The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [36]
Her theory is, in the end, unprovable, of course, but she insisted (as all anti-Strats do) that it is no more unprovable than the absurd patsy we call “Shakespeare.” Her version goes like this:
In 1589, or a little earlier if necessary, a nobleman—Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford will do just fine—and a Jewish moneylender found they had something in common besides the string of debts that bound one to the other. The earl and his moneylender’s son were both poets, and neither was able to participate fully in the booming theatrical world of Elizabeth’s London. It was beneath the earl to throw himself into rehearsals and company business (though he did write a few things under his own name for court), and the Jewish boy, at age twenty-three or twenty-four, desperate to be a part of it all, was, of course, unacceptable in that milieu.
The earl was a Cambridge man, and the banker’s boy was a tireless autodidact, spending his devoted and kindly father’s ducats on a beautiful library, where he loved Ovid best of all but read everything an Elizabethan gentleman ought.
The earl was not going to have an open friendship with his Jewish banker, but was humane (or financially needy) enough that when the moneylender asked him to read a few of his son’s verses, the earl condescended to agree. The father gratefully showed him a poem, the first scene of a play perhaps, and, in his own variety of condescension, granted some leniency on the terms of a bill coming due. The earl read the sample and was immediately aware that he was reading the work of someone with great ability. He summoned the father back and invited him to bring his son.
A strange and rivalrous friendship was born. The earl and the Jewish youth read each other’s words, peered across the social abyss carved deep between them, and recognized each other with mutual admiration and jealousy. They met again and again, without the father. Their conversations would have been productive educations for both of them. The earl would have known about the military, the law, court behavior, Latin. The younger man would have provided Old Testament fluency, financial expertise, and, if he had spent time outside London, an eye for the natural world—the plays’ rich language of birds, flowers, country fairs, apples. Each boasted that if he were able to write for the public stage he would be hailed as the greatest poet of the time, outshining Kyd, Marlowe, Lyly. Naturally, one of them suggested a plan.
Next in Dana’s fantasy comes a scene that other squinting anti-Stratfordians imagine as well: a young actor, Will Shakespeare, new to London from the Warwickshire town of Stratford, ambitious but of only middling talent, is invited one night to a private audience with the Earl of Oxford in his London residence and is presented with an irresistible offer. The actor would be given a role to act in his own life, forever. He would play a better version of himself and would win great fame for his performance. He would be slipped works to stage under his own name. He could even take them to a printer and publish them, if he wished. Whatever money he could squeeze out of this was his to keep. The renown would be his as well. The women or boys he charmed with his honeyed verses were his to bed. (“Really, Miss Phillips, is there any evidence of such proclivities in Shakespeare the man?” huffed the twelfth-grade teacher, angry that Dana was saying much more about his hero’s unknowability than his sexuality.) Changes made by the acting company in rehearsal were fine; the scripts should be brought back to the earl for reworking, and the earl would have felt the frisson of slumming it, toiling like some common artisan. No mention was made of the Jew at this early meeting where devilish Shakespeare won the souls of two other men and was paid for the victory.
Readily agreeing, the impostor went off with two plays: The Taming of the Shrew and Edward III. Before he