It is abundantly clear which authors have been selected to receive Lady Anne’s explicit endorsement. The problem that we will examine today is that Shakespeare’s First Folio — or anything representative of Shakespeare’s work — is missing. This surprising omission is all the more puzzling because Lady Anne Clifford was the wife of Shakespeare’s patron. Her second husband, the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, was one of the “Incomparable Paire of Brethren” to whom the First Folio was dedicated. This simple fact makes her very much an historical person of interest, especially when her excellent education and her life-long interest in literature are taken into consideration. We have here someone who is in the right place, at the right time, and with the right resume to know who Shakespeare was —or was not. We will call on her shortly to take the historical witness stand. In the words of the author of King Lear, she will testify to “who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.” I suggest to you that Shakespeare is noticeably “out,” and this is a case of conspicuous absence not at all in keeping with the orthodox story of the beloved Bard from Stratford-on-Avon.

To quote Justice Stevens, “Perhaps the greatest literary genius in the country’s history...did not merit a crypt in Westminster Abbey or a eulogy penned by King James, but it does seem odd that not even a cocker spaniel or a dachshund made any noise at all when he [Shakespeare] passed from the scene.”8 As we shall soon see, the case of Lady Anne’s Great Picture is right on point; posterity is again presented with another case of what Justice Stevens calls the dog’s “deafening silence.”

the First Folio was ‘in press’ for almost two years

It is simply clan instinct to believe and cogitate in terms that are acceptable, to fit in, to feed and run with the herd, to sniff which way the wind is blowing, sense what direction the closest hooves are shifting, as it is very often a matter of personal advantage and survival. Rebellion can be fatal to iconoclasts. On the other hand, clay pots crack and crash on their own after a time.

The academic refusal to debate who "Shakespeare" actually was, on evidentiary grounds, exhibits the ultimate, the atom bomb, of early childhood resistence, denial. Granted the stakes in terms of professional status are high, should the strategy of resistance fail. We need hardly mention economic ramifications, for instance adjustments in the Stratford-on-Avon industry, long ago typed lectures that must be abandoned, and revised historical texts if the De Vere paradigm gains credence. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding."

Schopenhauer's dictum, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

this secret relation among the three royals became a crisis in 1601, when Wriothesley took part in the Essex Rebellion to overthrow–his mother. His rash act put his life in danger. Elizabeth did not forgive sedition. The leader of the rebellion Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, heard his head thump in a wood bucket. It was only De Vere's pleadings to Elizabeth that saved their son's life. Instead, he was imprisoned in the Tower through the last years of the Queen's reign. When Elizabeth died, James I immediately freed him, because De Vere, 'the Great Oxford' in his words, had opposed the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, James' mother, in 1586-7. De Vere pleaded with Wriothesley too–that he was doing all he could to deliver him, even though as chief of the queen's council he had condemned him to death. That seems to be the import of Sonnet 26. It loomed for a time that if and when Elizabeth died, Henry could be King. That hope collapsed and De Vere's spirit in the next poem, the beginning of the slow minor movement of the work. Thinking that he might fail to assist this sacred ascension, exhausted and seeking rest, and unable to sleep, De Vere writes his son in thought, through Sonnet 27, since he cannot see him in prison. His insomnia continues until he revives in Sonnet 29 and 30. Sonnet 31 contains one of the hidden code phrases embedded in the whole. "And thou–all they–hast all the all of me." takes its meaning from Wriothesley's motto, "All For One", that is, all the love he has ever received focusses now upon his son in a critical hour.

When his execution is commuted as indicated in Sonnet 42, De Vere refers to the Queenly gesture as love, though he himself feels they together "lay on me this cross". Nevertheless, in loving their son he wishes to think she loves and forgives him too.

It was De Vere's fate, constituting a parable of the age, to agonize in the transit between medieval and modern aspiration, to play in his own life a losing role in James I's succession, the first ascension of an English King arranged by the English mercantile elite. Thus ended the Medieval period. That he one of the central participants recorded his perspective in one of literature's great works makes the Sonnets doubly significant.