The Shakespeare Mask

by Newton Frohlich

  Eliza Trentham Vere, the Countess of Oxford, died eight years after Edward’s death. In her last will and testament, she instructed her executor to pay “my dumb man.” Will Shakspere was still alive in Stratford, investing in real estate, trading in grain and malt, lending money, and suing his delinquent borrowers. In London, Will also joined with others in purchasing the Blackfriars gatehouse, played two small parts in Ben Jonson’s plays, and was described as an actor by Ben Jonson in The First Folio of Shakespeare’s Plays.

  In his last will and testament, Will made no mention of owning any books, unpublished manuscripts, or unperformed plays. Nor were any writings by him of any kind, even letters, ever found. A few years after Will’s death, a monument to his father containing a four-cornered woolsack was erected in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

  Seven years after Will’s death, The First Folio of Shakespeare’s Plays was published, Ben Jonson the editor. It did not contain a biography of the playwright. It did not contain Edward’s long poems with their passionate dedications to Henry Wriothesley. It did not contain the sonnets, which, through their references to the author’s lameness, age, and role as the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, all but named the Earl of Oxford as author.

  Jonson inserted a frontispiece to The First Folio that he described as the “figure” for Shakespeare. Prepared by Martin Droeshout, the frontispiece is not a likeness of Will, who died when Droeshout was a child. Jonson admonished the reader to look “not on the picture but the book.” He also included his poem that referred to Shakespeare as the “swan of Avon.” (Will lived in Stratford-upon-Avon; Edward owned a home—Bilton Hall—on the Avon.) And he included a poem by Edward’s childhood friend Leonard Digges that referred to the playwright’s Stratford “moniment,” with the “i” in moniment set in boldface type. A moniment is an archive of work, not a statue erected to honor a man.

  Two years after The First Folio was published, Oxford Eighteen and Henry Wriothesley went to the Low Countries to fight for Protestant rights. The “two Henries,” as they were described in a contemporary cartoon, died of wounds incurred in battle. Edward’s son inherited his father’s love of Venice—before he died, he was fined for riding in a Venetian gondola with a courtesan.

  The same year the two Henries died, King James died. After his son Charles succeeded him, a bloody civil war broke out. The Puritans overthrew Charles and ruled for eleven years, during which they closed all theaters. By the time the monarchy was restored, 156 years had passed since Edward’s death, 142 years since Will’s. No one alive knew them, their children, or their friends. Many theater records were destroyed.

  No original scripts of Shakespeare plays have ever been found. The First Folio states that it was prepared from copies.

  In 1709, the Reverend Nicholas Rowe, a curate in a town near Stratford, was preparing an edition of Shakespeare’s plays for publication. He reported that when he tried to write a biography of the playwright, he could find no evidence that Will from Stratford had been a writer, only that he was an actor and was poorly educated even by the standards of the day.

  The curate’s experience was repeated in the 1760s by an authority on English literary matters, Samuel Johnson. He made a similar investigation of Shakespeare for an edition of the plays he was preparing and reported finding next to nothing about Will. But he decided to equate Shakespeare with Homer, there also being next to nothing known about the legendary Greek author.

  When David Garrick, Johnson’s friend and a celebrated actor, organized a Shakespeare festival in Stratford in 1765, the myth of the Stratford man known as Shakespeare was born. Stratford town boosters “beautified” the monument to Will’s father by converting the four-cornered woolsack into an unlikely writing cushion, placing a sheet of writing paper on top of the cushion, and inserting a pen into the hand of the effigy. Today, Stratford is the second-largest tourist attraction in England.

  Until the 1800s, the sonnets, with their evidence pointing to Edward as Shakespeare, were largely ignored, although William Wordsworth, the poet laureate of Britain, did describe them as the way by which Shakespeare “unlocked his heart.” The question remained: who was Shakespeare? But another issue had captured the people’s imagination: why must all great people be noblemen?

  A host of commoner heroes emerged, from the Three Musketeers in France to Sherlock Holmes in England. The next step was predictable if not inevitable. Why not a commoner playwright? Why not Will, a common man who dreamed up sophisticated poems and plays without the education, knowledge of foreign languages, travel, and other experiences upon which the plays and poems were based? Surely he was the commoner genius with a magical imagination they were looking for.

  Still, many had doubts. By 1850, more than 250 published titles by established scholars and writers had taken on the question “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” Charles Dickens was particularly articulate on the subject. So was Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister. In America, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain joined the many who doubted Will’s authorship of the plays. Whittier wrote, “I am quite sure the man Shakspere neither did nor could.” And Walt Whitman said Shakespeare’s were “plays of an aristocracy.”

  Henry James expressed outrage: “I am ‘a sort of’ haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.” Mark Twain applied common sense to the issue: “A man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade in which he has not personally served.”

