Edward de Vere & William Shakespeare

He also noted that "158 verses and 10 Psalms marked in the de Vere Bible" had been cited by the writers on the biblical references in Shakespeare, and that "an additional 136 marked verses and notes exhibit — possibly, probably or certainly — a previously undocumented influence."

More recently, an old controversy has flared again over what is known as the Ashbourne portrait, which the Folger once considered a portrait of Shakespeare. In 1940, an article in Scientific American by Charles Wisner Barrell, a film specialist, argued that the Ashbourne painting was a portrait of Oxford. Using X-ray and infra- red photography, Barrell said he had found many indications that the portrait depicts Oxford, including Oxford's emblem (a boar's head) on the subject's signet ring and the monogram of the Dutch artist Cornelius Ketel, dating the portrait to around 1580.

Ruth Loyd Miller, who with her husband, Judge Miller in Louisiana, has kept Looney's book and other major Oxfordian works in print for decades, writes in her 1975 book, `Shakespeare' Identified: Vol. II, that Barrell found that two other paintings, formerly considered to be portraits of Shakespeare, had also been selectively painted over and that in his opinion his findings proved that both were portraits of the Earl of Oxford.