Bob Meyers — Was It Really William?

first I want to thank in advance the people who've given me guidance on this Mark Anderson Roger Strittmatter Shelley mayhawk Tom Renee Bonner Miller cutter Jim Warren Bryan Wilden Thal and there are probably others and I apologize if I've left your name off so today we're going to talk about sort of go through the sequence of why there's a controversy who might have written the plays legal issues members of royalty all really important people but first let's talk about me that's my high school graduation picture see that's that's why he's a great leader you can tell right okay so the deal is 1961 Forest Hills High School Queens New York anybody else from Pharsalus high school Queens New York in here right over there look at that unbelievable thing was I loved Shakespeare in in high school and I thought the story of the author was the stupidest thing I had ever heard my entire life here I was killing myself to study and learning cross-check and they said this guy who was illiterate couldn't read never went to school that sounded good to me at the time he wrote all these plays he's world famous four hundred years ago he never dies and I said I don't believe that those scholars really know the story I never think there was anybody else I just said this is baloney I thought something stronger but all right so when I do these talks and again I'm not talking to you but pretend this is you 10 or 20 years ago and you don't know anything about it but you're curious you're interested so let's take a look at the Elizabethan age violation of London in 1601 200,000 people Nobles formed a small restricted by powerful world and we've sorry about that and all of these names here show up in one way or another in the plays or associated with Oxford these are some of the issues at the time it was illegal to be a Catholic there was severe risks in criticizing the Queen the head of the Church of England there were religious wars with France Spain and the lowlands the monarch was unmarried and without an heir there were spies everywhere it was in many ways a police state I gotta tell you I've done this a number of times I got other things coming up this is the kind of thing that really gets to people a police state what happened to good Queen Bess as as a Mark Anderson one's color well I don't know either during this time in Elizabethan in Elizabeth's world the Pope declared her illegitimate 10,000 French Huguenots were massacred covert Catholic missionaries were sneaking into England Mary Queen of Scots was arrested and eventually executed the Queen did not tolerate dissent as you may know this is an image not exactly a photograph but of a John Stubbs who was a pamphleteer he opposed Elizabeth's married but pending marriage or possible marriage with a Duke d'Anjou the Catholic brother of the King of France he published his his objections in 1579 and he said the Queen was too old really a bad mistake to me with a monarch who kind of ruled a police state really not not to be done and for his objections he had his hand cut off I point out to you that that's an ax that's a hand and eventually the hand goes over here reports at the time said that as the axe was falling he said god save the queen you shouldn't say god save my right hand but if you were alive then if you were literate then if you were engaged in any member of the aristocracy you knew about this and it frightened you oh well talk about burying the lede titus andronicus was written at about the same time the chopping took place in 1579 titus is dated to fifteen seventy nine Stubbs was a relative by marriage of someone we will meet later well what do we know about William Shakespeare Shakespeare the traditional author noting born in 1564 his parents were illiterate his children were illiterate no record of schooling no record of travel outside of England where authorization was needed it was expensive it was dangerous no manuscripts though you know all this nothing was ever found tying him into his ability to write if he actually had one he married at 18 his wife is 26 he moves to London without her or their eventual three kids he's never identified as a writer and what fascinated me when I finally figured out was he never identified himself as a writer wouldn't you wouldn't you say I'm a doctor lawyer I am a baker and he dies without public notice in 1616 so how was he identified in his lifetime he's denta fide as an actor the College of Arms identified him as a player when it awarded a coat of arms which had been actually rejected few years early excuse me earlier he was identified as a property owner of grain merchants the moneylender in Stratford the of his life let me pause for a commercial announcement here this is the coat of arms that was finally issued and this is this was a big deal a couple of years ago if you recall somebody the Folger discovered the the original outline for what became his coat of arms and it says here Shakespeare the player not the writer not the playwright not the poet the player Act Tour okay it is only one of the great Shakespeare scholars of our ear James Shapiro who said in the Washington Post well if you put everything we know about Shakespeare together with the fact that he was a player it proves he wrote the plays I don't get that either because and I think it was Tom Renier pointed this out this was an eyewitness this was somebody who was there this was