Books, Arts & Manners: A Fair Shake for Oxford

A thousand people crammed the United Methodist Church across the street from American University in Washington on September 25 to witness a debate on the Shakespeare authorship question. TV crews covered the event, which made the front page of the New York Times the next morning. It had been ably promoted by David Lloyd Kreeger, a high-powered Washington businessman and patron of the arts who is convinced that “William Shakespeare” was the pen name of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Did I say high-powered? Kreeger managed to get three Supreme Court Justices to adjudicate the debate: William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens. All three ruled in favor of the traditional claimant, but the event lifted the Oxfordian theory out of the crank category. Blackmun and Stevens conceded that the case for Oxford is hard to dismiss, and Brennan, asked whether it was a tough case, smiled, “This was an absolutely impossible one!”

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Joseph Sobran

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A thousand people crammed the United Methodist Church across the street from American University in Washington on September 25 to witness a debate on the Shakespeare authorship question. TV crews covered the event, which made the front page of the New York Times the next morning. It had been ably promoted by David Lloyd Kreeger, a high-powered Washington businessman and patron of the arts who is convinced that “William Shakespeare” was the pen name of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Did I say high-powered? Kreeger managed to get three Supreme Court Justices to adjudicate the debate: William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens. All three ruled in favor of the traditional claimant, but the event lifted the Oxfordian theory out of the crank category. Blackmun and Stevens conceded that the case for Oxford is hard to dismiss, and Brennan, asked whether it was a tough case, smiled, “This was an absolutely impossible one!”