Oxford Society: No evidence Shakespeare "had any connection with the plays or poems"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?page_id=34

1. Why are there doubts about the authorship?

There are, in effect, two big problems that have kept this issue simmering away for nearly two centuries:

1) The mismatch between the man and the work;

2) The absence of a proper documentary record showing that the Stratford actor/merchant did write these works; each and every fact that exists presents problems and contradictions.

There should be masses of contemporary documents about the life of the world’s greatest writer. His manuscripts, his letters, the letters sent to him, the letters about him between others, and printed stories and pamphlets about him. But there are none of these things. There are reviews and comments on the plays and poems. There are a few legal documents concerning the man who usually lived in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon (population 1,400); we’ll call him Shaksper, the name he commonly went under. Shaksper got involved in several minor court cases and he was sought for non-payment of taxes. But there are no documents which show that he had any connection with the plays or poems.

[Faygo Kid]

1. Yeah, and where's his birth certificate?

Somebody contact Trump about this.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

2. Just like Elvis, birthers are everywhere, man...

That's right ladies and gentlemen,
The time has come!
Time has come to talk
To that little bit of Elvis inside of you.

Talk to it!
Call it up!
Say "Elvis, heal me!"
"Save me, Elvis!"
"Make me be born again
in the perfect Elvis light"

That's right!
You've got that Elvis inside of ya
and he's talkin to ya
He says he wants you to sing!
Everybody's got to sing like the king!

:-)

[cliffordu]

35. BWAAHHAHA!!!!!

:rofl:

[supernova]

3. Not a little axe to grind?

"Oxford" is code for wanting to support Edward de Vere, in Shakespeare's time the Earl of Oxford, as the "true" author of the plays. The people who think this are people generally interested in maintaining the idea that only people of "quality" have the talent to write such works. That a middle class plebian couldn't possibly be a literary talent.

[FLPanhandle]

4. I never knew this

Thanks. I can see the folks at Oxford trying to build a claim for one of their own.

[msanthrope]

8. He was the Earl of Oxford. He went to Cambridge. n/t

[DemoTex]

41. Edward de Vere was, specifically, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Meanwhile, in Mississippi ..

The Oxford Mississippi Society claims that Faulkner did not author such greats as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, The Reivers, The Bear, etc., etc.

:sarcasm:

:rofl:

[msanthrope]

57. Did you Snopes that?

(A very bad pun. I am sorry. But you don't get to make a Faulkner pun, often.)

[DemoTex]

74. All on authority of Flem Snopes.

Good one!

:rofl:

[cemaphonic]

102. Yeah, you can never pass up an opportunity for a Faulkner joke. Like my favorite.

Yo' mamma's so dead, I think she's a fish.

[DemoTex]

122. Vardaman Bundren, a lad of few words.

Certainly the shortest chapter (5 words) in all of Faulkner, and one of the shortest chapters in literature (AFAIK). But Vardaman's oldest brother, Cash, is rather taciturn too.

[coalition_unwilling]

135. My favorite Faulkner joke: William passed the draft manuscript

of "The Sound and the Fury" to his mother to read. "Bill," she said, "It's great. But the first chapter sounds like it was written by an idiot!" :)

[QC]

10. Exactly. It's all about class, baby.

Surely a small town boy like Shakespeare, son of a glover who went to the local grammar school, could not possibly have achieved anything worthwhile. Only aristocrats do that.

[malaise]

18. Ding ding

we have a winner

[joeybee12]

65. Exactly!

[xchrom]

14. +1 brazillion! nt

[msanthrope]

23. Not that middle class plebeian. "Pleasant Willy" didn't have the

education. Nor the temperament.



Look, Mark Twain took care of this a century ago--and there's one plebeian smarter than you and I.

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/Is_Shakespeare_Dead/

[EFerrari]

34. It's funny because the material coming out of the universities

was pretty horrible so education is apparently not the key to good writing. And as for temperament, how on earth do you know what his temperment was? And is there one we should be looking for?

[coalition_unwilling]

133. Couple serious problems with the Oxfordians, in addition to

their fairly obvious cultural bias that you reference.

First, de Vere died in 1604 but the later plays like "The Tempest" and "A Winter's Tale" did not see their debut until ca. 1610-11. The dates of first performance are perfectly well documented. Perhaps de Vere was writing from beyond the grave? :)

Second, de Vere was either openly or covertly Roman Catholic, but many of Shakespeare's plays have Protestant ideas and themes (thinking specifically "Hamlet" and "Macbeth"). Perhaps de Vere was a self-hating Catholic? :)

[msanthrope]

I, like Justice Stevens, am a proud Oxfordian. It was deVere who shook the spear. n/t

[Octafish]

134. +1

Hmm: Educated, well-travelled Artistocrat vs. Uneducated bum Actor.

From personal experience...

[Wednesdays]

5. The best theory I heard was that the playwright took up the name of the actor

The playwright had uncanny knowledge of history and the inner dealings of the English court, and was almost certainly highly educated--things totally out of reach for a mere actor from Stratford. So, the theory is that the playwright (for one or more of many reasons) was a nobleman who wanted to remain anonymous, and so published under the name of the already well-known actor William Shakespeare. (I wonder if Shakespeare the actor was also in on the ruse, since he'd happily benefit from the extra fame from the published works as well as his acting career.) Therefore, the images and documents that exist are of Shakespeare the actor (including his last will), while Shakespeare the playwright remains anonymous.

