My Oxford project

Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous about the true author of Shakespeare's plays, Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, reminded me of my fascination with this centuries-old controversy. 

Emmerich's movie got mixed reviews and predictably met a lot of resistance from people who simply don't want to hear it. I thought it was quite good, though too hard to follow because of all the backward and forward in time. Vanessa Redgrave puts Judi Dench and her eight-minute Oscar to shame with her portrayal of Elizabeth and Rhys Ifans transforms himself into a completely different person to portray Oxford. His sensitive depiction of Oxford's devotion to the power of words make the achievement of the plays freshly memorable. The awe of the other playwrights hearing the magic of this poetry for the first time is infectious.

I've been an "Oxfordian" for some time actually. When I went on my fasting cure at a spa on Lake Constance in the late 1980s, I had a lot of time to read and spent much of it reading Charlton Ogburn's The Mystery of Shakespeare. It opened my eyes to the controversy  because on reflection the idea that the historic Will Shakespere of Stratford-on-Avon was the author was so patently improbable.

As Derek Jacobi intones in a "prologue" in the movie, the fact that Shakespeare died many years after the last play appeared and had no books or manuscripts to bequeath alone is suspicious. He made no mention of any writings in his will and the sole documentary evidence we have of his existence largely deals with his activity as a grain merchant.

The academic establishment nonetheless vehemently defends his authorship. As the torturous Wikipedia article notes, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson were from a similarly un-aristocratic backgrounds, and we just happen to know more about them because of, er, their education and their manuscripts. Imagine!

Can anyone really believe that a writer whose worth was widely recognized by contemporaries could die such an obscure death and leave so few traces behind? It's not only Marlowe and Jonson, we know more about Dante and Chaucer and virtually every minute of Goethe's life has been documented. The historical record for this 16th century writer is virtually as thin as it is for Homer or the historical Jesus.

It doesn't matter obviously who actually wrote the plays. Whoever it was is dead, and the treasure for mankind is the corpus of literature this author left behind. And yet, curious minds want to know and we always look for further meaning in works of literature by trying to get to know the author's mind better.

So I'm embarking on this "Oxford project" -- solely for my own gratification, and not to take part in any academic debate. I'm convinced Oxford's the man and simply want to rediscover Shakespeare with this in mind. 

This is really the point of Mark Anderson's Shakespeare by Another Name. He traces the main details of Oxford's life and notes the overlap in the plays, and it truly does give insight into the work. So I want to read the Anderson book as well as the recent book by Kurt Kreiler and perhaps re-read the Ogburn book, while re-reading or reading the plays themselves. 

It might be fun to experiment with the functionalities of ebooks while reading -- highlighting, notes, bookmarks. I've already downloaded the Complete Shakespeare (for $1.99!) and will experiment with the Signet annotated editions. If I actually get this off the ground, I will probably create a separate Twitter account for it as well.