Discovering Shakespeare: A Handbook for Heretics [Paperback]

It is essential reading for those readers curious enough to look beyond the usual Stratford myths. It turns out, upon examination, that the sources of the plays have nothing to do with William of Stratford - but a great deal to do with the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
Edward Holmes has made a detailed case for the heretical alternative. His work derives from the text. He rejects romantic theorising on Hollywood lines, and demonstrates that the greatest writer in English was neither a working lad making good nor a model nobleman with a natural genius. The author proves to be a deeply-flawed and enigmatically complex character.

"Discovering Shakespeare" is a witty compendium of data designed to clarify some of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s meaning. It will prove to be essential reading for lovers of his work. A great deal of what happens in Shakespeare actually happened. His work is based on the life of his time, and we can here trace contemporary people and events.

Edward Holmes has assembled unfamiliar evidence and developed new lines of argument in a book designed to provide a further challenge to the establishment on this longstanding and sensitive issue of the authorship.

MEETING
He was sitting at a table near the window.
I approached with my tankard. The pub was crowded; the litter of papers with which he had surrounded himself did not deter me.
'Do you mind if ...?'
He gestured a grudging acceptance of the situation.
I put my pint on the table and extended a hand.
'My name's Holmes', I said.
He looked up. There was a hint of amusement in his eye as he responded.
'Mine's Mycroft.'
We both smiled in acknowledgement of the improbability.
His gaze drifted back to his book as I drank and took in the scene. Lunchtime pubs were not my favourite places. My eye noted his half-finished crossword and the little pile of books and papers beside him.
'I see you're a Shakespearean', I said.
He took off his glasses. Decent manners required him to give me a little attention.
'Yes, indeed. The Bard has been the principal preoccupation of my retirement.'
'And I'm so pleased to see you favour the Cambridge paperbacks. The Picasso always cheers ...'
I was looking, upside down, at the scrawled portrait on the red cover.
'True. Though I buy them because of the generous margins to scribble in.' He looked - guardedly, I thought - over his beer, then spoke.
'I think I should say, at the outset, that I am unlikely to prove a suitable companion for polite conversation about Shakespeare. I'm a heretic. I tend to offend or irritate the orthodox aficionado.'
Slightly miffed, I felt moved to challenge his assumptions of superior expertise; he did not have the look of an academic. It crossed my mind that he might be a crank and consequently available to be tested.
'I notice,' I said, 'that you have a copy of 'All's Well' at your elbow. I have always been puzzled by that curious list of soldiers in Act Four. Editors don't seem able to help. I'd welcome a heretical view.'
I played this card with some confidence. I hoped I was not being unfair to the man; no-one, I believed, knew the answer.
But Mycroft was smiling. I realised I had unwittingly played into his hands. He responded at once ... Parolles and his friends are offered to us as oddly-named inventions. They are, in fact, perfectly real ...
My examination of 'All's Well' will show that the plays's sources include a sector of Franco-Italian history, with reference to specific personalities and events and that the central focus is on the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. A Vere adventure in Paris and Florence in 1575 is the plain source of the play.
Boccaccio's story, 'Giletta de Narbonne' - the conventional source - is merely a secondary literary frame of reference. 'Shakespeare' fitted fiction to reality in a way that is to prove his trademark. He used an old story or ballad, a sector of real events amd people, and his own private life.
This is how the pattern works in 'All's Well'.
Let us begin with a puzzle, of a kind Shakespeare often sets us. He introduces (in Act 4 Scene 1) a list of eleven French soldiers who have volunteered for service with the Duke of Florence. They bear curious names (like Gratii, Spurio and Chitopher) which no editor feels able to identify. This constitutes a gratuitous stroke by the author, designed to tease us into a deeper curiosity. Accepting the challenge, we shall find the puzzle turns out to be no more demanding in its degree of difficulty than a modest crossword puzzle.
The first clue appears in Act 11, Scene 1, l 41, where we are introduced to the 'regiment of the Spinii' and 'a Captain Spurio, with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek'. Now 'Spinii' (Latin) clues 'Epineux' (French), that is, the thistle; and a French regiment, bearing such a badge, must belong to the clan of the Lorraine family. The thistle, or 'chardon', is their family emblem. Queen Elizabeth, in correspondence, calls the Duke of Guise 'chardon'. Their captain must therefore be Henri, Duc de Guise, leader of the extremist Catholic Lorraine faction. He received the wound on his left cheek at the Battle of Dormans in 1575 and earned the nickname 'Spurio', because his supporters maintained he had a claim to the French crown.
So the first clue completed, the puzzle opens up quite easily. 'Dumaine' is merely a modified form of the 'Duc de Mayenne', Henri's second brother. His identity is further confirmed by his label: 'a botcher's apprentice in Paris', a reference to the leading role the Guises had in initiating the bloody Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. De Mayenne gave full support to Henri de Guise, the 'patron butcher' and initiator of the slaughter. A third Guise brother, Cardinal Louis, suffers a simple metamorphosis into the Germanic form of 'Lodowick'. Once the first clue is unpicked, the rest is child's play.
There can be no reasonable doubt that Shakespeare's soldiers are really members of the group of Catholic extremists under the leadership of the Guises, who became militarily active in the years after 1572. A close observer of international events at this time would not have had any difficulty in interpreting what seems to have become an intransigent problem for scholars.
You can work out the rest of the candidates if you have access to 'La Grande Larousse'; but the legwork of sorting out solutions to these and several other Shakespearean puzzles was done over forty years ago by a French scholar, Georges Lambin, in Genoa, 1962, in a work that remains untranslated. The nicknames fit precisely the Lorraine group, who became known as the 'Holy League or as 'Ligeurs'.