Scholar Stands By Theory Of Shakespeare As A Fraud

PORTLAND - Oh, Daniel Wright has heard what things his peers whisper behind his back, felt their slings and arrows, their withering looks, sarcastic barbs and, perhaps the unkindest cut of all, their condescension.

But ridicule is the price the professor pays for daring to believe that the Bard of Avon is the Fraud of Avon - or that there's something rotten in Stratford.

Wright, who teaches literature at Concordia University in Northeast Portland, is among a handful of college scholars who say the 17th Earl of Oxford - Edward de Vere - was the real genius.

Oxfordians contend that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon lacked the education or experience to create the 37 plays, 154 sonnets and assorted other poems attributed to him.

"The biography of the man doesn't fit the work," Wright said.

Portland seems to be turning into a mini-hub for Oxfordians, who are seen by the literary establishment as academia's version of UFO conspiracy buffs.

"They are a nuisance," summed up Jack Cooper, a Portland State University professor, echoing the general opinion of literature scholars.

Wright is hosting the third annual Edward de Vere Studies Conference at Concordia in April. The campus theater marquee already announces its performance of "Romeo and Juliet by Edward de Vere" during the conference, the only such scholarly event for Oxfordians in the country.

Aside from Wright, the Shakespeare Oxford Society's 1997 "Oxfordian of the Year," the city is home to The Oxfordian, a new scholarly journal.

"Oregon has always been willing to try new things," said Stephanie Hughes, a Concordia student and the journal's editor. "The fight is only beginning."

Enduring power

That the Shakespeare vs. Oxford duel refuses to go away testifies to the enduring power of Shakespeare's work.

"Shakespeare in Love" pokes fun at the authorship debate in a scene when fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe gives a writer's-blocked Shakespeare help reworking the plot of "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter."

"It's wrong to mock them (Oxfordians) and take a stance that they're crackpots and we're so much better," said University of Oregon professor Lisa Freinkel. "They are participating in a greater phenomenon - the mystery of Shakespeare."

The identity enigma has lasted through the centuries because there is no beyond-a-doubt evidence that proves Shakespeare really was Shakespeare.

An assortment of scholars has floated ideas claiming, variously, that Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, even Queen Elizabeth, was the "real" Shakespeare. The theory identifying Oxford as the likely suspect was advanced in the 1920s by the unfortunately named J. Thomas Looney and is today the most widely held alternative authorship theory.

The Oxfordian theory

Oxfordian theory can get labyrinthine. But the gist is that there is no way a man of humble origins and education could have written plays that display such a vast knowledge of languages, law, medicine and history.

Only their man had the university education and experience to have written the plays, Oxfordians say. He adopted the pseudonym "Shakespeare," they contend, to protect himself from reprisals from the real-life characters he sometimes satirized.

Oxfordians also point to clues hidden in works like "Hamlet" that they claim uncannily parallel people and events from Oxford's own life.

"People believe in Shakespeare for cultural or emotional reasons," Wright said, "not rational reasons."

On the other side, Stratfordians show little mercy to the Oxfordians. They're not only kooky, the Stratfordians charge, but also elitists, unwilling to accept that someone so undistinguished could have written the Shakespeare canon.

Stratfordians poke holes in Oxfordian theory - pointing out, for example, that several of Shakespeare's greatest plays, including "King Lear," "Macbeth" and "The Tempest," have been dated as written after Oxford's death in 1604.

UO professor Roland Greene dismisses Oxfordianism as "pseudo-scholarship" and its devotees as "out of touch with reality."

Wright has been ostracized by the academic establishment. He has been snubbed by Stratfordians and had his articles rejected out-of-hand by scholarly journals. He has received nasty e-mail.

"You pay a price," he said. "But it is a small price to pay for integrity."

Thankful for Concordia

It makes Wright, 44, all the more appreciative of Concordia, where he has taught since 1991.

"Concordia respects the search for truth," he said.

Although he may be dedicating his career to debunking the greatest icon of English culture and history, Wright is an unabashed Anglophile. He grew up on a farm in Indiana but possesses an air of English formality.

He accepted "the Stratfordian fiction," he said, until graduate school at Ball State University in Indiana, when he started delving into the question of authorship. He came around gradually, even apprehensively, to the Oxfordian point of view.

He has ventured into the belly of the beast, visiting Stratford-on-Avon three times, and he scoffs at what he considers Britain's equivalent of Disneyland - a lurid testament to a grand lie.

"I bristle in silence at that spectacle constructed on a fraudulent premise," he said with a sneer.

Wright sees Stratfordians as the real elitists in the argument because they chalk up Shakespeare's greatness to genius that seemingly sprung up out of nowhere, rather than genius cultivated through education and hard work.

The authorship question may be dismissed as irrelevant because the work is great regardless of who wrote it.

But Oxfordians believe that reading Shakespeare's work as Oxford's transforms it into cunning political satire - rich in poetry but also full of insights into Elizabethan history.

Wright still holds out hope that someday someone will finally put an end to the mystery and discover irrefutable evidence that Edward de Vere was the real author of "Hamlet."

"I believe that we may someday be able to prove it."