Edward de Vere became earl as a child in 1562,
and lived
for eight years as the king's ward. In December 1571 married his ward's daughter, Anne Cecil.
He had studied at Queens' College
and Cambridge. His financial
position had become very strained, primarily because of his speculation in
financial schemes. His younger children were provided
for by his ward and father-in-law, Lord Burghley. He remarried in 1591 or 1592
and in
1586 Queen Elizabeth gave him a yearly stipend of 
1,000.
He never held any office or command of import, though he was named on the commissions of some famous trials I. It has been suggested that the reason for the stipend may have been for his services in maintaining a company of actors and that the obscurity of his later life can be explained by his play writing. He was indeed a notable patron of writers. He employed John Lyly, author of the novel Euphues, as his secretary for many years.
The idea that Oxford might written Shakespeare's plays was first argued in in "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford by J. Thomas Looney at the turn of the century on the basis of a similarity between Oxford's life and both Bertram - in All's Well That Ends Well - and Hamlet> He also argued that Oxford's poems resembled Shakespeare's early sonnets. Oxford's interest in theater went beyond patronage, and he wrote some plays, though there are no known examples which remain. His 23 remaining poems were written in his youth, and, because he was born in 1550, Looney proposed that they were the prelude to his adult work and that this began in 1593 with Venus and Adonis. This theory is bolstered by the coincidence that Oxford's poems apparently ceased just before Shakespeare's work began to appear. Others have argued that Oxford assumed a penname in order to protect his family from the shame attached to the theater and also because his spending had brought him into disrepute at court. A major difficulty in the theory, however, is his death date (1604), because, according to most experts, 14 of Shakespeare's plays, including many of the most important ones, were written after 1604. The iea, however, remains alive and vibrant.
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