Following the initial failure of the Baconian heresy to convince the world that Francis Bacon was the author of the works of Shakespeare, other candidates began to be named as the potential true writers of the Bard’s great works. The playwright Christopher Marlowe was one. There were, of course, many reasons why it could not have been Marlowe, but for many anti-Stratfordians, who simply refused to consider the notion that Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, could possibly have written the works, Marlowe too had come from too modest a background to have written the plays. Though Marlowe had written well-regarded plays, and though he had risen from his lower class background to attend Cambridge, and though he even had connections to the royal court, which many continued to believe was a prerequisite for consideration, Marlowe’s connection was rather shady, through the world of espionage. In the minds of many, the true Bard simply must have been an aristocrat, born of high breeding, and so they looked to members of the peerage, earls who seemed to fit their pet notions of what the writer might really have been like. In the early 1900s, while the Baconians were still searching for ciphers and hidden manuscripts, a few noblemen were suggested as the real culprit. One was the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who had long been associated with the Bard because Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated to him, with the words “What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours.” This, of course, was rather common language in dedications to lords who had sponsored the works in question. Long had Southampton already been viewed as the person referred to as “Fair Youth” in the Sonnets, but to suggest that he was also the author was simply insupportable. We’d have to imagine him dedicating his own works to himself and expressing love for himself in extravagant ways. It’s rather comical, and therefore was never very convincing. Another candidate was the 2nd Earl of Essex, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth during the later years of her reign, who eventually fomented a rebellion and was executed, a full 15 years before the date on William Shakespeare’s last will and testament. With no literary work attributed to him that could be compared to the great works of Shakespeare, there was little to his candidacy beyond a passing resemblance to the portrait of Shakespeare that appeared on the First Folio edition of his works, so this theory, too, fizzled, only to survive as the watered-down theory that whoever the author was had just used Essex as the model for the portrait. The fifth Earl of Rutland drew more support as a likely candidate in 1907, as he had literary connections and as an ambassador had traveled to the places that it was imagined Shakespeare had personal knowledge of. For example, he had served as an envoy to the Danish court, which his supporters said qualified him to write Hamlet. For Rutland to have been the guy, though, he would have had to write Romeo and Juliet at only 17 years old. Rutland and the others would soon enough be eclipsed by William Stanley, the Earl of Derby, as a favorite candidate. Derby’s initials were the same as William Shakespeare’s, the dates of his life fit, bits and pieces of the plays seemed to have some similarity to events in his life and travels, and according to one report, recorded by a Jesuit spy in 1599, he spent his time “penning comedies for the common players,” and he was known to finance drama companies and even had his own. Why he would write plays exclusively for a rival company of actors could not be adequately explained, however, so the theory never reached Baconian levels of popularity, though it still lingers today. Instead, the next favorite candidate to be credited with the authorship of Shakespeare’s works would be another earl, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, even though the Oxfordian theory, as it came to be called, suffered from many of the same problems as the cases in favor of these other earls.

In the previous episode we heard about how Baconians are somewhat ashamed of the origins of their preferred authorship theory, since it was dreamed up by a woman who would eventually be institutionalized as insane. Of course, there was much more to her story, and far more contributing to her mental health decline than just her theory regarding the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, which I tried to illustrate in the episode, but it does seem to have been embarrassing enough that works have been forged to pretend the theory did not originate with her. Similarly, the origin of the Oxfordian theory could be considered something of an embarrassment as well, stumbled on as it was by a Looney. To be more precise, his name was John Thomas Looney, though he actually insisted that it was pronounced “low-ney.” I can’t help but wonder if he insisted on that because its pronunciation had led to no small amount of ridicule in his lifetime, and certainly the name has led to similar mockery by those who would heap scorn on Oxfordians. I’m guilty of it myself, just now. Though I actually know someone with the same surname who pronounces it just how it looks, but since the man insisted that it rhymes with baloney, then we’ll say it rhymes with baloney. There was more to John Thomas Looney than just a silly name. He was a schoolteacher, and he was an influential member of the English Positivist community, specifically a member of its Church of Humanity, a kind of secular religion. Positivism was a philosophical movement that is somewhat hard to characterize. It was a 19th century school of thought that valued progress, but far from progressive, in its focus on order as a means of progress, it rejected revolutionary ideas as harbingers of chaos, and thus it was inherently reactionary. This was because its founder, Auguste Comte, had grown up in the age of the French Revolution and detested the disorder and anarchy that he believed was its result. While Comte rejected the metaphysics of religion, he valued the cohesion and order that organized religion engendered, so he and his Positivists sought to use the forms of religion to promote progress and the ideas of Positivism. Thus the Church of Humanity was born, ironically following in the footsteps of French Revolutionaries who converted churches into Temples of Reason. In the Church of Humanity, great leaders and thinkers were worshipped, their busts put in places of honor like idols, and among them was always a bust of William Shakespeare. So the Bard was deified again, but John Thomas Looney, who likely would have become the leader of the Church of Humanity had it not been for a schism and leadership struggle within the movement, would eventually go on to promulgate perhaps the most successful authorship theory, Oxfordianism, in his book “Shakespeare” Identified in 1920, tearing down the idol of Shakespeare once again.

