The life of Elizabeth de Vere. Daughter of Shakespeare, wife of Shakespeare or neither? PART 1 

Great surprise for the Memorial Day Weekend and a new video on this channel. Thank you , Cheers!

Enthralling and fascinating presentation. One can imagine Edward lying to the Queen to deflect any jealousy she may have felt knowing of his intimacy with 'another woman', albeit his wife.

Hideous behaviour to the poor elephant. All those poor animals. 😔🥺😔

Ya!!! Missed your videos. Grateful you have uploaded a new ones.

Thank you for the well researched and reasoned story of this sad time for Anne. I sense there are facts that have been lost that may have more fully explained de Vere's actions, as callous as they are. I'd like to think that de Vere, as author of some of the most beautiful poetry of love could not be such a terrible person to deny his own daughter and cause his wife such grief and pain. It seems karma caught up with de Vere and Anne lived on and hopefully had a happier marriage with Stanley. As always your masterful telling of the history captured my attention and I could hardly wait to have a chance to watch after I saw it was available earlier today. Thank you for sharing your work.

Volume is fine for me. The whole presentation was great. Thank you!

Well done ... The dramas are always important to understand especially those of the movers and shakers.

Very interesting as always, thank you!

Excellent and thoughtful presentation. Thanks!

My own experience with the quickening: it came much later than my midwife was comfortable with, but my darling baby was on time.

Yay You're back!!

Thank you

This is all so new to me and I’m a descendant of the de Vere family. I also have a close friend whose name is Golding so I’m sure to ask him if he is descended from Arthur or John Golding! So happy that I stumbled upon this documentary!

excellent presentation, truer than truth.

Or perhaps we should take Oxford at his word(s). You mentioned that De Vere claimed in court and in the presence of Queen Elizabeth (who may have been his lover at the time) that if Anne were pregnant, it could not be by him. You also cited an earlier letter to Elizabeth from her cousin, Mary Queen of Scotts, who chided Elizabeth regarding reports that de Vere had not consummated his marriage to Anne Cecil so as not to spoil a potential love affair with Queen Elizabeth herself. The second narrative poem by Shake-speare, The Rape of Lucrece, potentially provides an autobiographical explanation for de Vere's behavior (in retrospect and in apology from the author) to his wife: Following Lucrece's rape by Tarquin and her subsequent suicide, the victim's husband, Colletine, blames himself for certain actions he took (disclosure of a great secret) which he blames for leading to the assault on his wife. This twist in Shake-speare's narrative differs from Ovid's Fasti, and I cry every time I read it. To me, Colletine's horror and self recrimination seems real and autobiographical. The letter from Oxford to Cecil echos (paraphrasing): "why couldn't we have handled all this in private?" David, I like your analytical questions. Here are a few more: During the Royal Progress that Fall, was there a predator in the Elizabethan Court who may have overheard Oxford disclose this "great secret" to the Queen and found it too delicious an opportunity to ignore? Perhaps this individual already had an 'axe to grind' with William Cecil and may have also been jealous of the Queen's affections shown toward Oxford during the previous year, and when this opportunity was presented to him, he played his own 'bed trick' to cuckold two rivals at once... Remember, Anne lobbied Sir Thomas Radclyffe for larger accommodations; she lamented her husband's lack of attention to her and hoped more sumptuous rooms would help lure him to her bed. Could the Earle of Leicester have learned of Anne's request, and desire to unite with her husband (perhaps for the very first time) and pretended to be him for the evening - at least for as long as it took to gain entry to the bedchamber? I wonder if Leicester already knew where Oxford was sleeping (and with whom) and was confident he wouldn't be interfered with in his revenge taking... "Why was Anne keen to abort the baby?" (especially when Anne and her family had been maneuvering to 'normalize' this marriage for nearly three years at this point?) If the baby were a product of rape, and Oxford had never slept with his wife, the shame and humiliation (and desire to conceal a pregnancy) is the most likely answer.

Never mind the comments about the volume. I have a control on my headphones or just such an occurrence. Interesting developments in Lavenham recently.

