LONDON (AP):
A LITERARY group on Thursday marked the 400th anniversary of the death of an Elizabethan nobleman they contend was the 'true' Shakespeare.
The de Vere Society alleges that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, penned the 37 plays officially attributed to the master playwright.
"He is the best man for the job," said society secretary Richard Malim of de Vere. "He had the education and did the travelling, which Shakespeare did not."
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in William Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon in central England was dismissive of the claim.
"It's all nonsense. Edward de Vere did not write the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare," said Professor Stanley Wells, the trust's chairman. "There is ample evidence from his own time that Shakespeare was a very well regarded writer, especially playwright."
The playwright has long been targeted by pretenders to his throne, most notably playwright Francis Bacon and poet Christopher Marlowe. Another group is shortly to discuss its reasons for believing a woman, Mary Sidney, wrote Shakespeare's plays.
The de Vere Society simply believes that Shakespeare got lucky.
Arriving penniless in London, their story goes, he was seized upon by de Vere who, as an aristocrat, needed a cover for his writing and acting.
Wells said that it would have been impossible to pull off such a subterfuge in the "busy, gossipy world of the theatre" in Shakespeare's time.
He added that the idea that de Vere, a busy man, would have found time "in the midst of his multifarious activities to write 40 masterpieces or so is in itself ridiculous."
De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was born in 1550 at Castle Hedingham, his family's ancestral home, making him 15 years older than Shakespeare.
He studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and travelled extensively in Europe.
By contrast, Shakespeare was born to commoner parents on April 23, 1564, in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, and ended his formal education after a stint at Stratford Grammar School.
Malim said that it was important to give credit to the right playwright.
"If you persist in suggesting that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author, you distort the whole of literary
history," he said.
Wells, long used to rebutting the claims, was resigned.
"They are impervious to reason," he said of groups such as the de Vere Society. "The light of fanaticism comes into their eyes when they start talking about this instead of looking at the hard evidence."
On the Net: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: www.shakespeare.org