the county clerk or that the Herald would whatever the title was he was a player what did he look like now you've seen I in Bonners presentation a little while ago you you saw the the permutations of of the image of Shakespeare but remember you're playing a game right now that you don't know anything so just bear with me as I walk through this that's one of my favorite pictures it has these really terrific sort of look this was made twenty years after his death presumably by people who mooing best friends like that this was 30 1636 and I know that a lot of you who have written whether you use a typewriter or not probably write on a sack of sheep's wool I I do that all the time and about a hundred years later the sheep have gone elsewhere and we're riding on a pillow which is nice it's like you're staying at a Four Seasons Resort here have a quill pen and a pillow and let's see what happens and then here's our pudgy friend a bit later in in Stratford so we don't have original works pages notes or manuscripts but we do have his signatures which you all know about the best thing you can say the best thing I could say is that he either was a couldn't write or maybe sadly at the end of his life he had some kind of arthritis or palsy or something we don't know we don't know these are signatures taken from his legal documents today to make shacks bur equal Shakespeare you have to use certain kinds of language regarding him you have to say oh could should would must have probably you can almost see him he's a native genius he didn't need to read books and my favorite you don't need to travel there was a bar where travellers went I'm looking for that bar now the question is who could have written the plays and I called on one of the great scholars of our age digit to ask the question those of us of a certain age have heard of her I suspect the younger people have not and so I need to consult with people under 25 as to who I can substitute in here so here are some candidates Marlowe William Stanley bacon the queen who could read and write six eight languages including Greek Greek and Latin Emilia Bassano lennier this is what we call in journalism and edit starter I kind of heard of her but not really until that marvelous article in the Atlantic a couple of months ago where she touches a number of bases she probably traveled to Italy but she definitely spoke it because her father did he was a an insert and maker she was a published poet apparently published the first book by a woman in England and so she's a potential candidate who could have written their plays of and doubts about who authored the plays for years before his death and Brian is is about to publish a book that's gonna absolutely make that clear has published good but no one had ever systematically developed a way to investigate this question remember you are all interested people you are not the experts who are in the room attending this conference so that brings us to the 20th century to the mid early er mid nineteen teens the man is a British secondary preschool teacher his name is J Looney and here he is he's actually the Center for the Dallas Cowboys and I defy anyone in this room to make fun of the way his name is pronounced our guy is John Thomas loony loony an ancient name and the Isle of Manx teaches English he's always been bothered by the lack of a reasonable biography for Shakespeare he develops a method he rereads all the works he asks himself what the character is character is characteristics the author must have had including education knowledge history language skills etc he deduces that the author must have been a nobleman supporter of monarchy lover of sports including falconry which I believe was legal only for royalty to participate in well educated multilingual a loner he uses Venus and Adonis which we've heard a lot about on this conference 1593 the first heir of my invention as his guide his second the second thing about his method is that he can't believe no kidding that so polished a work was the f-first effort of a poet he looks at pal graves golden treasury of English songs and lyrics to find minor writers that is to say people who could write but weren't well known he compares the number of lines rhyming schemes of Venus and Adonis with pal graves entries he finds one poem called women which begins if women could be fair and yet not fond or that their love were firm not fickle still the poem was by Edward de Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford the only poem by de Vere in Palgrave talk about finding an historic needle in a haystack he goes to the dictionary of national biography for more information on the family and the man if possible and he learns it in fact he was highly educated spendthrift I'm growing increasingly unsure that I like that phrase spendthrift I think that could be kind of part of the anti Oxfordian lines but this is the learning process for me to Looney believes there's a match and here's the guy this is these are only two of his titles Lord great Chamberlain Viscount Bobeck his research lasts for four or five years and in 1920 he publishes a book shakespeare identified 100 years later the centenary centenary edition by our Jim Warren comes out and in his introduction he says he writes it remains the most revolutionary book on Shakespeare ever written why why is the book revolutionary because loonie didn't set out to prove anything he set out to