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UBC #21: Monstrous Adversary
UBC #21
Nelson, Alan H. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.
(Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala for the loan.)
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.
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.)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.
no subject
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.
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