Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00:00What's all this talk about the man who wrote Shakespeare?
00:00:12Wasn't Shakespeare Shakespeare?
00:00:16The case, in fact, has never been stronger that the wrong man has been fitted with the
00:00:20Bard's crown.
00:00:21And I think the plays were written much earlier than we are told, and they were constantly
00:00:26being revised and reworked.
00:00:39We have been handed the greatest work of art in human history, but it's also a map.
00:00:43It points us to, and it guides us through, the life of the author.
00:00:48But we've been looking at the wrong guy.
00:00:50We've been in the wrong city.
00:00:52There's always been this great question about why Shakespeare, who lived his entire life
00:00:59in England, but we have ten plays that are set in Italy.
00:01:05Why was Shakespeare so enamored of Italy?
00:01:08And, you know, where did he get his material?
00:01:13Once you reorient yourself, and once you relocate yourself to the city that the map is actually
00:01:18about, not only is the map still a beautiful map, and a beautiful work of art unto itself,
00:01:24but that map then guides you.
00:01:35Edward de Vere was an outstanding, ingenious, and sometimes abrasive Elizabethan Renaissance
00:01:41man.
00:01:42A scholar, spendthrift, courtier, wit, adventurer, patron, prolific ghostwriter, de Vere encompassed
00:01:49the character traits of many Shakespearean icons, among them Hamlet, Romeo, Othello,
00:01:55Falstaff, and King Lear.
00:01:58What really grabbed my interest was, is there any connection between Shakespeare's interest
00:02:03and Edward de Vere's interest?
00:02:05De Vere lived in Venice during his twenties, and visited the cities in France and Italy
00:02:10that would become the settings for more than a dozen Shakespearean plays.
00:02:14The amount of scholarship that he uses in his works indicates certainly a person of
00:02:20unique educational qualifications and an extraordinary literary heritage that he was privy to.
00:02:29He was a very theatrical man.
00:02:31I suppose in today's parliaments we say he was rather camp.
00:02:36He loved dressing up.
00:02:37He loved showing off.
00:02:39We don't want our kids knowing about de Vere.
00:02:41He was bisexual and maybe had an affair with Queen Elizabeth.
00:02:45One finds an abundance of correlations between the life of the courtier playwright Edward
00:02:50de Vere and Shakespeare.
00:02:52The question itself has a great deal of appeal to lawyers, physicians, scientists.
00:02:59People who come from fact-based backgrounds will give you the time of day and say, what's
00:03:05your evidence?
00:03:07If you spend all of your life doing a PhD and then focusing your teaching on the Stratford
00:03:13story, then it must be very scary to have to think, well, maybe this isn't true after
00:03:22all.
00:03:24Every author's life tells a story.
00:03:27The best place to begin is with the name itself, Shakespeare.
00:03:31The hyphen appears in many of the first publications of the plays and poems.
00:03:37Hyphenated phrases in an author's name often suggest that a concealed author, in an age
00:03:41rife with political and religious intrigue, when picking the wrong alliance or offending
00:03:46the wrong official, could mean imprisonment, torture, forfeiture of one's property, to
00:03:51the crown, or a death sentence.
00:03:53The evidence for Oxford to many people, including a number of professors, appears to be much
00:04:02more convincing than the evidence for the man from Stratford, Will Shakespeare.
00:04:08That's the way his name was spelled in Stratford, Shakespeare.
00:04:12The name on the play is uniformly Shakespeare.
00:04:16Two different names, two different people.
00:04:53On April 12, 1550, in the private apartments of a British stone-walled fortress, a lord
00:05:05and lady welcomed their heir into the world.
00:05:08The child's father, John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford, could rest assured that when he
00:05:13died, his own son would carry forward the title of 17th Earl.
00:05:17Lord Edward's nobility would place him among kings and queens and the powerful men around
00:05:22them who ran the state.
00:05:24For 400 years, Edward de Vere's ancestors have played a leading role in the wars and
00:05:29politics of England.
00:05:32In an uninterrupted succession from the Norman conquest onward, de Vere's had served the
00:05:36crown as statesmen and military commanders.
00:05:41The de Vere's were some of the most influential people because of their huge land holdings
00:05:47around the entire town, and anyone who wanted to do anything at all had to receive the permission
00:05:55of the lords of the manor, and they were, for over 600 years, the de Vere.
00:06:02But also the fact that they were the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlains of England gave them
00:06:08direct access to the monarch.
00:06:13Edward de Vere is one of the most interesting members of the family.
00:06:17He wasn't cast in the usual mould.
00:06:21As a toddler inside this ancient castle, Edward's formative years were probably lonely ones.
00:06:27As a young man, of course, he was, before his father died, his father had a troupe of
00:06:34players.
00:06:35He lived at Henningham Castle.
00:06:36He would see travelling groups of players and his father's own group of players.
00:06:43Sometime during Lord Edward's youth, the child was moved out of Castle Henningham and into
00:06:48the household of Sir Thomas Smith.
00:06:52Lord Edward, as his scholar, would have had access to Smith's library of hundreds of books,
00:06:59more than 400 titles in theology, civil law, history, philosophy, mathematics, medicine,
00:07:06grammar, and literature.
00:07:08Works by Livy, Virgil, Plutarch, Plato, Pliny, Homer, Ovid, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Dante
00:07:17and Boccaccio, line Smith's bookshelves.
00:07:22Edward de Vere's father died when young Edward was 12.
00:07:26His mother remarried soon after, burying her first husband.
00:07:29Then when his father died when he was 12 and he became a ward of court with Burleigh,
00:07:37again he was taken to theatrical performances at court.
00:07:45On Thursday, September the 3rd, 1562, the London diarist Henry Makin recorded that between
00:07:51five and six o'clock in the afternoon, a 12-year-old Earl of Oxford came riding out of Essex with
00:07:58seven score horse all in black through London and Cheap and Ludgate and so to Temple Bar.
00:08:05The child's parade was hundreds of feet long as it progressed over the drawbridge and through
00:08:09the arches of London's Aldgate on the eastern side of the city.
00:08:14With 140 horsemen bearing the colorless cast of mourning, de Vere took his entrance onto
00:08:20the worldly stage as the boy in black.
00:08:23London wasn't a particularly large city.
00:08:25I suppose it had a population of 100,000 at the most.
00:08:28It was run as a Stasi-type city with informers and it was a very dangerous place to live,
00:08:41which again I think is why there is such a confusion over the whole thing because they
00:08:50didn't have shredding machines but they had fires and I think a lot of evidence was destroyed.
00:09:01I'm the 18th Baron Burley, a grandson of the original Lord Burley.
00:09:07The population of England at the time I think was only about five million people and of
00:09:12those five million, not very many were well educated.
00:09:17The library of Burley's library was one of the most extensive in England at the time.
00:09:23The books the writer of Shakespeare would have had to have had connection with were
00:09:28in that library, mostly in the original languages.
00:09:33The variety of books kept within Cecil House was truly astonishing for those fortunate
00:09:38few who enjoyed access.
00:09:40A cousin of mine who was managing the house at Burley House gave me a copy of Lord Burley's
00:09:48precepts which were written about 1582, 84, 85, somewhere in there.
00:09:56They kind of reflect what is in the play Hamlet.
00:10:00These few precepts in thy memory look thou correcter.
00:10:04Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thoughts his act.
00:10:09There is one in particular which fits very well with the final statement by Polonius.
00:10:16This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day.
00:10:23Thou canst not then be false to any man.
00:10:26The book was printed in non-book form, 1616, but before that only family members or close
00:10:34associates would have had a chance to see those words, I would think.
00:10:40Certainly not Will.
00:10:42The players in Hamlet were strangely look-alikes to the English court and the people who were
00:10:49close to Edward.
00:10:51And in fact, the way in which people died right and left probably reflects his feeling
00:10:56of frustration in finding himself in that setting.
00:11:02Now he is praying, and now I'll do it!
00:11:11And so he goes to heaven, and so am I avenged.
00:11:15That would be scant.
00:11:16A villain who kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, did this same villain send
00:11:21to heaven?
00:11:22When Hamlet has an opportunity to murder Claudius at his prayers, he kind of does a double take.
00:11:30He says, well, if I kill him now, he's praying, he'll go to heaven.
00:11:38He says, this is not revenge, it's hire and salary.
00:11:42And in the process of this soliloquy, while he's watching Claudius at prayer, he says,
00:11:48he took my father, cruelly, full of bread.
00:11:52That is the allusion to Ezekiel 1649.
00:11:56One of the underlying verses in the Geneva Bible and one of the most significant proofs
00:12:03of Shakespeare's dependence upon the Geneva translation of the Bible.
00:12:10Cecil recorded that in the first quarter of 1570, De Vere purchased two unspecified Italian
00:12:16books, as well as a Geneva Bible gilt, a Chaucer, Plutarch's works in French, with other books
00:12:23and papers.
