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.

[@a_lucientes]

_When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change._

[@rameyzamora1018]

Discovering Oxfordianism has made me finally trust the Shakespeare plays & sonnets - before this they all seemed cryptic & pompous & incongruous. I couldn't relax into the poetry or the stories. Now I understand what rich background the works actually have, & how understandable they can be.

[@emmabradford1740]

same

[@johnwarner3968]

A wonderful and revealing talk. Shakespeare comes alive and has deeper meaning when read with the biography of Edward de Vere in mind. I’m an Oxfordian.

[@neilwilkes]

As am I thanks to Alexander Waugh's wonderful presentations.

[@webpilot71]

Wow, that was outstanding! On a visceral level, I knew that the truth mattered. This discussion did a great job of illuminating the reasons why.

[@andspecialjellies]

A fantastic talk. Maps out the experiential territory that one traverses on the journey from unquestioning Bardolator to enquiring doubter, to the 'Eureka' moments that cluster in profusion once the right author is put front and centre. It is precisely this experience that gives Oxfordians their passion, commitment and outreach.

[@adolforosado]

The difference between knowing and not, is of absolute importance since the works contain a coded message at many levels.

[@crd4243]

The lecturer deserves ten times more applause!

[@lesleyh4437]

What a brilliant talk, thank you so much.

[@daniellemcneill4870]

This was fantastic! Thank you! So well done 👍

[@michaelrg3836]

That 10 thousand hour theory about acquiring a skill is offended by the idea that Shakespeare never had to travel/study/read because he was a genius. Besides I live in hope of seeing Stanley Wells' smirk wiped off his Stratfordian face!

[@wynnsimpson]

Excellent talk. More please!

[@marymcgonigal9087]

A very enjoyable and informative talk, clear and balanced, good to listen to. Thank you.

[@richardwaugaman1505]

Excellent, Michael!

[@wayneferris9022]

Well done.

[@Santu7220]

This study is an interesting concept. I am looking forward to more updates to understand how the current situation has impacted the experience; do people feel more need for safety in their own identity hence more rigid or are more people more open?

[@jamesbassett1484]

Stratfordianism is, basically, a religion.

[@adolforosado]

The collective work of John Dee, Sir Edward De Vere and Sir Francis Bacon mainly but there are others. The Bard never even wrote a letter that we can find. Good day.

[@countvlad8845]

A paradigm shift? Maybe for those religiously inclined. My skepticism still allows me middle ground... in part, because I don't know Stratford's claims.

[@lookmath4974]

14:06 The gravedigger is the only person in Hamlet who is as witty as Hamlet. He's the hero of the play. And what about Falstaff? He's the most clever character in Shakespeare. And then there are the fools in Lear and Twelfth Night.

[@peterfrengel3964]

"Hero of the play" may be a bit much. The gravedigger's wit is like a hammer, plodding and simple, while Hamlet's wit soars. SIR John Falstaff was not a commoner. The fools are wonderful characters, but I'm not sure what social class they would come from to have such access to the courts of nobility. Look at Bardolph, Pistol, Nym, Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Dogberry, Verges, and in Hamlet, his disdain for Osiric, a wealthy landowner, but one not of very noble birth, is clear. Hamlet even puts down the gravedigger for not knowing his place, saying, "the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe." Coriolanus is disgusted by the lower classes. The characterization of the common rabble in Julius Caesar is brutal. Macbeth compares low born men to mongrels, not well bred dogs. The mechanicals in Midsummer are mocked. etc etc Sadly, I have to agree that the author of the plays was a classist snob!

[@rstritmatter]

The fool characters are the author's alter ego. Oversimplification, but basically right on.

[@bimbo-yw6ny]

many plays are politics, so it would be better to know who wrote, unfortunately there s not only de vere, but other writers involved...

[@dumcasta9327]

um... how do you account for the Scottish Play, which clearly references the 'Treatise of Equivocation' =Gunpowder Plot=James1 = Oxford already dead?

[@rstritmatter]

Um, how does it reference the Treatise of Equivocation? This is a myth. Equivocation had been a controversial doctrine since the 1560s, and there is no language common to two texts and requires one to assume Shakespeare read Garnet's Treatise. Also, the MS was written in 1598. So your argument fails on every point, even before we get to the influence of the 1567 murder of Darnley on the Scot's play or begin exploring all the larger circumstances of de Vere's authorship, now attested in over 9,000 books and articles.

[@andy-the-gardener]

but how do you account for the stratford guy writing anything at all. even if your 'problem' was not easily debunked by oxfordians, as has been done here, the problems with the stratford hypothesis are immeasurably greater than for the oxfordian hypothesis. so much so as to make it laughable that a stratfordian would dare pick holes with the oxfordian case. even if no smoking gun is never found, [and theres good reason to think it has, in the second paragraph of the sonnets dedication, which is an anagram of 'nothing truer than truth' in latin, something that would never occur by chance in so few letters], there is still more than enough evidence to make the oxfordian hypothesis the default historical position.

[@jennifermcclean1308]

Or Shakespeare is the British version of the Bible... and is a composite work..

[@myersred8]

It seems to me to be a bit heavy handed to say that because Oxford might have been one of the sources of the plays that came to be ascribed to Shakespeare that therefor Shakespeare had nothing to do with the production of the plays. I believe that Shakespeare probably had material written by Oxford but he curated it in such a manner that was distinctively Shakespearean. He must have been notorious for the overall nature of his productions, the way he marshaled and reworked consistently very high quality scripts and coached delivery and choreography and managed staging and costumes. I don't think of Shakespeare plays as the product of a single person sitting down with a pen and composing the words we read today. I see him as a uniquely ingenious conductor of an orchestra of helpers. The biggest problem with saying "Shakespeare didn't write this" is that it must rely on too narrow a version of what it means to "write" a play. Otherwise, why no outcry when the first folio came out? Surely there would have been objections lodges by people who were old enough to have known if the plays had not in fact been produced by someone named Shakespeare. Saying Oxford wrote the Shakespeare plays, to me, is like saying Chuck Berry ("You Can't Catch Me") is the real author of the Beatle's song "Come Together."

[@vetstadiumastroturf5756]

It's not a religion.