Contested Will (33 page)

Ogburn elaborated on this after he was elected president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in 1976: ‘English faculties, abetted by a generally subservient press, show how far entrenched authority can outlaw and silence dissent in a supposedly free society … We are dealing here with an intellectual Watergate, and it greatly behooves us to expose it.' Ogburn fought back. He tried and failed to secure federal funding for Oxfordian research in England. He tried and failed to get Louis B. Wright to debate with him. He tried and failed to get the
New Yorker
to run an article sympathetic to the Oxfordian cause. And he tried and failed to get the Folger Library to publish his scholarship (they claimed a three-year backlog of submissions). Even as he fought for public recognition for Oxford's candidacy, Ogburn began writing his nine-hundred-page
The Mysterious William Shakespeare
. The genius of his book was its interweaving de Vere's travails with those of modern-day Oxfordians facing an ‘intellectual Watergate' – yet one more instance of how authorities engage in conspiracy and cover-up, only, in the end, to be exposed.

As Ogburn understood it, there were two sides to the authorship question and his side was being denied a fair hearing. He had come of age at a time in America when there was nothing one could do about that. That came to an end in the late 1940s, when a ‘fairness doctrine' was made the law of the land – under the jurisdiction of the United States Federal Communications Commission – in order to ensure that media coverage was both fair and balanced. The doctrine was fiercely contested (for many, it ran counter to the freedoms assured by the First Amendment),
and finally overturned by the mid-1980s, but by then, it had become habitual in the media to give both sides of any controversy an equal hearing. When Ogburn learned in the late 1970s that the National Geographic Society planned a television programme on Shakespeare – with Louis B. Wright, that scourge of the sceptics, involved, he appealed for equal time on the grounds of the fairness doctrine. His initial demands were ‘smiled off', as he put it, but he persisted, since ‘under the law we had a right to time on the air to reply'. In the end, the project was shelved; but the Oxfordians were learning how to use the levers of democracy to fight back.

Convinced that the best place to challenge academics was in court, Ogburn called for a ‘trial at law' overseen by a ‘qualified judge'. But his opponents continued to stonewall. His strategy was not all that surprising; many of those who didn't believe that Shakespeare was the author of the plays were lawyers and the courts had been one of the few places where sceptics had held their own. Three years after the publication of
The Mysterious William Shakespeare
, the Oxfordians finally had their day in court. On 25 September 1987, three United States Supreme Court Justices – William Brennan, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens – heard their case, ‘
In re
Shakespeare: The Authorship of Shakespeare on Trial', before a thousand spectators in Washington, DC. The moot court was major news, with the
New York Times
reporting in advance that ‘the ruling could go either way', with the handicappers figuring that Brennan, the most liberal of the three, would lean toward Oxford, Blackmun ‘likely to be torn by the decision' and the ruling of an ‘enigmatic' Stevens difficult to predict. David Lloyd Kreeger had made it happen; member of the US Supreme Court Bar and Chairman of the Board of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, he was happy to bankroll the event.

Brennan, serving as chief justice, surprised Blackmun and
Stevens by declaring at the outset that the burden was on the Oxford side to prove its case – then overrode Blackmun's objection that ‘you didn't clear that with the rest of us'. The deck was now stacked in Shakespeare's favour. Arguments were presented in the morning and the justices deliberated at midday. They handed down their decision that afternoon. Brennan spoke first, ruling that the Oxford side ‘did not prove that he was the author of the plays'. Blackmun, who spoke next, conceded that while he agreed that this was the ‘legal answer … whether it is the correct one causes me greater doubt than I think it does Justice Brennan'. Stevens also ruled for Shakespeare, making the judgement unanimous, but added a significant qualification: ‘If the author was not the man from Stratford, then there is a high probability that it was Edward de Vere … I think the evidence against the others is conclusive.'

