Hermione, Juliet, Helena prefigured: A new poem by Edward de Vere?

Last November, Georgetown University psychology professor (and self-proclaimed "Oxfreudian") Richard Waugaman released a Kindle-only ebook that I think hasn't been given enough recognition. It's called Newly Discovered Works by "William Shake-Speare" a.k.a. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. 

(In recognition of Oxford's birthday, Prof. Waugaman is offering this ebook free of charge on April 12, 2015.)


As the title promises, Waugaman makes compelling (if not necessarily, by his own admission, conclusive) arguments for attributing five anonymous poems from the 1570s, '80s and '90s -- as well as a landmark work of literary criticism, The Arte of English Poesie (1589) -- to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

And there is one work in Waugaman's thought-provoking collection in particular that I want to mention here. Since reading his short ebook last year, this is the poem that sticks with me most. It's called "A Letter written by a yonge gentilwoman and sent to her husband unawares (by a freend of hers) into Italy." (The link here is to the entire poem on Google Books.)

It's an anonymous 96-line poem published in 1578 that is written, as advertised, in the voice of a woman pining for her husband as he travels in Italy.

Of course, Edward de Vere gained great renown at court in the 1570s for his 1575-'76 Italian tour and the disastrous aftershocks from his tumultuous return when he accused his wife, Anne Cecil, of cuckolding him while he traveled abroad. (She did give birth while he was out of the country, and the he-said-she-said arguments that ensued upon his return were tempestuous and epic. And, in a sense, they're still being rehashed on stages around the world to this day.)

Here's why Waugaman's find matters: If it were indeed Oxford writing these words, it'd be one of the more "Shakespearean" poems in his canon of early verse. For here is a poem that could be a kind of early draft of a speech from one of the many Anne Cecil-inspired heroines in the canon: Helena and Hermia come to mind in particular here. The former for her contending with a lover who has run off to Italy. The latter for a pathetic appeal she makes to her man citing the baby they have (she says) in common. Or in the words of "A Letter"

"And last of all, which grieves me most, that I was so beguiled
Remember most, forgetful man!, thy pretty tattling child." (ll. 37-38)

The Stratfordian myth we're now told about Oxford, exemplified in Alan Nelson's Monstrous Adversary, is that Edward de Vere saw the world through an "egocentric, cry-baby attitude" that Nelson (p. 161) memorably describes as being emblematic of Oxford's poetic style. Oxford was allegedly too self-absorbed, in other words, to have written in anyone's voice but his own.

But this poem would give the lie to such a claim. If Waugaman's attribution is correct, it's Oxford in his full youthful voice -- bold, unabashed and arrogant. But then channeling that through the voice of a self-effacing and modest gentlewoman who might be an understudy for a number of early Shakespearean heroines. (No fierce Portia or assured Isabella to be found here, admittedly, but a peer perhaps of the more meek-seeming, early Anne Cecil-inspired characters like Anne Page, Hero or Adriana/Luciana.)

The poem, indeed, purports to tell the story of a woman exactly in Anne Cecil's situation in 1578, when it was published. For this reason, Waugaman quotes the Stratfordian critic Steven May (an expert on Elizabethan courtly verse and editor of an edition of Oxford's attributed youthful poems) noting that the "poem's speaker seems to be in exactly the state of Anne De Vere during her husband's sojourn" in Italy.

And, it should be noted, the author of this anonymous verse also gets a dig in at the Cecils, with the sarcastic line about a "rich and wealthy dower." As "Shakespeare" by Another Name was first to point out, witness a previously unnoticed letter from a Spanish source, William Cecil appears to have dangled a staggering £15,000 dowry in front of Oxford as inducement to marry his daughter Anne. But, so far as I've been able to trace at least, Cecil never paid it out. Yet Cecil appears, again if the Spanish source is correct, to have made arrangements to pay the dowry with Spanish gold behind Spanish enemy lines in the Lowlands. (!) Which I think is why Oxford ran off to the Lowlands as he did in 1574.

In any event, Steven May does not go along with Waugaman in attributing the poem to Oxford. Though May is hardly the final authority on the matter either. Readers already familiar with the inventive, strongly rhythmic, metaphor-laced (often high-born metaphor-laced) voice of the early "Shakespeare" style should pay close attention.

I think Waugaman has a ringer here. Usage, spelling and other stylometric tests might constitute a strong followup attribution study of this poem. I'd be curious to know what readers would add to Waugaman's and this blog's initial reactions to the poem. Please contribute to the discussion in the comments section below.

So, until a more complete attribution study is done on this poem, I'd definitely put "A Letter Written by a Young Gentlewoman" in the keep-an-eye-on-this-space category.

Please, in any case, buy Waugaman's ebook. (Or, on Apr. 12, 2015, download it for free.) It's worth the small price of entry. And, to add to the discussion of its merits, I've posted a modern-English version of the poem below. (Please also post a comment below or send an email if you discover any transcription or translation errors.)

+-----------------+

A Letter Written By A Young Gentlewoman and Sent to Her Husband Unawares (By A Friend of Hers) Into Italy

Imagine when these blurred lines, thus scribbled out of frame,
Shall come before thy careless eyes, for thee to read the same:
To be through no default of pen, or else through proud disdain, 
But only through surpassing grief which did the author pain.

Whose quivering hand could have no stay, this careful bill to write
Through flushing tears distilling fast, whilst she did it indict:
Which tears perhaps may have some force (if thou no tiger be),
And mollify thy stony heart, to have remorse on me.

Ah, perjured wight reclaim thyself, and save thy loving mate,
Whom thou hast left beclogged now, in most unhappy state:
(Ay me poor wench) what luckless star? What frowning god above?
What hellish hag, what furious fate hath changed our former love?

Are we debarred our wonted joys? Shall we no more embrace?
Wilt thou my dear in country strange ensue Aeneas' race?
Italians send my lover home, he is no German born,
Unless ye welcome him because he leaves me thus forlorn.

As erst ye did Anchises' sonne, the founder of your soil,
Who falsely fled from Carthage Queen, reliever of his toil.
Oh send him to Britannia['s] coasts unto his trusty feere,
That she may view his comely corpse, whom she esteems so dear.

Where we may once again renew our late surpassed days,
Which then were spent with kisses sweet and other wanton plays.
But all in vain (forgive thy thrall, if she do judge awrong),
Thou canst not want of dainty trulles Italian dames among.

This only now I speak by guess, but if it happen true,
Suppose that thou hast seen the sword, that me thy lover slew.
Perchance through time so merrily with dallying damsels spent,
Thou standst in doubt and wilt inquire from whom these lines were sent.

