Shakespearean Authorship Trust Trustee Julia Cleave gave SOS permission to reprint her report on the conference: “Shakespeare: from Rowe to Shapiro held Nov. 28, 2009 at The Globe in London. This report appeared initially in Nina Green’s email list, Phaeton on December 3. Her report supplements an earlier report by De Vere Society Secretary Richard Malim.

Brian Cummings

James Shapiro

If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes – if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it – it wouldn’t be Rowe’s, it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s.

Julia Cleave, Trustee of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust : MA (Oxon) is a member of the academic board of the Temenos Academy. She originally studied Shakespeare with Professor Hugo Dyson, the most puckish of the Inklings, the literary group based in Oxford which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Subsequently, in her career as a teacher and teacher trainer, she taught Shakespeare in the context of training courses for foreign teachers and lecturers sponsored by the British Council. Since 1998 she has worked as an independent scholar, tracing the presence of Hermetic traditions in Renaissance and seventeenth century art and literature. Her interest in the Authorship Question was first piqued by reading John Michell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare? This interest has since deepened and developed through participation in Wisdom of Shakespeare workshops at The Globe, and the Shakespearean Authorship Trust conferences and lectures. She is a member of the Francis Bacon Research Trust and the De Vere Society.

ARC of James Shapiro's Contested Will

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
Simon & Schuster: New York, London, Toronto, Sydney
Publication date: April 6, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4162-2
Price: $26

Reviewed from advance, uncorrected reader’s proof (ARC) by Linda Theil

I like this book very much; it is interesting, even-handed, and lucid. Yes, James  Shapiro is a Stratfordian and he says things in Contested Will that anti-Strats will not like, but Shapiro presents an in-depth look at the history of the authorship question and I appreciate his efforts.

Although he seems to believe that there is some psychological crisis that drew brilliant men like Looney, Hawthorne, Freud and Henry James to the authorship question, that belief doesn’t prevent him from presenting their quest with fervor and conviction.

In his prologue, Shapiro says:

I became increasingly interested in why this subject (Shakespearean authorship) remains virtually taboo in academic circles, as well as in the consequences of this collective silence. One thing is certain: the decision by professors to all but ignore the authorship question hasn’t made it disappear. If anything, more people are drawn to it than ever. (ARC 5)

His moment of truth came when while giving a talk on Shakespeare’s poetry at a local elementary, a fourth-grader asked him about the authorship question.

Shapiro seems to think that if Shakespeare lovers truly understood the Elizabethan literary culture, the impossibility of concealing a writer’s identity and most important the false assumption of the autobiographical nature of the plays – the authorship question would disappear.

He discusses the first two elements in this book, but he puts the most energy into rebuking what he considers an anachronistic importance placed on the fact that the life of the Stratford man cannot be reconciled with the content of the plays. He chooses this aspect of the question with good reason since he says, without equivocation, that this discrepancy was the primary reason the authorship question arose — beginning with a frustrated Edmond Malone in the late eighteenth century who could find no primary sources for his biography of the great playwright.

Shapiro has divided his story into a prologue, four chapters, an epilogue and a bibliographical essay that serves as a reader’s resource, although – as is currently customary in a publication meant for general readership — no citations are given throughout the book. The four chapters are titled: Shakespeare, Bacon, Oxford, and Shakespeare (the evidence for Shakespeare). The first Shakespeare chapter leads the reader through the development of the Stratfordian history  including stories of Ireland’s and other forgeries, and what Shapiro call’s Shakespeare’s deification and a resulting unease with the biography of the man from Stratford.

Shapiro says:

When desire outpaced what scholars could turn up, there remained only a few ways forward: forgery, reliance on anecdote, or turning to the works for fresh evidence about the author’s life. The impulse to interpret the plays and poems as autobiographical was a direct result of the failure to recover enough facts to allow anyone to write a satisfying cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare.(ARC 45)

I found that statement to be a significant acknowledgment of a major anti-Stratfordian thesis, and I greeted it as such with joy. Although, to Shapiro, my interpretation is a false one based on a modern obsession with biography that did not exist in Shakespeare’s time.

I suppose I grasp his point, but I fail to see how a lack of interest in a personal story translates to not having one. Call it what you will, an English writer will not produce Sufi poetry unless he has been taught Arabic, trained in the methods of Sufi literature and imbued with the life and understanding of a Muslim. An artist can only express what his life has given him, and as Shapiro admits throughout this book, the work of Shakespeare was not the life expression of the Stratfordian.