  But faced with sixty candidates, scholars stayed with the man from Stratford. To accept anyone else meant scrapping a century of scholarship. Careers and reputations have been built on the assumption that Will from Stratford wrote Shakespeare’s plays—despite the “beautified” Stratford monument, The First Folio references to Avon and Stratford, the references in the sonnets that point to the Earl of Oxford, a pamphlet by “Wit” Robert Greene with a “shakescene” these scholars insisted was Will, and much other evidence to the contrary.

  The latest research reveals details I believe further establish Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as Shakespeare. Much of this novel is based on those details. Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare by Another Name, Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, and Richard F. Whalen’s Shakespeare: Who Was He? The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon are a few of many books that make the case.

  Literary figures, writers, and scholars, joined by Royal Shakespeare Company actors and directors including Derek Jacobi, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jeremy Irons, and the late John Gielgud have also raised their voices in support of the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare. Thousands more have signed a “declaration of doubt about Will” that is circulating on the web.

  After twenty-three years of study, John Paul Stevens, retired associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, announced that he, too, was convinced that the Earl of Oxford wrote the works of Shakespeare and said his conclusion was “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Justice Stevens reiterated that no original scripts have been found, but circumstantial evidence can be as reliable as hard evidence where, as in this case, there is so much of it. Justice Stevens was joined in his view by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, which in itself is noteworthy. Having practiced law in Washington, D.C., I know that the two justices seldom agreed on other issues. Retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the late Associate Justices Lewis Powell, William Brennan, and Henry Blackmun concurred.

  Hard evidence with strong probative value was uncovered in the twentieth century. Charles Wisner Barrell reported in Scientific American that an X-ray of a painting of Shakespeare in the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C., revealed an underpainting of a nobleman wearing a ruff collar and a ring with a boar’s head. In Elizabethan times, only noblemen were permitted to wear ruff collars, and the boar’s head was the insignia of the Earl of Oxford.

>   The underpainting also contains CK, the initials of Cornelius Kettel, who painted a portrait of the Earl of Oxford in 1580. Listed among the possessions of Oxford’s great granddaughter Henrietta Stanley of South Yorkshire as a portrait of Shakespeare, the painting went missing and was later renamed The Ashbourne Portrait. The face fits perfectly the face in another portrait of the Earl of Oxford, The Wellbeck Portrait, painted in 1575 and given by Edward to his wife Nan on the birth of their first child.

  More hard evidence was uncovered by Professor Roger Stritmatter, for which he was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He found that the red velvet-covered Geneva Bible in the Folger Shakespeare Library known as Shakespeare’s Bible contains the Earl of Oxford’s coat of arms embossed in gold on the cover. It also contains hundreds of mult-colored underlinings and manicules—hands with pointing fingers—next to words and phrases used in Shakespeare’s plays.

  Yet biographies, many by respected scholars, continue to claim Will is Shakespeare. Professor Colin Burrow of All Soul’s College, Oxford University, described the most recent one as “the literary biographical equivalent of Coca-Cola. The sweetness gets too much, … and after a while it starts to produce a buildup of gas.”

  It is understandable that scholars fear to admit a mistake. Jobs in the humanities are hard to obtain. No one wants to jeopardize a career. But the Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Literature issued a warning: Writings that claim Will is Shakespeare are filled with terms like perhaps, must have, could have, and should have and should therefore be read with caution.

  To my mind, the issue is settled. The Earl of Oxford predicted in Sonnet 72 that “my name will be buried where my body is.” But as he wrote Robert Cecil, “Truth is subject to no prescription, for truth is truth though never so old, and time cannot make that false which was truth.”

  Edward de Vere had to hide his authorship. But we don’t, and the time will come when we won’t.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This historical novel, dramatizing one of the world’s great literary mysteries, has a history of its own. I’d just completed 1492: The World of Christopher Columbus when the publisher asked if I’d be interested in writing a sequel. I began to trace what happened to several families who had populated Columbus’ world and discovered that some had fled to London and maintained contact with the man who wrote the works of Shakespeare.

  My research into their lives led me to doubt that William Shakspere of Stratford was “the” Shakespeare. I also learned I was in good company.

  I labored for fifteen years, an investigation that took me to England and Italy several times. Hardly a morning dawned when I didn’t sit down at my computer to be greeted by news from other researchers. I thank each and every one of them. This book could not have been written without them. Here are some of their names—if I have omitted anyone, it is not intentional.

  Nina Green’s web site was invaluable, especially for details about the Earl of Oxford’s financial affairs. Stephanie Hopkins Hughes, former editor of The Oxfordian, also maintains a valuable web site. I thank her for her insights on Elizabethan theater and Emilia Bassano Lanier (now recognized as the first feminist writer and activist), as well as her manuscript on the life of Sir Thomas Smith.

