Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time.

JOSEPH Sobran is a devoted reader of Shakespeare, and in his journalism often an astute commentator on the plays. Would that he had given us his comments on the plays themselves, a book of criticism or interpretation. Instead, in the present volume he has occupied himself with trying to prove that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and not Shakespeare, actually wrote the plays.

This book has been receiving and will continue to receive sternly dismissive reviews, which may only deepen Mr. Sobran's belief that he is right about the authorship. Yet if I were teaching a university course on Shakespeare or on the English Renaissance, I would certainly assign it as a supplementary read- ing. I would do so for a couple of reasons.

Mr. Sobran is steeped in the facts and lore of the period, and he provides a lively account of the political and literary scene in Elizabethan London. His profile of Edward de Vere is very fine: a violent, arrogant, learned, and witty courtier who liked the theater and would run you through with his sword as soon as look at you. Mr. Sobran's argument that this man wrote the plays would also give students a valuable case study in historical demonstration, how to decide among competing assertions and how to weigh what evidence we have, always asking where the preponderance lies.

Some have said that it does not matter who wrote the plays. After all we know little or nothing of "Homer," and his poems would be what they are no matter who wrote them. But history does matter, because we are historical beings. This we understand when we are told that Plato stole his stuff from forgotten African philosophers.

What Mr. Sobran has presented here is a sort of lawyer's brief for his proposition. It represents a good condensation of much earlier argument to that effect and adds some ideas of his own, such as that one of de Vere's motives for concealing his identity as author was his bisexuality, a theory that rests on a questionable reading of Shakespeare's sonnets. So far as I can judge, this may be the best brief possible for the de Vere thesis. As such, it has the paradoxical effect of demolishing it. The theologian Samuel Clark was a gifted man; as a wit said of him, no one doubted the existence of God until Clark tried to prove it.

The de Vere thesis, in the past and now, runs into two major obstacles. First, the time-line simply doesn't work. Edward de Vere died in 1604, and did so after at least some months of illness and weakness. Yet Othello appeared in 1604, when the Second Quarto of Hamlet was also published. King Lear appeared in 1605, Macbeth in 1606. De Vere's ghost must have been exceedingly active to have produced The Tempest in 1611.

In 1608, Shakespeare became a shareholder in the Second Blackfriars Theatre, not surprising for a successful playwright and sometime actor and manager. Shakespeare appears to have collaborated as what we would call a "play doctor" with John Fletcher on Henry VIII in 1613. A prosperous landowner, he died in April 1616 (the date is commonly placed as April 23, St. George's Day), in his hometown of Stratford and was buried under his own tombstone on April 25 -- 12 years after de Vere died. That happens to be a great deal more than we know about most of the playwrights of his social rank or lower in Elizabethan/Jacobean England.

Beyond the virtually insuperable chronological problem, there is the testimony of other poets who indisputably knew William Shakespeare, who came from Strat- ford, and identified him as the man who wrote the plays.

To cite just one example: Ben Jonson, somewhat younger, saluted him upon the posthumous publication of the First Folio edition of his plays. This, a major event, occurred in 1623. When Jonson published his own plays in such an elegant edition it was considered somewhat insurrectionary, meaning that Jonson was claiming classic status. Play scripts were widely considered throw-aways. Jonson, who knew Shakespeare, in 1623 welcomes him as a classic: "My gentle Shakespeare . . . Sweet Swan of Avon." That is, of Strat- ford-on-Avon. Jonson here celebrates him along with Marlowe, Chaucer, Spenser, and other indubitably historical figures. Edward de Vere makes no appearance in this company of celebrated poets.

Against all this and more, Mr. Sobran offers only dubious suppositions, coverups for which there is no evidence, and hypotheses such as that Shakespeare's plays have been wildly misdated, i.e., that none of them were actually written after 1604, no matter when they were released to the public; and, further, that everyone who mattered "knew" this, knew that de Vere had written the plays, and, when these initiates mentioned "Will" or "Shakespeare" or "Avon," they were winking to the knowing and all along meant de Vere. The fact is there is a great deal to connect Shakespeare with the plays and, except for Mr. Sobran's suppositions and inferences, nothing at all convincing to connect de Vere with them.

Besides the problems with dating and contemporary testimony, there are many misapprehensions in Mr. Sobran's argument. For instance, he says that Shakespeare at best had only a "grammar school" education. For all his knowledge of Elizabethan England, he appears unaware of the King's Free Gram- mar School at Stratford. Stratford was no rural hamlet but a prosperous market town, and Shakespeare's father was a man of some substance. William Shakespeare very probably attended this school.

There exists massive scholarship regarding such schools in the time of Shakespeare. They were a product of the Humanist revolution in the school cur- riculum launched by Erasmus, Colet, More, Ascham, and Elyot. Oxford and Cam- bridge were irrelevant to most people -- they were essentially professional schools. The school at Stratford was not a grammar school in anything like the modern sense, and at it Shakespeare would have been exposed to the new Humanist curriculum (see, for example, W. T. Baldwin, Small Latin and Less Greek, 1944). A typical grammar-school curriculum would have included:

English: Catechism, Psalter and Book of Common Prayer, New Testament, Queen's Grammar.

Prose (Latin): Aesop, Cicero, Sallust, Justinius, Caesar.

Verse (Latin): Quintus Curtius, Distichia Moralis, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Juvenal.

At such grammar schools, taught by university men, the students recited and wrote themes and verses. When we read the opinion that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," we must remember that this estimate comes from the astonishingly erudite Ben Jonson.

There can be little doubt about what a young man of Shakespeare's verbal gifts could make of such a curriculum. Given what emerged a few years later, we have to think of a young man whose mind absorbed words the way Mozart's absorbed notes or Bobby Fischer's absorbed chess moves. Shakespeare seems to have gone down to London in 1587 or 1588, and there, in a crowded and cosmopolitan city, found his mind opened to astonishing verbal vistas.

He certainly arrived in London at a moment of startling European creativity for which many theories have been offered but which none really explains. Part I of Cervantes's Don Quixote appeared in 1605, as did King Lear. John Florio's English translation of Montaigne's Essays appeared in 1603, just in time for Shakespeare to weave Montaigne into the Second Quarto version of Hamlet. Tradition has it -- and tradition should never be summarily dismissed -- that Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same day, April 23, 1616. This may or may not be a celebratory myth.

And certainly myths are bound up with the facts we have. Still, the evidence we have strikes me, as it has struck the overwhelming consensus of Shakespeare scholars over a long period of time, as disastrous for the de Vere thesis.

However, piling Pelion upon Ossa, Mr. Sobran throughout speaks in tones of contempt regarding such scholars, many of whom devoted their lives to just the texts and issues he addresses here. He calls them the "orthodox scholars," and even insinuates that "many of them" might have been bought, "subsidized by government treasuries." There is a nasty edge to all this, as if Mr. Sobran stands here heroically alone before the Diet of Worms, or, like Milton's Abdiel, alone resists Satan's lures. Mr. Sobran even claims that the "Strat- fordian" thesis is "sterile" and, in conclusion, holds out a Pisgah vision of literary possibility if we use the de Vere thesis. His subtitle very unfortunately speaks of "solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time."

Please. There is no mystery. In Samuel Johnson's phrase, Mr. Sobran has been milking the bull. He really ought to write the good book of which he is capable . . . on Shakespeare, who, in fact, wrote the plays.