Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  A dejected Charlton Ogburn took the justices’ decision as ‘a clear defeat’ and insisted that the moot court ‘hadn’t been his idea in the first place’. He wrote to the president of American University calling Professor James Boyle, who had defended Shakespeare at the moot court, ‘an outright liar’. Ogburn might have had in mind not what Boyle said at the proceedings but what he told James Lardner, who was covering the story for the New Yorker: ‘The Oxfordians have constructed an interpretive framework that has an infinite capacity to explain away information’: ‘all the evidence that fits the theory is accepted, and the rest rejected’. When Boyle added that it was impossible ‘to imagine a piece of evidence that could disprove the theory to its adherents’, Lardner asked, ‘What about a letter in Oxford’s hand … congratulating William Shakespeare of Stratford on his achievements as a playwright?’ Boyle didn’t skip a beat, mimicking an Oxfordian response: ‘What an unlikely communication between an earl and a common player! … Obviously, something designed to carry on the conspiracy of concealment. The very fact that he wrote such a letter presents the strongest proof we could possibly have!’

  Joseph Sobran, who wrote for the National Review, was among the few Oxfordians at the time to grasp how signal an event the moot court had been. Crucially, even while ruling against de Vere, ‘the justices effectively dismissed the other candidates for Shakespearean honors from serious consideration’. From now on, as far as the press and public were concerned, there would only be two viable candidates: the Earl of Oxford and the glover’s son from Stratford. Sobran also recognised that there ‘is no such thing as bad publicity’. He was right. Major newspapers and television networks had covered the trial. And the moot court was structured so that literary experts weren’t even represented. Even losing was a form of victory, since by having judges rather than scholars with decades of expertise evaluate the evidence, amateurs and experts were put on equal footing, both subordinate to the higher authority of the court and to legal rather than academic criteria for what counted as circumstantial evidence.

  The moot court proved to be a turning point in the decades-long struggle to promote Oxford’s cause. More than anything else, the Supreme Court justices had provided legitimacy; the Oxfordians were no longer the ‘deviants’ vilified by Schoenbaum (and one immediate effect of the moot court was that this harsh language was considerably toned down when Schoenbaum revised Shakespeare’s Lives in 1991). If Supreme Court justices could take them seriously and deem them the only serious rivals to Shakespeare, so could others.

  The Oxfordians, having learned some lessons from their defeat in the US, hoped that a retrial in England would reverse the decision. Once again David Lloyd Kreeger sponsored the event. The novelist Jeffrey Archer helped facilitate it, and Sam Wanamaker, founder of the as yet unbuilt Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, was willing to arrange it as a fund-raiser. Charles Beauclerk – who was descended from the de Veres – played an important role, too, helping to co-ordinate the Oxfordian side. Two years earlier, while a student at Oxford University, he had founded the De Vere Society hoping to reinvigorate the case for his ancestor. From the perspective of the Society, even staging the English trial was tantamount to a victory, since ‘three of the most senior judges of appeal of the realm … have agreed to provide the framework for bringing Shakespeare to court, and have by that very act conceded that there are grounds for doubting the traditional ascription of authorship to the unlettered William Shaksper of Stratford’.

  This moot court was held on 26 November 1988, with roughly five hundred in attendance in London’s Inner Temple, presided over by Lords Ackner, Oliver and Templeman. Once again, there was extensive media coverage. The initial plan was to have Charlton Ogburn square off against his nemesis, Samuel Schoenbaum. But despite their eagerness to do battle, both men were too ill to make the trip, and seconds were found. This time, academics were represented: the formidable pair of British scholars Stanley Wells and Ernst Honigmann served as expert witnesses for Shakespeare; Oxfordians Gordon C. Cyr (of the American Shakespeare Oxford Society) and L. L. Ware (of the British Shakespearean Authorship Trust) stepped in for the other side.

