Personal Adventures with the Authorship Question
Robin Fox
My encounters with the “Shakespeare” authorship problem are described in Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life, an account of the first forty years of my life. At school in the North of England in the late forties, I had my first shock. (The story is told in the third person.)
“He read Mark Twain on Shakespeare and a whole part of his world came tumbling down. If we couldn’t be sure that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare – and clearly the boring Stratford businessman Mr. Wm. Shakspeare hadn’t written those exquisite aristocratic poems and plays – then of what could we be sure?” (pp. 90-91)
Since my major subject in preparing for university entrance was English Literature and History, and since the major topic was the works of Shakespeare, this revelation had a shattering effect. I had, however, to keep it to myself for exam purposes, which was not hard since the question of authorship never came up as such. The plays were dealt with as things in themselves, unconnected to the life of whoever was their author.
Later, studying sociology, philosophy and anthropology at the London School of Economics in the early fifties, I had another unexpected encounter.. It was my first time speaking at the Student Union weekly debate, and I seconded a motion (something like - “Freedom is more important than equality”) proposed by the Tory MP, Enoch Powell. After the debate (they lost) he spoke with Powell over beers in the student pub – the Three Tuns.
“He was truly impressed in conversation in the bar afterwards with Powell’s intelligence and power of personality. A strange man, not even like a politician, more of an academic – which evidently he had been in Australia: a professor of Greek. He was a passionate believer in the claims of the Earl of Oxford to have written “Shakespeare.” This gave them something in common because our skeptic had never recovered from Twain’s debunking of the Stratford businessman. In some ways Powell was perhaps too intelligent, too academic, to be a successful politician. When he finally fell from grace it was really because he was too honest: he said what many of his party thought, but could not say out of political necessity: another hard lesson political reality.” (p. 121)
Powell’s “fall from grace” was a result of his prediction that uncontrolled immigration would lead to blood in the streets. He lost his Conservative seat in Birmingham and was rescued by the Ulster Unionists and voted back to Parliament in Belfast. None of this helped his Oxfordian cause. Powell was a political pariah to English intellectuals, comparable perhaps to Governor George Wallace in the States. To quote him as a supporter of the Oxford case was to court ridicule and contempt. However, the only other serious contender I knew about at the time was Francis Bacon, whose case got lost in a morass of codes and ciphers, which helped the orthodox portray all skeptics as fools. I had been studying the philosophy of science under Karl Popper, and had read enough Bacon – the Novum Organum and The New Atlantis, to figure that he was, while a brilliant thinker and the founder of modern experimental science, an unlikely candidate for the Shakespeare crown.
Later that decade, at Harvard for graduate studies in the Social Relations Department (now defunct) I was forced to read the works of Sigmund Freud who then dominated intellectual discussion. It was heavy going at first, but I liked Totem and Taboo, and eventually wrote a follow-up: The Red Lamp of Incest. I deeply admired Freud’s great learning and courageous attempt to look into the darkest recesses of human emotion.
“He warmed even more to Freud when he discovered that the old guy was a passionate devotee of the case for the Earl of Oxford as the author of “Shakespeare.” (How unfortunate, though, that the originator of the case was the oddly named ‘J. Thomas Looney’: an old Manx name, and pronounced ‘Loney’ – but no one knew that, and it didn’t help the cause.” (p. 176)
Back in England however, Freud’s reputation was not so high and the empiricist British thought his claims unverifiable and even phony. The establishment saw his views on childhood sexuality as perverted and there was more than little anti-semitism to stir the pot. Add Looney and Freud to Powell and you had a lot of baggage going into the authorship argument. I did read Looney, however, and was impressed by his arguments, except about The Tempest. However, I still thought there was a lot of Marlowe in the early works and evidence of other hands throughout, evidence that orthodox scholarship continues to unearth. Perhaps there was a consortium, with “Shakespeare” (the Stratford one) as the entrepreneurial, wheeler-dealer producer, making the nice profit he later parlayed into Stratford real estate. He also, as the “upstart crow” episode suggests, didn’t mind passing himself off as the author.
Many years later, in the seventies, I was on sabbatical at Oxford at the invitation of my old LSE tutor Maurice Freedman, head of the Institute of Social Anthropology and a fellow of All Souls College. I was invited to dinner there, with A. L. Rowse presiding.
