Baring the Bard

William Plumer Fowler '29, a New Hampshire lawyer and Shakespeare aficionado, believes that the Bard of Avon was actually Edward de Ver, the 17th-century Earl of Oxford. He sets out to prove his case in his book "Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford's Letters" (Peter E. Randall).

The incarnation of Oxford's pen-name William Shakespeare into the uneducated William Shakesper of Stratford—by capitalizing on the latter's similarity of name and connection with the stage, and attributing to him the authorship of Oxford's unparalleled works, along with the requisite genius and educational advantages for their production—was at the time of Britain's war with Spain, and has remained to this day, a matter of basic British state policy. And with the still greater fraud of making this puppet poet into the British National Poet, it has become a legend closely tied to the Church of England's religion, and accepted by authoritative scholarship throughout the English-speaking world. It has also become essential to the life of the heavily vested economic and emotional interests built up around it in the Town of Stratford and elsewhere.