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 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.
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