The Folger Shakespeare Library and Edward De Vere’s Geneva Bible
Washington, DC and Hyannis, MA
Introduction
Time’s glory is to calm contending Kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light
From The Rape of Lucrece
There is a high temple in the United States of America besides that of Salt Lake City. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, said,
“God comes first as a creator, but surely Shakespeare comes second.”
This high temple of Shakespeare Studies is The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. Its website advertises itself as, “The World’s Largest Shakespeare Collection.” Those of us who attended American high schools undoubtedly recall being issued Folger editions of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. Undoubtedly, it is larger than that of Stratford-Upon-Avon and London combined.
Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
John Harrington (https://welikequotes.com/author/john-harington-1561/treason-doth-never-prosper-whats-the-reason-for-if-it)
Yes, beyond doubt this facility is the world’s greatest beacon for Stratfordianism. Orthodox Shakespeare scholars such as James Shapiro and Michael Wood undoubtedly praise the facility to the heavens. They would be honored to lecture there. Beneath the facade of the exterior, beneath the mountains of books, however, there lies a dark secret. This secret is kept in a vault in the basement of the facility. This secret is rarely acknowledged by the library staff; it’s existence is not common knowledge among most people who go to the library. This evidence has been called, “the most compelling evidence…” The really disturbing thing about it is that it was bought at auction by the library’s founder, Henry Folger. The problem, for William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon, is that this evidence points to another man as the author of, “the greatest expressions of humanity in the English language.” This dark secret has a name: The Geneva Bible of Edward De Vere.
- Explaining Henry Folger’s Purchase of the Bible
Why would he buy such an obscure item? He obviously became interested in the Shakespeare Authorship Question. More specifically, with the theory proposed in J. Thomas Looney’s Shakespeare Identified (see below).
Dr. Stritmatter commented on Folger’s purchase of the Bible in his dissertation:
Folger’s 1925 invoice from Leicestershire bookseller Bernard Halliday identifies the book as a Geneva Bible in a silver binding bearing the “arms of [the]Earl of Oxford.” The date of the purchase, only five years after the publication of “Shakespeare” Identified, has naturally raised the speculation about whether Mr. Folger had some particular interest in Oxford. For some time now it has been rumored that Folger, like Freud or William Mcfee, who in his introduction to the second (1948) edition of Shakespeare Identified compared Looney’s book to Darwin’s Origin of Species, may have covertly entertained serious sympathy for the heresy. Convincing evidence to support this proposition has recently come to light (Stritmatter 51).
Mr. Folger was obviously curious enough to buy the only extant Bible once owned by De Vere. Conversely, Stratfordians can produce no Bible, or a book of any kind, that they can prove was owned by Shakspear.
Once the readers of ‘Shakespeare’ have the career and personality of the Earl of Oxford in their minds, they will find our great masterpieces pulsating with a new and living interest.
John Thomas Looney (https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/shakespeare-identified-100/)
Looking at the De Vere family crest on Oxford’s Bible, the epic poem of Venus and Adonis immediately comes to mind. The Stratfordian view offers no such connections between the author and the work.
Previous Oxfordian Evidence
Shakespeare is mandatory reading throughout much of the world. Despite this, few people ever question the traditional story of authorship: a young man with a grammar school education went to London where he became an actor and a playwright. Looney’s book offers a different story:
https://sourcetext.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/looney_identified_1920.pdf
Prior to this book, alternate candidates for the authorship had been proposed-most notably Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon. In his book, Looney argued convincingly for Edward de Vere (pictured below).
What a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me.
(Hamlet, v2)
The Lack of a Documented Relationship Between William Shakspere and the Earl of Southampton
There are two dedications in the epic poems of Shakespeare. They are found in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Upon reading Shakesepare and the Earl of Southampton by G.P.V. Akrigg, the reader comes to realize that there is no documented evidence that the two ever met.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLEY,
EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON, AND BARON OF TITCHFIELD
RIGHT HONOURABLE,
I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honour’d you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deform’d, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather: and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart’s content which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation.
Your Honour’s in all duty,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (from Venus and Adonis)
O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind
me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story (from Hamlet)
Five years after the publication of Shakespeare Identified, in 1925, Folger bought the Geneva Bible that the Earl himself had purchased, at the age of nineteen, in 1570. The fact that Folger bought the Bible is profound evidence that he was a full fledged Oxfordian.
Prior to Dr. Stitmatter’s dissertation, one of the best pieces of investigative journalism into the subject was produced by the late Al Austin of Frontline:
The University of London, via Coursera, is one of the few institutions of higher learning offering a course on the authorship question: https://www.coursera.org/learn/shakespeare?