00:12:24The Geneva Bible, it's lodged in the vaults of the Folger Library in Washington.
00:12:30It's the sort of connection between a man, a writer, and the works that doesn't ever
00:12:41occur with the man from Stratford.
00:12:45We have a record of him purchasing it in 1570.
00:12:50And it is very expensively and handsomely bound with his heraldic devices on it.
00:12:58There are a number of little manacules in the margins.
00:13:03And a manacule is a tradition that originated with the medieval scribes.
00:13:08When they copied a manuscript, if there was a particular passage that they felt was particularly
00:13:14important or edifying, they would draw one of these little manacules to literally point
00:13:19out the importance of that passage.
00:13:22Of the some thousand or so verses marked in the De Vere Bible, between two and three hundred
00:13:30plus of them exhibit an influence in Shakespeare.
00:13:34There is a close correlation between the level of interest Shakespeare showed in specific
00:13:40biblical verses and the level of interest De Vere showed.
00:13:43When Shakespeare echoed a biblical verse once, only 13% of those verses are marked in the Bible.
00:13:52The more times Shakespeare echoes a given Bible verse, the greater the likelihood that
00:13:58Edward De Vere marked that same verse in his Bible.
00:14:02So there are some verses that are echoed six times in the works of Shakespeare.
00:14:07Eighty-eight percent of those verses are marked in De Vere's Bible. Eighty-eight percent.
00:14:12The more interest Shakespeare showed, the more interest De Vere showed.
00:14:15It's almost a straight line.
00:14:17Roger has done landmark work, extremely important work.
00:14:21I think it's the most important scholarly work to make the case.
00:14:24Edward De Vere did write the works of Shakespeare.
00:14:26We can connect these annotations not only to Shakespeare, but to De Vere himself.
00:14:32There is a group of about 140 marked verses.
00:14:37All of these verses have some connection to the idea of economics.
00:14:42Matthew 6, 19 through 21 is a wonderful example.
00:14:47These are the verses in which Jesus says,
00:14:49don't store up your money on earth, but store your treasure in heaven.
00:14:54This is more than consistent with what we know about De Vere's biography.
00:15:01He was, although born a man of great wealth and power,
00:15:07was perhaps the most downerly mobile person in the history of the planet.
00:15:11He spent his whole life hemorrhaging land and money.
00:15:16Allow not nature more than nature needs.
00:15:20Man's life's as cheap as beasts.
00:15:24We have to understand De Vere as a man of his time.
00:15:30He was greatly concerned with the honour of himself and his family.
00:15:36But he suffered from all the ordinary human vices and weaknesses.
00:15:41It's known that he was fond of the tavern.
00:15:44And it's also known, of course, that he tended to be quick-tempered and quarrelsome.
00:15:51A plague on all cowards!
00:15:54What's up, Bob? Where have you been?
00:15:58But Edward De Vere was admired by many of his contemporaries.
00:16:02And he was described as one of the best wits in England.
00:16:07There are some contemporary writings that say there are certain courtiers
00:16:14at Elizabeth's court who are wonderful writers,
00:16:19the best of whom is Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
00:16:25That has been written.
00:16:27That was written, I think, in the 1590s by Francis Mears.
00:16:32In 1575, Edward De Vere obtained permission from the Queen to travel overseas.
00:16:42De Vere's first stop, the French royal court at the Louvre,
00:16:45would serve to remind De Vere just how staid and normal the English court actually was.
00:16:50Henri III was a flamboyant monarch, equal parts reign and roy,
00:16:55and would regularly wear gowns, make-up, earrings, and perfume.
00:16:59Frequently seen with San Majest were his mignons,
00:17:03young male favourites whom the king dressed as ladies of the night.
00:17:06King Henri had recently been in Venice,
00:17:09and he had so fallen in love with the Commedia dell'Arte
00:17:12that he imported a Venetian troupe to perform at his wedding.
00:17:15And his coronation provided only the first of a number of opportunities
00:17:19to drink in these amazing Italian comedies.
00:17:29De Vere moved to Venice in the spring of 1575
00:17:32and lived there on and off for the next year.
00:17:42Shakespeare's focus in so many of the plays on setting them in Italy,
00:17:49there's no suggestion whatsoever that the Shakespeare of Stratford
00:17:56ever travelled outside, you know, the southern part of England.
00:18:00We do know that others did travel,
00:18:03certainly Oxford travelled very significantly,
00:18:06had 18 months to two years travelling in Europe,
00:18:10and a lot of that was spent in Italy.
00:18:13Orthodox scholars try to explain this away as,
00:18:17well, he had a great imagination, and he could have read books,
00:18:22and he could have talked to travellers.
00:18:24But when you look at the actual material in the Italian plays,
00:18:28he evokes the location, the language, the culture, the imagery.
00:18:34He brings it alive and makes it seem like he knows it intimately,
00:18:40and he seems to have a strong emotional connection to Italy.
00:18:44What is interesting too is where they are sent from.
00:18:48Letters from Paris, letters from many places in Italy,
00:18:53all documentary proof.
00:18:57Well, the Italian connection with De Vere is very important
00:19:02because so many of the plays are set in Italy,
00:19:06and set at Italian courts.
00:19:10And again, that is very important
00:19:13because the majority of the plays are aristocratic.
00:19:18They're slew towards the aristocracy
00:19:21and the life of kings and courts and courtiers.
00:19:24And as I say, many of them are set in Italy.
00:19:28There's no question that Shakespeare
00:19:31was one of the greatest writers of the English language,
00:19:35and his plays are full not only of poetry and incredible dramaturgy,
00:19:44but personal expression and power and political commentary.
00:19:51I mean, for me, studying Shakespeare is studying the world.
00:19:59Venice was at that time a very huge town,
00:20:04more than 180,000 inhabitants,
00:20:08so one of the largest towns in Europe,
00:20:12and surely was a kind of New York City of a renaissance,
00:20:17so different people coming from different places,
00:20:21different cultures, so a big exchange of culture,
00:20:26and also the creation of fashion and everything,
00:20:32a kind of light for Europe.
00:20:37Reaching the shore of the Venetian Lagoon sometime in May 1575,
00:20:41the Earl of Oxford had finally arrived.
00:20:44As the boatman guided the ferry towards its island destination
00:20:48through the lagoon's shallow waters,
00:20:50a metropolis unlike any other came into view.
00:20:54The Earl would have had to present his papers of introduction
00:20:57from the Venetian ambassador in Paris to the Duke, or Durge,
00:21:01and his court at the Palazzo Ducale,
00:21:03the city's central municipal building,
00:21:05one that was Parliament, Whitehall, and Westminster
00:21:08all under one vast U-shaped roof.
00:21:12The Ducal Palace's state chambers exceeded even the opulence of Elizabeth's court.
00:21:17Allegorical statues, murals, and paintings by the likes of Tintoretto and Vernese
00:21:22covered every staircase, doorjamb, and square foot of the ceiling of the Palazzo.
00:21:31De Vere would have arrived in time for the annual theatrical season,
00:21:35which lasted until July.
00:21:37By the 1570s, Venice had become perhaps the most vibrant theatrical community
00:21:42in all of Europe.
00:21:44Venetian entrepreneurs had recently constructed
00:21:47the first two public theatres in the city.
00:21:50As the aristocratico inglese settled into his new hometown,
00:21:54he surely also began attending plays that would be meeting out ideas,
00:21:58plots, characters, and inspiration for the rest of his life.
00:22:03If De Vere had seen Pantalone in action at Henri III's coronation,
00:22:07he would have had ample opportunity to study the character in greater detail
00:22:10after arriving in Venice,
00:22:12where the Commedia literally spilled out into the streets and piazzas.
00:22:17Pantalone joined a cast of lovers, tricksters, heroes, and villains
00:22:22in improvised productions that survive today
00:22:24primarily in the form of brief plot summaries.
00:22:27There was nothing like it in England.
00:22:30A theatrical mixture of high and low, refined and proletariat,
00:22:34comic and tragic,
00:22:35the grace Venetian stages would present an aesthetic philosophy
00:22:39that would later be developed into the works of Shakespeare.
00:22:47Othello is the perfect representation of Commedia dell'arte.
00:22:53Commedia dell'arte, in a word, is satiric street theatre,
00:22:57stock characters, but different situations that they enact
00:23:02in an improvised way.
00:23:04Othello is the perfect embodiment of the Capitano,
00:23:09the braggart soldier.
00:23:13Iago is the embodiment of the Zanni,
00:23:18and in Commedia dell'arte the Zanni was the very clever schemer,
00:23:25a servant or an underling,
00:23:28who drives the plot forward at every point
00:23:33and in the end gets his comeuppance.
00:23:36The maid in Commedia dell'arte
00:23:40is invariably the outspoken truth-teller,
00:23:44and in Othello, the maid, Emilia, to Desdemona,
00:23:50is clearly, unequivocally, the outspoken truth-teller,
00:23:55and what happens to her? Iago kills her.
