THEATER; A Historic Whodunit: If Shakespeare Didn't, Who Did? (original) (raw)
Theater|THEATER; A Historic Whodunit: If Shakespeare Didn't, Who Did?
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THEATER
- Feb. 10, 2002
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February 10, 2002
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IT was not the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon. It was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
For Oxfordians, this is the answer to ''Who Wrote Shakespeare?''
It is a position long argued, and one that has gathered momentum in recent years. The question, which was the title of a Smithsonian Institution seminar in Washington last month, has divided families, friends and English departments. Do we care about Shakespeare? You bet. Shakespeare has more theater companies and festivals devoted to him every year. But more than being at the top of the theatrical heap, he helped to create the English language.
Most of the academic world has ignored the authorship question for generations, or belittled it as the obsession of idiosyncratic amateur scholars, while building altars in students' minds to the image the tragedian David Garrick promoted during the 1769 Shakespeare jubilee that created the Stratford tourism business: the man of humble origins who rose to the literary pantheon. The vast majority of academics still subscribe to that belief.
Other theories of authorship involve the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, the playwright Christopher Marlowe and various groups of writers. The Bacon theory bogged down in a search for cryptograms in Shakespeare texts that would point to Bacon, while the Marlowe theory and the group-authorship theory share one big problem -- their authors' works are quite different from Shakespeare's.
The Oxford theory, by contrast, has never been stronger. In 2000, a Massachusetts scholar successfully defended a dissertation based on the premise that de Vere wrote the Shakespeare canon. Hailed as a Rosetta stone of Oxford theory, the 500-page doctoral thesis discusses, among other things, the history of Oxford's life as reflected in the plays, and correspondences between the works of Shakespeare and verses de Vere marked in his copy of the Geneva Bible.
Most, though not all, Stratfordians are more interested in Shakespeare's works than his biography. The play's the thing. But today in the academic world as a whole, proponents of the historical and biographical approach have reasserted themselves after decades of being overshadowed by the textual analysts.
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