Whose Handwriting is in the de Vere Geneva Bible?

In late 1999 as I was wrapping up plans to complete my dissertation, I approached a board-certified forensic document analyst, Ms. Emily Will, to review the work that Mark Anderson and myself had already completed to investigate whether the seemingly plausible premise that Oxford had annotated his own Bible was a secure one or not.

After all, establishing the source of the annotations was essential if the study was to have any validity. Mark and I therefore set about, before making any other arguments, to answer the question: “Whose handwriting is in the de Vere Geneva Bible?”

It might seem like a reasonable premise that de Vere had annotated his own lavishly personalized bible, but it was one that required rigorous testing and cross-examination.

Using nearly every letter from the Bible, Mark and I prepared a four-way line-up of the Bible annotator against the Earl of Oxford, John Lyly, and George Peele, using examples from W. W. Greg’s 1925 opus, English Literary Autographs that forms Appendix H (501-538) of the dissertation (Figure 1).

After reviewing our work, and examining the raw samples from which it was done, Ms. Will wrote that “After thorough examination of all the documents presented in this case, it is my expert opinion that it is highly probable that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the author of the Q1 questioned annotations.”

Naturally the opinion of a board-certified forensics specialist means little to English professors like James Shapiro, so Will’s expert conclusion has been ignored and sometimes actively obfuscated by those with the greatest need to know the answer.

The obscurantist-in-chief has been Professor Shapiro, perhaps the most vocal and dogmatic Stratfordian in the United States, who in his 2010 faux history of the authorship question, Contested Will, summarized my dissertation (without offring any coherent analysis of the document it analyzed) by citing the work of internet “researchers” David Kathman, Tom Veal, and Terry Ross and appealing to his reader’s prejudice against “conspiracy theorists.”

These sleuths, Shapiro assured his readers

pointed out a good deal that Stritmatter’s dissertation committee apparently failed to notice. . . And, on closer examination, it wasn’t even obvious that de Vere himself had underlined these passages, since the marginalia appeared in different colored inks and might easily have been made by anyone who owned the Bible after de Vere’s death in 1604″ (213).

This was a dismal accusation for a scholar of Shapiro’s supposed reputation to be making.

It showed abysmal ignorance of relevant fact and a reliance on prejudice, confirming that Shapiro has difficulty with even elementary scholarship, a task that requires close attention to primary sources, not broadcasting unexamined opinions of internet pundits as if they constituted “evidence” or “argument.”

Here’s the first page that these self-appointed “experts” need to examine (Figure 2):

Figure 2 illustrates an essential aspect of the fact pattern of the de Vere Geneva Bible.

As I first stated in my 1992 research report, A Quintessence of Dust: An Interim Report on the Marginalia of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Owned by the Folger Shake-Speare Library, written nine years before the dissertation was submitted for approval and eighteen years before Shapiro (with typical disregard for fact, method, or literature review) accused me of concealing the fact from my dissertation committee, the Bible contains annotations in three main colors of ink, two of them visible here.

Contrary to Shapiro’s blithe insinuations, however, all the visible evidence of this page confirms that the annotations are by one person, namely the book’s original owner de Vere.

Both the red (now faded to orange) and the black ink detail the annotator’s preoccupation with the practical and moral problem of usury. Not only the content of the annotations, but also handwriting in the two colors is the same. One has to be blind or willfully dedicated to some a priori belief to try to spin this into evidence for multiple annotators.

This same pattern is visible elsewhere in the Bible, including at Proverbs 3.9 (Figure 3):

This second example documents the annotator’s very close attention to the printed text of the de Vere Geneva Bible. Throughout the Bible, as many as a dozen misprints are carefully corrected, including the ironic omission of the first person pronoun “I” at Romans 7:20.

A similar correction to the text at Ecclesiasticus 14:13 is based on the Roman Catholic Bible of the day, but the source of the parallel correction to Proverbs 3 is unknown.

In any case, comparing the two figures prompts a generalization that will prove consistently true throughout the entire Bible: the red ink – recalling the already known concept, “in the red” – deals with questions of economics.

To summarize, all of the evidence of the de Vere Geneva Bible supports the view that the different ink colors represent successive readings, with somewhat difference emphases and at different times, by the same reader, whose handwriting has now been identified by Emily Will as that of the 17th Earl of Oxford.

This is why, by 1992, after noting the three colors of ink in the book, I had drawn the conclusion that “all of the annotations in the Bible appear to be made in the same hand” (Quintessence p. 10).

For the forty page report on which this blog is based, you know what to do. Coming up in future blog entries: The scarlet ink variant. The autobiographical connections between the de Vere Bible annotations and the life of Edward de Vere.