Nothing Is Truer Than Truth

San Marco rises up out of the lagoon to greet the traveler like a hallucination – a sensory assault of color, light and shadow, music, watery reflections, vapors rich with antiquity and modernity, at once a city and a fantasy.

“The Venice of 1575 was the New York City of its day – a world financial center, fueling an ongoing explosion of learning, literature, theatre, music, and art. The city nicknamed La Serenissima [The Most Serene One] had, with the economic and artistic decline of its rival Florence, become perhaps the premier cultural capital of late-sixteenth century Italy. Reaching the shore of the Venetian lagoon sometime in mid-May 1575, the conte d’Oxfort had finally arrived.” So was the Venice encountered by Edward de Vere as described by Mark Anderson in his definitive biography Shakespeare By Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare.

“By the 1570s, Venice had become perhaps the most vibrant theatrical community in all of Europe. One can readily envision how, as this aristocratico inglese settled into his new hometown, he also began attending plays that would be meting out ideas, plots, characters, and inspiration for the rest of his life. The theatrical mixture of high and low, refined and proletariat, comic and tragic, that graced Venetian stages at the time would present an aesthetic philosophy that would later be developed into the works of Shakes-speare.”

On this elaborate stage, the virtual center of the known universe, Edward de Vere appears, at age twenty-five, an A-list celebrity and party-boy extraordinaire. “Above all,” interview subject Joseph Sobran writes, “his brilliance made him a magnet even to other brilliant men.” We see De Vere at a masque, demonstrating his skill as an accomplished dancer. We hear the music he has composed, including the familiar Christmas song “Greensleeves,” widely attributed to the pen of the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. “This Star of England,” as de Vere scholars Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn christened him, was also an accomplished storyteller: “De Vere would return from Italy with many tall tales that he would spin for his drinking buddies and fellow pub crawlers,” writes Anderson in Shakespeare By Another Name. I have secured an option for the documentary rights to this book for my film. As a student of writing and literature at Goddard College, I did extensive research on the theme of androgyny in Shakespeare’s plays. As a poet, I recognized in the early verses by Edward de Vere the emerging voice of the author of Shakespeare’s sonnets. As a writer and filmmaker, I am compelled to tell this story.

Edward de Vere was a man quite unlike any other: a life rich with adventure, conflict, passion, tragedy and controversy. The life of a scholar, a spendthrift, a scoundrel, a venture capitalist, a sailor, a composer, an athlete, and a world renowned storyteller. A rebel, a romantic, and a poet. A fatherless son, an absentee husband, a reluctant father, a capricious lover. A dandy, a courtier, a royal favorite, a traitor. His was an extraordinary life. Still, he was human, as prone to jealousy, vanity and resentfulness as the next man. He was educated by the greatest minds of his time, and his education was the one thing he did not squander. He transformed his academic training into a legacy for humanity. With his ability to refine complex intellectual and emotional conflicts into the purest simplicities of everyday existence, he defined genius.

In How The Mind Works, interview subject Steven Pinker writes, “Geniuses are wonks. The typical genius pays due for at least ten years before contributing anything of lasting value. During the apprenticeship, geniuses immerse themselves in their genre…They do not repress a problem but engage in “creative worrying,” and the epiphany is not a masterstroke but a tweaking of an earlier attempt.” Harvard University Professor Pinker is an experimental psychologist and an expert on the evolution of language and cognition.

De Vere translated history, comedy and tragedy through vivid expressions of experience. He was an alchemist with words. But as a man, he is forgotten. He chose anonymity as his guarantee of immortality. It is this mystery – why he opted to become invisible – that has compelled his followers to seek him, in books and poems, in paintings and in court documents, with relentless determination. Nothing is Truer than Truth joins the search.