A photo of J. Thomas Looney, originator of Oxfordianism

Looney’s book begins with a careful explanation of how he came to settle on the candidate Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, taking pains to present himself as so very open-minded and unbiased, although it is clear that from the outset he believed William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the works. Like others, he asserts that the records we have of Shakespeare’s financial matters just don’t comport with the expansive mind we encounter in the works, insisting the true author could not have cared about money so much as it seems the Stratford man had. That’s right. You heard it here first. Great writers don’t care about money. And it’s not as if the realities of the world force even the most profound thinkers to devote thought to such matters. What he says led him to Oxford was that he found a poem the earl had written that happened to be in the same poetic form as Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare. The stanzas were similarly structured. That’s it. A poet would laugh at this, for not only are the same poetic forms used over and over by many poets, but even a very unique form may be thought up independently by more than one poet. The elements of poetic structure—rhyme, meter, stanza, line lengths—are not fingerprints. But instead of comparing Shakespeare’s poetry to other poetry of the day, or comparing his plays to other plays, or in general just looking further than the first character he came across, he fixated on Edward de Vere, believing that elements of his life story fit well with the man he imagined the author of Shakespearian works to have been. Oxford had been a poet and playwright, though none of his dramatic works survive for comparison to the works of Shakespeare. He was a patron of the theater, with numerous works dedicated to him. He was well-educated and well-traveled, and he had connections to Elizabeth’s court. At the time that Looney was writing, there actually wasn’t much biographical information about Edward de Vere. There was his surviving poetry, some broad strokes about his life, and the occasional offhand remark about him, like the anecdote that Oxford left on his travels out of shame after he “happened to let a fart” in the presence of the Queen, and seven years later, when he returned, Elizabeth reassured him by saying “My lord, I had forgot the fart.” This vagueness with regard to the known facts about de Vere rather helped Looney’s theory, since there was little to disprove it. But there was the troublesome fact that he had died in 1604, before several of Shakespeare’s greatest plays are believed by scholars to have been written. Looney claimed, with no evidence, that Oxford wrote under a pseudonym because writing plays was an embarrassment to a nobleman, and that he had hoarded the plays to be released and performed posthumously. It is true that writing plays was not considered a proper use of a nobleman’s time, but it’s also apparent that people knew de Vere wrote poetry and plays, so who exactly he might have been hiding it from is unclear. And it’s certainly possible for someone’s written work to be released posthumously, but that is not typical of plays, which were collaborated on with the players of each company. The simple fact that the first appearances and performances of the plays attributed to Shakespeare match up with the lifetime of the Stratford man whose name appeared on them would certainly seem to be a clearer point in favor of Shakespeare having been the author.

After the book’s appearance, Oxford very quickly surpassed Bacon as the favorite of anti-Stratfordians. Likely this had a lot to do with how bonkers Baconians had become with their secret codes and conspiracies. The Oxfordians at least had a veneer of scholarly respectability. While Baconians had quite a few very famous converts, Oxfordians too had some big names, the most famous being Sigmund Freud, who came to believe that the plays of Shakespeare simply had to be autobiographical, and that Hamlet was as important an example of his Oedipal complex as had been the tragedy Oedipus Rex. When Shakespeare scholarship revealed that Shakespeare’s father had not necessarily died before Hamlet, in which the character is struggling to come to terms with his feelings about his father’s death, Freud came to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship rather than his interpretation of the play as autobiographical. And when it turned out that Edward de Vere’s father had died when he was young, it cemented for Freud that Looney must be right, for it meant that Freud himself had been right. As Oxford became the subject of ever more research, more facts about his life came to be known, and those who wanted to believe he was the Bard would find no end to the details they could suggest corresponded to elements of Shakespearian works. Characters in the plays became thinly vailed caricatures of his friends and lovers. His wife Anne Cecil was transformed into the inspiration for Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia. The one time he purposely stabbed a cook in the leg was portrayed as the basis for Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius. But more historical and biographical knowledge on the man, as well as on Shakespeare himself, cuts both ways. It was discovered that Oxford had his own company of actors, “the Earl of Oxford’s Men,” so just like the Earl of Derby, it’s quite unclear why he would write plays for some other company of actors to perform. It was learned that Oxford’s marriage to Anne Cecil was disastrous, that he was routinely unfaithful, that he was something of a cad, and that in his final years he devoted himself only to increasing his income. Those who thought him a more fitting personality than the man from Stratford had a rude awakening. And as more was learned about William Shakespeare, more was learned about his sources, such that we know where he took the inspiration for Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius, from Histoire Traguiques, by François de Belleforest. And we further know that, if proximity to the court of Queen Elizabeth was a prerequisite for authorship, William Shakespeare was actually in the Queen’s presence, performing at Whitehall, more than Oxford was during the 1590s and the early 1600s. Examining the Oxfordian case, it becomes exceedingly clear that all alternative authorship claims are totally subjective, and whatever does not fit one’s favored narrative can be discarded. For example, anti-Stratfordians had long suggested by their biographical reading of the work, that the many sibling rivalries in the plays meant the true author must have had brothers. Well, Edward de Vere did not, and in fact, William Shakespeare had two, one of whom had become a fellow actor in London. Though a clear point in Shakespeare’s favor even by their own reckoning, Oxfordians simply removed that criterion from their litmus so that their pet candidate fit better.

