hUMILITY pRESS
P.O. Box 1595  West Tisbury  Mass. 02575

17        "…. unlike the works of most of his urban or university educated
contemporaries…." [Wood tries to show that our poet was a country boy. We will
find many such references to this and education. While Shake-speare-Oxford was
farmed out to the most brilliant scholar in England at the age of four, he grew up in
the country until he was twelve. In London during his teens he learned at the feet of
his guardian's gardener, John Gerard who wrote the first herbal in English.

18        "That's the kind of knowledge you don't get at Oxbridge, or in a rich man's
house -" [Get the "Oxbridge" - Tom Stoppard, eat your heart out!]

21        "Baddesley, with its moat…." [Partly a circularity, this reaches into Measure for
Measure with Marianna and her "moated grange". Oxfordian scholars have
connected the moat with Shake-speare-Oxford's wife and her father's estate, Theobalds. 
Of course Wood needs to find us another handy moat, in case we have
heard something or other about the real one.]

39        "…. not only the act of killing, a running metaphor in his plays, but also the
way that blood flows…." [He is getting ahead of himself in dating the theory of

42        "…. key to the many legal cases involving John Shakespeare during William's
childhood….” [Plenty of books have been written on the rich legal content of the
Canon. Many authors have concluded there is no way that Shaksper could have
known enough to write this. Welcome to the beginning of the charade created by
this book (and its television series) directed at overcoming the fact that Shake-
speare-Oxford went to law school.]

48        Ovid's Metamorphosis (sic); my mother gave it me" - [Right on schedule,
Wood goes to work on The Ovid Connection. There will be more.]  and
"…. house inventories of the day tend not to mention books…." [Scholars of all
stamps have searched in vain for any record of Shaksper ever owning a book.
Wood hopes that this will explain how the life of a man so richly identified with
books of every kind could - well, you get the idea.]

49        "Given the controversy that still surrounds the authorship…." [Here the full
court press begins a three-pack of literary lesions: "But it can be stated for near
certain…." and "…. this is one instance where direct biographical evidence
from the plays is indisputable…." and  "Their author, as we know from the
contemporary testimony of his friends and colleagues, was William
Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon…." [Other than to receive a working
definition of "near certain" it would be interesting to see some proof of these
evanescent claims.]

50        "…. in a back-handed compliment, Ben Jonson said Shakespeare had 'small
Latin and less Greek’…." [The quote is: "though he had small Latin -" meaning
that even if he had, rather than having been fully competent.  Then a courtesy call
to Ovid and fantasies about the "end product" of the Elizabethan educational
system - the dramatic Tudor expansion of literacy plus a masterful note-in-passing
of a 'correct translation' (by Shaksper) of a word in Tempest omitted in the English
version by Arthur Golding.]

51        "Later in his plays, Shakespeare paints a picture of lessons as a grind…."
[Along with a quote from the picture caption: "Birching was the rule in Tudor
schools, but learning by rote (he assures us) stuck with you."]

61        "One day in class, when Shakespeare was about nine, his schoolmaster Simon
Hunt introduced him, in Latin, to the Roman poet Ovid." [No one knows for
sure whether he went to school, or where, or who his teacher(s) might have been.]

62        "….but to Ovid he went back time and time again…." [A running commercial
on Shakespeare's "best-loved book" continues to caulk the leaky Stratfordian seams
- but nothing could prepare us for Ovid being –

63        "….one of a small number of books that he used throughout his career - amid
thousands of texts browsed, skimmed, plundered or read intensively." [There
is equally speculative reason to believe that parts of Golding’s translation were
done by his young and brilliant noble nephew.]

89        "….if the queen loved anyone, it was Dudley." [Some back-fence gossip under-
mining Shake-speare-Oxford's hopes despite the fact that Dudley, also Oxford's
arch-enemy, was the model for Claudius in Hamlet. Those plays are like a great
net, Mr.Wood, you can't ever get free from them.]

97        "…. a time whose opacity has only added fuel to the fantasies and conspiracy
theories that have come to surround his life…." [Shaksper apparently had two
lives: the one shown here (the part that is based on facts), and the one about his
being a great writer, clearly four centuries of fantasy.]

106      "Maybe they know something we don't…." [Like the fact that the person who
wrote the earlier plays as well as the rest was fourteen years older than Shaksper?]

109      "Coincidences sometimes invite us to pay attention…." [This is a desperate 
paragraph conflating the experience of two different Williams with the goal of allowing 
the gullible to contemplate a ten-year-old boy beginning his professional career.]

