'What's all this talk about the man who wrote Shakespeare?
Wasn't Shakespeare, Shakespeare?
The case, in fact, has never been stronger
that the wrong man has been fitted with the Bard's crown.'
And I think the plays were written much earlier than we are told
and they were constantly being revised and reworked.
'We have been handed the greatest work of art in human history,
but it's also a map. It points us to, and it guides us through
the life of the author, but we've been looking at the wrong guy,
we've been in the wrong city.'
'There's always been this great question about why Shakespeare,
who lived his entire life in England,
but we have ten plays that are set in Italy.
Why was Shakespeare so enamoured of Italy
and where did he get his material?'
'Once you re-orient yourself and once you relocate yourself to the city
that the map is actually about,
not only is the map still a beautiful map
and a beautiful work of art unto itself,
but that map then guides you.
Edward de Vere was an outstanding, ingenious
and sometimes abrasive Elizabethan Renaissance man.
Scholar, spendthrift, courtier, wit,
adventurer, patron, prolific ghost-writer,
De Vere encompassed the character traits of many Shakespearian icons.
Among them, Hamlet, Romeo, Othello, Falstaff and King Lear.'
'What really grabbed my interest was, is there any connection
between Shakespeare's interest and Edward de Vere's interest?'
'De Vere lived in Venice during his 20s and visited the cities
in France and Italy that became the settings
for more than a dozen plays.'
'The amount of scholarship that he uses in his works
indicates certainly a person of unique educational qualifications
and an extraordinary literary heritage that he was privy to.'
He was a very theatrical man. I suppose in today's parlance
we'd say he was rather camp.
He loved dressing up, he loved showing off.
'We don't want our kids knowing about De Vere, he was bisexual
and maybe had an affair with Queen Elizabeth.'
'One finds an abundance of correlations between the life
of the courtier playwright Edward de Vere and Shakespeare.'
'The question itself has a great deal of appeal
to lawyers, physicians, scientists.
People who come from fact-based backgrounds will give you
the time of day and say, "What's your evidence?"
If you've spent all of your life doing a PhD and then focusing
your teaching on the Stratford story
then it must be very scary to have to think,
"Well, maybe this isn't true, after all."'
'Every author's life tells a story.
The best place to begin is with the name itself.
Shake-speare.
The hyphen is in many of the first publications of the plays and poems.
Hyphenated phrases in an author's name often suggested
a concealed author
in an age rife with political and religious intrigue, when picking
the wrong alliance or offending the wrong official could mean
imprisonment, torture, forfeiture of one's property to the crown
or a death sentence.'
'The evidence for Oxford to many people,
including a number of professors, appears to be much more convincing
than the evidence for the man from Stratford, Will Shakespeare.
That's the way his name was spelled in Stratford - Shakspeare.
The name on the plays - uniformly, Shakespeare. Two different names,
two different people.'
'On April 12th, 1550, in the private apartments
of a British stonewall fortress, a lord and lady welcomed
their heir into the world. The child's father, John De Vere,
16th Earl of Oxford, could rest assured that when he died
his own son would carry forward the title of 17th Earl.
Lord Edward's nobility would place him among kings and queens
and the powerful men around them who ran the state.
For 400 years, Edward de Vere's ancestors
had played a leading role in the wars
and politics in England.
In an uninterrupted succession from the Norman conquest on, De Veres
had served the crown as statesman and military commanders.'
'The De Veres were some of the most influential people
because of the huge land holdings.'
They owned the entire town
and anyone who wanted
to do anything at all had to receive the permission
of the lords of the manor and they were,
for over 600 years, the De Veres.
'But also, the fact that they were the hereditary
lord great chamberlains of England gave them
direct access to the monarch.
Edward de Vere is one of the most interesting
members of the family.'
He wasn't cast in the usual mould.
'As a toddler inside this ancient castle,
Edward's formative years were probably lonely ones.'
As a young man, of course, he was,
before his father dies, his father had a troupe of players.
He lived at Hedingham Castle,
he would see travelling groups of players
and his father's own group of players.
'Sometime, during Lord Edward's youth,
the child was moved out of Castle Hedingham
and into the household of Sir Thomas Smith.
Lord Edward, as his scholar, would have had access
to Smith's library of hundreds of books.
More than 400 titles in theology, civil law, history,
philosophy, mathematics, medicine, grammar and literature.
Works by Livy, Virgil, Plutarch, Plato,
Pliny, Homer, Ovid, Aristophanes,
Sophocles, Dante and Boccaccio
lined Smith's bookshelves.
Edward de Vere's father died when young Edward was 12.
His mother remarried soon after burying her first husband.'
Then when his father died when he was 12
and he became a ward of court with Burghley,
again, he was taken
to theatrical performances at court.
'On Thursday, September 3rd, 1562,
the London diarist Henry Machyn recorded
that between five and six o'clock in the afternoon,
a 12-year-old Earl of Oxford came riding out of Essex
with seven score horse all in black through London
and Cheap and Ludgate and so to Temple Bar.
The child's parade was hundreds of feet long as it progressed
over the drawbridge and through the arches of London's Aldgate
on the eastern side of the city.
With 140 horsemen bearing the colourless cast of mourning,
De Vere took his entrance onto the worldly stage as the boy in black.'
London wasn't a particularly large city.
I suppose it had a population of 100,000 at the most.
It was run as a Stasi-type city
with informers, and it was a very dangerous place to live,
um, which, again, I think is why there is
such a confusion over the whole thing,
because they, er, didn't have shredding machines,
but they had fires and I think a lot of evidence
was destroyed.
I'm the 18th Baron Burghley,
a grandson of the original Lord Burghley.
The population of England at the time, I think, was about 5 million
and of those 5 million, not very many were well-educated.
'Lord Burghley's library was one of the most extensive
in England at the time.'
The books, the writer of Shakespeare would have had to have had
connection with were in that library,
mostly in the original languages.
'The variety of books kept within Cecil House was truly astonishing
for those fortunate few who enjoyed access.'
A cousin of mine who was managing the house, Burghley House,
gave me a copy of Lord Burghley's precepts,
which were written about 1582,
'84, '85, somewhere in there.
They kind of reflect what is in the play Hamlet.
These few precepts in thy memory. Look though Character.
Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
There is one, in particular, which fits very well
with the final statement by Polonius.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
and it must follow, as the night the day,
though canst not then be false to any man.
'The book was printed in non-book form,
1616, but before that, only family members
or close associates would have had a chance
to see those words, I would think. Certainly not Will.
'The players in Hamlet were strangely look-a-likes
to the English court and the people who were close to Edward
and, in fact, the way in which people died right and left
probably reflects his feeling of frustration
at finding himself in that setting.'
'Now he is praying.
And now I'll do't.
