The life and theatrical interests of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford

Abstract

For sixty-three years following the 1857 publication of Delia Bacon's The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspeare Unfolded , conspiracy theorists unwilling to concede that William Shakespeare wrote his own poems and plays tended to accept Delia's namesake Sir Francis Bacon as the true author. This all changed in 1920, with the publication of J. T. Looney's ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford . Looney drew up a list of propositions declaring what Shakespeare must have been like given the particular characteristics of his surviving poems and plays. Thus, for example, because the plays often portray aristocrats, the author himself must have been an aristocrat. Predictably (judging from his title), Looney discounted the authorship of the historical William Shakespeare and promoted the authorship of the hyper-aristocratic seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Looney's primary source of information on Oxford was Sidney Lee's entry in the respected Dictionary of National Biography . In 1928 B. M. Ward followed up with The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550–1604, From Contemporary Documents . True to his title, Ward significantly increased the number of historical documents from which Oxford's life can be reconstructed; but his Victorian sensibilities balked at Oxford's apparent homosexuality. Two years later (1930), Percy Allen published, as the first of many titles, The Case for Edward de Vere 17th Earl of Oxford as ‘Shakespeare’ . Allen eventually embarrassed the cause by consulting spiritual mediums. In 1952 Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn published This Star of England: ‘William Shakespeare,’ Man of the Renaissance . The elder Ogburns represent an odd tradition in which Americans, having cast off English monarchy, grow besotted with English aristocracy; the Ogburns also promote the ‘Prince Tudor theory’ (discussed below) which undermines the scholarly integrity of the entire Oxfordian enterprise. A generation later, in 1984, their son Charlton Ogburn (the younger) published The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality . This Ogburn was more a publicist than a scholar, but what a publicist! He is more responsible than any individual since Looney for the current vitality of the ‘authorship debate’.