The Oxfordians had failed to convince them that de Vere, who died in 1604, could have been the author of plays written after that date. The justices also make clear that they believed that the case before them was essentially ‘a conspiracy theory' – but the various accounts of why this conspiracy took place were incoherent and unpersuasive. For some Oxfordians, it had been a private arrangement known only to de Vere and Shakespeare. For others, it was a far-ranging plot, beginning with the Queen and extending through the Earl of Derby and Ben Jonson's active roles in maintaining the hoax. Still others were sure that it was common knowledge, with so many Elizabethans aware that de Vere was the true author of the plays that nobody even bothered commenting on it. And of course, there were those convinced of the politically motivated Prince Tudor theory. There was no consensus and little likelihood of arriving at one. The Oxfordians had nonetheless succeeded in raising serious doubts in the minds of the justices about Shakespeare's authorship. Stevens in particular found the evidence in Shakespeare's favour ‘somewhat ambiguous', adding that ‘one would expect to find more references in people's diaries or correspondence about having seen Shakespeare somewhere or talked to someone who had seen him'. He was left
with a ‘sort of gnawing uncertainty'.

At the end of the moot court, Stevens unexpectedly turned to the disappointed Oxfordians and offered them ‘a bit of advice': ‘I would like to suggest that the Oxfordian case suffers from not having a single, coherent theory of the case.' Stevens had a solution: ‘In my opinion, the strongest theory of the case requires an assumption for some reason we don't understand, that the Queen and Prime Minister [
sic
] decided: “We want this man to be writing plays under a pseudonym.”' If they wanted to prevail, the Oxfordians had best scrap their confusing and contradictory accounts of the conspiracy and stick to the defensible claim that de Vere's secrecy was the result of an executive order, ‘a command from the monarch'.

A dejected Charlton Ogburn took the justices' decision as ‘a clear defeat' and insisted that the moot court ‘hadn't been his idea in the first place'. He wrote to the president of American University calling Professor James Boyle, who had defended Shakespeare at the moot court, ‘an outright liar'. Ogburn might have had in mind not what Boyle said at the proceedings but what he told James Lardner, who was covering the story for the
New Yorker
: ‘The Oxfordians have constructed an interpretive framework that has an infinite capacity to explain away information': ‘all the evidence that fits the theory is accepted, and the rest rejected'. When Boyle added that it was impossible ‘to imagine a piece of evidence that could disprove the theory to its adherents', Lardner asked, ‘What about a letter in Oxford's hand … congratulating William Shakespeare of Stratford on his achievements as a playwright?' Boyle didn't skip a beat, mimicking an Oxfordian response: ‘What an unlikely communication between an earl and a common player! … Obviously, something designed to carry on the conspiracy of concealment. The very fact that he wrote such a letter presents the strongest proof we could possibly have!'

Joseph Sobran, who wrote for the
National Review
, was among the few Oxfordians at the time to grasp how signal an event the moot court had been. Crucially, even while ruling against de Vere,
‘the justices effectively dismissed the other candidates for Shakespearean honors from serious consideration'. From now on, as far as the press and public were concerned, there would only be two viable candidates: the Earl of Oxford and the glover's son from Stratford. Sobran also recognised that there ‘is no such thing as bad publicity'. He was right. Major newspapers and television networks had covered the trial. And the moot court was structured so that literary experts weren't even represented. Even losing was a form of victory, since by having judges rather than scholars with decades of expertise evaluate the evidence, amateurs and experts were put on equal footing, both subordinate to the higher authority of the court and to legal rather than academic criteria for what counted as circumstantial evidence.

The moot court proved to be a turning point in the decades-long struggle to promote Oxford's cause. More than anything else, the Supreme Court justices had provided legitimacy; the Oxfordians were no longer the ‘deviants' vilified by Schoenbaum (and one immediate effect of the moot court was that this harsh language was considerably toned down when Schoenbaum revised
Shakespeare's Lives
in 1991). If Supreme Court justices could take them seriously and deem them the only serious rivals to Shakespeare, so could others.

The Oxfordians, having learned some lessons from their defeat in the US, hoped that a retrial in England would reverse the decision. Once again David Lloyd Kreeger sponsored the event. The novelist Jeffrey Archer helped facilitate it, and Sam Wanamaker, founder of the as yet unbuilt Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, was willing to arrange it as a fund-raiser. Charles Beauclerk – who was descended from the de Veres – played an important role, too, helping to co-ordinate the Oxfordian side. Two years earlier, while a student at Oxford University, he had founded the De Vere Society hoping to reinvigorate the case for his ancestor. From the perspective of the Society, even staging the English trial was tantamount to a victory, since ‘three of the most senior judges of appeal of the realm … have agreed to provide the framework for
bringing Shakespeare to court, and have by that very act conceded that there are grounds for doubting the traditional ascription of authorship to the unlettered William Shaksper of Stratford'.