Those who take it, like Looney and Stritmatter before them, will undoubtedly come to realize the numerous weaknesses in the Orthodox argument.
2. Stritmatter’s Research
Professor Stritmatter, of The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, spent a decade studying the Bible. His results were put on record in his dissertation, The Marginalia of Edward De Vere’s Geneva Bible: Providential Discovery, Literary Reasoning, and Historical Consequence (see below).
His findings constitute some of the most convincing evidence in support of the Oxfordian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship. The following introduction is from his dissertation:
This dissertation analyzes the findings of a ten year study of the 1568–1570 Geneva Bible originally owned and annotated by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), and now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (Folger Shelf Mark 1427). This is the first-and presently-only dissertation in literary studies which pursues with open respect the heretical but probative thesis of John Thomas Looney (1920), B.M. Ward (1928), Charlton Ogburn Jr. (1984), and other “amateur” scholars, which postulates de Vere as the literary mind behind the popular nom de plume “William Shakespeare.” This dissertation reviews a selection of the many credible supports for this theory and then considers confirmatory evidence from the de Vere Bible, demonstrating the coherence of life, literary precedence, and art, which is the inevitable consequence of the Oxford theory. Appendicies offer detailed paleographical analyisis, review the history of the authorship question, consider the chronology of the Shakespeare canon, and refute the claim of some critics that the alleged connections between the de Vere Bible and “Shakespeare” are random (Stritmatter XIII).
I fear not Goliath with a weaver’s beam
The Merry Wives of Windsor (V.i.22)
When given the choice of any location in the world, the author chose to set only one work of fiction, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in his native England.
Richard Paul Roe, in The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels
One of the most rewarding experiences for Shakespeare scholars can be had by reading the Folger Edition of Macbeth and then reading Stritmatter’s dissertation. For those who are old school, a hard copy of both may be comfortable. In the modern age, however, it can be accessed online:
Emphasis should be placed on “the killing of God’s annointed.” William Shaksper must have or could have been upset by the Trial of Mary Queen of Scots. Edward de Vere did attend the trial, was upset and did annotate II Kings. The appendix of the dissertation offers convincing paleographical anyalysis of De Vere’s handwriting and the annotations as does the Oxford fellowship website: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/shakespeares-bible/. Many orthodox scholars,however, do not find this proof enough. If proof was given by God himself, they would undoubtedly refer the case to Lucifer.
In September 1586, after being arrested for sanctioning an attempted assassination of Elizabeth I of England, the long-held captive Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots was brought to Fortheringay Castle, where this proud Catholic monarch would be put on trial for high treason…At the head of the row of peers was Edward de Vere…
I am an absolute queen, and will do nothing which may predjudice my own royal majesty, or other princes of my place or rank, or my son…I am queen by right of birth and have been consort to a king of France; my place should be there, under the dias…I am the daughter of James V, King of Scotland, and granddaughter of Henry VII…
Mary Stuart
It is bizarre that so many orthodox scholars find the vast accumulation of evidence, supporting the Oxfordian theory, as threatening. Readers can now view the Bible for themselves via the digitized version on the Folger website:
The Orthodox Refutation
The only professional Orthodox scholar, who argues against Stritmatter’s dissertation, to the present author’s knowledge, is James Shapiro in his Contested Will, Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Professor Shapiro had the following to say:
…the University of Massachusetts at Amherst awarded a Ph.D. in 2001 to Roger A. Stritmatter for an avowedly Oxfordian dissertation on “The Marginalia of Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible.” For many Oxfordians, the missing link between their candidate and the plays had at last been found. An annotated geneva Bible from around 1570 that Oxford once owned had been acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Most of its annotations consisted of underlingings, which Stritmatter argued closely corresponded to allusions to biblical passages in Shakespeare’s plays, thereby confirming that de Vere was their author. Stritmatter also argued that some of the underlined passages had an autobiographical component, conveying the familiar Oxfordian “inner story” of “a man whose name had been erased from history and which set forth the divine promise of his eventual redmption.”
When independent scholars David Kathman, Tom Veal, and Terry Ross looked at the evidence, they pointed out a good deal that Stritmatter’s dissertation committee had apparently failed to notice. For starters, the conclusion tha the underlining matched biblical allusions in Shakespeare was unwarranted, since “only about 10 percent of Shakespeare’s Biblical allusions are marked in the Bible, and only about 20 percent of the verses marked in the Bible are alluded to in Shakespeare.” Moreover, the Bible’s annotator, or annotators, were interested in Scripture that Shakespeare rarely drew on…(Shapiro 214–15).
This book can rightly be called, “Stratfordian Apologetics.” As good a writer that Shapiro is, the evidence in Stritmatter’s dissertation is just too compelling; the marked verses are just so obscure to simply view them as coincidental or random.
