“Shakespeare’s Son and His Sonnets” – An Amazon Review

I’d like to share an Amazon customer review of Shakespeare’s Son and His Sonnets by my friend and colleague Peter Rush, as a way of publicly thanking him for the rave, which now follows:

In 2005 the author, Hank Whittemore, published his “monumental”, and I would say definitive, study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, entitled The Monument.  Its 900+ pages is an extended tour de force, and represents, in my opinion, and the opinion of a growing number of others, scholars and “lay” persons alike, the heretofore missing “smoking gun” that not only explains, fully and totally, the entire cycle of 154 sonnets, down to every word in every line in every sonnet, but resolves, definitively, with no room for an alternate explanation, the “Shakespeare authorship” debate, in favor of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

The present volume is the author’s teaser, intended to reveal the core of his analysis and argument, in a very readable, relatively abbreviated format, that will by virtue of a more affordable price and much shorter format, reach a much broader and more general audience.

It is to be hoped that, teased by this volume, many will recognize the need to acquire The Monument itself in order to fully appreciate, at a much deeper, far more satisfying level, dozens and dozens of sonnets they have probably never read before, and which, had they read them, they would have found them incomprehensible, but which they will now find become transparent as to meaning, which will open up the ability to appreciate the astounding poetry, rich beyond compare.

I could attempt to provide some of the actual evidence for Whittemore’s thesis in this review, but I could only begin to scratch the surface, and I couldn’t do it as well as it is done in this volume. This volume can be read in one sitting, and does the job extremely well.  I do commend people to read my review of The Monument in Aug. 2005,  the first review that comes up, for some more information on Whittemore’s revolutionary discovery.

What I do want to say is that Whittemore has identified that not only a few sonnets, as some others have correctly determined, but every single sonnet, is about the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Queen Elizabeth, and/or Oxford himself, which has importance for one reason only — that Southampton was Oxford’s unacknowledged son by Elizabeth, thus of royal blood, a potential successor to Elizabeth, requiring only that she recognize him as her bastard
son for him to become king on her death. Don’t freak out, if this is the first time you’ve heard this thesis. Trust me, when you read this book, you will see hundreds of references in the sonnets that only make sense if this hypothesis is correct. Please don’t prejudge the argument without reading the evidence for yourself.

What I can confirm is that no other attempt to explain the entire sonnet cycle by any other researcher (and only a few have even attempted to analyze all 154 in detail and as a unified corpus), comes remotely close to explaining every sonnet, much less every word and every line in every sonnet. Absent Whittemore’s brilliant analysis, the sonnets at best remain an enigmatic exercise by an acknowledged genius that continues to elude intelligible explication. Anyone with any interest in Shakespeare, the sonnets, and/or the authorship debate, must read this book.

What you will find here is a wealth of different types of evidence that matches the sonnets, one by one, to historical events in Southampton’s life through his release from imprisonment in 1603. The first 17 are entreaties to marry (anyone) in order to procreate, in order to carry on the royal line. Sonnets 27-106 start on the day Southampton was arrested for teason on Feb. 8, 1601, and end the day before he was released. 107-126 cover the days to the burial of Queen Elizabeth. 127-152 are a reprise of the imprisonment period, more briefly, focusing more on Oxford’s anger at Queen Elizabeth, the “dark lady.”

Whittemore convincingly shows who the “rival poet” is, and by establishing that Southampton was his own son, obviously solves the riddle of how/why these poems could be putative love poems to–another man!

What distinguishes The Monument from this volume is that, in addition to providing even more detail along the lines of what this book contains, The Monument provides 14-line translations of every sonnet, rendering the underlying meaning clear, and then providing, in 1-3 pages each, detailed analysis of every line, and many words and phrases, for every sonnet, and showing how the same words or concepts also have appeared in one or more plays.  One needs to read The Monument to really appreciate every sonnet. But the present volume is a wonderful introduction to the thesis, and permits understanding many of the more crucial sonnets.

The Shakespeare authorship debate is in as full a swing as it has ever been. Finally, a number of leading Stratfordians have realized that ignoring the Oxfordian argument wasn’t working for them, and they have decided they need to fight back with books of their own on the authorship debate, websites, etc.

James Shapiro signs my copy of "Contested Will" for me after giving a talk in New York City.

