Exploring the Authorship Question

Jodi Picoult deserves congratulations for having the courage to explore the Shakespeare question in her new novel. It’s a pity, however, that she could not have done a more thorough canvassing of the history of the question and written with a stronger fictional premise in mind. Since 1920 the evidence has continued to accumulate, most recently “in spades” that the real author of the plays was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Within the last two years, de Vere has been shown in two separate peer-reviewed articles, one published in England and the other in the United States (Critical Survey and the South Atlantic Review) to have been named as the real author by both Francis Meres and Ben Jonson, the two most important early witnesses to the traditional biography. These findings cap over a hundred years of steady accumulation of evidence identifying him as the author and showing in intimate detail how the psychological profile of the author as he gives it in his own plays matches the biography, experiences, and temperament of the literary earl who lost caste from his commitment to drama and the arts. It’s a more interesting story because it happens to true.