Shakespeare Authorship

I have been reading allot about the debate over who actually wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. And I figured since this group is a lively and opinionated bunch I would put the question out there and see where everyone stands...

So what does everyone think of the debate over Shakepseares authorship?

May I recommend Contested Will by James Shapiro? It's a thorough and entertaining review of the various propositions. He's firmly in favour of the man from Stratford, and if I'd had any doubts previously he would have removed them.

And while I'm at it, may I also recommend Shapiro's rather older book 1599, a brilliant account of the writing of four of Shakespeare's plays in their historical social and political context.

It's typical conspiracy theory stuff. Start with the conclusion and then selectively prune "evidence" that supports the conclusion, i.e. the opposite of how historical research is done (or ought to be done). It animates English majors by turning an otherwise dry non-biography into a thrilling whodunnit.

It's also a commentary on the American public that big budget English versions of plays like "Coriolanus" barely get a release here (or not at all), while the dumb conspiracy film "Anonymous" gets big publicity and opens in 200 theaters.

I have actually read both of Shapiro's books. They are very good. They had a big part in my becoming a Stratfordian. I also enjoyed Stephen Greenblatt's Will In The World.

> 3

Many cops use the same methodologies ;-)

I didn't get around to seeing "Anonymous", which anyway looked a bit weak, but I wouldn't dismiss the Shakespeare authorship controversy as conspiracy nonsense. I remember reading a pretty decent account of it, "Who Wrote Shakespeare?", and it is indeed curious that a rustic commoner without a University education could be so literate as the author in question clearly was - consider that books were precious objects, and complete illiteracy the norm. While high-minded souls poured scorn on writing for the stage, Shakespeare's contemporaries were all University men (often rebellious types). It is not inconceivable that a nobleman might assume a nom de plume, or even ghost write to protect his reputation. And many serious people (including Freud) are/were convinced that Stratford Shakespeare wasn't "Shakespeare" - candidates include the Earls of Essex and Oxford, and Francis Bacon. I'm not sure myself, and I'm not sure how much it matters.

>1 SirFolio16:

There is no debate. The first person who thought Shakespeare did not write his plays was a certifiable lunatic who lived two centuries later. The only people who do not think Shakespeare was Shakespeare are those who seem to think that the only people who can write English are aristocrats and that a grammar school lad from the Midlands could not possibly provide such works of genius. It's a ludicrous form of snobbery.

>6 leonb: Shakespeare's contemporaries were all University men

Marlowe and Heywood studied at Cambridge, as did Fletcher (Beaumont is thought to have been at Oxford), but most of them never took degrees. Neither Ben Jonson nor Thomas Kyd is known to have been to university. Nor Dekker, nor Webster (though he trained as a lawyer), nor Aphra Behn. I don't think any of the great actor-managers went to university, even though Alleyn ended up founding a famous school.

I'm sure part of the reason for the "controversy" is that people tend to think of Elizabethan schools and universities in terms of the quite different roles that schools and universities have nowadays. In Shakespeare's day, the grammar school syllabus would have had a lot of overlap with what was taught at Oxford and Cambridge. The universities were really theological colleges with boys' boarding schools attached - I imagine that a landowner's son who had a private tutor and was sent to Cambridge when he was 11 would come out knowing less than a merchant's son who went to Stratford Grammar School, unless the landowner decided his son should take his degree and become a priest.

I'll second the other remarks that there is not a debate--and would just add that those who believe otherwise have very little working knowledge of how plays are made (both back then and today). Unlike novels where one can imagine some furtive writer holed up somewhere scribbling away like an anchorite (and, indeed, an imposter might be able to pull off such a stunt in those secluded circumstances) a playwright produces his scripts on the fly and in a very public manner as constantly evolving works depending on how the scripts "play" as they are being performed by the actors. Plays are not static, private things like a novel but fluid, public performances (indeed, there are multiple versions of many of Shakespeare's plays--as one would expect). And Shakespeare was known to collaborate with his peers and "doctor up" others' plays--as happens today as well. One cannot fake this process or have an imposter somehow interpose himself between the actual playwright and the actors and/or collaborators. And that, my friends, is why it's rank nonsense to think that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays (and revised them during rehearsals and worked on others' plays, all in public and in full view of many, many other people).

>7 InVitrio:

Snobbery has nothing to do with it, at least not in my mind. The author in question was not only highly literate, he was multi-lingual, had access to obscure contemporary foreign literature, and was conversant with the Classics. Books were thin on the ground in those days. Who do you mean as the "certifiable lunatic" originator of this theory a couple of centuries later? Perhaps you're thinking of John Thomas LOONEY, who was not, in fact, insane?

>8 thorold:

There's a lot in what you say about Grammar Schools and Universities in those days vs these. However, in addition to Marlowe, Heywood, Beaumont & Fletcher, whom you name; Marston, Middleton, and Chapman were all Oxford men. Jonson was thought to have gone to Cambridge, but his own account seems to conflict with this, and I'm not sure if this has been fully resolved. What all these men (including Dekker & Webster) had in common was that they were born and bred Londoners, who went to famous schools. Stratford-upon-Avon was really in the middle of nowhere in the 16th Century, and in an age without easy or speedy travel, widespread literary or readily available books, this matters. Not formally graduating isn't v relevant btw - it wasn't even that important in the 19th Century. And Aphra Behn was born 24 years after Shakespeare died, into the great upheaval of the Civil War.

Anyway, as I said, I don't have a strong view on the authorship question - I just wouldn't dismiss it so casually.

>9 podaniel:

There was certainly a great deal of collaboration and textual interpolation on the fly. Shakespeare was more self-referential than most, however, and consciously nurtured a cult of authorship long before the Romantics. Many alternative versions (bad quartos, etc) came from actors' mangled recollections, rather than being early or alternative drafts in their own right. But the very fact of promiscuous collaboration and the persistent theme of authorship in the works themselves both support alternative theories, I reckon.

"The only people who do not think Shakespeare was Shakespeare are those who seem to think that the only people who can write English are aristocrats and that a grammar school lad from the Midlands could not possibly provide such works of genius."

And they presumably apply the same criteria to that later Midlands grammar school lad, Samuel Johnson? No? Well there's a surprise.

What I do find surprising is that the theory is so favoured among Americans. Of all nationalities shouldn't they be the ones to celebrate to the genius of the common man? Log cabin to the Globe Theatre and all that?

Oh..wait..I've just heard The Voices telling me that the real author of Shakespeare has been lying in a refrigerated coma at Langley Air Force Base since 1947. Apparently she was taken there from somewhere in New Mexico, where her time-travelling machine crashed while she was on her way to infiltrate David Mamet's foetus.

>11 featherwate:

Samuel Johnson, who was writing 150 years after Shakespeare, did actually attend Cambridge (though like many he didn't graduate).

I think it's willfully anachronistic to credit a 16th Century country boy with the literary opportunities of a contemporary London-raised Oxbridge-going gentleman.

An intriguing discussion! I'm inclined to think that at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. After all, we don't know much about Homer, even if he existed at all in the body of one man. And surely, the university-educated Dan Brown is far too intelligent to have written The Da Vinci Code, so who did?

>13 boldface:

Agree, must have been some Midlands oik.

-11

More than anything else Americans love conspiracy theories. It's much, much easier to question Shakespeare the commoner than contextualize him properly or even read any of his plays. It raises your cachet with the least possible effort. In fact, we resent the Bard because of his challenging use of language; having been forced to read him and done poorly, he engenders a loathing within us. I'm not for the spouting out of Shakespeare, but other than actors (which are a plentiful bunch in the US), there's no terrific appreciation for him here. Nobody freely admits this though!!!

If I have a volume of Shakesapre in my hand, I am always foisted with a load by some well-intentioned nitwit who has heard or watched something on TV. "You know, Shakespeare didn't write those..."

But, Tolstoy tried to diminish the Bard, so it has it's antecedents and perhaps is a form of xenophobia.

A third possible explanation is our love of the biography genre. People often tell me they like non-fiction better because it's based on fact. Fiction frustrates them, especially literature because it doesn't give them exactly what they want. They also can't comprehend that a man as famous as Shakespeare (again, a subtle bit of anachronism) his specifics being so little known. They want to hear about his troubles, hardships, short-comings, it humanizes him and that's the only way Americans like anybody and that's extremely important to Americans, to like and be liked.

I once sat in on an 8th grade English class that was trying to read Romeo and Juliet. A good idea, but I felt very bad for the teacher as it was an obvious struggle with little reward. I would imagine the school board thought it up because of the young lovers aspect and because it was "Shakespeare". So, in conclusion, I think there are very conflicting ideas here in the US of what Shakespeare is--and perhaps most importantly--what he can do for us. I think this is why we see so many "Why read Shakespeare" type books, but that's pandering to the audience, though I've enjoyed some.

> 15

It's not all bad, though. You do have the Folger Shakespeare Library.

http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=2881&CFID=12857508&CFTOKEN=150863...

-16

You're probably right.

#12> I tend to remember that Samuel Johnson actually attended Oxford, not Cambridge. But it has not much implication on the subject of this thread...

>18 Pepys:

Yes, I did know that actually. Pembroke College (my brother's college, which is how I remembered). Don't know why I wrote Cambridge!

>15 DanMat:

On humanizing Shakespeare and biography more generally, there's a silly book by Caroline Spurgeon about the man, inferred from his work. The portrait is of a perfect and genial man, which perhaps she needed to believe (think Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare In Love). I get the sense of a darker, more troubled personality, and a misogynist.

>6 leonb:, >13 boldface:

I think you might be underestimating an Elizabethan grammar school education,which has been described as "roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical Classics major." (Contested Will, p. 312).

> 20

Going off-topic for the moment:

I am currently reading Peter Quennell's Spring in Sicily, written in 1952. To quote: "A century--half a century--ago, to remind an educated reader of the catastrophe described in the Seventh Book of Thucydides might have appeared a grave impertinence; and even today, during the present twilight of classical education, he may recollect the main outlines of tha appalling drama . . ."

~ shakes head at the sad degeneracy of educational systems in England ~ (not that things are any better in the States!)

>20 Willoyd:

Perhaps, and it's obviously an important point. But Shakespeare was also familiar with French and Italian, the languages and literature, which suggests a cosmopolitan reach beyond a typical Elizabethan country commoner, grammar school or no.

shakes head at the sad degeneracy of educational systems in England
There are many things that are wrong with the educational system, but the the loss of the Classics from their central role has never been one which I've ever had much of a problem with. But then I detested Latin and the Classics at school, and even today my interests lie far more with history, English, the Sciences etc - around which there are more than enough issues!

> 21
Ah, yes. If only Prime Minister David Cameron had received a proper education at Eton College, he could have done a Patrick Leigh Fermor and bonded with Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkosy through an exchange of their favourite lines from Horace as they huddled together watching the dawn coming up over Brussels and so brought the euro crisis to an end. :)

Or possibly not.

>20 Willoyd:
Whoever we are dealing with, and whatever their background, the author isn't 'typical', so looking at this in terms of what a 'typical' boy from Stratford might have achieved isn't to my mind that relevant.
There were plenty of opportunities to learn the languages, especially if Shakespeare had wanted to. And we, of course, have no idea what happened in the lost years.
From the limited reading I've done, I've always found the anti-Stratfordians somewhat unconvincing, not least because the whole thing is such a recent phenomenon - none of these issues appeared to give Shakespeare's contemporaries any problems and they seem to have found it all pretty normal - but as you say in an earlier post leonb, I'm not sure how much it matters.

>25 Willoyd:

Sure, and Stratford Shakespeare probably was "Shakespeare", not that it matters much. And if so, his intellectual development was all the more remarkable. So much so that I wouldn't completely dismiss alternative theories (given how little biographical material there is) as lunacy or snobbery - that's all I'm saying.

Shakespeare may have known French and Italian, ergo he must be Bacon or de Vere....

If Shakespeare spent time in London (which he did), he was himself a cosmopolitan, despite his "commoner" roots.

Here is some interesting reading though:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vavbMB9PMrgC&lpg=PP1&dq=The%20Sources%2...

And, the publisher Richard Field, would have had materials for Shakespeare to read...

http://books.google.com/books?id=lfnSQRnkg1MC&lpg=PT161&ots=iIBRujV5l7&a...

Of course, still speculative...but I don't see any reason though to doubt that Shakesepare wasn't "Shakespeare".

Perhaps Florio taught him Italian! Of course, Florio's name is also bandied about by anti-Stratfordians.

If it could be proved that the author of Hamlet was not the author of Othello, would that change our appreciation or understanding of either?

Similarly, if it could be proved that the author of Edward II was also the author of Richard III, ditto?

>28 jburlinson:

I think it would. Unless you subscribe to New Criticism (the author is dead, the text is all), your fullest interpretation and appreciation will be largely contextual. Essentially all understanding is contextual (a text in the context of a language, at least) - broader contexts (the period, the author, the canon) inform us more vaguely.

When I read Othello, Hamlet is more foregrounded than Edward II, which is more foregrounded than the Da Vinci Code - I find that works for me. Were I to discover that Shakespeare was in fact the author of the Da Vinci Code, it would reshape my readings of both.

But as long as the same author in the same period was chiefly responsible for "Shakespeare", my reading of it is only slightly coloured by the schooling and provenance of that author.

>10 leonb:

The certifiable lunatic was Delia Bacon.

Let's put it this way. There are lots of contemporary references to Shakespeare as a playwright; a bad pun on his name, records of him as author of plays approved by the censors, his pay with the Lord Chamberlain's men, the First Folio (an incredibly expensive undertaking for the time - a veritable coffee-table book, rather than the cheaper octavo format) with dedication from people who knew him, even a transcript of evidence he gave in a court case.

If you can find anything from Shakespeare's lifetime, indeed, anything from before the 19th century, that casts any doubt whatsoever that Shakespeare wrote his plays, then there might be the scintilla of a debate.

Until then, there is not.

> 29. I tend to agree with you. The long, tortured history of speculation on the authorship of Titus Andronicus bears out the importance of contextualizing these issues, with bardologists only achieving a consensus comfort level as long as: (1) Shakespeare didn't write all of it, and (2) it was written early enough to be considered 'prentice work.

Not having immersed myself at all in the various arguments, what strikes me about this thread is the extraordinary emphasis on early education as THE determinant of later exceptional skill in the English language.

To develop a point made by >25 Willoyd:, we on this thread (along with most of the world that is aware of Shakespeare's works) agree that the oeuvre is exceptional to the point of being without peer in the world of literature. If that is the case, then if Shakespeare is one person, that person must surely be so exceptional that any reference to normal learning paths, or even behaviour typical of that time or ours, is irrelevant. Such people exist but rarely, but exist they do.

