Edward de Vere & William Shakespeare

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.”

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

However, most recently the most compelling case has been made by Hank Whittemore in his magnum opus, "The Monument" (2005) that Southampton is the principal subject of the sonnets and that they are best understood when it is recognized that Elizabeth was his mother and the 17th Earl of Oxford his father (Edward de Vere).