(2 of 3)
Not that he didn't leave clues. De Vere's copy of the Geneva Bible has been discovered in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and to the delight of advocates, words are underlined that reappear in the masterpieces. For example, the declaration "I am that I am" from Exodus 3: 14 is found not only in a letter De Vere wrote to his father-in-law in 1584 but also in "Sonnet 121." In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a Falstaff speech refers to a "weaver's beam," two words highlighted in the Bible (II Samuel 21: 19). Oxfordians can cite scores of other examples linking De Vere's Bible to Shakespeare's texts.
In his 1997 book, Alias Shakespeare, Joseph Sobran posits another reason for De Vere's alleged secrecy. The sonnets, he says, may have started as a playful artifice in courting the Earl of Southampton to marry De Vere's daughter, but they evolved into a dense homoeroticism. All the more reason to keep his authorship secret. (In this context there is a telling silence in Richard II. The historic King was notorious for a homosexual affair with the earl's ancestor Robert de Vere. Shakespeare's play begins after that affair is over, with no mention of the relative.) Thus while the earl lived, he hid behind the name of a semiliterate hick turned actor; and Shakespeare of Stratford became the literary beard of the Earl of Oxford.
Mere prattle without practice, say the incensed Stratfordians, who form the vast mainstream. "The idea that you have to go to Oxford to be a great writer is snobbish," says Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare. Bate points out that Shakespeare, as the son of a local merchant and town official, would almost certainly have attended the Stratford Free School. And Elizabethan grammar schools offered a formidable education in Latin, including oratory and letter writing in the style of characters from classical myth and history. Students also had to be able to expand and embellish on existing literary works, much as Shakespeare did with Henry V and Julius Caesar. People shouldn't be surprised that a commoner should write so knowingly of the nobility. All playwrights wrote about aristocrats. Says Bate: "What is much harder to imagine is an aristocrat like Oxford reproducing the slang of the common tavern or the technicalities of glovemaking."
A critical weakness of the Oxfordians is that De Vere died in 1604, before several of Shakespeare's masterpieces were published or performed. The Winter's Tale, as Bate points out, was licensed by Sir George Buc, who began licensing plays for performance only in 1610. The Tempest may have been inspired by a shipwreck off Bermuda in 1609. The Oxford faction offers tightly argued explanations for the discrepancies, along the lines that the plays are misdated or that the earl had already written the plays (based on alternative sources) and kept them private. According to Dickson, only the panic that Protestant England would revert to Inquisitorial control propelled the earl's heirs, in 1622, to rush a set of plays into print and posterity as the First Folio. That edition, Oxfordians note, was dedicated to two noble kinsmen--one brother married to a daughter of the earl, the other having come close to marrying her sister.