132      "Shakespeare looked like this: a young blade…." [A great service to literature;
at least the BBC and Wood are allowing the "…. balding middle-aged man…."
to dissolve into the Stratford Myth. The several portraits of Edward deVere show
him equally handsome as the book's proffered-if-not-proven image of a young man
"…. the same age as Shakespeare (sic)….". In  1588, the date claimed, Shaksper
would have been twenty-four, but Shake-speare-Oxford was thirty-eight. One
wonders how long will this likeliness reverberate through countless
unreconstructed schoolbooks, and perhaps on a stamp for the Royal Mail.]

142      "…. as he was later to remark ruefully: - 'that every word doth tell my name'
…." [A brave but Pyrrhic attempt to defuse an important Shake-speare-Oxford
literary landmark. There is a sonnet, they say, from which these lines were excised
that is dedicated to illuminating the deVere identity. Nice try.]

148      "He called it the 'first heir of my invention'…." [Wood's theory that this means
it is the poet's first poem in print, and has it sitting around for sometime. Right on!
A thorough analysis of the references both to classic themes and astronomical
chronology ties it to a time when Shaksper was not yet eight. It was written for
Elizabeth, and her Adonis, the poet. From what her biographers say, she would
have been (secretly) delighted at theories demanding a homosexual explanation. It
is doubtful that another young man's outpouring such as this would have been
passed around. By 1593 it served as a way of communicating (as abstractions) this
love to the person he had reason to believe was his son - about the father and -- 

149      "a little smarmy - excessive self-deprecation was fitting - for a lower middle-
class -" [Thanks again, I have been searching for that word. The Stratfordim love
scenarios; try this one: you are poet and the current head of the oldest earldom in
England with nearly as much royal blood as your Queen, writing to your son who is
potentially the heir presumptive to the throne. Your romantic nature and parental
affection will have you: 1) treat him as royally as any father worth his salt would
do; and 2) as a practical matter, having by now read everything about royal history,
take no chances. This is only a scenario, mind you, but explains the language of the
dedication. The first seventeen sonnets are doing the same thing: marry Lord
Burghleys grand-daughter and improve your career options. Time showed
that Southampton was not that interested in being King. Who could blame him?]

161      "the oppressive heat of a Verona summer -" [There are several versions of the
story of Romeo and Juliet set in Verona. The play, both as Shake-speare-Oxford's
earlier Romeus and JulietI, and the one that grew out of it are the only ones that
have the details of the "geography" of the town properly arranged. Our wolfish earl
had been in Verona as well as other locations on the Continent used in his plays.]
and  "Midsummer Night's Dream was played, perhaps before the queen " [The
wedding of Shake-speare-Oxford's daughter Elizabeth with William Stanley, the 6^th
Earl of Derby, with her godmother Elizabeth I in recorded attendance. Derby is
among those who were thought to have collaborated on the plays. He worked with
his father-in-law's theater group. The Oxbloc device here is the casual way in which
Wood skirts important social geology whenever his charade gets close to the truth.]
and "Shakespeare - always unerring in his observation of lower-class people.”
 [Do we assume then that a cat can look at a king? Many of the famous lights who
have questioned the Stratford Myth have asked how Shaksper could have known
how to be comfortable with the noble and royal social patterns so brilliantly limned
in "his" work. S'truth, his Lordship was known to have distressed his father-in-law
(the model for Polonius in Hamlet) with his low-life friends; he was truly an
uncommon noble.]

180      "….why did he call him 'Mr'…." [If it had been William Herbert to whom the
sonnets were dedicated, Mister would probably have worked here, too. Another
scenario, please: The poet has been dead for five years, the poems are in the
possession  of 1) his son, Southampton, or 2) Elizabeth Trentham (Lady Oxford,
his second wife). They may have been stolen or at least pirated; the record is
unclear, but they were published without the assistance of either Shaksper or
Shake-speare. Aside from the possibility that instructions had been left for
posthumous publication, the alternative is that it was in the hands of a person "in
the know" and sympathetic to the Tudor - Oxford - Southampton - Pembroke -
Montgomery family dynamics. Reversing Henry Wriothesley's initials made him
not a noble; "Mr" was the only choice. A slightly less likely choice is that in this
time of turbulence at Court over the Spanish marriage, this was done to hurt
Southampton, a favorite at court. Either way, there were people who saw through
this thin device.] and "….the sonnets of William's cousin Mary Wroth…."
[Born a Sidney, she was Susan Vere's (Lady Montgomery's) best friend. Wood
quite rightly points out that after her husband died, she took up housekeeping with
Lord Pembroke. Of course Susan's father's sonnets had an influence, as did her
maternal uncle's (Philip Sidney's) poetry and prose. She wrote the first novel by a
woman in English, dedicated to Shake-speare-Oxford's daughter. See "wallowing at
Wilton" under Fantasies.]

