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Notes -
This Star of England is a biography Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in light of the theory that he wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
Some of its scholarship seems, for lack of a better word, incestuous, as Ward's biography (he was an Oxfordian) is cited often, and Looney’s (also an Oxfordian) attributions of certain poems to Edward de Vere are also taken as a given.
The narrative itself is much more engaging than I expected. Still the truth is that the Lord Oxford does not always come off as being the sensitive, honest and forthright man who they attempt to portray him as. He seems an awful lot like a man who avoided his wife despite her faithfulness and then accused her of infidelity because he had a personality disorder. But then again the record is not complete, so much is, as the authors say, optional to assume.
Yet I’m enjoying myself immensely; the book reads like a mythology which is pregnant with potential meaning, and such books I deem essential to a complete picture of wisdom. These are the kinds of things which make me upset with our society’s tendency to hide certain books from view: one doesn’t even know where to begin to find a canon of such books. One must rediscover in agonizingly slow steps, in utter confusion, and at his own peril. Ogburn Jr.’s preface (pdf) is well worth reading, if nothing else.
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