[msanthrope]

7. It was de Vere--the 17th Earl of Oxford.

http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/shakespeare/vere.html

[KittyWampus]

9. And why, pray tell, would the author need have been aristocratic? That link leads to a story

about some fool looking for an answer to a non-existant problem.

[msanthrope]

15. The issue is education. Who ever wrote the plays was multilingual,

well-versed in court life, and literate--and stopped producing anything new in 1604. Burghley's son-in-law it is.

Contemporaries knew that "Pleasant Willy" was not the writer, but de Vere "Thy countenance shakes a spear!” was.

Hey, I'm on the side of Mark Twain with this one...it wasn't Willy.

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/Is_Shakespeare_Dead/

[Bluenorthwest]

26. Many writers write passages in lanugages they do not speak

This is still the case. The presence of another language in a play does not mean the author spoke that language, or speaks it. There is a play called 'When She Danced' that is spoken in English, French, Russian, Italian and Greek. I doubt Martin Sherman is able to write at a high level in all of those languages. Maybe. Doubt it.
So can we conclude that Martin Sherman did not write When She Danced because he does not speak Greek but a character he made does speak and write all of those languages fluently if at all? No, we can not.
I'm not taking a side here, but that particular argument does not hold water.

[WinkyDink]

60. Your analogy holds even less water.

[EFerrari]

37. There is zero evidence to support the idea that he had to be multilingual.

or that he had to be college educated or even, have an inside track into the life at court that wasn't common gossip.

Let alone, that he didn't write Lear, or Antony & Cleopatra or MacBeth or the pastorals, which were all written after 1604.

[msanthrope]

48. You, my dear, are mistaken.

Lear, Macbeth, and A&C have all been dated as early as 1603 as possibly written. Google them.

Further, anyone who's read Macbeth knows it was written for the asscession.

If you think that whoever wrote the plays did not have a working knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, I suggest you read an annotated version of Antony and Cleopatra next time--Funny you should mention A&C.

Reread the death scene of Cleopatra, written when deVere grieved for Elizabeth.....note that the author never uses the Plutarch/North word 'asp.' (Because we know that Plutarch's Lives, which deVere had in the original, comprised much of the plot.) No. The Clown uses the word 'worm' to describe the way that Cleopatra/Elizabeth will deliver herself to immortality. (Alexander Pope puts the word 'asp' into the stage directions. They do not appear in the early Folios.)


GUARDSMAN. This is the man.
CLEOPATRA. Avoid, and leave him.
Exit GUARDSMAN
Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there
That kills and pains not?

(Of course, you get how "Vero Nihil Veritas" plays into that?)

CLOWN. Truly, I have him. But I would not be the party that
should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those
that do die of it do seldom or never recover.

CLEOPATRA. Remember'st thou any that have died on't?

CLOWN. Very many, men and women too. I heard of one of them no
longer than yesterday: a very honest woman, but something
given to lie, as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty;
how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt- truly she
makes a very good report o' th' worm. But he that will believe all
that they say shall never be saved by half that they do. But this
is most falliable, the worm's an odd worm.

CLEOPATRA. Get thee hence; farewell.

CLOWN. I wish you all joy of the worm.


CLEOPATRA. Farewell.
CLOWN. You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his
kind.

CLEOPATRA. Ay, ay; farewell.

CLOWN. Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the
keeping of wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.

"Ver" is the French word for worm. DeVere promised her immortality. He was right. (Vero Nihil Veritas is his motto)

[EFerrari]

50. LOL. Okay, this is now in ridiculous territory.

You realize, don't you, that Elizabeth's death was a decades-long proposition both in literature and in the theater, right?

No, I'm not mistaken. And to this really silly theory I say, slave, thou hast lived too long. :)

[msanthrope]

53. Oh, dear, that quote you picked was positively Freudian--

You forget, the Messenger only tells Cleopatra the hard truth.

And lives. Because Cleopatra cannot stop the truth, however unpleasant....

Tell me, who compassed the coming death of the monarch? The Treason Act of 1351 would have precluded it.

[EFerrari]

75. Who *compassed* the death of the monarch?

lol

Who didn't? And unlike yourself, they did it in the vernacular.

And please don't blame poor Freud for these wrenchings. He has nothing to do with them. :)

[msanthrope]

90. Oh, you're just pissy because your quote fell flat!!

And we were having such fun!

Must I mollify you with a false description of Octavia now??

(Why would I use the vernacular when the language of the statute is available?)

[EFerrari]

96. The death of kings was one of the most common tropes

in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.

[sybylla]

94. In old English, worm was the word used for snake

A word the common folk who made up a large part of the audience would have understood - far more than asp.

It's silly to use evidence that an author wrote to his/her audience as evidence against their writing it in the first place.

If what you and the Oxfordians propose is true, there should be great gobs of real evidence you can put on the table.

[coalition_unwilling]

136. The first performance of "The Tempest" was in 1611 at Whitehall.

Just sayin'

[anneboleyn]

111. Utter nonsense. Too bad de Vere's surviving verse happens to be miserable

No scholar of this time period takes the Oxfordian argument at all seriously. It's like far beyond the worst conspiracy theory nonsense, with completely ahistorical claims being advanced as arguments.

