CHAPTER 28.
Art made "tongue-tied by authority" is forced to employ devious means of polyvocal indirection to
persuade. As Sue Curry Jansen writes:
Domination, repression, and the stale cake of custom constrict the range of univocal discourse. They
force emancipatory ideas between-the-lines. But serious litterateurs seldom accept this exile with mute
resignation. They frequently seize the opportunity to plumb the paleosymbolic depths of equivocal
expressions. It is within this subterranean netherworld that the community founding powers of language
can be rediscovered or invented. It is here the "no longer" and the "not-yet" are uncovered.
(1988 192-93)
If de Vere was, as so many readers have concluded, the author of the "Shakespeare" canon, he must
have found himself in the position of one of those "serious litterateurs" who would not have accepted his
own exile from Mount Parnassus with mute resignation. Confronted on one side by a monarch's
command for silent complicity with a political hoax and on the other by a rising tide of anti-theatrical
Puritanism which transformed his authorship of dramatic works into an intolerable scandal, he must have
often thought of himself like the fool LaVache in All's Well That Ends Well who, when accused by the
Countess of being a "foul-mouthed calumnious knave,” can only reply in the affirmative: "A prophet I,
Madam, I speak the truth -- in the next way” (1.3.57-59).
That "truth" --
at least the idiosyncratic, idiomatic, dramatic truth of "Shakespeare" -- was often
regarded by the Elizabethan court as mere "calumny,” just as Claudius regards the theatrical
representations of the players at Elsinore, is the Oxfordian thesis in a nutshell. Truth is of course an
important word --
and concept --
which remained constantly in the foreground of Edward de Vere's
consciousness. He inherited, or more likely invented for himself, an onomastic personal motto -- "vero
nihil verius" -- "nothing is truer than the truth."
Because no exemplars of this motto are extant prior to Gabriel Harvey's 1578 Gratulationes
Valdenses, it seems probable that de Vere himself coined the motto sometime during the 1570s.
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