If so, remember first of all, if thou hast any spouse.
Remember when, to whom and why, thou erst hast plighted vows,
Remember who esteems thee best, and who bewails thy flight,
Mind her to whom for loyalty thou falsehood dost requite.

Remember Heaven, forget not Hell, and weigh thine own estate,
Revoke to mind whom thou hast left, in shameful blame and hate:
Yea mind her well who did submit, into thine only pow'r
Both heart and life, and therewithall, a rich and wealthy dower.

And last of all which grieves me most, that I was so beguiled
Remember, most forgetful man, thy pretty tattling child.
The least of these surnamed things, I hope may well suffice
To shew to thee the wretched dame that did this bill devise.

I speak in vain, thou hast thy will, and now saith Aeson's son,
Medea may pack up her pipes, the golden Fleece is won.
If so, be sure, Medea, I will show forth my self in deed,
Yet gods defend, though death I taste, I should destroy thy seed.

Again, if that I should inquire, wherefore thou dost sojourn,
No answer fitly mayst thou make, I know, to serve thy turn.
Thou canst not cloak (through want) thy flight, since riches did abound:
Thou needs not shame of me thy spouse, whose birth not low is found,

As for my beauty, thou thy self, erstwhile didst it commend,
And to conclude I know no thing, wherein I did offend.
Retire with speed, I long to see, thy bark in wished bay,
The seas are calmer to return, then earst to fly away.

Behold the gentle winds do serve, so that a friendly gale,
Would soon convey to happy port, thy most desired sail.
Return would make amends for all, and banish former wrong,
Oh that I had, for to entice, a Siren's flattering song:

But out alas, I have no shift or cunning to entreat.
It may suffice in absence thine, that I my griefs repeat.
Demand not how I did digest, at first thy sudden flight,
For ten days space I took no rest, by day nor yet by night.

But like to Bacchus' beldame none, I sent and ranged apace,
To see if that I mought thee find, in some frequented place.
Now here, now there, now up, now down, my fancy so was fed,
Until at length I knew of troth, that thou from me wert fled:

Then was I fully bent with blade, to stab my vexed heart,
Yet hope that thou wouldst come again, my purpose did convart:
And so ere since I liv'd in hope bemixed with dreadful fear,
My smeared face through endless tears, unpleasant doth appear.

My sleeps unsound with ugly dreams, my meats are vain of taste
My gorgeous raiment is despised, my tresses rudely placed
And to be brief I boldly speak, there doth remain no care:
But that thereof in amplest wise, I do possess a share:

Like as the tender sprig doth bend, with every blast of wind,
Or as the guideless ship on seas, no certain port may find.
So I now subject unto hope, now thrall to careful dread,
Amidst the rocks, tween hope and fear, as fancy moves, am led.

Alas return, my dear, return, return and take thy rest,
God grant my words may have the force, to penetrate thy breast.
What dost thou think in Italy, some great exploit to win?
No, no, it is not Italy, as sometimes it hath been.

Or dost thou love to gad abroad, the foreign coasts to view
If so, thou hadst not done amiss, to bid me first adieu:
But what hath been the cause, I need not descant long,
For sure I am, meanwhile poor wench, I only suffer wrong.

Well thus I leave, yet more could say: but least thou shouldst refuse,
Through tediousness to read my lines, the rest I will excuse:
Until such time as mighty Jove doth send such lucky grace,
As we thereof in friendly wise, may reason face to face.

Till then farewell, and he thee keep, who only knows my smart
And with this bill I send to thee, a trusty lover's heart.

Thy mate, though late, doth write, her light,
Thou well, canst tell, her name.


[Adapted with permission from Richard M. Waugaman M.D., Newly Discovered Works by "William Shake-Speare": a.k.a. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. (2014) Oxfreudian Press. Kindle Edition; image: Henrietta Rae, Mariana]

Welles the enigma, Welles the (sometime) Oxfordian

[Note: This post has been edited to add quotations from & discussion about the new book My Lunches with Orson, below.]

Orson Welles the maverick, Orson Welles the provocateur, Orson Welles the puckish contrarian. Also, on the strength of one unequivocally Oxfordian remark recorded c. 1954, there's Orson Welles the Oxfordian.

Below I'll discuss why I think he should be labeled a "sometime Oxfordian," because it's clear he'd changed his views over the course of his life. By the end he'd backed off, in other words, from his full-blown endorsement of Oxfordianism.

The questions over Welles' flirtation with the authorship question goes back to line a quoted from him in Cecil Beaton and Kenneth Tynan's 1954 book of celebrity interviews, Persona Grata. (i.e. "I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don't there an awful lot of funny coincidences to explain away.")

I don't think it's a coincidence that the Ogburns' opus This Star of England had been published in 1952, just a year or two before Welles' now well-known utterance. Welles was clearly impressed by the raft of correspondences between Oxford's life and the Shakespeare canon. And the timing at least suggests he'd learned of these correspondences from This Star of England. 

Yet why did he not say anything more on the matter after 1954? He died 31 years later, after all, in 1985.

I'd like to offer new evidence that Welles by the end of his life had resolved himself to a kind of defeatist agnosticism. (Meaning he de facto accepted the conventional story but preferred not to know much about the author -- satisfying himself with just the works.)

Now, fast forward to the early 1980s, when Welles was in his late 60s. The filmmaker Henry Jaglom took many lunches with Welles during the final three years of the legendary Hollywood maverick's life, 1983-'85. The BBC this week has an interesting hourlong radio documentary based on Jaglom's troves of tapes, recorded with Welles' permission, of their lunches together. It's a great listen, providing a fly-on-the-wall's view of this larger than life figure of stage and screen.

There was also a book published last year (My Lunches With Orson) transcribing many of Jaglom and Welles' conversations. I've been able to look through this book a little more since writing the first draft of this post.* And I've come to modify my views, namely that Welles evidently settled on a stance reminiscent of Charles Dickens' famous quote about the authorship question. ("It is a great comfort, to my thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet. It is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should come out." [Dickens letter to William Sandys, June 13, 1847])

Ironically enough, Welles' statement to this effect comes right after talking about Dickens.

--QUOTE--

Orson Welles: [W]ith writers, they have become my friends from the testimony of the pages they've written. And anything else diminishes what I feel. If I'm enraptured by any writer's work, I don't want to know about him. Somebody's come out with a snide biography of [Joseph] Conrad now. Just reading the review of it made me sick.

Henry Jaglom: But doesn't it add another dimension that --

O.W.: Nothing. I know everybody thinks that way, but I don't believe it. I don't want to keep hearing that [Charles] Dickens was a lousy son of a bitch. The hateful Dickens, you know. I'm very glad I don't know anything about Shakespeare as a man. I think it's all there in what he wrote. All that counts, anyway.

