World-renowned anthropologist Robin Fox turns his analytic eye on the Shakespeare authorship issue, and asks and answers some stark questions. He attacks some shibboleths on both sides of the debate, and comes to his own conclusions. Robin Fox is an anthropologist and historian of ideas, and is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University. Educated at the London School of Economics, Harvard and Stanford University, he did research with Pueblo Indians, Irish islanders and Macaque monkeys in the Caribbean. He founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers in 1967 (among the top ten in the U.S.) and was for twelve years a director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation with Lionel Tiger, co-author of The Imperial Animal. His Kinship and Marriage is one of the most consulted social science texts in the world. His latest book is The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard UP). (www.robin-fox.com) In Shakespeare's Education, the eminent anthropologist Robin Fox attempts to make the case for de Vere. Times Higher Education I'm one of those with a serious armchair interest in the Oxford Shakespeare argument, and I appreciate books like this one from a thorough-going academic who's willing to sweat the details. This short book by Fox helped my understanding in two major ways. First, its thorough chapter on Tudor schools gave me a clearer perspective on the fairly certain education of Oxford and the possible education of Stratford Shakespeare. Second, I greatly appreciated Fox's careful discussion of Oxford's fortune and why it disappeared, in the context of a major social/political shift that took off with Henry VII and that led to the draining on not only the Oxford fortune but of other noble wealth in land. Fox ties this aspect of Oxford's life also closely with the plays, especially Timon of Athens. There's lots more in the book, and lots of good leads for still further reading. Alan Venable on amazon.com Fox contends that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were written by Edward de Veré, the Earl of Oxford, and supports his argument by careful analysis of the works of Shakespeare, especially passages related to schools and teaching and what they might suggest about the education of the author. Nicholas Graham, Library Journal