And so he goes to heaven; And so am I revenged.
That would be scann'd: A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven.'
When Hamlet has an opportunity to murder Claudius
at his prayers, he kind of does a double take.
He says, "Well, if I kill him now, he's praying, he'll go to heaven."
he says, "This is not revenge, it's hire and salary."
And in the process of this soliloquy, whilst he's watching
Claudius at prayer he says,...
He took my father grossly, full of bread.
That is the allusion to Ezekiel 16:49,
one of the underlying verses in the Geneva Bible and one of the most
significant proofs of Shakespeare's dependence
upon the Geneva translation of the Bible.
'Cecil recorded that in the first quarter of 1570, De Vere purchased
two unspecified Italian books as well as the Geneva Bible gilt,
a Chaucer, Plutarch's works in French, with other books and papers.'
'The Geneva Bible, it's lodged in the vaults
of the Folger library in Washington.'
It's the sort of connection between a man,
a writer and the works
that doesn't ever occur
with the man from Stratford.
We have a record of him purchasing it in 1570,
and it is very expensively and handsomely bound
with his heraldic devices on it.
There are a number of little manicules in the margins
and a manicule is a tradition that originated
with the medieval scribes.
When they copied a manuscript, if there was a particular passage
that they felt was particularly important or edifying
they would draw one of these little manicules to literally point out
the importance of that passage.
But of the some thousand or so verses marked in the De Vere Bible,
between two and three hundred plus of them
exhibit an influence of Shakespeare.
There is a close correlation between the level of interest Shakespeare
showed in specific biblical verses and the level of interest
De Vere showed.
When Shakespeare echoed a biblical verse once,
only 13% of those verses are marked in the Bible.
The more times Shakespeare echoes a given Bible verse,
the greater the likelihood that Edward de Vere marked
that same verse in his bible.
So, there are some verses that are echoed six times
in the works of Shakespeare, 88% of those verses are marked
in De Vere's bible, 88%.
The more interest Shakespeare showed, the more interest De Vere
showed, it's almost a straight line. Roger has done landmark work,
extremely important work. I think it's the most important scholarly
work to make the case Edward de Vere did write the works of Shakespeare.
We can connect these annotations not only to Shakespeare, but to De Vere.
There is a group of about 140 marked verses.
All of these verses have some connection to the idea of economics.
Matthew 6:19 through 21 is a wonderful example.
These are the verses in which Jesus says, "Don't store up your money
on earth but store your treasure in heaven."
This is more than consistent
with what we know about De Vere's biography.
He was, although born a man of great wealth and power,
was perhaps the most downwardly mobile person in the history
of the planet, he spent his whole life haemorrhaging land and money.
Allow not nature more than nature needs;
man's life's as cheap as beast's.
He was greatly concerned with the honour of himself and his family.
But he suffered from all the ordinary human vices and weaknesses.
It's known that he was fond of the tavern, and it's also known,
of course, that he was, tended to be quick-tempered and quarrelsome.
A plague on all cowards!
What's up, Bob?
Where have you been?
'But Edward de Vere was admired by many of his contemporaries,
and he was described as one of the best wits in England.'
There are contemporary writings
that say there are certain courtiers
at Elizabeth's court who are wonderful writers,
um, the best of whom is Edward de Vere,
17th Earl of Oxford.
That has been written, that was written,
I think, in the 1590s by Francis Meres.
In 1575, Edward de Vere obtained permission
from the Queen to travel overseas.
'De Vere's first stop, the French royal court of the Louvre,
would serve to remind de Vere just how staid and normal
the English court actually was.
Henry III was a flamboyant monarch, equal parts Renne and Rois
and would regularly wear gowns, make-up, earrings and perfume.
Frequently seen with Sa Majeste were his minions,
young male favourites whom the King dressed as ladies of the night.
King Henry had recently been in Venice, and he had so fallen in love
with the comeddia dell'arte that he imported a venetian troupe
to perform at his wedding. And his coronation provided only the first
of a number of opportunities to drink in these amazing Italian comedies.
De Vere moved to Venice in the spring of 1575
and lived there, on and off, for the next year.'
'Shakespeare's focus on so many of the plays'
on setting them in Italy,
there's no suggestion whatsoever
that the Shakespeare of Stratford
ever travelled outside the southern part of England.
'We do know that others did travel.
Certainly, Oxford travels very significantly, he had 18 months
to two years travelling in Europe and a lot of that
was spent in Italy.'
Orthodox scholars try to explain this away as,
"Well, he had a great imagination, and he could have read books and he
could have taught to travellers." But when you look at the actual
material in the Italian plays, he evokes the location,
the language, the culture, the imagery.
He brings it alive and makes it seem like
he knows it intimately
and he seems to have a strong emotional connection to Italy.
'What is interesting too, is where they are sent from.
Letters from Paris, letters from many places in Italy,
all documentary proof.'
Well, the Italian connection with De Vere is very important
because so many of the plays are set in Italy.
And set at Italian courts
and again that is very important
because the majority of the plays are aristocratic,
they're slued towards the aristocracy
and the life of kings and courts and courtiers
and, as I say, many of them are set in Italy.
There's no question that Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers
of the English language and his plays are full,
not only of poetry and incredible dramaturgy,
but personal expression
and power and political commentary.
I mean, for me studying Shakespeare
is studying the world.
Venice was, at that time, a very huge town,
more than 180,000 inhabitants
so one of the most largest towns in Europe
and surely was a kind of a New York City
of the Renaissance, so different people coming from different places,
different cultures so a big exchange of culture
and also the creation of fashion,
you know, and everything.
A kind of light for Europe.
'Reaching the shore of the Venetian lagoon sometime in May 1575,
the Earl of Oxford had finally arrived.
As the boatman guided the ferry towards its island destination
through the lagoon's shallow waters, a metropolis unlike any other
came into view. The earl would have had to present
his papers of introduction from the Venetian ambassador in Paris
to the Duke or Doge and his court at Palazzo Ducale,
the city's central municipal building, one that was parliament,
Whitehall and Westminster all under one vast U-shaped roof.
The Ducal palace state chambers
exceeded even the opulence of Elizabeth's court.
Allegorical statues, murals and paintings by the likes of Tintoretto
and Veronese covered every stair case, door jam and square foot
of the ceiling of the Palazzo.
De Vere would have arrived in time for the annual theatrical season
which lasted until July. By the 1570s, Venice had become,
perhaps, the most vibrant theatrical community in all of Europe.
Venetian entrepreneurs had recently constructed
the first two public theatres in the city.
As the aristocratico Inglese settled into his new home town, he surely
also began attending plays that would be meting out ideas, plots,
characters and inspiration for the rest of his life.
