In the wake of Charlton Heston’s death, the Weekly Standard republished a letter written by the actor to that publication some years ago championing the Stratfordian cause. Among other things, Heston criticizes the view that "the queen and Oxford’s family would have been ‘scandalized’ … to know he’d written works of genius."
He asks,
Why? Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, published at least one book and wrote music and songs for court masques; her successor, James I, sponsored the first production of Macbeth mounted indoors, at court.
This is mixing categories. Yes, some nobles published the occasional book — a sober religious tract or a sententious political essay, written not for money or personal glory but for the betterment of society. And it was perfectly acceptable for nobles to pen plays and masques for the private amusement of the court. But any form of remunerative work was considered an affront to a nobleman’s dignity. To write plays for the unwashed public — to openly consort with common players, who were legally in the same class as pickpockets, prostitutes, and vagabonds — and worst of all, to publish vulgar, crowd-pleasing plays for money … this would have been unthinkable for any self-respecting member of the upper class. Even so noted a poet as Sir Philip Sidney published nothing in his lifetime; his works were printed posthumously, by special arrangement of his adoring sister.
In any case, the Oxfordian claim is not that the queen and Oxford’s family didn’t know about his pastime; they surely did. But they did not want this secret to become general knowledge — embarrassingly public knowledge. That was the "scandal" they feared.
Linked to Heston’s letter is an article by Paul Cantor, a professor of English dead-set against the Oxfordian heresy. Cantor’s 1997 piece, a hostile review of Joseph Sobran’s Alias Shakespeare, sternly informs us that an education wasn’t necessary for a natural genius like the Stratford man:
But does having a college degree really make it any more likely that someone could write Hamlet? There is something embarrassingly bourgeois about this way of thinking, as if some 12-step program were available that leads to literary achievement of the highest order. Some of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights, like Christopher Marlowe, did have university degrees, but the fact is that many of the greatest authors in history never set foot in college. Geniuses are geniuses precisely because they do not play by the ordinary rules.
Well, this is silly. The argument is not that only college graduates can be geniuses; rather, Oxfordians point to the many indications that these particular plays and poems were written by a highly educated man. Among other things, the author
— seems to have been fluent in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. (Several of the plays’ sources were available only in those languages; Shakespeare coined many English words from foreign tongues; significant parts of Henry V are written in French.)
— was widely versed in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and the intellectual controversies of his day, as well as the customs and climes of foreign lands, notably Italy. (Some of this information could have been picked up in grammar school, in church, or on the street, but the breadth of Shakespeare’s learning argues for an extensive education and considerable foreign travel.)
— was intimately familiar with the law. (Legal expressions and concepts turn up constantly in the plays and, most noticeably, in the sonnets, even in seemingly inappropriate contexts.)
So whoever wrote the Shakespearean corpus was multilingual in contemporary and ancient languages; was widely read and well-traveled; and had studied law. "Does having a college degree really make it any more likely that someone could write Hamlet?" Indeed it does, precisely by providing knowledge in all these areas — as a university education of the time, augmented by a tour of the Continent, would have done.
Incidentally, having branded Sobran "embarrassingly bourgeois," Cantor goes on to suggest that his way of thinking places him in company of "contemporary radicals" with "a Marxist view of literature." Bourgeois or radical Marxist – which is it? Apparently anything goes when the argument consists only of empty name-calling.
Cantor acknowledges that Shakespeare the author was in sympathy to the aristocracy, or at least to aristocratic virtues. But he cannot believe the Bard was an aristocrat himself. Addressing the Oxfordian claim that the earl of Oxford was very much like a character in a Shakespeare play, Cantor seems to agree, but he sees a purely negative significance in this fact.
How could anyone [like de Vere] who led such a dissolute life find the time and discipline to write the plays we know as Shakespeare’s? Sobran confuses living an aristocratic existence with being able to portray it. He writes of Oxford: "His life sounds more like the subject of a Shakespeare play." But could King Lear have written King Lear or Macbeth Macbeth? If literary history teaches us anything, it is that authors are usually the opposite of the heroes they create. Homer was no Achilles.
"Authors are usually the opposite of the heroes they create." Really?
Ernest Hemingway wrote about hard-living men who fought in combat, hunted big game, and loved a good bullfight.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about expatriate American intellectuals searching for meaning while idling on the Continent.
Mark Twain wrote about imaginative, energetic boys growing up in rural Missouri.
Ayn Rand wrote about fiercely individualistic, chain-smoking capitalists who defied the moral conventions of their day.
Is there no similarity between these authors and characters they created?
Moreover, if some of Shakespeare’s characters do indeed resemble de Vere, as even Cantor appears to concede, then how did the lowly commoner from Stratford get away with writing such plays? Depicting a living nobleman on stage was the sort of thing that got people thrown in the Clink — the Clink being an actual jail of the period. Ben Jonson was jailed twice for sedition on account of topical references in his plays, and other playwrights suffered similar fates; Thomas Kyd seems to have been driven to his grave by government persecution. Yet the long arm of the law never touched the Stratford man, even when "his" plays were making unmistakable (and derogatory) references to leading figures of the realm. It is widely acknowledged that Polonius in Hamlet is based on the Queen’s counselor (and de Vere’s father-in-law) William Cecil. What commoner would dare mock a man who could easily toss him in prison and throw away the key?
Or consider Richard III. The title character is very likely a caricature of Cecil’s powerful and much-feared son, Robert — right down to Robert’s humped back. Clare Asquith, though a resolute Stratfordian herself, provides a persuasive rundown of parallels between Robert Cecil and King Richard in her book Shadowplay:
Richard III, a play about the hunchbacked fifteenth-century king notorious for murdering two princes in the tower, dates from the early 1590s and is a startling portrait, not merely of the general style of the ‘Regnum Cecilianium’ but of the unpopular public persona of Robert Cecil in particular…. Cecil is recorded as saying, ‘God knows I labour like a pack horse’; the ‘pack’ one of his joking references to his own deformity. The only play in which Shakespeare uses the word ‘packhorse’ is when the hunchback Richard describes the services he did for his brother, the king, in the role the Cecils so often adopted — that of the selfless public servant: ‘I was a pack-horse in his great affairs,/A weeder-out of his proud adversaries’ (I.3.121)…. Richard’s spectacular success in seducing the widow of one of his victims over her husband’s corpse recalls another Cecil characteristic — his unlikely prowess as a womaniser…. Both Richard and Robert were called ‘Toad’; ‘Here lies the Toad’ was scrawled on the door of his house. Robert was an ‘Elf’ to Queen Elizabeth; Richard is called ‘elvish-marked’ (I.3.227) in the play. [pp. 79-80]
We have, then, a playwright and poet who aligns himself with the aristocracy; who shows all the signs of learning and foreign travel to be expected of an aristocrat; who has the temerity to attack the most powerful men in England, and the ability to get away with it; and whose plays repeatedly feature characters and incidents strongly reminiscent of the life of Edward de Vere — known in his day as a leading poet, though one who (like other nobleman) did not publish under his own name.
More than ten years since the publication of Cantor’s hit piece, the Oxfordian case is stronger than ever.