00:24:01This is the tragic element that Oxford brings in
00:24:05to this bitter black comedy.
00:24:08As if the playwright were saying,
00:24:11I'm going to show you how foolish and misguided these people are.
00:24:32Since De Vere was still a courtier, albeit in a foreign court,
00:24:35he undoubtedly sought out lodgings
00:24:37close to the centre of the Venetian courtly universe.
00:24:40One clue about the possible site of De Vere's Venetian household
00:24:44comes from the Shakespearean canon.
00:24:46Othello reports that his house lies somewhere near a place
00:24:50he calls the Sagittarii.
00:24:52Sagittarii is arguably an anglophonic rendition of Vicus Sagittarius.
00:24:59Known more commonly as the Fretzeria,
00:25:02this street was less than 50 metres from St Mark's
00:25:05and was a prominent commercial venue
00:25:07that had derived its name from the arrows
00:25:09that were originally sold in its shops.
00:25:12Orazio Cuoco, a Venetian choirboy the Earl would hire as a page,
00:25:16later reported that he first met De Vere
00:25:19at the church of Santa Maria Formosa
00:25:21and that De Vere himself worshipped at the church of the Greeks,
00:25:24San Giorgio de' Grecchi.
00:25:26Both of these churches lie within a five-minute walk
00:25:29from the Ducal Palace and St Mark's Square.
00:25:33The Earl of Oxford, we know, was living in the neighbourhood
00:25:36of the church of Santa Maria Formosa,
00:25:38which is the same neighbourhood where a Murano moneylender
00:25:41living in Venice in the 1570s by the name of Gaspar Ribeiro lived.
00:25:46Ribeiro had an office, in fact, in that church.
00:25:49He was the Gestaldo, the protector of the sacred virgin.
00:25:55Brian Pullen, University of Manchester,
00:25:58for over the last 30 years has been publishing a series of articles
00:26:01pointing out the incredible similarities
00:26:04between Shakespeare's Shylock and Ribeiro.
00:26:08Ribeiro was involved in usurious loans.
00:26:11He was a collector of precious stones.
00:26:13He had a daughter who escaped from the family household
00:26:16and married a Christian.
00:26:18The trial that he went through,
00:26:20which is really how we know so much about him,
00:26:22during the investigation by the Venetian Inquisition
00:26:25into whether he was a Christian or a Jew,
00:26:28provides a lot of evidence that we can attach
00:26:32to Shylock's character as well.
00:26:34He was known for his meanness, for his greediness,
00:26:37for his obsessiveness and for his hostility,
00:26:41particularly toward his daughter and daughter-in-law.
00:26:44Jessica!
00:26:47Jessica!
00:26:49Shylock denounces Jessica,
00:26:51who had run off with the jewels and the ducats
00:26:54and married Lorenzo,
00:26:56and said that it was better that she were dead.
00:26:59Ribeiro said of his own daughter-in-law
00:27:02that he would rather give her a rope upon which to hang herself.
00:27:06He was so angry at her.
00:27:08And she similarly had run off with a bunch of ducats.
00:27:11The scenario is remarkably parallel.
00:27:14So definitely the Earl of Oxford
00:27:16would have been aware of Ribeiro's existence
00:27:19and no doubt encountered him in church,
00:27:21because we know Oxford went to the church of Santa Maria Formosa.
00:27:25That's where he met Orazio Quacco,
00:27:27who became his page and returned to England with him
00:27:30and spent a year under his care.
00:27:38If De Vere's house was indeed on the frezzeria,
00:27:41the Rialto Bridge was also his gondola's exit.
00:27:45The Rialto Bridge and piazza,
00:27:47known in the Merchant of Venice as Shylock's main haunt,
00:27:50was mere minutes away from the frezzeria.
00:27:55De Vere probably visited the Rialto regularly,
00:27:58since it was one of Venice's main shopping centres
00:28:01where the city's Jews lent money to anyone with good credit,
00:28:04and vendors of all creeds sold anything from swords and lamps
00:28:07to wine and meats for the banquet table.
00:28:12When he returned from his 14 months in Europe,
00:28:14most of that time spent in Italy,
00:28:16he brought back with him a so-called choir boy,
00:28:19actually a 16-year-old Italian.
00:28:22The allegation was that this was for sexual purposes.
00:28:25Edward De Vere also had well-documented heterosexual relationships.
00:28:31When De Vere arrived in Venice in 1575,
00:28:34he found a city unlike any other in Europe,
00:28:37renowned for its appreciation of liberty and sensuality,
00:28:40a frontier town where anything and everything was available.
00:28:43The sexual attitudes and practices of Venetians in the late 16th century
00:28:47would have a lasting impact on De Vere's life and work.
00:28:52There's always been a question about the writer's sexuality,
00:28:59and I firmly believe that whoever it was had to be bisexual.
00:29:05The personality that comes across when you really find out about De Vere,
00:29:11he was a swinger, you know, and whoever the place had to be.
00:29:19De Vere's activities and wanderings were, of course,
00:29:22not limited to Venice's south side.
00:29:24One anecdote points to a portion of De Vere's life elsewhere on the island.
00:29:28Virginia Paduana lived in an apartment on the Campo San Jeremia,
00:29:33a square just off Venice's Grand Canal near its northern entrance.
00:29:38As a Cortesana, Paduana belonged to a distinguished tradition unknown to England.
00:29:43In the words of one contemporary traveler,
00:29:46thou wilt find the Venetian Cortesan a good rhetorician and a most elegant discourser.
00:29:52Often schooled as poets, scholars and musicians,
00:29:55Cortesans in Venice carried out entire careers true to the first syllable of their name.
00:30:01In 1575, the Cortesan Veronica Franco had published her Tazarime,
00:30:06an erudite poem that satirized traditional love lyrics.
00:30:11An English traveler a dozen years later would list Paduana
00:30:14as one who honoreth all our nation for my Lord of Oxford's sake.
00:30:19Cortesans, one, is a very particular movement coming in Venice during the 16th century.
00:30:28They were prostitutes, but many of them opened their houses
00:30:34to the most famous poets, writers, musicians.
00:30:39From a certain moment they can do what the girl of a noble family of Venice cannot do.
00:30:46They can study, to talk, you know, at one corner of their salon about astronomy
00:30:54and crossing the salon, going and speaking of poetry.
00:30:59If Shakespeare would have been here, he would have visited also a place like that.
00:31:05I was always very alive to what was happening to the women in the plays.
00:31:10What you see in the very early comedies is that the women are either shrews or the virgins on the pedestal.
00:31:16You know, it's clearly a projection, a young man's projection.
00:31:19In the middle plays, so many of the women tell the truth, but they end up dead for telling the truth.
00:31:26But what happens in Romeo and Juliet is there is a huge change
00:31:30because Juliet is allowed her sexuality just as much as Romeo is.
00:31:35You suddenly get a portrait of a whole woman or a whole portrait of a woman that you don't get before.
00:31:41Therefore stay yet, thou need'st not to be gone.
00:31:47Ah, let me be taken, let me be put to death.
00:31:52I am content, sir, thou wilt have it, sir.
00:31:56I guess one thing that struck me lately is that the women, I think, are very remarkable in the plays
00:32:01and very wonderful women.
00:32:03And he seems to have had a lot of difficulty and anger with women, Oxford,
00:32:08so I'd like to know more about how he wrote such wonderful parts for women
00:32:14when he doesn't seem to have really thought much of women in his life.
00:32:18He seemed to have been more hurt by them and upset by them.
00:32:22When De Vere was 21, De Vere married William Cecil's daughter, Anne, who was then around 15.
00:32:30One of the big themes in Shakespeare and one of the big themes in De Vere's life when he was in Italy
00:32:35was his wife delivering a daughter.
00:32:37He learned from his servant that his wife may have sought to terminate the pregnancy
00:32:41and discovered he didn't really know if the child she bore in his absence was actually his.
00:32:45It was a central event in De Vere's life
00:32:48and one that much of the Shakespeare canon seems to be refracted through.
00:32:52Now that he had established his base camp in Venice,
00:32:55Edward De Vere had three factors driving him onward.
00:32:58The plague was becoming an ugly fact of life by Midsummer's 1575,
00:33:03those letters of introduction from King Henry III that the Turkish court was sitting on his desk unused,
00:33:08and the money he had brought with him to Venice was burning a hole in his pocket.
00:33:13Since De Vere would be traveling on a Venetian ship under the Venetian flag,
00:33:17the earl enjoyed ample opportunity to visit the Ottoman-occupied lands to the east, including Greece.
00:33:23Everybody travels from Venice to Cyprus because the Turks are believed that they're going to invade it,
00:33:30and indeed it's a historical fact that they did invade Cyprus.