If De Vere had seen Pantalone in action at Henry III's coronation,
he would have had ample opportunity to study the character
in greater detail after arriving in Venice where the Commedia literally
spilled out into the streets and piazzas.
Pantalone joined the cast of lovers, tricksters, heroes and villains
in improvised productions that survive today
primarily in the form of brief plot summaries.
There was nothing like it in England.
The theatrical mixture of high and low, refined and proletariat,
comic and tragic that graced Venetian stages would present
an aesthetic philosophy that would later be developed
into the works of Shakespeare.'
Othello is the perfect representation
of the commedia dell'arte.
Commedia dell'arte, in a word, was satiric, street theatre,
stock characters but different situations
that they enact in an improvised way.
'Othello is the perfect embodiment of the Capitano,
a bragger, soldier.
Iago is the embodiment
of the Zanni and in commedia dell'arte'
the Zanni was the very clever schemer,
a servant or an underling
who drives the plot forward
at every point and in the end gets his comeuppance.
The maid in commedia dell'arte is invariably
the outspoken truth-teller
and, in Othello, the babe,
Emelia, to Desdemona
is clearly, unequivocally
the outspoken truth-teller and what happens to her?
Iago kills her.
This is the tragic element
that Oxford brings into this bitter, black comedy
as if the playwright were saying,
"I'm gonna show you how foolish and misguided
these people are."
'Since De Vere was still a courtier, albeit in a foreign court,
he sought out lodgings close to the centre
of the Venetian courtly universe.
One clue about the possible site of De Vere's Venetian household
comes from the Shakespearian canon.
Othello reports that his house lies somewhere near a place
he calls The Sagittary. The Sagittary is, arguably,
an anglophonic rendition of Vica Sagittarius.
Known more commonly as The Frezzaria,
this street was less than 50 metres from St Mark's
and was a prominent commercial venue that had derived its name
from the arrows that were originally sold in its shops.
Orazio Cuoco, a venetian choir boy the Earl would hire as a page,
later reported he first me De Vere at the church of Santa Maria Formosa
and that De Vere himself worshipped at the church of the Greeks,
Saint Giorgio dei Greci.
Both of these churches lie within a five-minute walk
from the Ducal palace in St Mark's Square.
The Earl of Oxford, we know, was living in the neighbourhood
of the church of Santa Maria Formosa,
which is the same neighbourhood where the Murano money lender,
living in Venice in the 1570s by the name of Gaspar Ribeiro lived.
Ribeiro had an office back in that church, he was the gastaldo,
the protector of the sacred virgin.
Brian Pullen, University of Manchester, for the last 30 years
has been publishing a series of articles pointing out
the incredible similarities between Shakespeare's Shylock and Ribeiro.
Ribeiro was involved in serious loans, he was a collector
of precious stones, he had a daughter who escaped from the family
household and married a Christian. The trial that he went through,
which is really how we know so much about him, during the investigation
by the Venetian inquisition into whether he was a Christian or a Jew
provides a lot of evidence that we can attach
to Shylock's character as well.
He was known for his meanness, for his greediness,
for his obsessiveness and for his hostility,
particularly towards his daughter and daughter-in-law. Jessica!
Jessica!
Shylock denounces Jessica, who had run off with the jewels
and the ducets and married Lorenzo
and said that it would better that she were dead.
Ribeiro said of his own daughter-in-law
that he would rather give her a rope upon which to hang herself,
he was so angry at her, and she similarly had run off
with a bunch of ducets.
The scenario is remarkably parallel.
So, definitely the Earl of Oxford would have been aware
of Ribeiro's existence and, no doubt, encountered him in church,
because we know Oxford went to the church of Santa Maria Formosa.
That's where he met Orazio Cuoco who became his page
and returned to England with him and spent a year under his care.
'If De Vere's house was indeed on the Frezzaria,
the Rialto Bridge was also his gondolier's exit.
The Rialto Bridge and Piazza, known in The Merchant of Venice
as Shylock's main haunt, was mere minutes away from the Frezzaria.
De Vere probably visited the Rialto regularly
since it was one of Venice's main shopping centres
where Jews lent money to anyone with good credit
and vendors of all creeds sold anything from swords and lamps
to wine and meats for the banquet table.'
When he returned from his 14 months in Europe, most of that time
spent in Italy, he brought back with him a so-called choirboy,
actually a 16-year-old Italian
and the allegation was that this was for sexual purposes.
Edward De Vere also had
well-documented heterosexual relationships.
'When De Vere arrived in Venice in 1575,
he found a city unlike any other in Europe,
renowned for its appreciation of liberty and sensuality,
a frontier town where anything and everything was available.
The sexual attitudes and practices of Venetians in the late 16th century
would have a lasting impact on De Vere's life and work.'
There's always been a question about
the writer's sexuality,
and I firmly believe that whoever it was
had to be bi-sexual.
The personality that comes across when you really
find out about De Vere, he was a swinger,
you know,
and whoever wrote the plays had to be.
'De Vere's activities and wanderings were, of course,
not limited to Venice's south side.
One anecdote points to a portion of De Vere's life elsewhere in Venice.
Virginia Padoana lived in an apartment on the Campo San Geremia,
a square just off Venice's Grand Canal near its northern entrance.
As a cortesana, Padoana belonged to a distinguished tradition
unknown to England.
In the words of one contemporary traveller, "Though wilt find
a Venetian courtesan a good rhetorician
and a most elegant discourser."
Often schooled as poets, scholars and musicians,
courtesans in Venice carried out entire careers
true to the first syllable of their name.
In 1575, the courtesan Veronica Franco
had published her Terza Rima,
an erudite poem that satirised traditional love lyrics.
An English traveller, a dozen years later, would list Padoana as one who,
'Honoreth all our nation for my lord of Oxford's sake."'
Courtesans is a very particular movement,
coming in Venice during the 16th century.
They were prostitutes but many of them
open their houses
to the most famous poets, writers, musicians.
From a certain moment they can do what a girl of a noble family
of Venice cannot do - they can study, to talk, you know,
at one corner of the salon about astronomy
and crossing the salon, going and speaking of poetry.
If Shakespeare would've been here,
he would have visited also a place like that.
'I was always very alive to what was happening to the women
in the plays.'
What you see in the very early comedies is that the women
are either shrews or they're virgins on the pedestal, you know,
it's clearly a projection, a young man's projection.
In the middle plays, so many of the women tell the truth
but they end up dead for telling the truth, but what happens
in Romeo & Juliet is there is a huge change,
because Juliet is allowed her sexuality just as much as Romeo is.
'You suddenly get a portrait of a whole woman or a whole portrait
of a woman that you don't get before.'
Therefore, stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone.