This moot court was held on 26 November 1988, with roughly five hundred in attendance in London's Inner Temple, presided over by Lords Ackner, Oliver and Templeman. Once again, there was extensive media coverage. The initial plan was to have Charlton Ogburn square off against his nemesis, Samuel Schoenbaum. But despite their eagerness to do battle, both men were too ill to make the trip, and seconds were found. This time, academics were represented: the formidable pair of British scholars Stanley Wells and Ernst Honigmann served as expert witnesses for Shakespeare; Oxfordians Gordon C. Cyr (of the American Shakespeare Oxford Society) and L. L. Ware (of the British Shakespearean Authorship Trust) stepped in for the other side.

The outcome was no different; in the words of one supporter of de Vere, it was an ‘Oxfordian disaster'. The Lords were especially dismissive of the notion that Oxford had taken the name of a man acknowledged as an ‘actor manager' in the theatre. And they couldn't understand why it took until 1920 for someone to propose that the Earl of Oxford was the true author of the plays. The Oxfordians fulminated. The biggest lesson they had learned from this latest setback was that ‘there was neither time nor opportunity within the format of a court proceeding to puncture many of the Stratfordian balloons'.

There would be no more trials. Though privately acknowledged as a stinging defeat, the event gave an unexpected lift to doubters and especially to the Oxfordian cause in the UK, much as the Washington trial had done in the US. Both the moribund Shakespeare Authorship Trust and the De Vere Society (according to Beauclerk, its activities now supported by the wealthy Chicagoan, William O. Hunt, to the tune of
£
2,000 a term) were invigorated. In 1988 Beauclerk would also edit and see into print an abridged version of Ogburn's book, which ‘signals a literary revolution of unprecedented proportions' – emphasising in his
introduction both his ancestor's biographical fit (‘de Vere was every inch a Hamlet') and his place among English aristocratic writers (as ‘the natural precursor to Byron and the Romantic tradition in English literature').

While plans to make a film or a book of the English moot court proceedings fell through, it didn't take long for the British media to seize upon a now legitimate and newsworthy story. Where judges tried to resolve controversial issues, television hosts enjoyed stoking them. In April 1989,
Frontline
aired ‘The Shakespeare Mystery', produced by Yorkshire Television in conjunction with American Public Television station WGBH. In the US alone, over three and a half million television viewers were offered their first glimpse of the authorship controversy, and the programme's title (indebted to Ogburn's) as well as Al Austin's opening voice-over made clear that things had begun to tilt in Oxford's favour: ‘Who was the real Shakespeare? The son of a Stratford glovemaker? Or was he a forgotten nobleman, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford?' The programme was a triumph for Ogburn, as well as for his English counterpart, Charles Beauclerk. The academics who spoke on behalf of Shakespeare – Schoenbaum and A. L. Rowse – sounded stuffy, the Oxfordians impassioned. Al Austin's narration did the rest, filling in the blanks by connecting events in Oxford's life to key passages in the plays.
Frontline
followed it up with an even more in-depth, three-hour live videoconference, ‘Uncovering Shakespeare: An Update', moderated by William F. Buckley, Jr, which aired in September 1992, and included some sharp sparring between Charles Beauclerk and Professor Gary Taylor. The programme ended with a prerecorded animation of the Stratford monument breaking up and revealing the Earl of Oxford.

The BBC wasn't far behind, providing a one-hour film on the controversy in 1994, with Charles Beauclerk again playing a prominent role. Proponents of de Vere's cause weren't happy about having to share airtime with ‘poorly supported Baconians and Marlovians', but believed that ‘Oxford came out well ahead in the programme'. The charismatic Beauclerk continued to promote
Oxford's cause, especially in the United States, where he appeared at over 170 venues, from college campuses to the Folger and Huntington Libraries, in the early 1990s. The Shakespeare Oxford Society was now reporting a surge of new members from as far away as Estonia and Australia.