--END QUOTE--

Welles makes it clear elsewhere in the interview that he accepts Will Shakspere of Stratford as the author (discussing, for instance, Shakspere's coat of arms and real estate transactions). Welles adds that he thinks any mystery around Shakespeare is "greatly exaggerated," which might seem to contradict what he said above. (It's probably worth noting too that as Jaglom told the BBC, these lunches also involved imbibing no small amounts of wine. So expecting logical self-consistency here might be, shall we say, a bit too stringent a requirement.)

There's a kind of once-burned-twice-shy quality to Welles' musings about Shakespeare here. As Jaglom himself tried to interject, an author's biography does "add another dimension." (I might suggest a book for him to read.)

Oxfordians of course have a straightforward response as to why the Stratford biography simply makes no sense and adds zero insight into our understanding and appreciation of the "Shakespeare" canon.

Namely scholars and biographers have the wrong guy. Jaglom's absolutely right. And Welles was right, once upon a time, too.

On a related note, the blogger Rambler has this year been assembling a monumental and impressive case that Vladimir Nabokov was fascinated with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and the authorship question and peppered many of his own enigmatic and hard-to-decipher novels with allusions (e.g. the "discreet Bill" interlude at the end of Lolita) to Nabokov's own discoveries and musings about the authorship debate.

If Rambler is right, and I think he makes a compelling case over months and months of blog posts encyclopedically proving his point, then Nabokov offers up a provocative case study of a great artist who embraced the Oxfordian mystery -- albeit in a characteristically veiled manner. Welles' response of fleeing from it, I think, offers the other side of the coin.

Nabokov (1899-1977) and Welles (1915-1985) are rough contemporaries whose flirtations with/explorations of the Shakespeare authorship question and Edward de Vere, I think, might be considered in light of one another. Both relished their role as controversialist and enjoyed a love-hate relationship with scholars, critics and fans. Nabokov, Rambler has convinced me, discovered artistic wellsprings of inspiration to be found in Oxfordian readings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Would that Welles had arrived at a similar frame of mind.


* The first draft of this blog post also stated we do not know what Welles' position on the authorship question was later in life. As can be seen from the passage above, this is clearly not the case.

Corrigendum: The case of "Oxford's Greek New Testament"

On the Facebook forum ShakesVere, researcher, author and blogger Marie Merkel recently questioned a piece of evidence in the Oxfordian docket. The item -- a Greek New Testament (it is surmised) that Edward de Vere gave to his wife Anne -- is mentioned in Appendix A of "Shakespeare" by Another Name. 

In reviewing this material, I'm persuaded that, yes, there's more supposition than fact here. As will be described below, I think the matter still merits an endnote. But only as a hypothesis, and one that also should be flagged as such. 

As Oxford's first biographer, B.M. Ward first pointed out, there's a record in the calendar of manuscripts at Hatfield House (XIII, 362) of a copy of a New Testament which is no longer extant. But the manuscript calendar does transcribe a Latin inscription from the book's flyleaf. Nina Green's excellent Oxford-Shakespeare website has the full Latin transcript with an English translation here.  

The Latin poem from the New Testament's flyleaf contains homophonic, though not etymological, puns on Vere and the Latin veritas (truth). Here's part of it:

"[S]ince thou, a Vere, art wife and mother of a Vere daughter, and seeing that thou mayest with good hope look forward to being mother of an heir of the Veres, may thy mind always glow with love of the truth, and may thy true motto be Ever Lover of the Truth. And that thou mayest the better attain to this, pray to the Author of all Truth that His Word may teach thee; that His Spirit may nourish thy inner life, so that, thus alleviating the absent longings of thy dear husband, thou, a Vere, mayest be called the true glory of thy husband. ... To the illustrious Lady Anne Vere, Countess of Oxford, while her noble husband, Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, was travelling in foreign parts."

Not exactly Virgil. Still, despite its anonymous nature, the context of the poem does suggest Oxford's hand, especially as it might offer an interesting glimpse into an insecure, doting zealotry in Oxford's intense scrutiny over Anne's pregnancy.

These c. 1602 references to Macbeth explode the Stratfordian myth

Readers of this blog hopefully already know that a much more active site of SBAN-related discussion these days is the  Facebook group ShakesVere. And a familiar refrain on SV over the past year has been "Please, go read Rambler." 

Rambler is a pseudonymous blogger with an encyclopedic grasp of early modern drama who's been posting on nearly a daily basis since last April about his forays into Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays written by many authors other than "Shakespeare." 

Executive summary of Rambler's posts: Writers from the London literary scene 400 years ago -- Chapman, Middleton, Jonson, Nashe, and numerous others as well -- had all written in guarded terms about Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." Their testimony taken as a whole exposes and validates what we today call the Shakespeare Authorship Question. And the Oxfordian theory specifically. Stratfordians have COMPLETELY missed the boat here.

Rambler's blog carries the catchy spoonerism "Quakespeare Shorterly" and is at the URL http://lookingforshakespeare.blogspot.com. Anyone interested in the authorship question should really bookmark its RSS feed and Please, just go read Rambler. 

Rambler's latest two posts concern, in part, Queen Elizabeth as a historical prototype for the character Lady Macbeth. (Post 1, post 2) As I was writing "Shakespeare" by Another Name in 2002-'04, I'd reached the conclusion myself that England's queen seems to have served as a prototype for the play's bloodthirsty Scottish queen -- at least in the context of the Mary Queen of Scots trial and Elizabeth's (and, as a jury member in Mary's trial, Oxford's) ordering Mary's beheading. 

The execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 was an extraordinarily big deal, especially for a member of the feudal nobility who had been reared in the belief that kings and queens were God's handpicked agents in human affairs. (As noted in SBAN's Appendix A and in Roger Stritmatter's landmark PhD dissertation, the motif of anointed kings is a commonplace in the handwritten biblical annotations found in Oxford's copy of the Geneva Bible too.) 

To liken Mary's execution to deicide is no mere exaggeration. The anxiety over the royal blood Oxford and Elizabeth had spilled spills over into Macbeth in multitudinous ways. Books can, and should, be written about this. SBAN only begins to get the ball rolling. (Though it's also been surprising to me to learn how little even Oxfordian commentary there has been on Lady Macbeth and Queen Elizabeth.) 

Anyway, Rambler's two posts argue that the late Elizabethan play Blurt, Master Constable riffs on Lady Macbeth and language in Macbeth that strongly suggests Macbeth inspired this play that was published in 1602. Rambler points out that previous scholarship points to 1600-'01 as Blurt's likely composition date, but 1602 would be a hard-fast number here. For Macbeth to have influenced Blurt, some version of it must have been written and likely performed before Blurt was published.