Let me ba ta'en, let me be put to death;
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
'I guess one thing that struck me lately'
is that the women, I think, are very remarkable in the plays
and very wonderful women and he seems to have had a lot
of difficulty and anger with women, Oxford.
So, I'd like to know more about how he wrote such wonderful parts
for women when he doesn't seem to have really thought much of women.
He seemed to have been more hurt by them and upset by them.
When De Vere was 21, De Vere married William Cecil's daughter,
Anne, who was then around 15.
'One of the big themes in Shakespeare
and one of the big themes in De Vere's life when he was in Italy,
was his wife delivering a daughter.
He learned from his servant that his wife may have sought to terminate
the pregnancy and didn't know if the child she bore was his.
It was a central event in De Vere's life and one that much
of the Shakespeare canon seems to be refracted through.
Now that he had established his base camp in Venice, Edward de Vere
had three factors driving him onward.
The plague was becoming an ugly fact of life by mid-summer, 1575.
Those letters of introduction from King Henry III to the Turkish court
were sitting on his desk unused, and the money he had brought with him
to Venice was burning a hole in his pocket.
Since De Vere would be travelling on a Venetian ship,
under the Venetian flag, the Earl enjoyed ample opportunity to visit
the Ottoman-occupied lands to the east, including Greece.'
'Everybody travels from Venice to Cyprus
because the Turks are believed that they are gonna invade and indeed,
it's a historical fact that they did invade Cyprus.
However, they're at the other end of the island from Famagusta.
Famagusta's not mentioned in the play but it's the only port
in Cyprus so there are 12 instances
in Othello that point directly
to this port of Famagusta and Cyprus.
To think that the playwright who wrote Othello
would put in these 12 very specific passages,
why and how could a playwright put those in unless they'd been there?
What is fascinating is that whoever wrote these, the plays,
must have visited those cities, must have known those cities,
because just by, not accident,
but little things are just thrown in like the things
in Romeo and Juliet about the sycamore grove.
Now, why talk about a sycamore grove in Verona? Why did he choose that?
Is there a sycamore grove?
Well, Rowe's book says, "Yes, absolutely, it's there."
These little mentions of actual locations
indicate that whoever wrote these plays
put in little touches
of local colour that he had seen.
Once in Palermo, ruled by a prince who loved the equestrian sports,
De Vere organised an impromptu tournament
to joust for the honour of Her Highness Queen Elizabeth.'
He challenged the whole of Palermo to a duel.
'Such valour would certainly have impressed the prince, Sessa.
It may have even yielded De Vere letters of passage to the other
Spanish kingdoms where records reveal he would later be travelling -
Naples and Milan. Sessa had, in fact, only returned
recently from the Spanish garrison at Naples where the viceroy
had become enamoured of a lame Spanish soldier who was gaining
notice as a first-rate poet - Miguel De Cervantes.
The late summer of 1575
presents the Earl Of Oxford at perhaps his most quixotic.
Thumping his chest in the Palermo square, offering to tilt against
any comer who might dare to challenge the virtues of his fair Dulcinea
on the English throne.
And Cervantes was a notoriously good observer who would spend the rest
of his life transforming his youthful adventures into novels and plays.
No one has ever considered De Vere as one of Cervantes' early character
inspirations, yet if De Vere's Sicilian exploits do ring
with the mock bravado of Falstaff, perhaps future scholars will find
in them snapshots of Don Quixote as well.
De Vere's prodigal lifestyle had not abated since he crossed the Alps.
Over 14 months of travel, the Earl spent £4,561,
some $1.2 million in today's currency.
In September, De Vere sent a letter to Burghley
explaining why communication had been cut off during the grand tour.
De Vere requested a loan he had taken out for 500 crowns
should be settled with the sale of his lands.
The fall of 1575 was a bad time to get sick in Venice.
The city was suffering an epidemic of the plague.
Church spires were all too often aglow with lanterns of the dead,
an Italian funerary tradition that appears in Romeo and Juliet.
The plague of 1575-77 would ultimately claim the life
of one of the most celebrated Venetians of his day,
the artist Tiziano Vecellio, known today as Titian.
In 1575, however,
this octogenarian great master was anything but ailing.
Titian's studio at the island's northern edge, Ca Grande,
was churning out complex works at the time such as the Allegory
of the Battle of Lepanto and the Allegory of Religion.
Both of these paintings were commissioned
by King Phillip II of Spain
and would inspire literary tributes by the Spanish playwright,
Lope de Vega.
In 16thC Italy, Titian was an artistic celebrity
comparable to Picasso in the 20th century.
Venetian society flocked to his bay-side home and noteworthy
foreign visitors frequently paid their respects.
It is likely De Vere did as well.
One painting alone, depicting a myth from Ovid's Metamorphosis
would fire the Shakespearean imagination years later.
Shakespeare's epic poem Venus and Adonis boldly revises
the Ovidian myth in the same way that Titian does.
Whereas all classical sources of the Venus and Adonis fable depict
the couple's affair as mutually passionate, Titian's
Venus and Adonis portrays the former as a desperate vixen
and the latter as a disinterested boy.
On Titian's canvas, a grasping goddess of love clings
to a wilful youth who appears bothered by the temptress
embracing him. Titian's Venus nearly falls over herself
to restrain Adonis from leaving.
There were at least four copies of Titian's Venus and Adonis elsewhere
on the continent by 1575, most notably in the collection
of the King of Spain.
But the copy remaining in Titian's studio was distinctive.
In Titian's copy and in Titian's copy only,
Adonis wears a stylised from of a man's hat known as a bonnet.
The other copies of the painting feature a bare-headed Adonis.
Shakespeare's Adonis wears a bonnet that hides his angry brow.
On November 27th, the Earl wrote to his father-in-law from Padua
not to inhibit any sales of his family lands in order to stem
a rising tide of debts.
The Merchant of Venice describes the trip from Padua to Venice
by what Portia calls the tranect, the common ferry.
The river Brenta connected the inland university town
to the Venetian lagoon and the seven-hour journey
by horse-drawn ferry was one of the most scenic river-rides in Italy,
passing riverside estates and numerous luxurious mansions.
The Brenta was known to locals as the continuation of the Grand Canal.
Portia lives on the Brenta in an estate called Belmont.
Belmont, she notes, is at a location ten miles from Venice
and two miles from a monastery.
There is only one villa that meets these two geographic details -
the luxurious Villa Foscari.
De Vere's ferry ride down the Brenta would have passed
the classically-inspired Villa Foscari as the traghetto
slowed down to round a wide curve on the riverbank.'
'There are certain things in The Merchant of Venice about
Portia's journey from Belmont
into the court
which are so accurate, so accurate
that whoever wrote them must have been there, must have been there.
And we know Oxford was.
'One of Italy's most celebrated college towns, Padua was home
to a university that, thanks to its independence
from the Catholic Church, drew scholars
from the occident and orient.
