Words, Words, Words: A More Accurate Understanding of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare by James Warren

During the past decade, while conducting research for Shakespeare Revolutionized and other articles, Jim Warren came across several dozen words or short phrases used in telling the story of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare that have been misconstrued. Here he presents some two dozen of them, along with brief explanations of their real meaning in the context of the times. It concludes by tying all the words and phrases together in a short, coherent restatement of the authorship story.

One example: Sidney and Oxford are described as “rivals for the hand of Anne Cecil” (Ward, 283). However, Sidney didn’t court Anne as a rival to Oxford or anyone else. His guardian, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and Anne’s father arranged a marriage for them in 1569 when Sidney was only 15 and Anne only 12. Fifteen-year-old boys simply don’t court and seek to marry 12-year-old girls. As well, Oxford didn’t become engaged to Anne until two years later, in July, 1571.

Such misunderstandings came about, perhaps, because of inappropriately applying literary evidence to real-life events, showing that great care is needed when reading de Vere’s life into the plays or when applying situations in the plays to his life.

Bio: James A. Warren is the author of Shakespeare Revolutionized: The First Hundred Years of J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified (2021). As an editor and publisher, he has issued new editions of 16 books and collections of hundreds of articles by the first generations of Oxfordian scholars, including J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified (2018) and “Shakespeare” Revealed: The Collected Articles and Published Letters of J. Thomas Looney (2019). His new hardback edition of Bernard M. Ward’s The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford 1550-1604 was issued earlier this year, and his novel on an Oxfordian theme, Summer Storm: A Novel of Ideas, was published in 2016. He has given presentations at more than a dozen Oxfordian conferences, and in 2020 was named the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s Oxfordian of the Year. His interest in the authorship question developed more than a decade ago, at about the time he retired from the U.S. Department of State, where he had served as a career diplomat.

Learn more at https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/