The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare

'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson

A triumph of literary detective work about the true author of the works of Shakespeare

William Shaksper of Stratford was an actor and entrepreneur who had little education, never left England, and apparently owned no books. In the centuries since his death more and more questions have arisen about the true source of the plays and poetry conventionally attributed to him. Now journalist Mark Anderson's page-turning and groundbreaking new biography Shakespeare by Another Name offers tantalizing proof that it was the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere - a courtier, spendthrift, scholar, traveler, scoundrel, patron, and prolific ghostwriter of state propaganda - who actually created this timeless body of work.

Weaving together a wealth of evidence uncovered in ten years of research, Anderson brings to life a colorful figure whose biography presents countless mirror images of the works of Shakespeare. De Vere lived in Venice during his twenties - racking up debt with the city's money- lenders (Merchant of Venice); his notorious jealousy of his first wife spawned both self- critical works (Othello, The Winter's Tale) and self-mocking japes (The Comedy of Errors); an extramarital affair led to courtly disgrace (Much Ado About Nothing) as well as street fighting between his supporters and rivals (Romeo and Juliet). Anderson contends that the only way de Vere's compromising works - including brutally honest portraits of the powerful elite at Queen Elizabeth I's court - could ever be published was under another man's name.

"A human being is the best plot there is."

John Galsworthy

Every author's life tells a story. According to the conventional biography, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564; he moved to London sometime in the late 1580s or early 1590s and soon enjoyed great success as an actor and playwright, authoring some 37 or more plays, 2 epic poems, 154 sonnets, and assorted other verse that have become the crowning works of the English language. He retired to his hometown sometime around 1612, and he died in 1616. Seven years after his death, the first edition of his collected plays appeared in print. Although no authenticated portrait from his lifetime exists, the 1623 folio of Shakespeare's works features the above image on its opening page.

Yet this image and this conventional story have confounded many great minds over the years.

The novelist Henry James remarked in a 1903 letter to a friend that he was "haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world." In Sigmund Freud's 1927 essay "An Autobiographical Study," the founding father of modern psychology stated, "I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him." Mark Twain published an entire book in 1909 Is Shakespeare Dead? that tore the conventional Shakespeare biography to tatters. Walt Whitman told a confidant in 1888: "It is my final belief that the Shakespearean plays were written by another hand than Shaksper's [sic]. . . . I do not seem to have any patience with the Shaksper argument: it is all gone for me up the spout. The Shaksper case is about closed."

Doubts about the Shakespeare story emerged less than a century after the first conventional biography appeared. In 1709 the dramatist Nicholas Rowe first sketched out "Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear [sic]." In 1747, the antiquarian Joseph Greene came across a copy of Shakespeare's will and was singularly unimpressed, calling the document "so absolutely void of the least particle of that spirit which animated our great poet." In 1767, the theatrical impresario David Garrick launched the Shakespeare industry in Stratford-upon-Avon with a three-day jubilee that transformed the backwater Warwickshire town into the literary tourist mecca that Stratford has remained to this day. During the same year, Garrick's friend, the physician Herbert Lawrence, wrote an allegory, The Life and Adventures of Common Sense, accusing "Shakespear" of stealing other people's works. In 1786, the American statesman John Adams, upon visiting Stratford, echoed a growing skepticism of the validity of the Shakespeare story. "There is nothing preserved of this great genius which is worth knowing," Adams recorded in his personal travelogue. "Nothing which might inform us what education, what company, what accident, turned his mind to letters and the drama." Early in the next century, the novelist Washington Irving continued the thread of doubt with his own semiautobiographical account of a visit to Stratford. "The long interval during which Shakespeare's writings lay in comparative neglect has spread its shadow over his history," Irving wrote in his 1820 Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. "And it is his good or evil lot that scarcely anything remains to his biographers but a scanty handful of conjectures."

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry James had joined a chorus of doubters who all expressed the same grave reservation: The conventional biography of Shakespeare is simply wrong; the ghost of another man haunts the canon.

In 1920, this ghost materialized in a revolutionary work of investigative scholarship by the British educator J. Thomas Looney. Looney's "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford gained early converts such as Sigmund Freud and the actor and director Leslie Howard both of whom proclaimed their conviction that the Elizabethan courtier Edward de Vere was "Shakespeare." In establishment circles of Shakespeare scholarship, however, Looney's book was met with a resounding harrumph. (Looney's detractors' most consistent critique was also their most effective: He has a funny name.)

De Vere (1550-1604) was a courtly poet and playwright who, as one literary critic in 1589 put it, would be recognized as perhaps the finest of his age "if [his] doings could be found out and made public with the rest." Although some sixteen to twenty youthful poems have been attributed to de Vere some of notable quality, some not none of his mature dramatic or poetic works have survived under his own name. The young de Vere was an active patron of literature and drama and a sponsor of theatrical troupes. And, this book proposes, de Vere added to and revised his early courtly masques and interludes, eventually transforming them into the plays and poems published under the byline "William Shakespeare."

"I think [the earl of] Oxford wrote Shakespeare," the filmmaker and leading Shakespearean actor and director of the first half of the twentieth century Orson Welles told an interviewer in 1954. "If you don't, there are some awful funny coincidences to explain away." In the half century since the screen legend uttered these prophetic words, countless scholars and investigators have compounded those "awful funny coincidences" to the point that every corner of the Shakespeare canon has now been found to contain snippets or passages from de Vere's life and times.

De Vere became entangled in a love affair that led to an interfamilial war Elizabethan Montagues and Capulets. While traveling in France, de Vere suffered the devilish whisperings of his own Iago, who ignited de Vere's jealousy over his wife's alleged infidelities. De Vere lived in Venice and went into debt borrowing from the local loan merchants. De Vere's first marriage produced three daughters who inherited their alienated father's family seat while he was still alive (King Lear). He had a close but rocky relationship with Queen Elizabeth whom he portrayed variously as the witty and charming Olivia (Twelfth Night), the powerful vixen Cleopatra, the cloying Venus, and the compromised Cressida. De Vere's father-in-law was the historical prototype for Polonius; de Vere's brother-in-law was the original for Petruchio; de Vere's sister the model for Petruchio's Kate; his first wife for Ophelia, Desdemona, and Hero (among many others); de Vere's second wife for Portia; his eldest daughter for Miranda; her husband for Miranda's Ferdinand.

Perhaps the most autobiographical play in Shakespeare is Hamlet, with multifarious connections to de Vere's life that are discussed in nearly every chapter of this book. For example, when de Vere was traveling through France at age twenty-six, he encountered a Teutonic prince who paraded his troops before de Vere's eyes. Soon thereafter, de Vere boarded a ship that was overtaken by pirates, and de Vere was stripped naked and left on the English shore. In Act 4 of Hamlet, in a sequence that is in no known source text for the play, Hamlet first witnesses the invading Prince Fortinbras's troops and then boards a ship that is overtaken by pirates, in an ordeal that leaves a humiliated Hamlet stripped naked on the Danish shore.

"Shakespeare," it turns out, was one of the most autobiographical authors who ever took pen to paper. To recognize this, one need only redefine "Shakespeare."

Copyright © 2006 Mark Anderson

About the Author

Journalist Mark Anderson has devoted more than a decade to researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, publishing articles on de Vere in Harper's, The Boston Globe, and on PBS.org. He has also been a contributing writer for Wired.