The university also housed a world-famous law school,
an institution where Sir Thomas Smith had once trained.
Its most celebrated professor in 1575 was a jurist named
Ottonello Discalcio, a man who made regular trips to Venice to render
his considered opinion in court cases that required
outside consultation.
Discalcio was the real-life inspiration
for The Merchant of Venice's celebrated
Padua university law professor, Bellario.'
'The court shall hear Bellario's letter.'
In the instant that your messenger came,
in loving visitation was with me
a young doctor of Rome; his name is Balthasar.
I acquainted him with the cause in controversy between the Jew
and Antonio the merchant: we turned o'er many books together:
he is furnished with my opinion, which, bettered with his own
learning, comes with him, at my importunity, to fill up your grace's
request in my stead. You hear the learn'd Bellario, what he writes:
And here, I take it, is the doctor come.
'Just a day's journey from Padua was the city of Mantua where De Vere's
idol, Baldassare Castiglione, had lived and worked.
Castiglione was buried in the church of Santa Maria Delle Grazie,
five mile outside Mantua's city walls.
La Grazie was a popular sanctuary
containing numerous life-size statues in coloured wax
of local dignitaries and religious leaders.
Amid these effigies stands Castiglione's tomb.
Atop the tomb, one finds a masterful sculpture of a risen Christ.
The monument was designed and sculpted
by Castiglione's friend, Giulio Romano.
Romano is, in fact, mentioned by name in Shakespeare.
In The Winter's Tale a painted statue of wronged wife Hermione
is compared to statuary by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano.
This sentence has often been cited by orthodox academics
to disprove Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian art.
Romano is known today as a painter, not a sculptor.
Visiting dignitaries such as an English earl would have been put up
as a guest of the local duke, Guglielmo Gonzaga.
The Gonzagas had, in 1575,
reigned as dukes of Mantua for nearly 250 years.
De Vere probably read tales from the family's own bookshelves about
the strange and curious history of the Gonzaga dynasty.
One Gonzaga, a cousin to Castiglione, had been accused of murdering
the Duke of Urbino by pouring poison in his ear.
This is the same story Hamlet tells
in his play within a play, The Mouse Trap.
The Gonzagas' monstrous, 500-room, 15-courtyard Palazzo Ducale
contained a number of suites for distinguished guests.
In 1575, one of the main guest rooms
was the Apartamento de Troya.
The Apartamento contained frescoes of famous scenes from the Trojan War,
painted and decorated by none other than Giulio Romano.
The mural is one busy work of art.
On the ceiling - Mount Olympus and battles between Greeks and Trojans.
On the walls - Paris' judgement, 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.
Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece describes just such a painting,
202 lines of poetic elaboration
upon a mural of epic proportions.'
Aren't I right, Bob? Aren't I right?
We have heard the chimes at midnight.
That we have. That we have.
In fact, Bob, we have.
Jesus, the things we've seen.
Well, the extraordinary thing about Shakespeare is that he was one man,
but he could identify with every character in his play.
The king, the pauper,
the man, the woman, the lover
and he's able to put himself into every psyche
and the constellation of humanity and that crosses sexuality.
The Rape of Lucrece, ultimately, it's about a friend raping
the man's wife, but the author, Shakespeare, dedicates this
to Southampton and the dedication is very...considered
by orthodox scholars as very homo-erotic.
'The dedication begins, "The love I dedicate to your Lordship
is without end," and it continues,
"What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours,
being in part all I have devoted yours."'
'Then some of the plays are more explicit, I believe, in terms of
their relationship between the men, like in Merchant of Venice.'
To You Antonio I owe the most money and in love,
and from your love I have a warranty to unburden
all my plots and purposes how to get clear of all the debts I owe.
I pray you, good Bassanio, let me know it;
And if it stand,
as you yourself still do,
Within the eye of honour,
be assured, My purse, my person,
my extremest means, Lie all unlock'd to your occasions.
And then when you look at the sonnets,
you see all the homosexual allusions there.
'Presuming that Southampton is the fair youth being addressed
in the sonnets, as has often been argued by scholars
of all persuasions, the meaning of these once enigmatic love poems
becomes clear.'
'It depends how you think of the sonnets, in particular,
which were published after his death.'
For me, this is why the whole thing is contentious
as you've probably realised,
the whole thing for me is they're lovebirds.
They are poems of...
an older man to a younger man.
They are also love poems to a woman.
Um, they are very varied which, again,
suggest the bi-sexuality.
'Characters, themes and plots in Shakespeare's plays and poetry
reveal an author who is clearly interested in bi-sexuality,
gender identity and human behaviour.'
Diana's lip is not more smooth and rubious.
Oh. Thy small pipe Is as a woman's organ,
shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman's part.
Aah!
Then we look at who the potential author is, who I think is Oxford,
and look at his life and then I see a match.
He was married, he had children, but he was really flamboyant,
he was accused of sodomy, he wrote two, dedicated two poems
to Southampton who was considered by many, back then, also bi-sexual.
I do believe that the author of Shakespeare's works was bi-sexual.
I've been working mostly with the sonnets where there is the implicit
bi-sexuality of 28 love poems that are heterosexual and 126 love poems
that are homosexual and some, in a very explicit way,
there is the phrase, "Nature hath pricked thee
out for a woman's pleasure"
and the word prick meant the same thing then it means now.
That alone really disqualifies the man from Stratford
from having written this.
If they're being written to an earl, how in the world could a commoner
have written something so crude to an earl?
I think, particularly the sonnets, I cannot imagine
that whoever wrote the sonnets,
I cannot imagine that the man from Stratford
would write, in those terms,
in those intimate terms of a lover,
to an earl whom he didn't know.
There is no evidence
that he ever met, certainly never got any money from him.
It couldn't have been the man from Stratford.
There's another great example, by the way, another Renaissance poet
was Michelangelo. He's known more as a painter and sculptor,
but he wrote poems, he wrote sonnets and he wrote poems
to a young man and those weren't published
until, I believe it was his great nephew published them,
but, changed the wording to hide the homo-erotic quality
of those sonnets, too, so there's really
very interesting precedent for a bi-sexual Renaissance poet
to have had the bi-sexual nature of his poetry concealed
for a century or centuries.
We came out of the Victorian age, and we started putting up
these, you know, these kinds of barriers, if I can put it like that.
I think the great majority of men slept with whoever was to hand.
(LAUGHS)
And so I think Shakespeare was probably the same.
I don't think that academia
would go along with the idea
that his bi-sexuality is in any way
a hindrance to believing
that De Vere wrote the plays,
not in this day and age, no, no, no.
I don't think that's... maybe in the past,
in the Victorian age,
when all the myth of the Stratford man began.