In his book, Shapiro further links a growing willingness to question received wisdom about the authorship of the plays of William Shakespeare with F.A. Wolf’s 1795 book challenging “Homer’s” authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey. Wolf had used the methods of the “Higher Criticism” pioneered by Biblical scholar J.G. Eichhorn in the 1780s. According to Shapiro, the Higher Criticism used historical methods to study the origins, date, composition and transmission of the books of the Bible. Then D.F. Strauss’ used this method to demythologize The Life of Jesus published in 1835.

Shapiro says the Biblical controversy influenced thinking about Shakespeare authorship because Shakespeare had been deified by eighteenth century Englishmen.

Had the impulse to speak of Shakespeare as a literary deity been curbed or repudiated, Shakespeare might not have suffered collateral damage from a  controversy that had little to do with him. (ARC 73)

It seems that in 1848 an American, Lutheran pastor, S. M. Schmucker, in an attempt to ridicule Strauss, published A Life of Shakespeare – a parody meant to undermine Strauss that laid out the authorship question in all respects.

Shapiro quotes Schmucker:

Is it not strange that one individual, so ill prepared by previous education, and other indispensable requisites, should be the sole author of so many works, in all of which it is pretended that such extraordinary merit and rare excellence exist? (ARC 78)

In the next section on Sir Francis Bacon as Shakespeare, Shapiro explores his topic through the life and works of Delia Bacon, Mark Twain, Helen Keller and Henry James. He then segues into Oxford through Freud, then J.T. Looney’s Shakespeare Identified completed in 1918 and published in 1920. Shapiro treats Looney with great respect, although he disputes that Looney didn’t already have Oxford in mind before he began his work in 1910, and he says that Looney was not the romantic school master of his book, but a failed disciple of Auguste Comte’s Positivist philosophy – to which Hitler also ascribed, Shapiro notes.

Personally I never thought my interest in Shakespearean authorship was either religious or political, but I suppose there are those who see it as both, even though I maintain my innocence.

Shapiro covers the history of the Oxfordian movement in the twentieth century wherein all our friends and neighbors are mentioned. He writes a wonderful pretend letter to Oxfordians, saying:

Imagine the disbelief that would have greeted a contributor to the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter in the early 1980s, who, rejecting all the hand-wringing, urged fellow Oxfordians to be patient and predicted that in twenty-five years their movement would be thriving: . . . (ARC 202)

And he follows with a long, long list of all that has been accomplished in the past 20 years.

From Oxford, Shapiro finally makes his way to the evidence for Stratford Will. He hauls out the usual suspects: George Buc and Ben Jonson, and the published references to the writer that – oops — don’t actually relate to the Stratford man unless you make the assumption that he is the writer William Shakespeare. His fall-back position is that the playwright could not have been anonymous in the milieu of Elizabethan England, and we would all be convinced if we were just a bit better informed (and maybe a little less spiritually deformed).

Shapiro will not give up Stratford Will because denying him would be tantamount to stripping Shakespeare of his most magnificent attribute – his imagination. I say allowing Shakespeare an aristocrat’s experience gives him the tools to detonate his imagination into a nuclear reaction of the mind – for Shakespeare, imagination equals experience times the speed of light squared.

This is a fascinating book by a fine writer who loves his work. There is a lot here to think about, consider and dispute; but to my way of thinking James Shapiro has made in Contested Will, a stride toward armistice in the “trench warfare” of authorship inquiry. (ARC 7)

James Shapiro is Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University. He is the author of four books, most recently A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, which won the BBC Samuel Johnson prize in the UK, given annually for the outstanding work of nonfiction. His next book will be The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

William Leahy, John Barton, Tom Hunter, and  Dorna Bewley added commentary to David Aaronovitch’s report on the Nov. 15 Shakespeare Authorship Trust conference at the Globe in London. Aaronovitch’s amusing Nov. 19 report in The Times Online had a decidedly mocking tone that was rebuked by these commentators.

Tom Hunter said to Aaronovitch:

Your skepticism of Shakspere skepticism is well taken. It really will be worth more to you than a few lines of throwaway sarcasm to speak from a bit more knowledge, and you are entirely welcome to make that leap.

The Aaronovitch article is titled “The hunt for the real Shakespeare is a fruitless act: Authorship of the mass of work ascribed to William Shakespeare has long been the subject of debate. David Aaronovitch spends a day in pursuit of the ‘real’ Bard.” It was published Nov. 19, 2009 on The Times Online.

