The Edward Oxenford Review

Mission Statement:

The Edward Oxenford Review is dedicated to re-evaluating the life of Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, and his contribution to Elizabethan theater and literature, without bias for or against his person, due to theories of authorship.  Instead, we begin with these ten premises.   

About the editor: In 1984, I began a twelve-year independent study of the craft of poetry, during which time I had the good fortune to take classes with masters of the trade such as Les Murray, Mary Jo Salter, Derek Walcott and Richard Wilbur.  My poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly and The New Republic.

Since first learning of the “authorship question” in April of 2000, I’ve been researching the extravagant claims made for the earl of Oxford as author of not only the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, but also the works of Robert Green, Thomas Nashe and many others.

In 2002, I discovered a clear link between Oxford’s Howard cousins and one of Shakespeare’s plays.  For the next five years I worked exclusively on researching and writing Shakespeare and the Howards: A New Reading of Titus Andronicus. An expanded version of chapter 1, “Titus Andronicus and the Treasonous House of Howard” appeared in The Oxfordian, Vol. 12.

My next project explored the tempestuous relations between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare during the Poetomachia, or “Poet’s War” of 1597 – 1602, and the echoes  of these times found in The Alchemist and The Tempest.  I’ve presented two papers on this topic at the “Symposium: Shakespeare from the Oxfordian Perspective” conferences in Watertown, MA., the first resulting in an article for the Shakespeare-Oxford Society Newsletter, “Ben Jonson & The Tempest: ‘The Copie may be mistaken for the Principall’” (Sept. 2009).

My last foray into public speaking was at the annual SOS – SF conference (Ashland, 2010), where I presented a talk on some previously unnoticed intertextual curiosities involving Shakespeare’s “fruiterer” in Henry IV, Part II and a similar “fruiterer” in the 1562 anonymous Interlude, Jack Juggler.

Thanks for visiting the EO Review!  Comments and questions are always welcome.

~ Marie Merkel