["Shaksper" is the Stratford businessman/London actor. So is "Stratford Willy" - I'm not convinced that the spelling of his surname matters that much.
"de Vere" is Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
"Shakespeare" is the playwright, whoever he was.]

> -the backgrounds of the two men are an obvious point to consider. Shaksper was most likely trained
> in the Stratford Grammar school, where he would have been taught highly subjective information.

But, of course, we have no proof of that. No record of any kind remains regarding where or how Stratford Willy was educated, and guesses don't really count toward either side of the argument, do they?

> we have no evidence that he ever read or wrote anything except for 6 signatures on various legal
> documents, all of which (the documents) were written by other people.

All of which, as a point of interest, were written at the tail end of his life, *after* Shakespeare stopped writing.

Some people would say that this just proves the point, because surely he'd be a good writer by now.
Others would say: what if Shakespeare retired because he was in some kind of accident, injured his hand or something?

Just a thought.

> -de Vere was tutored by the man who translated Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, the book that has the
> most influence, next to the Bible, on Shakespeare's plays.

Cite?

> he travelled extensively

Did Stratford Willy not?

> and had connections with the English court,

Did Stratford Willy not?

> as well as 2 master's degrees and background in law.

Why is a background in law important?

> -Shakespeare would have been the ideal nom de plume for de vere. the de vere coat of arms had a
> lion shaking a spear on it,

So say the people who want de Vere to be Shakespeare.

"How do you know he's not just holding it?" say I. "His arm isn't moving."

> a prominent scholar once said to de vere "...thy *will shakes spears*", the goddess of the theater,
> Pallas Athena, was referred to as the spear-shaker.

An interesting run of coincidences.
But they could be just coincidences.

> a book of poetry published by the royal court, in which they refered to several men of the court who
> wrote poetry without their own names, and said edward de vere was the best of these.

Cite?

> -we DO have several things written by de vere. from the things we have, de vere's vocabulary was
> 98% the same as shakespeare's.

Hmm. A bit dubious.

> -in all of elizabethan writing, the phrase "I am that I am," as said by God, can only be found in
> Sonnet 121 and one of de Vere's letters.

Also a bit dubious.

I'm pretty sure we don't have access to "all of Elizabethan writing", really.

> -while de Vere's daughter was engaged to the Earl of Southampton, two of Shakespeare's plays
> were dedicated to the Southampton family.

In extremely sycophantic terms totally unsuitable for a dedication from an Earl to someone his junior in years and status.

> -_A Midsumemr Night's Dream_ was first performed at the marriage of another of de Vere's
> daughter's weddings.

Nope, same daughter. Different fiancee, though; Southampton broke off the engagement and she ended up marrying the Earl of Derby instead.

Lucky her. Does this prove anything, though?

> -de Vere's son-in-law and brother published the most famous folio of Shakespeare's works.

More detail on this one, please?

> -the plot line of _Hamlet_ has some parallels to de Vere's life.

By an amazing coincidence, it also has a striking number of parallels with an earlier play about a Danish prince called Amleth, whose uncle murders his father and marries his mother and...


(And you missed the bit where de Vere gets kidnapped by pirates.)

> -in -Henry IV, Part I_, Prince Hal and several friends "rob" Falstaff on Gad's Hill. In real
> life, de Vere and some friends played the same prank on a man - at Gad's Hill.

Obviously, the story got around a bit - you've heard it, after all. Playwrights are noted for nicking any good story they came across.

> -while in Italy, de Vere borrowed money from a Jewish banker, a situation in _The Merchant of
> Venice_

The reason it's a situation in The Merchant of Venice is that TMoV is (at least in part) about racism, and the Jewish moneylender was a racist stereotype common at the time.
The reason it was a common stereotype at the time was that there were a lot of Jewish moneylenders (it was one of the few things they were allowed to do), and a *lot* of people borrowed money from them.

> -through his characters, Shakespeare expresses contempt for those who purchase and use land for
> financial gain, an attitude that de Vere held. Shaksper, on the other hand, bought and used land
> for a profit numerous times during his life.

How often did Shakespeare's characters do this? I can't remember any of them passionately declaiming on the subject.

> -Edward de Vere's Bible has been studied extensively. in it, many passages are underlined,
> and many of these are ones that are used in Shakespeare's plays. Quite a few of these are very
> little known. Falstaff says many of the lines that make references to verses, including
> "whoreson Achitophel" (I Samuel 16:23), "an everlasting bonfire-light" (Matthew 25:41), "the
> son of utter darkness" (I Thessalonians 5:5), "Blessed are they that have been my friends, and
> woe to the cheif lord justice!" (the Beatitudes), and "I fear not goliath with a weaver's beam"
> (II Samuel 21:19). In _Hamlet_, Hamlet says "took my father grossly, full of bread". All
> Shakespearean scholars believe this to be a reference to Ezekiel 16:49. In de Vere's bible,
> this is the only verse in the book of Ezekiel underlined. all fo the other verses mentioned
> above are also underlined.

Mmm.



And now that I'm finished being skeptical, I'm off to read up on the case for de Vere, because you've got me curious. :o)


Since you said you'd forgotten the name of the book you knew, I offer as a possible aide memoire the names of the books I found at the library:

+ Warren Hope and Kim Holston, _The Shakespeare Controversy_. McFarland and Company, 1992.

Subtitled "An analysis of the claimants to authorship, and their champions and detractors", which about sums it up. "William Shakspere" is treated as another claimant, and the authors explain why they think he couldn't have dun it either.
Their conclusion: It was de Vere.
(Of course. I wouldn't have got the book out otherwise. :o) )


+ Joseph Sobran, _Alias Shakespeare_. The Free Press, 1997.

The author, a journalist and syndicated columnist (among other things, he's got a column at www.uexpress.com, if you want a look at his work) explains why he ditched Stratford Willy after thirty years, and why he now promotes de Vere's case.


And then I'm going to go back and re-read

+ Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman, _The Shakespeare Conspiracy_. Century, 1994.

This is the book that introduced me to the idea that Stratford Willy and Shakespeare might be two different people. The authors support Stratford Willy, because they don't think any of the other claimants have a case[1]. One of their main arguments against the idea that Willy was covering for someone else is that Willy never made a big deal about it being him who wrote the plays; recognition didn't come until after his death, not so much rendering the charade pointless as suggesting that there wasn't a charade at all.
This leads to another question: If Stratford Willy did write the plays, why is it so hard to link the Stratford businessman with the guy in London?
And they make an interesting point - this question doesn't go away even if you assume that Willy didn't write the plays. Many of the arguments used to deny a connection between businessman and playwright suggest just as strongly that there's no connection between businessman and actor - and not even the anti-Stratfordians try to claim that the actor and businessman were two different people.
And by the time the authors have finished explaining what they think is behind Stratford Willy's amazing double life, they've damaged a lot of the common arguments against the man from Stratford being the writer of the plays.

Paul


[1] Mind you, in the copy I just got out of the library, the chapter on de Vere has a comment scribbled in the margin casting aspersions on the quality of the research...