Las Vegas high school teacher claims to have unmasked Shakespeare

Anne Hosier

Monday, Jan. 5, 1998 | 8:01 a.m.

Who was the person we call William Shakespeare?

Was he the son of a glovemaker, born in the small English village of Stratford-upon-Avon?

Or was he a member of the British Royal family who was pressured to conceal his true identity by using a pen name?

For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have held the former to be true.

Yet a small but growing group of literary buffs, who call themselves "Oxfordians" believe the 17th Earl of Oxford, more commonly known as Edward de Vere, was actually the author of the famed plays and sonnets.

And now one of those Oxfordians, Charles Young, an English literature teacher at Cimarron-Memorial High School, claims he can prove it.

According to Young, the Bard's real name -- de Vere, that is -- is encrypted in the message on the tombstone in the English church where Shakespeare is supposedly buried.

And Young has found the "key" to deciphering the message: an asymmetrical triangle, the dimensions of which he extracted from a medieval text known as "Minerva Brittana."

At first glance, the tombstone's message appears to bear only this warning: "Good Friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones."

But when Young places his triangle over the message, the letters "V-E-R-E" line up along the triangle's side. And three lines containing the letters "EDV," "MAN," and "BE HE" appear to the left of the triangle's central vertical axis.

"This is so visual," Young says, pointing to a diagram he drew of the triangle, superimposed on a rubbing of the etching. "You can't help but see it."

Young published his diagram and a 4,000-word article he wrote on his finding in the February issue of Games magazine, which hit newsstands in December. The same day the magazine came out, USA Today also ran a short article on Young's discovery.

The English teacher had hoped the articles would help bring the Earl of Oxford the credit he feels the nobleman deserves. But for the most part, his discovery has been met with a resounding silence.

"I was expecting all of sudden for the world to light on fire," he says wistfully, as he stands amid piles of books on Shakespeare in his small, tidy classroom at Cimarron-Memorial. "And nothing's happened, pretty much.

"It's really hard changing history books and people's minds."

Indifferent opposition

Barbara Mowat, director of academic programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is just one of the vast majority of Shakespearean scholars who subscribe to the belief that Shakespeare was the son of a glovemaker born in Stratford-upon-Avon -- and not the 17th Earl of Oxford, born in the village of Hedingham, England.

Mowat says the issue of who wrote the famous plays and sonnets "has been looked into fairly thoroughly" and is no longer a topic of interest to established Shakespearean scholars.

"The best analogy I've heard is that 'this question is about as interesting to the Shakespeare world as creationism is to a molecular biologist,' " she says.

Young has heard this kind of response before.

"I've had English teachers say 'I don't care,' and actually walk away," he says. "I've had history teachers say 'We have his words, what else do we need?' and that just really upsets me."

Marketing the Bard

Young suspects there are two major reasons the established literary world is so reluctant to accept the notion the Edward de Vere was the author of the famous literary works.

One is that de Vere has been written up in history books as something of a villain, a ne'er-do-well who squandered the family fortune. "They label him as a 'wolfish' earl,' " he says. And that just doesn't mesh well with the way people view Shakespeare the author.

The other reason is that a $6 billion -- yes, billion with a "b" -- per year industry has sprung up around the small village of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the "glovemaker's son" was supposedly born and buried, Young says.

Accepting that Edward de Vere, not some glovemaker's son, is Shakespeare creates "a real problem for England," Young says, "because they built Disneyland (in Stratford-upon-Avon)."

Like many Oxfordians, Young thinks that "William Shakespeare, the glovemaker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon" probably didn't even exist. Instead, Young theorizes, this was a "compendium" -- a fictitious character created by Edward de Vere's circle of friends to draw attention away from the Earl himself.

Young says the author's main patron was Queen Elizabeth, and she had given the royal edict for him to keep his mouth shut about "the secret." Besides, Shakespeare's plays were so politically volatile and critical of highly-placed figures, the earl would not have had an easy time of it in his usual social circles if the truth about authorship were known.

In any case, if today's literary world were to accept that de Vere was the real Shakespeare, the tourism industry would likely shift toward the village of Hedingham, where the earl was born. And according to Young, who has visited that village and chatted with folks there, that wouldn't be such a welcome change. "There're no roads coming into it, no public restrooms," he says of Hedingham. "When we were there, we were the only ones in the tourist shop and they love it that way."

