The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Helen Heightsman Gordon

Gordon, Helen Heightsman

158 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2005

About the author

Helen Heightsman Gordon, Ed.D., has been a professor of English at Bakersfield College in Bakersfield, California, and an editor in the College of Engineering at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She has studied the Shakespeare authorship question for the past fifteen years, having been persuaded by the Oxfordian scholars Charlton Ogburn, Jr., and his parents, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. She has edited and published a World War II memoirs, authored a historical novel, a book of word games, and five textbooks. She has also published numerous articles in professional journals, newspaper opinion pieces, poetry, and humor.

Reviews

[John Fredrickson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a frustrating read. In part I think this is because there is no clear direction or thrust to it. What is clear is that the author is convinced that Edward DeVere was the real playwright and poet, and that William Shakespeare was likely paid to keep his silence about the use of his name. The argument that DeVere is the real poet is fine - I am sure a cogent argument could be made, and I would be happy to read it, though I do find the authorship discussions to be somewhat tedious. At one point in the book the author states "It is almost impossible to imagine this poem being written by a commoner", a phrase that is all too familiar.

The main struggle I had with the book is that the evidences supplied by the author to support her thesis appear fairly random, and poems that seem to point away from her argument (e.g., Sonnet 145 with potential references to Anne Hathaway) are ignored. The difficulty here is that some of the text resonates with potential truth, but a lot of it comes across as pure unsupported speculation.

The author postulates that DeVere and Elizabeth had a fling and a love child. The relationship itself and the child are two secrets that would need to be protected from public knowledge, thereby requiring the use of pseudonyms and a lot of encoding in DeVere's written works. The book thus opens with attention to Elizabethan practices of encryption to guard such secrets, and the dedication to the sonnets is considered from this light, but very unconvincingly.

Also presented are portraits of the relevant characters from the time, with similar noses and slender fingers as potential evidence, which again seems quite tenuous.

The main thrust of the book is a mapping of different sonnets against actual (and quite often surmised) life situations of DeVere. The sonnet selections are presented in a very different order from the way they normally are, but we do not know if the 'normal' order is even correct, and the author does not address this. Each selected sonnet is presented and then paraphrased for the reader, though I often thought the paraphrasing ignored important elements. Though the author is clearly very knowledgeable, the discussion of these sonnets comes across as pure speculation, but often contains elements that seem to contradict each other (e.g. Elizabeth as the dark lady, also as the fair one needing no arts, but nonetheless slathering on the makeup).