[blogslut]

6. Not this shit again

meh

[bemildred]

13. Indeed.

"Why are academic disputes so vicious? Because the stakes are so small."

[EFerrari]

30. LOL.

Wackjobs who name themselves after Oxford as if that will make them credible.

[msanthrope]

38. He was the Earl of Oxford. Thus, Oxfordian. Besides, he went to Cambridge.

I'm sorry you see Justice Stevens and Mark Twain as whackjobs who need the name 'Oxford' to make them credible.

[fishwax]

43. nice -- an appeal to authority wrapped inside an appeal to authority

;)

[msanthrope]

58. I try.

I was going to mention Henry James, but I don't like to turn the screws.

[EFerrari]

44. Yes, I know who he was. And the appeal to authority is not scholarship. n/t

[PurityOfEssence]

99. Yes, but it IS academia...

Buh-dump-bump. Tang.

[EFerrari]

101. Somewhere.

I still keep in touch with guys in the racket and this isn't a burning topic that I know of. :)

[KittyWampus]

11. The ONLY way this would have validity is if papers were found written by someone using the same form

of prose that Shakespeare used.

Further, there is no "mismatch between the man and the work". That mismatch is a ridiculous invention.

[robcon]

12. Old story. No new evidence: only 'lack of evidence' of authorship.

Not terribly persuasive, but the Oxford name lends an air of authority to the evidence-free claim.

[msanthrope]

20. I think you might be interested in this.....

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/CHAPTER%206.SomeCuriousMarks.pdf


I would read the whole dissertation, but you may have only time for the juicy chapter.

[Bluenorthwest]

16. Not new information. There are no documents tying anyone to

the plays or poems. This is an ongoing controversy, one of my favorites, because it is an area where no one knows the truth yet everyone with a theory holds to that theory as if it was proven truth, usually in ways that reveal why they chose that theory to begin with. Many hold tight to the idea that such writing had to be done by a noble, just because. Others are very married to Will as author. They are all very touchy and brittle about it.
This link is to a group that holds the 'true author' is the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Veres, it is not to be confused with being from Oxford colleges. Oxford in their title refers to the noble who they are sure must have written the plays, because they hold only a noble would have been smart enough to do so. They have no 'evidence' either, and some of the plays debuted after deVeres died, so Oxford is by no means a 'slam dunk' for authorship.
Walt Whitman was an Oxfordian. So it is an ongoing controversy, to say the least.
My own pet theory involves collaboration and that really pisses off both the Oxfordians and the Stratfordians. Because it has to be one or the other to both of them, I think because they are focused on making a point about themselves rather than about the plays.
The author, really, is inconsequential. The play's the thing. And they plays are pretty good stuff.

[msanthrope]

25. What about the deVere Bible? Twain's writings?

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/Is_Shakespeare_Dead/

[JackRiddler]

51. Yes. Oxfordians replace one author fetish for another.

The play's the thing.

The play material is plundered from everything that could be plundered. In the Oscars they would almost all be nominated in the adapted screenplay not the original screenplay category.

The plays were developed as business ventures. This was the Hollywood of its time and place. The Stratford man was an owner, a producer of the plays. He was also a brandname. Who really wrote what and what revision process was undergone will always be obscure to us. Stratford man hung out with court people who by the conventions of the time would not be able to publicly acknowledge their involvement in vulgar theater (hence DeVere theory can never be falsified). The difference in styles even within a play suggests multiple hands, or perhaps only one after all, but very attentive to different voices. They probably evolved as they were played. The folios are not the scripts used for the plays, they were set down afterward.

On top of all that, this was at times the official propaganda division of the state. The King's Men, for fuck's sake. Who authored the plays? One answer: The need to conform in the legitimation of Tudor power (so as to retain one's head and position) in tension with the desire to sneak in some criticism.

In the movie analogy, who authored the works of Steven Spielberg, or Martin Scorcese? Spielberg's would be more authored by a collaborative process that gets his name on it. Scorcese's would be much more a direct personal authorship. Neither is absolutely at one pole of that.

The play's the thing.

[msanthrope]

55. I think you might be very close to the truth.

I've always thought that the Crown itself was far more involved--the plays were a type of social control, a way of expression thatthe Crown could control and monitor.

[Greybnk48]

17. The pic looks like Ringo Starr, who WAS

a Beatle and one of the loves of my life!

[deutsey]

82. Yeah, but Paul died in a car crash and replaced with an imposter.

:evilgrin:

[UTUSN]

19. K&R #1(?) but got ZERO?!1 w-t-f?!1 Fascinating article, thanks!1 n/t

[cali]

21. oh for fuck's sake. not this shit again.

love the silly source.

[Lyric]

22. I don't discount the idea that Shakespeare might have used Oxford's life as a framework

for a couple of the plays; they knew each other and worked together, after all, and Shakespeare would have had plenty of reason to try and suck up to the noble who was one of his patrons. But I don't believe de Vere wrote the plays. Frankly, I'm much more inclined to believe the exact opposite--that Shakespeare was the actual author (or at least heavy editor) of de Vere's credited poetry. I, like the Oxfordians, have no actual concrete evidence of this, of course. It's just a pet theory. :)

[msanthrope]

24. Who do you think the Dark Lady was?

I haven't found a better candidate than Anna Vavasour.