00:33:34However, they're at the other end of the island from Famagusta.
00:33:38Famagusta is not mentioned in the play, but it's the only deepwater port in Cyprus.
00:33:43So there are 12 instances in Othello that point directly to this port of Famagusta on Cyprus.
00:33:54To think that the playwright who wrote Othello would put in these 12 very specific passages.
00:34:03How could a playwright put those in unless he'd been there?
00:34:10What is fascinating is that whoever wrote these, the players, must have visited those cities,
00:34:18must have known those cities, because just by, not accident, but little things are just thrown in,
00:34:26like the things in Romy and Julie about the Sycamore Grove.
00:34:30Now, why talk about a Sycamore Grove in Verona? Why did he choose that?
00:34:36Is there a Sycamore Grove? Well, Roe's book says, yes, I've seen it, it's there.
00:34:42These little mentions of actual locations indicate that whoever wrote these plays
00:34:52put in little touches of local colour that he had seen.
00:35:06In The Winter's Tale, the route from the land of the Oracle leads directly to Palermo,
00:35:10where records do survive of a De Vere visit.
00:35:14Once in Palermo, ruled by a prince who loved the equestrian sports,
00:35:18De Vere organised an impromptu tournament in the city to joust for the honour of Her Highness Queen Elizabeth.
00:35:24He challenged the whole of Palermo to a duel.
00:35:27Such valour would certainly have impressed the prince, Cesar.
00:35:31It may have even yielded De Vere letters of passage to the other Spanish kingdoms
00:35:35where records reveal he would later be travelling, Naples and Milan.
00:35:39Cesar had in fact only returned recently from the Spanish garrison at Naples,
00:35:44where the viceroy had become enamoured of a lame Spanish soldier
00:35:48who was gaining notice as a first-rate poet, Miguel de Cervantes.
00:35:55The late summer of 1575 presents the Earl of Oxford at perhaps his most quixotic,
00:36:00thumping his chest in the Palermo square,
00:36:03offering to tilt against any comer who might dare to challenge the virtues
00:36:07of his fair Dulcinea on the English throne.
00:36:11And Cervantes was a notoriously good observer,
00:36:14who would spend the rest of his life transforming his youthful adventures into novels and plays.
00:36:19No one has ever considered De Vere as one of Cervantes' early character inspirations,
00:36:24yet if De Vere's Sicilian exploits do ring with the mock-provider of Falstaff,
00:36:29perhaps future scholars will find in them snapshots of Don Quixote as well.
00:36:35De Vere's prodigal lifestyle had not abated since he crossed the Alps.
00:36:39Over 14 months of travel, the Earl spent £4,561, some $1.2 million in today's currency.
00:36:50In September, De Vere sent a letter to Burley,
00:36:53explaining why communication had been cut off during the Grand Tour.
00:36:57De Vere requested a loan he had taken out for 500 crowns should be settled with the sale of his lands.
00:37:03The fall of 1575 was a bad time to get sick in Venice.
00:37:07The city was suffering an epidemic of the plague.
00:37:10Church spires were all too often aglow with lanterns of the dead,
00:37:14an Italian funerary tradition that appears in Romeo and Juliet.
00:37:18The plague of 1575-77 would ultimately claim the life of one of the most celebrated Venetians of his day,
00:37:25the artist Tiziano Vecchiello, known today as Titian.
00:37:31In 1575, however, this octogenarian great master was anything but ailing.
00:37:38Titian's studio at the island's northern edge, Cagrande,
00:37:41was churning out complex works of the time such as the Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto and the Allegory of Religion.
00:37:50Both of these paintings were commissioned by King Philip II of Spain
00:37:54and would inspire literary tributes by the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.
00:38:01In 16th century Italy, Titian was an artistic celebrity comparable to Picasso in the 20th century.
00:38:07Venetian society flocked to his bayside home,
00:38:10and noteworthy foreign visitors frequently paid their respects.
00:38:14It is likely deviated as well.
00:38:19One painting alone, depicting a myth from Ovid's Metamorphosis,
00:38:23would fire the Shakespearean imagination years later.
00:38:27Shakespeare's epic poem, Venus and Adonis,
00:38:30boldly revises the Ovidian myth in the same way that Titian does.
00:38:34Whereas all classical sources of the Venus and Adonis fable
00:38:38depict the couple's affair as mutually passionate,
00:38:41Titian's Venus and Adonis portrays the former as a desperate vixen
00:38:45and the latter as a disinterested boy.
00:38:48On Titian's canvas, a grasping goddess of love clings to a willful youth
00:38:54who appears bothered by the temptress embracing him.
00:38:57Titian's Venus nearly falls over herself to restrain Adonis from leaving.
00:39:01There were at least four copies of Titian's Venus and Adonis elsewhere on the continent by 1575,
00:39:07most notably in the collection of the King of Spain.
00:39:10But the copy remaining in Titian's studio was distinctive.
00:39:13In Titian's copy, and in Titian's copy only,
00:39:17Adonis wears a stylized form of a man's hat known as a bonnet.
00:39:21The other copies of the painting feature a bare-headed Adonis.
00:39:25Shakespeare's Adonis wears a bonnet that hides his angry brow.
00:39:33On November 27th, the Earl wrote to his father-in-law from Padua
00:39:37not to inhibit any sales of his family lands in order to stem a rising tide of debts.
00:39:44The Merchant of Venice describes the trip from Padua to Venice
00:39:47by what Portia calls the Tranect, the common ferry.
00:39:51The river Branta connected the inland university town to the Venetian lagoon,
00:39:55and the seven-hour journey by horse-drawn ferry was one of the most scenic river rides in all of Italy,
00:40:01passing riverside estates and numerous luxurious mansions.
00:40:07The Branta was in fact known to locals as the continuation of the Grand Canal.
00:40:11Portia lives on the Branta in an estate called Belmont.
00:40:16Belmont, she notes, is at a location ten miles from Venice and two miles from a monastery.
00:40:22There is only one villa that meets these two geographic details, the luxurious Villa Foscari.
00:40:30De Vere's ferry ride down the Branta would have passed the classically inspired Villa Foscari
00:40:35as the trajetto slowed down to round a wide curve on the riverbank.
00:40:39There are certain things in the Merchant of Venice about Portia's journey from Belmont into the court,
00:40:49which are so accurate, so accurate, that whoever wrote them must have been there, must have been there.
00:40:56And we know Oxford was.
00:40:59One of Italy's most celebrated college towns, Padua was home to a university that,
00:41:05thanks to its independence from the Catholic Church, drew scholars from all across the Occident and Orient.
00:41:11The university also housed a world-famous law school, an institution where Sir Thomas Smith had once trained.
00:41:18Its most celebrated professor in 1575 was a jurist named Ottonello Discalcio,
00:41:25a man who made regular trips to Venice to render his considered opinion in court cases that required outside consultation.
00:41:33Discalcio was the real-life inspiration for the Merchant of Venice's celebrated Padua university law professor, Valerio.
00:41:44The court shall hear Valerio's letter.
00:41:47In the instant that your messenger came, in loving visitation was with me a young doctor of Rome.
00:41:53His name is Balthasar.
00:41:55I acquainted him with the cause in controversy between the Jew and Antonio the Merchant.
00:41:59We turned o'er many books together.
00:42:02He is furnished with my opinion, which, bettered with his own learning,
00:42:06comes with him at my importunity to fill up your gracious request in my stead.
00:42:12You hear the learned Valerio?
00:42:14And here, I take it, is the doctor. Come.
00:42:17Just a day's journey from Padua was the city of Mantua,
00:42:21where De Vere's idol Baldassare Castiglione had lived and worked.
00:42:29Castiglione was buried in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, five miles outside Mantua's city walls.
00:42:38Le Grazie was a popular sanctuary, containing numerous life-size statues in coloured wax of local dignitaries and religious leaders.
00:42:47Amid these effigies stands Castiglione's tomb.
00:42:53Atop the tomb, one finds a masterful sculpture of a risen Christ.
00:42:58The monument was designed and sculpted by Castiglione's friend, Giulio Romano.
00:43:04Romano is in fact mentioned by name in Shakespeare.
00:43:08In The Winter's Tale, a painted statue of wronged wife Hermione is compared to statuary by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano.
00:43:21This sentence has often been cited by orthodox academics to disprove Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian art.
00:43:27Romano is known today as a painter, not a sculptor.
00:43:31Visiting dignitaries such as an English Earl would have been put up as a guest of the local Duke, Guglielmo Gonzaga.
00:43:39The Gonzagas had, in 1575, reigned as Dukes of Mantua for nearly 250 years.
00:43:46De Vere probably read tales from the family's own bookshelves about the strange and curious history of the Gonzaga dynasty.
00:43:52One Gonzaga, a cousin to Castiglione, had been accused of murdering the Duke of Urbino by pouring poison in his ear.