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s education blog, Making a Scene: Shakespeare in the Classroom, is a rich resource for every Shakespeare-lover. In his November 13 post, “Folger Education at NCTE“, Folger’s Senior Consultant for National Education Mike LoMonico laid out a fabulous list of Folger offerings highlighted by Folger staff at the National Council of Teachers of English 2009 convention held in Philadelphia last month.

Among the Folger offerings, LoMonico said:

. . . We will be showing off our new Teacher Toolkit and its contents which includes two DVDs, a 2GB USB flash drive with podcasts, videos, images from our collection, and lots of handouts and edited scenes. We will also be answering all of your questions about Institutes, Workshops, and the rest of our resources.

The NCTE serves all levels of students — elementary through college, and would be a good partner in the Shakespeare authorship endeavor. Their 2010 annual convention will be held Nov. 18-23 in Orlando, Florida. Deadline for proposals submitted electronically is Jan. 20, 2010.

Sources:
http://folgereducation.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/folger-education-at-ncte/http://www.ncte.org/annual

SOS Public Relations Chairperson Matthew Cossolotto, submitted the following report on publication of The Oxfordian:

The Shakespeare Oxford Society recently mailed this year’s The Oxfordian (Volume 11) — the first volume edited by recently appointed editor Michael Egan (PhD), an award-winning Shakespeare scholar who is open-minded on the Shakespeare authorship question.

Commenting on his appointment, Professor Egan stated: “I believe the Shakespeare authorship mystery is a legitimate and important area for investigation and that there are enough doubts or unexplored areas to continue serious academic research.”

New York-based Shakespeare Oxford Society is an educational organization dedicated to exploring the Shakespeare authorship question and researching the evidence that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 – 1604) is the true author of the poems and plays of William Shakespeare.

John Hamill, recently elected president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, said:

We’re delighted that a Shakespeare scholar of Professor Egan’s stature agreed to join us as the editor of our flagship annual publication. We invite other Shakespeare scholars and Bard lovers worldwide to take a look at this year’s edition of The Oxfordian and to approach the authorship issue with an open mind. It’s a fascinating topic that deserves the serious attention of scholars and the media.

The BBC recently published a story (November 27, 2009) about the case for Edward de Vere as the real Shakespeare. See BBC Oxford: Edward de Vere: The Bard or not the Bard by Dave Gilyeat.

In this BBC report, Dr. Egan said:

One of the most disturbing aspects of the whole debate is the way the anti-Stratfordians are silenced. There isn’t any real attempt to confront the arguments. There’s just a general mocking and ridiculing strategy — what I call arguing by adjective… ‘ridiculous, absurd’ and so on… whereas in fact there’s some very suggestive and interesting pieces of information that need to be factored in there. It’s a little like the Copernican theory of the universe. What seems obvious at first turns out to be not so when you try to reconcile the obvious with the anomalies and the anomalies are great.

The 2009 edition of The Oxfordian features an Open Forum section with articles supporting five different authorship candidates: David Kathman on William of Stratford-upon-Avon; Peter Farey on Christopher Marlowe; John Hudson on Amelia Bassano Lanier; John Raithel on William Stanley, and Ramon Jimenez on Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

The Oxfordian, Vol. 11, also includes:

· Stephanie Hopkins Hughes: An Oxfordian Response;
· Robin Fox: Shakespeare, Oxford and the Grammar School Question;
· Earl Showerman: Timon of Athens: Shakespeare’s Sophoclean;
· Frank Davis: Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte: Shakespeare’s Biography?
· Michael Egan: Slurs, Nasal Rhymes and Amputations: A Reply to MacDonald P. Jackson;
· John Shahan and Richard Whalen: Auditing the Stylometricians: Elliott, Valenza and the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic.

Professor Egan said:

If the traditional ‘Shakespeare’ did not write the plays ascribed to him, who did? On this matter I am not settled. I have a lot of sympathy for the Oxfordian response, but frankly my mind remains open. I believe all scholars worthy of the name should allow the research to take us wherever it leads, and that’s exactly how I intend to operate as editor of The Oxfordian.

Michael Egan, PhD
Michael Egan is an internationally known writer, consultant and educator with experience working in England, South Africa, and the US. Egan earned his BA from Witwatersrand University, and his MA and PhD from Cambridge. He has served as Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Lecturer in English, Lancaster University, UK. and as Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University, and South London University. He is a prize-winning author of ten books and over 80 professional articles.