James Shapiro’s “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare” is just the latest book I believe to be entered in the lists (a wretched, pathetic attempt, in my opinion), and there are a number of extensive websites. In several of these, the Stratfordian side has finally attempted (I think futilely) to actually mention the arguments from the Oxfordian side, and attempt to refute them.  I mention this because, despite being available for the past five years, I have been unable to track down a single attempt by any Stratfordian to tackle Whittemore’s thesis.

I believe this fact (unless I’ve missed some analysis somewhere) is extremely telling.  Given the slowly gathering recognition by more and more people that Whittemore has found the key to both the sonnets and to the authorship issue, it seems pretty certain that had the Stratfordian side any serious argument with which to debunk Whittemore’s thesis (other than prima facie “the thesis that Southampton is QE’s son is impossible”), we would have seen it by now. Their silence speaks volumes in favor of the power of his thesis and
likelihood that Whittemore has, indeed, solved this mystery. I can only imagine that they pray every night that most people will never be able to “get over” their aversion to believing that Southampton could be QE’s bastard son by Oxford, and hence never have to confront Whittemore’s thesis on the evidence itself. If so, I believe they will find themselves sadly mistaken.

In the interests of full disclosure, I want to make known that I have become a personal friend of the author, having read an early draft of his thesis in 2000 on a listserve, when I first contacted him, and have followed his progress from tantalizing hypothesis to confirmed theory ever since. I don’t believe this taints my review. I was intrigued by his early hypothesis, and totally convinced by The Monument, his completed thesis. The present volume is wholly derivative from that 2005 book.

I also want to note a criticism of the way the book was put together, which doesn’t negatively impact the thesis, but does cry out for improvement in a second edition.  The volume reads like a compilation of three or four essays that might have been written separately and then just published together (but I don’t believet his was the case).  Transitions between some of these sections are lacking, and the effect leads to occasional repetition of points already made in an earlier section, and some jumping around of the subject matter.

Thanks to Peter Rush — and Cheers from Hank

Published in: on January 18, 2011 at 4:18 pm  Comments (1)  
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“Contested Jim” — Shapiro in New York for “Contested Will”

James Shapiro spoke to an audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Sunday, May 2, 2010, about his book Contested Will and his argument that those of us who question the attribution of the “Shakespeare” works to William of Stratford are, well, not quite right in the head.

Hank Whittemore and James Shapiro, author of "Contested Will," at the 92nd Street Y in New York

Jim Shapiro is a likeable guy even as he wields the ol’ blade, with a smile, to cut us into pieces — his victims including Henry James, Mark Twain, Orson Wells, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, and dozens of other whackos who believe that a writer writes from his own mind and heart, so that knowing about his life can help us understand the meaning of his work.

I attended with Ted Story, co-writer and director of my performance in the one-man show Shake-speare’s Treason.  I performed it in November 2008 at the Globe in London, where Shapiro was in the audience.  At the time he was still researching his book, wherein he gets to the pivotal point of his argument on page 264, by bringing up my book The Monument, which demonstrates that the Sonnets of 1609 contain a real-life personal and political story, linked with real events of contemporary English history leading to the death of Queen Elizabeth I on March 24, 1603 and the succession of James VI of Scotland as King James I of England.

Hank Whittemore with James Shapiro, who signed a copy of his book

Here is Shapiro’s pivotal point:

“The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the plays and poems, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  And every step scholars have taken toward such readings has encouraged their adversaries to make even speculative claims. The recent publication of Hank Whittemore’s Oxfordian reading of the Sonnets, The Monument, offers a glimpse of  where things may be heading. Even other Oxfordians (as William Boyle, editor of Shakespeare Matters, put it when news of Whittemore’s book first circulated) saw that they were ‘undoubtedly journeying into new territory,’ one that was both ‘controversial—and risky.’  The Sonnets  could now be read not as primarily fictional creations but as  ‘documentary evidence every bit as important and potent as any letters, any or anything to be found in the Calendar of State Papers.  In fact, in some instances the Sonnets provide historical information that exists nowhere else.'”