follow the evidence hello because it is fact-based because it connects the works with a real person's life and suddenly if you connect the works with a real person's life and you connect the life with the works you start to say oh wait a minute he's not the only person in the history of literature and civilization who has no connection to his works what no of course he has a connection to his works Devere as an author he's connected to the works and we can see that as we go through so what do we know about Oxford 1550 his father is John the 16th Earl his mother is Lady Marjorie his lineage can be traced back to the Norman Conquest his father sponsored a troupe of actors the Earl of Oxford's men he's brilliant quite hot-headed again I'm not sure about that maybe that's part of the anti Oxfordian propaganda he's in excellent horseman extravagant again I'm not sure about that I'm putting this in because it's the standard biography as a ward a minor his properties are sold by his guardian as an adult he often sells the states to raise cash and I'm wandering increasingly whether he sells the estate's the cash for the production of plays not simply to pay off gambling debts or whatever again for me this is a gray area he dies at the age of 54 and 1604 his father had died at the 8th I wonder if I skip something hang on a second no and just skip the blank page his father died at the age of 43 when Oxford was 12 that biacky age retrospectively the possibility of poisoning is raised why we know of anybody else poisoned okay so maybe who knows he's made a war to the crown Elizabeth becomes his legal mother SSO becomes his guardian 12 years old he leads I wish I had an image of this apparently Roger tells me I can find it somewhere but he leads a troop of a hundred and forty mounted retainers dressed all in black writing two-by-two from heading him castle to sessile house in London 65 miles away sessile house has a library of 1700 books I would like to get from you the that graphic of the books in this I just I was so stunned by that thank you [Music] that's the keypad hitting him there's some jousting going on and there's you can rent for your wedding or your divorce if that's what you want to do and this is William Cecil and anybody who's been in North Carolina to see the Biltmore Estate will sort of recognize the same market modest architectural and and there is a painting of William Cecil right in the front of the bedroom area I nearly fell over well my wife and I were down there on a vacation a couple years ago there's the guy all right so what do we know about Cecil most powerful advisor to the Queen you know this stuff Secretary of State historian says for nearly 40 years the biography of see so that's really the Cecil family is indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and the history of England ruthless and smart and and but a yeoman cannot marry into the nobility this will play a role later on Robert Cecil is his son takes over from dad scoliosis Hunchback Queen Elizabeth calls him my pygmy ridiculed in Richard the third maybe didn't particularly like Oxford because of it let's take a look at his education for the moment I'm gonna kinda rush through this from the age of five to twelve when his dad dies he is tutored by Sir Thomas Smith one of the two greatest linguists in England and the owner of four hundred books in Greek Latin in English tutoring takes place at heading ham and anchor wick near Windsor his second tutor at Cecil house is Lawrence Knoll scholar and founder of anglo-saxon studies the most famous work in anglo-saxon literature is Beowulf I know you've all read it in the original one day while tutoring Oxford a package arrives the world's only copy of Beowulf Beowulf will not be reprinted for another 100 years Noah receives the package I'm sure it was the Amazon delivery service of the day receives it signs it and dates it Stratfor Tian's say echoes of Beowulf can be seen in Hamlet but say it wasn't translated it wasn't reprinted for another hundred years so you either had to go into Noel's house and steal it or read it or you had to somehow invents a book that won only one copy of which exists how did that happen genius death unbelievable now I'm calling this devere's classical education was actually mine dancing at 7:00 to 7:30 in the morning breakfast French Latin writing and drawing common prayers midday meal cosmography Latin French and exercises with his pen exercises with his pen now if I didn't really mean but as you know I'm not a mean guy I would have run this handwriting sample right next to the five signatures we have to show you what writers really had in those days third teacher he's now about 15 is his uncle his mother's brother who's then engaged in translating Ovid's metamorphoses into english for the first time golden Golding is a Puritan the metamorphosis can get pretty racy did fifteen-year-old Oxford help in the translation and kind of maybe juice it up a bit I don't know 1564 he gets a bachelor's degree from Cambridge a master's from Oxford he enrolls at Gray's Inn for legal studies there's Gray's Inn why would England's hereditary Lord great Chamberlain study law the aristocracy was expected to be judges against crimes against the state the treason trials of Mary Queen of Scots Norfolk Essex Oxford himself as a landlord owned lots of of estates and he needed to adjudicate disputes on his estates and indeed there were lots