  The outcome was no different; in the words of one supporter of de Vere, it was an ‘Oxfordian disaster’. The Lords were especially dismissive of the notion that Oxford had taken the name of a man acknowledged as an ‘actor manager’ in the theatre. And they couldn’t understand why it took until 1920 for someone to propose that the Earl of Oxford was the true author of the plays. The Oxfordians fulminated. The biggest lesson they had learned from this latest setback was that ‘there was neither time nor opportunity within the format of a court proceeding to puncture many of the Stratfordian balloons’.

  There would be no more trials. Though privately acknowledged as a stinging defeat, the event gave an unexpected lift to doubters and especially to the Oxfordian cause in the UK, much as the Washington trial had done in the US. Both the moribund Shakespeare Authorship Trust and the De Vere Society (according to Beauclerk, its activities now supported by the wealthy Chicagoan, William O. Hunt, to the tune of £2,000 a term) were invigorated. In 1988 Beauclerk would also edit and see into print an abridged version of Ogburn’s book, which ‘signals a literary revolution of unprecedented proportions’ – emphasising in his introduction both his ancestor’s biographical fit (‘de Vere was every inch a Hamlet’) and his place among English aristocratic writers (as ‘the natural precursor to Byron and the Romantic tradition in English literature’).

  While plans to make a film or a book of the English moot court proceedings fell through, it didn’t take long for the British media to seize upon a now legitimate and newsworthy story. Where judges tried to resolve controversial issues, television hosts enjoyed stoking them. In April 1989, Frontline aired ‘The Shakespeare Mystery’, produced by Yorkshire Television in conjunction with American Public Television station WGBH. In the US alone, over three and a half million television viewers were offered their first glimpse of the authorship controversy, and the programme’s title (indebted to Ogburn’s) as well as Al Austin’s opening voice-over made clear that things had begun to tilt in Oxford’s favour: ‘Who was the real Shakespeare? The son of a Stratford glovemaker? Or was he a forgotten nobleman, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford?’ The programme was a triumph for Ogburn, as well as for his English counterpart, Charles Beauclerk. The academics who spoke on behalf of Shakespeare – Schoenbaum and A. L. Rowse – sounded stuffy, the Oxfordians impassioned. Al Austin’s narration did the rest, filling in the blanks by connecting events in Oxford’s life to key passages in the plays. Frontline followed it up with an even more in-depth, three-hour live videoconference, ‘Uncovering Shakespeare: An Update’, moderated by William F. Buckley, Jr, which aired in September 1992, and included some sharp sparring between Charles Beauclerk and Professor Gary Taylor. The programme ended with a prerecorded animation of the Stratford monument breaking up and revealing the Earl of Oxford.

  The BBC wasn’t far behind, providing a one-hour film on the controversy in 1994, with Charles Beauclerk again playing a prominent role. Proponents of de Vere’s cause weren’t happy about having to share airtime with ‘poorly supported Baconians and Marlovians’, but believed that ‘Oxford came out well ahead in the programme’. The charismatic Beauclerk continued to promote Oxford’s cause, especially in the United States, where he appeared at over 170 venues, from college campuses to the Folger and Huntington Libraries, in the early 1990s. The Shakespeare Oxford Society was now reporting a surge of new members from as far away as Estonia and Australia.

  Oxfordian success on television was reinforced by major magazine and newspaper coverage. In October 1991 the Atlantic Magazine gave prominent attention to the debate, inviting two independent scholars – Tom Bethell for Oxford and Irving Matus for Shakespeare – to present a case and rebut his opponent’s. Harper’s followed in April 1999 with a cover story of its own – ‘Who in fact was the bard, the usual suspect from Stratford, or Edward de Ver
e, 17th Earl of Oxford?’ Again, it was the fairness doctrine exemplified: this time, ten contributors in all, five in favour of Oxford’s candidacy and five in favour of Shakespeare’s. It was clear by now that Bacon, Marlowe, Derby and the dozens of other rival claimants were no longer viable competitors – no small victory for the Oxford camp.

