Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (/də ˈvɪər/; 12 April 1550 – 24 June 1604) was an English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era. Oxford was heir to the second oldest earldom in the kingdom, a court favourite for a time, a sought-after patron of the arts, and noted by his contemporaries as a lyric poet and court playwright, but his volatile temperament precluded him from attaining any courtly or governmental responsibility and contributed to the dissipation of his estate.
A champion jouster, Oxford travelled widely throughout France and the many states of Italy. He was among the first to compose love poetry at the Elizabethan court and was praised as a playwright, though none of the plays known as his survive. A stream of dedications praised Oxford for his generous patronage of literary, religious, musical, and medical works, and he patronised both adult and boy acting companies, as well as musicians, tumblers, acrobats and performing animals.
In his efforts to fashion general history into a specific fictional story, Shakespeare may have consulted the Gesta Romanorum, a well known thirteenth-century collection of tales, legends, myths, and anecdotes written in Latin, which took figures and events from history and spun fictional tales around them. In Shakespeare's lifetime, a writer known for doing likewise was Matteo Bandello, who based his work on that of writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and who could have served as an indirect source for Shakespeare. So, too, could the first major English author to write in this style, William Painter, who borrowed from, amongst others, Herodotus, Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Claudius Aelianus, Livy, Tacitus, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, and Bandello himself.
Top 18 Reasons Why Edward de Vere (Oxford) Was Shakespeare (Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship).
An excerpt from, "John Milnes Baker: How I Became an Oxfordian" Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, April 5, 2016:
My older brother Alan was an English major at Columbia. He graduated in 1947 and earned a M.A. in English Literature two years later. In 1952 he married Columbia Professor Alfred Bennett Harbage’s daughter Diana. (Dr. Harbage later became Cabot Professor of English Literature at Harvard and was general editor of The Complete Pelican Shakespeare.) I was a Fine Arts major at Middlebury College but took the popular “Cubeta’s Shakespeare.” Paul Cubeta, a graduate of Williams, earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale. He was also director of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Summer School of English, so I had no reason to question his conventional Stratfordian view. (I went on to earn my M.Arch. from the Columbia School of Architecture in 1960.)
In 1986 I discovered Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare – the Myth and the Reality. I naturally assumed that my brother would share my enthusiasm for this enlightened thesis. Not so. Though normally a convivial fellow, Alan suddenly turned a vivid red, smoke came out of his ears, and something resembling a roman candle erupted from the top of his head! “How could you believe that nonsense!” I was startled by this stunning response. Subsequently I learned that he was typical of the Stratfordians who assert their conviction with patronizing complacency, exasperation with such naïve gullibility, and often with the fury of a religious fanatic. So we simply agreed to disagree.
Video Title: Talk 8 - Who was Shakespeare? Source: Ralph Ellis. Date Published: July 29, 2020. Description:
We all think we know who Shakespeare was. But then we find out that the Stratford Man left no books or manuscripts in his will; that we have no documents penned by his hand; that he could barely sign his name; and that his daughters were illiterate. Was this ill-educated Stratford Man the real Bard, or was he someone else?
Video Title: Jim Warren – Foundations of the Oxfordian Claim. Source: Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Date Published: December 7, 2022. Description:
The evidence in support of Edward de Vere’s authorship of “Shakespeare’s” works is far stronger than most people today realize because much of the evidentiary basis uncovered by the first generations of Oxfordian scholars in the 1920s and 1930s has been forgotten. Of the eleven distinct lines of evidence they uncovered, only four are well known today. Three others are only partially known, and four more are mostly unknown. This presentation reviews all eleven lines of evidence in the order in which they were first uncovered to provide a sense of how the Oxfordian movement developed as well as information about the lines of evidence themselves.
Video Title: John Milnes Baker - The Case for Edward De Vere as the Real William Shakespeare. Source: Kent Memorial Library. Date Published: October 26, 2020.