00:44:04This is the same story Hamlet tells in his play within the play, The Mousetrap.
00:44:09The Gonzaga's monstrous 500-room, 15-courtyard Palazzo Ducali contained a number of suites for distinguished guests.
00:44:18In 1575, one of the main guest rooms was the Appartamento di Troia.
00:44:24The Appartamento contained frescoes of famous scenes from the Trojan War, painted and decorated by none other than Giulio Romano.
00:44:33The mural is one busy work of art.
00:44:36On the ceiling, Mount Olympus and battles between Greeks and Trojans.
00:44:39On the walls, Paris' Judgment, the Rape of Helen, Hecuba's Dream, the forging of Achilles' arms, the building of the Trojan horse, and the deceitful Simon's ploy to induce his countrymen to receive the horse.
00:44:53Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece describes just such a painting.
00:44:57202 lines of poetic elaboration upon a mural of epic proportions.
00:45:09Aren't I right, Bob? Aren't I right?
00:45:12We have heard the chimes at midnight.
00:45:15That we have.
00:45:17That we have.
00:45:19In fact, Bob, we have.
00:45:22Jesus.
00:45:24The things we've seen.
00:45:26Well, the extraordinary thing about Shakespeare is that he was one man, but he could identify with every character in his play.
00:45:35The king, the pauper, the man, the woman, the lover.
00:45:41And he's able to put himself into every psyche in the constellation of humanity, and that crosses sexuality.
00:45:50The Rape of Lucrece ultimately is about a friend raping the man's wife.
00:45:55But the author Shakespeare dedicates this to Southampton, and the dedication is very, considered by orthodox scholars, is very homoerotic.
00:46:05The dedication begins,
00:46:07The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.
00:46:11And it continues,
00:46:13What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being in part all I have, devoted yours.
00:46:20And then some of the plays are more explicit, I believe, in terms of their relationship between the men, like Immersion in Venice.
00:46:28To you, Antonio, I owe the most in money and in love.
00:46:34And from your love, I have a warranty to unburden all my plots and purposes, how to get clear of all the debts I owe.
00:46:44I pray you, Rubassani, let me know.
00:46:46I pray you, Rubassani, let me know.
00:46:51And if it stand, as you yourself still do, within the eye of honour, be assured, my purse, my person, my extremist means, lie all unlocked to your occasion.
00:47:10And then when you look at the sonnets, do you see all the homosexual allusions there?
00:47:15Presuming that Southampton is the fair youth being addressed in the sonnets, as has often been argued by scholars of all persuasions,
00:47:23the meaning of these once enigmatic love poems becomes clear.
00:47:28It depends how you think of the sonnets in particular, which were published after his death.
00:47:36For me, and this is why the whole thing is contentious, as you've probably realized,
00:47:42the whole thing for me is they're love poems.
00:47:47They are poems of an older man to a younger man.
00:47:53They are also love poems to a woman.
00:47:58They are very varied, which again suggests the bisexuality.
00:48:06Characters, themes and plots in Shakespeare's plays and poetry reveal an author who is clearly interested in bisexuality, gender identity and human behaviour.
00:48:16Diana's lip is not more smooth and rubious than a small pipe is.
00:48:22It's a woman's organ, shrill and sound.
00:48:25And all its simplity is a woman's part.
00:48:30And then we look at the potential author, who I think is Oxford, and look at his life, and then I see a match.
00:48:39He was married, he had children, but he was a very flamboyant, he was accused of sodomy.
00:48:46He wrote, dedicated two poems to Southampton, who was considered by many back then also bisexual.
00:48:53I do believe that the author of Shakespeare's works was bisexual.
00:48:57I've been working mostly with the sonnets where there's the implicit bisexuality of 28 love poems that are heterosexual
00:49:04and 126 love poems that are homosexual, and some in a very explicit way.
00:49:11There is the phrase, nature hath pricked thee out for woman's pleasure, and the word prick meant the same thing then, it means now.
00:49:22That alone really disqualifies the man from Stratford from having written this.
00:49:25If they're being written to an earl, how in the world could a commoner have written something so crude to an earl?
00:49:34I think particularly the sonnets, I cannot imagine that, I mean, whoever wrote the sonnets,
00:49:41I cannot imagine that the man from Stratford would write in those terms, in those intimate terms of a lover,
00:49:50to an earl whom he didn't know, there is no evidence that he ever met, certainly never got any money from him.
00:50:01It couldn't have been the man from Stratford.
00:50:04There's another great example, by the way, another Renaissance poet was Michelangelo.
00:50:09He's known more as a painter and sculptor, but he wrote poems, he wrote sonnets, and he wrote poems to a young man.
00:50:15And those weren't published until his, I believe it was his great nephew published them,
00:50:21but changed the wording to hide the homoerotic quality of those sonnets too.
00:50:26So, there's really very, very interesting precedent for a bisexual Renaissance poet
00:50:34to have the bisexual nature of his poetry concealed for a century or centuries.
00:50:39We came out of the Victorian age and we started putting up these, you know, these kind of barriers, if I can put it like that.
00:50:49I think the great majority of men slept with whoever was to hand.
00:50:54And so, I think Shakespeare was probably the same.
00:51:01I don't think academia would go along with the idea that his bisexuality is in any way a hindrance to believing that Tver wrote the plays.
00:51:18Not in this day and age, no, no, no.
00:51:21I don't think that's, maybe in the past, maybe in the Victorian ages,
00:51:26when all the myth of the Stratford man began, the Victorian biographies of Shakespeare all started the myth of the man.
00:51:41I mean, Gary could put him on the map in the middle of the 18th century by locating him in Stratford-on-Avon.
00:51:49One final trip into the heart of Italy remained.
00:51:53De Vere and his train pointed their horses and carts south towards Florence on December 12th.
00:51:58First, they had to pass through the Duchy of Ferrara.
00:52:01One of Ferrara's famous sons, Giraldi Sinthio, had published a collection of short stories,
00:52:06Gilles Hecatomithi, 1566, that would have been spiritual balm to a husband pondering his wife's sexual duplicity.
00:52:13The Hecatomithi recites the tale of a young woman who, in a dream,
00:52:17The Hecatomithi recites the tale of a jealous moor and a wife he accuses of infidelity,
00:52:22a fair young wench named Desdemona.
00:52:31My life upon her faith.
00:52:41De Vere had arrived in Siena at a time of revelry.
00:52:44This gorgeous Tuscan town was one of the most active theatrical cities in all of Italy outside of Venice,
00:52:50and the period from Christmas to Twelfth Night, January 5th, was filled with celebrations, parties and plays.
00:52:57Upon arriving in Siena, De Vere would likely have met the man who stood at the center of the Sienese theatrical world in 1576.
00:53:05The 67-year-old Alessandro Piccolamini was a Sienese philosopher-playwright widely hailed as the prince of comic writers.
00:53:14Piccolamini's academy observed a decades-long Sienese tradition of performing his comedy, The Deceived, on Twelfth Night.
00:53:23The plot of The Deceived concerns a brother-sister set of twins.
00:53:27The sister falls madly in love with a nobleman who's wasting his affections on someone else.
00:53:32The sister then disguises herself as a male servant who ferries love letters between the noble and his elusive paramour.
00:53:39The twin brother, supposedly dead, arrives on the scene and straightens out the mess by falling in love with the nobleman's paramour,
00:53:46while the twin sister snatches the noble for herself.
00:53:49This is also the plot of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
00:53:54The cathedral in Siena was, like the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, a unique piece of architecture and design,
00:54:01situated on the highest prominence in this hilly town.
00:54:04One peculiar piece of art inside Siena's Duomo is a circular mosaic representing the proverbial Seven Ages of Man.
00:54:12As you like its world-traveller, Jaques, a melancholic who sold his lands to see other men's,
00:54:19describes these same seven ages in a speech that famously begins,
00:54:22All the world's a stage.
00:54:25All the world's a stage.
00:54:28And all the men and women merely players.
00:54:32They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts.
00:54:39His acts being seven ages.
00:54:44After the drizzly January voyage from Siena back to the Viennese home, a new kind of commedia dell'arte awaited him.
00:54:50Venice's carnival season, from December 26th to the beginning of Lent,
00:54:55represented the city's other great annual period of theatrical and comic activity.
00:55:03Venetians from the highest-born grandees to the lowest vagabonds don masks
00:55:08and perform with one another in carnival skits and masquerades.
00:55:13The Venetian carnival mask was a social equalizer unlike anything De Vere would ever see again.
00:55:18An opportunity for an English blueblood to interact with all walks of life without the burdens of his high caste.
00:55:29So, for six months a year, about, you could go around masked in this town.
00:55:36Try to think what this means in a century like the 16th, in the Renaissance.
00:55:43This was Mars, I think, for a foreigner, you know.
00:55:46I think this Shakespeare would have loved.
