Contested Will (34 page)

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 Vere, 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

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

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'.

When independent scholars David Kathman, Tom Veal and Terry Ross looked at the evidence, they pointed out a good deal that Stritmatter's dissertation committee had apparently failed to notice. For starters, the conclusion that the underlining matched Biblical allusions in Shakespeare was unwarranted, since ‘only about 10 percent of Shakespeare's Biblical allusions are marked in the Bible, and only about 20 percent of the verses marked in the Bible are alluded to in Shakespeare'. Moreover, the Bible's annotator, or annotators, were interested in Scripture that Shakespeare rarely drew on (especially Samuel I through Kings I, Maccabees, Esdras, Ecclesiasticus and Tobit), and paid comparatively scant attention to passages actually alluded to in the plays (from Genesis, Job, the Gospels and Revelation, in particular). And, on closer examination, it wasn't even obvious that de Vere himself had underlined these passages, since the marginalia appeared in different-coloured inks and might have easily been made by anyone who owned the Bible after de Vere's death in 1604. Doubts had already been raised after Alan Nelson, the leading expert on Oxford's handwriting, examined the marginalia and concluded
that the ‘hand is simply not the same hand that wrote [Oxford's] letters'.

No matter. Oxfordians dismissed the naysayers and remained convinced of this link between de Vere and the plays. And they were greatly encouraged by the legitimacy that the dissertation had secured within the academic establishment. It was a milestone. Stritmatter's abstract proudly declared that it is the first ‘dissertation in literary studies which pursues with open respect the heretical thesis of John Thomas Looney (1920), B. M. Ward (1928), Charlton Ogburn Jr (1984) and other “amateur” scholars, which postulates de Vere as the literary mind behind the popular nom de plume “William Shakespeare”'. His findings were now part of the Oxfordian story. Others have subsequently consulted de Vere's Bible in hopes of strengthening the Oxfordian claim, including Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who told a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
how, seeing a possible connection between ‘an incident using the bed trick' in Shakespeare's work and an ‘incident in the Old Testament where the same event allegedly occurred', he reasoned that de Vere ‘would have underlined' the relevant passage in his Bible. So he went to the Folger Library and asked ‘them to dig out the Bible' so he could check. Unfortunately, the passage – Genesis 29:23 – wasn't underlined. Stevens added that ‘I really thought I might have stumbled onto something that would be a very strong coincidence,' but ‘it did not develop at all'.

The Oxfordian makeover came at some cost. Explicit talk of conspiracy had to be toned down, replaced by the more neutral language of an ‘open secret' or ‘concealed' authorship. Shelved, temporarily, was talk of Oxford's sexual dalliance with Queen Elizabeth or mention of their son, the Earl of Southampton, as the Tudor Prince to whom de Vere dedicated the Sonnets. As Peter Moore bluntly told his fellow Oxfordians at their annual conference in 1996: ‘Face reality on this “Prince Tudor” business, and submit it to proper historical scrutiny … If you can't make or listen to the strongest arguments that can be made against your
own theories, then you'd better keep them to yourself.' Oxford's advocates also knew better than to debate in public the full extent of Oxford's literary range – even if they believed he deserved credit for the literary output of a dozen or so Elizabethan poets and playwrights. Finally, there would be no more calls for prying open graves in the hopes of exhuming missing manuscripts.