From the latest Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter:
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"Mr. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, (who died January 26, 2003), one time Regius Professor of History at Oxford University...wrote extensively on the Elizabethan era, and was one of the earliest mainstream historians to express skepticism about the Stratfordian theory of the authorship of the Shakespeare canon. The basis of Mr. Trevor-Roper's skepticism was the lack of evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford ever wrote anything. Mr. Trevor-Roper said he believed Shakespeare's identity would be found in the author's own writings, and that regarding him as an untutored natural genius was fantasy. "On the contrary, we realize that he was highly educated, even erudite, ...He is clearly familar, in an easy, assured manner, with the wide learning of his time and had the general intellectual formation of a cultivated man of the Renaissance."

From this perception, Mr. Trevor-Roper concluded, "A cultured, sophisticated ARISTOCRAT, fascinated alike by the comedy and tragedy of human life, but unquestioning in his social and religious conservatism - such is the outward character revealed by Shakespeare's works."

A better one-sentence description of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, could hardly be written.
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Perhaps there are those who can find a way to believe that calling the poet an aristocrat means that the learned professor is not questioning that the poet was the son of a glove-maker from a remote Warwickshire village. If so, let them boldly step forward.

Feste