00:55:51He left us a brilliant image of a Renaissance Venice.
00:55:57He was surely one of the most important knowers of Venice in England.
00:56:05On the day before Fat Tuesday, March the 5th, 1576,
00:56:09De Vere and his train packed their bags and bade farewell to the city
00:56:12that yielded up so many of its riches and unburdened the Earl of Oxford with so many of his.
00:56:18Perhaps to beat the post-carnival rush, De Vere and his servants boarded the Tranect, the common ferry,
00:56:24and watched as Venice floated away like an unmoored ship.
00:56:29As De Vere was returning home on his way north toward Paris,
00:56:33the entire country was bracing itself for bloody hostilities.
00:56:36In early 1576, the King of France's younger brother, Alençon,
00:56:42had forged a secret alliance with Protestant forces in France, Germany, and England,
00:56:47and had secretly begun to advocate for a coup d'etat.
00:56:50A cavalry division led by the German Duke, Jan Casimir,
00:56:54had invaded the eastern provinces to assist Alençon in the uprising.
00:56:58De Vere's train came across Casimir's forces, who were then based in the eastern region of Lens.
00:57:03The Earl's encounter with the invading German prince survives in a peculiar form,
00:57:08an extended enconium to De Vere that appears in a play by the Jacobean dramatist George Chapman.
00:57:15Chapman's stoic hero is a French noble named Clermont d'Amboise,
00:57:20who claims to have been present at the meeting between De Vere and Duke Casimir.
00:57:27Hamlet's final soliloquy is inspired by the puzzlement mixed with envy
00:57:31that wells up in him upon seeing his rival Fortenbrass's troops march in front of him.
00:58:01De Vere's meeting with Duke Casimir's army was soon followed by a channel crossing intercepted by pirates.
00:58:24As the poet Nathaniel Baxter, who was part of De Vere's entourage,
00:58:27wrote of the episode in a book of poetry from 1606,
00:58:31Naked we landed out of Italy, enthralled by pirates, men of no regard.
00:58:36Horror and death assailed nobility, if princes might with cruelty be scarred.
00:58:41Lo, thus are excellent beginnings hard.
00:58:45De Vere was left naked, stripped to his shirt, treated miserably,
00:58:50his life in danger, if he hadn't been recognized by a Scotsman.
00:58:53Landing at Dover on a vessel stripped by seafaring bandits,
00:58:57De Vere had stepped ashore into a swarm of questions about Anne's daughter's paternity.
00:59:05Rumors about the unknown father of Elizabeth De Vere had spread beyond the Queen's presence chamber
00:59:10and the Lord Treasurer's privy chamber.
00:59:13Perhaps there was a misunderstanding at the root of it.
00:59:16Ales and sweet wines flowed liberally in an age when clean water was a luxury.
00:59:20A night of drunken marital sex in the autumn of 1574 was not out of the question.
00:59:26Now that he'd returned, however, De Vere undoubtedly wanted to resolve the controversy with minimal fanfare.
00:59:34Burleigh's insistence on an immediate and public display of affection
00:59:38might have been designed to make that impossible.
00:59:41It was at best surprisingly undiplomatic,
00:59:44a sort of banner by the quayside proclaiming,
00:59:46Welcome home, dear Cuckold.
00:59:50De Vere's trusted servant, Roland York,
00:59:53offered an alternative that provided what must have seemed the most neutral space available on such short notice.
00:59:58Roland's older brother, Edward, kept a house in London on Woolbrook near London Stone.
01:00:03Burleigh later logged in his diary that De Vere
01:00:06was enticed by certain lewd persons to be a stranger to his wife.
01:00:12The way in which he handled his wife,
01:00:14my relative,
01:00:17was very unkind.
01:00:21He was brilliant and inspiring to people, on the one hand,
01:00:28and quite dark and difficult and unkind in this other phase.
01:00:37If Othello's blindness to the dishonesty of his honest Iago
01:00:41is in any way autobiographical,
01:00:44De Vere and York must have made a pitiful team
01:00:47of verbally poisoned and verbal poisoner.
01:00:51Lest I say so.
01:00:53She did deceive her father, marrying you,
01:00:55and when she seemed to shake and fear your looks, she loved them most.
01:00:58And so she did.
01:01:00I go to them.
01:01:05But I am much to blame.
01:01:07I am much to blame.
01:01:11I humbly do beseech you of your pardon for too much loving you.
01:01:15I am bound to thee forever.
01:01:17Roland York remains not only the likely immediate instigator of De Vere's crisis,
01:01:22but also, if rumors of De Vere's bisexuality are to be believed,
01:01:26a possible channel for De Vere's sexual frustrations.
01:01:29As De Vere's marriage withered and shriveled,
01:01:32York remained at his master's side.
01:01:34It is possible that some closer relationship,
01:01:37be it sexually charged or sexually sublimated,
01:01:41existed between the two men.
01:01:43Numerous modern scholars find Othello and Iago's
01:01:46deadly dance of lies and misplaced trust
01:01:49resonating with homosexual overtones.
01:01:56De Vere would spend the rest of his life
01:01:59writing about the dramatic and traumatic events of his 26th year.
01:02:02Setting aside the history plays,
01:02:04De Vere's 26th year of life enters into
01:02:07slightly less than half of the canonical works of Shakespeare.
01:02:11There's no doubt that the Earl of Oxford is the leading candidate
01:02:15and has been ever since he was first proposed in 1920 by J. Thomas Lowney.
01:02:21He seems to have put himself in his plays to a remarkable extent.
01:02:27I mean, we see this most clearly in a play like Hamlet,
01:02:29which is often thought to be his most autobiographical work.
01:02:34But it isn't just Hamlet.
01:02:36You see this in the character of Baroon in Love's Labour's Lost.
01:02:40The merry, madcap Lord Baroon.
01:02:43I mean, Oxford was known as a wild, crazy guy.
01:02:47The same is true of Prince Hal.
01:02:49Prince Hal is very much about the development of a future king
01:02:57and what he was like as a young man.
01:02:59And Edward De Vere was described as hanging around
01:03:03with all sorts of strange characters,
01:03:05as Prince Hal did at the Boar's Head.
01:03:08This is not just about imagination.
01:03:11Genius is about much more than imagination.
01:03:14And authors of works do put themselves in their works.
01:03:19Throughout the summer of 1576,
01:03:22De Vere continued to feud with his in-laws and live apart from his wife.
01:03:25On July 13th, De Vere wrote another letter to Burleigh
01:03:29from his lodging at Charing Cross in Westminster.
01:03:32York House, near Charing Cross,
01:03:35appears to have been where De Vere now called home.
01:03:38As De Vere lamented the life he had returned to,
01:03:41his laments of years past had only just appeared in print.
01:03:44Edward's 1576 verse anthology,
01:03:47The Paradise of Dainty Devices, was a bestseller.
01:03:51It would go through at least eight editions into the 17th century.
01:03:55All but two of De Vere's verses in The Paradise
01:03:58belonged to the genre known as the complaint,
01:04:01a form he would ultimately master in the Shakespearean poem,
01:04:04A Lover's Complaint.
01:04:06Here is one early experiment in the form.
01:04:09I am not as I seem to be,
01:04:11or when I smile I am not glad.
01:04:14A thrall, although you count me free,
01:04:16I most in mirth, most pensive, sad.
01:04:21The teenager had nevertheless set down
01:04:23the first hints of character sketches
01:04:25that later mature into Othello, Hamlet,
01:04:28Prince Hal, Bertram and Romeo.
01:04:30Taking his cue from what he had witnessed in Venice and Siena,
01:04:33De Vere would begin to stage his complaints
01:04:36in the form of commedia dell'arte,
01:04:38transformed and translated for English audiences.
01:04:41On a field north of the Bishop's Gate entrance
01:04:43of the City of London,
01:04:45a team of entrepreneurs was just opening up
01:04:47the first custom-built playhouse in England.
01:04:50Two brothers-in-law named James Burbage and John Brayne
01:04:53had erected an open-air building
01:04:55they called simply the Theatre.
01:04:57The dramatic troupe that De Vere enjoyed closest access to
01:05:01was the Children's Company of Choir Boys
01:05:03from London's St. Paul's Cathedral.
01:05:05On the evening of New Year's Day, 1577,
01:05:08Westcote led his troupe in a play
01:05:10titled The History of Error.
01:05:13Here, one suspects,
01:05:15is a prototype of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.
01:05:19De Vere was probably inviting controversy
01:05:21by dramatising his own imbroglio
01:05:23with the House of Cecil.
01:05:25The crux of the comedy,
01:05:27and one suspects history of errors,
01:05:29is marriage into a powerful family,
01:05:31the chief error of the title
01:05:33that never should have been.
01:05:37Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell,
01:05:40sleeping or waking, mad or well advised,
01:05:42known unto these and to myself disguised?
