Dear Brian Boyd,
I
agree with you that historically, and taken as a whole,
anti-Stratfordians have often been "ridiculous" and refused "to engage
seriously with even evident counter-evidence." However, I believe the
Oxfordians' intellectual rigor--and the overwhelming if circumstantial
evidence they've turned up--sets them apart. For this reason I suspect
Nabokov may have been attracted to the Oxfordian cause, while
rightfully scorning Baconian acrostic-hunting and the like.
(If the words "Oxfordian rigor" made you laugh, see this internal
document: http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=81)
Most people who dismiss the Oxford theory seem not to have
investigated it fully--by reading, say, Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare by
Another Name" or Charlton Ogburn, Jr.'s "The Mysterious William
Shakespeare." This is understandable, because no one can read
everything, and Stratfordian books vastly outnumber Oxfordian ones. (I
was lucky enough to stumble on a copy of Ogburn's book before my views
were fixed.) But it also gives rise to gross--if innocent--errors and
misrepresentations.
You cite as "evident counter-evidence" to the Oxford theory that
"Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, died in 1604, nine years before
Shakespeare’s last work, and before the wreck of the Sea-Adventurer
in 1609 and the 1610 account of it that Shakespeare drew on for The
Tempest..."
This is a reference to the 1609 wreck of the Sea-Venture, and
in particular William Strachey's True Reportory [sic] of
the Wrack,
and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, not
published until 1625 but dated July 15, 1610 and circulated at that
time. Shakespeare's alleged indebtedness to accounts of the wreck is
detailed in "Dating the Tempest"
by the
Stratfordian scholar Dave Kathman [http://shakespeareauthorship.com/tempest.html]
If "Dating the Tempest" were the final word on the matter, you
would be right to doubt de Vere's authorship of the Shakespeare canon,
since the pre- and post-1604 plays are obviously by the same hand. The
Tempest/1604 death conflict was a final stumbling block for me, though
the other evidence for Oxford was so convincing that I assumed the
dating issue would be resolved with time.
And in 2005 it was resolved, when Lynne Kositsky and Roger
Stritmatter demolished the theory that Shakespeare was indebted to
Strachey's
True
Reportory, or to any account of the Sea-Venture's wreck.
They proved that more striking parallels with The Tempest's
shipwreck existed in Eden's 1555 The
Decades of the New Worlde Or West India, augmented by Willes in
1577, Erasmus' 1523 "Naufragium”/”The Shipwreck,” and Ariosto's Orlando
Furioso (1516; revised 1521 and 1532). For
Kositsky and Stritmatter's stunning discovery, see http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/tempest/kositsky-stritmatter%20Tempest%20Table.htm
As for the assertion that 1604 was "nine years before
Shakespeare’s last work," this too is supposition. The
evidence that any play was composed after 1604 is shaky at
best, the orthodox chronology being retrofitted to the Stratford man's
lifespan. As argued at http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/chronogate.htm
and more fully at the "Oxfordian rigor" link above:
"One rational objection against the de Vere theory is that he died
in 1604, before several Shakespearean plays were allegedly written.
Conventionally Lear (1605), Macbeth (1605), Timon
(1605), Pericles (1607), Antony and Cleopatra (1607), Coriolanus
(1608), Cymbeline (1609), Winter's Tale (1610), The
Tempest (1611) and Henry VIII (1613)
are dated after his death. When orthodox scholars are being honest,
however, they admit that these dates are the insecure result of
inferences which may be far less than conclusive. Often, in fact,
orthodox chronological reasoning is circular. The great E.K. Chambers,
to whom most subsequent scholarship on the chronology is greatly
indebted, concedes the significant element of doubt in his chapter on
chronology:
'I have attempted to bring together the results of chapter ix and
fit them into the facts of Shakespeare's dramatic career as given in
chapter iii. There is much of conjecture, even as regards the order [of
composition], and still more as regards the ascriptions to particular
years. These are partly arranged to provide a fairly even flow of
production when the plague and other inhibitions did not prevent it"
(Chambers 1930 I: 269).'"
As for the contention that "Shakespeare is the
second-best documented playwright of his era (after only Ben Jonson)",
Samuel Schoenbaum himself, at the conclusion to Shakespeare's Lives
(p. 767), laments:
"Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse
between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of
the documentary record. What would we not give for a single personal
letter, one page of diary!" And as for VN's praise of Schoenbaum's
work, it needn't necessarily be taken as agreement with Schoenbaum's
Stratfordianism, since Shakespeare's Lives
is more a "biography of Shakespeare's biographers" than a life of the
poet himself. Nabokov may simply have found Schoenbaum's frank
acknowledgment of his ignorance a welcome relief from bios like Frayne
Williams’ Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, of which VN (in
a review for the New Republic) wrote: “The biographical part of
this book will not disappoint the imaginary not-too-bright giant for
whom blurbs are fattened and human interest lavishly spread.”
It seems VN had zero tolerance for those who would fantasize about what
Mike Marcus calls "the infinitely elastic" lost years of the man from
Stratford.
Note, by the way, how Schoenbaum's lament echoes the following lines
from VN's 1924 cri de coeur:
"Reveal yourself – whose memoirs/refer to you in passing? Look what
numbers/of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace,/what countless
names Brantome has for the asking!/
Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,/
you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!" Stephen Blackwell's
judgment that "It...seems plausible
that Nabokov's poem was deliberately adopting a temporary
perspective--has a fictitious lyrical I...rather than a
'sincere' or autobiographical
voice" is contradicted by the poem's heartfelt tone. This is is no
fictional "I" but Nabokov himself. I agree with Mike Marcus
that Blackwell's interpretation "seems grossly implausible." Likewise, while I agree with you that many poems "play
with possibilities, they do not vouch for verities," I don't believe VN's "Shakespeare" is one of these, or
that he merely "entertained an anti-Stratfordian position" for the sake of literary
exercise.
I genuinely don't want to ignite an authorship debate, since my aim
is only to discover Nabokov's beliefs on the matter, especially at the
end of his life. But I fear those beliefs may never be fully known as
long as scholars are unacquainted with the Oxford theory's merits.
Worse, VN's views may be dismissed as youthful indiscretions, followed
by a charitable sigh that even Nabokov nods. On the contrary, I believe
he was correct in his doubts, and possibly in his final conclusions, as
he was correct about so many things. A summary of what I suspect he'd
believe were he alive today can be found here: http://www.authorshipstudies.org/articles/oxford_shakespeare.cfm
As for Elliott and Valenza's linguistic study of
Shakespeare's and de Vere's writings, I only ask that you read, without
the benefit of statistical analysis, the 21-year-old de Vere's
introduction to Clerke's 1571 translation of Castiglione's The
Courtier. Can this possibly be the man Harold Bloom claims
"couldn't write his way out of a paper bag"? http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/vere106.htm
Cheers,
Brian Tombe