The Victorian biographies of Shakespeare
all started the myth of the man.
They could put him on the map in the middle of the 18th century
by locating him in Stratford-on-Avon.
'One final trip into the heart of Italy remained.
De Vere and his train pointed their horses and carts south
towards Florence on December 12th. First, they had to pass through
the Duchy of Ferrara. One of its famous sons, Giraldi Cinthio,
had published a collection of short stories,
Gli Hecatommithi, 1566.
It would've been spiritual balm
to a husband pondering his wife's sexual duplicity.
The Hecatommithi recites the tale of a jealous Moor and a wife he accuses
of infidelity, a fair young wench named Desdemona.'
(EXHALES SHARPLY)
(HISSES) My life upon her faith!
'De Vere had arrived in Siena at a time of revelry.
in Italy outside of Venice and the period from Christmas to 12th night,
January 5th, was filled with celebrations, parties and plays.
Upon arriving in Siena, De Vere would have likely met the man who stood
at the centre of the Sienese theatrical world in 1576.
The 67-year-old Alessandro Piccolomini
was a Sienese philosopher/playwright widely hailed
as the prince of comic writers.
Piccolomini's academy observed a decades-long Sienese tradition
of performing his comedy The Deceived on 12th night.
The plot of The Deceived concerns a brother/sister set of twins.
The sister falls madly in love with a nobleman,
who's wasting his affections on someone else.
The sister then disguises herself as a male servant who ferries
love letters between the noble and his elusive paramour.
The twin brother, supposedly dead, arrives and straightens out
the mess by falling in love with the nobleman's paramour,
while the twin sister snatches the noble for herself.
This is also the plot of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
The cathedral in Siena was, like the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua,
a unique piece of architecture and design,
situated on the highest prominence in this hilly town.
One peculiar piece of art inside Sienna's Duomo is a circular mosaic
representing the proverbial seven ages of man.
As You like It's world traveller, Jaques, a melancholic
who sold his land to see other men's,
describes these same seven ages in a speech that famously begins,
"All the world's a stage."'
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
'After the drizzly January voyage from Siena back to De Vere's
Venetian home, a new kind of commedia dell'arte awaited him -
Venice's carnival season.'
From December 26th to the beginning of Lent
represented the city's other great annual period
of theatrical and comic activity.
Venetians from the highest born grandees to the lowest vagabonds
donned masks and performed with one another
in carnival skits and masquerades.
The Venetian carnival mask was a social equaliser
unlike anything De Vere would ever see again,
an opportunity for an English blue blood to interact with all
walks of life without the burdens of his high caste.'
So, for six months a year, about,
you could go around masked in this town.
Try to think what this means in a century like the 16th
in the Renaissance.
This was masque, I think, for a foreigner, you know?
I think this, Shakespeare would have loved.
He left us a brilliant image
of a Renaissance awareness.
He was surely one of the most important knowers of Venice
in England.
'On the day before Fat Tuesday, March 5th, 1576,
De Vere and his train packed their bags and bade farewell to the city
that yielded up so many of its riches
and unburdened the Earl of Oxford to so many of his.
Perhaps to beat the post-carnival rush, De Vere and his servants
boarded the tranect, the common ferry, and watched as Venice
floated away like an unmoored ship.
As De Vere was returning home on his way north toward Paris,
the entire country was bracing itself for bloody hostilities.
In early 1576, the King of France's younger brother Alencon,
had forged a secret alliance with protestant forces in France,
Germany and England and had secretly begun to advocate for a coup d'etat.
A cavalry division led by the German duke Jan Casimir,
had invaded the eastern provinces to assist Alencon in the uprising.
De Vere's train came across Casimir's forces, who were then based
in the eastern region of Lyon.
The Earl's encounter with the invading German prince survives
in a peculiar form - an extended encomium to De Vere
that appears in a play by the Jacobean dramatist, George Chapman.
Chapman's stoic hero is a French noble named Clermont D'Amboise,
who claims to have been present at the meeting
between De Vere and Duke Casimir.
Hamlet's final soliloquy is inspired by the puzzlement mixed with envy
he has upon seeing his rival
Fortinbras's troops march before him.'
How all occasions do inform against me
and spur my dull revenge!
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?
A beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not that capability
and god-like reason To fust in us unused.
'De Vere's meeting with Duke Casimir's army was soon followed
by a channel crossing intercepted by pirates.
As the poet, Nathaniel Baxter, who was part of De Vere's entourage,
wrote of the episode in a book of poetry from 1606 -
"Naked we landed out of Italy, Inthralled by pirates,
men of no regard; Horror and death assailed nobility,
If princes might with cruelty be scarred.
Lo! Thus are excellent beginnings hard."
De Vere was left naked, stripped to his shirt, treated miserably,
his life in danger if he hadn't been recognised by a Scotsman.
Landing at Dover on a vessel stripped by sea-faring bandits,
De Vere had stepped ashore into a swarm of questions
about Anne's daughters' paternity.
Rumours about the unknown father of Elizabeth De Vere
had spread beyond the Queen's presence chamber
and the lord treasurer's privy chamber.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding at the root of it.
Ales and sweet wines flowed liberally in an age
when clean water was a luxury.
A night of drunken marital sex in the autumn of 1574
was not out of the question.
Now that he'd returned, however, De Vere undoubtedly wanted
to resolve the controversy with minimal fanfare.
Burghley's insistence on an immediate and public display of affection
might have been designed to make that impossible.
It was, at best, surprisingly undiplomatic,
a sort of banner by the quayside proclaiming,
"Welcome home, dear cuckold."
De Vere's trusted servant, Roland Yorke, offered an alternative
that provided what must have seemed the most neutral space available
on such short notice. Roland's older brother, Edward, kept a house
in London on Walbrook, near London Stone.
Burghley later logged in his diary that De Vere was enticed
by certain lewd persons to be a stranger to his wife.'
The way in which he handled his wife,
my relative,
was very unkind.
He was brilliant and
inspiring to people on the one hand
and quite dark and difficult
and unkind in this other phase.
'If Othello's blindness to the dishonesty of his honest Iago
is in any way autobiographical,
De Vere and Yorke must have made a pitiful team
of verbally poisoned and verbal poisoner.'
Dost thou say so?
She did deceive her father, marrying you; And when she seem'd to shake
and fear your looks, She loved them most. And so she did.
Why, go to, then.
But I am much to blame.
I humbly do beseech you of your pardon
for too much loving you.
I am bound to thee for ever.
'Roland Yorke remains not only the likely immediate instigator
of De Vere's crisis but also, if rumours of De Vere's bi-sexuality
are to be believed, a possible channel
for De Vere's sexual frustrations.