Through interviews with university and high school students, actors, directors, writers, Oxfordian scholars, and professors of history, neurobiology, and music, Nothing is Truer than Truth asks: Who was Edward de Vere? What is the relationship between truth and history? What responsibility does academia have to teach the truth? What is the relationship between personality and genius? Through graphic animation, Nothing is Truer than Truth provides an overview of De Vere’s epic life story, from the death of his father when Edward was twelve, to his affair with Queen Elizabeth, through his imprisonment for treason, to his years as the leader of the Euphist writers in London, to his retirement in the country, and his death at age fifty-four. Through dramatic recreation, travel footage, archival footage, extant portraits and manuscripts, performances of the plays, and narration including the words of the poet, Nothing is Truer Than Truth focuses on the eighteen month period when De Vere escaped the confines of life at Elizabeth’s Court and traveled the Continent from his home base in Venice, gathering the raw material for the great canon that would become known as the works of Shakespeare.

Nothing is Truer than Truth introduces De Vere to viewers who have never heard of him. It provides a brief encounter with a brilliant, troubled, charming man. It immerses the audience in the world as he discovered it, a world filled with political intrigue, renaissance music and art, the emergence of science, the stranglehold of religion, the obligations of family and nobility, the struggle between honor, duty, and individuality. Sharing De Vere’s journey, today’s students, tomorrow’s writers, explore the intersection of history and experience, literature and documentary. Nothing is Truer than Truth – from the de Vere family motto, Vero Nihil Verius – seeks to illuminate truth through the life and words of Edward de Vere.

Nothing is Truer than Truth is intended to engage elementary, junior high school and high school students in cities, suburbs and rural regions of the United States and Great Britain. This age group, viewers from five to eighteen years old, is served primarily by reality television programs, music video programs, and multi media platforms. By bringing Edward de Vere to students in classrooms, in theatre workshops and at historical sites traditionally associated with Shakespeare and his work, Nothing is Truer than Truth will provide an opportunity to question the conventional wisdom about the character known as the Bard of Avon. The film will facilitate a dialogue about the relationship between truth and history.

Through the National Endowment for the Arts’ Shakespeare for a New Generation Initiative, the Shakespeare plays are being introduced to new audiences in communities throughout the United States. The goal of Nothing is Truer than Truth is to provide an interactive experience for viewers who will become the next generation of Shakespeare scholars.

Partial List of Interview subjects

MARK ANDERSON Shakespeare By Another Name
HANK WHITTEMORE The Monument – Shakespeare’s Sonnets
RICHARD WHALEN Shakespeare: Who Was He? The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon
SARAH SMITH Chasing Shakespeares
DR. CHARLES BERNEY Senior Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
JOSEPH SOBRAN Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time
DR. DANIEL WRIGHT Professor of English, Director, Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference and Institute, Concordia University
DONALD OSTROWSKI Professor of History, Harvard University, Three Criteria for Historical Analysis
MARJORIE GARBER Professor of English, Director of Humanities Center, Harvard University, Shakespeare After All
DR. PAUL ALTROCCHI Retired Professor of Neurology, Stanford Medical School
MICHAEL DUNN Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Mystery
DR. PETER AUSTIN-ZACHARIAS Renaissance Studies, Michigan State University
ALEX MCNEIL Total Television BA Yale University, JD Boston College Law School
ELISABETH SEARS Shakespeare and the Tudor Rose
JAMES NEWCOMB Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Adjunct Professor at UCSD
CAROLE SUE LIPMAN Founder & President Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable
STEVEN PINKER The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works
BRIAN MILAUSKAS Founder/Director Kidstock! Creative Theatre Education Center
JOHN BERENDT The City of Falling Angels
JOHN OXENFORD Winner, 23rd Annual Shakespeare Competition, English Speaking Union of the United States, student Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School
DIEGO ARCINIEGAS, Artistic Director, The Publick Theatre
SUSANNE NITTER, Producing Director, The Publick Theatre
ROBERT J. ORCHARD, Executive Director, American Repertory Theatre
CHARLES BIRD Historian, De Vere Society Member
TINA PACKER Founder, Shakespeare & Company
DR. RIMA GREENHILL, Senior Lecturer in Russian Language, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University

IFP New York sponsors the film. Founded in 1979, the Independent Feature Project helped bring recent indie doc hits like Mad Hot Ballroom to audiences around the world. Tax deductible donations to support Nothing is Truer than Truth may be sent to IFP at 104 West 29th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY, 10001.

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