The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET
The author "lived a life of allegory" and "his works are comments on it," declared the brilliant Romantic poet John Keats. If so, it is to Hamlet that the student should turn to most directly apprehend the Bard's own allegorical life. By general assent this is the most "autobiographical," intimate and self-revelatory play in the Shakespeare canon.
The life revealed by the dramatic devices of allegory is not, however, that of the Stratford bourgeois. Instead, a transparent network of figurative associations links the play with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. As Washington Post writer Don Oldenburg has said, Oxford's life reads like a "rough draft" of the play: his conflicted relations with his curmudgeonly father-in-law William Cecil and vulnerable wife Anne, his respect for his "fighting cousins" Horace and Francis ("Horatio" and "Francesco") Vere, and above all his cunning use of the theatre for political and moral purposes, while remaining a concealed ghostwriter and theatrical impresario, are all depicted in Hamlet.