So the question should be not who had the intellectual knowledge and capacity to write these plays, but who had the opportunity. In other words, who was actually and clearly around the theatre when all of these plays were written? I understand that William Shakespeare fits the bill best.

> 32 Garry Wills makes that point in this article, arguing that the playwright was writing for specific actors, had to know their strengths, who could double (or triple) parts, how much time they'd need to go off and come on as another character, etc.

He notes: "But what might look like a distraction for such authors—acting in his own and other people’s plays, coaching fellow players, helping manage the ownership of the troupe’s resources (including its two theaters, the Globe and Blackfriars)—was a strength for Shakespeare, since it made him a day-by-day observer of what the troupe could accomplish, actor by actor. The company was, after all, mounting plays with bewildering rapidity, studying, memorizing, and rehearsing in the morning and evening while performing in the afternoon. Without that experience, Shakespeare could not have written as he did. Lord Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, writing in their homes, could not have known such things."

>31 jburlinson:

I think Titus is actually far more sophisticated than critics generally realize, but, as you say, many are deeply uncomfortable with it being Shakespeare's.

>32 vat1sem:

Opportunity includes access, and education requires more than natural talent. I wonder how much even a genius could garner from a world without TV, internet, books, or public libraries, where illiteracy was the norm, low born in a village.

>33 lilithcat:

Is it possible that Stratford Shakespeare was also a writer (as well as "director" and occasionally actor), and one of talent, but that he might have been working with and over scripts originated elsewhere? The stage was highly collaborative after all.

"But Shakespeare was also familiar with French and Italian."

No evidence for this. No evidence that he knew anything except English, with a little Latin, and less Greek.

As far as this "it doesn't matter who the author is" line of thinking goes, I have to strongly disagree. If you're going to accept anonymity for Shakespeare's plays then you should accept it for the rest of literature as well. Does it really ultimately matter that we know the author of "Ode to a Skylark"? Isn't the poem just as beautiful sans an author's name attached to it? It is, but why in the world would we do that when we know who the author is?

Great men should have great biographies: this is a modern expectation. Shakespeare, lacking such, through no fault of his own (only the times he lived in), is greatly dissatisfying to our modern mind. We want to know everything about him and instead we know almost nothing. Don't fear! says the conspiracy theorist. There must be a reason we don't have one! And if we just spend enough time and research, we will find a biography that meets our modern expectations!

>35 GiltEdge:

Am pretty sure some of his source material was contemporary, European, and untranslated - for example, Cinthio's novella, the basis of Othello. The French in Henry V is basic, of course, but he's comfortable enough punning in it. I don't think Shakespeare's familiarity with French & Italian is controversial.

> 37

It's pure speculation as far as I know, based on the idea that since there wasn't a (for example) printed 16th C. edition of Cinthio's Hecatommithi in English that we know of, then Shakespeare *must* have read one of the romance language versions for "Othello." But stories circulated in manuscript all the time. Other playwrights may have used the theme first.

>16 boldface:

Within walking distance of my work. I really ought to go some time. No reading experience parallels the time one spends in the company of the Bard.

"A person who wants to believe lives in a world of proof." - Ramona Ausubel, "No One is Here Except All of Us

Os.

>35 GiltEdge:,38
Jonson's "small Latin and less Greek" line is another thing we need to see in the context of its time. And remembering that it was said in a eulogy by someone who wanted to stress how remarkable Shakespeare's achievement was.

By our standards, Shakespeare probably knew a good deal of Latin. The Elizabethan grammar-school syllabus certainly covered a lot more ground in Latin than the "O" level I took. (Various people have also pointed out that Greek grammars at the time were written in Latin, so you'd need to be fairly confident in the one before you could learn any of the other.) From that starting point, a basic working understanding of French and Italian isn't a very big leap.

The traditional Stratfordian theory presents us with a major disconnect between the life of the presumed author and his creative output. It’s almost as if we have a disembodied body of works with little or no relationship to the author.
Several points should be considered.

1) In twenty years of supposedly living in London, not a single letter exists from or to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare (referring to the actor from Stratford) left no letters or other writing in his own name, except for six crude signatures that are barely legible. There is only one known letter addressed to him — it was about 30 pounds and it was never delivered.

Yes, documents from 400 years ago could be lost, yet we have letters from Thomas Nashe, Philip Massinger, Gabriel Harvey, Samuel Daniel, George Peele, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and William Drummond, Anthony Mundy, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and others, many of them lesser writers.

2) There is no evidence that William of Stratford could have acquired the vast educational, linguistic or cultural background necessary to write the masterpieces of English literature ascribed to Shakespeare. His plays reveal knowledge of languages, the law, Latin and Greek classics, medicine, falconry, the sea, music, and nature that is so deep it could have only been learned through personal experience.

3) He left no books or manuscripts in his will, though, at the time of his death, 20 of his famous plays remained unpublished. Indeed, his will gives no indication that the deceased was engaged in literary activities of any sort.

4) He took no legal action against the pirating of the Shakespeare plays or the apparently unauthorized publication of Shake-speare’s Sonnets in 1609, even though he was known to frequently initiate lawsuits to recover petty sums of money owed to him

5) His parents, siblings, and daughters were all illiterate except that one daughter could sign her own name. Would the greatest writer in English history have allowed this?

6) He was so well known that at the height of Shakespeare’s alleged fame, tax collectors could not discover where he lived.

7) Shake-speare’s Sonnets, published in 1609, paint a portrait of the artist as a much older man. The scholarly consensus today holds that most of the Sonnets were written in the 1590s, when Shakspere of Stratford was in his late 20s to late 30s, a relatively youthful age even in Elizabethan times.

Yet, the author of the Sonnets at times is clearly much older and anticipating his own imminent death. Inexplicably, the publisher’s dedication in the 1609 volume of Sonnets refers to Shakespeare as our ever-living poet, a term that implies the poet is already dead, but Shakspere of Stratford was still very much alive until 1616

8) At his death, there were no eulogies, no testimonials, or tributes, not even from fellow actors, playwrights, or his esteemed friend, Ben Jonson. His only alleged connection to the plays came seven years after his death in the tribute by Ben Jonson in the First Folio. Why was no notice taken of Shakspere of Stratford’s death if he was such a literary luminary?

9) The Sonnets also suggest strongly that Shakespeare was a pen name and that the author’s real identity was destined to remain unknown. In Sonnet 72 Shakespeare asks that “My name be buried where my body is”. Sonnet 81: “Though I, once gone, to all the world must die”. If Shakspere of Stratford truly was the famous author of the Sonnets, why would he think his name would be buried with his body? The name Shakespeare which appears on the title page of the Sonnets themselves — certainly wasn’t buried with the body of the poet, whoever he was.

10) There is no evidence of a single payment to Shakspere of Stratford as an author. Nor is there any evidence of Shakspere of Stratford seeking out or establishing an ongoing literary patron as was a common practice for writers of the day

11. Shakespeare is not known to have traveled outside of England, yet the plays reveal an extensive knowledge of Italy and France.

12. The plays reveal an intimate familiarity with court life and manners that Shakespeare, as a commoner, could not have obtained simply by conversations at the Mermaid Tavern.

13. Shakespeare’s point of view in the plays and poems is always that of an aristocrat. He has created commoners, but they are mostly buffoons who mangle the language. He portrays the nobility as individuals, but the lower classes as types, even stereotypes.

14) Many books that were used as source material for the plays were not translated into English in Shakespeare’s time. For example:

Francois de Belleforest Histories tragiques
Ser Giovanni Fioranetino’s Il Pecorone
Epitia and Hecatommithi
Luigi da Porto’s Romeus and Juliet (Italian)
Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (Spanish)

Shakespeare’s reliance on books in foreign languages puzzles the experts, so we can suppose all sorts of things rather than conclude the obvious. If the man who was Shakespeare regularly relied on books not yet translated from Italian, French, and Spanish, then he must have been able to read in Italian, French, and Spanish. We know specifically that Edward de Vere was fluent in four foreign languages, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French.

15) The Shakespeare plays and poems show that the author had specific knowledge of certain works of literature, certain prominent persons in Elizabeth’s court, and events connected with them. In the sonnets and the plays there are frequent references to events that are paralleled in the life of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

The evidence for Oxford is strong and I would even call it compelling but it requires looking under the surface of many common myths that are circulating and to read books beyond the Stratfordian biased account of James Shaipro who deals with no evidence mentioned above, but is only content to put down those who do not believe the orthodoxy.

The plot thickens...

Devotees who care to google Howard Schumann and Shakespeare will discover evidence of a real enthusiast, who has given users of the internet every opportunity to share his views. He appears to have joined LT specially to share them with us.

Exactly what I did and hence my previous post.

I am interested in one thing - to follow the evidence wherever it takes me. My passion is to discover the truth. Right now it is a literary mystery but the evidence seems strongly to favor Edward de Vere as the true author.

Rather than googling my name, perhaps you should concentrate on responding to the evidence.

> 46

How would I have found your blog unless I had googled it? Thanks for providing new avenues for testing any evidence one way or another.

You're very welcome.

>42 Howard_Schumann: and 46

This is ridiculous until you refute the obvious objection that being a playwright is necessarily a public profession and writing plays is necessarily a public activity. I am unaware, in the history of play writing, that there has there been a case of an unknown-at-the-time ghost playwright (which is fundamentally different from writing scripts for movies--obviously, blacklisted writers did use covers). Give me an example to the contrary that is historically undisputed.

I must confess that as a Shakespeare lover I had never taken this debate seriously until I read Howard Schumann's post in 42 above. Fascinating.

Use of pseudonyms were commonplace in Elizabethan England. It was a totalitarian state with a strong Puritan bent that routinely closed theaters and sent writers to the Tower for alleged crimes against the state. In that regard, many of Shakespeare's works can be seen as unflattering satires of court figures.

About anonymity, the following is from the book description of "Anonymity, A Secret History of English Literature" by John Mullen.

"Today we have forgotten that the first readers of Gulliver's Travels and Sense and Sensibility had to guess who their authors might be, and that writers like Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Bront went to elaborate lengths to keep secret their authorship of the best-selling books of their times. But, in fact, anonymity is everywhere in English literature. Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Defoe, Swift, Fanny Burney, Austen, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing--all hid their names."

From The New Yorker, "In England, the use of the word "anonymous" to describe a literary work dates only from the sixteenth century, but by the end of the eighteenth seventy per cent of all novels were published "in secret."

Regarding your other comment, Edward de Vere was hardly an unknown. He was a recognized poet and playwright who was described in 1598 as "best for comedy." He operated two theater groups, "The Oxford Men" and The Oxford Boys" and was a patron of the arts.

The evidence for Oxford is strong and I would even call it compelling but it requires looking under the surface of many common myths that are circulating and to read books beyond the Stratfordian biased account of James Shaipro who deals with no evidence mentioned above, but is only content to put down those who do not believe the orthodoxy.

I am no expert on this debate, but reading the above, most of it seems to rest on the absence of evidence, rather than presence of it. Just because there is not evidence for, does not mean it's evidence against, especially at 500 years remove. Some of these jump out at me as being totally specious - e.g. 11 (I had a working knowledge of German long before I ever visited the country), and there are others where if you turn the sentence around, applies just as equally to the Oxfordian argument (12. The plays reveal an intimate familiarity with Warwickshire dialect and trades that Oxford, as an aristocrat, could have not obtained simply by conversations at court).

I certainly don't find these arguments particularly compelling.

This is all v interesting, Howard Schumann (if indeed you are "Howard Schumann").

-52
They are compelling in a Patricia Cornwell sort of way.

Howard, Robert Greene didn't exist either????

> 42
Wow, very interesting points, thanks for sharing them with us. I was unaware of most of these previously but I have to say my extensive knowledge of the historical period rather than literature itself makes me believe that you bring up some very valid points which would need to be convincingly refuted in order to disallow the possibilitiy of their plausability.

>52 Willoyd:

Yes, taken in sum the arguments give pause, but the nature of the evidence being negative rather than positive makes it difficult for me to do more than just shrug. 2 and 11 are not very compelling. Arguments such as 4 are interesting, but I have to admit a lack of knowledge of the time period and so I can't say just HOW interesting they are. Perhaps he did receive payment or some other consideration? Perhaps he had reasons for not pursuing?

Apart from a couple coincidences, is there positive evidence that suggests Oxford? Something found amongst his possessions, something he may have said or intimated? This is not so much a challenge as a genuine question. I have not delved into this debate before and am a novice in the subject.

>51 Howard_Schumann:

I take your non-response to mean that you do not know of a historical example of a ghost playwright. Certainly, books could be published by "anonymous" and so, I suppose, could plays--but the director/actors/collaborators (that is, the public) would know who the "anonymous" playwright actually was. Here, everyone thought it was "William Shakespeare" who, you argue, was a near-illiterate hick who just happened to pull off the most brazen and brilliant literary masquerade of all time by convincing his contemporaries (many of whom were much smarter university men) that he was a great playwright when, in actuality, he was just a near-illiterate hick front man for a shadowy someone else. Don't you realize that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't by your own argument? Either he's a brilliant playwright or a brilliant fraud. You pick your poison.

Yes, there is strong evidence for Oxford including his detailed knowledge about the cities and towns he visited in Italy during 1575-76. There is a new book called "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" by Richard Paul Roe

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_15?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-key...

The book describes in detail facts about Italy written in the plays that only someone who has been there would have known.

Keep in mind, there is no smoking gun. All of the evidence is circumstantial, but there is no direct evidence for any of the candidates since we do not have the manuscripts.

In the sonnets and the plays there are frequent references to events that are paralleled in Oxford's life.

For example, in ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Oxford became a ward of court in Lord Burghley's household at the age of twelve. Oxford left his widowed mother to become a royal ward.

Bertram left his widowed mother to become a royal ward.

Oxford’s guardian's daughter fell in love with him and wanted to be married.

Bertram’s foster-sister fell in love with him and wanted to be married.

Oxford was of more noble birth than Anne and did not favor marriage.

Bertram argued he was of too high birth for marriage.

Following an ailment, marriage was agreed and the Queen consented to Oxford’s marriage.

Following an illness, the King consented to the marriage.

The wedding was at first postponed, no reason was given.

Bertram attempted to change the King's mind regarding his marriage.

After the wedding, Oxford suddenly left the country.

After the wedding, Bertram suddenly left the country.

A reconciliation between Oxford and Anne is contrived by switching his bed companion for his wife. As a result, a son is born. Confirmation of this reconciliation appears in The Histories of Essex by Morant and Wright: 1836.