As De Vere's marriage withered and shrivelled,
Yorke remained at his master's side.
It is possible that some closer relationship, be it sexually charged
or sexually sublimated, existed between the two men.
Numerous modern scholars find Othello and Iago's deadly dance of lies
and misplaced trust resonating with homosexual overtones.
De Vere would spend the rest of his life writing about the dramatic
and traumatic events of his 26th year.
Setting aside the history plays, De Vere's 26th year of life enters
into slightly less than half of the canonical works of Shakespeare.'
There is no doubt that the Earl of Oxford is the leading candidate
and has been ever since he was first proposed in 1920
by J Thomas Looney.
'He seems to have put himself in his plays
to a remarkable extent.
I mean, we see this most clearly in a play like Hamlet
which is often thought to be his most autobiographical work,
but it isn't just Hamlet.
You see this is in the character of Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost.
The married, mad-cap Lord Berowne.
I mean, Oxford was known as a wild, crazy guy.
'The same is true of Prince Hal.
Prince Hal is very much about the development
of a future king and what he was like as a young man.
And Edward de Vere was described as hanging around with all sorts
of strange characters
as Prince Hal did at the Boar's Head.'
This is not just about imagination. Genius is about much more
than imagination and authors of works
do put themselves in their works.
'Throughout the summer of 1576, De Vere continued to feud
with his in-laws and live apart from his wife.
On July 13th, De Vere wrote another letter to Burghley
from his lodging at Charing Cross in Westminster.
York House, near Charing Cross,
appears to have been where De Vere now called home.
As De Vere lamented the life he had returned to, his laments
of years past had only just appeared in print.
Edward's 1576 verse anthology The Paradise of Daynty Devices
was a bestseller. It would go through at least eight editions
into the 17th century.
All but two of De Vere's verses in The Paradise belonged to the genre
known as 'The Complaint', a form he would ultimately master
in the Shakespearean poem A Lover's Complaint.
Here is one early experiment in the form.
"I am not as I seem to be,
Nor when I smile I am not glad,
A thrall, although you count me free,
I, most in mirth, most pensive sad."
The teenager had, nevertheless, set down the first hints
of character sketches that later mature into Othello, Hamlet,
Prince Hal, Bertram and Romeo.
Taking his cue from what he'd witnessed in Venice and Siena,
he'd begin to stage his complaints in the form of commedia dell'arte,
transformed and translated for English audiences.
On a field north of the Bishops gate entrance of the City of London,
a team of entrepreneurs was just opening up the first
custom-built playhouse in England.
Two brothers-in-law named James Burbage and John Brayne had erected
an open-air building they called simply The Theatre.
The dramatic troupe that De Vere enjoyed closest access to
was the children's company of choirboys from St Paul's Cathedral.
On the evening of New Year's Day 1577, Westcott
led his troupe in a play titled The History of Error.
Here, one suspects, is a prototype of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.
De Vere was probably inviting controversy by dramatising
his own imbroglio with the house of Cecil.
The crux of the comedy, and one suspects, History of Errors,
is married into a powerful family, the chief error of the title
that never should have been.'
Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking?
Mad or well-advised? Known unto these, and to myself disguised!
I'll say as they say and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go.
'De Vere, the misunderstood husband, becomes Antipholus of Ephesus,
married to a fond fool of an impatient wife, Adriana.
The twist that turns this melodrama into a comedy is that Antipholus
has a twin brother who he doesn't know exists.
Almost every element of the Comedy of Errors' plot is stolen from
commedia dell'arte scenarios of mistaken identity.
The author performed an experiment he'd repeat many times in his career.
He has splintered himself into more than one character.
The Comedy of Errors was the author's first attempt at broaching the topic
of his, at times, pathological behaviour
towards his wife and her family. It's comedy in denial,
oblivious to its own predispositions.
An appropriate subtitle is "What? Me? Jealous?"'
That's why those works have endured and that's why we read Shakespeare
today and we don't read Jonson, we don't read Fletcher, we don't read
Beaumont, we don't read works of his contemporaries that do not have
that autobiographical element in them and those are strictly works
of fiction that are more tied to their times.
But Shakespeare was doing something new, he was experimenting with
new forms of drama, and I think he was experimenting with something
even more profound - putting his own story into his works.
Psychologically, Shakespeare's very accurate about what it means to be
a human being and what these family relationships are about and then
on a larger level what the political,
social relationships are about,
what it feels like to have a bad government, what it feels like
to have, you know, people who can, who have economic power over you.
The evening of New Year's Day, 1577,
the talents of her temperamental courtier.
A year in Italy had transformed De Vere,
26-year-old chronic pain in the arse, into a chronic pain in the arse
with an astonishing capacity for court comedy.'
She is spherical, like a globe.
I could find out countries in her.
In what part of her body stands Ireland?
Marry, sir, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
Where, England?
I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them;
but I guess it stood in her chin,
by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands? (CHUCKLES)
Oh, sir, I did not look so low.
'At Whitehall palace on shrove Tuesday, February 19th,
Westcott's boys cap the season with an encore performance for the court.
The Queen's account books list the title of Westcott's masque as,
'The history of Titus and Gisippus - an Ancient Story of Friendship.'
It is also known to be one of the two principal source texts
for Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona.'
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased.
By penitence the Eternal's wrath's appeased:
And, that my love
may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia
I give thee.
It's always been my impression that people in the theatre are forced,
for some reason or other, to express themselves behind the mask
of pretending to be someone else, whether you're an actor or a writer
because, due to shyness or some other reason. Perhaps because of
nobility or other social strictures in Shakespeare's time,
they're not able to express themselves in the more natural ways
that other people do. That obviously applies for De Vere.
There are example after example after example of complex
personal motivations overlapping with current cultural conventions
about whether someone signs their name to something.
One theory about why, even in 1623,
almost 20 years after the death of Edward de Vere,
they still could not attach his name to the works,
one theory is that the Earl of Southampton then had enough power
that he didn't want his early liaison
with Edward de Vere to become public.
I just find it, um, interesting,
the first time that the name Shakespeare appeared
it was hyphened, it was Shake-Speare
and it looked like a pseudonym.
This whole business is trying to find out the man,
the person, the living, breathing,
writing, person behind the name,
um,
and the journey is fraught and long.
De Vere himself is a threatening individual.
Shakespeare is intimidating to begin with but it's wonderful to have
a Shakespeare who wasn't anybody,
because that sort of makes him a little bit less intimidating,
he's a little bit less real, he was just a genius.
You, too, can do it, young man, or young lady, if you're a genius.
You don't have to have any special advantage, you don't have to have
good tutors, you don't have to read the best books.
When you replace that with this very troubled,
charismatic, angry,
deeply conflicted real human being,
that's a lot more difficult.
