Shakespeare Unparadised

A defense of Shakespeare as pseudonym.

Though the title of this Cypriot poet's treatise suggests a comical satire in the tradition of Alexander Pope, Iacovou is absolutely serious in promoting his view that William Shakespeare was no playwright. Like many defenders of the anti-Stratfordian position, Iacovou consults a wide variety of sources?both Elizabethan and modern?to support his argument that The Bard was none other than Edward de Vere (1550?1604), 17th Earl of Oxford, Lord High Chamberlain of England, and perhaps lover to Elizabeth I. Acknowledging that J. Thomas Looney was the first, in 1920, to support de Vere's candidacy as Shakespeare, Iacovou further asserts that, during his day, Shakespeare's true identity was something of an open secret: "Why nothing by his contemporaries has survived equating Edward de Vere with the author of Shakespeare's plays is extremely difficult to explain. Due either to chance, or the product of satanic design, now that the equation William Shakespeare = Edward de Vere proves valid by the evidence brought together and analyzed, this lack of documents identifying Edward de Vere as William Shakespeare need neither deter nor torment us any longer." Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Greek, Iacovou argues that de Vere drew his nom de plume from "spear-shaking arm," a line in Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, who, states the author, is the greatest playwright ever. Though Iacovou devotes much of the book to outing de Vere, using as ballast the fact that 17 modern "geniuses" (among them, Milton, Dickens, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Gainsborough, Disraeli and Freud) doubted Shakespeare's authorship, he also argues that de Vere wrote Elizabeth's historic Tilbury speech, that the fate of the Turkish fleet in Othello matches that of the Spanish Armada off the coast of Ireland in 1588 and that the locale for that most famous of storms in The Tempest could only be Iacovou's native Cyprus.

Esoteric, and often reads like an extended footnote, but Shakespeareans should enjoy this passionate, if quirky, analysis of the authorship question.