(October 5, 2008)

Shakespeare By Another Name

Peter D. Kramer/The Journal News

Matthew Cossolotto loves Shakespeare.

Make that "Shakespeare."

Cossolotto's Yorktown Heights home doubles as the home of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, a group dedicated to the proposition that the plays and sonnets attributed to a glove-maker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon were actually written by a nobleman: Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Cossolotto's basement serves as the library for some 1,800 volumes dedicated to Shakespeare's canon - and to casting doubts that it could have been written by "William of Stratford" or "Stratford Will," as Cossolotto and his fellow "Oxfordians" call him.

De Vere, they point out, was well-traveled, spoke many languages and was well-acquainted with the court, giving him the insight to set several of his plays there. He also owned a theater company.

While Stratford Will was listed in a company of actors, Oxfordians say he did nothing to distinguish himself in that realm.

And he didn't spell his name "Shakespeare": The surviving signatures clearly show him to be William Shakspere.

The Shakespeare Oxford Society holds its annual "authorship conference" with the like-minded Shakespeare Fellowship, from Thursday to Sunday at the Crowne Plaza in White Plains.

Cossolotto, a public-speaking coach and author, serves as the society's president. He readily admits a "cognitive dissonance" in having the Shakespeare Oxford Society based in Yorktown Heights.

"The society was based in the D.C. area for several years but we moved the office up here mostly for convenience," he says. "It was founded in New York in 1957 so now we're back close to where we started."

On the conference schedule are papers and discussions and movies related to the authorship question, including a Saturday keynote address by Mark Anderson, whose 2005 book "Shakespeare by Another Name" came into play this summer for a Cold Spring director of Shakespeare.

John Christian Plummer was well into rehearsals for "Twelfth Night" at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival when he discovered Anderson's book. He says knowing about de Vere colored his work with the cast.

"So many intuitive ideas that I had about the script were being confirmed by the facts of de Vere's life," Plummer said in a video interview posted on Anderson's blog, shakepearebyanothername.blogs pot.com.

"Understanding how a life led to the writing of these plays - rather than just fancy - allows you to understand that the play is full of life and it isn't just fancy."

Who wrote the play matters as much, Plummer says, as who was the queen when these plays were written.

The authorship of Shakespeare's canon has long been in doubt. Some have attributed the works to Francis Bacon, others to Christopher Marlowe, others to a committee of writers.

Oxfordians have had many champions, including Mark Twain, whose slim book "Is Shakespeare Dead????" laid out the case for de Vere. It was published one year before Twain's 1910 death.

The Twain connection raises a central belief for the Oxfordians: that "William Shakespeare" was merely a pen name used by de Vere, just as Mark Twain was a pen name used by Samuel Clemens.

Writing for the theater would have been seen as beneath the nobleman de Vere, Cossolotto says. And if de Vere were using contemporary nobles or Queen Elizabeth as the model for his fictional characters, he'd want to distance himself from the work. He'd need a pen name.

What de Vere has that Stratford Will lacks, they say, is a paper trail of sorts. Even biographies of Shakespeare acknowledge that little is known about the Bard.

For Cossolotto, a key to dismissing the Stratford man as the canon's author is the fact that his two daughters were illiterate.

"It is unimaginable that the great 'William Shakespeare' would not see to it that his own children could read and appreciate his peerless works," he says.

There is no record of Stratford Will attending any school or even owning a book. His will included no books.

De Vere was well-educated and well-traveled, accumulating a base of knowledge that would have been useful in the writing of 37 plays and 154 sonnets, Oxfordians say.

Another key, Cossolotto says, is that when Stratford Will died in 1616, no one took notice.

De Vere died in 1604, 19 years before the "First Folio" of 36 Shakespeare plays was published, financed by William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke - married to Oxford's daughter, Susan - and Philip Herbert, the first Earl of Montgomery, who was once engaged to Oxford's daughter, Bridget.

Another key Oxfordian was Thomas Looney (pronounced "LOW-nee") whose 1920 book, "Shakespeare Identified" won over a whole new generation of acolytes, including Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles.

Cossolotto stumbled upon the topic a decade ago.

"I was puttering around a Yorktown bookstore and found Joseph Sobran's 'Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time,'" he recalls.

"I had heard that there was some authorship issue, so I picked it up and read it and I was fascinated," he says. A decade later, he has turned his home office over to the society and his basement over to its library.

There are still many questions to be answered and this weekend's conference will hope to at least ask some of them. One conference topic asks participants: "If you could know one additional thing about the Oxfordian case, what would it be?"

Cossolotto jokingly hopes one day for a "CSI: Stratford" series that would unlock the literary mystery. But he is convinced that the answers won't be found there.

"They're barding up the wrong tree in Stratford," he says with a laugh. "It comes down to Edward de Vere."