Fortunatus in Disguise: The Adventures of Master F.I. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

Abstract

Like most "Stratfordians," I did not think that Oxfordians "deserved the compliment of rational opposition," as Jane Austen would say, and never would have reviewed this book had I not encountered a footnote in the fascinating, tortured correspondence between Sigmund Freud (a notorious Oxfordian in later life) and his fiancée Martha Bernays. If scholars of their caliber, three of the world's most eminent historians of psychoanalysis, can take Oxfordianism seriously, Shakespeareans need to speak up and not simply trust that Hollywood will sink the Oxfordian cause by reducing it to the absurd. Arguing against opponents who hold a view rooted in class prejudice and requiring belief in near-omnipotent conspiratorial power while discounting the power of an author's imagination is a thankless and usually vain task, but one hopes that outsiders to the field of Renaissance English literature will be open-minded enough to recognize evidence when confronted with it. I will leave the authorship of Shakespeare's plays and poems to Shakespeareans. But since it is not as notorious that Oxford warmed up for Shakespeare by writing George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F.J. and several poems included in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), I feel compelled, as the most recent editor of that book, to dispute Kurt Kreiler's assertions about the authorship of Master F. J. and other poems that he attributes to Oxford.

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