[Lyric]

28. I've always thought that there wasn't one particular "Dark Lady"

I've always seen her as an amalgamation of many women who were supposed to represent seduction and temptation--including Anne Boleyn, possible Mary Fitton, and perhaps one or two of the brothel girls who worked for his landlord, George Wilkins.

[JackRiddler]

27. What's with the author fetish?

All of those plays were created as theater productions in a very active troupe. They were revised collaboratively. I have no doubt the merchant from Stratford was the primary author and that others were also involved.

Old philosophical question: Who is the author of a Hollywood movie?

[NashVegas]

78. Ooh - a Merchant? Well That Explains It

400 years later it's still pissing people off that he didn't have a degree.

[JackRiddler]

83. You're waving your strawman at the wrong guy.

I like that he didn't have a degree. And nothing wrong with a merchant as an author. You must have something against merchants, if you think identifying someone as a merchant is automatically insult.

[ehrnst]

29. Whatever. I don't care who wrote it. It's still great, and that's what makes it classic. (nt)

[On the Road]

31. Eventually This is Going to Become the Standard View

If you gave people short biographies of Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, and then showed them some sample poems with the names reversed, it wouldn't take them long to begin saying "Wait -- this isn't right. These poem sound like that guy and those other poems sound like this guy."

When the biographcial details are studied, it becomes evident that by all accounts, the guy called William Shakespeare was completely unequipped to compose those plays and poems. Edward deVere, OOH, not only had the education, background, talent, and leanings, but details of his life are strewn throughout the plays and poems. Some of the details are very striking.

When you read debates on the issues, what's really surprising about the orthodox view is how little there is to it other than the observation "ordinary people can be geniuses, too." The evidence was compelling enough for Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, Charlie Chaplin, Sir John Gielgud, Mortimer Adler Supreme Court Justices Blackmun, Powell and Stevens, as well as countless less-famous academics. I think the deVere hypothesis is only to gain adherents.

[hfojvt]

46. interessant

then how did they come to have Billy's name attached to them?

[On the Road]

64. We Don't Know Exactly

But deVere's and Shakespeare's situation and motivations suggest some scenarios: Shakespeare was a up and coming businessman who produced plays. deVere was an Earl who spent himself into bankruptcy and had to sell his lands, which were the source of his income. The most likely reason is that deVere needed money and Shakespeare not only wanted to produce the plays -- he wanted the fame and prestige of claiming authorship.

We know that deVere wrote historical plays, comedies, and/or tragedies which were not published, at least under his name. According to another member of the court, *if* deVere's plays were made public, he would be considered England's greatest writer.

I'm tempted to go on, but there's so much material. The seminal work is "Shakespeare Identified" by Thomas Looney. You can read the text here in different formats (I think "full text" is best). The Shakespeare Oxford Society has broader and more current materials.

I think there's a perception that denying Shakespeare's authorship somehow lessens the works. On the contrary, I think it makes them not only more interesting, but more understandable.

[EFerrari]

93. Shakespeare did not produce plays.

He was a writer and an actor and later a stockholder in a production company. Had he been the producer as we now understand producers, we'd probably have a more extensive record of his transactions.

And ridiculous praise of nobility was not scarce at the time. A whole popular form was founded on praising authority, often tongue in cheek, in Euphues by John Lyly. Before you take any of that praise seriously, you have to comb through for satire because that type of thing was very much in vogue at the time. (That's how Lyly could say his prospective patron had the wisdom of Nestor and the policies of Ulysses when Nestor was considered an old fool and Ulysses an irrepressible liar.)

[EFerrari]

49. First, you don't need biography to distinguish one hand from another.

And there is no reason at all to believe a middle class writer with a limited formal education couldn't have written those plays.

At one time, I had every known source of the plays in my library. Most were translations of the Greek and Roman poets that were available to school children and histories that were also widely available. Of the remainder, there are a number of plays adapted in London from earlier play texts which anyone working in that theater would know how to get, either in writing or by memory. And then there was the bible.

[On the Road]

76. Certainly the Source Material for the Plays Was Publicly Available

but the writing of those plays involved a lot more than distinguishing one hand from another.

Several things which link deVere to the plays, just from memory:

- On the trip to Italy that bankrupted deVere, he traveled in Italy and the Adriatic. With the exception of Rome (eg, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar), every location that he stayed appears in the plays, while none of those he bypassed do.

- The opinion of another member of the court that if deVere's historical plays were made public, he would be considered England's greatest writer.

- The appearance of an Old Testament name (that escapes at the moment) both underlined in deVere's Bible and in the plays that is so obscure that it rarely appears anywhere else in the history of literature.

- A wife whose husband refuses to sleep with her and produce an heir arranging with her father to sleep with her husband anonymously while masquerading as a prostitute -- that strange scenario appears both in the plays and in deVere's own biography.

None of these may be individually compelling, but there dozens of them, and cumulatively they are very impressive.

But more to your point, the only document we know Shakespeare wrote was his barely literate will. Whether someone with a middle-school education could have written the plays and poetry is subject to debate, but it's difficult to see the author of the will as the same person who wrote Shakespeare's corpus. OOH, the juvenalia known to have been written by deVere sound very much like an adolescent Shakespeare.

