History: The Bard's Beard?

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The Oxford camp can go into admirable contortions explaining why Shakespeare's friendly rival Ben Jonson, in an encomium in the 1623 First Folio, calls the deceased Bard "the swan of Avon" (a conspiracy, they say). But their gravest problem is the existing poetry of De Vere himself. It is competent yet uninspired. The 20 or so poems may be juvenilia, but there is neither spark nor promise to the lines, too full of alliteration, all too devoid of depth. "Fram'd in the front of forlorn hope past all recovery,/I stayless stand, to abide the shock of shame and infamy..." The praise Oxford received as a poet may simply have issued from the mouths of sycophants hungry for patronage. Says Alan H. Nelson, a University of California professor who is writing books about Shakespeare and De Vere: "The Earl of Oxford was perhaps the most egotistical and self-serving person of his day in England. It would have been out of character for him to write the plays and then keep authorship a secret. Many Elizabethan noblemen wrote and published."

All that may weaken the case for Oxford. But what a life De Vere led, an existence more Shakespearean than Shakespeare's! Of the man from Stratford we have only a sheaf of facts slimmer than a Gospel redacted by atheists. He is a man about whom it is impossible to write the literary biography as we know it today--kiss, tell, stab in the back, keep the codpiece, and don't dry-clean the doublet. And thus De Vere tantalizes. He may not have been the Bard, but--with apologies to whomever--was his life the stuff of which Shakespeare's dreams were made on?

--With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York