The Waugh on Shakespeare

Why the bard couldn't have been a pleb

The British writer Alexander Waugh died last week aged only 61. He was part of the Waugh dynasty: Evelyn’s grandson and Auberon’s son, and was by all accounts a decent writer himself. But what interested me most about him was his activism in the cause of arguing that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. In 2014 he published a book called Shakespeare in Court, in which he imagined the fake bard arraigned for having taken the credit for work actually written by others. Waugh believe that he had discovered clues in various Stuart era works which alluded to the claim that Shakespeare had been a nom de plume for Edward De Vere, the earl of Oxford. In 2016 Waugh became chairman of the De Vere Society founded by a (frankly eccentric) descendant of the Earl, Charles Beauclerk, to further the family claim. The website for the society is deveresociety.co.uk, should you feel in need of a diversion.

As part of my research into modern conspiracy theories for my book Voodoo Histories, I took a look at what is called anti-Stratfordianism. Why would so many apparently intelligent people invest so much time creating improbable hypotheses when the most likely explanation - that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, was readily available? Just snobbery concerning the grammar school educated son of a tradesman? A desire to bring genius down a peg or two? Perhaps a need to insert oneself somehow into the great story of English literature? It was intriguing.