If Rambler is correct, to put it mildly, this would pose a serious problem for Stratfordian chronology. It would mean some early draft of Macbeth were written before at the latest 1602 -- and would, by extension, stand to devastate no small portion of the whole house of cards upon which the Stratfordian chronology is built. 

Stratfordians have long claimed, on very little evidence, that Macbeth was a direct response to the Gunpowder Plot, a terrorist campaign that quickly became a public sensation in London in 1605-'06. Yet, as noted in SBAN's Appendix on the "1604 Question", the allusions Macbeth makes that might be seen as Gunpowder Plot references also trace back to courtroom trials from the 1580s and '90s, one of which Edward de Vere even sat on the jury for!

Despite all this, Macbeth and King Lear have been emerging lately as the Stratfordian fallback positions to a losing battle they're now fighting on The Tempest. (See here and especially here.) In all 3 cases, the claim is these are plays definitively written sometime after Edward de Vere died, in June 1604. So, if any one of those claims could be established firmly, then – again to put it mildly – it'd be very difficult sledding ahead for the Oxfordian paradigm.

Instead, however, 1604 has emerged as a kind of line in the sand. Attempts to discover firm evidence for composition of "Shakespeare" plays before 1604 often prove fruitful. Oxfordian chronologies of the "Shakespeare" canon from before 1604 draw on much the same evidence Stratfordian chronologies do.*

But after 1604, Stratfordian chronologies are, to put it bluntly, a joke. There is not only no firm evidence to date any "Shakespeare" play after 1604, there's plenty good evidence to argue that a post-1604 date is wrong.

Blurt, Master Constable is just the latest example.

As Rambler signs off, Thank you for reading. 

*That said, Oxfordians are also not bound by the Stratfordian stringent timeline for Will Shakspere. His move from Stratford to London in the late 1580s at the very earliest is presumed to be the earliest possible date for any "Shakespeare" work. Of course with Oxford circulating in Elizabeth's court  from 1562 onwards, Oxfordians have much more leeway to (realistically, I think) stipulate substantial foregrounds for many of the plays. So Comedy of Errors, as an example, may ultimately date to 1594 as Stratfordian chronologies theorize. But the performance at court in 1577 of the anonymous play A Historie of Error (as noted in SBAN) also makes good sense as an early draft of what eventually was staged and published as the mature "Shakespeare" work.

+----------------------------+

POSTSCRIPT: I can already hear the Stratfordian reply: Who's to say Macbeth wasn't referencing Blurt, Master Constable? To which I say, simply, one is one of the greatest plays ever written. The other is a largely forgettable lark. If you knew nothing else about popular culture over the past 50 years and saw Spaceballs and then Star Wars or Austin Powers and then Goldfinger or even read Pride and Prejudice and then read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.... which one would you think came first and which one came second?

The spoof post-dates the thing it's spoofing. Great masters at the top of their game don't worry themselves with referencing disposable goofs and trifles. Seriously, folks. In anywhere but topsy-turvy Stratford-land, this is Q.E.D.

(cc) image: John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

Shakespeare, Decaffeinated

The Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi once said, "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." The same might be said about writers and books -- or plays. 

London's first coffeehouse opened in 1652 and was an instant hit. With not much exaggeration, it's been said coffee fueled the Enlightenment. As one recent account of London coffeehouses on the website Public Domain Review notes,

"Remember -- until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly — or very -- drunk all of the time. Drink London’s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (“small beer”). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses — in Jonathan’s, Lloyd’s, and Garraway’s — spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain’s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America."

In the spring of 1575, Oxford wrote back to Lord Burghley from Paris that in his travels from Venice and beyond he intended to "bestow two or three months to see Constantinope and some part of Greece." That plus the fact that King Henri III of France had given Oxford letters of introduction to the Sultan's court in Constantinople suggest it's at least possible that the man Elizabeth called her "Turk" did in fact visit Turkey.

For me, when I was researching and assembling "Shakespeare" by Another Name, Turkey became a bridge too far in piecing together the most likely itinerary for Oxford's Italian, Adriatic, Mediterranean (and Aegean and Black Sea??) travels. I just couldn't make it all fit, and Turkey just seemed too far out of the likely orbit.

But there it is. Oxford said he wanted to go. And he had letters of passage from the King of France to give him entry.

There the coffee certainly flowed like water. Er... well at least syrupy water. A Turkish proverb from the time said coffee is best served "black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love."

Given how much Italy Oxford brought back to England with him in 1576, I'm inclined to suspect -- given the absence of Turkey (and coffee!) in his life and works and in the "Shakespeare" canon as well -- he never quite made it to Sultan Murad III's court.

The age of "Shakespeare" was still some 50 years before the dawn of the age of coffee in England. Hamlet written with the benefit of caffeine: It's a curious thought experiment at least, though I suspect it will forever be only just that. 

"Long Day's Journey Into Denmark" -- a talk in New York on Jan. 20

On Monday, Jan. 20 (Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in the U.S.), I'll be giving a talk after the Acting Company's production of Hamlet at the Pearl Theatre in New York City. 

The play begins at 7 p.m., and the talk (approx. 25 minutes) will be after the performance. A question and answer period will follow.  

It's titled "Long Day's Journey Into Denmark: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and the Radical Autobiography of Hamlet."

Tickets can be ordered here. 

Cast info here. About the company: 

The Acting Company was founded by theater and film legend John Houseman along with current Producer Margot Harley, Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, David Ogden Stiers and a dozen other graduates of the first class of Juilliard’s Drama Division.  Now in its 41st Season, it has won a TONY for Excellence in Theater while touring to 48 states and 10 foreign countries – performing, engaging students and building new audiences for the theater.  In addition to Mr. Kline and Ms. LuPone, Rainn Wilson, Jesse L. Martin, Jeffrey Wright, Frances Conroy, Harriet Harris, Hamish Linklater, David Schramm and Keith David all began their careers with The Acting Company along with 300 others who have carved out careers in the theater, TV and film.

"Anonymous" with a byline - screenwriter John Orloff interview (part 3)

Below -- in honor of the 462nd birthday of Edward de Vere (Apr. 12) -- we continue with the third and final part of our exclusive, long-form interview with Anonymous screenwriter John Orloff. (Here are links to parts one and two of the interview.)

Anonymous is now available as a DVD or Blu-Ray video disc and as streaming online video -- through Amazon. 

This site can only urge once more... Please see it. In my experience, and that of many I've spoken to, it's so rich and densely packed that seeing it a second time is better than the first. (Review here.) 

Anonymous also changes the conversation in the authorship debate in some fundamental ways. Its box office performance was good but not great: Falling somewhere between the revenues generated by Kenneth Branagh's 1996 adaptation of Hamlet and the 2004 Merchant of Venice (starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons). Nevertheless, it lives on and will continue to do so for many years to come -- albeit in less culturally conspicuous ways than in first-run cineplexes around the world, where it has been over the past six months.

