The Man Who Was Shakespeare, Part 3

'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson

(Page 3 of 8)

The Return from Parnassus: This anonymous comedy staged by students at Cambridge University in 1600 pokes fun at an oafish actor, the clown Will Kemp. Kemp is made to say, "Few of the university men pen plays well; they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis." The joke here is that Kemp doesn't know the difference between an author (Ovid) and the title of his work (The Metamorphoses).

In the next breath, Kemp says, "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down!" With these words, Kemp glorifies the playwright "Shakespeare," a "fellow" actor. But the joke is on Kemp. A sophisticated Elizabethan university audience would understand that if Kemp doesn't know that "Metamorphosis" wasn't the name of a writer, he would have zero credibility to talk about the actor Shakspere as a writer.

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece: These two Shakespeare poems from 1593 and '94 are dedicated to the earl of Southampton, a high-ranking Elizabethan courtier. Southampton is conventionally assumed upon no further evidence to have been Shakspere's patron. A number of scholars over the past two centuries have devoted countless man-hours to discovering other evidence of Southampton's patronage of Shakspere. They have found none. As will be seen in Chapter 9, the Venus and Adonis and Lucrece dedications actually make more sense coming from Edward de Vere's pen than from Shakspere's. For one, at the time of the dedications, Southampton was being considered as a possible husband for de Vere's daughter Elizabeth.

"Terence": In a pamphlet published in 1611, the poet John Davies described "Shake-spear" [sic] as "Our English Terence." Terence is known today to have been both an actor and a playwright.

However, this is not what many in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries believed. According to the essayists Cicero, Quintilian, and Montaigne, as well as a leading literary textbook of the Elizabethan Age, the actor Terence was actually a front man for one or more Roman aristocratic playwrights. Although most scholars today dismiss the possibility, many of Davies's learned contemporary readers would have recognized the allusion: Shakspere was an actor who pretended to be an author. The author Shakespeare was someone else altogether.

The Book and the Monument: Shakspere's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon's Trinity Church, constructed sometime before 1623, ostensibly suggests he was a writer. (The statue is of a man using a pillow for a desktop, holding a quill pen over a blank piece of paper; the cryptic inscription beneath the statue reads, in part, ". . . all [that] he hath writ leaves living art but page to serve his wit" although exactly what these words mean has long been a mystery and will be discussed later.) The first edition of the complete plays of Shakespeare in 1623 alludes to the Trinity Church bust (". . . when time dissolves thy Stratford monument . . .") and to the river in Shakspere's hometown (". . . sweet swan of Avon . . ."). Together, the 1623 First Folio and the Stratford monument would appear to deliver prima facie evidence for Shakspere as Shakespeare.

However, both date to a period (circa 1623) when Edward de Vere's children and in-laws were waging a brutal campaign in the court of King James I against a controversial British royal marriage alliance with Spain. This book argues de Vere's children and in-laws used the works of Shakespeare as part of a propaganda war during the "Spanish Marriage Crisis" of the early 1620s and that the Stratford monument and publication of the Folio constituted a last-ditch maneuver to preserve de Vere's literary legacy, even if it meant burying his identity.

And that's the whole of it. There are abundant additional references in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writings to Shakespeare's plays and poems, none of which connect to Shakspere of Stratford. There are also contemporary allusions to Shakspere's business investments and theatrical activities at the Globe Theatre and elsewhere. But these don't connect to Shakespeare the author.

So far as is known and can be proved, Shakspere never traveled anywhere beyond the roads connecting London to Stratford-upon-Avon. So far as is known and can be proved, he did not even attend Stratford Grammar School. So far as is known and can be proved, Shakspere never wrote a complete sentence in his life. Shakspere's wife and daughters were, like his parents and siblings, either illiterate or close to it.

"We are the reasoning race," Mark Twain wrote in Is Shakespeare Dead? "And when we find a vague file of chipmunk tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that Hercules has been along there. I feel that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet."

* * *

Edward de Vere was a brilliant and troubled man with whom one might enjoy sharing a beer but loathe sharing a house. He was at times a cad and a scoundrel. He also was a notorious teller of tall tales. One of his contemporaries recorded a fable de Vere recited about his adventures in Italy: "In it [de Vere] glories greatly. Diversely hath he told it, and when he enters into it, he can hardly out, which hath made such sport as often have I been driven to rise from his table laughing."

Despite his tall tales, it was actually de Vere's truthfulness that ultimately necessitated his taking refuge behind the Shakespeare mask. De Vere spent nearly his entire life in Queen Elizabeth's court, portraying this world and its key figures unflinchingly. He skewered such powerful men as Sir Christopher Hatton (Malvolio in Tweltfth Night), Sir Philip Sidney (Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor; Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night; Michael Cassio in Othello), Lord Robert Dudley (Claudius in Hamlet; Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor), William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Polonius), the earl of Southampton (Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida), and the earl of Essex (Coriolanus). De Vere also exposed the court's dirty laundry, accusing Dudley of being a poisoner (Hamlet), turning Cecil into a veritable pimp (Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida), and even portraying the sacred Virgin Queen as a vain and fickle tease with a Jezebel streak (Cleopatra, Gertrude, Cressida, Venus). "Shakespeare" was a subterfuge that distanced the scandalous works from its primary subjects: the queen and her powerful inner circle of advisors. The "Shakespeare" ruse enabled de Vere to write till the end of his days in 1604. However, the bargain was a Faustian one, depriving de Vere of the immortality due him for his literary accomplishments and foisting upon the world a monumental myth.

The Shakespeare canon, informed by de Vere's life story, paints a vivid and complex picture. He was both a defender and critic of the state, a bohemian and a statesman, an outlaw and an enforcer of the law, a comic and a quintessentially tragic figure, a patron and an artist seeking patronage. He was an athletic figure with military aspirations who also was effeminate and inhabited a small frame.

But de Vere's most striking physical characteristic was his eyes. His extant portraits (two of which are pictured on the cover of this book and discussed in Appendix D) all find the sitter, eyebrows arched, fixing a piercing gaze out of the canvas and through the ages. Behind those windows lay the cagey intellect of a man who knew he knew too much.

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.