  In justifying this extensive coverage, Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, recalled how he had first become interested in the controversy after editing a piece by Charlton Ogburn in the early 1970s. He found the Oxfordian hypothesis ‘congenial … because I could more easily imagine the plays written by a courtier familiar with the gilded treacheries of Elizabethan politics than by an actor peeping through the drop curtains’, and also ‘because 1972 was not a year conducive to belief in the masterpieces of official doctrine’. Lapham was no longer willing, as he had been in his college days, to ‘ask no questions of the standard mythography’ on which claims for Shakespeare’s authorship had long rested. He now found himself far more sympathetic to a theory based on governmental cover-up at a time when

  Richard Nixon was busy telling lies about a war in Vietnam; the unanswered questions about the assassination of John F. Kennedy had been declared inadmissible by the custodians of the country’s respectable opinion; [and] the Central Intelligence Agency was papering the walls of Berlin and Panama City with the posters of disinformation.

  Lapham may well have been the first to identify why long-ridiculed Oxfordian claims about Elizabethan political conspiracies had gone from a hindrance to a selling point. The rise of Oxfordianism in the closing years of the twentieth century coincided with a greater willingness to believe in governmental cover-ups of all kinds. To cite but one example, a CNN/Time poll taken two years before Lapham wrote this editorial reported that ‘80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms’. Theories soon circulated widely on the Internet about secret government involvement in the 1988 Pan Am flight 103, the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the downing of TWA flight 800 in 1996, the deadly tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, the London bombings in 2005, and most notoriously of all, the attacks on 11 September 2001. In such a climate, a minor act of conspiratorial suppression on the part of Tudor authorities made perfect sense – and in comparison, was small beer.

  The Oxfordian case had the added advantage of appealing not only to anyone suspicious of governmental conspiracies, but also to those alert to gaps, anomalies and doctored or missing evidence when very public figures died. Who was responsible for the death of Diana, Princess of Wales? Or behind the alleged suicide of Marilyn Monroe? What really happened to Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur? For many, these remain mysteries waiting to be solved – even as the Oxfordians struggled to solve similar mysteries of what happened to de Vere’s missing will and of why the Jacobean authorities decided to imprison Southampton (and perhaps confiscate his papers) the day that de Vere died. There were no coincidences.

  Conspiracy theorists chalked up another victory on 11 July 2002. On that day in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, a memorial window was unveiled in Christopher Marlowe’s honour. His date of birth and death are given as ‘1564–?1593’. Why the question mark? In his own day, and for the next four centuries, there had been no doubt about the year of Marlowe’s death. After he was killed on 30 May 1593, an Elizabethan inquest took place confirming the exact day and manner in which he died. The original document survives. The only reason to question the year of his death is if you believe that the Elizabethan coroner’s report was fabricated and that those at the highest levels of government substituted another body in his stead and smuggled Marlowe away, allowing him to spend the next two decades writing the plays now attributed to William Shakespeare. Oxfordians took note. If Marlovian conspiracy theorists could pull off something like this with so far-fetched a claim, surely they could secure a deserved place for Oxford in Westminster – and soon began the laborious fund-raising and campaigning needed to realise Looney’s dream of a pilgrimage site worthy of Edward de Vere.

  The sympathetic coverage in Atlantic and Harper’s was nothing compared with the stories that now began to appear in the New York Times, thanks to the efforts of William Niederkorn, a self-professed ‘agnostic’ on the authorship question. Readers browsing through the New York Times on 10 February 2002 may have been caught short by his surprising lead: ‘It was not the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon. It was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. For Oxfordians, this is the answer to “Who Wrote Shakespeare.”’ Much of what followed in that story reads like promotional material. Niederkorn assures his readers that the Oxford theory ‘has never been stronger’, touts the ‘Edward de Vere Studies Conference, a beachhead in academia’, provides contact information for the Shakespeare Oxford Society and quotes the remarkable if undocumented claim that ‘Oxford as a likely candidate is taught in more universities and colleges than we can begin to imagine’.

