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babbles bathetically about what a good time can be had by older homosexuals. He claims they are still desirable, they are misrepresented in the media, they are misunderstood as “garden variety fags.” This last was his invented terminology for older conservative gay men — fags who garden. You really should look up these old identity-based articles, they’re quite a hoot.
    Dash King’s plays are also an entertainment in themselves. He wrote quickly, so quickly that it was impossible for him ever to write a great play (or what might be considered great by the artistic standards of the time). Some of his plays were written in the space of one week, and he often defended himself by comparing himself to the likes of Donizetti, Noël Coward and Lope de Vega. We won’t even discuss Donizetti and Lope de Vega; they were prolific, but that is something quite different than shallow and careless. As for Noël Coward, not even Noël Coward ever lived up to being Noël Coward, and if
Private Lives
was
written in a week, it certainly shows. Some of Dash King’s plays can still be found, and there is something touching about them. But more as an antithesis to the “Death of the Author” paradigm: they are interesting only because of what one knows about the author. I think Mr. King would have been quite perturbed to know that he has not been remembered, not even as a gay activist. In fact, one of his whining articles goes on about his concern that he will be remembered as a gay activist rather than as an artist. Well, the fact is, the only chance he has of being remembered at all is if our discussion of his lost papers becomes the foundation for an article that is widely read. This is, in itself, also unlikely. Anyway, the plays are mostly unreadable rants about homosexuality, peppered with nostalgia for the good old days of gay liberation when gay men were girls and had “high heels in their hearts” — one of my favourite kitschy King lines. As I say, the plays hold little interest except as a footnote to his tragic life.
    His imploded scholarship, however — especially the scribbled notes on several printed versions of the
Hamlet
essay — is interesting, particularly in the context of his heroic attempt to resurrect identity politics at a time when they were so very clearly over. I neglected to mention the
Hamlet
article marginalia because I am saving the best for last. King’s essay appeared in an online journal when online scholarship was in its infancy. The journal was concerned with the notion that Shakespeare was not “the man from Stratford,” as the journal likes to put it, but instead Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
    There were many reasons why a late-twentieth-century faction who called themselves “Oxfordians” had decided that the Earl of Oxford was the real Shakespeare. But for King it was all a matter of identity politics — everything was. Other heterosexually identified Oxfordians found the proof they needed for identifying de Vere as Shakespeare in the Earl’s background, life and learning. He was an aristocrat, and was certainly a very learned — if not a dissipated, and perhaps criminal — sort of man. When one begins to research the old Oxfordian websites, one may be surprised by the notion that their entertaining fictions might indeed be fact. There are certainly a remarkable series of coincidences connecting the two men. For instance, the Earl’s life resembles, to a shocking degree, the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. The Earl of Oxford had three daughters, was married to a woman who cuckolded him (or was thought to), spent much time in Europe, was the adopted nephew of the real-life person on whom Polonius was inarguably based . . . The list of coincidental similarities goes on and on. All of this might matter — if Shakespeare mattered. It might matter if work that is so antique and indecipherable