knowledge, was fully aware. Indeed Looney notes that the "central fact of Hamlet's working out
a secret purpose under a mask of eccentricity amounting almost to feigned madness" (398) forms
an analogue to the real-life circumstances of Edward de Vere as the greatest of the "concealed
poets"
4
in the Court of Elizabeth I:
All the quickness of the senses which marks alike the work of De Vere and Shakespeare
manifests itself in the person of Hamlet. He misses nothing; and every thing he sees or hears
opens some new avenue to the "inmost parts" of those about him. A man like this is almost
foredoomed to a tragic loneliness; for even such love as he shows towards Ophelia and she
towards him cannot blind him to her want of honesty in her dealings. He sees much of which
he may not speak. In the play he can express himself in soliloquy or cunningly reveal to the
audience what is hidden from the other personages in the drama; but in real life he would
become a man of large mental reserves and an enforced secretiveness. (395)
Has any Shakespeare critic, ideology aside, written two hundred more eloquent words about
the essential nature of the character Hamlet? I cannot name any.
The entire complex of relations between these two plays and the documented circumstances
of de Vere's life forcefully underscores the cogency of Justice John Paul Stevens's "suspicion" of
"an autobiographical element" in Hamlet (Stevens 1992 1379). How much greater must this
"suspicion" appear, in light of present discoveries, when we remember that grounds for the same
suspicion are found also in Alls' Well that End's Well when Helena traps her husband in the bed
trick, just as the Countess of Oxford is said to have entrapped de Vere into becoming the father of
her first child? Similar analogies between life and art disclose themselves at every corner when
the canon is read, particularly in its entirety, from the so-called "Oxfordian" point of view.
4
The phrase is from the letter of Francis Bacon, March 28 1603, to the poet John Davies (MSS 976 fo. 4 Lambeth Palace), which
signs off "desiring you to be good to concealed poets…" (Hope 1993).
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