Sweet Cytherea”
Proving Oxfordian Authorship in “Sweet Cytherea” The Wind-Up Oxford’s poems do not resemble Shakespeare’s. They were two different writers. Such is Academe’s preclusive claim that a literary chasm exists between the known, usually early, writings of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and the collected works we recognize by the spectacular epithet ‘Shakespeare’. (Baldrick, l7-18; Elliott, The Shakespeare Files; Kathman, website; Low, letter NY Times; Nelson, quoted, “Shakespeare Matters”, 7; Nelson, website) Since Lord Oxford published under a series of pseudonyms and proxies in order to carry on an artistic vocation shunned by his class, only three subscribed poems after his youth have survived. (“Shakespeare” Vol I, 553) There are no original notes and manuscripts to document an Oxford/’Shakespeare’ stylistic evolution. His plays are said to have been lost. (Sidney Lee, in “Shakespeare” Vol I, 112) The 1951 Encyclopaedia Britannica noted only, “He was a lyric poet of no small merit.” Orthodoxy therefore may prefer the slanted odds of comparing The Sonnets, ‘Shakespeare’s masterpiece, with Oxford’s juvenilia, involving a gap of twenty-five to thirty-five years in a life full of writing and personal change. Lacking the autograph work, critics who credit Oxford as the mind behind the name 'Shakespeare' must build their evidence from logical deduction, similar phrasing and poetic devices, biographical allusion, vocabulary, allegorical reference, and a recombination of previously disparate sources. But these investigative techniques apply to any author’s unprovenanced writings. The literary detective work is no different. Should it link an unattributed work to Francois Marie Arouet, for instance, which means simultaneously to his pseudonym Voltaire, it would be a red-letter day for literature.
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