A reconciliation between Bertram and Helena is contrived by switching his bed companion for his wife. As a result, a son is born.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I would suggest the following books:

"Shakespeare by Another Name" by Mark Anderson

"The Mysterious William Shakespeare" by Charlton Ogburn

"De Vere as Shakespeare" by William Farina

Shakespeare's Unauthorized Biography" by Diana Price (not an Oxfordian book but anti-Stratfordian)

There are also some good websites including:

http://hankwhittemore.wordpress.com/

(He is attempting to compile 100 reasons why de Vere was Shakespeare)

www.politicworm.com

The problem I have with Mr Schumann's long list of questions or challenges, is that they seem solely designed to sow doubt (and clearly they have been effective, on this thread anyway) rather then to prove a "compelling" alternative.

As regards the authorship question in general, it never ceases to amaze me the vehemence it can generate. What I've never seen adequately explained though is why such a conspiracy would exist (if conspiracy it is). Or indeed, if it's less sinister, just a mistake or harmless subterfuge, why (and how) it survived unchallenged for 300-odd years.

There is a reason why supposition and speculation are not accepted in a court of law as evidence. It is precisely because absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.

To say that we do not have much information about Shakespeare because it all happened so long ago is false and misleading. We have much documentation for lesser writers.

Gabriel Harvey left over 150 books written in five languages.

Thomas Nashe left behind a handwritten verse in Latin, a letter to William Cotton, and a 1593 letter to Sir George Carey to Cotton reports that Nashe had dedicated a book to him.

Robert Greene’s death in 1592 was the talk of the town in literary circles and there is a complete record of Greene’s education at Cambridge.

George Chapman contributed a commendatory poem to John Fletcher and received one from Michael Drayton.

Drayton was treated by physician John Hall and was described in Hall’s casebook as an excellent poet. He has a handwritten inscription to “his honored friend” Sir Henry Willoughby on a copy fo his poem “The Battle of Agincourt”.

Drayton, Chapman, Henry Chettle, and John Webster among others were paid by Henslowe to write plays. Thomas Dekker’s name appears in the Henslowe diary as a payee over fifty times.

I could go on and on citing documentation from the period for John Marston, Francis Beaumont, William Drummond, Samuel Daniel, George Peele, John Lyly.
Thomas Kyd wrote in a letter that he shared a room with Marlowe for writing and that Marlowe had been writing for his players. Peele paid tribute to Marlowe with in a month after his death.

There are records of Marlowe’s education at Cambridge. Marlowe along with Eatson and Webster were three of the least documented writers yet for each of them, literary records survive such as personal tributes (while they were alive) or payments for writing.

If the man from Stratford did write the plays, he would have left some trace as to HOW he did it. There is nothing to show that Shakespeare was a writer by vocation, and anyone who conspired to eradicate records could not possibly predict which records may have escaped detection and therefore might survive.

As far as question 11, as I have suggested below, a new book "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" by Richard Paul Roe is compelling evidence that the man who was Shakespeare traveled to Italy as did Oxford did in 1575-76

In Elizabethan England there was a small circle of writers and they all knew each other. They were all fearful of reprisals from the state and protected each others anonymity.

The Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men were involved in protecting the source of their plays for both cultural and financial reasons.

I never characterized the man from Stratford as being "an illiterate hick." Those are your words. I think he had to be, intelligent and especially if he was an actor, able to read. Keep in mind, that he was probably paid pretty well for the use of his name, so everyone had a stake in offering a cover story.

I'm just curious that if he was the greatest writer in the English language we would only have six unreadable signatures, each spelled differently as his legacy.

You are very welcome and thank you for your willingness to be objective. I think that the strongest supporters of the orthodox theory are the academics (their reputations depending on the books they have published), the media (who own publishing companies) and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and their huge Stratford Tourist industry.

The Shakespeare industry is a multimillion dollar venture. Each of those mentioned above have a lot at stake in maintaining the status quo,

This is all a surfeit of pickle herring!

All this does is make me want to get my copy of the Letterpress Macbeth. Whoever wrote it has never been surpassed.

I am still reading/learning about this debate... hence why I started this subject. So first I would like to say thank you to everyone for helping me further my knowledge.

At the moment I am leaning toward William Shakespeare as being the author, but this is really based on the lack of substantial evidence (IMHO) for anyone else.

I have read several articles/books that have made reference to the fact that in the plays there are many intimate references to places such as Italy, and that this indicated that the author must have traveled there. This to me is not a convincing argument... I feel this just means that the author either read a book by someone who had visited these places or perhaps even spoke to someone who had been to them. I have had many conversations with people that were so passionate/detailed in their descriptions of places they had been that it made me feel like I was the one that went. I don’t doubt that if I gave several descriptions of places that I both have and have not been most people would be hard pressed to tell me which was which.

As for why we only have “six unreadable signatures, each spelled differently as his legacy.” This is a bit trickier in my opinion. I think the mystery here is why only 6 signatures and nothing else. As for the 6 different spellings, this is nothing out of the ordinary. This was very common in the time period. One example would be that of Christopher Marlowe... his name can be found written as Marlow, Marley, Marlin, Merling, and Morley among others… some of which came from his own hand.

I am not going to pretend I remember exactly what book/article I read this in but another interesting theory I had read once was that the cover up wasn’t that William Shakespeare was a cover for someone else. But simply that he was covering up for the fact that he could not write. Is it possible that someone could think up and dictate such masterful pieces of work? I find this theory extremely doubtful but thought it was interesting all the same.

Read "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" by Richard Paul Roe. If that doesn't convince you that the author had to have been there, nothing will.

We have much more in writing from Christopher Marlowe than his signatures.

Would you care to elaborate?

>66 Howard_Schumann:

Without actually reading the book (I am unlikely to), I am curious what knowledge a person can pick up through first-hand travel that he or she can't also obtain through the accounts of another person? I can't think of anything that wouldn't be transmitable orally from one person to another regarding the customs or scenery, etc. of another country. What is transmittable onto paper is surely transmittable orally to another person (who can turn around and transmit it to paper themself).

I am not saying by any means that there isn’t much more in Marlowe’s hand than there is in Shakespeare’s. That’s why I said this argument is tricky. I agree it is very mysterious/concerning that there is nothing else in Shakespeare’s hand. I am simply stating that having 6 different signatures in and of itself is nothing out of the ordinary. If anyone was to look at a sampling of my signatures throughout a week they would think I was about 100 different people.

I will def. read "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" (thanks for the suggestion) along with all the other books I am currently reading on the subject. And I will be sure to post my thoughts on it.

There is a reason why supposition and speculation are not accepted in a court of law as evidence. It is precisely because absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.

In which case one has to accept the flipside of that: one of things that there is an absence of in Shakespeare's time is evidence of doubt that Shakespeare was the author, these theories being relatively modern constructs. Rather the opposite - Shakespeare is generally acknowledged in his role.

Equally: these theories have been around for some 150 years now, and yet in all that time not one of the candidates has really proven their case, far from it with, it appears, every argument in favour of one candidate matched by another argument from the Shakespeare side. What is offered on behalf of all the candidates is still all circumstantial: there is a distinct absence of any direct evidence that any of them wrote these. And if absence of evidence is evidence of absence......

Just out of curiousity is the book "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" arguing for Oxford? Or is it simply showing that whoever the author was they must have traveled and spent time in Italy? I didnt see any reference to Oxford specifically in the descriptions I read.

No, it does not argue for Oxford though I met Mr. Roe (who is deceased). I presume that he was an Oxfordian because he spoke at a conference sponsored by Oxfordians, but I have no way of proving it.

In any event, the authorship question as such is not mentioned in the book.

Any opinion on the lost years and the possibility that Shakespeare could have been traveling?

That is the nature of the issue. There is no direct evidence for either side. If there was any direct evidence, there would be no authorship debate.

It is all circumstantial and no one has proven their case. Those who are seeking the truth behind the mystery must rely on circumstantial evidence and, while there is some evidence for all of the candidates, the amount of evidence for Oxford I believe is the strongest.

People have questioned the Stratfordian attribution for a long time. Ever since he became better known in the 18th century, investigators have done thorough research to come up with information about the man, his personality, what he looked like and so forth, but came up empty.

The list of doubters go back quite a ways. They include:

Charlie Chaplin
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Charles Dickens
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sigmund Freud
Sir John Gielgud
Leslie Howard
Sir Derek Jacobi
Henry James
Malcolm X
David McCullough
Amb. Paul H. Nitze
Mr. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr
Mark Rylance
Mr. Justice John Paul Stevens
Orson Welles
Walt Whitman
Hamilton Basso (novelist, reviewed 5 Stratfordian biographies in The New Yorker 4/18/50)
Prof. Louis P. Benezet (Dartmouth)
Richard Bentley (President, Chicago Bar Association, and Editor of The American Bar Association Journal)
Tom Bethell (syndicated columnist)
John Bright (Lord Rector of University of Glasgow)
John Buchan (novelist, historian & Chancellor of Edinburgh University)
Otto von Bismarck
Charles Champlin (Arts Editor of the Los Angeles Times)
Benjamin Disraeli
Senator Paul Douglas (also a Chicago University Professor)
Daphne DuMaurier
Cyrus Durgin (drama critic, The Boston Globe)
Prof. William Y. Elliott (Harvard)
Clifton Fadiman
Prof. Bronson Feldman (Temple University)
Daniel Frohman (famed producer of plays & theater historian)
W.H. Furness (literary scholar and father of the editor of the Variorum)
John Galsworthy
Charles DeGaulle
Prof. Louis J. Halle (Ecole de Hautes Etudes)
James Joyce
Helen Keller
Kevin Kelly (drama critic, The Boston Globe)
David Lloyd Kreeger
Lewis Lapham (Editor, Harper's)
Prof. Abel LeFranc (College de France; one of 40 members of Academie des Inscription et Belles Lettres)
Prof. W. Barton Leach (Harvard Law)
Clare Booth Luce
Lord Palmerston
Maxwell Perkins (eminent literary editor)
Prof. William Lyons Phelps (Yale)
Canon Gerald H. Rendall (Litt D.)
Dr. Peter Sammartino (Founder & First President, Farleigh Dickinson University)
Lincoln Schuster (of Simon & Schuster)
Joseph Sobran (syndicated columnist)
Muriel Spark
Day Thorpe (Literary editor, Washington Star)
Philip Weld (Publisher, International N.Y. Herald Tribune)
John Greenleaf Whittier
Dr. Daniel Wright (Chair, Department of English, Concordia University - Portland, OR)
Prof. Crane Brinton (Harvard)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Tyronne Guthrie
Thomas Hardy
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Prof. Sidney Hook (S.Y.U.)
James Russell Lowell
Prof. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford University)

Yes, he could have gone to Italy but there is no evidence for it. I guess anything is possible. He could have explored the North Pole or traveled to Africa.

On the other hand, we know for certain that Oxford traveled to Italy and the mention of the cities he visited is evident in the plays, as is the influence of the Commedia del Arte.

Well food for thought until I get to read the book.

One last thing I keep reading about that I would like to know your opinion on is what of the date issue. There are plays that are dated well after Oxfords death, and seem to reference events that took place after his death as well.

Howard, any chance you can provide some citations? I bet you can't for Joyce. And Dickens?

Thanks for your question.

Neither date of performance nor date of publication tell us the date of composition. The conventional chronology is designed to fit the plays within the Stratfordian time frame.

Recent scholarship by Stritmatter and Kositsky has shown that there were earlier, more plausible sources for The Tempest and that the doctrine of Equivocation used to date Macbeth to 1616 was enunciated as far back as the early 1580s.

It is quite possible that the plays were edited and updated by de Vere's son-in-law, The Earl of Derby, himself a prominent playwright, but that is just speculation.

What is true, however, is that no source for any Shakespearean play is dated after 1604. No sonnets were written after 1604. Between the years 1593 to 1604, seventeen plays attributed to Shakespeare were published.

From 1605 to 1623 there were only five, said to be collaborations. Even Shakespeare scholars cannot by style alone determine which are older or newer plays.

Howard, any chance you can provide some citations? I bet you can't for Joyce. And Dickens?

Does it matter? Indeed it's quite funny - after all, the last person on that list believed in the authenticity of the Hitler Diaries too, and that was in an area he was meant to know something about. The opinions of celebrities about subjects outside their expertise adds not one jot to an argument - indeed, it makes me even more sceptical when I see that sort of thing being swung behind an argument.

One characteristic uniting all proponents of an "authorship controversy" is that no matter how many times their ideas are refuted, they will simply pretend that there was no refutation at all, and go on posting the same nonsense again and again. Much like JFK and 9/11, the conspiracy is far too much fun and intriguing to let it die against the cold, forbidding halls of scholarship. Once more unto the breach, my friends, once more unto the breach.

So far we've heard the same tired old arguments from ignorance, arguments from silence, and arguments from authority. These are all logical fallacies, Howard. These are not evidences. They are wishful thinking from JFK-land. Real evidence is the name "William Shakespeare" on the title pages of 50+ books and quartos (inc. reprints) printed between 1592 and 1623.

Anyone else who thinks this nonsense "interesting" should at least spend some time here:

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/

And of course, there are now several books on the market that ably demolish the so-called "controversy."

By the way, despite what Howard claims above, no letters written by Christopher Marlowe (the second most important playwright of the era) survive, and his only surviving signature is spelled Marley. NOTHING written in his lifetime refers to him as a poet or playwright -- nothing??? From a man who revolutionized the English drama of his time? That cannot be possible! The 129th Duke of Burgandy must be waiting to be unmasked behind a velvet curtain!

You can play this silly game with every writer and artist in history if you want. Knock yourself out.

GiltEdge - As I have stated I am very interested in this topic. Are there any books in particular you recommend?

"The Shakespeare industry is a multimillion dollar venture. Each of those mentioned above have a lot at stake in maintaining the status quo."

This is incredibly insulting to the thousands of scholars (both alive and dead) who have devoted their entire lives to studying Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. Pathetic.

> 81

Yes, two that I can think of.

Scott McCrea - The Case for Shakespeare

This is a highly accessible and readable book; if you only want to read one book on the subject, it should probably be this one.

Irvin Matus - Shakespeare, In Fact

This is a much more detailed demolition of the conspiracy theory.

This reminds me of the moon landing conspiracy theorists and people who believe aliens built the pyramids. They have in common the assumption that Shakespeare/American scientists/Egyptians were incapable of accomplishing a feat of great genius, so it must be a conspiracy.

> 58. If the Earl of Oxford was, indeed, Shakespeare, why would he decide to portray himself in the person of Bertram of all people? Bertram? Of whom Samuel Johnson wrote, "I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness."

Shakespeare, Homer - I couldn't give a fiddler's fart if they are just names we collectively recognise works by.

Nonetheless, I see the quest for accurate history as a noble adventure.

Two separate things.

Here is the "overwhelming" proof of Dickens' belief in the Shakespeare conspiracy:

http://books.google.com/books?id=g985AAAAMAAJ&dq=%22but%20would%20calmly%20h...