3. Shakespeare Aficionados’s Views on the Authorship Question
What do the library staff think about the Bible? Do they have opinions on the Authorship Question? Will they be like the staff at the Roswell Public Library, saying, “We can’t give interviews while at work”? What do the scholars in the library think? Until the facility reopens, those with open minds can only imagine. What are the professional opinions of other people in the nation’s capital?
Abbie Weinberg, the Research and Reference Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library, had the following to say in regards to De Vere’s Bible being at the library,
Thank you for reaching out to us with your question. Henry Folger was deeply interested in all things related to Shakespeare, including how Shakespeare was understood and studied after his death. We have no reason to think Folger believed anything but “Shakespeare was Shakespeare” but he was fascinated by those who believed otherwise. He saw it as part of Shakespeare’s legacy and something any scholar of Shakespeare needed to be aware of.
The Folgers were also committed to collecting books that were representative of Shakespeare’s era and world. They purchased many bibles from that era (including two others of the same edition as the De Vere-owned copy), and were particularly interested in copies with a known early provenance — that is, copies where we know (usually from inscriptions on the book itself) who might have owned it in the early modern period.
United States Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, had the following view of Stritmatter’s findings:
The owner of the De Vere Bible had the same knowledge of scripture as the author of the Shakespeare Canon.
The following quote is from MVJ’s(Military Veterans in Journalism) Devon Lancia, who holds a B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of Florida,
I personally am in the camp that Shakespeare did write the works attributed to him, but given other poets in history — such as Homer from ancient Greece, whom many classicists now believe was not one real individual — I can definitely see where the thought process behind it comes from.
Jeff Shaara, one of the greatest authors that America, and the English speaking world as a whole has produced, has the following views on Shakespeare,
I’m not the Shakespeare expert by far. My father actually taught a Shakespeare course at Florida State, many years ago, and could probably quote from every play Shakespeare wrote. The only thing I can come up with is that Shakespeare understood people- he understood emotions and human behavior, both good and bad. Often, it’s the bad we focus on, since that sort of thing shows up so often in history- no matter what history you’re talking about. Not sure if this is any use to you, but again, I’m a long way from being a Shakespeare scholar…
My father used to get pretty upset at anyone suggesting Shakespeare did not author his plays, but I’m not sure what he was basing that on. At the end of the day, the plays stand on their own, no matter who, ultimately, can claim authorship.
Charlton Ogburn Jr. has the following to say,
I think it’s the shame of the English speaking people, both British and American, that we have taken these works, incomparable in literature, and vested them on a Stratford bumpkin whom no one ever said anything good about except that, ‘He was a natural wit.’
Sigmund Freud had the following analysis,
I no longer believe that … the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him. Since reading “Shakespeare” Identified by J. Thomas Looney, I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford…. The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.
Sir Derek Jacobi has the following opinion on the subject,
It is not enough to say, ‘We have the plays and poems. It does not matter who wrote them.’ It matters to me, and I sense, to a growing number of others.
In regard to Stritmatter’s dissertation,
A phenomenal piece of scholarship.
Charles Vere has the following to say,
“It’s interesting that everyone involved in the publication of the First Folio was engaged or set to be engaged to Edward De Vere’s daughters.”
Professor Clare McManus, of The University of Roehampton, has the following views on the Authorship Question,
I don’t believe in Francis Bacon. I don’t believe in the Earl of Oxford. Some people believe that Shakespeare had to be rich or an aristocrat, but I don’t believe that at all.
The Dr. who made Edward De Vere’s Geneva Bible famous; one might say infamous, has the following views on the Authorship Question,
Once you realize that Oxford is the author, everything makes sense….
I am sorry that you got no response from your previous inquiries. This is because you are probably twenty years ahead of the Shakespeare professors whom you sought to contact. Most of them are still in the denial phase of the paradigm shift and are emotionally shut down about the topic. All this will change, but probably only very gradually over the next couple of decades.
Conclusion
It can be proven that the Geneva Bible currently held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. was owned and annotated by Edward De Vere. There is no Bible, or any books for that matter, that it can be proven were owned and annotated by William Shakspere of Stratford on Avon. Dr. Stritmatter’s dissertation, taken with the evidence already accumulated by Looney and Roe, tips the balance of the authorship question more decisively in Oxford’s favor.
Works Cited
Akrigg, G.P.V. Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton.
Looney, Thomas. Shakespeare Identified. 1920.
Roe, Richard Paul. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels.
Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon and Schuster, 2010. Print.
Strimatter, Roger A. The Marginalia of Edward De Vere’s Geneva Bible: Providential Discovery, Literary Reasoning, and Historical Consequence. Oxenford Press, 2015.
