child Edward de Vere begat upon Anne Vavasour. So, no, I don't think it all likely that Oxford was, himself, the Queen's secret son. But IF there might be any truth to the notion that when he was her 'favorite' she may have become pregnant by him, and borne a child -- i.e. the boy raised as a changeling in the home of the Earl of Southampton -- then the 'secret' of Shakespeare's devoted language to Wriothesley in the Sonnets would seem to have a logical if stunning basis. Alexander Waugh makes a good case that Oxford convinced Wriothesley to father a child on his behalf, using Penelope Rich as a surrogate mother due to her prolific breeding capabilities. Presumably, Oxford himself was unable to father an Heir himself by then -- perhaps due to having been made 'lame' by a crotch-aimed sword-thrust by Thomas Knyvet, in revenge for having brought disgrace to Miss Vavasour -- and needed someone else to do the begetting. But why choose Wriothesley? If Wriothesley were NOT his own secret son, then the 'Heir' borne of the Wriothesley/Penelope Rich union would NOT be his own blood. The Old Testament provides a way for an heirless man to acquire an Heir: the law of Levirate Marriage. The story of Judah and Tamar in GENESIS exemplifies this alternative. But Edward de Vere -- had he needed someone to surrogate a child (i.e. a Son) on his behalf -- would have been better off having known Vere family males such as Sir Francis Vere [b. 1560/1561], age 31 or so in the 'begetting' year of 1592, or Horace Vere [b. 1565], age 27 in that begetting year, rather than using the 'stud' services of a man who was not of Vere blood -- Henry Wriothesley, born on 6 October 1573 and, hence, 19 years old when the begetting needed to be done in order for the Heir (Henry de Vere, the 18th Earl) to be born on 24 February 1593. The Mosaic Law of Levirate Marriage demands that ONLY a begetter who is a close male relative of the heirless man may legally be allowed to do the duty. That's why Judah's 2nd born son Onan had a legal obligation to beget a child upon Tamar, the widow of Onan's deceased-yet-heirless older brother Er, and his act of 'coitus interruptus' -- spilling his seed upon the ground -- led God to kill him. Tamar, after being denied an impregnation from Judah's 3rd son Shelah -- all three brothers having been born to a Canaanite wife and, thus, inheriting Noah's Curse on Canaan -- resorted to playing the role of a Harlot, seducing her father-in-law Judah, getting HIM to impregnate her and, thus, fulfilling the terms of the Levirate Marriage. This is the same sort of "Bed-Trick" which is used as a plot device in ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL and MEASURE FOR MEASURE -- and this is from Hank Whittemore's website: “[Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford] forsook his lady’s bed, but the father of the lady Anne [Cecil], by stratagem, contrived that her husband should, unknowingly, sleep with her, believing her to be another woman, and she bore a son to him in consequence of this meeting.” - The History and Topography of Essex by Thomas Wright, 1836 - discussing Oxford in relation to his wife Anne and her father William Cecil, Lord Burghley. “…the last great Earle of Oxford, whose lady [Anne Cecil] was brought to his Bed under the notion of his Mistris, and from such a virtuous deceit she [Susan Vere, Countess of Montgomery] is said to proceed.” - Traditional Memoirs of the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth & King James by Francis Osborne, Esq., 1658. [Note that Wright in 1836 mistakenly refers to the Bed-Trick producing "a son" rather than Anne Cecil's actual firstborn child, the daughter Susan.] Is there any doubt but that Edward de Vere knew about the 'Bed-Trick', given that it was said of his first daughter's birth -- Anne Cecil's daughter Susan -- to have been the method used to procreate her? Or was this a fable invented after Oxford's death in 1604? I think not. Oxford left behind an annotated Geneva Bible, and whether or not he underlined any of the verses in that tale of Judah and Tamar in GENESIS is beside the point. Oxford had read his Bible, and would have known of that controversial tale of Levirate Marriage -- the 'Bed-Trick' -- and would have known that the God of the Bible sanctioned the use of a 'stud' to provide an Heir, provided only that the Begetter was of the same bloodline, and wasn't just some random stranger, no matter how handsome such a Begetter might be, to produce a handsome Heir. Mind you, I cannot prove that Edward de Vere convinced his own secret son -- Henry Wriothesley -- to be the surrogate father of his changeling Heir, Henry de Vere, but I'd argue that Wriothesley HAD to have been a near blood-relation to Oxford IF such a scheme to produce an Heir was actually put in place, as Alexander Waugh's detective work seems to suggest. In order for this scheme to be valid in the eyes of Jehovah -- assuming that those concerned actually cared about God's Will and all that! -- Oxford's surrogate Begetter HAD to be related to him: if not a Brother or a Cousin, then a SECRET SON through whose veins his own blood flowed . . . and, possibly, that of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. If Oxford knew Henry Wriothesley to be his own son -- the unacknowledged offspring of the Queen herself -- then THAT would explain the devotion he had towards him. Not a homosexual predilection, but the love he as a Father owes to him -- no matter that the world at large could never know they were Father and Son -- and that he as Wriothesley's SUBJECT owed to him, in the offhand chance that the Queen were ever to publicly acknowledge Wriothesley as her own son and Heir -- thenceforward the rightful King Henry IX of England . . . had not such a wished-for outcome been rendered impossible due to the failure of the Essex Rebellion.