The quote on doubter websites have it a bit more concise:

“It is a great comfort, to my way of thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn up.”

A bit of cherry picking there...even still, this one quote from one letter does not make him an especially ardent proponent.

First of all, they are not celebrities but mostly writers, actors, philosophers, professors, and even Supreme Court Justices. I think by and large I would sooner trust the judgment of writers to recognize the truth about another writer.

The only reason the list was included is to counter the argument that -well, this thing has been around for 150 years and it is just a "lunatic fringe.".

Well, as you can see, that is untrue. The issue has been around only because prominent people in many different professions have questioned the Stratfordian attribution. I also know that the issue will not go away until the truth is told and accepted.

If you think the ideas are so easily refuted, why haven't you addressed the issues I raised? It is very easy and very lazy I might add to pretend that the whole issue has been handled. That is truly wishful thinking.

see: www.doubtaboutwill.org

The name on the title page tells us nothing about the man behind the name. How do you explain that, during his lifetime, no one ever claimed to have met the man, talked with him, exchanged letters, anecdotes, diaries, etc.

There are no authentic portraits of the man. The ridiculous Droeshout portrait in the First Folio with a mask on his face seems to have been put in as a pointer that the real author was someone else.

The Shakespeare Authorship Page - dedicated to the proposition that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare” is the website of Dave Kathman and Terry Ross and the most prominent Stratfordian blog on the web and it is worth reading. The blog, however, does not appear to have been updated for several years since no knew knowledge about Will of Stratford has been available for over a hundred years.

The website starts off by saying that those who support Oxford as Shakespeare are “sincere and intelligent”. They go on, however, to put down those sincere and intelligent Oxfordians as “not taken seriously by the Shakespeare establishment because (with few exceptions) they do not follow basic standards of scholarship, and the "evidence" they present for their fantastic scenarios is either distorted, taken out of context, or flat-out false.”

So even though the site declares Oxfordian claims to be not even worth discussing, the entire website is devoted to doing just that. Kathman and Ross assert that “some…extreme Oxfordians claim that there is an active conspiracy among orthodox scholars to suppress pro-Oxford evidence and keep it from the attention of the general public,” although I have never come across such claims and the website offers no evidence to support its assertion.

The site makes broad, general assertions about contemporary evidence for Shakespeare mostly citing references to the name that appears on the title pages of some plays.

In their attempt at a “case closed” explanation called “How do we know that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?” they offer the arguments about the name on the title page and the fact that no one mentioned Oxford as the author of the plays, which only shows that the coverup was successful/

These arguments of course ignore the following points articulated by Hank Whittemore, “Yes, the name “Shakespeare” was printed on the narrative poems and plays, but never during the Stratford man’s lifetime was he ever connected to that name or was that name ever connected to him. Up to his death in 1616 (and for years afterward) he can be identified only as a businessman — money lender, grain dealer, property buyer — and never, not once, identified as a writer.”

Oh, by the way, in case you hadn't noticed, in the last poll, 90% of the American people do not believe the findings of the Warren Commission.

>88 Howard_Schumann:

Why should we trust the judgement of other writers to recognize the "truth" about another writer? I don't see the logical base for that. A fishmonger who knew Shakespeare would be more valuable here than an author who wrote hundreds of years later.

Regardless, what proof is there that Dickens, for example, supported an alternative author theory?

I'm still curious to hear someone's take on >68 menteith: above. If we accept that the author of the plays had special knowledge of Italy, then I don't see why we can't conclude that Shakespeare either travelled to Italy or spoke with people who had.

What about the fact that just as in Shakespeare's case there is no surviving copy of any of the Shakespeare plays in Oxford's hand. I would think even if he was trying to hide his identity that there would eventually have been some manuscripts or drafts found in his hand. I could accept Shakespeare's copies having been burnt or lost to other natural causes given who,and what he was. But I would imagine that Oxfords conditions would have lended themselves to the preservation of documents to a much greater degree. Even if he prefered to be anonymous in his lifetime you would think something would have been passed on through family or friends and eventually made public... Unless I am mistaken there is nothing directly tying Oxford to any of the plays.

Of course this is all just speculation and me thinking aloud...

If your theory about all the objective scholars were true, why have Oxfordian arguments been dismissed as not worthy of consideration? Why is it that no thesis promoting the Oxfordian point of view is acceptable as a thesis in most universities?

Why have PhDs such as Dr. Roger Stritmatter who worte his thesis on the parallels between underlined words in Oxford's bible and words prominent in the plays was refused employment in every major university in the country and had to settle for a small inner city college in Baltimore?

Sorry, these academics are simply defending their turf. Their reputations built carefully over the years with Shakespeare books are definitely on the line.

I think people should read these books, if only to see for themselves the lack of substance in the orthodox position. These books are one page of fact and 399 pages of "could have's", "might have's", it's possible that" and so forth ad infinitum, all speculation unsupported by evidence.

Address the issues, otherwise your post contributes nothing.

Perhaps because the events in the play have parallels to his life. He was human after all, unlike the Stratford statue.

The Oxfordian argument does not stand or fall on what Charles Dickens said or did not say.

>92 Howard_Schumann:

Threatened by people who also have something at stake, it should be added. Books to sell, theses to defend, careers to build. Websites to traffic.

>91 SirFolio16:

I was wondering the same thing as well. That would be something to lay serious credit to the Oxford theory. I suppose at this point it is safe to assume nothing will every be unearthed.

>94 Howard_Schumann:

It's becoming difficult to follow your responses. Who are you responding to?

>96 Howard_Schumann:

It was a simple question--why do you include Dickens among the list of sceptics? You are evasive in your responses. You list Dickens as a sceptic, maintain that "I think by and large I would sooner trust the judgment of writers to recognize the truth about another writer," (a curious statement in my opinion), and then say it doesn't matter in >96 Howard_Schumann:. If the list is important enough to include, surely you consider the opinions of the people on it valuable.

Did you find this list of sceptics on a website somewhere or did you research it? It is not at all an irrelevant question in my opinion. It lets me know what kind of legwork you've done. Should I consider you an authority on the Oxford theory or are you just regurgitating a list you found somewhere else?

Oxford . . . ? . . . Shakespeare . . .?

"What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title"

Howard_Schumann, jburlinson asked an important question (85) which I myself was burning to ask:

Why would Oxford portray himself so unflatteringly as Bertram? If there are parallels, then perhaps the author drew on Oxford's life without being Oxford himself?

You didn't address this.

Also, the varied spellings of Shakespeare's name do not point to weak literacy - the age was less anal that way, and "Shakespeare" himself (over) prone to word play.

I think your case would be stronger if focused on fewer key points. You're a bit all over the place, slinging mud and hoping some sticks.

I remain uncertain either way.

If Oxford were really Shakespeare then OUP would have to re-label their publications from the "Oxford Shakespeare" to the "Oxford Oxford." And Cambridge would have to change their series to "The New Cambridge Oxford". Makes your head spin.

>100 jburlinson:

Cambridge would never concede!

Can we get another doubter in here? Please! It's mostly boilerplate though, probably wouldn't matter.

I don't object to questioning authorship, it's just the certainty, the arrogance and slippery presentation of "evidence" that goads me.

Why is it incumbent on us to refute all the points?

You know, the doubters have their own little industry to defend. I never realized the enormous web presence before today.

-100
The New Cambridge Oxford, oh man!

Howard_Schumann wrote:
I also know that the issue will not go away until the truth is told and accepted.

And what 'truth' is that?

Howard_Schumann wrote:
Oh, by the way, in case you hadn't noticed, in the last poll, 90% of the American people do not believe the findings of the Warren Commission.

And that means what?

Oxford is of course the leading contender in the Shakespeare authorship debate, but do we have any supporters for the other contenders. Perhaps a defender of the Shakespeare plays actually having been written by a woman?

Howard - your list of names also has me curious... I did a quick search on a few of the names and I am not seeing anything referencing their disbelief that Shakespeare wrote the plays (I am already aware of Twain). Would you be able to provide some citations for your list or at least let me know where the list came from.

SirFolio 16- There are quite a few lists. I respect the sources of these lists and don't feel I have to research each name.

Here's a few:

http://doubtaboutwill.org/past_doubters

http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=39

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/hall_of_fame/swf_skeptics/Malcom.htm

At a rough count, there are 14 of Shakespeare's plays written after de Vere died.

>104 SirFolio16:

Freud was certainly skeptical, and a few of the others on the list I'm aware were too, but my impression is that this list is overcooked.

I would be particularly interested to have Joyce confirmed. My suspicion is that his "suspicion" may have been inappropriately lifted from the frequent Shakespeare banter in Ulysses.

Howard,

I'll try one more time and then be quiet about the huge hole in your argument--the fact that writing plays is necessarily a public activity. This is analogous to the dog that didn't bark in the Hound of the Baskervilles. Perhaps a thought experiment would help. Suppose someone today argues that Babe Ruth could not have hit his home runs because he was fat, pigeon toed, had weak upper-body strength and was drunk all the time. Indeed, a number of his contemporaries were in much better shape and yet their home-run totals were much lower. So, someone else must have hit his home runs. Obviously, no one would make this argument since he necessarily hit his home runs in public and everyone saw him do it. That's true for Shakespeare too.

And here's the last little bit of damning evidence for you. Your list of illustrious names doesn't appear to include any actual playwrights. Why do you think that is? Might it be because they know that your claim is preposterous for the same reason as the claim that Babe Ruth couldn't have hit his home runs? No doubt, you could dig up some obscure playwright somewhere who might agree with you. Again, the Hound of the Baskervilles is not barking.

> 108

Nice argument, but I have to point out that the non-barking dog appeared in Silver Blaze, not the Hound of the Baskervilles (which was very vocal indeed).

One of the major arguments against Shakespeare seems to be that, had he written the plays, he would have been more celebrated in his lifetime. Surely it then follows (under the alternative author theories) that people of the day KNEW Shakespeare hadn't written the plays. The only alternative conclusion is that the plays themselves didn't cause enough of a stir to make him a celebrity. If the first scenario is true, that the plays were popular but Shakespeare was not celebrated because everyone knew he did not write the plays, then surely we would have some record of speculation contemporary to Shakespeare. Is there ANY record from 1600 of anyone anywhere inquiring into who wrote the plays? Anyone contemporary to the time speculating over their authorship? Surely you cannot write 30 plays and not at least have rumors of your authorship circulate. But from everything I gather, Shakespeare's contemporaries believed Shakespeare to be the author. Barring some major revelation, that is good enough to satisfy me. It is incumbent upon the Oxfordians to offer that revelation if they want to be taken seriously.

>107 leonb:

That's the problem. Not that everyone on the list is a flat-out lie, but that there are certainly people on there who don't belong there and were put there for some frivolous reason, some chance remark or comment that has been twisted.

Scepticism is fine and healthy, but I think true scepticism extends to scepticism itself. Nearly all of Howard's talking points strike me as equally suspect--wildly circumstantial, twistable, and hard to verify. Who cares if the tax collector couldn't discover where Shakespeare lived? How do we know this? Was the tax collector new to the town, and does someone stopping to ask for directions constitute not being able to find someone? Even if the collector truly couldn't find him, does it really say anything relevant? I'm sceptical.

>109 vat1sem:

Oops, thanks vat1sem. Now in repentance I feel that I must hie to abebooks and acquire FS's Sherlock Holmes.

> 110
Was the tax collector new to the town, and does someone stopping to ask for directions constitute not being able to find someone?

Well, it might. If a visiting tax collector today asked me for the address of one of my friends or neighbours - or any other resident - would I tell them? Would I heck!

>110 menteith: One of the major arguments against Shakespeare seems to be that, had he written the plays, he would have been more celebrated in his lifetime.

And that's the argument that is the weakest for me. He is not writing poems for the current king/queen; he is not writing masques; he is not writing poems that the Court uses to woe their new conquest. He is a playwriter - and as much as theater picks up during his lifetime, it is still not the same as the Court masques.

>113 AnnieMod:

Yes, it seems to be perhaps the biggest argument. If he wrote the plays, he would have been better known and documented during his life. The tax collector wouldn't have gotten lost, etc. It doesn't hold much water in my opinion.

Is it possible he was considered a good playwright, but not a genius? It wouldn't be the first time a genius wasn't recognized in his own time.

>114 menteith:

Done by Elizabethan scholars? Because most of the people I see this from are usually from later eras... when things had been different.

I had seen the arguments; I had seen almost any speculation that exists for that. It's a nice thing to loose time on I guess.

>88 Howard_Schumann: First of all, they are not celebrities but mostly writers, actors, philosophers, professors, and even Supreme Court Justices. I think by and large I would sooner trust the judgment of writers to recognize the truth about another writer.
Exactly...in terms of the value of their opinion they are almost all celebrities rather than experts. What on earth qualifies a Supreme Court Justice, an expert in law, no doubt, to be an expert per se on the origins of these plays? Nothing. And, actually, when you look at the list in the greater scheme of things (amongst all the writers, actors, philosophers, professors and even Supreme Court Justices who are likely to have taken an interest in Shakespeare over that period), the list isn't exactly extensive.

The only reason the list was included is to counter the argument that -well, this thing has been around for 150 years and it is just a "lunatic fringe.".

So to counter that argument, you provide a list where as far as I can see pretty much everybody is of the last 150 years or so? One dominated by those whose opinions really add little to the debate other than they are a well known name? And one where it now appears the enthusiasm for the Oxford argument amongst some of them might not even be exactly overwhelming? What would have been far more interesting, amongst other things, would have been to provide a list of contemporaries who doubted Shakespeare's authorship.

#74: That convinces me. The only other place I see long lists of names dragged out like this is in wild conspiracy theories, so dragging it out goes to show that the argument that Shakespeare wasn't the author of his plays is one of those theories.

One of the most convincing arguments I've seen for Shakespeare was here on LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/topic/116883#2765105 Roughly, Shakespeare wrote two plays a year, faster then Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Neil Simon, etc. There's no way someone with a full time job could have written that many plays on the side; it's almost hard to believe that one person could have even as a full-time job.

> 74 "That is the nature of the issue. There is no direct evidence for either side."

Well, actually, there IS direct evidence for Shakespeare. Just one example will suffice for now; the Stationers' Register for 1607 records a couple of publishers having bought the rights to "a booke called Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Banksyde."

Now, if there were just one document from before the 19th century for Oxford, there may be a debate.

There isn't.

>119 InVitrio:

Yes, but what about our poor lost tax collector? Surely the two pieces of evidence are of the same weight ;-).

You could have 100 such pieces of real evidence; the Oxfordians have too much on the line to capitulate-- books to write, websites to traffic, theses to defend.

> 74 "That is the nature of the issue. There is no direct evidence for either side."