At issue in this part of the interview with Orloff was a separate conversation I had had with the emeritus Berkeley English professor Alan H. Nelson about Anonymous. Nelson -- like most orthodox Shakespeare scholars and fans -- took great exception to actor Rafe Spall's over-the-top portrayal of Will Shakspere of Stratford as a bit of an illiterate oaf. (Pictured here, left to right, Sebastian Armesto [Ben Jonson], screenwriter John Orloff, Rafe Spall [Shakespeare])

Here is where the conversation picks up:

MARK ANDERSON: Let's talk about the portrayal of Will Shakspere of Stratford by Rafe Spall. How did you imagine him? How did that role evolve?

JOHN ORLOFF: Rafe is amazing. I love his performance in the movie. [The film] started off with the conceit that Shakespeare is a movie star.  He's young. He's handsome. He's got an ego. He loves the ladies. He's ambitious. But in his heart, he really wants to act. That's what his art is, and that's what calls him. 

He was always in our script as illiterate. The scene when Ben Jonson demands that he writes something in front of the Mermaid wits, that was always in the script. 

MKA: But when you say illiterate...

JO: He couldn't write. 

MKA: So in every draft, he was able to read his parts. But he just couldn't write. 

JO: Correct. That was always in there. 

And then Rafe came and read. And he really just broadened the character. He was always a little funny in our script. But Rafe broadened it -- but at the same time, I find his Shakespeare a little dark and menacing, as the movie progresses. And I like that about him. He's got a lot to lose, by the middle of the movie. And goddam it, he's going to protect it. There's a dark side to our Shakespeare. 

I would ask [Spall] what he thinks about the [authorship] issue. I think Rafe was on our set a "closet Stratfordian." He would never really comment. Fair enough. But what he did say is, 'I think Shakespeare is the hero of this movie.' And I'd say, 'What do you mean?' And he said, 'If he didn't do this, none of it would have happened. Thank God he said Yes to Ben Jonson.' So we have these fabulous plays. That's how he thought of Shakespeare. 

I started to think of Shakespeare as a Greek tragedy. He was the fool. He has the fool's role in our Shakespearean tragedy. 

MKA: So Rafe thinks Shakespeare's the hero. You think he's the fool. 

JO: In the sense that he's our comedic relief throughout the film, which I think it needs, because it's such a serious, somber and at times melodramatic story. It needs that lighter touch that Rafe peppers throughout the film. 

And, listen, if you're going to go there. If you're going to say Shakespeare didn't make the plays, you don't want to make him a super-smart character, do you? Because you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. You don't want to make an argument in the universe of the film that he's totally capable of making the plays. You want to make the argument of, 'No, he's some stupid actor.' You have that line when Oxford discovers that it's Shakespeare. The first thing out of his mouth is, 'An actor??!! An actor, for God's sake!' As if it's the worst thing imaginable. 

It was also poking in the eye of professors -- my own professors. I would also argue that the thing scholars know least about is Shakespeare and his personality. And so I think the version we have of Shakespeare is just as justifiable as Joseph Fiennes' Shakespeare. The professor [Alan] Nelson might have a big issue with Shakespeare in my movie. But that's because he's coming to it with his own emotional baggage of his impression of who Shakespeare was. I'm not responsible for that emotional baggage. I can't help him with that. 

The FAQ - from this Oxfordian's POV

I recently received a questionnaire from some high school students doing a project on Edward de Vere, Shakespeare and the authorship question. They asked some good questions that really got to the heart of the matter in the Shakespeare debate.

A number of readers have requested I post the (14) questions and my responses to them. 

What follows are one Oxfordian's opinions and perspectives. Others in the trenches of course have very different opinions and points of view. Vive la différence. 

With that caveat in mind, then...

1. How long have you researched Shakespeare and the authorship question?

I have been researching Shakespeare and the authorship mystery since 1993. I wrote a book, published in 2005, "Shakespeare" by Another Name, which was republished in ebook format last year. 

SBAN presents what I -- along with a small but growing minority of scholars, writers, theatrical professionals and Shakespeare buffs -- suspect is a very likely scenario, namely that the Elizabethan court dramatist Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, played a key role in the creation of the plays and poems published under the name "Shakespeare." I personally suspect de Vere was essentially the author himself. Others find a group collaboration scenario more probable. In any event, de Vere deserves much more attention by both scholars and people in the theater -- who of course bring these works to life. 

2. What ultimately made you believe Shakespeare was not the true author of all of his plays, sonnets, etc.?

Here's a great website that collects many of the so-called "anti-Stratfordian" arguments but does not advocate for any alternative "Shakespeare" candidate. Check out the YouTube video, in particular. A fine introduction to the case. 

Guest post: How Did A Man Who Didn't Go to Italy Go to Italy? A review of Richard Paul Roe's The Shakespeare Guide to Italy

Book review of Richard Paul Roe, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels (Harper Perennial, Nov. 2011)

by John Christian Plummer

Imagine that you lived in a time in which every educated person was absolutely certain that the planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moved both forward and backward.  This is what the astronomer Tycho Brahe called “retrograde motion.”  In Hamlet, when Claudius tells Prince Hamlet that a return to Wittenberg (the alma mater of Brahe) “is most retrograde to (the King’s) desire.” 

From the standpoint of the 21^st century, it requires a powerful feat of imagination to reckon that a vast celestial body like Mars would stop in the middle of space and reverse its direction.  And that it would do so consistently.  But that is precisely what many well educated 16^th century Europeans thought happened, and they didn’t just make this up out of a desire for imaginative tales; they had a problem that needed explaining.  The problem was Mars appeared at one point in the east of the sky, progressed westward, but then appeared back east of its westward position.  If Mars were to move in that way as it orbited the earth…well…one logical explanation would suggest it wasn’t orbiting the earth.  But that was impossible, of course, because Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and all the other planets, as well as the sun, absolutely did orbit the earth, because the earth, as everyone knew, was the center of the universe.  So given that unassailable fact, Brahe proposed his theory of retrograde motion. Mars, like a crab, like Hamlet, moved backward.

           

From where we sit in the age of Einstein, it’s easy to chuckle at this absurd mental contortion which, we now know, flies in the face of not only the correct, heliocentric model of the solar system, but also basic Newtonian physics.  But let us not forget that the educated Europeans of the 16^th century were operating from a working hypothesis – the geocentric model of the universe – that was powerful enough to put mortal fears into the minds of men like Copernicus and Galileo, whose more elegant, thoroughly researched and ultimately accurate explanations eventually won the day.

