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ken meece

The Sonnets of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Essay by WJ Ray - 0 views

www.wjray.net/...shakespeare-sonnets.htm

shared by ken meece on 13 Sep 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the eternal conflict between artistic conviction and prudential control, which is rooted in human nature, the left- and right- brains perhaps. The inner conflict therefore determines the essence of human history. For such reasons the Sonnets will be both refuge and record of the human heart, until language joins the silence.
  • the next poems promising immortality to his Prince, through the verse he writes, are self-consolation, though without religious consolation language
  • an idea embedded in virtually all religions, that the Word, truth, is immortal. Thus its sign is as well.
  • discourses on Time, Sonnets 64-5, perhaps the most profound on that subject in a modern language
  • De Vere declares his verse superior to any temporal events–that "tyrant's' crests and [monarchs'] tombs of brass" cannot match it. Brass represented temporal falsity. His son's Kingship, denied politically, will live on in verse, a true record of the usurpers' injustice towards their Majesty's sacred blood.
  • De Vere's story is the untold saga of the Renaissance Man crushed on the ocean-rocks of power.
ken meece

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/Niederkorn-NYTWhodunit.htm - 0 views

www.shakespearefellowship.org/Niederkorn-NYTWhodunit.htm

deVere shakespeare

shared by ken meece on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603); or that Southampton (1573-1624) was his child by her
  • There is also some evidence that de Vere may have taken his own life, an act that would have made his legacy highly problematic at a time when severe penalties were exacted against the heirs of suicides.
ken meece

Agenda for Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference - 0 views

www.authorshipstudies.org/...agenda.cfm

deVere shakespeare

shared by ken meece on 07 Feb 10 - Cached
ken meece

The Monument by Hank Whittemore : 0966556453 : 9780966556452 - BetterWorldBooks.com - B... - 0 views

www.betterworldbooks.com/he-Monument-id-0966556453.aspx

betterworldbooks Shakespeare deVere

shared by ken meece on 03 Oct 09 - Cached
  • ken meece on 03 Oct 09
     
    "Customer Reviews * Rating Most important work on Shakespeare in a century Aug 5, 2005 (48 of 56 found this helpful) It is gratifying to read so many other reviews that agree on the importance of Hank Whittemore's latest book, The Monument, on Shakespeare's Sonnets. What Whittemore has accomplished is nothing short of breath-taking. He has achieved in the literary realm what Thomas Kuhn so excellently described for science 40 years ago: a paradigm shift, where it takes a totally fresh view, unemcumbered by the assumptions and prejudices of a given field of inquiry, to solve what are otherwise perceived in the profession to be unsolvable questions. Einstein's Special Relativity Theory, coincidentally exactly 100 years ago, is the best example of such a paradigm shift, where the only solution to the conundrums plaguing physics was Einstein's assertion that time itself was not constant, and neither was mass. The difference in the case of Whittemore's work is that despite massive evidence that Shakespeare's Sonnets remain to this day a virtually totally impenetrable enigma, very few mainstream scholars even appear to recognize this fact. I have recently read the work of the only four scholars, so far as I am aware, in the last 50 years who have published either a paraphrase of, or extended comments on, ALL 154 sonnets. They are to be commended for recognizing the importance of treating the entire sonnet sequence as a whole, but in each case, in my view, they are a miserable flop at explaining the meaning of the sonnets. What Whittemore recognized is first, that the sonnets are ONE unified, coherent, internally consistent, document. Whatever is said in one sonnet MUST relate to all the other sonnets. So long as there are (apparent) contradictions between one's interpretations of different sonnets, so long is that interpretation fatally flawed. Second, he not only agreed with many scholars that Sonnet 106 is about the death of the Queen, the pea
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