of other well-known writers who were from an aristocratic background who went to Gray's Inn but let's deal with the question of whether education matters I believe the number of the creation of 1700 or more words in Shakespeare for scene in Shakespeare for the first time in English there are more doublets in England in the English translation of Ovid than in the original Ovid strike that in the original Latin this is Richard Wagner man's work I'm not sure if he's presented at this conference but I know he's published on it handy is that what it's called indices yeah legal language throughout the work summers lease hath all too short a date and and let's ask whether Oxford published anything under his own name letter is offering asking for money or business concessions introductions in English and Latin of the works of others twenty more than twenty-six published poems who thought the first to sigh alas my heart who taught like tongue the woeful words of plain who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart who gave the grief and made thy Joy's to faint hard evidence roger strip matters original research the second edition of the Geneva Bible printed in 1569 seventy purchased for Oxford along with the Chaucer and a Plutarch Stratfor Tian's our friends the Stratfor Tian's regarded as the bible most familiar to shakespeare and it's at the Folger there's a picture of Roger I hand drew that there are a thousand mark passages 300 marked Bible passages are reflected in the Shakespeare works and 2001 Roger II got his PhD on the Bible and there's the Bible unfortunately you can't see it but as you may know that's the boar bo AR and this doesn't really come out good the key word here is naughty and crooked nation which appears in the Bible and we don't have to go very far to have Portia say how far this little candle throws his beams so shines a good deed in a naughty world I forgot to turn my watch so you'll be late for lunch 15 minutes so let me turn it on now so sessile gets elevated to the peerage in 1571 which amazingly enables his daughter to marry Oxford and is 15 at Edward is 21 here are some interesting what you would call fun facts the now married Oxford is rumored to be the Queen's lover in 73 Oxford's men assault burly's men on the road to Rochester which we can read about in the first part of Henry the fourth Oxford goes to the lowlands without permission of the Queen and is ordered back you do not mess around with the Queen and her orders he does get permission to go from England down to Italy stopping off in France to attend the marriage of this guy and a question has been raised was he doing it was he was he given permission to travel if he spied on goings-on in France or or the king then on to Italy where he stays in this motel 6 ty place the judges palace in Venice we know there are 13 plays set in Italy and the stupidest thing you can ever imagine of the Stratfor T in saying well in that bar the hawk and dove or whatever was called he heard people talking about the different streets yeah I don't know about you but the last time I spent a lot of time in a bar streets street addresses were not what I was really focusing but call me crazy does the teachin studio now you got to remember few people had access to these locations there was not an in-ear ID ticket you could buy to these locations in in Venice this is a close-up of Adonis and if you notice he has a beautiful head of hair but nothing else on his head in Venus and Adonis we read he sees her coming begins to glow and with his bonnet hides his angry brow there is the bonnet that picture has never left Titian studio there were all kinds of reproductions done by the school of Titian but only one with a bonnet you had to be there to see it he goes 30 miles up the road to Mantua he is mesmerized by the works of the sculptor and painter Giulio Romano and he's mentioned by name in The Winter's Tale the only artist mentioned in the works this is the room and the Palacio del Tay Hecuba which were gonna the dream of Hecuba is here it was installed there and it never left there this is in Luke Reis the poem accurately describes her figure the the cloth and in the background you can see Tarquin looming ominously over her Stratfor Tian's have a real problem with this kind of information about Oxford so frequent and thorough in Shakespeare's engagement with Italy in his plays that it has been suggested that he traveled to Italy sometime between the mid 1580s in the early 1915 90s the so-called lost years when we have unreliable with no reliable information no evidence to support this claim but I'm a straight forty and so I'll make it anyway it's clear that Italy was the primary land of his imagination unlike other countries such as France Austria Denmark in which he sets particular plays his representations of Italy are diverse and unusually precise that is by a professor of modern English literature at University College London Merchant of Venice set in Venice you know the plot Antonio Oh three thousand ducats repayable with money or a pound of flesh this ship's sink at sea the judge says to a pound of that same merchants flesh is line the court Awards it and the log of give it Sherlock can hardly believe his good luck but then the judge says take thou thy pound of flesh but in the cutting of it if it shed one drop of Christian blood thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate under the