Utter, complete, freeze-dried nonsense. The name "William Shakespeare" printed on the title pages of 50 separate publications (inc. reprints) between 1592 and 1623, including one 900 page folio, is direct, cumulative evidence for primary authorship. If "Oxfordians" want to play a game and pretend this means nothing, that's a wild eccentricity peculiar to their species.

Having such evidence means that if you're going to dispute a corpus this huge, and this important, you better have something really, really strong to make us doubt it, something like a letter written by De Vere to Shakespeare talking about the conspiracy and his authorship. Although a lot of De Vere's letters survive, you have nothing of the sort.

This is all so very predictable.

"If you think the ideas are so easily refuted, why haven't you addressed the issues I raised?"

They've been refuted a hundred thousand times, in books, essays, and anywhere wherever an Internet thread on the "authorship conspiracy" exists.

By the way, I like how you completely ignored my correction to your major error about Marlowe. Another patented conspiracist tactic -- when somebody points out you're blatantly wrong about something, just pretend it never happened, or quickly change the subject to something else. It's not like you have a credibility to protect.

"It is very easy and very lazy I might add to pretend that the whole issue has been handled. That is truly wishful thinking."

Pretending that the issue hasn't been refuted is the Oxfordian's favorite pastime. People have been refuting "authorship controversies" (note plural) since the 19th Century.

"The name on the title page tells us nothing about the man behind the name."

We don't need to know anything about the "man behind the name." Of no other writer in modern history does one say, "We have a name on a title page, but that doesn't tell us much about him, so his authorship is therefore in doubt."

"How do you explain that, during his lifetime, no one ever claimed to have met the man, talked with him, exchanged letters, anecdotes, diaries, etc."

People didn't think such trivia was worth keeping. It was a more enlightened time.

"There are no authentic portraits of the man. The ridiculous Droeshout portrait in the First Folio with a mask on his face seems to have been put in as a pointer that the real author was someone else."

In your dreams perhaps.

"So even though the site declares Oxfordian claims to be not even worth discussing, the entire website is devoted to doing just that."

Refutation is necessary to prevent rot from spreading.

"In their attempt at a “case closed” explanation called “How do we know that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?” they offer the arguments about the name on the title page and the fact that no one mentioned Oxford as the author of the plays, which only shows that the coverup was successful."

Well there you go. The fact that there is absolutely no evidence PROVES the conspiracy! Brilliant.

"These arguments of course ignore the following points articulated by Hank Whittemore, “Yes, the name “Shakespeare” was printed on the narrative poems and plays, but never during the Stratford man’s lifetime was he ever connected to that name..."

Blatant lie. Shakespeare the author is identified as being from Stratford in the opening pages of the First Folio.

"...Up to his death in 1616 (and for years afterward) he can be identified only as a businessman — money lender, grain dealer, property buyer — and never, not once, identified as a writer.”

Blatant lie.

"I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d…. His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it had beene so too. Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter…. But he redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.” (Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter, included in Appendix B of The Riverside Shakespeare)

"I think people should read these books, if only to see for themselves the lack of substance in the orthodox position. These books are one page of fact and 399 pages of "could have's", "might have's", it's possible that" and so forth ad infinitum, all speculation unsupported by evidence."

That's because real historians are limited by what little survives from that (or any other) period, not what they WISH survived (the "Oxfordian" approach). Lacking huge reams of documents does not give the real historian license to then go running down a rabbit-hole of his imagination, feverishly making arbitrary connections until they finally connect enough dots to satisfy their expectations. So we don't have any idea where Marlowe was or what he was doing for large periods of his life? No problem! We'll just create a life for him. Great men must have great biographies, even if we have to invent them for him.

This just blows the cover of the whole "authorship controversy" supposedly being a serious academic exercise.

A bit harsh in place, perhaps, GildEdge - it can be hard reconciling Stratford Shakespeare (who died wealthy but left no books - which should horrify Devotees!) to "Shakespeare"; and it's also true that anonymity and assumed identities were commonplace back then. Howard's argument is weak (even irritating) because desperately (shamelessly?) overstated, but he might be right nevertheless.

I'll be seeing Edward Bond's play "Bingo" at the Young Vic soon, which is a kind of Marxist laceration of bourgeois Shakespeare's life, based on a land dispute he was involved in. In a sense, I guess, it's also an attempt to reconcile Shakespeare's patchy, petty, litiguous biography with the glamour and humanity we instinctively attribute to the Bard from his work.

Leonb - Thanks for at least injecting a little rationality into the discussion, though I do not honestly see anything "weak" or "overstated" in my argument. If anything it is understated.

For anyone who maintains their objectivity like yourself, however, it is quite instructive to notice how this thread has been hijacked by a few Stratfordian trolls whose only purpose is to create chaos.

They have no interest in the truth. They already know the truth. Their only purpose, like schoolyard bullies, is control and intimidation. One of their tactics is to accuse others of the very same things they are guilty of. They think that if they dismiss and deny evidence that is presented by labeling it as “boilerplate”, “unconvincing”, or “twisted” that they have satisfactorily dealt with it.

What they do is to ignore 95% of the issues raised and concentrate on one or two miniscule points and beat them to death. They have a simple explanation for everything. To them, there are no longer any mysteries. Anyone who disagrees is insulted, ridiculed, and put-down with mean-spirited sarcasm.

Such excessive responses are strong witness to their attempt to preserve the status quo with all of its comfortable illusions. Their example of direct evidence is a name on a title page, though this tells us nothing about the real author behind the name. When asked to present evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime, they cite the First Folio, as if no one would know that it was published seven years later.

n most cases, they have not read a single book on the life of Edward de Vere or the case for his authorship. The Shakespeare Authorship question is a deeply complex, multi-leveled issue in which there are plenty of questions but no easy answers. Often what is needed is logic and common sense, to see the big picture.

How anyone can look at the material and not conclude that there is a real mystery and that something is seriously missing from the official story is beyond me. At this point in the game, dogmatic denial and what appears to be professional debunking borders on the irrational.

As more of the truth about the true author becomes available, their opposition becomes more and more strident. More people, however, have begun to open their eyes and raise questions about the fairy tale that has been fed to them since day one. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” That will happen sooner rather than later.

>125 Howard_Schumann:

"...this thread has been hijacked by a few Stratfordian trolls whose only purpose is to create chaos. "

By offering an alternate opinion to your own? Those devils!

> 125. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.

The important question is, how long can stage one last?

>125 Howard_Schumann:

"...this thread has been hijacked by a few Stratfordian trolls whose only purpose is to create chaos. "

Given that it appears you only joined LT to "hijack" this thread, and run the Oxford line, this is a bit rich.

Anyway, good to see you avoided the trap of just criticising your opponents and their motives and instead put up some rational and objective arguments in support of your position - nice one.

I am so TIIIIIRRRRRREED of conspiracy theorists. Always driven by people who think themselves Sherlock Holmes. And I mean the fictional character who was able to solve fictional problems using evidence made up by Doyle to show off his character’s thought processes.

Great entertainment and I love it as entertainment. And like literature, it provides some lessons that can be applied appropriately in life.

But the real world is incredibly much more complex and, more critically, chaotic. It gets even more complex when we apply modern cultural and social perspectives to historical behaviour. The fact that we attempt to apply the little we know about the cultural and social milieu does not make it much more feasible as that knowledge itself is constrained by our modern perspective.

Call me simple-minded, but in the absence of compelling real proof (and I mean real proof, not circumstantial supposition built on circumstantial supposition spiced up by the odd irrelevant fact tortured into some overblown piece of ‘evidence’) I prefer to stick with what almost everybody says.

As I said earlier, I don’t know much about the ‘who wrote Shakespeare’ circus, but I’ve seen so many conspiracy theories (World trade centre towers, world zionist conspiracies, JFK, etc) full of huge gaps that rely wholly for their currency on picking small and often irrelevant holes in the accepted explanation. And to top it off, the conspiracy theorists always assume that the conspirators have an inhuman capacity to deliver complex plans flawlessly (without practice of course) or else misapply some misconstrued scientific principle.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14665953

I'm with the Conspirators!

"When asked to present evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime, they cite the First Folio, as if no one would know that it was published seven years later. "

Whereas it's fine that over a third of Shakespeare's output came after Oxford died?

Just one piece of evidence from before the 19th century linking Oxford with authorship of Shakespeare's plays. That's all I'm asking. Just one.

>130 LesMiserables:

Yes, but which ones. Looking at the article, it seems to me that just co-ordinating the various elements would have been a nightmare for the most controlled and controlling regime, let alone one that can barely get its legislators to avoid wilful debt default purely for reasons of political pigheadedness.

#125: How anyone can look at the material and not conclude that there is a real mystery and that something is seriously missing from the official story is beyond me.

Because we've discovered that where there's smoke, there's smoke. I'm sure I could argue that JK Rowling is really Anne McCaffery--ever notice that as McCaffery got sick and died, any discussion of new Harry Potter books ended? Does anyone believe that HPAPS is really a first novel? That a real author would write just seven novels and stop?*--but most people accept that given that JK Rowling is publicly known as the author of the Harry Potter books, and no one who would know anything is saying otherwise, that we can accept that as truth.

* That's a useful one. Who really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? Did she steal it from Ernest Hemingway? Did Isaac Asimov write it under a pseudonym because it was so far out of his normal topic? Maybe Nabokov sold it so Lolita didn't hurt its sales. Anyway, another example of how can you look at it and not conclude there is a real mystery.

> 133

Who really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird?

Not to start anything, but there was a rumor that it was written by Truman Capote: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5244492

Here another unenlightened Stratfordian troll promulgating more pickled herring:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/19/yes-shakespeare-really-did-writ...

*Please, scroll down for the first comment...it's very funny!

>122 GiltEdge:

"'How do you explain that, during his lifetime, no one ever claimed to have met the man, talked with him, exchanged letters, anecdotes, diaries, etc.'

People didn't think such trivia was worth keeping. It was a more enlightened time."

Brilliant; this made me LOL.

>122 GiltEdge:

"How do you explain that, during his lifetime, no one ever claimed to have met the man, talked with him, exchanged letters, anecdotes, diaries, etc. "

Are you planning on reading what was said above or you just repeating your lines?
Look at what kind of works he is writing, look at what is written at his times. His plays are not masques; his sonnets can be used to wow someone's beloved but compared to almost anything from the era, they have a different sound. We consider him a genius now, his plays are timeless but at the time they were written, they were the different thing. And in the Court, being different and not writing odds to the monarch is not exactly a recipe for being popular.

Anyway - anyone can believe whatever they want. I just hope that whoever had not made their mind yet will make the effort to study the Elizabethan and James I customs (mainly Elizabethan) and not try to judge an author from these days with the expectations of a 18th and 19th century authors.

>135 DanMat:

Hahahaha. Oh, Howard. He has a lot at stake in this argument.

>134 lilithcat:

Do we know whether Capote or Harper Lee ever had problems with tax evasion?

That's the important part that I think we all need to focus on. What about the tax collector????????????????

The anti-Stratford view is based on too many wild speculations and conjectures. Shakespeare remains a shadowy figure but there is enough evidence to point to him as a man and as the author of the plays and the sonnets. I am happy to leave it at that and just to continue to enjoy reading and seeing his plays.

Quicksilver66 - How many books have you read on the life of Edward de Vere and the case for his authorship? If you think his candidacy is based on "wild speculation and conjectures", my guess is that you probably haven't read any.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was a prodigy, wrote poems and plays from childhood, owned and sponsored play companies and produced plays nationally on assignment from Queen Elizabeth before the expected Spanish Armada.

The life of de Vere is well documented and his biographical connection to the plays and sonnets is unmistakable. His travels to Italy are clearly demonstrated in the precise details of his Italian plays.

You say that there is enough that points to Shaksper as a man and the author of the plays and poems. Pray tell, what would that be? Can you name anyone who DURING HIS LIFETIME, connected the author William Shakespeare with Shaksper of Stratford?

Shaksper is well-known as a money-lender, a grain and hops broker, an investor, a litigant over small sums, and a witness in a trial wherein he could not remember what year in which he was born.

We have documentation about Shaksper as an entrepreneur, businessman, most likely an actor but we have nothing documenting him as a writer.

What do we know about the man? Virtually nothing. No portraits, no letters, no descriptions, no diaries, no anecdotes. He was a complete cipher. The whole authorship debate is predicated on the fact that we know next to nothing about the greatest writer in the English language. Very odd indeed.

140 -

One of the things I find confusing is if as you say "Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was a prodigy, wrote poems and plays from childhood, owned and sponsored play companies and produced plays nationally on assignment from Queen Elizabeth before the expected Spanish Armada." then why the need for an alias at all.

Most often I hear its because he didnt want people to know he was a playwright as it was frowned upon. But if your statement is true then his fear of being associated with the theater and being a playwright cannot also be true.

Please correct me if I am wrong or perhaps shed some light on what I am missing.

IMO, this type of speculation is class warfare, pure and simple. Either a person is "touched by God" as a genius/prodigy (e.g. Mozart) or is a member of the elite class, or both, in order to have accomplished anything extraordinary.

Athe average working stiff, someone in the 99%, just couldn't have been Homer or Shakespeare, because, because ... well, he/she just couldn't!

I'm starting to question the authorship of "Howard Schummann". Is he related to the internet commenter Howard16? Who--better yet--what is this presence on the internet? Is it a single author or possibly a group of authors? Are there clues or ciphers hidden in the messages? Could it be an elaborate hoax on the part of some diabolical Stratfordians to delegitimize the Oxfordian theory once and for all? Perhaps Harold Bloom is involved. And the Baconians? Roland Emmerich? It is quite puzzling.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user-comments/howard16?commentpage=1#start-...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/howard16?action=comments

http://www.leesburg2day.com/users/profile/howard16/

http://letters.mobile.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/03/28/contested_will/vie...

"We have documentation about Shaksper as an entrepreneur, businessman, most likely an actor but we have nothing documenting him as a writer."

This is probably more a statement about the times Shakespeare lived in than anything else.

Honestly, the culture of fame and celebrity, the idol worship of entertainers...that's all largely a 20th century invention. No one was keeping records of famous playwrights in Elizabethan England because, quite frankly, their "fame" would be extraordinarily limited by today's standards!

There are records of business and the law because that's what everyday life was comprised of: the struggle to make some money to put food on the table and a roof over one's head. The lower class was lucky to have a few pence to go see a play once or twice a year and the aristocrats thought play-going a silly little diversion; not something one obsessed over, studied, and kept detailed documentation of!

(And certainly any scholars studying Drama were probably not concerning themselves overmuch with 'current' plays and playwrights.)

But he's a literary superstar, you may say. Well, playwrights were not considered "serious writers", so Shakespeare would not have been thought of as a literary persona. He would have been more widely known as the businessman and actor than a writer, hence why that's the only documentation of Shakespeare available.