My colleague Bill Boyle had it right – the amazing revelation about the Sonnets is that they were written to preserve an important story for those of us living in posterity.  In a nutshell, the winners of the political struggle to control the royal succession also got to control the official record and, therefore, the writing of the history – “History is written by the winners,” as George Orwell put it in 1944 – but Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford, before his death in June 1604, completed the “monument” of the private Sonnets to preserve the truth for “eyes not yet created” in the distant future:

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read.
Sonnet 81

And one big aspect of this truth involved the burial of the “name” or identity of the real author of the poems and plays and sonnets:

My name be buried where my body is
Sonnet 72

Try showing up at the Y and telling THAT to the group!

But try to keep telling students of this generation, and of those to come, that only the greatest writer of them all cannot be found in his work, and that we don’t need to know the man to understand his writings!

Here’s a secret:  Oxford poured his life into every corner of it!

Oh – on page 269, Shapiro writes, “Those who believe that Elizabethan plays were autobiographical ought to be able to show that contemporaries were on the lookout for confessional allusions.”  Well, the family of chief minister Polonius, which includes his daughter Ophelia and her suitor Hamlet, is a mirror image of the family of chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, which includes his daughter Anne Cecil and her husband Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who, by means of confessional allusions in the play ‘Hamlet,’  gave us an intimate portrait of his life within that family and his emotional reactions to it.

Cheers from Hank

(Photos by Ted Story)

Published in: on May 6, 2010 at 4:05 pm  Comments (3)  
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Contesting “Contested Will” – Part One

James Shapiro reaches the climax of his new book Contested Will in the epilogue, where – lo! – he recounts attending my performance of Shake-speare’s Treason (based on The Monument) in November of 2008 at the Globe playhouse in London.

His point, by page 267, is that it’s simply wrong to try to learn anything of substance about the man who was William Shakespeare, either from the documents about his life in Stratford and London or from his poems, plays and sonnets.  All is speculation, virtually all of it off the mark.

The first and foremost culprits are not those who dare to doubt that Will of Stratford was “Shakespeare,” but, rather, traditional Stratfordians, who have attempted to fashion flesh-and-blood portraits of the Bard by linking aspects of his recorded life to elements of his work and vice versa.

This practice has resulted in puffed-up fictions posing as biographies; these scholars should stop doing it, not only because they keep serving up baloney but also because they encourage anti-Stratfordians to keep doing the same thing for their own candidates, such as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

And since the Oxfordians have so much more biographical evidence from which to pick and choose, they will keep on winning.  Even now, with the coming of Roland Emmerich’s feature film Anonymous about Oxford as Shakespeare (with Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth), due out in 2011, the tide of public acceptance may even turn in their favor!

Queen Elizabeth I and Vanessa Redgrave

Shapiro’s solution is extraordinary and courageous and perhaps, in the long run, even foolish:  Let us have no more biographies of Shakespeare!  No more attempts to look in the plays and poems and sonnets to find any reflections of his real life!   Let us stop thinking entirely of Shakespeare the man, before it’s too late!

Such is the problem when you start with the wrong man in the first place!

He criticizes Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard for giving his “seal of approval” for the autobiographical approach with his bestselling Will in the World. Others have erred this way as well, he goes on, admitting that even “I flinch when I think of my own trespasses in classrooms and in print, despite my best efforts to steer clear of biographical speculation.”

Shapiro writes:

“The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the plays and poems, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  And every step scholars have taken toward embracing such readings has encouraged their adversaries to make even more speculative claims.  The recent publication of Hank Whittemore’s Oxfordian reading of the Sonnets, The Monument, offers a glimpse of where things may be heading…

“In November 2008, I joined ninety or so people gathered at London’s Globe Theatre to hear Whittemore share his work.  It turned out to be an elegant revival of the Prince Tudor theory….”

Here he offers a concise (and accurate) summary of the story of the Sonnets as set forth in The Monument and dramatized in Shake-speare’s Treason, which I performed at the Globe at the invitation of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust led by the brilliant actor Mark Rylance, who had been the Globe’s artistic director for a decade.

“It was a spellbinding performance,” Shapiro writes, “as perfect a marriage of conspiratorial history and autobiographical analysis as one could imagine.”

Conspiratorial?  You mean the way President Kennedy privately hosted Marilyn Monroe in the swimming pool of the White House and no agent, no aide, no one at all, ever told about it?  Hmmm, just think of all the people who had to be “in on it” and who had to “agree to be silent.”  Hmmm.

