FRESHMAN COMPOSITION, RHETORIC, GRAMMAR II

&

INTRO. TO LITERARY RESEARCH & WRITING

INSTRUCTOR: James Maxfield

James Maxfield

Prof. Richardson

English 400: Senior Seminar

Shakespeare Authorship Controversy

Winter Term, 19__

Is Edward De Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, the Author of

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece?

"That Is the Question."

(abstract)

The Shakespeare authorship controversy has generally settled upon the 17^th Earl of Oxford as the leading contender to William Shaksper [sic]. But the Oxfordians have only succeeded in presenting evidence which can prove nothing with any certainty. The bulk of evidence marshaled by the Oxfordians is coincidental, speculative, often irrelevant, and always inconclusive. If the Oxfordians whish to prove their case, that Edward De Vere was the real Shakespeare, then a new methodology is needed, and there is only one logical point of initial attack: the point at which De Vere apparently stops writing and Shakespeare emerges as a new talent, about the year 1590.

All authors have an inherent stylistic and creative imprint. A comparative analysis of De Vere’s extant poetry to Shakespeare’s first poetry, the two narratives, V & A and Lucrece, (as well as the Sonnets, which were completed during this decade), will reveal De Vere’s style as the early developing Shakespeare. The new methodology must focus on building an empirical model for linguistic and stylistic analysis, and it must be limited to poetry (because we have no extant dramatic works by De Vere) and based primarily upon an author’s inherently patterned uses of syntactic grammatical tendencies.

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