Ironically, it was one of my Oxford tutors who used to drum into my head this valuable advice: stop thinking about these people and situations from your 21st century point of view! Put yourself in THEIR shoes!

You say that there is enough that points to Shaksper as a man and the author of the plays and poems. Pray tell, what would that be? Can you name anyone who DURING HIS LIFETIME, connected the author William Shakespeare with Shaksper of Stratford?

Well, for starters, from what I've been reading here and elsewhere in the past day or so, the acceptance by pretty much all contemporary material that the author was William Shakespeare rather than somebody else (I'd be grateful if somebody could correct me if wrong). Let's ask this same question from a different angle:

Can YOU name anyone who DURING HIS LIFETIME connected the author William Shakespeare with Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford?

It's been an enlightening thread, not least because, having started reading through it with no real opinion either way (having never really looked at this before), the arguments in favour of William Shakespeare seem to me to be far more convincing, and the arguments against classic conspiracy theory (except I've still yet to see any convincing arguments as to why, at least in the case of Edward De Vere, there was any need for a conspiracy).

As a bit of an aside, I'm also intrigued to know who these Stratfordian trolls who have taken this thread over are too.

jburlinson - The question is not who could have written the works but who did. I think it's fair to say that whoever wrote the works was a genius.

Genius, however, is not only a product of birth but of environment. Genius has to be nurtured. Both factors must be present for gifted children to excel in any domain. They must be born with talent, but they must also have the support of family or caregivers who value their efforts, who can offer what has been called an “enriched environment” with opportunities for reading, playing and talking, one in which education is valued. Without these, no matter how great the inborn gifts, nothing can develop.

In Will of Stratford's case both parents were illiterate and there is nothing in his background that suggests the kind of opportunities for learning that others of a more advantaged environment had. That is not a value judgment, just a fact.

In addition, if you are familiar with most of Shakespeare's plays, you will notice that they appear to be written primarily from the point of view of a courtier, and with intimate inside knowledge of the royal Court and foreign affairs.

Lower class characters in Shakespeare are almost all introduced for comic effect and given little development. Their names are indicative of their worth: Snug, Stout, Starveling, Dogberry, Simple, Mouldy, Wart, Feeble, and so forth.

If you are looking for class distinctions, they are all over the plays.

>146 Howard_Schumann:. There are plenty of examples of men and women of genius from unlikely and impoverished backgrounds.

if you are familiar with most of Shakespeare's plays, you will notice that they appear to be written primarily from the point of view of a courtier, and with intimate inside knowledge of the royal Court and foreign affairs.

Add "the gods" and the same could be said of the Greek tragedians. Perhaps they didn't write their plays either, but were front men for Zeus.

I have to say I disagree with this:

"Genius, however, is not only a product of birth but of environment. Genius has to be nurtured. Both factors must be present for gifted children to excel in any domain. They must be born with talent, but they must also have the support of family or caregivers who value their efforts, who can offer what has been called an “enriched environment” with opportunities for reading, playing and talking, one in which education is valued. Without these, no matter how great the inborn gifts, nothing can develop. "

I agree that true genius is something that you are born with, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be nurtured. I think so long as a family or environment doesn’t directly force the suppression of genius it still stands a very good chance of developing on its own.

Oh, I can't resist. Based on your definition of genius there's been a very successful imposter who impersonated Charles Dickens since some boy condemned to a bottle-blacking factory couldn't have gone on to produce all those wonderful novels.

Willoyd - The whole point of the coverup was to make sure that no one connected Edward de Vere to the works of William Shakespeare.

However, Puttenham in "The Art of English Poesy" in 1589 mentions Oxford as a hidden poet.

Only four (Oxford, Sidney, Ralegh and Dyer)
appear three times. The references to Oxford are as
follows:

"in her Majesty’s time that now is, are sprung up
another crew of Courtly makers (ie. poets),
noblemen and gentlemen of her Majesty's own
servants, who have written excellently well, as
it would appear if their doings could be found
out and made public, with the rest, of which
number is first that noble gentleman, Edward,
Earl of Oxford . . .
doings as I have seen of theirs . . . for tragedy,
the Lord Buckhurst . . to deserve the highest
praise, the Earl of Oxford . . . for comedy and
interlude."

No plays have survived in Oxofrd's name.

Additionally, of utmost importance is the reference from Henry Peacham in his list in The Compleat Gentleman published in 1622 when the First Folio project was well underway. For it is Peacham who lists Oxford first among the greatest Elizabethan poets, and yet fails to mention Shakespeare at all.

If Will of Stratford was the true author, it raises questions as to why no one connected him as the author of the Shakespeare plays and why we know next to nothing about his life, other than a few non-literary facts.

"
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was a prodigy, wrote poems and plays from childhood, owned and sponsored play companies and produced plays nationally on assignment from Queen Elizabeth before the expected Spanish Armada. "

And he died in 1604. New Shakespeare plays came out over the next decade, and stopped just before Shakespeare died. Impeccable timing from His Lordship to write just enough plays to be kept back and released over the exact future lifetime of his ostensible amanuensis.

"In Will of Stratford's case both parents were illiterate and there is nothing in his background that suggests the kind of opportunities for learning that others of a more advantaged environment had. That is not a value judgment, just a fact."

As I said right at the top of the thread, the reason why people doubt Shakespeare was Shakespeare is inverse snobbery. That a Midlander from an ignoble background could be a genius. I assume on that basis Dickens was a secret child of George III.

"We have documentation about Shaksper as an entrepreneur, businessman, most likely an actor but we have nothing documenting him as a writer."

Other than, as has been repeatedly pointed out above, entries in the Stationers' Register, copies of plays published in his lifetime, the testimony of Ben Jonson, the jealousy of Green and loads of other contemporaneous evidence.

In favour of de Vere we have...nothing.

Not a sausage.

Come up with ONE bit of evidence, as I've previously requested, from Shakespeare's time, or maybe the next 200 years afterwards, and then we can discuss. Until then, there is no debate, only prejudice.

And Leonardo da Vinci was most likely a minor Medici.

SirFolio16 - Read Dr. Ellen Winner, Professor of Psychology at Boston College and Senior Research Associate at Harvard, one of a group of innovative psychologists who, roughly twenty years ago, embarked upon a study they term the Psychology of Creativity, a study launched by the pioneering work of Dr. Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis.

He book is called "Gifted Children; Myths and Realities (1996)."

http://www.amazon.com/Gifted-Children-Realities-Ellen-Winner/dp/0465017592/ref=s...

I'd imagine after each performance of Hamlet, screaming fans outside the Globe. Shakespeare, tired, exits a side door. The onslaught of fans see him, rush down the alleyway quartos and quills in hand. Instantly he is encompassed. Bulbs flash. He is tired but reluctantly agrees to be photographed and signs half a dozen quartos. Recently he has seperated from Emilia Lanier. Working with Burbage has been increasingly difficult. Why did he agree with de Vere to assume this identity? Perhaps de Vere knew the responsibilty that comes with fame. The lonely nights in hotel rooms. The gruelling pace. Interviews. Performances. Interview. Bear-baitings. It has to end. De Vere must concede the fact. That night with the help of a secretary of Elizabeth's he pens a full confession. As he about to sign the bottom and send it to the papers the door breaks down. It is de Vere and Jonson. Jonson is drunk. The two branish pistols. The secretary quickly exits. "Been signing Quartos again, eh Shakespeare?". They throw the heap of autographed quartos into the blazing fireplace. Shakespeare turns pale. A single tear begins to fall down his cheek. "Listen guys, I never signed up for this..." he says, voice trailing. De Vere approaches the table and picks the confession up. De Vere reads silently. Shakespeare buries his head in his hands and begins to sob: "I can't live this way anymore...". Reading the confession de Vere becomes enraged. He forcibly grabs Shakespeare's face. "You have no say, William. You have no rights, you" he pauses a moment, "Commoner". "As if you, the son of a tanner, could write these plays...". De Vere laughs to himself. "Gullible public". He then pulls out a photograph of Shakespeare's wife and children. "No!" Shakespeare cries, "Not Annie!". De Vere's smile becomes frightful, his teeth gleem in the firelight. "Oh yes William, Anne. She hath a way..." Jonson erupts in laughter. De Vere laughs and both exit.

You know, Howard, thinking about Charles Dickens actually raises a conundrum. You assume that William Shakespeare was not educated or travelled enough to be the playwright who produced his plays. And yet you do not doubt that Charles Dickens, the second-greatest-writer in the English language, who received a desultory education at best, actually wrote the books attributed to him. Why?

DanMat - I am one of the most open and honest commentators on the Internet. My name is always a variation of my real name and I use howard16 as well. I also write film reviews for www.cinescene.com. I don't hide behind a screen name.

I have been writing about the authorship controversy on the Internet for many years.

Anything else you want to know about me?

SirFolio16 - There are a few early poems that survive in his name, mostly written in his late teens and early twenties. No plays survive in his name.

If you've seen the film "Anonymous", being associated with the theater was frowned upon by both William and Robert Cecil. If you consider the likelihood of the Prince Tudor theory, that Southampton was the son of the Queen and Oxford and in line for the throne, it was incumbent on the Queen to protect him and not reveal his name, though Elizabeth probably knew of Oxford's literary career.

She wanted to be certain Oxford would not be associated with the subversive works he had written concerning individuals and government policies of his time, because it would have meant the Tower.

Podaniel -The questions you have to ask in comparing Shakespeare to Dickens are these:

How did Shakespeare acquire such an outstanding knowledge and scholarship in classical philosophy and mythology?

Why are the Shakespeare plays and poems so full of academic learning and University matters?

Why does Shakespeare often use, out of context and as if natural to himself, the idiomatic language of Cambridge University, and refer to customs and stories unique and private to that university?

Besides Latin and Greek, where did Shakespeare learn French, Italian and Spanish, which he needed in order to read certain source material which he used?

How did Shakespeare manage to get access to the multitude of books, many of them rare or untranslated, which he read?

How did Shakespeare acquire such a mastery of the English language and to such an extent that he not only used over 24,000 different words but also invented at least 1700 new words and Latinized others?

Why would Shakespeare want to use so many new and abstruse words and meanings?

Why are the Shakespeare plays and sonnets filled with legal terminology, some of it abstruse and all of it appropriately used?

Why do the Shakespeare plays indicate not only the author’s expert acquaintance with the law in general, but also with the language, rules, circumstances and even the most trivial aspects of Gray’s Inn and its twin establishment, the Inner Temple?

If Shakespeare was not a member of Gray’s Inn, how could he have known of the various circumstances and wording of the elaborate Gray’s Inn Revels of 1594/5?

I repeat my comment and link in #118: Shakespeare wrote faster than almost any other playwright. Where did Edward de Vere get the time to take on a full-time playwright job along with the rest of his responsibilities?

InVitrio - If you read all my posts in this thread, including the one directly above and the one where I talk about the 1604 question, you will have my response.

My problem with the Oxford theories so far is as has been stated above... I don’t see much real evidence for Oxford. I just see allot of questions being brought up about William Shakespeare. Just because we don’t know how Shakespeare came to create plays that indicate he knew various languages and must have traveled doesn’t mean he didn’t.

The fact that Oxford went to Italy doesn’t count as evidence to me, as a great many people would have traveled to Italy and detailed information could easily have been passed on to Shakespeare. Oxford was a known writer of poems and plays as stated by Howard but yet for these particular plays he used an alias. I still don’t understand why... even if some of the plays could have caused problems for him at court not all of them would have. So then why not take credit for those that wouldn’t have caused ripples.

prosfilaes - By the late 1580s and early 1590s, Oxford had fallen out of favor with the court. Walsingham had given him protection by supporting his writing for The Queen's Men.

When Walsingham died, however, the Cecils, moved to take over Walsingham’s operation and rid the nation of the writing establishment he’d fostered.

His father-in-law, Lord Treasurer Burghley, tied Oxford's hands financially by calling in his debts to the Crown, while his brother-in-law Robert Cecil, using Walsingham’s former agents, destroyed his leading rival, Ferdinando Stanley, formerly Ld Strange, by then Earl of Derby.

Having fallen as low in reputation and credit as a peer of his stature could, he was saved by Lord Chamberlain, creating a Crown company for him to write for and began rewriting his old plays in the style that grew out of the sonnets he had been writing for the young Earl of Southampton.

Wary of Robert Cecil, Oxford retreated ever more deeply into anonymity, venting his bitterness satirizing Cecil’s father-in-law, William Brooke Ld Cobham, as the fat knight Sir John Oldcastle when, following Hunsdon’s death.

Oxford was primarily an artist, not a soldier and his duties at court during those years were inconsequential. On the other hand, the question should be asked how a full-time actor would have the time to write the plays?

Howard - Im sorry but I also had to point out that this is funny to me:

"DanMat - I am one of the most open and honest commentators on the Internet. My name is always a variation of my real name and I use howard16 as well. I also write film reviews for www.cinescene.com. I don't hide behind a screen name."

While I admire that you do not hide behind a screen name, I find it funny that you seem proud of this fact especially since you are championing the cause of someone who would have been doing just that.

SirFolio16 - My best response to your questions would be to read one of the books about Oxford that I mentioned somewhere in this thread, including "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" which, I believe I mentioned at least three times. All your questions about Italy will be answered.

The majority of his plays contained references to court figures and not in a flattering way. Keep in mind, this was a totalitarian state and his name would surely have been tied to all of his plays.

We know a great deal about Oxford's life and how it is reflected in the plays and sonnets while there is nothing in Mr. Stratford's biography that in any way connects him to the work.

Yes, it is funny, but I do believe it's a bit different, n'est-ce pas?

"Yes, it is funny, but I do believe it's a bit different, n'est-ce pas?"

Yes, it may be so.

It may be different but that has yet to be proved. As far as I can see Oxford and yourself have at least two things in common. You are both writers in your own right, and from what I have read here both of you did not/do not hide behind another name.

But like I said I am still researching/reading and I will make sure that I give Oxford his due and read what there is to be read about him.

Oh and just to clarify the fact that I responded to "n'est-ce pas" does not indicate that I know French or have ever been to France. I simply asked my coworker. Sorry if this caused any doubt as to my identity since if you look into my life you will see that I have never been to France and have never taken a French class.

>168 SirFolio16:

I enjoyed that. Ha!

Sir Folio16 Sorry, I thought everyone knew what n'est-ce pas meant. I wasn't trying to be pretentious.

The biggest difference between Oxford using a screen name and me using my own name is that his life was at stake, and mine isn't (at least I hope it isn't).

Thanks for keeping an open mind. That is the path to truth.