In an earlier comment, I pointed out that Roland Barthes contends that Mallarme - who was writing prior to 1898, the date of Sidney Lee’s pronouncement - sought to dislodge the empire of the Author. If correct, Barthes’ contention seems to call into question Prof Waugaman’s view that Sidney Lee is the progenitor of Death of the Author theory.

I've now twice tried to post a reply. Perhaps it was blocked because I included a link--to something Mallarmé wrote on this topic. I wonder if Barthes read his own ideas into Mallarmé's ambiguous remarks. Ambiguous stimuli, like ink blots, elicit projections of our own subjectivity. @@MrAlexsegal

Thanks for this comment, Richard. I don’t know enough about Mallarmé to adjudicate the matter at issue. But I think there are some things in Mallarmé that make Barthes’ response to him understandable. For example, his 1895 statement: “if the poem is to be pure, the poet’s voice must be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves … the poet must be absent”. And to the extent that he saw literature as like music, he could be seen as encouraging a non-biographical approach to literary criticism. For on the face of it the biography of Bach is less relevant to appreciating a Bach sonata than is the biography of Wordsworth to appreciating a Wordsworth sonnet. To the best of my knowledge, Mallarmé scholarship has not impugned Barthes’ interpretation. All this of course does not show that Barthes is right. But I think it does suggest that his view cannot be quickly refuted.

Thank you. Well, speaking of Bach, I was intrigued to hear the theory that he composed his works for unaccompanied violin after he returned from a long trip to learn his beloved wife had died. Since they used to play violin duets together, the sublime double-stopping in his unaccompanied works (especially the Chaconne in Partita #2) create the illusion that her spirit is still there, performing with him. Can't prove it, but I find this hypothesis profoundly moving. Yes, it's true that a few writers of fiction downplay any connection between themselves and their literary works. They may need to do that to liberate their creativity. Anne Tyler, one of my favorite contemporary novelists, only recently admitted that there are more connections between her life and her fiction than she'd realized. @@MrAlexsegal

Thanks for asking. Although I don't know, I believe there has been some willful ignorance of Lee's reversal on the part of Shakespeare scholars. To their credit, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Allen Bell wrote the 2004 encyclopedia article about Lee that speculated about his change of heart.They didn't go far enough, but they may have been the first to infer that his (internalized?) homophobia was a crucial factor.

And thank you for expanding on this theme, better than I could have, Ron. I couldn't agree more. For some 20 years, I've been in a monthly book group with a friend who specializes in literary theory. He used to chair a university department of English. He once contradicted something I said in our group discussion with the astonishing put-down, "The professionals know the author is irrelevant to understanding a work of fiction." That has motivated me ever since to understand where literary theorists went wrong.

@@richardwaugaman1505 Thank you for your kind words. I believe that the last "bolt" in the Stratford illusion was set in place when Roland Barthes first came up with the "death of the author" (DOTA?) theory in the late 1950s. That gave them the perfect excuse to ignore historical facts and new evidence that their man was not the true author of the plays and poems attributed to him. There is a lot of push back from literature scholars against this and as Shelly Maycock said in an SOF presentation, no less a philosopher/critic as Foucault repudiated the theory in his later notes. My theory is simple: without the author, you have nothing. And if you cannot know the person behind the words, you have nothing. Therefore, the DOTA is also nothing. It's solipsism gone bonkers. By DOTA reasoning, the only thing that counts is the ego of the reader and whatever current theoretical fad there is, not the people who wrote what they allegedly study.

@@ronroffel1462 Again, thanks. Fascinating to learn that about Foucault! Roger Stritmatter has said that Samuel Schoenbaum admitted shortly before his death that of course we don't know for sure who wrote Shakespeare.

Ron Roffel: Do you really believe that T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism was “faddish”?

It may seem that I am making a fuss about nothing. But I think one reason the issue I highlight matters is that Prof Waugaman in effect imputes a lack of integrity to T. S. Eliot. For he sees Eliot’s move away from biographical criticism as motivated by Eliot’s wishing to avoid engagement with the Shakespeare authorship question and thereby shore up Stratfordian orthodoxy, an unscholarly motivation that Eliot conceals. So the charge being made against Eliot is a very serious one and needs I think to be backed by more careful argument than the video provides. The fact that the motivations of Oxfordians are unfairly impugned gives them an extra reason to be careful when it comes to imputing shonky motives to others.

Yes, they were so controversial that the Sonnets were banned in New Zealand until the 1920s.