182      "…. a woman named Bridget de Vere…." [My candidate for an appropriate
subtitle for this book: In Search of Shakespeare. We have been told that Mary
Herbert induced the Bard to write sonnets directed at getting her son married off;
and that he had escaped the clutches of the aforesaid Bridget. This young lady had
at least two things going for her: she was the sister of mother Mary's daughter-in-
law; and she was Shake-speare-Oxford's daughter. Has "Oxford" become the word
that can not be spoken? Or is the author just having a little joke?]

184      "…. written only eight months after the death of his own son." [Perhaps the
most imaginative Oxbloc in the book, this one tries to wrest the case for the Earl
away in several directions at once. The deathless line "He was but one hour
mine…." has been correctly identified under Circularities at this page. But to drag
the relationship of a father (or father figure) with an infant (changeling) son into the
"weeping, sleepless" forest of homosexuality takes special dedication and skill.
Has the Oxford movement been that successful? Is it that with less and less space to
turn, the Stratfordim have found themselves in a behavorial sink?

223      "Equally suggestive is the role of Hamlet's friend Horatio - absent in the play's
sources…." [While Shake-speare-Oxford may have used some of the Orestia,
Amleth (Hamlet) also had a friend in Saxo Grammaticus' Danish account. The
primary source for the play, it was not translated into English until 1605. Wood
seems unwilling to take a chance since with all of his mustabeens and circularities,
he could not guarantee Shaksper could have read it in Latin.]

224      "…. despite Gertrude's remarks, it is modeled not, as Freudians have said, on
the tale of Oedipus, but on that of Orestes." [In this most autobiographical of all
the plays, scholars find Elizabeth there with her "son" in scenes that have always
raised eyebrows. This has not been lost on her biographers as they have updated,
decade by decade, her "allowable" sexuality. Wood's gambit will not deny the play
its proper place on the couch.]

229      "…. dismiss the 'eyrie of children, little eyeases - now the fashion, and so
berattle the common stages…." [.... and other words to upstage the man who
founded and directed the children's theaters. It seems impossible for someone who
sees this as a saga of "…. commercial pressure, competition, big investments,
and stage rivalry…." to understand what was really going on.]

231      "…. deconstruction  of Olivia's Puritan steward, Malvolio…." [Deconsruction,
yes; but of what. One of Shake-speare-Oxford's worst enemies at court, Sir
Christopher Hatton had to take this send-up in stride. Except for Burghley (his
father-in-law) as Polonius, this is one of the best caricatures in the Canon. Hatton
was anything but a Puritan, although there has been some speculation. By dragging
him across the trail to put us off-scent, Wood also abets his creative eschatology.]

267      "These pages, apparently in his own hand, form part of the manuscript of Sir
Thomas More...." [Most of the manuscript is in the unmistakable hand of Anthony
Munday, Shake-speare-Oxford's secretary. Other pages are in other hands but
expert analysis has found none of them to be in the illegible scrawl of Shaksper's
signature(s).

271      "…. he probably owned the Protestant Geneva version…." [Stratford's scouts
are doing their job; they have learned that the Folger Library, a stronghold of
Shaksperians (although Folger himself believed in Oxford) has Edward deVere's
own Geneva Bible. And further, that the first doctorate ever earned using Oxford as
the Bard, was based on this very volume. See Mustabeens, pages 191 and 271, but
this transparent allusion is also a classic Oxbloc.]

273      Caption: "…. the play resonated the profound anxieties in the body politic in
1605-6." [Of course it did, as it does today. See Mustabeens , this page, for an
honest dating. The reference to an "old play" on page 274 is needed because
Shaksper could not have written it. Shake-speare-Oxford did.]

282      "…. his company performed Lear before the King ....” [ Wood uses capitals for
James title; lower case for Elizabeth's] and “.... and court at Whitehall on St.
Stephen's Day 1606….” [Whatever Shaksper's job in the group was he might well
have been there. But there is no record of his being in London after 1604, except
for some transactions a few years later that might have been remotely negotiated.
This "Shakespeare's company" litany is not a new device - it has always been thus.
But there are few, if any contemporary references to whichever groups Shaksper
was working for, or Shake-speare-Oxford was writing for that are on record.]