It's still remarkable that it all back goes to the argument "well, he *could* have written them." Whether or not that's true, it's remarkable there's no little else. That in itself is telling.

[EFerrari]

80. The Oxfordians are reduced to marrying the plays to De Vere

and not the other way around because they have no case.

There are plenty of contemporary references to Shakespeare. Do you believe the entire theatrical community was in on the secret?

And the plot with the wife, husband, heir, other relative and prostitute and its variants is not at all uncommon in the Jacobean theater. Gaming the system in one way or another goes back at least as far as The Miller's Tale and likely, is older than that.

[hfojvt]

103. I have to laugh about that one

because that story, of a wife who has a husband that refuses to sleep with her, etc., etc., is the story of Tamar from Genesis 38 not really something that is all that obscure to a Bible reader.

[EFerrari]

104. You're right. And it's probably older than that, too.

lol

[JDPriestly]

132. Why didn't de Vere claim authorship if he wrote the plays and poems?

Remember, Faraday, a self-educated religious fanatic discovered benzene and facts about magnetism that the well educated scientists of his time failed to observe.

[On the Road]

138. It's Certainly a Legitimate Question,

but we already know from deVere's biography that he wrote historical and comedic/tragic play that he did not make public. The most likely explanation is that it was considered to be beneath an Earl's dignity, as someone who was in the Queen's court, to be an author of that kind of entertainment. These things were thought of differently in previous centuries.

I think it's less important to try to identify with the motivations and more important to ask if it's something that's actually happened. If so, it's a possibility. There have been multiple authors who chose to publish anonymously, even in more recent times, as well as front men who took the credit.

Orthodox Shakespeare scholars are fond of the quote that 'Shakespeare is our Petrarch' -- ignoring the fact that Petrarch was, rightly or wrongly, considered by some contemporaries to have been a front man for another writer. While a lot of silly theories have been floated, it's not a modern controversy.

[JDPriestly]

141. I remember that years ago my dad told me of a theory that Queen

Elizabeth actually wrote the plays. I don't think they were written by a woman although it is possible.

This is intriguing. Is is possible that Shakespeare wrote, meaning polished the scripts in corroboration with De Vere? That seems quite plausible to me. Shakespeare was a theater man. He knew what was needed to sell the play. Could De Vere have been the concept guy? Could they have worked together on the scripts?

That happens in scriptwriting these days?

Certainly artists of the period worked as teams on occasion. And major artists certainly had assistants.

Would De Vere and Shakespeare have had the means and opportunity to work together?

Part of the greatness of Shakespeare's plays is their tremendous effect on stage. They had to have been written at least with the input of a theater technician who knew how to pull the ropes and set the scenes so to speak. Surely DeVere would not have had that expertise. Or?

[On the Road]

143. It is Possible That They Worked Together

Shakespeare is known to have collaborated with other writers. If it happened that way, I would think Shakespeare's talents would have been more in producing and directing, with deVere being the writer and having control over the final script.

The Shakespeare authorship question strikes a lot of people as unnecessary, elitist and/or conspiratorial.

The charge of elitism is IMO reading motives into people that aren't there. Certainly a guy like Charlie Chaplain didn't believe ordinary people were incapable of works of genius.

OOH, there *have* been many tin-foil proposals. For example, if the playwright was Christopher Marlowe, his death would have had to have been faked and he would have lived the rest of his life in secret. This is kind of silly even if he really was a spy. But the deVere hypothesis in a different category -- it is extraordinarily well researched and has innumerable pieces of evidence. And the fact that so many candidates have been proposed shows how many people have seen a problem with Shakespeare as the author.

While not all writing is autobiographical, you can usually see connections of some type between the author and the work. It is strange to think of an insurance lawyer as the author of Wallace Stevens's poetry, or Kazuo Ishiguro as the author of a novel about an elderly English butler, but familiarity with their lives illuminates the connections.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, left few traces other than his name on the plays. Known details of his life do not suggest contemplation, familiarity with the court, Italy, or a number or much of the other subject matter in the plays. Mark Twain called a popular depiction of his life "a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris." The dates of his life correspond oddly to the dates of the plays. And the only two documents he can definitely be connected to -- his will and his epitaph -- sound commonplace or even semi-literate.

[NashVegas]

81. Modern Elitism

It appears to me that almost every modern college degree *outside* of the traditional majors - economics, history, liberal arts, etc ... - came along to teach large groups of people what an original few had already accomplished, using their own imagination.

Where did DW Griffith go to film school? Anyone?

[EFerrari]

84. Shakespeare's theater was a pretty subversive place.

That's why people who keep one eye trained on authority try to bind and gag it and deliver it up to some establishment figure somewhere.

[PurityOfEssence]

97. Funny how academics have a problem with backwoods Willy being the guy

but theatre people generally don't...

Yes, he was the least educated of the major playwrights of his day. Big damned deal.

Small Latin and less Greek.

"For there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."

Did 40 plays in 20 years and had pretty much said all he had to say a few times over. With his riches and a few steps ahead of the crazy theatre-hating Puritans, he chucked it all and went home to retire. Out drinking with a couple of old chums from the boards one night, a bit too much red wine and herring did him in. He did his time in the cockpit and that was that.

