Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog

An obvious link in the chain of evidence connecting Edward de Vere to “Shakespeare” is the similarity of his and Hamlet’s family relationships:

Queen Gertrude as played by Glenn Close

Gertrude is the mother of Hamlet, while Elizabeth was the legal mother of Oxford, when he was her ward.

Polonius as played by Eric Porter

Polonius is chief adviser to Gertrude, while Burghley (William Cecil) was chief adviser to Elizabeth.

Hamlet is engaged to young Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, while Oxford became engaged to young Anne Cecil, daughter of Burghley.

Ophelia as played by Helena Bonham Carter

Ophelia’s older brother, Laertes, goes off to Paris, his behavior causing great distress to his father, who recites the famous “precepts” to him as guidance. Anne’s eldest brother, Thomas Cecil, went off to Paris, his behavior causing great distress to his father, Burghley, who wrote him long letters full of wise “precepts” as guidance. Later he would also write his famous precepts to son Robert Cecil.

Claudius, who fatally poisons Hamlet’s father and marries the prince’s mother the queen, thereby becoming king, reflects Elizabeth’s lover Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was suspected of many poisonings. Oxford may have concluded that Leicester had caused the death by poisoning of his own father, John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford.

In Hamlet, the Shakespeare play carrying the most autobiographical tone of them all, we find the main character in virtually the same web of family relationships at court as Edward de Vere.  Traditional scholars may ask rhetorically, “Well, now, you’re not claiming this as proof that Oxford wrote Hamlet, are you?” We might reply, “No, of course not, but doesn’t this give you a little queasy feeling in the gut?  Don’t you have the slightest tremor of doubt that Will of Stratford could have, or would have, written such a play?  Do you think this mirror image of family relationships can be mere coincidence?”

James Shapiro of Columbia University argues in Contested Will that “such claims about representing on the public stage some of the most powerful figures in the realm betray a shallow grasp of Elizabethan dramatic censorship.”  He adds that Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, “whose job it was to read and approve all dramatic scripts before they were publicly performed, would have lost his job – and most likely his nose and ears, if not his head, had he approved a play that so transparently ridiculed privy councilors past and present.”

Perhaps it is Shapiro himself who betrays a shallow grasp of what is really happening on the public stage. The author himself supplies a further clue to this when an exasperated Polonius, speaking of Hamlet, tells Gertrude: “He will come straight.  Look you lay home to him.  Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with, and that your Grace hath screened and stood between much heat and him.” Hamlet-Oxford has taken too many liberties, unbearably so, but nonetheless the queen has protected him from “much heat” and/or reprisals by government officials [such as Tilney] and his enemies at court.

Otherwise, Shapiro is right: not only Tilney but also the playwright surely would have lost his head … if he had been Shakspere of Stratford!

(This post, with great help from editor Alex McNeil, is now No. 9 of 100 Reasons Shake-speare was the Earl of Oxford)