The 17th Earl of Oxford
The man who died too early
There are copious reasons advanced, many of them claiming to be conclusive, as to why the Earl of Oxford simply has to be the author of Hamlet. Similarities between his life and the Prince’s, characters at the Elizabethan court who are mocked or otherwise represented, feuds amongst his staff that resemble onstage feuds are cited. Details of court procedures about which only an Earl could have known are cited. Biographical detail after biographical detail is called into evidence.
Legal knowledge of specific cases which only a trained lawyer would have known about are extensively cited, all in an attempt to make it seem impossible that a young man from Warwickshire might be able to claim credit for work which is full of what Oxfordians see as elite knowledge and an aristocratic perspective on life.
However, in addition to the life ascribed to him by Oxfordian theorists, The Earl of Oxford had a life of his own. This life, since he was in the public eye, is actually well documented. Oxfordians claim that looking at this life closely reveals the author of the plays.
Are they looking at the right life? A life which ended before a third of the work was written. At the life of a dramatist who led a revolution in Jacobean theatre? Oxford’s life ended in 1604 before anyone knew what Jacobean theatre was or had wondered how it might be different from Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare continued to write for another decade.
Oxford’s only peer-reviewed biographer, Dr Alan Nelson certainly doesn’t think he wrote plays for money.(Nelson 2003) Nor does Professor Steven May, the leading authority on ELizabethan courtier poets(May 1991). Oxford’s life does not easily map onto the life of a successful Elizabethan playwright. He lived world’s apart from Bankside.
Aside from being dead when Macbeth was being written—a play full of ominous overtone from The Gunpowder Plot of 1605—when Oxford should have been in Southwark, working out the details of staging the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, he was actually trying to secure a monopoly on alcohol testing. When he should have been working on Cleopatra’s costumes to amaze Enobarbus, he was writing begging letters and trying to win the Governorship of Jersey. And when he should have been assessing sound effects for the great storm on the heath scene in King Lear, he was sleeping The Big Sleep
