Shakespeare

In response to “Happy Birthday, Dear William,” by Jenijoy La Belle, Commentary, April 21:

Softly now, Jenijoy and all the rest of you cocktail party intellectuals, armed with your “deathblow” facts--not one of which was mentioned in your article--let me suggest that rather than continue to perpetuate this enormous hoax, that you begin your true education concerning this “authorship question” by the acquisition of Charlton Ogburn’s massive, brilliant investigative study, “The Mysterious William Shakespeare--The Myth and the Reality.”

If, after reading Ogburn’s exceptional work, you can continue participation in and perpetuation of this greatest of all literary myths/lies/crimes, then there is nothing that will convince you that the person named Gulielmus Shakespere, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, could not possibly have acquired a vocabulary of nearly 20,000 words, that he could not possibly have had access to or knowledge of the internecine intrigues of Elizabethan court society, that he could not have been able to read or translate Italian, Hebrew, French or Greek without a practical university or tutored education. There is not one shred of evidence that the man from Stratford even went to elementary school, let alone had any other form of the higher education. No amount of “natural genius,” either from a so-called commoner or a well-born person, will account for the incomprehensible, illogical notion that they could.

And if I were at one of your cocktail parties, I’d raise a glass and wish a very happy birthday to the true author, Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

AL ALU

Los Angeles