> 146, Lower class characters in Shakespeare are almost all introduced for comic effect and given little development. Their names are indicative of their worth: Snug, Stout, Starveling, Dogberry, Simple, Mouldy, Wart, Feeble, and so forth.

Except for those who are not: Enobarbus, Adam, Mariah, Iago, Montano, Cornwall’s servants, Horatio, Francisco, Bernardo, Marcellus, the players and gravediggers in Hamlet , Isabella, Jessica, Tubal, Mariana, Antonio, various fools (of the professional variety), and so forth.

I have to say I disagree with this statement as well: "Lower class characters in Shakespeare are almost all introduced for comic effect and given little development. Their names are indicative of their worth: Snug, Stout, Starveling, Dogberry, Simple, Mouldy, Wart, Feeble, and so forth."

I don’t think it is right to say "almost all"... and while this might seem like a small issue I think it is significant.

IMHO “almost all” is a gross overstatement. As shown by post 171 there are a great many “lower class” characters that are not named for comic effect. Almost all creates an image of Shakespeare that isn’t necessarily factual. I think a large part of why he chose the names he did (when he did use the comic names) is that he knew his audience and what they would enjoy.

SirFolio16 - I should have said "almost" all. In any event, here's the point.

Of the 37 plays, 36 are laid in royal courts and the world of the nobility. The principal characters are almost all aristocrats with the exception perhaps of Shylock. From all we can tell, Shakespeare fully shared the outlook of his characters, identifying fully with the courtesies, chivalries, and generosity of aristocratic life.

The history plays are concerned mostly with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power and are concerned with righting the wrongs that fall on people of high blood. His comedies are far removed from the practicalities of everyday life or the realistic need to make a living.

Shakespeare's vision is a deeply conservative, feudalistic and aristocratic one. When he does show sympathy for the commoners as in Henry V speech to the troops, however, Henry is also shown to be a moralist and a hypocrite. He pretends to be a commoner and mingles with the troops in a disguise and claims that those commoners who fought with the nobility would be treated as brothers.

But we know there was no chance of that ever happening in feudal England. What can scarcely be overlooked is a compassionate understanding of the burdens of kingship combined with envy of the carefree lot of the peasant, who free of the "peril" of the "envious court", "sweetly…enjoys his thin cold drink" and his "sleep under a fresh tree's shade" with "no enemy but winter and rough weather". This would come naturally to a privileged nobleman.

>161 Howard_Schumann:

Your answer to the 1604 question seems to be that Shakespeare not writing about contemporary events is evidence that plays that were known to have been first performed after 1604 may have been written before 1604. On that basis they may have been written before 1554 as well. Perhaps Henry VIII wrote them?

Most of your astonishment at Shakespeare's skill can be explained by his education; as for Gray's Inn and Inner Temple, they were not twin establishments but separate entities and someone living in London (and who was involved with at least one legal case, and was a shareholder in his company) would be fairly au fait with them both.

Although one wonders where de Vere would have gained his knowledge of glove-making or Midland dialect words...

>173 Howard_Schumann:

It is possible for an author to use his imagination. I don't think anyone claims that Homer was a 12th century BC Greek warrior, for example.

And I'm guessing that sad stories of the deaths of kings were a bit more interesting to a London audience than an argument about who left the pot on the stove. Can you point to a Greek tragedy for example that deals with domestic issues? Indeed Euripides is even parodied for his occasional proletarian characters and debasement of monarchs. Comedies deal with more mundane lives, but then again so do Shakespeare's.

Still waiting for that one bit of evidence that links de Vere with authorship, incidentally.

>173 Howard_Schumann:

And where do you want him to have the action happening? People in these days are going to the theater for entertainment - not to watch their own life on the scene. This is something the 20th century people might be doing; the 16th and early 17th century ones - not that much.

Had he really shared their outlook? Or did he write what the people seeing the plays could laugh at or could be awed by?

I do not think that the fact that Shakespeare's plays, particularly the tragedies, were about kings and nobles says anything at all about Shakespeare's own station in life. The greater the state, the greater the fall, and for the dramatist and his audience the fall of an Oedipus or a Lear is far more compelling than that of the shoemaker or the cook. As Aristotle said in his Poetics: "He {the tragic hero} must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous- a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families. "

InVitrio - There are three possibilities for the 1604 question.

The orthodox chronology is wrong; Oxford left uncompleted plays which were completed and updated by Fletcher or by his son-in-law William Stanley, The Earl of Derby; he didn't die in 1604 but was exiled or exiled himself and died in 1608.

The first one seems the most reasonable explanation since no manuscripts were found and the dating is pure conjecture.

As far as his knowledge of the law is concerned, it is very extensive.

Resources on Shakespeare and the Law can be checked out at the following site:

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/Law.htm

Shakespeare's Knowledge of the Law: A Journey through the History of the Argument. Serious study of Shakespeare and the Law should begin with Mark Alexander's in-depth study, orginally published in the 2001 edition of The Oxfordian.

Shakespeare's "Bad Law". A shorter survey focusing on Shakespeare's supposed misuse of legal terms.

The Legally Annotated Hamlet. A complete annotation of the 1604 (Quarto 2) edition of Hamlet.

"An Unrecognized Theme in Hamlet". Tony Burton's important article first appeared in the Fall 2000 edition of The Shakespeare Newsletter: “In Hamlet there is a consistent and coherent pattern of legal allusions to defeated expectations of inheritance, which applies to every major character.” (71)

"Laertes's Rebellion as a Defense of His Inheritance: Further Aspects of Inheritance Law in Hamlet" Tony Burton's follow up article provides further corroborating detail.

"Could Shakespeare Think Like a Lawyer? How Inheritance Law Issues in Hamlet May Shed Light on the Authorship Question." Thomas Regnier's outstanding 2003 University of Miami Law Review article.

The Shakespeare Law Library. Numerous original early source texts on Shakespeare's knowledge of law, by George Greenwood and others.

In addition to the law, his works show extensive knowledge of philosophy, classical literature, ancient and modern history, art, astronomy, mathematics, music, medicine, military and naval terminology, and English, French and Italian court life, as well as a mastering of at least five languages other than English – a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge. How could he have learned so much about so many subjects without corresponding with others? Wouldn’t some of these letters have survived?

As far as his knowledge of midland language, Hamlet's enigmatic line "When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually derives from hawking lingo popular in East Anglia -- where Edward de Vere was born and spent part of his childhood.

InVitrio - There are no smoking guns and if you want a more detailed explanation of the case, read one of the books I suggested.

"The Mysterious William Shakespeare" by Charlton Ogburn is 800 pages long. I'm sure you will find your answers there.

Lilithcat and AnnieMod - All I can say is that people write what they know most about. Knowledge of the court from an insiders point of view is prevalent throughout the plays, the kind of knowledge that could not be picked up at the Mermaid Tavern.

>179 Howard_Schumann:

Do you always believe to what people write in books even it does not make logical sense? And I am just wondering - can you recommend a book/study from late 16th or 17th or early 18th century that shares these ideas? Or can you share what documents from the 16th and early 17th century had been discovered to support these claims or are used when the claims were initially made.

In history, it is considered a bad scholarship if you claim something for a certain period of time without sources from that period or very shortly after that. Or without sources that can be verified to have used such sources. And there are enough bogus theories that had been invented in the 19th and 20th centuries - usually from someone applying the wrong set of values and expectations on something or someone.

Don't send me to read books - just list a few sources here please. That will prove that there is some merit in the theory - how much will depend on the type of documents and so on. Without any documents like that... well - I can spin a tale about a monarch from the 7th century and call it "a theory" based on a hear-say and some circumstantial notes made centuries later.

If you keep on sending people to read books and do not give straight answers to straight questions, I can only presume that you actually do not know the answers...

AnnieMod - I listed the Puttenham and Peacham books in one of my earlier posts. There are no other books from the 16th and 17th century to my knowledge that support the idea of Oxford being Shakespeare. The first book that was written was "Shakespeare Identified" by J. Thomas Looney in 1920.

http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Identified-Edward-Seventeenth-Oxford/dp/021714...

I do not rely on books that do not make logical sense. The books I listed are scholarly and very convincing.

You are right. I don't have all the answers. I have tried, however, to use whatever knowledge I do have to present a case for Oxford. Obviously, I cannot go into great detail about all the evidence. The subject is very deep. That is why I referred you to books that have been written at a much greater depth than I can provide here.

If that doesn't satisfy you, you will have to do your own research rather than rely on me to provide all the answers.

If you don't want to read books, there are several Oxfordian websites which I also listed in my earlier posts.

>182 Howard_Schumann:

But that's the problem. I had done my research in the 16th and early 17th century. And I am keeping an eye on almost any new development using sources from these times as a base.

Anyone can believe whatever they want. 1920 is almost 3 centuries too late.

Puttenham's mentioning of Oxford is well known and explanations for it can be found as well. It is interesting that he is not mentioned for his tragedies though - but only as a poet.

As for Peacham - he does not lost only Oxford; nor does he list all poets of the age. Why he is mentioned first has more to do with his station in life than anything else. Don't forget as well that commoners can be missed by default -- simply because of the times and the readership.

And even if (and it is a big if) these two are saying that Shakespeare did not exist, they are NOT saying the he is Oxford.

PS: I had read books from both sides of the argument. Too many of them. That is why I am asking for sources - none of the ones from your side of it had listed anything useful from the proper centuries.

"I do not rely on books that do not make logical sense. The books I listed are scholarly and very convincing."

Sure, but only if you know nothing about scholarship or history. Dan Brown *could* have included a lot of footnotes in The DaVinci Code if he'd wanted, too.

GiltEdge - Which books have you read from the Oxfordian point of view?

AnnieMod - It seems to me that you are full of rationalizations.

Obviously, if de Vere's identity as the true author was kept hidden, you will not find a whole lot of sources revealing what people went to great lengths to hide.

Evidence is cumulative since there is no direct evidence for either man or for Bacon or Marlowe for that matter. You have to put it all together and decide for yourself who has the weight of the circumstantial evidence in their favor.

"How did Shakespeare acquire such an outstanding knowledge and scholarship in classical philosophy and mythology?"

90% of his classical references come from one book. Arthur Golding's Ovid. Hardly outstanding.

"Why are the Shakespeare plays and poems so full of academic learning and University matters?"

There is actually very little of either of these vaguely-defined terms in the works.

"Why does Shakespeare often use, out of context and as if natural to himself, the idiomatic language of Cambridge University, and refer to customs and stories unique and private to that university?"

Blind assertion, but not sure how these equally vaguely-defined criteria support your case. Oxford didn't spend eight years working on an MA in classics at Cambridge.

"Besides Latin and Greek, where did Shakespeare learn French, Italian and Spanish, which he needed in order to read certain source material which he used?"

Pure conjecture on the sources, as I pointed out earlier. And as was also pointed out, if he was fairly fluent in Latin (which wouldn't be unusual with a good grammar school education) then he could have picked up a passably good understanding of romance languages.

"How did Shakespeare manage to get access to the multitude of books, many of them rare or untranslated, which he read?"

He bought them.

"How did Shakespeare acquire such a mastery of the English language and to such an extent that he not only used over 24,000 different words but also invented at least 1700 new words and Latinized others?"

His vocabulary was actually quite average compared with other writers and poets of the time, as a recent article in Shakespeare Quarterly made abundantly clear. And we have no idea how many words he invented. Just because 800 or so (not 1700) appear for the first time in his works in no way means that he invented them. Using too many neologisms would have alienated the groundlings at the Globe.

"Why would Shakespeare want to use so many new and abstruse words and meanings?"

"Abstruse" to us doesn't mean that they were to a decently educated Londoner, or even many groundlings, at the time. The First Folio, after all, came with no footnotes. Nor did any of the quartos.

"Why are the Shakespeare plays and sonnets filled with legal terminology, some of it abstruse and all of it appropriately used?"

He researched the subject and took pains to get it correct. Like nearly every other writer has done since the beginning of time.

"Why do the Shakespeare plays indicate not only the author’s expert acquaintance with the law in general, but also with the language, rules, circumstances and even the most trivial aspects of Gray’s Inn and its twin establishment, the Inner Temple?"

He was not an expert. He was interested in law, especially the rich language, and used it to make his characters sound official and important.

"If Shakespeare was not a member of Gray’s Inn, how could he have known of the various circumstances and wording of the elaborate Gray’s Inn Revels of 1594/5?"

From a friend? This would not be shocking, except perhaps to Oxfordians.

There you go -- mysteries solved.

Can I recommend a web page that might save you a LOT of time?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or "appeal to ignorance" (where "ignorance" stands for: "lack of evidence to the contrary"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false, it is "generally accepted" (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to prove the proposition satisfactorily to be either true or false.

"GiltEdge - Which books have you read from the Oxfordian point of view?"

Mark Anderson's.

> 187 Thank you GiltEdge. Every one should read the Wikipedia entry on 'argument from ignorance'. Unfortunately, arguing from ignorance is so much easier to do and so much more attractive to the listener.

Oh, you're just full of answers, aren't you, whether or not they defy logic and common sense?

I guess there is no mystery, after all. My bad.

Incidentally, there is a thorough discussion of Golding's translation of Ovid and its relationship to de Vere.

http://hankwhittemore.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/the-second-of-100-reasons-why-oxf...

He researched the subject and took pains to get it correct. Like nearly every other writer has done since the beginning of time.
This summarises one of the many, but important, things that I find very unconvincing about the Oxfordian argument. Shakespeare was a playwright, a professional. Professionals do research, they talk to people, they find things out, they read books, they learn things. Yet the arguments Howard Schumann list seem to ignore these likelihoods. It's this refusal to accept such straightforward explanations that is one of the main reasons why I have found the Oxfordian arguments as put forward by HS so unconvincing and why this thread has certainly swung me strongly towards the 'Stratfordian' viewpoint.

Oh, you're just full of answers, aren't you, whether or not they defy logic and common sense?
Interesting that - because one of the prime reasons where I think the Oxfordian argument falls down is exactly in these areas - there are simply too many failures in logic and common sense.

I guess there is no mystery, after all.
Of course there's a mystery - there are all sorts of unanswered questions surrounding Shakespeare which would be good to answer. It's just that they don't need a modern day conspirary theory, with just as many if not more questions unanswered and unanswerable, as a solution. Some of us are quite prepared to accept the fact that there isn't enough evidence available about Shakespeare to fill in all the details of his life - that's historical life.

As Paul Clarkson and Clyde Warren point out in The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama, the use of legal terminology by Shakespeare gives no more weight to the theory that he was Oxford than to the theory that he was Bacon or any other lawyer.

They also note that it matters to the question (that is, was Shakespeare a lawyer or have legal training) whether such usage was unique to Shakespeare, or whether it was commonly found in plays, even those written by playwrights known to have no legal training. What did they find?