state of Venice and says is that the law and the judge says myself shall see the law political affiliations aside you will recall that last year or the year before the Merchant of Venice was put on in the ghetto in Venice for the first time and Justice Ginsburg served as the judge that cool so Oxford's personal life can be kind of disdainful of public opinion he hired a courtesan to accompany him while he was there he brings a boy singer back from Venice to England now you could say well the courtesans in Venice they weren't ladies of the evening they were skilled they were knowledgeable they could read and write they could perform on musical instruments and this guy had a great voice I can buy all I really can but from the point of view of shall we say in modern political turns optics this looks really bad as strained relations with his wife his daughter is born while he's away X number of 17 years this is my you know with all the the me to movement his wife denies infidelity and I just started to wonder where she raped and too ashamed to say I mean if that timing is accurate and I I don't know they separate for five years he has a child out of wedlock with an vez or one of the ladies of Queen's ladies and weddings all three or scents of the tower and you have to wonder with Burley the most powerful man in England have liked this treatment of his daughter I mean you know this I still want to figure out and I don't have he's lost his good name but the shock and shame of infamy what was the infamy I mean I don't know and I don't have an answer that satisfies me but as I say this is a work in progress his poems are published the introductions are to the Earl of Southampton this gets pretty steamy the second introduction Allah crease what I have done is yours what I have to do is yours being part in all I have devoted yours I suspect if not from the arendelle family and others who wanted to slander him this is the kind of thing that led others to say he was bisexual he was notorious I have no idea I'm just reporting but the thing is would a land from the countryside have had the sheer stupidity to address a nobleman this high up in that emotional passionate way don't you sort of get your tongue cut out I mean if you I don't get it meanwhile Elizabeth without an heir is sitting on a fragile throne I got to change that language it's really not good there's there's no air she's rejecting suitors left and right marriage negotiations are falling apart England is still threatened she needs to unite her country against enemies domestic and foreign she declares herself the Virgin Queen married only to England now we come to the 1000 pound grant which Bonner has so brilliantly illusi ated both in an essay in her book and and today oxford gets a thousand pounds half a million to a million a year in today's money it continues for 18 years the funds never had to be paid back or accounted for no purpose was ever stated how come we suddenly get a bunch of history plays and they all tend to support the Tudor dynasty what a coincidence the Devere line went back to William the Conqueror it was England's oldest oldest family the British plays our pro monarch anti rebellion pros stability the Stratfor Tian's hate that line they hate that line because it shows who would be pro monarch except maybe royalty who would be anti rebellion because poor people disempowered people rebel and after all if Shakespeare was such a nice guy from the countryside he might have rebelled too well Justice John Paul Stevens for one whom whose tribute we heard from Tom the other day he believed that Oxford was hired to rewrite British history in favour of Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty Winston Churchill thought that Henry v was such an inspirational play and a great propaganda play that he encouraged Lawrence - I believe produce it but definitely act in it richard ii the abdication scene was never permitted to be performed in the queen's lifetime and she said no you not that I am Richard Midsummer Night's Dream he thought I was enamored of an ass really difficult thing now if titania is a stand-in for Elizabeth's infatuation with the Duke who's an ass again you have to ask okay would a commoner like Shakespeare have been permitted to mock the Queen without losing his right hand Hamlet there are lots of parallels we say they are autobiographical strat forty and says nonsense Hamlet Oxford Polonius s ol aphelion sessile Laertes Thomas says Oh Gertrude Oxford's birth mother or maybe the Queen remember when his father died and perhaps he was poisoned Hamlet's father dies before the play starts Oxford even say Hamlet starts to take place in 1584 burly's other son Thomas goes on diplomatic travels Burleigh writes the precept certain precepts out for him you know them all by heart and so do they sound familiar ladies and gentlemen Polonius versus Burley Burley said the real person says be not scurrilous in conversation or satirical in my jests Polonius the character says give thy thoughts no tongue there any unproven act as thought be thou familiar no means by no means vulgar I've got a couple of others in here and here we go neither neither borrow of a friend or of a neighbor but a stranger but of a stranger who's paying for it thou shall hear no more of it Polonius says neither a borrower nor a lender be you can see this now Burleigh dies in fifty the precepts were found at pearlies house in 