It is no hyperbole to call Richard Paul Roe a twenty-first century Galileo of literature.  Roe isn’t examining the stars without, but rather the stars within: specifically a third of the canon of the man some call the greatest author who ever set pen to paper, the man we call William Shakespeare.  The so-called Italy plays of Shakespeare are the subject of Roe’s tremendous inquiry, and his more than two decades of painstaking investigation and research have resulted in the landmark book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels, just released, posthumously, under the Harper/Perennial imprint.

"Anonymous" with a Byline - Screenwriter John Orloff interview (part 2)

As of the writing of this blog post, the Oxfordian biopic Anonymous has earned $6.9 million in international box office revenue. The movie also continues to open in staggered release in countries all over the world through the end of February. Later in 2012, of course, its extended life will begin on home video, on television, on airplane flights, in classrooms, etc. 

Despite the sometimes astonishingly vein-bulging tantrums of Oxfordian deniers, Anonymous will continue to introduce millions of people to the Shakespeare authorship mystery and to the most likely alternative "Shakespeare" candidate -- Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. 

We're grateful for Anonymous screenwriter John Orloff giving this blog an exclusive long-form interview with him about the alpha to omega of his script. (Orloff has also generously provided some of his own personal collection of photographs he took while on set with director Roland Emmerich -- during the movie's principal photography last year.) 

In part one of the "Shakespeare" by Another Name Blog's interview with Orloff, we discussed the screenwriter's own discovery of the Shakespeare authorship question courtesy of the 1989 PBS Frontline documentary The Shakespeare Mystery. Orloff ultimately wrote a screenplay about Edward de Vere and "Shakespeare," a script he originally titled Soul of the Age. 

Orloff had, he said, shopped it around Hollywood. And on the strength of Soul of the Age, Orloff had had meetings with Tom Hanks -- who ultimately hired Orloff to write two scripts for Hanks' co-production with Steven Spielberg, Band of Brothers. 

(SPOILER ALERT: This part of the interview with Orloff (part 2 of 3) begins getting into the thick of the movie's plot.)

MARK ANDERSON: Does Tom Hanks have an opinion on the authorship question?

JOHN ORLOFF: We never discussed it. My guess is he's a Stratfordian. But we never got deep into it. But Soul of the Age led to me getting a writing career and doing other work. A lot for Tom. 

MKA: Beyond Band of Brothers?

JO: Only that was produced. But I wrote about three more scripts for Tom over the years. And then meanwhile, I got a phone call from my agent saying Roland Emmerich is looking for writers for this disaster movie he's going to make about global warming. I said, "I don't know if I'm the right guy for that kind of stuff. I don't know the genre that well."

But [my agent] said, 'Yeah, but he's heard a lot about you. He really wants to meet you.' 

MKA: So this was when?

JO: This was 2002 or '03. We sat down in his office, and we talked about "Day After Tomorrow." Which sounded totally cool. But it also sounded like a movie I didn't understand as a writer. It's very outside of my wheelhouse, as they say. 

The other thing is, as a writer, I have to write things I love. And I don't know that genre as well as I should. And I said that to Roland. I said, "I'm so flattered that you think I can do this. I'm not sure I can. And I think quite frankly you can get a lot of writers who are way better than me for this kind of material." 

He said, "Well, what else have you written?" And I do what I always do, which is, I say, "Funny you should ask. Do you know anything about the Shakespeare authorship issue." And as usual there's a blank face. And I start doing my spiel, my 20 minute spiel. And I could see he was really interested. He said he wanted to read it. And about a week or two later, my agent called me up and said, "Hold on to your seat. Roland Emmerich wants to buy your script."

Which was a surprise. As it would be to anybody. Now that I know Roland, it's not a surprise at all. But not knowing Roland it seems like a surprise. 

"Shakespeare" with an E - The new 2011 ebook edition of "Shakespeare" By Another Name

As noted previously on this blog, on the ShakesVere Facebook boards and elsewhere, "Shakespeare" by Another Name has been updated and revised for an ebook edition. 

Today, I'm pleased to announce, the ebook of SBAN is now online and available for sale at ebook retailers across the Internet and around the world. The new ebook copy is also now being converted into a print-on-demand paperback that will be available for sale later this year. More announcements on that front forthcoming. 

Anyone with an ebook reader, smartphone, tablet or even just plain old PC or laptop can buy the ebook and read it on their device(s). The ebook is available in formats for all the major portable reader devices today (Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android tablets & smartphones, Google Books devices, etc.). Formats for reading the ebook on your PC/laptop reader (PDF) are also available or will soon be available, depending on the outlet. (Some sites take longer than others.) 

The central clearinghouse for all of this is the publisher's page for SBAN. As of this writing, SBAN's ebook publisher, Untreed Reads, is offering a 30% off sale -- just $5.59 for "Shakespeare" by Another Name in its new e-formats. 

"Anonymous" with a Byline - Screenwriter John Orloff interview (part 1)

Note: A year ago, the screenwriter John Orloff sent an email over the transom and started what has become a yearlong correspondence about his Edward de Vere biopic Anonymous (with which "Shakespeare" by Another Name is unaffiliated -- although that said, I very much enjoyed the film and hope everyone reading these words takes the opportunity to see this tremendous movie on the big screen).

When the publicity push for Anonymous was kicking into high gear, in early October, Orloff sat down for an interview for the "Shakespeare" by Another Name Blog at Orloff's office in western Massachusetts.

Orloff had already, three weeks before the movie's release, heard and read so much misrepresentation of what his movie was about and where it was coming from. In this long-form interview, Orloff wanted to help set the record straight. He also, very kindly, provided a number of his own behind-the-scenes photographs from the set of Anonymous, some of which are below.

What follows is the first part of the transcript (part 1 of 3) of our two-hour interview.


MARK ANDERSON: So let's start at the beginning. You're coming out of UCLA film school and eager to get into the film and TV industry. What happens next?

JOHN ORLOFF: What happened was 20-some-odd years ago, it was a very different film business. And it was a lot harder to get in to. Especially as a screenwriter. I first realized that I didn't have anything to write. I hadn't lived. I had nothing to say. And I was 22 years old. I had a relatively sheltered life. I lived in LA all my life. I'm actually fourth-generation film business. My great-grandparents were Fibber McGee and Molly. Jim Jordan and Marian Jordan. Their son, Jim Jordan Jr. was a TV director, and my grandmother was a B-movie actress. My father was a commercial director. And my brother's an Academy Award winning sound mixer.

In my 20s, I ended up working in advertising, because I could get work there. Just struggling to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And then I met my now-wife, who at the time was working at HBO in the long-form movie division. She would bring home these long form scripts that tended to be non-fiction based. Movies about Dorothy Dandridge, the African American Baseball League. I've always been interested in non-fiction based movies. A lot of my favorite movies are David Lean movies. I love historical films.