Indeed, our reading of the plays revealed that about half of Shakespeare's fellows employed on the average more legalisms than he did -- some of them a great many more. For example, the sixteen plays of Ben Jonson . . . have a total of over five hundred references from all fields of the law. This surpasses Shakespeare's total from more than twice as many plays. Not only do half of the playwrights employ legalisms more freely than Shakespeare, but most of them also exceed him in the detail and complexity of their legal problems and allusions, and with few exceptions display a degree of accuracy at least no lower than his.

If you believe that Shakespeare acquired his vast amount of knowledge of languages, the law, Latin and Greek classics, medicine, falconry, the sea, music, and nature by talking to people and "finding things out", more power to you. You probably have simple explanations for all of life's complexities.

If you believe that Shakespeare acquired his vast amount of knowledge of languages, the law, Latin and Greek classics, medicine, falconry, the sea, music, and nature by talking to people and "finding things out", more power to you. You probably have simple explanations for all of life's complexities.
Not all, but it's surprising how often Occam's Razor holds good, especially as, as is coming through from a number of posts here, a fair bit of that 'vast' amount of Shakespeare's knowledge may not have been quite t that exceptional after all.

I dont know if I can say I completely think 193 is wrong. Assuming that the people Shakespeare was talking to and listening to were educated in the subject they were discussing then I dont see why he couldnt have learned a great deal of what we find in his plays from them. We do something like this now... But we call it school. And it is a great way to find things out.

Good night and good luck. It's been fun (or not).

> 173. From all we can tell, Shakespeare fully shared the outlook of his characters, identifying fully with the courtesies, chivalries, and generosity of aristocratic life.

How can you have read, say, Hamlet or King Lear or even Twelfth Night and hold such an opinion?

The fact that we don't know a lot about Shakespeare and his life is not grounds to steal his authorship from him. Oxfordians are doing the Bard a great disservice and should either bring something more solid to the table or else admit that there is a very good chance that they are wrong. A lot of wild speculation here is being repeatedly submitted as fact. The smugness of it and the unwarranted certainty is maddening.

My impression is that Howard would be absolutely devastated if it were (more substantially) proven that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Can we at least get a Bacon theorist on the board to change things up?

mentieth - "My impression is that Howard would be absolutely devastated if it were (more substantially) proved that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare."

Yes I have a gun ready in the case of such an eventuality.

Seriously, I don't believe I am in sole possession of the truth, unlike some of the dogmatists on this board who are willing to believe anything so long as it supports the status quo.

If Mr. Stratford was shown to be the true author, I would be the first to acknowledge it.
My family would still love me.

"The fact that we don't know a lot about Shakespeare and his life is not grounds to steal his authorship from him. "

The fact that we know next to nothing about the greatest writer in the English language should at least raise questions, but unfortunately it will not affect a culture that is determined to drain every last mystery from life.

>200 menteith:

Questions have been raised. That doesn't mean that I buy your answers.

I am afraid that we will never drain every last mystery surrounding Shakespeare and his life. We just won't. I don't think that that makes him a "statue," however. It makes him all the more intriguing.

I have no emotional bond with Shakespeare the man, however. If de Vere wrote the plays and it is somehow proven, so be it. Until then, I think the threshold of proof is higher for Oxford than for Shakespeare.

"The fact that we know next to nothing about the greatest writer in the English language should at least raise questions."

And there you have the whole Oxfordian position in a nutshell, as I predicted a few days ago. Great men must have great biographies. 21st Century expectations must be projected onto Elizabeth's England, and if they fail to meet our expectations, we need to ring up Sam Spade and launch a full-scale investigation. An investigation that includes the massive "cover-up" perpetrated by historians, textual scholars, and English professors over the last 200 years. People whose life's work in this field means nothing.

It was 150+ years after Shakespeare was dead and buried before anyone started thinking about him as "the greatest writer in the English language." Another 100 years or more passed before anyone started to think that the lives of great writers was so utterly fascinating and important that we need to archive every last scrap of their papers.

The other absurd idea is that simply going to Cambridge or Oxford somehow magically transformed a person into a great, learned poet or dramatist. If that were the case, Greene, Nashe, and Lyly should have written masterpiece after masterpiece for the stage. Yet today only English Renaissance scholars even know their names. Marlowe's plays are good but they also reek too much of the academy. They don't glow with the stuff of life like Shakespeare's. Contemporary playgoers recognized this and responded to it.

Shakespeare's background as a commoner is in fact the secret to the universal appeal that the plays have had since they debuted back at the Globe. He can be pretentious at times, sure, but a deep, profound understanding that all of us, even kings and queens, are subject to the same failures, emotions, desires, and loves runs straight through nearly all of his greatest plays. An understanding utterly and completely alien to high born royalty, who were instead told they were God's jewels and the rest merely swine. That may suffice for a 16th Century court poet, but it's hardly an attitude that produces immortal literature.

> 192

Thank you. Shakespeare's "expertise" on the law was no different than his fellow dramatists. Should we therefore find something suspicious about their authorship, too? Perhaps the entire London dramatic scene was comprised of lawyers from the Inns, hiring local yokels as their "frontmen" ... I think I'm on to something. Get Sam Spade on the line!

203 brings up another thing that bothers me about all of the different Shakespeare authorship theories. I keep seeing Shakespeare being singled out for things that were fairly common among playwrights of the time. One of course being his working knowledge of law as stated above.

I have also noticed that allot of quotes are chopped up or used out of context for these arguments. At the moment I am reading Shakespeare in fact by Irvin Matus, its a great book from a Stratfordian point of view. It attempts to address allot of the Oxfordian ideas. It also puts allot of the quotes back into there original form and proper context. I highly recommend it.

What concerns me is if Oxford was Shakespeare, who was Jonson? After all, he was the adopted son of a bricklayer and went straight into masonry from school. Did Oxford write him as well so that he could make up a contemporaneous source for Shakespeare? Jonson talks about legal issues as well, so he must have been a lawyer rather than the son of a brickie.

>202 GiltEdge: The other absurd idea is that simply going to Cambridge or Oxford somehow magically transformed a person into a great, learned poet or dramatist.
That isn't the impression I've had reading HS's posts. What I understand from them is that Oxfordians believe that for the author of the plays to have written them, he needed this sort of background, not that Oxbridge would necessarily create the author. The author still had to bring themselves to the learning. Different but important emphasis. Not that I agree with it - there are many ways to develop learning and understanding - but I can see where the Oxfordians are coming from on this one.

blimey that was a long read.

Bill Bryson has a whole chapter in his book Shakespere which is dedicated to this. He mentions that Ben Jonson also did not have a university education but that Shakesperes more rural background is in evidence somewhere in all of his plays.

One line he mentions is 'Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney sweepers, come to dust'

In Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad while one about to disperse its seeds was a shimney sweeper.

There loads of other examples but I'm not about to type out the whole chapter!

This thread used to be so hot, now it's a shadow of its former self:

Here's a lovely review of the new Ben Jonson biography:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/books/review/ben-jonson-a-life-by-ian-donaldso...

This thread seems over so if one puts Shakespeare authorship in google, many good blogs come up.Hank Whittimore's blog has been mentioned but Roger Stritmatter's site

http://shake-speares-bible.com/

is excellent and gives many fine links. Stritmaatter wrote a dissertation on Oxford's Geneva Bible and its links to Shakespeare. (I was present at his dissertation defense.) He also has co-written with Lynne Kositsky a ground breaking deconstruction of the dating and sources of the Tempest that has been well received in mainstream quarters and has found a publisher

http://shakespearestempest.com/.

For those who think all conspiracies are crazy go to

http://www.ctka.net/ (Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination)

The research is modern, ground breaking and rock solid. It'll curl your toes.

The issue here is NOT snobbery, class or education. These are all Orthodox straw man arguments.

The issue is the lack of a contemporaneous historical record for a figure this prominent that backs the Folio attribution. To have doubts about how tradition has interpreted the author and tried to reconcile the disparity does not make one crazy.

Go to

http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com/

and read Diana Price's first chapter as well as her outstanding article which really addresses the issue, submitted to the Tennessee Law Review- "Evidence for a Literary Biography" and then you will understand the core of the debate.

Most of what has been posted here which Howard tried to deal with is drivel from people who don''t have a clue about the issue.

> 209. The issue is the lack of a contemporaneous historical record for a figure this prominent that backs the Folio attribution.

Doesn't that same lack bedevil any attribution? Wouldn't it be especially true of attributions that have absolutely zero support in the contemporaneous historical record?

>209 kenkap:

Drivel from people who don't have a clue.

Oh yes, you seem a person worth talking to!

> 208

Thanks for the link. I do plan on picking up the new Ben Jonson bio, but tell me: how is it possible that the poor step-son of a bricklayer who never went to college became the most learned and celebrated fiction writer of his time? That simply cannot be possible.

> 210, 2111

Don't feed the troll, it will only elicit 200 more messages full of nonsense.

212-It looks interesting, sure hope my library gets a copy.

Here is a Baconian dealing with "A never writer to an ever reader" prefatory remark. Note the condescending tone toward Oxfordians.

http://www.sirbacon.org/troilusandcressida3.htm

He calls De Vere the Elizabethan Pepe Le pew!

>212 GiltEdge:

You're right! My apologies. I should probably just click ignore for the whole thread. I find ridiculous posts hard to not respond to sometimes, but of course all responding does is keep the thing going.

No intention to reopen discussion in this thread. Just want to point out that (following affle's recommendation at the very beginning) I have read Contested Will and it is indeed a most enjoyable and interesting presentation, besides being fair, in my opinion, in the discussion of conflicting views. The epilogue summarises the whole debate, and the bibliograhical essay is what all bibliographies should be: not just a list of books but an annotated, referenced and commented exercise of erudition. James Shapiro has done an outstanding job.

BTW, this is the first time that I print out a whole thread (25 pages) from this forum. It managed to achieve a lively discussion without really insulting or offending anyone (not irreparably, anyway). A mean feat!

Yes, Shapiro is good.

I have an odd feeling this thread will rise from it's current state of near dormancy and Dow-like top ten thousand. Maybe that's too high. We never did have any Baconians, they must not maintain the same web presence as Oxfordians.

And Howard Schumann, what a tenacious fellow! Compliments to you Sir, wherever you may be. You shot into this place like a wild stallion full of confidence and life then flew back over the horizon leaving a trail of dust behind you. I actually read a lot of Howard's stuff online and some of his tangential associations. That young girl from WSU with her heart-felt essay, her wild-eyed Alan Moore look-alike professor (I do find it funny, an Oxfordian teaching the Shakespeare courses!). But it's a testament to the work itself, that it can engender genuine comradery despite bonds of conspiritorial mania and specious rationalizing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/wouldnt-it-be-cool-if-shakespeare-was...

The revival of this thread made me consider again what I detest about conspiracy theories and the like. That is, if the same scrutiny that is applied to the conventional wisdom to pick holes in it were applied to any alternative theory, you could drive Hannibal's army, complete with elephants through each and every alternative theory.

Whether it is the authorship of Shakespeare's plays (which is a pretty harmless controversy), the question of who shot JFK (which has become more harmless with the passage of time) or the attack on the World Trade Center (which is a highly dangerous and vicious controversy), they are all based on positing alternative theories that have completely ludicrous elements that are only addressed by the conspirators by adding another completely unsupported theoretical element.

To borrow from Churchill: The accepted explanation is totally unsatisfactory; it's just better than all the other explanations out there!

Edited to thank DanMat at >216 DanMat: for that delightfully entertaining link!

The cartoon on top was cute, wasn't it? Tom Gauld. Here's more, apparently he does literary subjects:

http://www.tomgauld.com/index.php?/portfolio/the-three-musketeers/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomgauld/

What a fascinating and dynamic thread, liberally sprinkled with outbursts of irritation! I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this, thank you to all contributers for so enlightening novices to the Shakespeare authorship question such as myself. I certainly wouldn't presume to add a ha'penny to the evidence either way, though I would say that the logic of the arguments posted above does incline me to consider Shakespeare as the real bard, even if it would be more fun to conspiratorially imagine de Vere.

> 219

I too found this thread fascinating, cronshaw. It lead me to read James Shapiro's Contested Will and I'm now immersed in his other work 1599. Recommended.

> 220 Thanks! (Groan - yet more great-looking books for the enormous in-tray!!)

> 221

Actually, all credit should go to affle who recommended the books in post # 2. Render unto Caesar...

I would also recommend "Shakespeare: In Fact" it's a great book and a light read.

> 223

Thanks. Remember the author? A search returns 3666 results!

> 223

OK, I think it's Irvin Leigh Matus

Ooops. Yes it's Irvin Matus

Actually, I think Irvin Leigh Matus is an imposter since his name is an anagram for "His Rum Vigilante." He's obviously merely trying to defend Shakespeare in order to protect the real Shakespeare.

Wonder what the Bard would think of equitable pricing...

> 228

" Put money in thy purse; follow thou the
wars; defeat thy favor with an usurp'd beard. I say put money in
thy purse."

Othello, Act 1, Scene 3

Make of that what you will !

> 228

Probably, "The lady doth protest too much."

Hamlet Act III, scene 2.

> 228
Oh for the love of whatever you worship, Let sleeping dogs lie!

Or, FS replying to Antipodes customer complaints:

I am not bound to please thee with my answers

The Merchant of Venice Act IV, scene 1

> 232
You made me laugh out loud and I am sitting home in front of my computer with no one around. Nice job!

I think Shakespeare would have been all in favour of price discrimination, as the aforementioned Merchant of Venice would hold...

We should hold day with the Antipodes,
If you would walk in absence of the sun.

___________

>207 pinkpaper: "In Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad while one about to disperse its seeds was a shimney sweeper.

"There loads of other examples but I'm not about to type out the whole chapter!"

by Prof. Rosalind Barber,

“In the 1970s Hugh Kenner claimed that ‘golden lads’ and ‘chimney sweepers’ in the lines from Cymbeline, ‘Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’, came from Warwickshire dialect because in that part of the country yellow dandelions were called ‘golden lads’ and dandelions ready to be blown to the wind were ‘chimney sweepers’.

“But that certainly wouldn’t have been the case in Shakespeare’s era – for a start, the typical chimney sweep’s brush Kenner alludes to wasn’t invented until 1805!" ...

__________________

See, also, Rosalind BARBER*, "Shakespeare and Warwickshire Dialect Claims," Notes and Queries (Journal) 263/4 December, 2018, pp. 549-551 :

"Longstanding claims that Shakespeare used Warwickshire dialect words and phrases have been shown to be false."¹

_____________________________

* (Goldsmiths, University of London,)

(1) "Shakespeare and Warwickshire Dialect" Journal of Early Modern Studies (2016), No 5, April 2016 | by Rosalind Barber | Goldsmiths, University of London