If Anne conceived in October 1574, why was Oxford not informed before he left for France on Feb 1, 1575 nearly 4 months later. This discredits the July 2nd date and gives credence to the late Sep 1575 date. James Warren gives good arguments in his 2023 Oxfordian article.

Please see my paper Behind the Tennis Court Affair in Great Oxford III, pp.97-118, for a different interpretation of these events.

Hello David. Thank you for a well researched and well explained presentation. I am a retired teacher, spending much of my free time these days, dipping into the Shakespeare debate. In four months I have been impressed by the efforts of scholars, like yourself, questioning, researching and code-breaking. I have formed a broad picture of what I now consider to be a Rosecrucian ‘Shakespeare Project’. Unfortunately, I have failed to keep accurate records of where I picked up certain ideas (facts or assumptions). I have many questions but let me begin with just one - Did Queen Elizabeth give a gift of a tilt table (scoreboard) to Oxford when he became a jousting champion? Did he then give it to Anne Vavasour some years later. The thinking is that the queen heard about this and was not pleased. Sonnet 122 becomes a very clear apology to the queen if this is true. Can you pin down some facts? Kind regards, Ray Vyse

The volume is too low!

This is interesting, but learn some volume metering please. Way hard to hear.

Doesn’t her face look very much like that of the subject of the Pregnancy Portrait?

Can you please tell me why you leave no contact information on your videos. I have a lot to tell you about the "Bard'

Dr Aubrey was a doctor of laws, not a doctor of medicine.

what a shame to have done all this work and then record it with the volume so incredibly low as to be unlistenable. I hope you take mercy on your audience and raise the volume in a large amount, then raise it again, as we'd much rather have to turn the volume down than to again skip your work.

Hello, is there an email of which I may contact you to ask questions related to feedback? With open mind as equal heart- GreY

“…A son of my own (as I hope it is)…” In other words: "I hope, rather than believe, the child is mine." Thank you for this presentation, David, but I believe you have misread the evidence and that Oxfordian scholar, and lawyer, Dorothea Dickerman's interpretation of this fact-pattern explains the many apparent mysteries much better. The biggest mystery which you do not account for is how Edward could ever condone abortives to be used on his potential heir? It simply isn't possible, yet the record shows it is true. Thus, Edward believed the child was a bastard and had not one shred of doubt regarding his own paternity: he was NOT the father. All the correspondence makes consistent veiled reference to this. De Vere never acknowledges paternity without some veiled denial ("...a son of my own (as I hope it is)..."). De Vere clearly intended to handle this himself with less humiliation for Anne and blames Burghley for forcing the issue into the open. The paternity mystery becomes unravelled when it is supposed that Anne was impregnated by rape. This explains all of Anne's behavior, it explains Edward's copious regrets after he accepts the girl as his own, and it gives meaningful context to Shakespeare's poem, "The Rape of Lucrece." So here is a link to a "competing theory of the case" presented by Dorothea Dickerman: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vNnPPnQjLPU.html

Great video but that chart showing only 20 women tested when billions have gone through it was...lame. In my opinion, I see no problems. Edward didn't have the control he was destined by God to have so he blamed his wife and father in law. He could control others if, in say, a play, for example. Of course he said the child wasn't his in front of the woman he really really wanted. I'm sure everyone laughed. Of course he had sex with his wife when he was drunk at it was his child. Of course, he was pissed at his father in law for not giving a little money but taking it his whole life. Lesson 1: testosterone is a hell of a drug Lesson 2: people are idiots.

Whooa, there David. Are you perhaps British? I’m not. From the point of view of Americans like me, the entire British aristocracy is “narcissistic, entitled and pugilistic.” Today. Case in point, the recent coronation. Narcissism and entitlement on bold display. And the way they eat their own, like Harry, is merely their supposedly sophisticated version of “pugilistic.” For 500 years ago, multiply each of these three descriptors times a hundred. Head chopping Elizabeth wasn’t more pugilistic than Oxford? Really. If these adjectives fit Oxford, he was only being what he was raised to be. That he was a literary genius anyway is the miracle.