The Oxfordian availability:

Shakespeare Oxford Society members receive a copy of The Oxfordian as a benefit of membership. Join online at: http://www.goestores.com/catalog.aspx?Merchant=shakespeareoxfordsociety&DeptID=27020

Non-members of the Shakespeare Oxford Society may order a copy of the latest issue by sending a request for The Oxfordian/11 (2009) The Annual Journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society to: Shakespeare Oxford Society, P.O. Box 808, Yorktown Heights, NY, 10598-0808. Enclose a check for a total of $24.95. ($20 plus $4.95 shipping via USPS Priority Mail)

Back issues of SOS publications may be ordered online at: http://www.goestores.com/catalog.aspx?StoreName=shakespeareoxfordsociety&DeptID=49368

Conference – “Shakespeare: from Rowe to Shapiro”
The Globe/London: 28 November 2009
Reported by De Vere Society Secretary Richard Malim with assistance from Kevin Gilvary

Shakespeare’s Globe are to be applauded for organising a conference drawing together many academics who have published on the life of Shakespeare. Among those present were various Oxfordians, Dr. William Leahy, and Mark Rylance, who has done so much to bring the authorship question to the fore. The conference was not particularly well attended, with about 60 present including a number of students and there were eleven speakers.

The content of some of these papers was very mixed: some must be passed over in the silence of anonymity as even the academic applause was moderate. For example, one speaker contended that the eleven year old William Shakespeare might have been entranced by his un-evidenced sighting of the Queen at Kenilworth (some eleven miles from Stratford), and thus inspired — but I am left uninspired, and amazed that anything so remote from possibility may be thought to have some claim to scholastic recognition

Two speakers spoke at length on how current biographies affect the writing of historical novels – nothing to do with the history and development of Shakespeare’s biography, but interesting nonetheless to illustrate the cross-over between fact and fiction in Shakespeare biographies.

Graham Holderness confirmed that there two sources for the deer-poaching tradition, which makes it more likely that it is correct: whether it is relevant to the biography as it impinges on the Works was not explained. It is mainly used to explain why the young man left his native country for the uncertainty of city life. Rene Weis thought that more research should be devoted to Shakespeare’s descendants in the hope that evidence of Shakespeare’s library might yet be discovered.

Brian Cummings
On a more positive note, Brian Cummings emphasised that modern reconstructions or replacements such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shakespeare’s Birthplace and the Cottage Garden reflect the taste of the age of the redeveloper. Extrapolating that thesis to scholarship in regard to the canon, such endeavours may invite ridicule today. The Wallaces’ discovery of the Bellott-Mountjoy deposition was a desperate disappointment to them, but with the luxury of hindsight we Oxfordians can inquire what else they could have expected. When the quotation from Coleridge was put to him that he (Coleridge) preferred the internal evidence from the plays to the documentary research of Malone on his (Malone’s) play dating scheme, Professor Cummings answered that he preferred Coleridge’s approach.

Stanley Wells & Paul Edmondson
Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson launched an attack on the William-Shakespeare-autobiographical thesis for the sonnets. They made some good points particularly about the Dark Lady sonnets 127ff; noting that only three are actually addressed to a woman (139,141 and 145), although others reflect on her dark/black appearance and behaviour. These last group of sonnets smack also of exercise-like material rather than strict autobiography.

They were very effective when they denounced the desire of biographers to find William-Shakespeare-autobiographical references, i.e. the connections between “the lovely boy” and William Shakespeare: in doing so they kicked away the ladder whereby any connection between the irrelevant life and the canon can be invented – a valuable exercise for Oxfordians, who can demonstrate over and over again the biographical connections between Oxford and Southampton in their biographies as they reappear in the Sonnets’ references.

Shapiro
The highlight was the appearance of James Shapiro, whose talk was on the effect of Malone’s conversion of Shakespeare into an autobiographical writer.

Notes on Shapiro’s talk:
Almost nothing we know shines light on his (Shakespeare’s) personality. There are no personal essays and no diaries; we have to admit there is now any chance of further illumination of his inner life is irrevocably lost; and in Malone’s chronological listing there is nothing likewise to be learnt. The temptation for biographers is to line up the life with the works. The loss of his only son in 1596 cannot be said to have inspired the speeches of Constance in King John, as Malone suggests. Likewise there is no evidence that Ann Hathaway was unfaithful to William: Sonnet 93 (“…like a deceived husband”) does not properly connect with the bequest in the will of the second best bed; or that the jealous husband of Othello is a reflection of that surmise.

