Talk:Anonymous (film)/Oxfordian material removed from article

Background
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as William Shake-speare, rather than William Shakspere of Stratford is known as Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. Oxfordian theory was originated by J. Thomas Looney with the publication of his "Shakespeare" identified in Edward De Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1920. The theory has been trail-blazed by many others since, especially Charlton Ogburn.

The illegitimacy and incest that Emmerich refers to in interviews is to the theory that Edward de Vere was the son of Elizabeth (when she was 16) and Thomas Seymour (older brother of Jane Seymour, the third Queen consort of King Henry VIII of England); and that later Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (often theorized as one of the primary individuals discussed in Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the son of Elizabeth and Edward de Vere (albeit unwittingly). This is known as Prince Tudor theory.

There is a growing list of prominent doubters:

Mark Twain, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Whitman, Tyrone Guthrie, John Gielgud and Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and Sandra Day O'Conner, and the Shakespearean actors Orson Welles, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh (detailed at Shakespeare authorship question). Keanu Reeves was even trying to make his own film about it in the 90s.

Shake a Spear at Ignorance
"shake a lance ... at the eyes of ignorance" - Ben Jonson First Folio, 1623

"vultus tela vibrat (ignarus)" - Gabriel Harvey 1578 letter to Edward de Vere

Mark Anderson has noted, there may not be a smoking gun pointing directly to Edward de Vere but it's just like mounting circumstantial evidence can convict someone in a court of law.

For instance, the Droeshout mask which can be seen clearly on the First Folio 1623 cover, but is suspiciously obscured with shading in later reproductions.



Then there is the 'notorious hyphen' in the often printed "Shake-speare" and the link to the Elizabethan understanding of Pallas Athena (Minerva) goddess of wisdom and civilization - 'shake a speare at ignorance' (using a lance-shaped pen - 'the pen is mightier than the sword').

Thus Robert Greene's (Groastworth of Wit, 1592) shake-scene = theatre-scene.

Yet just like the Droeshout reproductions, the hyphen is often 'forgotten' by orthodox scholars, like when referencing to John Davies' Scourge of Folly and his "To our English Terence, Mr. Will: Shake-speare" line (see also Shakespeare authorship question - "Shake-Speare" as a pseudonym).

Vanessa Redgrave noted in the press con that we have trouble comprehending how different things were back then - Elizabethan English was closer to modernday American. The first usage of the word 'theatre' (previously it had been 'ampitheatre') dates back to 1576 with the building of first theatre for the commoner, aptly called "The Theatre".

Edward de Vere returned from his 'tour' of the European (he seems to have slipped away after a falling out with Elizabeth at around the time of the birth of Southampton) entertainment scene in 1576. He then lived nearby in Fisher's Folly of Bishopsgate. He also had the early lease on the exclusive Blackfriars theatre down town.

Around him Oxford gathered his personal secretaries and hangers on, including: John Lyly (Euphues and his England 1580 - often considered the first English novel, and like many other Elizabethan writers he dedicated it to Edward de Vere), Anthony Munday (Robin Hood), Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Watson (who brought along a young Christopher Marlowe), and Thomas Nashe (many of them strangley went quiet at about the same time he sold 'Sidextra'). It was a time when authors were not celebrities, many works were "anonymous" - it was uncouth for nobleman to sink to putting their names on plays and anyone linked to writing anything exposing folly was persecuted, any such evidence had to be destroyed. And just like in modern Hollywood many writers worked on a script, uncredited (even long after it has played and is then published, like Mary Sidney (mother of the two First Folio dedicatees and thus Susan de Vere 's mother-in-law), who like de Vere had family links and estates in the Stratford area at Bilton and Billesley. There is also a Stratford, London near Hackney where de Vere lived out the last years of his life.

So commoners around them were paid off as frontmen, Ogburn and later scholars like Hopkins Hughes (politicworm creator) link Edward de Vere also to Arthur Brooke (The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, 1562), Thomas Kyd's (The Spanish Tragedy and Ur-Hamlet), and Francis Bacon to Thomas Nashe. Thus explaining why orthodox scholars are forced to accept the great playwright rarely creating original work, but constantly reworking (plagiarizing even) older plays of others; when like all writers over centuries, Edward de Vere was reworking his own plays.

The problem becomes not that his works were edited (probably by Mary Sidney and Francis Bacon) after his death in 1604 for publication in the First Folio, but that many of Shake-speare's works are based on earlier plays written when Shakspere would have been a teenager.

Stratfordians take the obscure allusions in Greene's Groatsworth to the 'upstart crow', 'shake-scene', and 'O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide', Henry VI Part III: 1.4.137 - as the first printed reference to the idea of William Shakspere as the great playwright. Many (like Daryl Pinksen) have shown the upstart crow (a rant which Greene had included in earlier works) more likely refers to Edward Alleyn, who was the actor speaking the lines in the play at the time, and married to Philip Henslowe's (famous impresario) daughter.

Ogburn, Anderson et al, note too that the Henry VI play overly promotes in an anachronistic way Edward de Vere's ancestor 13th Earl of Oxford (the oldest peerage in England).

There is no such comparative documentary record of the movements of William Shakspere. There's his Will that doesn't mention plays or reference books, but rather his 'second best bed' bequeathed to his wife and tomb monument which originally showed his hand resting on a bag of grain (the quill being added later). Orthodox scholars with a vested tenure in the perpetuation of the William Shakspere industry continue to scoff at Oxfordian theory, the idea of de Vere is "absurd", but the man from Stratford fits perfectly to them.

The Earl of Oxford crops up everywhere from the childhood of precocity, including tutoring from Thomas Smith, Laurence Nowell (Anglo Saxon writings like Beowulf and Saxo Grammaticus/Hamlet), and Arthur Golding (his uncle, being around him when the translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses was being done); masques at Gray's Inn; the first theatre; many scholars believe that the wedding of Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Derby to William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby at Cecil House was the inspiration for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that the play was first performed at the couple's wedding festivities ; all the way to the First Folio being dedicated to  Susan de Vere 's husband and his brother the Lord Chamberlain - controller of Elizabethan Theatre.