  America’s paper of record was finally making up for its many past slights. Niederkorn’s biggest news was that the Supreme Court justices who had presided over the moot court had more or less overturned their decision. While it was widely known Justice Blackmun had subsequently written sympathetically about the Oxfordian case, Niederkorn broke new ground by reporting that Justice Stevens told him over the phone that if he ‘had to pick a candidate today, I’d say it definitely was Oxford’. Even more surprising was the revelation that Justice Brennan, who had been so dead-set against Oxford at the moot court, had ‘modified’ his position before his death in 1997; reportedly, the more he read about the controversy, ‘the more skeptical he became about the Stratfordian position’.

  De Vere’s supporters were properly grateful. The editors of Shakespeare Matters acknowledged in an editorial that ran in the Spring 2002 issue that

  Oxfordians everywhere owe the Times’ William S. Niederkorn a vote of thanks for his many months of reading and research that led up to this article, and, just as importantly, his tireless efforts within the Times to keep his fellow writers and editors apprised of the strength of the Oxfordian case.

  They may also have suppressed a knowing smile at the surprising news of Justice Brennan’s otherwise undocumented defection – for Niederkorn cited as his source the word of William F. Causey, a lawyer who had recently organised an authorship debate at the Smithsonian – reportedly, after reading Diana Price’s attack on the traditional attribution of the plays in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. And they were happier still when Renée Montagne, one of the most familiar radio voices in America, hosted a programme on the case for Oxford on National Public Radio that drew on Niederkorn’s reporting and took his undocumented claim a half-step further, saying that ‘all three’ Supreme Court justices ‘came to doubt their decision’. Oxfordians were so pleased by her programme, which reached millions of listeners, that they honoured her with their annual Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. A story subsequently ran in the Wall Street Journal setting the record straight about Justice Brennan; but it also added Justice Antonin Scalia to the ranks of committed Oxfordians.

  Oxfordians were no less delighted when Niederkorn spoke to them at their annual Oxford Day banquet in April 2002 about ‘his personal journey in studying the authorship question and on bringing it to the attention of his colleagues at the Times’. Niederkorn was becoming something of a regular at Oxfordian gatherings, attending the annual meeting in October 2004, where he lectured on ‘Abel Lefranc and his case for William Stanley, Earl of Derby, as the author of the canon’, based on archival research he had conducted. His next Times piece on the controversy appeared ten months later, on 30 August 2005. This time there would be no more hedging: ‘The controversy over who wrote Shakespeare’s works has reached a turning point of sorts. A new biography of the Earl of Oxford improves on the unorthodox argument that he was Shakespeare, while fantasy has now been firmly established as a primary tool of other, more traditional Shakespeare studies.’ The wheel
had come full circle: now the Shakespeare scholars were the fantasists. Niederkorn offered the following pronouncement on how things stood: ‘On both sides of the authorship controversy, the arguments are conjectural. Each case rests on a story, not on hard evidence.’ He ends with a proposal that infuriated Shakespeareans, for whom his rhetoric smacked of that employed by creationists eager to see intelligent design taught in the schools alongside evolution: ‘What if authorship studies were made part of the standard Shakespeare curriculum?’

  *

  The articles in the New York Times revealed the extent to which the Oxford movement had undergone a makeover, had grown, in Niederkorn’s words, ‘from a handful to a thriving community with its own publications, organizations, lively online discussion groups and annual conferences’. Oxfordians now sought to portray themselves as a mirror-image of their rivals. To outsiders, how much difference could there be between Shakespeare Matters and Shakespeare Studies? And they were abetted in their efforts by scholars in English departments content to ignore questions that mattered to non-academics but not to them.

  This became especially clear when the University of Massachusetts at Amherst awarded a PhD in 2001 to Roger A. Stritmatter for an avowedly Oxfordian dissertation on ‘The Marginalia of Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible’. For many Oxfordians, the missing link between their candidate and the plays had at last been found. An annotated Geneva Bible from around 1570 that Oxford once owned had been acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Most of its annotations consisted of underlinings, which Stritmatter argued closely corresponded to allusions to Biblical passages in Shakespeare’s plays, thereby confirming that de Vere was their author. Stritmatter also argued that some of the underlined passages also had an autobiographical component, conveying the familiar Oxfordian ‘inner story’ of ‘a man whose name has been erased from history and which set forth the divine promise of his eventual redemption’.