Much Ado About Real Shakespeare : Literature: Charles Vere is making a quest--and career--of proving that his 16th-Century relative is the authentic Bard. He’ll face his sympathizers and ridiculers at Chapman University.
Like many young college graduates, Charles Vere, Oxford ‘89, wasn’t quite sure what to do with his life.
His first job out of school--as an editorial assistant at a publishing house--proved distastefully “bureaucratic and clerical,†he says. So the language major tried to capitalize on his Russian and Polish skills, and applied to an insurance company that was planning to expand into Eastern Europe. That didn’t work out either. “I just sort of knew that insurance wasn’t me.â€
Floundering about London, out of a job, saddled with debts from his college days, “it was a pretty low period in my life,†Vere admits.
But then, gazing back across 400 years of family history, he found his future.
At 27, Vere, the Earl of Burford, has decided to dedicate his life to proving that his 16th-Century ancestor Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, is the actual author of the plays normally attributed to one William Shakespeare, late of Stratford-upon-Avon.
That quest--begun five months ago in Florida, bankrolled by American sympathizers, ceaselessly ridiculed by the academic Establishment--brings Vere to Orange on Sunday, when he will present his theory at Chapman University.
There, Vere first will try to demolish the reputation of the actual Shakespeare, dismissing the “Stratford man†as an illiterate, untutored bumpkin wholly incapable of creating plays that many regard as the finest writing yet produced in the English language.
In his place, through a weighty assemblage of circumstantial evidence, Vere will posit De Vere (or Oxford) as “the only plausible candidate†for the authorship. The Oxfordian theory, first put forward in 1920 by an English schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney, links everything from the fact that both the historical Oxford and the character Hamlet were patrons of acting troupes, to the detail that Oxford’s crest depicted a lion that shakes a spear.
Vere asserts that Oxford--who as a young man was known, Vere says, for his talents at poetry and music--used William Shakespeare as a front. Apparently, Elizabethan England held writers in even greater contempt than does present-day Hollywood, so the earl found it necessary to conceal his inky habit to preserve his social standing.
But the price Oxford paid was his rightful place in history, according to his collateral descendant.
“The more I appreciate the sacrifices he made for his art, the more I find it unacceptable that his greatness should not be recognized, that we should be accepting a nobody as author in his place,†says Vere, who founded a student club at Oxford to right the 400-year wrong through lectures, books and “rather extravagant dinner parties.â€
And while historians say Oxford lost the 60-odd estates he once owned because he was “a lightweight, a spendthrift, a liar and a drunkard,†Vere insists that his ancestor actually exhausted his inheritance in service of the muse. “He spent it for literary patronage and generally supporting the arts,†Vere says. “More literary works are dedicated to him than to any other person of his age other than Elizabeth I.â€
Among scholarly circles, Vere’s earnest ancestor-worship is seen as an annoyance at best, and a disinformation campaign at worst. “It’s pure nonsense,†says Reginald Foakes, a UCLA English professor who rebutted Vere’s lecture Monday at the Huntington Library in San Marino.
Like many scholars, Foakes resents Vere’s assertion that only an educated nobleman like Oxford--not a man of Shakespeare’s modest means--could write such sublime verse. Where Vere argues that only an aristocrat would know enough about court society to create such characters as “Hamlet’s†Polonius, Foakes counters that “you can argue the opposite case, that he would have to be a laborer to create such wonderful workingmen†as Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.â€
Vere’s claim, says the professor, “has no connection with genuine scholarship or historical fact at all. This is an invented mystery, something that becomes to its followers an article of faith, where you just twist the facts to fit the faith.â€
And Foakes, author of the forthcoming book “ ‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear’: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art,†is one of the friendlier Shakespeareans whom Vere has encountered: He actually agreed to share the stage with the young earl, who acknowledges that English departments--from Harvard and Smith to Kutztown (Pa.) University and Palm Beach (Fla.) Atlantic College--universally have declined to sponsor his lectures.
Journalists have seen Vere as anything from a curiosity to an outrage; one writer, in the Jerusalem Post, unfavorably linked Vere’s revisionism to Oliver Stone’s selective brand of history in “JFK†and even to the efforts of neo-fascists to deny that the Holocaust occurred.
Two separate panels of exalted jurists--one made up of three U.S. Supreme Court justices, the other of their British counterparts, the law lords--held mock trials on the question and unanimously rejected Oxford’s claims. Vere’s faith can be ascribed to a particularly strong sense of family loyalty. And, according to his critics, perhaps to something else as well.
“And as far as the Earl of Burford is concerned, he’s on to a good thing, isn’t he?,†grumbles the English-born Foakes.
“It sounds to me like (Vere has) found a good way to see the U.S.A., if you know what I mean,†adds Thomas F. Bradac, the locally prominent Shakespearean director (and anti-Oxfordian) who will introduce Vere at Chapman.
The Americans who are paying Vere’s freight, however, are devoted thoroughly to their young champion. They put the bachelor nobleman up in their homes, buy him meals and escort him everywhere he goes on his American odyssey.
“Lord Burford is very charismatic and very well-versed,†explains Carol Sue Lipman, a 40-something anti-Stratfordian from Santa Monica who says she edits screenplays for a living. “We all feel he’s probably the best spokesman among all of us.â€
Vere is proud to call himself the world’s first “professional Oxfordian. I make my living at this,†he says, adding that despite his venerable title, he has no fortune to fall back on.
He plans to write two books--one on the Oxfordian theory, the other on his experiences in America--and between these and his lectures Vere is certain that “in three to five years, (De Vere) will be accepted universally as the author†of the Shakespeare plays.
But just in case he isn’t, Vere finally may have found his calling after all.
“Now that I’ve got a taste for public speaking, my second choice would be politics,†he says. Anticipating a parliamentary campaign as an independent or a Green, Vere already is fashioning a platform that links modern concerns over the environment and the European Community to, of all things, the vindication of Edward de Vere.
“The whole centralization thing today is getting out of hand. You have (EC) bureaucrats in Brussels telling farmers in Scotland what they can and cannot grow. I believe we have to go back to people trusting more in their individual destinies,†Vere says. “And if De Vere is recognized as the author, it will be a triumphant victory for individualism.â€
In more ways, perhaps, than one.
Charles Vere, Lord Burford will speak Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Waltmar Theater, Chapman University, 301 E. Palm St., Orange. Information: (714) 744-7016.
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