April 12, 2006
Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare
Or actually, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, born this day in 1550. A poet and dramatist in his own right, he is also the subject of a small but noisy movement that insists he also wrote Shakespeare's works. The Shakespeare-Oxford Society offers a basic summation of this movement's arguements.
Frankly, I don't think much of this business, but then again, I dislike conspiracy theories as a rule and prefer to take an Occam's Razor approach to history (as to other things). It is seductively easy to take any handful of facts about a given topic and, with a little imagination and embellishment, weave a tangled web around them. But every time I've tried to pull apart one of the Oxford-as-Shakespeare threads, it's come to nothing. IMHO, there simply isn't enough evidence to support the notion that the Bard wasn't the Bard.
Posted by Robert at April 12, 2006 09:38 AM | TrackBackShakespeare's actual birthday is April 23, which is just twelve days after April 11. There are twelve letters in "Edward de Vere" and "Earl of Oxford," which means--
Hang on. Today is April 12. Of course, de Vere's math skills were notoriously slipshod....
A good conspiracy theory can be entertaining, but this one simply fails to convince. I'm surprised nobody's linked this with the da Vinci code, proving that Shakespeare was a remote descendant of the lesbian former prostitute who was the real author of the four Gospels.
Posted by: utron at April 12, 2006 11:10 AMI hear it was a llama what wrote all them Shakespeare books.
Posted by: rbj at April 12, 2006 12:04 PM
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