Sacramento’s de Vere descendents

It’s a controversy that a handful of people really, really care about: Who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare?

A new film by Roland Emmerich, Anonymous, purports to tell the story of the true author of Shakespeare’s plays: Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Turns out that Edward de Vere has some relatives in Sacramento—and you may have hoisted a flagon or two with them, since they’ve got a couple of bars called, of all things, de Vere’s Irish Pub.

The patriarch of the Sacramento de Veres is Dr. Ralph deVere White, an oncologist and head of the UC Davis Cancer Center on X Street.

So you’re a descendant of Edward de Vere?

I’m descended from Aubrey de Vere, who is a direct descendant of the Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

Our ancestors on the White side go back to about 1300. I went to school in a monastery that had been owned by the Whites until 1506. Then a descendant of Aubrey de Vere married into the White family, and formed the de Vere Whites, and that’s where I came from.

And what do you think about this new attention to his possibly having written Shakespeare’s works?

My thinking on this is that at long last, we’ll be recognized, and get the royalties we deserve, and I can pay off the cancer center and the pubs and run off into the sunset.

Do you think the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays?

My father was a literary man, the editor of the Irish Times, and he never claimed the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare. Now, he was never one to miss a tale, and I think he would have claimed it if he believed it.

I hope to God he did. It would mean there was at least one real decent literary person in the family. It would up the cachet incredibly. Who wouldn’t like to feel that the person who wrote Shakespeare was in the family?

Have you seen the movie yet?

We’re all going off to it. We want thousands of people to come to the pub and discuss it and we’ll be fully informed. … There are so many awful things, dismal things going on, so it’s nice to have something fun to chat about.