Furthermore there is no evidence of what William did during the “missing” years 1586-1590 – all that stuff about being a school-master, a lawyer’s clerk, a soldier etc. is unprovable rubbish. There is as a result a temptation for biographers to be ingenious (and here Shapiro confessed he had done it himself), to which they almost all succumb. Wordsworth’s opinion of the Sonnets : “With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart”, and Coleridge’s view that the plays reflected Shakespeare’s psychological development in the canon are both valueless. The problem is that so much modern writing is autobiographical, modern biographers assume Shakespeare’s writings are the same.

Of course there must be some shards of his life in the works, but we do not know where or why they are included, and Shapiro has no confidence in even the ones suggested by Wells or Weiss. He would dispute Michael Wood’s assertion, that Prospero in The Tempest is an autobiographical portrait, and Greenblatt’s surmises about Shakespeare’s marriage. Both Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians are at fault when they seek to couple the life and the works and include in apparent topicalities.

These errors are not just an aberration, as the whole approach can be traced back to Malone and his original mistaken view. It diminishes the power of Shakespeare’s imagination: all his characters are within that imagination.

Shapiro’s approach represented a shift (which he actually denied in reply to a question) from what he wrote in his recent book, 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, when he wrote:

We know too little because we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was . . . Even if we don’t know about his personality, we know a great deal about his career as a writer (more than enough to persuade a reasonable sceptic that he wrote the plays himself).

Now he has destroyed the personality nexus almost completely, diminishing what we (think we ) know about his career as a writer.

Comment
It was certainly gratifying that there were none of the usual snide anti-antiStratfordian comments or humour. It is just possible that there is a degree of academic acceptability on the horizon for Oxfordians. The more distinguished speakers were very much against any clear link between particular parts of, or incidents in, William Shakespeare’s life and the works.

By discarding what might have been the stronger argument for Stratfordians, and having to fall back on the chronology scheme as revised by Dowden and Chambers, and only subsequently qualified in minor ways, means this makes the De Vere Society’s dating project even more germane.

Soon William’s case therefore will patently be totally shattered: whether academia will recognize the true extent of the wreck is another matter. First the Oxford biographical connections to the works need to be taken on board, and the criticisms of the conference speakers’ attempts to do that for William will not work on the Oxford connections because of the sheer volume and exactitude of them; and secondly the topicalities. (These were totally ignored by the conference – of course, because there are none such, if the present chronology is used.) Finally the De Vere Society dating project will draw these strands together.

Perhaps the reality of the acceptance of Oxford as the author is an inch or two closer.

R.M.

Minerva's Voyage by Lynne Kositsky

Shakespearean scholar Lynne Kositsky reports that her young adult novel, Minerva’s Voyage inspired by the William Strachey account of the voyage of the Sea Venture is available at Amazon.ca and in Canadian bookstores and will be soon available at Amazon.com.

Kositsky said:

Minerva’s Voyage is a blackly comedic take on the voyage of the Sea Venture in 1609 for ages 10-15. It contains Minerva Britanna emblems and secret codes to be solved by young readers. Names of voyagers and ship have been changed, however, to protect the guilty, and the novel veers off the Strachey track when the young protagonists reach the mysterious Isle of Devils. The novel would make a great gift for teens, or grownups who want something a little rib-tickling to read.

Synopsis of the plot of Minerva’s Voyage:
Robin Starveling, aka Noah Vaile, is scooped off the streets of seventeenth century Bristol, and dragged on board a ship bound for Virginia by the murderous William Thatcher, who needs a servant with no past and no future to aid him in a nefarious plot to steal gold. Starveling fits the bill perfectly since he lives nowhere and has no parents. Aboard the ship, Starveling makes friends with a young cabin boy, Peter Fence. Together the two boys suffer through a frightening hurricane and are shipwrecked on the mysterious Isle of Devils. They solve the ciphers embedded in emblems found in Thatcher’s sea chest, which has washed up with the wreck, then make their way through gloomy forests and tortuous labyrinths to a cave on the shore that houses a wizard-like old man. Beset by danger and villainy on every side, they finally discover the old man’s identity and unearth a treasure that is much rarer and finer than gold.

Biography:
Lynne Kositsky is an award-winning poet and the author of several novels in Penguin’s Our Canadian Girl Series, including Rachel: A Mighty Big Imagining, which won the White Raven Award. Lynne’s fiction has been nominated for the Geoffrey Bilson, White Pine, Golden Oak and Hackmatack Awards, and in 2006 she won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Youth for The Thought of High Windows. She lives in Vineland, Ontario with her husband Michael, a composer, and her two shelties, who provided the template for Tempest, the doggy character in Minerva’s Voyage.