Makes perfect sense to me.

[EFerrari]

98. None of the academics I studied with had any problem

with Shakespeare being Shakespeare. In fact, no one in the department took the "Oxfordians" as anything but a cocktail party joke.

[anneboleyn]

119. Not Renaissance scholars, only Oxfordians have a problem with this idea.

[fishwax]

126. academics are pretty close to universal in their acceptance of Shakespeare as the author

just for the record. The "Oxfordian" view has very little traction in academic circles.

[msanthrope]

61. The movie will cinch it---

http://www.aceshowbiz.com/video/download/00018506/

[On the Road]

66. Wow, That's New

It sounded from one of the clips like Elizabeth personally the plays to remain anonymous. That's a bit of speculation that IMO it's best to avoid -- there are so many arguments with better evidence. But it looks very intriguing.

[msanthrope]

72. "The Shakespeare Apocalypse"--'balls-out looniness"

http://www.slate.com/id/2252365/


It's either gonna be great, or suck...but I can't wait to see what 1599 London looks like....

[On the Road]

77. Oh God, the Emmerich of 2012!

I knew that name was familiar.

I think there's a better than even chance that this movie makes Oxfordians appear to be lunatics.

[On the Road]

139. The Trailer Looks Amazing

and it would nice for it to bring some publicity to the controversy.

But the looniness is right there in deVere's life -- there's no way to get around it.

[Greybnk48]

32. This makes me think the real author may be a woman.

A woman who used a local man's name in order to get published and performed.

[RaleighNCDUer]

33. Nonsense.

For one, 'proper' folk had little to do with theater folk - they might go see the plays, but they did not mingle with actors, who were thought of as little better than criminals. Particularly if they were of humble origin.

Second, why would there be a wealth of correspondence to/from Shakespeare? When he was not writing plays he was working on production. Everyone he knew, everyone important, he saw on a daily basis.

Third, where would what little correspondence there was be kept? At the theater. The Globe, which burned in 1613, only three years before Shakespeare's own death. (A side note: Hensley's Rose Theater was the premier theater in London at the time - Shakespeare worked at the less prestigious Globe throughout his career.)

Also, is there a wealth of correspondence concerning the Burbage brothers, who built the Globe and who Shakespeare worked for? THEY were the business men, not Billie.

What about surviving correspondence from his contemporaries? He was not necessarily considered the "world's greatest writer" in his own time - Christopher Marlowe was more popular, and Thomas Heywood wrote far more plays and was better known for it. How much of their correspondence survived? What about Ben Johnson? Thomas Dekker?

Let's not forget - William Shakespeare didn't become William Shakespeare The Greatest Writer Ever until more than a hundred years after his death. Like J S Bach, his genius was less apparent in his own time, and was only fully appreciated by later generations (which gives me hope for my still-unpublished novel).

[EFerrari]

42. Between the fires and the wars, we're lucky to have as much as we do.

Agree, with one quibble. A while ago, I read every play that we know was produced in London between 1601 and 1610. The vast majority of them were horrendous, lol, so the work of people like Marston and Heywood and Shakespeare really does stand out brightly like jewels in a mud puddle.

The mythos has had four hundred years to develop but the work itself was always among the best in the business.

[suffragette]

95. Add on to that the Puritans burning and repressing during the Civil War

and the later Great Fire of London. We're fortunate to have what made it through those successive disasters.

[coalition_unwilling]

137. When he was not writing plays or working on production, he (Will Shakespeare) was

also busy acting, being a member of various troupes, among them the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

[trackfan]

36. Well, the plays were written by somebody, and

the following is as true of any candidate other than "the Stratford Merchant" as it is of him:


>There should be masses of contemporary documents about the life of the world’s greatest writer. His manuscripts, his letters, the letters sent >to him, the letters about him between others, and printed stories and pamphlets about him. But there are none of these things.

[fishwax]

40. indeed n/t

[fishwax]

39. the idea of a single author is kind of silly

they were collaborations of a theater company.

That said, though, I've always found the need for an alternative Shakespeare amusing. It's also amusing that they cite the absence of a documentary record connecting the plays to W. Shakespeare among the series of premises meant to demonstrate that De Vere must have written them :rofl:

[EFerrari]

47. Collaborations that then went through many hands

before they wound up at Barnes & Noble.

There's a fun little book that is a record of Jonson gossiping with William Drummond in the late 16 teens. It's full of theater talk & Jonson was a huge gossip. If De Vere had written all that stuff, Jonson would have known and he would have found a way to batter De Vere about the head and shoulders.

lol

[fishwax]

62. exactly -- and thout sounds like a cool book

I'll have to look into it. I don't usually spend much time in that era, but it's sometimes hard not to love Ben Jonson :)

[EFerrari]

68. I think it's here!

http://www.archive.org/stream/conversationsbe00jonsgoog/conversationsbe00jonsgoog_djvu.txt

[fishwax]

70. cool -- thanks! n/t

[nemo137]

45. A society dedicate to the idea that William Shakespeare didn't write those plays

Finds no evidence that William Shakespeare wrote those plays.

I remain unsurprised.