One thing led to another, and I started talking to my wife about the Shakespeare authorship issue, which I'd already learned about through the "Frontline" [episode on the Shakespeare Debate]. This was probably 1995. But I'd learned about the issue around 1989. Which led me to then going, "This seems true. It seems crazy that I've never heard of this." That led me to reading Ogburn's book as my first book. I was really just blown away by it. As many people are.

Comment-upon-comment: The scholars consider

On the Facebook ShakesVere boards, Geoffrey Green points to a recent blog post by a Stratfordian  scholar who sighs and says, OK, Anonymous now means we have to take on the Oxfordians. 

My comment on this literary scholar's blog after the jump. 

The Soul of the Age, The Amadeus of the Stage: A review of the movie ANONYMOUS

In brief: See this movie. Anonymous is, first and foremost, a ripping good yarn. It also represents the biggest media event in the history of the Oxfordian story and perhaps the whole Shakespeare authorship question. Over the coming months and years, millions of people around the world who know nothing about Edward de Vere and his relationship to the "Shakespeare" canon will be witnessing the entire Elizabethan and Oxfordian world that Anonymous has fascinatingly and carefully created -- historical liberties and all. Some critics will undoubtedly knock Anonymous's departures from documented fact, even setting the Shakespeare authorship issue aside. But such criticism, in this reviewer's opinion, misses the point of the fictionalizing: The dramatic license the movie wields all arguably helps it tell a powerful and gripping story to as wide a global audience of moviegoers as possible. This is, on balance, a very good thing.

Review: Roland Emmerich's forthcoming Oxfordian biopic Anonymous (Columbia Pictures, US & UK release Oct. 28, elsewhere here) is a revolution in a 16:9 frame. Fittingly, the story prominently features its own uprising.

An enraged mob has just seen a performance of the Shakespeare play Richard III. Incited by the play's allegorical depiction of the crook-backed Elizabethan Machiavel Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg), they're ready to smash and burn. The playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) sees a trap, though, and he tries to stop the masses from running headlong into it. 

However, as the "Essex Rebellion" actually played out 410 years ago, it was preceded by a performance of the Shakespeare play Richard II -- a knottier drama whose relationship to the rebellion turns on less immediately accessible points, concerning a scene depicting the deposition of an English monarch. And while we're nitpicking, Jonson wasn't part of the marauding hordes either. 

Yet the success of Anonymous is that even those who know the historical facts with which the movie takes its liberties aren't given much time to care. It's a wild and entertaining ride. The intrigue and literary double-dealing sweeps the viewer up into a shadowy world all its own. The actor Shakespeare, as the film portrays him, is an ale-hoisting codpiece who fronts as the author of plays written behind the scenes by an Elizabethan court playwright who is no stranger to readers of this blog, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. 

The depiction of de Vere blending into his Shakespearean milieu -- from authorship of plays and poems to courtly performances to outdoor public theaters -- is a revelatory and sometimes shocking experience. Even for an Oxfordian viewer.

Those who make a hobby or (part-time) profession professing the case for de Vere as "Shakespeare" nevertheless live in a hostile Stratfordian world, forever defending ourselves from critical brickbats. We rarely if ever get, even in our minds' eyes, to inhabit these worlds. But Anonymous exerts every effort to ensure that for two hours and ten minutes, we do. And, thanks to a painstaking work of filmmaking, we really do.

The immersion comes not just from the lavish production design and photorealistic and nearly ubiquitous CGI digital backdrops. (The computer generated imagery in fact fits so comfortably and seamlessly into the scenes and settings that it actually fooled Variety's reviewer into claiming Anonymous is "nearly CGI-free.")

A few performances -- in particular the mother-daughter team of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson as the elder and younger Queen Elizabeth -- entice the viewer like a siren to join the film's Oxfordian universe.

And Rhys Ifans's quiet and measured turn as the mature Edward de Vere reverses nearly a century of academic slander against his character by flashing the fire and shaking the spears that Oxfordians have long said makes him such a compelling and convincing "Shakespeare." Ironically, Ifans' knowing glances, each themselves concealing volumes, will probably reach more eyes than the whole output of books and articles in the long history of the authorship question. 

At a public Q&A with Emmerich recently, Columbia University professor James Shapiro (Contested Will) tried to smear Emmerich with insinuations of Nazism -- a vile slander that provided a case-in-point of the desperation and intellectual bankruptcy that marks most Stratfordian rearguard actions today. 

Orthodox Shakespeare scholars -- those whose reputations and careers rely on Shakspere of Stratford claiming exclusive right to the "Shakespeare" canon --  have good reason to be worried. The comparable arrow in their quiver, Shakespeare in Love, is an empty vessel compared to the heady draught of thriller, romance and epic literary biography that Anonymous serves up.

That Anonymous surpasses Shakespeare in Love, incidentally, is actually no trivial statement from this reviewer. I am one Oxfordian who enjoyed Shakespeare in Love, especially for its own witty and carefully crafted depiction of the period. But Shakespeare in Love was -- like Stratfordian best-selling books Will in the World or 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare -- entertaining ultimately only for its backdrops and bit players. None of these stitch jobs had a living, approachable, comprehensible, and fallible human soul at its core.

Anonymous, on the other hand, delivers just that. It makes the kind of immediate and visceral human connection to its protagonist that good movie performances can forge. 

Anonymous class 1: Why search? Why ask?

This week, we're welcoming all to join in a discussion led by the teachers of an eight-week course called "Anonymous the Movie and William Shakespeare's Identity." (Description here [PDF], p. 21.)

The class is offered by the University of Minnesota's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and taught by OLLI science/liberal arts leader George Anderson* and retired Univ. of Minn. humanities professor James Norwood.

The instructors have one question this week which they'll be asking their students -- and ask anyone else to join in here and on the "ShakesVere" Facebook page. It's as follows:

Anonymous post-Toronto: The Good, The Better, The Oscars?

It has been fascinating to monitor the press coverage of the Oxfordian Columbia/Sony Pictures film Anonymous as it had its official premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this past weekend. It opens in movie theaters across North America and the UK on Oct. 28 -- and throughout the rest of the world in the two months following.

The upshot has been very upbeat: Four reviews (that I've been able to find) have posted so far, and all four are anywhere from begrudgingly positive to wholly positive. 

