SHAXSPER

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I will be uploading chapters from my manuscript, The Virtual History of Willy Shake-Speare, onto this blog. I wrote this manuscript in the spring-summer of 2009. Here is some project background and information.

Dr. David C. Levine

I have been a Professor at the University of Toronto since 1975.  Trained as an historian, my first two degrees are from the University of British Columbia. I was awarded a PhD from Cambridge University in 1975.  I have published seven academic books and I have also published more than three dozen scholarly articles, given a large number of talks at universities and conferences, and written a variety of newspaper and magazine articles/book reviews.

Project background

This text,  The Virtual History of Willy Shake-Speare, is built on my academic work and, especially, my graduate-level teaching in “Historiography,” which is concerned with how and what historians know.  The Bard of Avon is, after Jesus Christ, the second-most iconic historical person in western culture yet the so-called “authorship-conundrum” hasn’t been explained satisfactorily and probably won’t be/can’t be unless there is a radical new source that can answer – definitively – who wrote The Collected Works and how he did it, within the context of Elizabethan history.

There are 63 unambiguous, historical documents relating to the life of William Shaksper of Stratford-upon-Avon: not one concerns play- or poetry-writing.  All but one of these references relate to business transactions (mostly to do with property- and grain-speculation) and/or life-cycle events.  This absence of evidence should not be surprising because the historical Will Shaksper lived in both provincial obscurity and in a culture of illiteracy.

The historical Will Shaksper’s parents were both illiterate. The historical Will Shaksper married an illiterate woman and his surviving daughters were also both illiterate.  Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever regarding his son’s education. Since there are no surviving documents about the Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School for the years-in-question, Will Shaksper’s own educational history is based purely on suppositions. Indeed – and, in point of fact  – all the “orthodox” biographical arguments connecting the historical Will Shaksper of Stratford with The Bard of Avon are built on similar piles of unsubstantiated hypotheses.  From an historiographical viewpoint, this is what we might today call a kind of “slumdog millionaire’s view of historical possibility.” The spurious nature of The Bard’s identity is what first got me interested in the authorship question because it was relevant to my teaching about historical interpretation and the reliability of source materials.

About the manuscript

In The Virtual History of Willy Shake-Speare, this iconic story is re-told and cross-cut with concerns about issues of historiography, memory, identity, documentation, and historical representation in relation to the most iconic person in the cultural tradition of English-speaking peoples.  Based on my reading of the scholarly literature, it seems to me that the Oxfordian argument – which boasts no smoking gun but a lot of extremely suggestive, circumstantial connections that are pretty hard to explain away – makes more sense in terms of Edward de Vere’s documented life-experiences and his extant poetry from the 1570s.

My manuscript is structured around a tri-partite story-line.

The first part, which takes place in the Elizabethan period, recounts a few documented episodes as well as some invented ones. These episodes have been embellished so that they ‘fit’ accepted historical understanding with a virtual representation of them.

The second strand occurs at a contemporary academic conference on “Penumbral Issues in Shake-speare Scholarship” which takes place in Cambridge in 2014.

The third line in my story happens in “AfterLife,” from where Edward de Vere (aka Willy), seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, Will Shaksper, the illiterate glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon, and Bess (aka Queen Elizabeth I) look down upon the academics’ proceedings (as well as looking back on their own LifeOnEarth), regaling themselves with their ability to have created a conspiracy-of-silence which still breathes life after four centuries.  Their open secret was well known among contemporaries yet successor generations have been completely misled about the identity of William Shakespeare, The Bard of Avon.  And, like a triple helix, the three temporal scenarios wind themselves around each other in relation to an Oxfordian storyline.

A final note

I’m not a fanatical Oxfordian so much as a wary one because I don’t think that we will ever be able to do more than advance arguments (and counter-arguments).  Indeed, after more than two centuries of dedicated archival searching, it is reasonable to argue that the crucial hard evidence is just not there to make a definitive identification of The Bard with either Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, or Will Shaksper, the illiterate glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon.  A conspiracy theorist might ask why that is – and, as “FU” (the caddish Prime Minister in the PBS series “House Of Cards”) would have said: “you may believe it to be so, but I couldn’t possibly comment on that”.  But, of course, I do comment on it quite extensively.  Indeed, as Dante wrote, “se non e vero, e ben trovato.”