One of the greatest minds and names in world literature was a Briton and genius who wrote the plays ascribed to a William Shakespeare. But for me and for many others, Shakespeare, a mediocre actor and uneducated person who owned a lumberyard, never left English soil, and had no higher education, and was arrested for hoarding food during a famine, did not write these plays at all.
Instead, it was clearly Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Chamberlain of England (1550-1604), whose descendants, by the way, now own the ancestral Norman castle of my own de Nugent family in County Westmeath, Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford
Castle Nugent, now property of the de Veres
As a child, every fiber in me said I could never regard anyone as a genius who was as obviously part-jewish as the actor (and selfish, convicted food-hoarder in time of famine) who was named William Shakespeare.
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Edward de Vere was a high-born aristocrat who traveled widely, spoke several European languages fluently (especially Italian), and wrote many plays about kings and lords …. How could the nobody William Shakespeare, who ran a lumberyard in Stratford, and never set foot on the Continent, know all about Italian culture and court life?
Nor could I understand how an obvious jew (at least by his DNA) could ever write a masterpiece like “The Merchant of Venice,” a classic work of powerful antisemitism.
Shylock in the Shakespeare play was truly an Eternal Jew, a man of gold, greed, lies, merciless vengeance, and sadistic murder.
The sadistic and vengeful Shylock prepares with delight to get his “pound of flesh” from an anti-jewish Venetian
Though the jews were technically still expelled from England at that time, all one had to do was say one had “converted to Christianity” to stay in England or get back in. And many jews just went up to Scotland, which was not under England at that time, after Longshanks (Edward II — photo from the film “Braveheart” with Mel Gibson) banned and expelled the jews in 1290… Some of these jews then quietly returned to England while calling themselves “Scotsmen”!
Some others, being dark of hair and with an olive tan, cunningly said they were “Welsh.”
Anyway, my late wife Margi, whose mother (photo, center) Hazel founded and ran for decades a renowned Shakespeare company in Asheville, North Carolina, the Montford Park Players (https://www.montfordparkplayers.org/history/), got me to read an outstanding book by an author named Mark Anderson on the theory (or fact) that Edward de Vere was actually the author of the very greatest of the “Shakespeare” plays.….
The two huge problems for Edward de Vere in taking credit for some of his plays were:
1) that aristocrats were not supposed to be playwrights, because if the play flopped, the common people would be ridiculing a member of the nobility, and Edward was the Lord High Chamberlain of England….
and
2) some of the plays, because published anonymously, dared to contain implied or hinted criticism of Queen Elizabeth I or of her friends.
The Virgin Queen, a redhead, had a habit of chopping heads off just like her father before her, Henry VIII. In fact, she even had her own cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, decapitated.
So the plays circulated but without de Vere’s name, and the unscrupulous actor and lumberman William Shakespeare began taking credit for them, especially after Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, died at just 54 in the year 1604.
Edward, though a genius, actually got in lots of trouble, and once, with his sword, sliced another nobleman’s servant in the thigh, and the servant died of this wound. The Queen once had him and his mistress, who was one of her maids-of-honour, locked up in the Tower of London.
He also blew through lots of money in Italy as well as England, but Anderson’s book relates that de Vere was so brilliant that 70 years after he had passed through Milan in northern Italy, the Milanese were still talking about “the brilliant Englishman.”
As a child, Edward, who, again, was the EARL of Oxford (an “earl” being like a count, or a Graf in Germany, this being the rank just below the king), had been tutored by the most brilliant professor at the University of Oxford.
Wiki:
He fell out of favour with the Queen [Elizabeth I] in the early 1580s and was exiled from court and briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London when his mistress Anne Vavasour, one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour, gave birth to his son in the palace. Vavasour, too, was incarcerated, and the affair instigated violent street brawls between Oxford and her kinsmen.
He was reconciled to the Queen in May 1583 at Theobalds,[8] but all opportunities for advancement had been lost. In 1586, the Queen granted Oxford £1,000 annually ($483,607 in 2020 US dollars)[9] to relieve the financial distress caused by his extravagance and the sale of his income-producing lands for ready money.
