Nowadays nothing succeeds like Shakespeare. I acknowledge borrowing from Dumas for that phrase, just to keep out of trouble. You see, the trouble with Shakespeare--and success--is that everyone wants a cut, kind and unkind. Not only is Hollywood ransacking the bard's works for the play that might be the next big thing, but the question has arisen of who really wrote Shakespeare in Love. The London press pointed out last week that the screenplay of that very palpable hit has remarkable similarities to the plot of No Bed for Bacon, a 1941 novel by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon. A spokesman for Miramax, the film's distributor, could only respond, "Nothing is truly original. Shakespeare borrowed and adapted plots himself." To borrow (a bad habit) from T.S. Eliot, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
"But those plays aren't really Shakespeare's!" That is the rebel yell of a hardy band of amateur historians as they catch the wave of the bard's new vogue to resplash their thesis: Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare; Edward de Vere did. What's more, an ivory-tower conspiracy is keeping their views from being taken seriously. "We're into something called bardgate," says Peter Dickson, a CIA official turned revisionist Elizabethan scholar. Shakespeare is not a crook, reply the defenders of the glover's son from Warwickshire. And each side casts the other as devils citing Hamlet to their own purposes.
But what if we've actually been tracking the wrong Englishman? What if the real Shakespeare had led another life, one tingling with clear parallels to his sonnets and plays? (See chart.) What if he were really a nobleman, an earl who could trace his roots to a time before William the Conqueror? And what if, unlike the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, we had an undeniable record of his education--a degree from Oxford University and a solid grounding in the law that would explain the plenitude of Tudor legalese in the plays? Again, unlike the Stratford man, this nobleman would have once resided in Venice, the site of several plays. An able soldier, our earl would also be the nephew of a pioneer in the form of sonnet we now call Shakespearean; another uncle translated Ovid's Metamorphoses, the source of much Shakespearean allusion. He would be hailed as poet and playwright and become patron of an acting troupe. Finally, what if our nobleman had on his crest a lion that holds out a paw and, ah yes, shakes a spear?
That is some of the circumstantial but rather sexy evidence surrounding Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, in a contention that began in 1920 and has gathered steam through the '80s and '90s. De Vere led a life that was a veritable mirror of Shakespeare's art. Why then did he not write under his own name? It would have been unseemly, his advocates point out, for a courtier to attach his name to public wares. And De Vere was a truly uncommon nobleman: he was the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain and a sometime favorite of Elizabeth I's.