On Outing Shakespeare

Well, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has thrown his hat in the ring on the controversy regarding Shakespeare's identity, and his choice for the role is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Of course those of us who have read Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe might have been expecting some such developments. The interesting thing is that this opinion comes from outside the circles of the high priests of Stratford upon Avon, not to mention from outside the clerical circles of wider literary scholarship who have traditionally maintained the myth that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. A book on this controversy which I have earlier discussed on this blog, 'Shakespeare' by Another name: The life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the man who was Shakespeare, by Mark Anderson, and it already had convinced me pretty much, although I was by that time prepared to be open to that kind of development, exactly because of Arten's comments in Gary's book.
Here's how Arten said it;

 ARTEN: Sure. The gentleman who wrote the Shakespeare material was an Earl whose family's crest bore the image of a lion shaking a spear. To honor his family he was sometimes toasted at Court with the phrase, "Your countenance shakes a spear." But this Earl was forbidden by Queen Elizabeth the First, who was a political genius and very controlling, from putting his name on his work. There was a social stigma attached to the stage at that time. Plays, especially comedies, were not considered to be serious literature and were beneath the dignity of royalty.? (from Gary R. Renard, The Disappearance of  the Universe)

We are now probably not far away from a point that anything written about Shakespeare is fairly much irrelevant unless you appreciate that the writer of the words "all the world's a stage" in fact was in fact very much an actor on that stage who had known success and failure spectacularly, with a rich formal education, as well as plenty of lessons from the school of hard knocks, enough so that indeed it allowed him to gain an entirely different perspective, in what is customarily called enlightenment, allowing him to see through the whole charade from another vantage point, which A Course in Miracles describes as the view from "above the battle ground":

   Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? (ACIM:T-23.IV.9)

It is the sure knowledge that nothing is to be gained from anything in this world, which alone grants us the serenity and the sublime humor with which Shakespeare looks at the world. As Gary has recently observed somewhere, it is also the smile of the Mona Lisa. It is the manifestation of the peace of mind of Logion 42, "Be passersby."
It is like the shift of looking at Moby Dick through the eyes of Jed McKenna, to be looking at Shakespeare through the eyes of the Earl of Oxford, who in worldly terms was a nobleman at the Court of England who was decidedly past his prime, but who had acquired the perspective necessary for the task. It is also like realizing that Thomas Jefferson could not be understood and appreciated unless one realized the multiple levels of complexity and inner contradiction in his life as reflected in his relationship with Sally Hemings. Prior biographies do not only need to be corrected on that point, but entirely rewritten, for the man cannot be understood any other way. His fascinating relationship with Jesus, as evident from the Jefferson Bible, is another dimension of his character that has been widely missed, and treated at best as a curious episode, but not understood for being the central key to his character which it is. So, it seems we are having an interesting time of it with a massive reframing of some very interesting accepted truths in our culture, which turn out to be falsehoods.
In learning to step back from our own life, by adopting that view from above the battleground, it becomes easier to spot these things, for as we begin to understand that the classrooms of our life are in fact just that, it begins to make sense how Edward de Vere was able, as he stepped back from the wreckage to understand the whole story on a new level, including seeing it in the holographic framework of his life's experience and learning, in which Shakespeare's endless anachronisms becomes understandable as it is meaning, or content for which he merely finds the form to express it from the repertoire of his life and learning, Part of this learning involves this experience of déjà vu across time and space, for some people that goes with lively "past life" experiences (General Patton is my fave for that) for others it remains more ethereal, as simply deep insights and joining in an experience which we suddenly recognize at a deeper level.