A Comprehensive review
of Alan Nelson's Monstrous Adversary 2003
This review is copyright © 2003 by Robert Brazil
Introductory Comments
about Monstrous Adversary
For many people, this has been a long-awaited book. Several researchers
have been holding off publication of works for years because they did
not want to go to press with wrong facts about Oxford nor be bereft
of any great new scoop. In that light, Nelson's book is a huge disappointment.
The book does contain a scant few new facts, but much less new information
than was anticipated. The further disappointment is that people new
to Oxford and the Shakespeare mystery, who read Nelson first, may get
tainted by his overwhelmingly negative assessment of the life and worth
of the 17th EO.
Alan's endnote system and
intratext reference system uses microscopic fonts and confusing overlapping
jurisdictions. It is often very unclear what is being referenced by
what. It is also often unclear where he is quoting and when exactly
quote becomes paraphrase, or mutates further into 21st century opinion
If his goal was to obfuscate and make his tracks very hard to follow
he did a smashing job.
Nelson's book is not the
authoritative documentary biography of Oxford that many folks have been
waiting for that would actually present all the relevant documents,
or at least reprint the entire relevant sections. Now maybe Nelson wanted
to, but the book would have been 2000 pages. I can understand that.
But what he has given us (or sold - I had to buy my copy) is a very
selective interpretive biography.
I was not asking for a definitive
biography, but a true documentary biography - as Schoenbaum did for
William Shakespeare of Stratford. Introduce all the documents that are
known. There are not an infinite number. It is a manageable and finite
number (though that number keeps growing). Transcribe and offer context
for each document with as little spin as possible. True, it would not
be a popular book. But it would be a useful book that could be the foundation
for interpretive biographies. Until Nelson, Oxfordians had to base their
work on Ward, the Ogburns, Miller, and data published in journals. I
had hoped that Nelson's book might be at least useful as an improved
reference point, on which to base further work. But because his work
is so flawed and so terribly opinionated, every fact has to be rechecked.
And the net result is this: Since I and others have to recheck the facts
and find the parts of the documents he ignores, by the time we have
the information we want, Nelson was just the irritant, a catalyst for
obtaining the better information we now have. The book, as it is, is
useless as a universal or basic reference on Oxford. It does have some
value though, because Nelson did dig up a few new documents that nobody
knew about before. And his extreme cartoon characterization of Oxford,
(a part of Nelson's overall scheme to paint Oxford as a self-centered
hedonist/ruffian who only brushed up against the Renaissance) actually
makes it even more clear that we are dealing with the man from whom
the Shakespeare canon emerged. And that's exactly why I have tortured
myself - going through the whole book line by line. My comments were
shared with a 60-plus member e-mail research group. As we discussed
the minutiae of Nelson's book it seemed as if we were a Harry Potter
club taken to exponential proportions. But in historical studies, one
has to find out what is real and what is fantasy and what is just innocent
error. Nelson's book contains highly select facts simmered in fantasy
and seasoned with error. It still remains for someone else to publish
a true documentary biography some day of Edward de Vere.
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