After the death of his first wife, Anne Cecil, Oxford married Elizabeth Trentham, one of the Queen’s maids of honour, with whom he had an heir, Henry de Vere, Viscount Bulbeck (later 18th Earl of Oxford). Oxford died in 1604, having spent the entirety of his inherited estates.
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Of the theory that de Vere wrote the famous plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, etc, I was convinced literally halfway through Anderson’s foreword! 
Btw, the word “ducats” is used repeatedly by the hate-filled jew Shylock at the end of “The Merchant of Venice.” It is a reference to the coin and currency of the medieval Republic of Venice — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducat — just as Germany once had the deutschmark and Europe currently has the euro.
The word “ducat” is Latin and refers to the coins issued by a duke, as opposed to coins minted by a king. This is the kind of thing an aristocrat might know and especially one who traveled to Italy, as de Vere did.
In the Shakespeare play “The Merchant of Venice,” at the end of the tragedy the greedy and vengeful Jew Shylock bemoans the losing of both his daughter and his ducats, wailing “my daughter, my ducats.” The real emphasis by Shylock is on “my DUCATS”…. my MONEY…..
And of course readers back then were familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, unlike our numb and dumb masses of today. Here is a Venetian gold ducat of the year 1400, containing 3.5 grams of gold, and worth about US$100.
Actor Al Pacino as Shylock
Btw, one can profit from reading the great de Vere plays in a modern “translation.” Many English words have changed their meaning in 400 years. In my own case, I read Hamlet, not in the dated English of the 1590s, but in a modern French translation — and suddenly realized — wow — just how great the play was.
When the jew Shylock refers to his “ancient grudge” with the gentile Antonio, he alludes to not just the longstanding personal animosity between the two men, but to the long history of semitic crimes and anti-Semitic stories and attitudes that shaped the world at the time the play came out.
The gruesomeness of Shylock’s demand for “a pound of flesh” might shock a modern audience, but tales of bloodthirsty Jews harming Christian bodies were common in medieval and renaissance Europe.
De Vere and his Elizabethan audiences probably would have known the story of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, a child whose death was committed by the jews there as a “ritual murder” in the thirteenth century, and similar true stories abounded of Jewish sacrifices of Christian children.
Likewise, the revulsion that Shylock endures because he was a money-lender was consistent with longstanding European attitudes toward Jewish moneylenders.
In medieval and renaissance Europe, moneylending was one of the few professions available to Jews, who were barred from practicing many other trades. But the fact that they charged huge interest on their loans caused them to be further reviled by Christians who believed usury, or money-lending at high interest, was sinful.
In addition to believing derogatory truths about the Jewish religion, most members of Shakespeare’s audience would have never met a Jew in real life. Elizabethan England was a homogenous society; in 1290, King Edward I had expelled all Jews from England.
Additionally, the 1594 trial and execution of Roderigo Lopez, Queen Elizabeth I’s royal physician, led to a surge of anti-Semitism in England in the late sixteenth century. Lopez, a convert to the Church of England of Jewish descent, conspired for Spain to poison the queen, was arrested, tried and convicted of high treason, and was hanged, drawn and quartered.
Dr. Lopez asks a Spanish agent in Latin “Quid dabitis?”, meaning “How much will you give?” In the right corner of the cartoon you see him hanging. The caption says “Lopez compounding [conspiring] to poison the Queen”
The Merchant of Venice was written by edward de Vere when this event was fresh in the public’s mind. Furthermore, in Christopher Marlowe’s 1589 play The Jew of Malta, which critics consider a significant source for The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish character of Barabas is a murderous villain who poisons every character who stands in his way.
So now I hope you enjoy Edward de Vere with a new appreciation!
But I do want to take back our castle which the earl’s descendants now own! And put a new roof on it. http://nugentcastle.homestead.com/
From the plays, here are two Edward de Vere sayings which I have used:
After reading the two bestsellers by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now and The New Earth, suddenyl I understood this line from Hamlet.
Earth is a unique and strange planet that is under a curse because earthlings are so insane that they lie even to themselves.
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