[JackRiddler]

52. I love the death scenes.

They tell you that the plays were part of the entertainment industry of the time and place. Polonius cannot die without a chance for the people to hoot and cheer. It's a shame there are no records from the theater's creative politics, because as far as the subject sequence of the plays goes, I'm sure it came out of what we would today define as pitch meetings and marketing deliberations. With tavern drunkards as the focus groups -- and the writers.

DeVere died too early to account for all plays, so to argue for him is necessarily to argue for a collaborative venture.

[JackRiddler]

54. Absolutely the final answer is RIGHT HERE! Click now!

Acutally, these are of course my loose opinions (which I wrote a year ago)...



Does what one thinks of the author change one's reception of the plays? On some level, no doubt, but their greatness and perpetual relevance remain.

Though it's been years since I was moderately well-read on this subject, I feel safe to say we're never gonna know for sure. Even an authentic smoking-gun document establishing truth beyond denial would not achieve consensus acceptance, not after 400 years. My present model of an answer occurred to me recently, in the course of actually seeing film and theater made.

This debate seems oft-blind to the reality of theater, and bogged down in a 19th or early 20th century idea of authorship and genius as intensely individual, private, exclusive. It also has a whiff of present-day ideas of intellectual property right applied to an era when everyone stole with abandon and could more easily get away with it. I too fell once into a delusion that the question had to have one man's name as the answer. The mistake is to think of these works too generally, as texts rather than scripts, or even transcripts. "The play's the thing in which we'll catch the conscience of the King."

Of course, the idea of owning a creative work was not foreign to the Elizabethans, who jealously guarded against having their material stolen by competitors even as they stole what they could.

"The author of this motion picture"

Two companies managed and part-owned by William Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon a.k.a. Shakespeare, actor, created these plays. The plays were performed practically as they were being written, and rewritten in the course of performance. An insatiable market demanded more, newer, faster.

For myth-making power, popularity and glamor during the city's rise to empire and golden age of arts, the London theater companies were like great Hollywood studios. Social climbers, talents high and low, venturesome courtiers, whores figurative and professional, fan-boys, scene monsters and royal propagandists all would have sought a whiff, a piece, a role. It's impossible to imagine theater without entourage.

The plays display more styles, phases and knowledgeable details than any one man can likely encompass. I reject vigorously the anti-Stratfordian canard that some enterprising commoner couldn't evoke the court or speak as a Hamlet or a Lear, not when so much points also to a strong, unapologetic sense of the common life, even of the woman's life; but the case for De Vere's involvement based on the presence of so many of his biographical details cropping up in the plays seems overwhelming. And yet he died a decade before The Tempest. Which, for all its greatness, suggests a court influence, a work of state-sponsored propaganda for New World colonialism.

If you think of Shakespeare as a producer, head writer, the era's equivalent of director, or editor-in-chief, as well as a star and above all the moral copyright holder and thus author in the way "Warner Brothers" authors films, in a time when copyrights were ill-defined, then a solution to the puzzle appears. I think several people authored or co-authored the plays, De Vere and Shaksper no doubt primary among them, so that Shakespeare, the actor and producer, and his companies could put them on.

I imagine this group not just as collaborators in art and business, but also as conspirators in propaganda operations, victims both of the censor's and the rogue publisher's interpolation, carousers through nights of ale and improvisation, no doubt wildly jealous and fighting for the accolades, rewards and credits, comrades and sometimes lovers who all felt some part in the greatness they brought forth. All were just players in it.

Bottom line? Mr. Shaksper was the boss.

.

[IScreamSundays]

56. Actually I have read about this before a couple of years

back. There is some evidence to suggest that there was a ghost writer.

[WinkyDink]

59. And how many scoffers here have actually read BOOKS on this topic?

WS in no way wrote the works attributed to him.

[msanthrope]

63. Not a single one. You can see a performance of Twain's Book on YouTube, though--its great.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7004942638729319523#

and the movie will cinch it....

http://www.aceshowbiz.com/video/download/00018506/

[Spider Jerusalem]

87. Thanks for assuming

I've read books on the subject. The "Oxfordian" theory is absurdist nonsense born of snobbery. It persists for the same reason that conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of JFK persist. "But but...a provincial nobody with a grammar-school education couldn't be the greatest writer the English language has produced/a loser with a cheap rifle couldn't have possibly killed the most powerful man on earth!"

The idea that "authorship" as presently understood has any application to the world of the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre is an ignorant one; playwrights wrote much, but much was also contributed by the actors...it was a collaborative effort, and the manuscript of a play might evolve considerably in production. Shakespeare's career in London is well-documented; his work as a playwright and poet is attested by numerous contemporaries. And the idea that Shakespeare's plays present a knowledge of X/Y/Z that Shakespeare himself could not have possessed (whether that X/Y/Z is law, nautical and military terms, etc) is also absurd; he wasn't illiterate, and attending the inns of court to watch the proceedings was far from unheard of at the time. And as to the idea that Shakespeare couldn't have possessed the language, military, or naval knowledge: the Globe Theatre was in London. Near...the docks. Of a busy port city which saw ships with sailors and soldiers of many nations routinely. There's nothing at all in Shakespeare that isn't plausibly the product of a man of his background.

