Shakespeare,Anonymous and the Oxford Theory

Upcoming Columbia Pictures release Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff, takes as its premise the Oxford Theory of Shakespearean authorship. First proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920, the fringe theory holds that masterworks attributed to Shakespeare were in fact written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. In anticipation of the film’s release, Recess solicited two Shakespearean professors in the Duke English department, George Gopen and Joseph A. Porter, to give their takes on Anonymous and the validity of the Oxford Theory.

Guest Lecture: Joseph A. Porter

Some twenty-five years ago a descendant of Edward de Vere toured England and the US staging “debates” about authorship. For his Duke visit, he invited George Walton Williams, Duke’s senior Shakespearean, and also me to participate. Independently we both declined, not wishing to lend any color of legitimacy to a case without merit. As I recall, the de Vere group nevertheless cobbled up a presentation, which was duly covered by the Chronicle and soon forgotten.

At the time I was an assistant professor with one Shakespeare book, The Drama of Speech Acts, developed from my dissertation, and working on a second. I had begun serious Shakespeare study in a graduate school seminar that hooked me for life. Over the Duke years, I succeeded George Williams at his retirement, I published Shakespeare’s Mercutio and then an edited collection of essays on Mercutio’s play Romeo and Juliet, as well as scholarly articles and eight co-edited volumes in the Renaissance Papers series, each with its Shakespeare complement, and I have signed on as Editor-in-Chief of the mother of all editions of Othello, the MLA New Variorum, still in progress. Some of my former Duke students have entered the academy as Shakespeareans, and in teaching, writing, and in conferences we and our colleagues engage with major developments in the field, including most recently Lukas Erne’s paradigm-shifting Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, which argues that Shakespeare wrote not only for the stage but also for the page, to be read. I myself am especially keen on Erne because of my indissoluble liaison with fiction writer Joe Ashby Porter, which disposes me to read Shakespeare in a writerly way, as if from inside his shaping mind. That disposition may have prompted me to notice a particular phrase in a text Shakespeare knew, a phrase that justifies the most famous emendation in English literature, Lewis Theobald’s “babbled of green fields” in the account of Falstaff’s death. That emendation, while generally adopted, had remained merely conjectural for some 250 years, until my serendipitous discovery.

So then: like other Shakespeareans I am far too deeply invested and informed to care much about a foolish and reductive film. Still, while I concur with the general dismissal, I do part company with some respondents. I cannot wring my hands with Stephen Marche writing in The New York Times about harm the film might do. Shakespeare has survived much greater mischief, as for instance with the forgeries of his nineteenth century editor Collier. Nor can I agree with Ben Brantley in the Times that the author’s identity doesn’t matter. We know more about Shakespeare than about any of his playwriting contemporaries, we keep learning more, and anything we know may figure in our understanding of his works.

Shakespearean Joseph A. Porter and fiction writer Joe Ashby Porter constitute a Janus-faced Duke Professor of English and Theater Studies.

Edward de Vere died in 1604. Shakespeare wrote for another decade beyond that. The Oxfordians try to argue he wrote the plays before he died (which certainly would have been wise of him to do); but some of the real events to which the plays make mention had not yet occurred. If de Vere could have summoned them up before he died – well, then maybe he too was a genius.

But all we need to do to settle the matter is to look not at the contents of the plays but rather at their language. What do I mean by “language”? I mean his control of rhythm and meter, his use of rhyme, his skill in varying blank verse and rhymed verse and prose, his rhetorical architecture in set speeches and his linguistic interplay between characters, and his stunning use of all the rhetorical figures of speech known to the English language. The last of these by itself is enough to demonstrate the unique quality and qualities of these extraordinary works of literature. If you could study at length how he makes use of alliteration and assonance, metaphor and simile, anaphora and epistrophe, asyndeton and polysyndeton, metonymy and synecdoche, chiasmus, anadiplosis, antanaclasis, diacope, epanalepsis, ploce, and epizeuxis, you would discover the literary “DNA” that makes him different from all other writers. Given the time and the space – and the motivation – I could demonstrate with great confidence that the man or woman who wrote the texts we have from de Vere, Bacon, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Queen Elizabeth could not possibly be the same person as he or she who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. His rhetorical skill is so far beyond any other writer in English that one cannot make out in the distance the identity of whoever is in second place.

His contemporaries – especially Ben Jonson, a chief competitor – thought he wrote them. Is it possible he had a ghost writer who has never been detected? That is not impossible – though extraordinarily unlikely. But none of those writers put forward to date as the real author shows, in “their own” work, anything close to the rhetorical brilliance of the Bard. Thus I am content to conclude that if the plays of William Shakespeare were not written by William Shakespeare, they were certainly written by another man of the same name. Just what would we gain by disproving Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? Only a victory for the kind of class snobbery and condescension we have long since decided is inhuman and downright embarrassing.

George Gopen is a Professor of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke.