Alexander Waugh

Alexander Waugh’s diary: Shakespeare was a nom de plume — get over it

Plus: If I were a panda I'd rather be extinct; Dame Edna's show sent me to hospital

Researching a new book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, I stumbled upon an astonishing piece of hitherto unnoticed evidence in a 16th-century book by a sex-maniac clergyman from Cambridge. I shall not bore you with the details; suffice it to say that William Covell (the author and S-MC in question) revealed in words not especially ambiguous by Elizabethan standards that ‘Shakespeare’ was a nom de plume used by the courtier poet Edward de Vere. Now a lot of people have been saying this for a very long time — so stale buns to that, you may think — except that no one has yet noticed that the matter was revealed in a book as long ago as 1595, so that makes it an important discovery. Well the Sunday Times ran a jumbled account on its news pages illustrated by a photograph of a nudist performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Times ran a piece the next day suggesting that ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ was a rarely performed play by Shakespeare.

'Our de Vere - a secret'? Is this an encrypted allusion by William Covell to Shakespeare from Polimanteia (1595)

‘Our de Vere – a secret’? Is this an encrypted allusion to Shakespeare in William Covell’s Polimanteia?

Our newspapers may be put together by degraded and ill-educated editors, but the reports were still just about coherent enough to rouse the hornet’s nest. ‘Stratfordians’ used to hoot at anyone who questioned their orthodoxy, but now that the tide of evidence has turned against them, and almost every intelligent educated person concedes, at very least, that there is a genuine authorship problem, their derisive laughter has toned itself down to the sort of soft growl that senile dogs emit when you try to get them into the car. After two days of manfully parrying emails of vituperation (‘Evelyn [sic] your [sic] just an attention seeking pratt [sic]’: ‘why give air to the views of that talentless little wanker Waugh’ etc), I decided that enough was enough and it was time to take myself abroad.

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