UBC #21: Monstrous Adversary

[truepenny]

UBC #21

Nelson, Alan H. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.

(Thanks to matociquala for the loan.)

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Monstrous Adversary is the epitome of academic biography. It is exhaustively researched and consists almost entirely of primary source material: Oxford as revealed through his own words and those of his wife, father-in-law, daughters, friends, enemies, dependents, superiors ...

It is not a flattering picture.

Nelson effaces himself almost completely, although his loathing for his subject can't be entirely suppressed. In fact, the biography is a little frustrating to read because Nelson so utterly refuses to supply any kind of a narrative framework. He gives facts and contexts, but no interpretations. And there are a lot of places where I found myself asking, "But why on EARTH did Oxford do THAT?" If it's not in the primary material, Nelson doesn't attempt to provide answers, and even though that's frustrating, I admire him for it very much.

The seventeenth Earl of Oxford was a selfish, greedy, vain, profligate man, who lied and cheated and murdered his way through an utterly undistinguished life, routinely betraying his friends and dependents and treating those who tried to help him with the utmost ingratitude.

I'll take the glover's son from Stratford, thank you.

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I have a terribly romantic acquaintance who is a devout Oxfordian. I am so tempted to put this on the Christmas list for her.
She may never speak to me again.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

The bits where he demolishes the Oxfordian's arguments that Oxford=Shakespeare are particularly priceless.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I had the same frustration with a recent book on the notorious Frances Howard poisoning case -- the author loathed the lady in question and made no attempt at all to get into her POV.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm misreading you, but I don't think we're talking about quite the same phenomenon.

The frustration I felt was--I imagine--the same frustration any biographer feels (especially at 400 years' remove), when the primary sources simply don't CONTAIN certain kinds of information. And I respect Nelson for refusing to make stuff up in order to get a narrative that modern readers will find satisfying.

He could have created a pattern--could have given signposts about how he thought we ought to interpret Oxford's life. But he didn't. He presented the evidence and (sometimes) his own opinion--which was always very clearly his opinion and generally erupted around incidents like Oxford's claim that his wife's first child couldn't be his, because he wasn't sleeping with her twelve months before the baby's birth. (No, really.)

So my frustration was with history, not with the biographer. And having had the opposite frustration with wossname's biography of Henry James, in which great lavish wodges of Freudian interpretation are imposed on the hapless subject's life, I actually found it rather refreshing.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I did misread you. My apologies.

[cheshyre]

Out of curiousity, which book was that?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I'll take the glover's son from Stratford, thank you.

La. Give me a tax-evading grain-hoarding actor over an illiterate pedophile traitor any day.

[skeetermonkey.livejournal.com]

I read it, and enjoyed that it seems to be the only Oxford biography out there that isn't written to sell something to the audience. Oh, it sells something, all right, but Oxford is hoisted on his own pitard. The author sits back and says, "oh, look at this, says he was buggering his page from Italy, oh, look at this, says he treated his wife like crap, oh, look at this, Oxxie says that if women aren't available, a boy will do." (Undeniably in Oxford's own words.) Talk about debunking! The Oxford conspiratists all seem to routinely dismiss it and hate it because the shining light of the truth is too much for them to take. Hissing like Gollum, they creep back into the nether cracks of the arse of history to plot and bide their time, and hope that maybe someone will discover that Nelson has some huge flaw in his character that they can all point to and say, "THERE! See!!!! HE LIKES GEORGE BUSH! EVERYTHING HE WROTE WAS A LIE!"

[barriequark.livejournal.com]

"Hissing like Gollum, they creep back into the nether cracks of the arse of history to plot and bide their time"

Wow. I think I love you!

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

You are a beautiful man, man.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

If Oxford had gone to a University, he would have been in Skull and Bones.

Nine

[barriequark.livejournal.com]

Until someone finds early drafts of the plays in Oxford's cellar, in his handwriting, I am going to assume that Shakespeare wasn't trying to cover for him by pencilling in his own name. :P

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Sounds like my kind of biography, if I cared at all about de Vere, which I don't.

The most fascinating thing about those think that Oxford (or Bess herself, or any one of half a dozen others)is the revelation of their own intense class (and intellectual) prejudice. Not only don't they believe that a jobbing actor of middle class origins could not have written THOSE plays, they believe it had to be an aristocrat (often on the barmy premise that Shakespeare could not have known about Elizabethan courtly manners, when all they know about Elizabethan courtly manners was learned from reading Shakespeare) and/or someone who had been to University.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yanno, the concept of acting does seem to be lost on some people. (We note, of course, that Jonson and Marlowe were working-class boys, and of the three of them, only Marlowe had a university education. Which puts them in good company, actually.