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Discovering William Shakespeare

Professor Daniel Wright, Ph.D. : (From previous issue) Oxford, therefore, probably masked his identity from the larger public because he was compelled by his family and the Crown to do so. A writer for the public stage could ill afford to be linked to the Court. If he were to become publically known as a courtier poet and playwright, his poems and plays might be interpreted as government-financed propaganda or-perhaps more ominously-satirical commentary on the life, mores and personages of the Court, and no courtier, after all, was more prominent than Oxford's own father-in-law: the great Lord Treasurer, spymaster and chief counselor to the Queen, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to whom Oxford was personally as well as politically beholden (Burghley, as Master of the Court of Wards, had overseen and provided for Oxford's youth in his own household before Oxford became his son-in-law). Therefore, by adopting the pseudonym of William Shakespeare, Edward de Vere provided himself, his family and the Crown with the means of preventing the public from looking to the Court in search of the Shakespeare playwright. His use of the nom de plume, Shakespeare, likely would have been known among only a few intimates, fellow courtier poets, principals of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the Crown's chief officers. Indeed, that the "secret" was something of an open one, particularly in certain literary circles, seems confirmed by Oxford's receipt of a continuing stream of dedications and acclaim by his contemporaries, over many years-although, curiously, he is purported by most Traditionalists to have published nothing under his own name after 1576. By contrast, no one ever dedicated a single literary work to anyone named William Shakespeare in that writer's supposed lifetime, the merchant from Stratford never spelled his name as "Shakespeare," and he never is identified by anyone during the whole of his life as the Shakespeare poet-playwright. But why "Shakespeare"? Why would Edward de Vere adopt that name as his playwriting name? There is no mystery here. Like that of Martin Marprelate, the well-known sobriquet of a Puritan dissident (still unknown to us) in the late 1580s, Shakespeare was a pseudonym that addressed the chief realm of the writer's attention; in Marprelate's case, his focal point was the prelacy of the Anglican Church; in Shakespeare's case, it was the theatre. "William Shakespeare" is a name that might have been adopted by almost any writer who wished to conceal from the public his title, office or his baptismal name but who yet wished to assert his identity as a playwright. After all, Pallas Athena, the mythological patron goddess of Athens (the ancient home of the theatre) wore a helmet, crowned by a Sphinx, that, when its visor was drawn, made her invisible. In her hand she carried a great spear. For a writer to be such a "spear-shaker" could therefore suggest that he was a writer of plays-an invisible writer of plays. That Oxford should have resorted to this pseudonym makes eminent sense, for he also was known as a champion battler in the lists-a spear-shaker of military renown. Similarly, Oxford's occasional hyphenated spelling of his poet-playwright name may also have been adopted to allude, with a more obvious wink and a nudge, to the author's role as a warrior with a pen as his spear. The possible suggestiveness of the name "Will-i-am Shake-speare" ("I will be [a] spear-shaker") as one whose words are intended to disturb the complacent takes on additional significance when we read Ben Jonson's knowing commemoration of Shakespeare in the First Folio: "He seems to shake a lance / As brandish't at the eyes of ignorance." Writers always have taken terrible risks by writing "offensive" works. Ovid so offended Caesar Augustus' puritanical sensibilities by his erotic verse that he suffered the indignity of life-long exile from the empire. Dante, too,was exiled from his beloved Florence. When the brilliant British novelist, Matthew Gregory Lewis, owned up to his authorship of the Gothic novel, The Monk, he faced savage rebuke from ossified old Tories like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and risked charges of blasphemy being leveled against him in Parliament. Voltaire (the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet) was imprisoned and subsequently exiled. Emile Zola was driven from France following his publication of J'accuse. Jean-Baptiste Pocquelin concealed himself, and protected his family, behind the name of Molière. Women, in particular, have invoked pseudonyms merely to get into print. Consider Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and the Brontë sisters (who published under the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell); Jane Austen wrote anonymously (her name was attached to her work only after her death). Oscar Wilde, while in exile, wrote as Sebastian Melmoth (the martyred wanderer). The sobriquet "O. Henry" shielded William Sidney Porter's family from association with Porter's personal disgrace following his conviction and imprisonment for embezzlement. In the 1950s, America's Hollywood Ten resorted to a host of pseudonymns and front men to try to get around the barriers to work that were established by the McCarthy-era blacklists. Daniel Defoe concealed himself behind more than twenty pseudonyms. In retrospect, Salman Rushdie probably wishes that he had chosen to hide behind at least one...! English nobility who have employed pseudonyms since Elizabethan days include King George III, who published as Ralph Robinson. Lord Tennyson sometimes published his poetry under the name of Merlin. Lord Hardinge of Penshurst published crime fiction in the 1940s as George Milner. Edward de Vere might be comforted to know that the tradition of adopting a disguise when venturing into publication continues even today among England's peers. In any event, that the chief courtier poet-playwright of Elizabethan England, son-in-law of the Lord Treasurer and cousin to the Queen should have chosen the devices of anony