  The work of the late Dr. Noemi Magri of Padua was very helpful in connection with Oxford’s travels in Italy, his visit to Titian’s atelier, and his writing of Venus and Adonis. The late Cecil Roth’s classic The Jews in the Renaissance was crucial in appreciating Leone de Sommi of Mantua’s contribution to commedia dell’arte and Shakespeare’s works. The late Richard Paul Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy is indispensable to anyone wishing to know how, where, and why Oxford wrote a third of his plays in and about Italy. Richard F. Whalen’s research on the alteration of Will’s father’s monument by the Stratford town boosters was an eye-opener. Professor Kay Redfield Jameson’s Touched by Fire contains valuable insight into the Earl of Oxford’s likely bipolar condition. Eva Turner Clark’s Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays is a gold mine of evidence about the early versions of Shakespeare plays the Earl of Oxford performed for the queen when he returned from Italy. I found Kevin Gilvary’s Dating Shakespeare’s Plays a sound guide to the periods during which the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays.

  The research of Philip Johnson, Alex McNeil, Marion Peel, Eddi Jolly, Derran Charlton, Sally Hazelton, Alastair Everitt, John Rollett, Richard Malim, the late Scott Brazil, and Ramon Jimenez was indispensable, as was Jeremy Crick’s investigation of Elizabeth Trentham and her brother Francis. Richard Malim has also written a fine new work on the Earl of Oxford.

  I also thank Naomi Czekaj-Robbins of the Wellfleet Library for her resourceful assistance.

  Edward de Vere’s descendant Jason Lindsay and his wife, Demetria, who live in Hedingham Castle, were most gracious to my wife and me. They showed us around the castle keep and permitted us to walk the grounds of Edward’s childhood home. A recent article in Shakespeare Matters by Jack A. Goldstone was helpful in my understanding the ambiguous inscriptions on the Stratford monument.

  The research of Robert Detobel, Hank Whittemore, John Michell, Diana Price, Charles Beauclerk, Dennis Baron. Ron Hess, Gary Goldstein, Dr. William Waugaman, Dr. Paul Altroochi, John Shahan, Matthew Cossolotto, Professor Rima Greenhill, Ruth Lloyd Miller, John Hamill, and the late Sir Frank Kermode was also helpful, as was that of Charles Bird, Charles Murray Willis and Michael Llewellyn. David Riggs’ The World of Christopher Marlowe helped me understand the Earl of Oxford’s contemporaries. For Edward’s correspondence, William Plumer Fowler’s Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford’s Letters was indispensable.

  Professor Margaret F. Rosenblum’s The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth Century Venice brought to life the world the Earl of Oxford entered during his year in and around Venice.

  For those interested in a greater understanding of Shakespeare’s plays, I recommend The Oxfordian Shakespeare Series, fully annotated from an Oxfordian perspective by Richard F. Whalen.

  I want to thank my editors, Renni Browne—founder of The Editorial Department and co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers—and her colleague Shannon Roberts for steering me away from taking on the Shakespeare academic establishment. Her and Shannon’s painstaking editing and probing questions helped bring this odyssey to a sound conclusion. Thanks also to my literary agents and publishing consultants, Nigel J. Yorwerth and Patricia Spadaro of Yorwerth Associates, for their knowledge, insights, and valuable help in revising and preparing the second edition of this book for publication, arranging its distribution to the book trade, and representing my work for rights sales to foreign publishers.

  I thank my son-in-law Dr. Moshe Wurgaft for holding my hand throughout the many computer challenges. I thank his wife, my daughter, Dr. Nina Wurgaft, for her constant encouragement. I thank my son, Professor James Ron, for helping me find compassion for scholars in today’s hard-pressed academic world. I also thank his wife, Emma Naughton, for her encouragement.

  To my wife, Dr. Martha Frohlich, author of two books on the creative process of Beethoven, I say thank you for fifty years of marriage, for her help in thinking through this book, for so much more that words can never express. And to our four grandchildren, Mia, Tessa, Leo, and Sacha, I want to pass along the words of the Earl of Oxford, my companion over these many years, in the hope that they will offer inspiration during difficult times ahead. As he wrote in Hamlet, “The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.” So to you, the people I love, and to my readers, I say never stop dreaming.

  Newton Frohlich

  Wellfleet, Massachusetts

  Newton Frohlich, a former lawyer in Washington, D.C., is the author of 1492: The World of Christopher Columbus (published by St. Martin’s Press) and Making the Best of It: A Common-Sense Guide to Negotiating a Divorce (published by Harper & Row). He spent fifteen years traveling and researching for The Shakespeare Mask and is a
member of the Shakespeare Oxford Society and the De Vere Society. He has lived in Washington, D.C., the south of France, and Israel. He makes his home on Cape Cod with his wife, Martha, a musicologist. To learn more about Newton Frohlich and his work, visit www.NewtonFrohlich.com.