Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog

Shakespeare was obsessed with truth.  In his works he used the word “truth” at least 309 times and “true” no less than 766 times, with “truer” and “truest” and “truths” about three dozen times – well over a thousand usages of those five individual words.

Pallas Athena, a.k.a. the Goddess of Truth

Equally obsessed with truth was Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford, starting with his earldom motto Nothing Truer than Truth.  So similar are “Shakespeare” and Oxford, in this respect, that I list “truth” as another reason to believe they were one and the same.

The similarity is not just in terms of quantity but also of how “truth” is used by “Shakespeare” and by Oxford in writings under his own name.  For example, in the Shakespearean plays the phrase “truth is truth” appears three times – in King John (act 1, scene 1); in Love’s Labour’s Lost (act 4, scene 1); and in Measure for Measure (act 5, scene 1), when Isabella says: “It is not truer he is Angelo than this is all as true as it is strange:  Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth to the end of reckoning.”

Oxford wrote to Robert Cecil on May 7, 1603, several weeks after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of King James:  “But I hope truth is subject to no prescription, for truth is truth though never so old, and time cannot make that false which was once true.”

In my view Oxford not only wrote Shakespeare’s Sonnet 123, but he did so within the same period — just a few days before Elizabeth’s funeral on April 28, 1603, expressing the same theme: “NO!  Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change … Thy registers and thee I both defy … For thy records, and what we see, doth lie … This I do vow, and this shall ever be:/ I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.” [Yes, his opening “NO!” is capitalized with an exclamation point in the original 1609 quarto.]

Given such a similarity between those words in Oxford’s letter and the words of Shakespeare’s sonnet, how can anyone fail to consider that both might have been written by the same man?

Shakespeare believed that even though the “winners” [of political power struggles] would write the history for future generations, the truth will eventually come out – and certainly that was his overall objective for the sonnet sequence … a “monument … which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read.” (81)

The Merchant of Venice (act 2, scene 2): “Give me your blessing; truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man’s son may, but at length truth will out.”

The Rape of Lucrece (stanza 135): “Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,/ To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.”

Oxford to Robert Cecil in January 1602, in eerily similar words: “But now time and truth have unmasked all difficulties.”

Shakespeare’s obsession with truth is evident in Sonnet 82: “Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathized/ In true plain words by thy true-telling friend.”

Troilus and Cressida (act 3, scene 2): “Yet after all comparisons of truth,/ As truth’s authentic author to be cited,/ ‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse/ and sanctify the numbers.”  [The author refers to his 154 numbered sonnets as “my numbers.”]

So this is Reason No. 42 to believe Oxford was “truth’s authentic author.”