01:05:45I'll say as they say, and persevere so,
01:05:47and in this mist at all adventures go.
01:05:51De Vere, the misunderstood husband,
01:05:53becomes Antiphilus of Ephesus,
01:05:55married to a fond fool of an impatient wife, Adriana.
01:05:59The twist that turns this melodrama into a comedy
01:06:02is that Antiphilus has a twin brother
01:06:04who he doesn't know exists.
01:06:06Almost every element of The Comedy of Errors' plot
01:06:09is stolen from Commedia dell'arte's scenarios
01:06:11of mistaken identity.
01:06:13The author has performed an experiment
01:06:15he would repeat many times throughout his career.
01:06:17He has splintered himself into more than one character.
01:06:19The Comedy of Errors was the author's first attempt
01:06:21at broaching the topic of his, at times,
01:06:23pathological behavior towards his wife and her family.
01:06:27It's comedy in denial,
01:06:29oblivious to its own predispositions.
01:06:31An appropriate subtitle would be
01:06:33What, Me Jealous?
01:06:35That's why those works have endured
01:06:37and that's why we read Shakespeare today
01:06:39and we don't read Johnson,
01:06:41we don't read Fletcher, we don't read Beaumont,
01:06:43we don't read works of his contemporaries
01:06:45that do not have that autobiographical quality.
01:06:49They don't have that autobiographical element in them
01:06:51and those are strictly works of fiction
01:06:53that are more tied to their times.
01:06:55But Shakespeare was doing something new.
01:06:57He was experimenting with new forms of drama
01:06:59and I think he was experimenting
01:07:01with something even more profound
01:07:03of putting his own story into his works.
01:07:06Psychologically, Shakespeare's very accurate
01:07:09about what it means to be a human being
01:07:11and what these family relationships are about
01:07:14and then on a larger level
01:07:16what the political social relationships are about,
01:07:17what it feels like to have a bad government,
01:07:20what it feels like to have
01:07:22people who've got economic power over you.
01:07:29The evening of New Year's Day, 1577
01:07:32may have marked the first time
01:07:34Elizabeth truly recognized the talents
01:07:36of her temperamental courtier.
01:07:39A year in Italy had transformed De Vere,
01:07:4226-year-old chronic pain in the arse
01:07:45into a chronic pain in the arse
01:07:47with an astonishing capacity of court comedy.
01:07:50She is spherical, like a globe.
01:07:54I could find out countries in her.
01:07:56In what part of her body stands Ireland?
01:08:00Mary, sir, in her buttocks.
01:08:02I found it out by the bogs.
01:08:04Where England?
01:08:06I looked for the chalky cliffs
01:08:08but I could find no whiteness in them.
01:08:10But I guess it stood in her chin
01:08:12by the salt room that ran between France and it.
01:08:14Where stood Belgium, the Netherlands?
01:08:17Oh, sir, I did not look so low.
01:08:21At Whitehall Palace on Shrove Tuesday, February 19th,
01:08:25Westcote's boys capped the season
01:08:27with an encore performance for the court.
01:08:29The Queen's account books list the title of Westcote's mask
01:08:32as The History of Titus and Gisippus,
01:08:35An Ancient Story of Friendship.
01:08:37It is also known to be
01:08:39one of the two principal source texts
01:08:41for Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona.
01:08:44Who by repentance is not satisfied
01:08:47is nor of heaven nor of earth,
01:08:50for these are pleased.
01:08:53By penitence the eternals, wroths, are pleased,
01:08:57and that my love may appear plain and free.
01:09:04All that was mine in Sylvia,
01:09:07I give thee.
01:09:13It's always been my impression that people in the theatre
01:09:16are forced for some reason or other
01:09:18to express themselves behind the mask
01:09:20of pretending to be someone else,
01:09:22whether you're an actor or a writer,
01:09:24because due to shyness or some other reason,
01:09:27perhaps because of nobility
01:09:29and other social strictures in Shakespeare's time,
01:09:33they're not able to express themselves
01:09:35in the more natural ways that other people do.
01:09:38That obviously applies for De Vere.
01:09:41There are example after example after example
01:09:44of complex personal motivations
01:09:47overlapping with current cultural conventions
01:09:50about whether someone signs their name to something.
01:09:53One theory about why even in 1623,
01:09:56almost 20 years after the death of Edward De Vere,
01:09:59they still could not attach his name to the works,
01:10:02one theory is that the Earl of Southampton
01:10:05then had enough power
01:10:07that he didn't want his early liaison
01:10:10with Edward De Vere to become public.
01:10:13I just find it interesting
01:10:17that the first time that the name Shakespeare appeared,
01:10:21it was hyphened, it was Shake hyphened Spear,
01:10:24and it looked like a pseudonym.
01:10:28This whole business is trying to find out
01:10:32the man, the person, the living, breathing,
01:10:35writing person behind the name.
01:10:39And the journey is fraught and long.
01:10:44De Vere himself is a threatening individual.
01:10:49Shakespeare is intimidating to begin with,
01:10:52but it's wonderful to have a Shakespeare
01:10:55who wasn't anybody,
01:10:57because that sort of makes him
01:10:59a little bit less intimidating,
01:11:01he's a little bit less real.
01:11:03He was just a genius.
01:11:06You too can do it, young man or young lady,
01:11:09if you're a genius.
01:11:11You don't have to have any special advantage,
01:11:13you don't have to have good tutors,
01:11:15you don't have to read the best books.
01:11:17When you replace that with this very troubled,
01:11:21charismatic, angry,
01:11:25deeply conflicted real human being,
01:11:28that's a lot more difficult.
01:11:31What I love about Shakespeare's plays
01:11:33are the window into the psyche of a character
01:11:37or the soul.
01:11:39Let's say in Macbeth,
01:11:41he's committed the murder
01:11:43and then he gets to have a soliloquy
01:11:45about seeing the dagger floating in front of his eyes.
01:11:50To me those are like great operatic moments.
01:11:52It is the poetic, theatrical,
01:11:55heightened expression
01:11:57that we all go to the theater for.
01:12:00Is this a dagger which I see before me?
01:12:05The handle toward my hand.
01:12:10Come, let me clutch thee.
01:12:15His plays have these gems
01:12:18of psyches and worlds and characters
01:12:22and that Shakespeare can live in our modern culture,
01:12:25not just his texts in books
01:12:26or his plays done as written,
01:12:29but the inspiration of Shakespeare
01:12:31is felt in our modern culture.
01:12:34I think the plays are full of politics,
01:12:37of political satire,
01:12:39of propaganda.
01:12:42And it makes them richer,
01:12:45that they are not just plays
01:12:49to enthrall and to entertain
01:12:53and to amuse and to excite
01:12:57and to stir and to thrill.
01:13:00They are also commentary
01:13:03on life as it was being lived.
01:13:07We invent it every time.
01:13:09We, you know, each,
01:13:11it is, there is artifice.
01:13:13I mean, the paradox is that we,
01:13:15you hopefully see authenticity
01:13:17in the human experience
01:13:19through the artifice of the theatrical form,
01:13:21which I think is key
01:13:23to what Edward de Vere,
01:13:26as the author of the plays,
01:13:28was wanting to get to,
01:13:30was the journey of artifice to authenticity
01:13:34with his characters,
01:13:36with himself as a human being,
01:13:38in his circumstance,
01:13:40in his time, in his world,
01:13:42as a young man,
01:13:44and as he grew older.
01:13:46I think that was the core of the author's work
01:13:48and that is why it is important to know
01:13:49definitively that it was Edward de Vere
01:13:52that wrote the plays.
01:13:54Unwrapping the plays
01:13:56from a protective kind of duvet
01:13:58and like a piano cover
01:14:00that the Stratford case has put around them
01:14:02to make them this cuddly little harmless
01:14:04provincial kind of fantasy,
01:14:06taking that off and seeing
01:14:08that they are really, really painful plays
01:14:10and they are attacking
01:14:12and disturbing and confused at times
01:14:15and raging.
01:14:16The public desire
01:14:18to know about this man,
01:14:21which is wholly understandable,
01:14:24is so great.
01:14:26Orthodox Shakespeareans
01:14:28must insist
01:14:30that it is impossible
01:14:32to understand
01:14:34a connection between
01:14:36the life of the author
01:14:38and the works themselves.
01:14:40Their only real recourse
01:14:42is to say,
01:14:44it's impossible.
01:14:46Don't try to do it.
01:14:48Forget your curiosity.
01:14:50He wasn't a person like us.
01:14:52He was a primitive Elizabethan
01:14:56and they didn't understand
01:14:58very much about psychology
01:15:00and nothing that they did
01:15:02was ever autobiographical.
01:15:04He was very much part
01:15:06of the court theatrical program,
01:15:10writing for it,
01:15:12I believe acting in it,
01:15:14because the plays do show
01:15:16a tremendous amount
01:15:18of theatrical knowledge
01:15:20and I believe that
01:15:22that was picked up initially
01:15:24in court performances
01:15:26and I know that the plays
01:15:29were presented,
01:15:31some of the plays were presented
01:15:33at court
01:15:35long before the public ever saw them.