In both the book and the show (co-written with director Ted Story), I simply put together the heretofore separate tracks of the literature and the history.  I show how the central 100-verse sequence of the Sonnets fits within the context of the Essex Rebellion of 1601 and its aftermath, that is, with the ordeal of the Earl of Southampton in the Tower until the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of James.  There’s no need to alter either the sonnets or the recorded events of contemporary history; instead, they are brought together in this framework for the first time, where they fit without any trouble, yielding a third dimension – the true story of why Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford agreed to the obliteration of his identity as Shakespeare even after his death, as he states:

My name be buried where my body is – Sonnet 72

I, once gone, to all the world must die – Sonnet 81

What bothers Shapiro most may be that Oxfordians – in this case, specifically The Monument & Shake-speare’s Treason – unfold a better story than even the most fantasy-driven biographies of the Stratfordians:

“If the enthusiastic response of the audience that evening was any indication, Oxfordian concerns about the riskiness of Whittemore’s approach were misplaced.  I looked around the room and saw the same kind of people – middle-aged, sensibly dressed, middle-class – who regularly attend lectures about Shakespeare, nodding their heads in agreement and laughing aloud at the funny parts.  I found it all both impressive and demoralizing…”

Does he sound a tad defeated here?  Well, not yet.  At this stopping point, I’ll let him have the last word:

“I found it all both impressive and demoralizing, a vision of a world in which a collective comfort with conspiracy theory, spurious history, and construing fiction as autobiographical fact had passed a new threshold.”

Well, that’s one way to put it!

In Part Two we dig a little deeper…

Published in: on April 20, 2010 at 9:50 pm  Comments (4)  
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The End of the Authorship Question – Not!

Anticipating James Shapiro’s defense of Stratfordian virtue (and anti-Stratfordian lunacy) in his book Contesting Will, due this spring, I figured it would be wise to finally read through The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea.

The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question (Not!) - by Scott McCrea

The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question (Not!) - by Scott McCrea

As the title indicates, this was supposed to be a knockout punch, the final blow to those of us who are very much involved in the Question; but lo, four years after its 2005 publication, here we are!  Stubborn, ain’t we!

Well, I did read McCrea’s book very carefully and for some reason it was quite enjoyable, perhaps because of the feeling that I actually understand his point of view; or, I should say, I find it normal even though naive.  He spends time knocking down certain arguments used by some Oxfordians and other anti-Stratfordians – arguments with which I myself disagree; and also sets up fabricated or conveniently weak arguments or “straw men” to be easily slain.

For now I’ll touch on just one example: that McCrea apparently assumes that most if not all Oxfordians believe that Shakspere of Stratford acted as a “front man” during the 1590’s onward, somehow convincing everyone that he, yes, he, was the great poet-dramatist.  Well, I’ve never believed such a silly thing.  What I do believe is that “William Shakespeare” was a pen name used by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and that most contemporaries were unaware of this.

Will, if this is you, tell the truth: you never acted as a "front man" for the real author, did you?!

Will, if this is you, tell the truth: you never acted as a "front man" for the real author, did you?!

Even Shakspere of Stratford was unaware of it! In my view  all the contemporary tributes and references to Shakespeare the writer were by those who assumed that the name was real but knew nothing else about him, much less that he was actually the Earl of
Oxford.

This is a common experience, after all.  We read the names of authors and playwrights and screenwriters and poets every day and have no idea who they are, what they look like, where they live and so on.  Out of the last dozen movies you’ve seen, how many of the screen writers can you name?  If you heard a name and it was new to you, how curious were you to find out more about him or her?

How many folks knew - or cared to know - the identity of the man who was "Trevanian," a pen name?

How many folks knew - or cared to know - the identity of the man who was "Trevanian," a pen name?

You know of the author “Trevanian,” no doubt.  He was finally identified —  but how many readers are aware of it?  How many cared a hoot about it?  [“Trevanian” was the pen name of American author Dr. Rodney William Whitaker: June 12, 1931- Dec 14, 2005; see Wikipedia on this.  Was it a “conspiracy”?  Of course not.]

Some of you have heard about the playwright Jane Martin of Louisville, yes?  Here’s a link to a short essay entitled, A Two Decade Old Mystery: Who is Jane Martin?