Portrait of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

As Oxfordian literature expanded, the researchers following in Looney’s footsteps began to stretch the limits of credulity in their search for elusive proof, in the process developing wilder and weirder claims and becoming more and more like the Baconian heretics they detested. It started simple enough, in 1923, with one H. H. Holland reading between the lines of plays to suggest they contained allusions to events of the 1570s and 1580s, when Oxfordians held that all the plays must have been written because of Oxford’s pesky death date. In 1931, two separate writers, Montagu Douglas and Gilbert Slater, claimed much as Delia Bacon had before them that Oxford was actually part of a conspiracy, the leader of a group that was responsible for authoring the plays and for orchestrating the imposture of their attribution to Shakespeare. The same year, Oxfordians began to partake in the very technique they had so roundly rejected in Baconian work: cipher seeking. Writers like George Frisbee started to see Oxford’s signature hidden throughout the works of Shakespeare, not exactly in acrostics, but rather in the very common words “ever,” “every,” and “never,” which he claimed, with their combinations of “e” and “ver” were actually the hidden name of Edward de Vere. Unsurprisingly, since just about every piece of English writing has these words, Frisbee eventually started claiming that the works of Chistopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and King James must also have been written by the Earl of Oxford, since those words were in them. In 1937, a Scientific American article made the astonishing conspiracist claim that the Ashbourne portrait, a painting thought to be a portrait of William Shakespeare, had been altered and painted over, a literal coverup to hide Oxford’s identity as the true author of the plays. In fact, the portrait had been tampered with, before it had ever appeared on the art scene in 1847 with claims that it was a portrait of Shakespeare. As later analysis would show, though, it wasn’t a portrait of Edward de Vere. Rather, it had formerly been a portrait of Hugh Hamersley, merchant and mayor of London, as the coat of arms that had been painted over proved. It is believed that the painter who first came forward with the portrait in 1847, Clement Kingston, had altered it, changing the date painted on it, erasing the coat of arms, and scraping off the subject’s hair to make him appear more like other portraits of Shakespeare. Rather than a vast conspiracy to cover-up a historical secret, it was just a forgery, which earned the painter a fair profit. Nevertheless, some Oxfordians continue to claim, without evidence, that the portrait depicts de Vere.

The most absolutely bonkers claim ever made by Oxfordians, one that even embarrassed Looney, was actually advanced a few years before the claims about the Ashbourne portrait. It was first made by Percy Allen, a theater critic and one of the more prolific writers promoting Oxfordian claims in the 1930s. Allen argued that the Earl of Oxford had actually been Queen Elizabeth’s secret lover, and that the queen famous for having been a virgin had actually borne his son, William, who became an actor and used the stage name Shakespeare, a name his father was then using as a pen name. By Allen’s reckoning, this was the hidden meaning behind the Dark Lady and Fair Youth sonnets. Of course, with its echoes of the Baconian folly, in which cipher seekers swore that they had decoded secret messages revealing that Francis Bacon was Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son, the Prince Tudor theory, as it came to be known, was entirely embarrassing to Oxfordians who wanted to be taken seriously as Shakespeare scholars. And it only got worse as the theory evolved, with later writers adding that actually, Queen Elizabeth had borne an illegitimate son before, that her own father had raped her, and that the issue of that assault was actually Oxford himself, so when Oxford then became her lover, it was incest upon incest, with Oxford both Elizabeth’s brother and son, and their child in turn both her son and her nephew. It’s confusing and, frankly, gross, and I think it says a whole lot more about the people who came up with it than it does about the works of Shakespeare. But Percy Allen wasn’t done. Next he turned to a medium, determined that, if he couldn’t find hard evidence in the real world of Oxford being the author, he would seek it from the man’s ghost. Spiritualism, of course, had been a massively influential movement, with many reputable believers, but it should be noted that by the 1940s, when Percy Allen sought to communicate with the spirit world to find evidence of his claims, it was very much in decline. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the medium that he met with, Hester Dowdon, was able to channel not just Oxford, but Bacon and Shakespeare as well, and in their voices told Percy Allen just what he was hoping to hear, that Oxford had written the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare, and that his works did tell the secret story of his and Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son. Perhaps he would have taken her performance with a healthier grain of salt had he known that that a few years earlier, this same medium had pretended to channel the same spirits to tell a Baconian that Bacon had been the true author. And perhaps all of these anti-Stratfordians would have considered the spiritualist method suspect had they realized that decades earlier another writer had claimed through séance to have proven that Shakespeare was indeed the author of the works attributed to him.

