Michael Dudley — The Bard Identity: Becoming an Oxfordian

“What difference does it make who wrote the plays and poems of Shakespeare?”

This is the question that is inevitably asked whenever the debate about Shakespeare’s identity arises in conversation or in the mass media. In this video, I take this otherwise rhetorical question seriously, seeking a phenomenological understanding of the journey from skepticism in the traditional biography of Shakespeare to belief that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the poet-playwright, and how this belief affects one’s experience of the canon.

An interpretive reading of fifty recently-published personal essays by self-identified “Oxfordians” suggests that an expansive experience of Shakespeare’s works obtains when viewed as de Vere’s writing, one that can intersect significantly with one’s sense of self. Using a framework for mapping the phenomenology of paradigm shifts, the essay uncovers novel cognitive, affective and conative (sense of purpose) responses to Shakespeare, in particular a strong sense of empathy for the author otherwise difficult under the traditional attribution.

The essays in question were all published since November 2015 on the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship (SOF) website, as part of its ongoing feature “How I Became an Oxfordian” in which members of the SOF are invited to submit 500-word personal essays recounting their own shifts in beliefs. To date, the Fellowship has published more than 50 of these essays, and they provide a rich and remarkable window into the lived experience of those who question the Shakespeare of tradition and have embraced instead an Oxfordian Shakespeare.

While there are of course variations in the narratives of the Oxfordian experience, we can draw some generalizable characteristics. The Oxfordian essayists initially feel alienated from an intellectual and cultural environment characterized by what they feel to be ritual, inert knowledge which is maintained and reinforced by a dominant majority. Faced with such a significant discontinuity regarding something they otherwise treasure, they suffer cognitive and emotional dissonance. Eventually some catalyzing event, most often an encounter with a key Oxfordian text helps them gain a critical awareness that they can no longer tolerate the status quo, and so they begin to move away from this Stratfordian model towards the Oxfordian one. Eventually (and sometimes all at once) a threshold point is reached and the previous unsatisfying, dissonant state is irreversibly abandoned as the essayists find a rewarding, transcendent experience with their authentic selves and a community of similarly-motivated individuals. The Shakespeare canon takes on new significance and coherence, and in their renewed enthusiasm for the poet-playwright, the Oxfordian is inspired to discover all they can and to contribute to the cause of promoting De Vere as the author, often through creative means.

These essays are at their core fundamentally concerned with their authors’ experience of crossing thresholds: their disbelief, dissatisfaction or trouble comprehending the works of Shakespeare disappear suddenly when they discover and integrate the knowledge of Oxford-as-Shakespeare. What is most significant in this analysis is that the coherence and sense-making afforded by the Oxfordian model unleashes a level of empathy unavailable to the reader wedded to the Stratfordian mythology. In the place of the remote, god-like paragon of “natural genius,” the national poet against whom all must be compared and whom none can approach, the Oxfordian reader comes to know, understand and profoundly empathize with the author.

Yes, it really does make a difference to understand who wrote the plays.

This talk was presented at Winnipeg Public Library on January 31, 2018.

For more on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, visit ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org.