Stephen Moorer of Carmel, California enlightened Martin Samuel on the use of “equivocation” in Macbeth and other errors in Samuel’s anti-Oxfordian commentary, “Sorry, it’s true. The Bard WAS a mere Brummie” that appeared yesterday (Nov. 28, 2009) in the Daily Mail .

In his comment on Samuel’s essay, Moorer said, “Please Mr. Samuel, don’t be so “clever” that you simply rely on old-hat arguments that no longer hold water!”

London’s Heward Wilkinson also weighed in on the side of the angels, and a charming Brummie (a person from Birmingham, according to SOS’s The Oxfordian editor, Richard Egan) offered Brumdignian translations of Shakespearean titles — have you seen the delightful comedy, “A lot o’ fuss about nowt”?

Samuel, the columnist, explained his desire to explode the Oxfordian thesis in terms of potential crimes against Westminster, thus:

Still, back to Looney and Spear-Shaker, because if we do not resist this nonsense we will end up in the same foolish position as the Dean of Westminster. He has placed a question mark next to the date of death on the memorial to Christopher Marlowe at Poets’ Corner in order to appease the nutters who think he wrote the Bard’s 37 plays and 154 sonnets.

Ah, the perils of literary politics.

Note: Readers are allowed to rate posts in terms of their preference at the site.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1231227/Sorry-true-The-Bard-WAS-mere-Brummie.html#ixzz0YAGXJ1Nk

In an extensive report on BBC today, Shakespeare Oxford Society Oxfordian Editor Michael Egan defends the Oxfordian thesis of Shakespearean authorship.

“Edward de Vere: the Bard or not the Bard? Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was one of the leading patrons of the Elizabethan age, but was he also William Shakespeare?” by Dave Gilyeat was featured this morning on BBC Oxford.

The report led with the announcement of the publication of Kurt Kreiler’s book Der Mann der Shakespeare Erfand (The Man Who Invented Shakespeare) and offered a lengthy exposition of the Oxfordian thesis with long and multiple quotes from Egan.

“Nature and intellectual life abhor a vacuum,” added Dr Egan.
“We don’t know enough about Shakespeare’s biography.
“There are huge gaps and because we know so little about him – despite his being one of the most researched lives in literary history – the situation calls for alternative explanations.
“The real key to the authorship debate is the mismatch between what we know of Shakespeare of Stratford and what we can infer about the author of the plays when we read them.
“When you look at the plays without preconceptions of the author we’d have to say this is a highly educated person, well travelled, with intricate knowledge of the courts and aristocratic life.
“So the question is where did an obscure provincial boy gain all this information and knowledge?”

Shakespeare by Another Name author Mark Anderson was also quoted extensively. Anderson was able to elucidate his insight that Oxford’s 1604 death is a positive point for Oxfordian authorship.

“The chronology is ironically a solid piece of evidence for de Vere,” insisted Mark Anderson.
“In fact the proponents of the evidence actually suggest that the Shakespeare factory shut down in 1604.
“There are no new Shakespeare plays that appear in print after 1604 with two exceptions.
“There’s a brief period in 1608 and ‘09 when de Vere’s widow sold the house where they lived and I think it stands to reason there was some house cleaning going on.
“An orthodox scholar would say there was a shipwreck in 1609 that The Tempest refers to.
“In fact there’s some really good scholarship published that suggests that it was a different shipwreck that was referenced in a couple of 16th century books that were in de Vere’s father-in-law’s library.”

The Stratfordian viewpoint was defended in Gilyeat’s article by Alan Nelson and Emma Smith.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/oxford/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8380000/8380564.stm

Publicist Caroline Ratner said a new book titled The De Vere Code by actor Jonathan Bond has been published in the UK. “(The De Vere Code is) the first book published by a new publishing house called Real Press which is part of the Real Group,” Ratner said. Her press release about The De Vere Code says:

Shakespearean actor, Jonathan Bond who studied Philosophy and Mathematical Logic at University College, London and Jesus College, Cambridge has discovered evidential proof from examination of the dedication to the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609 and fragmentary evidence that suggests it is an elaborate word puzzle. Numerous books and scholarly papers have previously suggested, without evidence that Edward De Vere was the real author of some of Shakespeare’s works but for the first time The De Vere Code presents conclusive proof that Edward De Vere, not Shakespeare was the author of the Sonnets.

The book is available from the publisher at: http://www.deverecode.com/dvchome.html