What I love about Shakespeare's plays
are the window into the psyche of a character or the soul,
let's say, in Macbeth, you know.
He's committed the murder and then he gets to have a soliloquy about,
you know, seeing the dagger floating in front of his eyes.
To me those are like great operatic moments.
'It is the poetic, theatrical,
heightened expression
that we all go to the theatre for.'
Is this a dagger which I see before me?
The handle toward my hand?
Come,
let me clutch thee.
His plays have these gems of psyche
and worlds and characters,
and that Shakespeare can live in our modern culture not just his texts
in books or his plays done as written but the inspiration
of Shakespeare is felt in our modern culture.
I think the plays are full of politics, of political satire,
of propaganda,
um, and it makes them richer
that they are not just plays
to enthral and to entertain
and to amuse and to excite
and to stir and to thrill,
they are also commentary
on life as it was being lived.
We invent it every time, we, you know, each...
there is artifice.
I mean, the paradox is that you hopefully see
authenticity in the human experience
through the artifice of the theatrical form,
'which I think is key to what Edward de Vere
as the author of the plays was wanting to get to,
was the journey of artifice
to authenticity with his characters,
with himself as a human being in his circumstances,
in his time, in is world
as a young man and as he grew older.'
I think that was the core of the author's work and that's why
it's important to know definitively it's De Vere that wrote the plays.
Unwrapping the plays from a protective kind of duvet
and like a piano cover that the Stratford case has put around them
to make them this cuddly little harmless,
provincial kind of fantasy,
taking that off and seeing that they are really, really painful plays
and they are attacking and disturbing
and confused at times and raging.
The public desire to know
about this man,
which is wholly understandable, is so great.
'Orthodox Shakespeareans must insist that it is impossible
to understand a connection
between the life of the author and the works themselves.
Their only real recourse is to say,
"It's impossible, you can't do it,
don't try to do it, forget your curiosity,
he wasn't a person like us.
He was a primitive Elizabethan,
and they didn't understand very much about psychology
and nothing that they did was ever autobiographical."
He was very much part of
the court theatrical programme,
writing for it, I believe acting in it,
because the plays do show a tremendous amount
of theatrical knowledge and I believe
that was picked up, initially
in court performances
and I know that the plays
were presented, some of the plays were presented at court before,
long before the public ever saw them.
One of the reasons why Stratfordians, as they're called,
bang on and say, "William Shakespeare was from
Stratford-upon-Avon" is because in a poem in 1623,
Ben Jonson writes, "Sweet Swan of Avon!
What a sight it were, To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza, and our James!"
Now, where on the banks of the Thames did Queen Elizabeth
and King James enjoy watching Shakespeare's plays?
The King and the Queen never went to a public theatre,
they enjoyed them at court.
And the most famous, the grandest and biggest theatre
where the Shakespeare plays were played in front of King James,
of Elizabeth, right on the banks of the Thanes was Hampton Court
and guess what, the original name for Hampton Court was Avon,
so "Sweet swan of Avon" does not mean that he came
from Stratford-upon-Avon where one of seven rivers exist called Avon.
It means he's a courtier poet, that his plays are on at Hampton Court.
Theatre was part of his blood right from...right from childhood,
um, and performing and there are indications
in the works and particularly the sonnets
that the writer had first-hand knowledge
of actually getting up on a stage, putting on a costume
and speaking lines and entertaining people.
'The Shakespeare ruse enabled De Vere to write to the end of his days
in 1604. However, the bargain was a Faustian one,
depriving De Vere of the immortality due him
for his literary accomplishments and foisting upon the world
a monumental myth.'
We've been praising the wrong man for 400 years.
If you accept the bottom line
that a writer writes primarily
about his own experiences,
his life, what motivates him,
then all that we know about De Vere
fits wonderfully, then suddenly
a person comes into focus.
'Edward de Vere died in Hackney in 1604
and was buried, as far as we know, in an unmarked grave.'
Percival Golding, who's the first cousin of Edward de Vere,
writes about him in 1619 and says,
"Edward de Vere, my wonderful, clever, noble cousin
died in Hackney and now lies buried at Westminster."
Where is Edward de Vere actually buried?
He should be here, he should be in Westminster Abbey.
Behind me here we have his wife's grave, Anne Cecil,
Countess of Oxford, his father-in-law just to the side,
we've got his cousins, Francis Vere, Horace Vere,
his son, the 18th Earl of Oxford, is buried in Westminster Abbey.
His daughters are buried here. Where is Edward de Vere?
Why isn't he here? This book is called Antiquities of Warwickshire,
By William Dugdale, who was a great antiquarian.
It was published in 1656.
It has the first published picture of Shakespeare's monument
in Stratford-upon-Avon and what is very extraordinary about this
is what we actually see is a man clutching a woolpack.
Actually, a lot of recent research has gone into discover
that Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was a big wool dealer
and that Shakespeare probably came to London for the first time -
William Shakspear of Stratford - came to London as a wool broker.
This picture of a wool dealer is endorsed by Shakspear's descendants.
Since then, someone has come along and said, "Ooh, hang on, isn't he
supposed to be a famous writer?" and shoved a quill and a piece of paper
in his hand. The epitaph on this monument has not been understood
by anybody for 400 years.
The English says, "Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed
Within this monument: Shakspear."
So, to put it very, very simply, it's asking you a question -
who is Shakespeare buried with?
Just above it are two lines of Latin and at the beginning of the second
line it says, "Terra Tegit". That means, "The Earth Covers".
Then along the top line we've got three names, three Latin names -
Udicio Pilium,
Genio Socratem, Arte Maronem.
This means, "Pilius with his judgement,
Socrates, with his genius,
Marow, (who is Virgil), with his art."
We actually have three allusions to three other people
whom Shakespeare is buried with,
and those people are:
Virgil is an allusion to Edmund Spenser.
Edmund Spenser was known as our English Virgil,
he was the English poet most connected to Virgil.
Next to him we have Genio Socratem, the genius of Socrates.
Chaucer, who is buried next to Spenser in Westminster Abbey,
is associated with the genius of Socrates.
It said on his tomb - now gone - "You have the genius of Socrates."
Next to Chaucer is buried Francis Beaumont
and Beaumont was known as Judicious Beaumont.
Who is Shakespeare buried with? It's sitting above us all that time,
nobody's noticed it, three clear allusions
to Beaumont, Chaucer and Spenser,
who are buried in exactly that line-up at Westminster Abbey.
Everything's pointing to the fact that Shakespeare is buried here,
at Westminster Abbey.
Now, he may be under that statue behind me, I may be standing on him.
He's here somewhere, it's all pointing in that direction,
so I think the next thing is for the Abbey to take this seriously
and we can start hunting for him,
because he's somewhere under our feet, here.