01:15:38So one of the reasons
01:15:40why Stratfordians, as they're called,
01:15:42bang on and say
01:15:44Stratford upon Avon
01:15:46is because in a poem in 1623,
01:15:48Ben Johnson writes
01:15:50Sweet swan of Avon,
01:15:52what a sight it were
01:15:54to see thee in our waters yet appear
01:15:56and make those flights
01:15:58upon the banks of Thames
01:16:00that so did take
01:16:02Eliza and our James.
01:16:04Now, where on the banks of the Thames
01:16:06did Queen Elizabeth and King James
01:16:08enjoy watching Shakespeare's plays?
01:16:10But King and Queen
01:16:12never went to a public theatre.
01:16:14The most famous,
01:16:16the grandest and biggest theatre
01:16:18where the Shakespeare plays
01:16:20were played in front of King James,
01:16:22in front of Elizabeth,
01:16:24right on the banks of Thames
01:16:26was Hampton Court.
01:16:28And guess what?
01:16:30The original name for Hampton Court
01:16:32was Avon.
01:16:34So Sweet Swan of Avon
01:16:36does not mean that he came
01:16:38from Stratford upon Avon
01:16:40where one of seven rivers exists
01:16:42called Avon.
01:16:44It's a place of childhood
01:16:46and performing.
01:16:48There are indications
01:16:50in the works
01:16:52and particularly the sonnets
01:16:54that the writer
01:16:56had first-hand knowledge
01:16:58of actually getting up on a stage,
01:17:00putting on a costume
01:17:02and speaking lines
01:17:04and entertaining people.
01:17:06The Shakespeare ruse
01:17:08enabled De Vere
01:17:10to write till the end of his days
01:17:12in 1604.
01:17:14The costume one,
01:17:16depriving De Vere
01:17:18of the immortality due him
01:17:20for his literary accomplishments
01:17:22and foisting upon the world
01:17:24a monumental myth.
01:17:26We've been praising
01:17:28the wrong man for 400 years.
01:17:30If you
01:17:32accept the bottom line
01:17:34that a writer writes
01:17:36primarily
01:17:38about his own experiences,
01:17:40his life,
01:17:42what motivates him,
01:17:44then all that we know
01:17:46about De Vere fits wonderfully.
01:17:48Then suddenly
01:17:50a person comes into focus.
01:18:15Edward De Vere
01:18:17died in Hackney in 1604
01:18:19and was buried, as far as we know,
01:18:21in an unmarked grave.
01:18:23Percival Golding,
01:18:25who's the first cousin of Edward De Vere,
01:18:27writes about him in 1619
01:18:29and says,
01:18:31Edward De Vere,
01:18:33my wonderful, clever, noble cousin,
01:18:35died in Hackney
01:18:37and now lies buried at Westminster.
01:18:39Where is Edward De Vere
01:18:41actually buried?
01:18:43Behind me here,
01:18:45we have his wife's grave,
01:18:47an ancestral countess of Oxford,
01:18:49his father-in-law.
01:18:51Just to the side,
01:18:53we've got his cousins, Francis Vere,
01:18:55Horace Vere, his son,
01:18:57the 18th Earl of Oxford,
01:18:59is buried here in Westminster Abbey.
01:19:01His daughters are buried
01:19:03in Westminster Abbey.
01:19:05Where is Edward De Vere?
01:19:07Why isn't he here?
01:19:09This book is called
01:19:11It has the first published picture
01:19:13of Shakespeare's monument
01:19:15in Stratford-upon-Avon.
01:19:17And what is very extraordinary about this
01:19:19is what we actually see
01:19:21is a man clutching a wool pack.
01:19:23Actually, a lot of recent research
01:19:25has gone in to discover
01:19:27that Shakespeare's father,
01:19:29John Shakespeare, was a big wool dealer
01:19:31and that Shakespeare himself
01:19:33probably came to London for the first time.
01:19:35This is William Shakspeare of Stratford,
01:19:37came to London for the first time
01:19:38to see Shakespeare.
01:19:40This picture of a wool dealer
01:19:42is endorsed by Shakespeare's descendants.
01:19:44Since then, someone has come along
01:19:46and said, ooh, hang on,
01:19:48isn't he supposed to be a famous writer
01:19:50and shoved a quill
01:19:52and a piece of paper in his hand?
01:19:54The epitaph on this monument
01:19:56has not been understood
01:19:58by anybody for 400 years.
01:20:00The English says,
01:20:02Stay, passenger,
01:20:04why goest thou by so fast?
01:20:06Read if thou canst
01:20:08Shakespeare.
01:20:10So, to put it very, very simply,
01:20:12it's asking you a question.
01:20:14Who is Shakespeare buried with?
01:20:16Just above it are two lines of Latin.
01:20:18And at the beginning of the second line
01:20:20it says, Terra, take it.
01:20:22That means the earth covers.
01:20:24Then on the top line
01:20:26we've got three names,
01:20:28three Latin names.
01:20:30Eudicio Pilium,
01:20:32Genio Socratem,
01:20:34Arte Maronem.
01:20:36This means,
01:20:38with his genius.
01:20:40Maro, who is Virgil,
01:20:42with his art.
01:20:44We actually have three allusions
01:20:46to three other people
01:20:48whom Shakespeare is buried with.
01:20:50And those people are
01:20:52Virgil,
01:20:54is an allusion to Edmund Spenser.
01:20:56Edmund Spenser was known as
01:20:58our English Virgil.
01:21:00He was the English poet
01:21:02most connected to Virgil.
01:21:04Next to him we have Genio Socratem,
01:21:06the genius of Socrates.
01:21:08Genio Spenser, Westminster Abbey,
01:21:10is associated with the genius of Socrates.
01:21:13In fact, it used to say on his tomb,
01:21:15it's now gone,
01:21:17you have the genius of Socrates.
01:21:19Next to Chaucer is buried
01:21:21Francis Beaumont.
01:21:23And Francis Beaumont was known as
01:21:25judicious Beaumont.
01:21:27Who is Shakespeare buried with?
01:21:29It's sitting above us all that time.
01:21:31Nobody's noticed it.
01:21:33Three clear allusions
01:21:35to Beaumont, Chaucer and Spenser
01:21:36in exactly that lineup
01:21:38at Westminster Abbey.
01:21:40Everything's pointing to the fact
01:21:42that Shakespeare is buried here
01:21:44at Westminster Abbey.
01:21:46Now, he may be underneath
01:21:48that statue behind me.
01:21:50I may be standing on him.
01:21:52He's here somewhere.
01:21:54It's all pointing in that direction.
01:21:56So I think the next thing is for the Abbey
01:21:58to take this seriously
01:22:00and we can start hunting for him
01:22:02because he's somewhere
01:22:04under our feet here.
01:22:06violin plays softly
01:22:36violin plays softly
01:23:07violin plays softly
01:23:09violin plays softly
01:23:11violin plays softly
01:23:13violin plays softly
01:23:15violin plays softly
01:23:17violin plays softly
01:23:19violin plays softly
01:23:21violin plays softly
01:23:23violin plays softly
01:23:25violin plays softly
01:23:27violin plays softly
01:23:29violin plays softly
01:23:31violin plays softly
01:23:33violin plays softly
01:23:34violin plays softly
01:23:36violin plays softly
01:23:38violin plays softly
01:23:40violin plays softly
01:23:42violin plays softly
01:23:44violin plays softly
01:23:46violin plays softly
01:23:48violin plays softly
01:23:50violin plays softly
01:23:52violin plays softly
01:23:54violin plays softly
01:23:56violin plays softly
01:23:58violin plays softly
01:24:00violin plays softly
01:24:02violin plays softly
01:24:04violin plays softly
01:24:06violin plays softly
01:24:08violin plays softly
01:24:10violin plays softly
01:24:12violin plays softly
01:24:14violin plays softly
01:24:16violin plays softly
01:24:18violin plays softly
01:24:20violin plays softly
01:24:22violin plays softly
01:24:24violin plays softly
01:24:26violin plays softly
01:24:28violin plays softly
01:24:30violin plays softly
01:24:32violin plays softly
01:24:34violin plays softly
01:24:36violin plays softly
01:24:38violin plays softly
01:24:40violin plays softly
01:24:42violin plays softly
01:24:44violin plays softly
01:24:46violin plays softly
01:24:48violin plays softly
01:24:50violin plays softly
01:24:52violin plays softly
01:24:54violin plays softly
01:24:56violin plays softly
01:24:58violin plays softly
01:25:00violin plays softly
01:25:02violin plays softly
01:25:05violin plays softly
01:25:07violin plays softly
01:25:09violin plays softly