De Vere Bible Dissertation/ Copyright Roger Stritmatter 1998, 2000.
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Introductory Material
The present document, a University dissertation which argues for the relevance of an
impressive if unconventional body of evidence, in support of an equally unconventional
conclusion, has been completed in an atmosphere which might perhaps be best compared to a
bitter trench warfare. On one side is a shrinking population of tenured professors in English and
allied disciplines, which not only believes the official story of Shakespeare, retailed most recently
in Park Honan's new biography (1999), and before that by a long list of distinguished but
ultimately unconvincing scholars from James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips (1882) to Sir Sidney Lee
(1898), E.K. Chambers (1930), Marchette Chute (1949), A.L. Rowse (1963, 1973), Samuel
Schoenbaum (1975; 1991) or even Gary Taylor (1989) ---
but resents any doubts about this
premise as an affront to its integrity and professional mission. On the other side is a collection of
eccentrics and free thinkers, mostly without PhDs or other paraphernalia attesting to their status
as experts, who might best be compared to Falstaff's recruits in II Henry IV. These insist, against
all official sanction, that an impressive body of evidence supports a contrary conclusion -- namely
that "Shakespeare" was a pen name for Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-
1604).
Whether the traditional and now moribund view of Shakespeare can be kept alive through
new life-support technologies to survive the first decade of the new millennium remains an
unanswered but significant question at this point in intellectual history. For what is not -- yet –
recognized is that there is a third force allied, sometimes without knowing it, to the Oxfordian
heretics. A number of prominent academicians, adapting consciously or otherwise to the present
threat to orthodox cognitive equilibrium, have adopted epistemic positions on the early modern
cultural history of Europe which are inexorably undermining conventional views of Shakespeare.
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