He adds: "I believe there are a lot more scholars like myself who know the truth, but don't want to pass it on," Young says. "It's kind of like a national secret."

Roots of the mystery

Young first became interested in the debate over Shakespeare's identity almost a decade ago, when public television aired a documentary on the subject. At the time, Young was aware that there was some question about who the famed playwright really was. "I was taught in school that Christopher Marlowe had a claim to it, Francis Bacon had a claim to it." Even Queen Elizabeth was believed by some to be the true author.

But Young had never heard of Edward de Vere "and I'd been teaching Shakespeare for 15 years!"

The television program made a compelling case in favor of the 17th Earl of Oxford. The theory was first proposed in 1920 by J. Thomas Looney (pronounced "Loney") -- who was also an English teacher -- and was quickly embraced by a small minority of literary buffs.

Among the evidence these Oxfordians point to was that de Vere quit publishing poetry and plays under his own name in 1593, the same year Shakespeare's name first appeared; that de Vere had as a coat of arms a lion "shaking a spear"; that de Vere was praised by another nobleman in a speech with the words "Thine eyes flash fire, thy will shakes spears"; and that Queen Elizabeth paid de Vere a stipend of 1,000 pounds a year, an enormous sum which equaled one percent of England's national budget at the time.

According to Young, who cites a rumor circulating in the 1600s, that was exactly the amount that Shakespeare earned writing two plays a year. And de Vere had what Young calls "a superior, virtually unique knowledge" of foreign languages, literature and law -- knowledge that is reflected in the works of Shakespeare.

Amazed by what he learned from the documentary, Young quickly set about reading everything he could get his hands on that dealt with the subject. "I've been obsessed for the past eight years," he says.

The more he delved into the subject, the more convinced he became that de Vere was the man.

Perusing de Vere's biography, Young says he was struck by the similarities between the nobleman's life and Shakespeare's plays.

In the real-life tale of de Vere's life, for example, where two Frenchmen bent on political gain try to destroy the Englishman's marriage by fabricating a story about how de Vere's wife had been unfaithful to him and was bearing another man's baby, Young saw the plot of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour Lost."

In the biographical account of de Vere's subsequent affair with Anne Vavasour, one of Queen Elizabeth's maids, Young could discern the inspiration for "Romeo and Juliet."

In real life, as in the play, supporters of two opposing families "were gang fighting on the streets of London."

Jan Seagrave, another local Oxfordian, was also struck by the parallels between de Vere's life and Shakespeare's work, particularly "Hamlet."

"The key, in my opinion, is 'Hamlet '-- that's (de Vere's) life story," she says. "Even people who don't think that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare still think he was the model for Hamlet, because everything corresponds."

Finding the key

Young spent eight years poring through various texts, listening to the opinions of different Shakespearean scholars, even traveling to England, before accidentally stumbling upon the "key" to the tombstone's message.

"What amazes me is that I wasn't even looking for this."

Instead, Young was planning to write a screenplay about the life of the 17th Earl of Oxford. (Though he's been "sidetracked" somewhat by his discovery, he still plans to go forward with the screenplay.)

Among the texts Young read was "Minerva Brittana," which is filled with countless pieces of artwork, all of which have one thing in common: their key elements line up to an asymmetrical pyramid, having angles of 45 degrees and 54 degrees at their base. When the same pyramid is placed over the tombstone's inscription, "Vere" appears along its two sides.

Encoding a message this way was nothing new, even then, Young says. During the Revolutionary War, one noteworthy British general sent messages to his troops that could only be read by superimposing an hourglass shape on the words, Young says.

The hypothesis isn't that far-fetched, especially given the Elizabethan mentality.

"They were extremely fond of puns and visual tricks," Seagrave says.

Seagrave, who has also been fascinated with de Vere since seeing the same public television documentary nearly eight years ago, says that the more she studies the literature, the more obvious it seems that Shakespeare really was the 17th Earl of Oxford.

But so far, Young's had a hard time convincing people.

"The last eight years have been kind of lonely."

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