1616 18 years after his death Oxford dies in 1604 Hamlet is printed in 1604 how would Shakespeare Will Shakespeare from Stratford have sighted a private manuscript 12 years before it was discovered I'll be silent while you think about that hmm those were all correct answers I think I've got a minute and a half you know about all this Oh Oxford Oxford Oxford left England but never went to Denmark but his brother-in-law did he went to Denmark to Castle Elsinore where he met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern I'm indebted to Tom Renier for this this was the law case of Hale's V Pettit this was actually an inheritance case if I'm standing by the water and the water comes up and drowns me is it murder or is it suicide it has to do if it's one of the other has to do whether my heirs can get my estate but what does it matter it was written in Norman law French another language I'm sure they talked all the time in Stratford but Oxford went to the Inns of Court to graze in okay that's the location of fishers folly where he could have had his writing group these are three examples of theatres at the time where you can get a sense of sort of why the theatre was so disrespectful or was treated in such a disrespectful way here's an example of bear baiting this is the globe a reconstruction of the globe this is at court and I think it's important to remember that here are the actors up here and here's the Queen and there's really not much space between them so let's ask a few remaining questions why didn't ask for identifying self and if you're gonna do this and take this to local groups in your communities this so far has been the most popular question I get asked why didn't he identify himself well we can say there was risk he commented through the plays on politics and personalities even his father-in-law the custom was Nobles didn't do such things they used pseudonyms that seems to be very hard for an audience to grasp a modern Orie it was an age of disguised names researcher at Penn has come up with four thousand disguised names of authors and publications up to 1640 and it doesn't include Mark Twain the public stage was disreputable we saw the bear-baiting in the prostitution bad things happen to people who anger the Queen Oxford was the first cousin of John Stubbs wife remember John Stubbs who lost his writing hand that was Oxford's cousin how was his first cousin you all have first cousins right we're Oxford's papers another common question we don't know I I try and deal with the fact that given the bad relations between Burley and Oxford disappearing him would be a good way to start because most of the things were found in the manuscripts are papers of other people how did he top the shakes for your name I'm not getting into that because you've heard it a number of times we know it's a big deal note the hyphen in other words it can be spelled lots of different ways and significantly there's nothing written in here where the author's name would normally go I proposed once that Bob Meyer is going there but no nobody bought it why does it matter because the Elizabethan age represents one of the greatest the most tumultuous moments in history understanding who wrote the IRA's greatest works and why they were written enriches enriches history and all people because if I said to you that it doesn't matter how Rembrandt studied light or Henry Ford developed his assembly line you would throw me out truth matters first Foley in all of this I'm going to go through quickly published in 1623 it included some but not all of the works it was published without Shakespeare's crest really what does that have to do with anything but it was published with this jokey image of somebody even Ben Jonson says the image is a phony don't look on his image look on his book why would I want to look at his image where had the plays been all these years that's the first folio and that's Mary Sidney Herbert and she the she was the Countess of Pembroke her brother was Philip Sidney she had two sons the incomparable pair of brethren William and Philip William had been engaged to a noble woman named Bridget Philip was married to Bridget sister whose name was Susan and Susan was the youngest daughter of Edward de Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford so what is keeping the truth from coming out and we had a really wonderful session on this the other day how that happened Shakespeare is worth three hundred and twenty-five pounds or four hundred and five million dollars a year in England Google took less than a second to tell me that there are 24 million books about Shakespeare Shakespeare industry supports 11,000 local jobs in Stratford talked about in industry these are the halls of academia that's the library at Oxford University that's the library at Columbia and tragically that's Royce hall at UCLA where I graduated in 1965 and these are books that are essential among many others to understanding the issue and Roger I've the next edition gets your recovery you're booking here on the poems these are the folks who've made this possible they helped me if there are any mistakes it's mine [Applause]

Channel: Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship

Views: 9,008

Rating: 4.8562875 out of 5

Keywords: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare Authorship, Edward de Vere

Id: uPxuCUXWKUM

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020