The Ashbourne Portrait, a forged portrait of Shakespeare

With the wilder theories of Percy Allen and others, the Oxfordian movement too went into decline and would not see a resurgence until after World War II. In 1949, the publication of a new edition of Looney’s book in America saw a brief renewal in interest, but it wouldn’t last. Indeed there was more interest in Marlowe during these years than in Oxford. This would change with the entrance onto the scene of a new Oxfordian writer, Charles Ogburn. His first book on the topic was published in the 1960s, and he oversaw a rebirth of interest in the Oxfordian theory during the 1970s and especially the 1980s. Recoiling once again from the outlandish claims and retreating into more scholarly-seeming arguments, he pushed very hard for Oxfordian theories to be acknowledged in academia and for authorship studies to be taken seriously as a legitimate academic undertaking. His arguments echoed the Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents of the same era, arguing that Oxfordian theories were a valid alternative to the traditional consensus view of William Shakespeare having been the Bard, and that schools should “teach the controversy.” In fact, thanks in no small part to Ogburn’s effort, his cause even got their own equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial when he orchestrated a mock trial, to be judged by three Supreme Court Justices, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and William Brennan. The result of this well-publicized event was not in their favor. They found that anti-Stratfordian arguments did not meet their burden of proof. However, the justices clearly favored the Oxfordian theory over other anti-Stratfordian theories, which was itself a victory, and the trial had the unexpected result of actually boosting the popularity of the notion. Though a second mock trial was held in London and went even more poorly for Oxfordians, back in America, mass media had taken an interest.

First came a piece on Frontline, the PBS documentary series, which made a play for ratings and viewers by asking just the sorts of questions Oxfordians wanted them to ask. Next, favorable pieces began to appear in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and even the New York Times. It was simply too juicy a claim for the media to ignore, which meant Hollywood wasn’t far behind. In 2011, the film Anonymous was released, with Rhys Ifans as Oxford and Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, and directed by Roland Emmerich, of Independence Day fame. Unsurprisingly, the film is far from historically accurate, but then again, maybe we shouldn’t expect accuracy from the filmmaker who brought us Stargate, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and recent stinker Moonfall. Along with the boosts provided by mass media and Hollywood, the Internet of course helped to spread the Oxfordian thesis, as it has with so many dubious claims. And in the end, Charles Ogburn and later Oxfordians succeeded where Creationists had failed! In 2001, a University of Amherst Ph.D. candidate received his degree based on an Oxfordian dissertation, arguing that annotations in Edward de Vere’s Bible proved he was the author of Shakespeare—though since that time, further study has shown that the passages of the Bible that Shakespeare seemed most interested in were not even annotated in the Bible, and that the handwriting suggests the Bible was not even annotated by de Vere. Nevertheless, the ironbound doors of academia had been cracked, and in 2007, it finally happened: Brunel University London announced that it would offer the first master’s degree in Shakespeare authorship studies. It is telling, though, that only one other institution of higher learning has created another such program, Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, which was shuttered shortly thereafter when its principal bankrollers, the Lutheran Church, pulled its funding. Next time, in the conclusion to our series on the Shakespeare authorship question, we will finally discuss why the claims of anti-Stratfordians are rejected by academia and are not seen as worthy of their own programs of study.

Until next time, remember, when you find out that proponents of a claim had to rely on a séance to gin up support, you can safely dismiss it as false. Seeing as how this was a pretty telltale revelation when it came to the work of Trevor Ravenscroft, author of The Spear of Destiny, maybe we can call this the “Ravenscroft Rule.”

"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part Three: Oxford's Ghost

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