“Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time”, by Joseph Sobran

311 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-0684826585

Pop Quiz: what do Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, Charlie Chaplin, Vladimir Nabokov, Mortimer Adler, John Gielgud, Lewis F. Powell, Harry Blackmun, Orson Welles, John Paul Stevens, Derek Jacobi, Michael York and Kenneth Branagh all have in common?  Give up? Quitter. They all believed that William Shakespeare was a pseudonym for Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford. In Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time, Joseph Sobran attempts to demonstrate that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and William Shakespeare the Playwright of the Globe (see what I did there?) could not possibly have been one-and-the-same. The burgher from Stratford who became an occasional actor and an investor in a London playhouse appears, to Sobran and all other Oxfordians, to have had neither the schooling nor the experience of the world to have written the most spellbinding and sophisticated dramas produced in the English language. Nor did he have, Sobran assumes, the essential aristocratic and erudite contacts to have been able to write so knowledgeably about law courts, literary antecedents and the lives of the nobility, for while Sobran purports to match lines of the Shakespeare plays to an overwhelming number of individuals and experiences from the life of de Vere, he can find no corresponding connections to William Shakespeare – or, I guess, “William Shakespeare”. Declares sage Sobran: “Oxford seems to have known everyone Mr. Shakespeare should have known if he was Shakespeare”. To clinch the matter, Sobran finds no sources for the famous plays emerging after the Earl’s death in June 1604. Hmmmmm…where shall we begin? Okay, how ‘bout here:

• Why the absence of any contemporary documentary evidence that Oxford wrote the plays? Did nobody in his contemporary circle ever sniff him out?
• If they did figure out de Vere’s little secret, why did they keep mum? Were they threatened? Were they blackmailed? Were they murdered?
• Are there any bibliographic ties betwixt the good Earl’s handwriting and the spellings in the folios and quartos of the canon? Any unusual spellings common to both?
• How about the fallacy – nay, lunacy – of treating literary documents as objective sources of evidence? 
• How about the arrogance of charging the other side with rhetorical cheap shots, and then using rhetorical (not logical, evidentiary) methods to push Oxford's case?
• Why has the alleged identification always faded before? Why were there no contemporary claims? 
• The earl may have wanted to conceal his connection with a money-grubbing trade, but why, in a lively press, did no gossips expose, even posthumously, the stand-in for his imposture?

This book, like all of the books I have read on this subject, is an ideological gem: it takes an assumption (Shakespeare’s work MUST match his life) and then, absent hard evidence, creates a lovely theory-world of intrigue, conspiracy and undercover writing. While not much is known about the gentleman Shakespeare, through those gaps Sobran merrily (and sometimes meanly) drives his conspiracy bus onward, gaining clueless passengers as they ride to the land where naughty earls handpicked country illiterates to front the greatest literary works in our language; the literary equivalent of Oliver Stone. Just why do the Oxfordians believe that a non-nobleman could never have written these? They were too erudite? What about the mistakes found in the plays, some real whoppers? I’ll leave you with one example: over the course of The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, husband to Paulina, the loyal friend to Hermione, abandons a child on the coast of Bohemia, reporting that Hermione appeared to him in a dream and bade him name the girl Perdita. He leaves a fardel (a bundle) by the baby containing gold and other trinkets which suggest that the baby is of noble blood. A violent storm suddenly appears, wrecking the ship on which Antigonus arrived. He wishes to take pity on the child, but is chased away in one of Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions: “Exit, pursued by a bear”. My point? Bohemia is the modern-day Czech Republic…a land-locked country that NOBODY could have been shipwrecked on, something you would think a Peer of the Realm would know but a detail a guy from BFE Stratford-upon-Avon would get wrong.