The Boston Globe offered an appreciation of Helen Vendler’s book on the care and feeding of Shakespeare’s sonnets. While not exactly a rave review, it was written from a totally orthodox viewpoint. But this response to the Globe (which was not published) suggests that editors might well want to hear from both sides of the aisle when major works are baptized.

A Global Issue in an Issue of the Globe

In his review of Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Globe November 30th) William Pritchard selected the analysis of Sonnet 87 to demonstrate her devotion to something he calls "plainsense". The choice could not have been more appropriate. That particular sonnet was written to a person who called herself "prince" and who had backed out on her betrothal to the author of the sonnet.

For more than fifty years scholars have had the option to accept a credible source for the plays and poems of "Shake-speare". Perhaps the most important aspect of this identity is that these works present an overview of Elizabethan England and the Continent that is interwoven with a haunting autobiography; a life and times all quite inaccessible to the more accepted culprit from Stratford-on-Avon.

Nowhere in her book does Vendler suggest that this poetry was written for any ordinary purpose, or that there has ever been the slightest question of its authorship. Instead she insists that these "lyric" stanzas exist in an artistic vacuum. The comparable parallel would be to maintain that Picasso's Guernica was painted as an academic exercise, or at best, the product of a bad LSD trip. Vendler's analyses seem driven by quantum mechanics; for every word there are an indeterminate number of possible meanings, to be considered in parallel, completely isolating these beloved quatrains from the mind that gave them life.

Neither Dr. Vendler nor any of the authors she read in nine long years of research seem willing to relinquish their allegiance to the Stratford Myth, with its easy fellowships, grants, professorships, and access to publishing. The bumpkin they champion was so dull they have had to assume his product was either totally abstract or inspired by divine guidance. Or both! If asked to prove their case, there is no more than a page and a half of facts available, none of which have anything to do with writing plays, or even sonnets.

But many of the sonnets were written to or for women. Our poet, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was Elizabeth's champion in the lists; he never lost a contest. He fought a duel over another lady with whom he had a titled son. He had three daughters by his second wife, and a noble heir by his third. For a father-in-law he had the real-life model for Hamlet's Polonius. One of the two brothers who published the First Folio was his son-in-law. As hereditary Lord high Chamberlain he was responsible for at least two groups of players. One of these became “The King’s Men” after Elizabeth died. A year later, on Oxford’s death, James I lighted up the night with a sequence of plays in his memory

Whatever the detailed reasons behind the world’s most famous nom de plume, they centered on state security. England was no match for France and Spain, so a great Queen forsook at least one of her loves to keep the French at bay by contemplating marriage to the Duc d’Alencon. The love she denied herself re-created her over and over again in his plays.

At the center of Elizabethan cultural life, he forged a language long mired in dysfunctional jargon into the one that some of us have come to love. He saw the task as one of simplification as well as instruction and amusement. It would be impossible to quantify the impact of Shake-speare’s English on our world of communication, or on it’s cybernetic future.

Why should Dr. Vendler not be free to hallucinate about the writings of a person for which there is no proof he ever even owned a book? A good question. Perhaps the most important reason is not literary. Oxford, with the support of a brilliant Queen, gave us a living matrix for conscious thought and feeling. The common denominator of the plays and poems is cause and effect; responsibility.

Implicit in Harvard’s (The University Press) publication of Vendler’s book is the support by our leading educational institutions of covens of Stratfordians wallowing in the mass onanism of virtual reality. Vendler’s attempt to titrate the works of a poet she does not believe ever existed required a syntax and vocabulary that is in itself unintelligible. It thickens the caul surrounding the century from which the New World emerged. We are the poorer for the loss of a chance to re-examine the entrails of that lost century.

 While poetry is all about simplified communication through imagery and ideas; the sonnets were about real people, in real time. In this book they have been rolfed beyond recognition. If the 17th Earl of Oxford returned today to find his language heaped upon the soggy midden from which it sprang, would he have the heart to start all over again?

West Tisbury, MA