“For a start he had to fend off Rowse’s not-too-serious advances, but then he had the temerity to bring up the subject of the authorship of Shakespeare. He even worse had to mention Enoch Powell’s quite passionate espousal of the cause of the Earl of Oxford. He knew Rowse had written a ‘biography’ of the Bard – full of suppositions rather than facts, since there were so few facts, and those contradictory. He did not know quite how passionate a bardolator Rowse was in turn. “Idiotic stuff!” spluttered the indignant one. “De Vere! De Vere! My God! Earls don’t write plays. What earl ever wrote a play? Clever grammar school boys write plays.” Despite sounding like an exaggerated version of Ashley Montagu at his most exaggerated, Rowse was in fact a miner’s son from Cornwall, and a clever grammar school boy himself. As a card-carrying member of the clever-grammar-school-boy’s club, our boy granted him his point in general, but said in a loud aside that it proved nothing about the case in question. Freedman was much amused, being himself, like Ashley, a product of the poor Jewish East End of London who had polished up his diction: yet another of the clever-grammar-school Mafia.” (p. 541)
I learned that this was a pretty standard rant by Rowse; something much rehearsed and dreaded: trotted out when faced with a heretic. “Oh my God,” said a colleague, “you didn’t mention that?” I have mentioned that quite often now to the orthodox. “Oh no! You’re not one of those, are you?” A UFO fanatic or Holocaust denier could not evoke more horror and dismay. In the meantime, Stratfordian pornography like Will in the World continues to gush forth and be the subject of uncritical hype.
I have since these encounters discovered the intriguing world of Oxfordian scholarship, largely through a friend, Gaile Sarma, who was a member of a society I didn’t know existed. She actually gave me a copy of Charlton Ogburn’s large and expensive tome, The Mysterious William Shakespeare. I was already convinced of the case against the Stratford man. No question there; Twain was right. The positive case for Oxford is strong, but is in turn often overstated. Thus Ogburn has to trash the Stratford Grammar School to prove it incapable of giving “Shakespeare” the classical background he needed.
I went to such a small country grammar school, with one classics teacher, and by age fifteen I could read comfortably in Latin, (less Greek – but that was my fault.) By seventeen I was acquainted with most of the authors the Bard is credited with knowing, either in the original or in translation, and certainly equipped to read further. If Will of Stratford had gone to the grammar school, as Marlowe did to the King’s School at Canterbury, he would have started Latin at about seven rather than my eleven, and concentrated on it much more exclusively than I was able to do. By the time he left for London he could have been perfectly well equipped in the classical languages and literatures. The real case to make is that there is no evidence that he did go to the grammar school, and the evidence of his few signatures suggests he was at very best semi-literate. Also, in my further reading I had the advantage of good free local libraries, and the earliest, and very cheap, Penguin Classics. Many of these classical texts were not even translated in Elizabethan England, and the only libraries were private and exclusive.
Despite such excesses (and this is one of the few blemishes I find in Ogburn’s fine book) the cumulative positive evidence for Oxford, as at least a major contributor, is impressive. A nobleman of his standing could not have published plays and poems under his own name, and the efficient police state run by Cecil (his guardian) and Walsingham could easily have ensured there were no traces of his authorship. The First Folio seems to have been a put-up job by Oxford’s relatives (the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery) to preserve the plays while obscuring the authorship, with the strange complicity of Ben Jonson. One can make a case against this as against all conspiracy theories, but for me there are simply too many coincidences that point uncannily to de Vere, as Orson Welles said many years ago.
For example Mark Anderson points out that the only place the names Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern appear outside Hamlet, is in Peregrine Bertie's manuscript account of his sojourn as British ambassador at the court of Denmark in Elsinore. This account was in Cecil’s private library, and thus easily available to Bertie’s brother-in-law, and Cecil’s ward and son-in-law, Oxford. But how could the petty litigator from Stratford, shifting his lodgings in London to dodge his taxes, have seen it? Nor would this have been in the “court gossip” he is supposed to have picked up in the tavern and used in the plays. A small point, but one of so very, very many. The “biographers” of the Bard constantly tell us that Will of Stratford could have acquired the knowledge, the information and the experiences that went into the plays. But in Oxford’s case we know he did have all three. We don’t have to speculate. Of course I would like to see a smoking gun that would incontestably connect the claimant to the work, but so would the Stratfordians!
A version of this was published in The Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter 42:2 (2006)
Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford
