This year, discover why 2016 isn't the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death

If you haven't already, you'll soon be hearing and reading that this year is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death and with this (mistaken) anniversary shall come rehearsals of the well-known story of a fellow from Stratford on Avon named William Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, what you'll hear--and perhaps what you've long believed about this fellow-- is, from start to finish, a load of humbug.

This year, for the actual facts of the matter, find, download for free (from archive.org) and read J. Thomas Looney's Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and decide for yourself where credit properly belongs.

It's part if my current reading and, apart from a few quibbles over Mr. Looney's views, (yes, Shakespeare did introduce clever allusions in his plays (and sonnets) to indicate his real identity) the account states the case in favor of Edward de Vere against the Stratford man as the person behind the name "Shakespeare" quite well.

LINK TO THE PDF File (a good, clear and well-presented file of the original text
here

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_B004AAAAIAAJ

Again, read and decide for yourself.

P.S. the correct 400th anniversary passed in 2004.

Thanks! Also available at mobileread.com. The formatting looks better because I believe they are all individually proofed.

Best wishes,

k4k

I can't help thinking what a terrible time he must have had at school, being called John Thomas Looney. Probably warped him for life...

K4K: Thank you. I'll look for that.

Thorold: no doubt! His name is pronounced "lone-y" but of course children are often cruel. Still, it is Looney who is known and remembered today for original & important work while his tormenters are lost in obscurity.

P.S. to K4K :


I think I have stumbled on what, in Shakespeare's day should have been called a "fair copy" here (taken from the sources found at the Wikipedia page for J. Thomas Looney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Thomas_Looney#Publications :

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_B004AAAAIAAJ

So, interested readers, I recommend you try this link first. Please report here any problems in retrieval. I was apparently able to download a copy of the file. It looks very good.

-------------------

Just to keep the record straight, the exact title is "Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford" rather than "as Edward De Vere"...

>5 proximity1: thanks! A picture too! How nice.

k4k

----
Note: First of further comments to come on the reading of J. Thomas Looney's "Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford."

Obviously these are my personal opinions and others have their own. I invite comment from others on Looney's work and their comments and questions on my opinions here.
-----

As a result of this, my first reading of Looney, I have some reservations to convey and so I thought that I would post them here. I do not want to leave it implied in this thread that I subscribe to all of Looney's views since I have found aspects of his analysis sometimes difficult and sometimes impossible to square with my impression of Edward Oxford's intentions for his work and legacy.

Looney, for example in chapter IX, The Records and Early Life of Edward de Vere, at page 173, insists on Oxford's own willingness in what was, inevitably, his personal part in maintaining a mask—the pen-name “Shakespeare” (1)—behind which, according to the Oxfordian interpretation which I share, he concealed his public identity as the author of the writings of Shakespeare:

“One naturally asks why the author of the great dramas should
have wished to throw a veil over his identity as he did; and the
strange thing about the matter is this, that, with the Shakespeare
sonnets before us, we should have been so slow in framing this
question and answering it satisfactorily. For, not merely in an
odd sentence, but as the burden of some of his most powerful
sonnets, he tells us in the plainest of terms, that he was one whose
name had fallen into disrepute and who wished that it should per-
ish with him.

'No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell;
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
the hand that writ it.' … from Sonnet 71

'My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.'
… from Sonnet 72

'Or I shall live your epitaph to make
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die.'
from Sonnet 81

'Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view.'
from Sonnet 110

'Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.'
from Sonnet 111

'Your love and pity doth th'impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow;'
from Sonnet 112

“When to all this we find him adding the fear

'That every word doth almost tell my name,'
from Sonnet 76

“it is made as clear as anything can be that he was one who elected
his own self-effacement, and that disrepute was one, if not the principal motive. We may, if we wish, question the sufficiency or reasonableness of the motive. That, however, is his business, not ours.”
(p. 174) (Looney)

For me, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of the import of the words,

“That every word doth almost tell my name,”

That was not entirely the fruit of a fear of discovery. Read the line in its context and it should be
clear that, here, Oxford is, one, stating this as a matter of fact and two, he is not fearful of or ashamed of this fact but, rather, proud of it and three, this is a direct and intended allusion to
his real name, Edward de Vere, in a cleverly rendered cryptic. E(dward)VER(e)Y (ed)WO(a)RD or “ E VER WORD ” doth almost tell my name: “Edward de Vere” and not. literally “every word” throughout his sonnets (as yet unpublished when he penned these lines.)

First, the sonnets themselves were hand written and sent, piecemeal or in batches, to their addressee(s). They constitute one side of what was surely a prolonged exchange in writing by (at least) two people (the principal two of these) who were intimately acquainted. The idea that the recipient would not have very well known his correspondent's real name or that, as Looney believes, that Oxford feared being known—
at this stage, at any rate, and by the person to whom this sonnet was addressed—is simply too far-fetched. Throughout the body of the work of the sonnets it is clear that Oxford was intensely proud of his work despite periods of dejectedness in which he belittled all human effort and existence itself as a vain affair. He repeatedly assures his correspondent that both of them shall, as a result
of the writings, be known for as long as men read and write, thus outlasting that renown which many other forms of human accomplishment can confer. They are some of his plays which were the main concern for annonymity to the general public rather than the sonnets, which, in any case were published posthumously.

----
(1) I join others, (see, esp. Stephanie Hopkins Hughes at www.politicworm.com) who argue that Oxford also wrote under other pen-names as, for example, when he introduced the first published allusion to the pseudonymous “Shakespeare” in a text, “Greene's Groatsworth of Witte” (1592) which he wrote under the pen-name of “Robert Greene.”

Note: I intended to post the following comment in the thread of a readers' discussion ("below the line") at The Guardian:
Link
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/01/shakespeare-timeline-playwrights-li...

But the comment period closed before I could post this
So I offer it here.

"Some readers have asked why Edward Oxford couldn't have simply published long poems such as "Venus and Adonis" or "The Rape of Lucrece" under his own name. He'd have had no reason not to own these works- and this is true, as far as it goes. I believe the answer to his motive is to be found suggested in the lines of sonnet LXXVI:

..." Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?"

The focus here is on the phrase, ...that every word doth almost tell my name"....

Though I find multiple meanings in this phrase--including a covert one--I'm interested here in only the plainly obvious meaning: his style is such that, practically everything he writes -or might one day write-would be infallibly recognised as his. So, while he could openly claim credit for the poems, he had other writings and other plans for writings which should have been too controversial to have published under his own name and he recognised this at least as early as the late 1580s- before the publication of his first work under the pen-name "Shake-speare", the hyphen being an open indication that this was a pseudonym.