After the break, excerpts from the four. First, though, SBAN blog correspondent Ted Alexander was in attendance at last night's screening and had the following to report: 

    I loved the movie as did my wife and daughter. Crowd liked it too. No standing O but sustained applause.
    I think the movie succeeded spectacularly as entertainment. The actors were superb in their roles; the story was interesting and I thought,well-told; the cinematography, costuming, CGI, etc were all great. I really enjoyed all the bits of the various Shakespeare plays that they staged in the film (really enjoyed the Henry V, Mark Rylance does a wonderful job with the opening chorus).
    Now as to the historical accuracy of the movie, there are a lot of things wrong, especially chronologically and a lot of things that are highly speculative. I'm not a proponent of the PT theory but it does serve the plot well and makes the story more interesting. We don't know anything about what sort of relationship Ben Jonson had with the author but the way it is portrayed in the film feels like what I imagine it could have been or at least what I would have liked it to have been if that makes any sense. I really liked the Jonson character in the film. He has one of the best lines in the film to de Vere's wife when leaving their home near the end of the film.
    All-in-all I think the writer and the director have done a masterful job of creating an entertaining film that is still enlightening in some significant ways while taking liberties with the facts. Bravo! Can't wait to see it again.

(Mr. Alexander also took a handheld video of the audience Q&A with director Roland Emmerich, five members of the cast and the screenwriter John Orloff.)

**EDITED on Sept. 13 to add correspondent Kathryn Sharpe's brief review after attending the other public screening to date of Anonymous -- this year's Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in Portland, Ore.:

I loved it. Emmerich says it's his story of Shakespeare--a darker story. He changed the known history when necessary to convey an "emotional truth" just as Shakespeare did with his history plays. The changes will bother people who know what actually happened, but it's not unlike seeing your favorite book made into a film. Things will change for the sake of the art form. The most memorable scene for me? The interior of Oxford's study, with shelves piled high with leather-bound manuscripts, those precious manuscripts. And Hank Whittemore said that he does not mind that the movie will be picked apart and compared to the historical record, because it is not a pure fantasy (as was Shakespeare in Love), it is about real people, real literary works. Real politics and real power.

"Shakespeare" the Venetian: Why Titian matters

Following up on the previous post -- which finds Hamlet using dialect peculiar to East Anglia, where Edward de Vere grew up -- it's worth remembering that the Shakespeare canon is also brimming with evidence that the author knew and wrote about Italy from first-hand experience. 

In a few cases, it's even possible to date when the author must have been there -- or, at least, communicated with someone who was in Italy at the time. 

The Shakespeare epic poem Venus & Adonis provides one such clincher. It contains lines that suggest the author was in Venice -- and was capable of gaining entrée to a prestigious Venetian artist's studio -- sometime before August 1576, when the artist died. 

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, traveled in Italy using Venice as his home base from May 1575 through March 1576. When de Vere traveled to La Serenissima, the city of canals had one superstar celebrity who arguably eclipsed all other cultural figures in town: The painter Tiziano Vecellio, a.k.a. Titian (c. 1488/1490 - 26 Aug. 1576). 

When the king of France, Henri III, had visited Venice in 1573, the king insisted on meeting Titian at the master's Venice studio. The octogenarian artist, former arch-rival of Michelangelo, had met and in many cases painted most of the leading intellectual, cultural, religious and political figures of the century. 

An Italianate English lord -- an emissary from Queen Elizabeth's court -- visiting Venice would have almost been expected to pay homage to the city's greatest living cultural icon. To have neglected to do so could have verged on the impolitic. 

If de Vere did indeed meet Titian, for starters, he could have heard a first-hand account of the life and the grisly death of one of Titian's patrons, the Duke of Urbino. The dearly departed Oxfordian scholar Andrew Hannas long advocated that Titian's portrait of Urbino, pictured here, was arguably the pictorial inspiration for King Hamlet's ghost, cap-a-pie, as Horatio says: 

A figure like your father,
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie [head-to-toe],
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them: ...

On the Elsinore battlements, we hear again about the ghost's armor, his pale complexion and his "countenance more in sorrow than in anger." Check, check and check. The apparition does, the soldiers say, have a grey beard. (Titian's Urbino doesn't.) Then again, aren't all ghosts supposed to look grizzled? 

Anyway, Hamlet's play The Mousetrap stages Urbino's murder. Titian's patron was poisoned by a courtly rival named Gonzago. In the ear. (Hamlet says of the murderer, "His name's Gonzago: The story is extant, and writ in choice Italian.")

Titian could have told de Vere all about the gruesome deed his patron fell prey to and the insider politics behind Hamlet's play-within-a-play. 

Titian also had in his studio at the time a masterpiece that would become a prime inspiration for the first work ever published under the name "Shakespeare," the 1593 epic poem Venus and Adonis. 

"Shakespeare" the East Anglian: Hawks, Handsaws & Hamlet

In 2006 Greg Hancock, a reader from Coburg, Ontario, sent an email to the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Bulletin sharing his revelation that Hamlet's enigmatic line "When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually derives from hawking lingo popular in East Anglia -- where Edward de Vere was born and spent part of his childhood.

Today, Mr. Hancock sent an update on this fine little nugget. Thanks to Google Books, he uncovered a fuller explanation of what Hamlet is talking about.

"Harnsa" (phonetic spelling) was East Anglian slang for a heron. When a hawk chases a "harnsa," the heron often flies with the wind to escape its predator. When the wind is from the south, the sun is at the hunter's back, so he can easily differentiate between his bird and his bird's prey. (By contrast, when the wind is from the north, the hunter might have to squint into the sun -- and would have a harder time telling the difference between the two birds.)  

What the commentator (from H.H. Furness's 1877 edition of Hamlet) doesn't say, however, is that the gloss only holds if the author of Hamlet's line knows East Anglian regional dialect -- and, presumably, has some experience hawking in that part of the country. De Vere, yes. Will of Stratford? Another misfit. 

In Mr. Hancock's words:

Basically the important point is that a heron or hernsew is pronounced "harnsa" in Norfolk and Suffolk, which together constitute East Anglia.  East Anglia is only about 150 miles from Stratford on Avon, but even in 2011 it is culturally and linguistically in a different country. ... It was presumably the same in the 16th century.

The Earl of Oxford was of course brought up in Suffolk, so he would have understood.  It is very unlikely Stratford Shakespeare would have been familiar with Suffolk dialect, or would have [understood] written references to it.

It is pleasing to me that the reference to a handsaw had been correctly identified as being a "harnsa" or heron before 1877 by a Fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge, and as such gives a little more academic credibility to the theory.

His original email to the SBAN Bulletin is below, after the jump. 

This. Looks. Big. (pt. 2)

Sony Pictures released its second Anonymous trailer last week. US & UK release dates are still set for Oct. 28. (Other worldwide release dates are here.) 

[Aug. 17 addendum: The movie's international trailer was also recently released: More dialogue snippets, less short-attention-span smashcutting between visual baubles. (Ahem, not the most flattering commentary about American audiences, no?) Clearly providing more hints about the movie's storyline. Facebook discussion about all the above here.]