The piece starts this way: “It is a mystery that has confounded the theatre community for over two decades. Who is Jane Martin? She has produced over ten full length plays, six one-acts, and numerous shorts.  She has been nominated for the Pulitzer prize, and won the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award twice. Yet, she has not made one public appearance. There are no interviews. No pictures. No sightings. Nothing. She has been called ‘America’s best known unknown playwright…”

A play by "Jane Martin" - a pen name

A play by "Jane Martin" - a pen name

Here’s from Wikipedia’s entry:

“Jane Martin is the pen-name of a playwright speculated to be retired Actors Theatre of Louisville artistic director Jon Jory.  Jon Jory, Martin’s spokesperson, denies being Jane Martin but has directed the premieres of Martin’s shows.  Martin has traditionally been billed as a Kentucky playwright. While speculation about her identity centers around Jory, other theories have cited former Actors Theatre of Louisville Executive Director Alexander Speer, former Actors Theatre Literary Manager Michael Bigelow Dixon, and former intern Kyle John Schmidt…”

Sounds like the authorship debate!  Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon… Well, you get the picture.  EVEN NOW in the 21st century, with all our technical miracles, we have folks referring to a playwright by his or her PEN NAME without knowing, or caring, about anything else.  Any of us could write a tribute — “O Jane Martin, you are a great dramatist!” — without having a clue about Jane’s identity.  In fact, people pay tribute to Jane all the time!

Such was the case of the pen name “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare,” suggesting a warrior shaking the spear of his pen…

I should stop here for now.  But let’s put it to rest: the wiser sort among us “heretics,” as McCrea routinely calls Oxfordians and those supporting other claimants, have understood that Will of Stratford was never a “front man” or “stand-in” who was posing or acting as the man to eventually be regarded as the greatest writer the world has known. But I must admit that some of my colleagues in the “heresy” camp do, in fact, entertain that nonsensical notion.

(Of course Will was in fact a real individual, a businessman, and in a future blog I’ll describe my version of his entry into this history as well as the role he played up to, and after,his death in 1616. And I’ll take up the matter of Ben Jonson’s testimony at the same time, since, as a matter of fact, Ben and Will go together…)

Castle Hedingham in Essex, England, birthplace of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Castle Hedingham in Essex, England, birthplace of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

The fact is that Edward de Vere was a central figure behind the great growth of literature and drama in England up to the victory over the Spanish armada in 1588, after which he went “underground,” while “Shakespeare” emerged in 1593 as the printed name for an author whose contemporary sources were nearly all associated personally, on the record, with Oxford.   That’s a fact, a verifiable fact, and it’s much more interesting and meaningful than the last dozen biographies of the Stratfordian Shakespeare put together!  Beyond that, it’s the truth.

McCrea’s overall problem, which I’ll get to in one of these blogs about his book that has “ended” the authorship question (Not!), is that he’s holding onto a mythical figure with no more physical reality than Santa Claus.

He thinks we’re pulling a “con job” by separating the Stratford man’s recorded life from the documented history of the “Shakespeare” name — but McCrea himself would never have connected the two on his own, certainly not during Will’s lifetime, since the words “Sweet Swan of Avon” and “Stratford moniment” (correct spelling) in the First Folio came later in 1623. (Even then few if any readers would have connected those two phrases, which were in separate eulogies.)

Near the very end of his book McCrea states:  “We can try to make sense of the world and make decisions based on reason, or we can cling to our prejudices.  We can defend our wrong ideas to the death or be open to the possibility of changing our minds.”

Well, Scott, most Oxfordians including myself were once Statfordians; we tried to make sense of the facts we were given and to make decisions about them based on reason; we did not cling to our ‘prejudices’ or ideas that had been ingrained in us; we did not try to defend those old knee-jerk ideas to the death; instead, without being conspiracy nuts or snobs or misguided con men, we were open to the possibility of changing our minds — and when we learned about a Hamlet-like nobleman named Oxford whom no college professor had ever told us about, in fact we did begin to change our minds … and we are still on that exciting adventure, learning, discussing, debating, researching, having the time of our lives … and I suggest you come on over and try it with the possibility of changing your mind!

Cheers from Hank

Published in: on October 15, 2009 at 9:13 pm  Comments (2)  
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