(And Anonymous is, quite frankly, rubbish; the idea that not only was the Earl of Oxford the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, but he was ALSO the bastard son of Elizabeth I...and not only that but ALSO her lover and father of the Earl of Southampton? That takes the whole thing from "farfeteched" into the realms of "insane".)

[apocalypsehow]

128. + about a million. n/t.

[PCIntern]

67. When I studied literature all those years ago

people were enthralled by "Baconiana" (Francis Bacon's writing of Shakespeare) - my Milton Professor ssaid that it was ridiculous...but a lot of fun...

[EFerrari]

69. Except for the ones you have to read and write about

to advance to candidacy at Cal in Sh, the 16th & 17th, not a one. :)

[jpgray]

92. Would that Dryden, Milton and Dr. Johnson were as erudite as you.

They certainly met their match for scholarship in Delia Bacon. In any event, they can hardly be blamed for failing to grasp that Shakespeare was not the author--much too close to the problem. Necessary understanding of the works, the period and so forth is best reached at some centuries' distance, by those who have achieved little or nothing in poetry or criticism.

[anneboleyn]

109. I have, actually. And the Oxfordian theory is total bunk.

[EFerrari]

114. So nice that you got yourself together to post in this thread.

:)

[anneboleyn]

120. What does this mean? I have no idea. I suppose it's some sort of snarky criticism. Thanks.

How lovely. I post at DU in various threads every few days, actually, and have visited this site for years. Given the fact that I suffer from a terminal illness, which some folks here know about, some days I feel better than others, and post more in some threads than others. But thanks for the criticism.

[EFerrari]

121. No, not snark at all.

I am glad that you posted to this thread and am happy to see you posting.

eta: It's not very often that I get to dust off my Sh studies.

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
(Hamlet, 4.5.46-53)

[fishwax]

127. plenty of scoffers have n/t

[LeftishBrit]

71. Obviously the plays really come from Kenya! It's a SOCIALIST PLOT, I tell you!

And 'Julius Caesar' is all about wicked terrorists who assassinate their rightful ruler. Shakespeare needs to be sent to Guantanamo Bay!

[msanthrope]

73. Shakespeare's really more a "No. 2 guy in alQaeda" type...we need to dig deeper. n/t

[fishwax]

129. lol

:)

[jpgray]

79. "To the memory of my beloved," anyone? But then what the fuck does Ben Jonson know?

What whoreson zeds anti-Stratfordians are. Pregnant with unnecessary letters and blind to the relevant ones. :rofl: The Oxfordian hypothesis is among the more ridiculous such, since he suffered a critical failure of existence before the writing and performance of some major plays.

[EFerrari]

85. Jonson was much too close to the trades to be reputable.

Essex probably wrote all his work, some of them posthumously, because no brick layer could have written Volpone.

:rofl:

[jpgray]

86. I forgot the most compelling evidence! The poetry we know to be Oxford's is fucking horrible

:D

(I shouldn't say fucking horrible. It's not -that- awful.)

[EFerrari]

88. LOL

:)

[anneboleyn]

116. EXACTLY. But the Oxfordians seriously claim that this was a cover-up on his part

to disguise the fact that he was a literary genius, the greatest one in the English language of course.

[PurityOfEssence]

125. Yes, but to the true believer, the more contrived the proof, the more compelling it is

These things become a religion.

And on occasion, even I know a hawk from a handsaw.

He was prolific, diverse, playful and reverent. Coloring so much of the fixation is a weird jealousy and need to get on top of a situation that people just can't accept: a real, hands-on, working artisan from the boonies gave airy nothing a local habitation and a name in a massive way for a very long run, and in ways that others have rarely managed on occasion.

[Jack Rabbit]

89. The Oxfordian theory is total lunacy

There are no documents? Yet there are reviews. Those reviews name as the author of those plays William Shakespeare of Stratford. Before 1600, Francis Meres, in a book seeking to compare English dramatists to classical dramatists, named Shakespeare as the author of the plays that he had written up to that time except The Taming of the Shrew (Meres also slipped in a play called Love's Labour's Won, which remains a bit of a mystery). After Shakespeare's death, his friend and rival playwright, Ben Jonson, wrote a poem in praise of Shakespeare. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death and nineteen years after the death of the Earl of Oxford, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's fellow shareholders in the King's Men theater company, known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men prior to 1603, which documents show first performed these plays when they were written, complied Shakespeare's works and published them. The volume named as the author of the plays Mr. William Shakespeare. If Oxford's heirs wanted to raise a question about Shakespeare's authorship, that was the time to do it, not 350 years later.

The Oxfordian theory holds that the Earl of Oxford didn't want to sully his name by writing plays for the public theater. However, Oxford was a decent poet in his own right and, if he wanted to write plays, could have written plays for private theaters without damaging his reputation. Gorboduc, a classical tragedy, was written Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville and first preformed in private theaters in 1561, three years before Shakespeare's birth. Sackville later became the Earl of Dorset.

In the play Macbeth, references are made to the gunpowder plot, particularly in the porter's speech. The gunpowder plot took place in 1605. Also in 1605, a prominent member of the King's Men, Augustine Phillips, died. That year also saw the first performance of King Lear, the last of Shakespeare's plays featuring a melodramatic villain. Macbeth, first performed in 1606, was the first of Shakespeare's tragedies to feature a hero who was his own worst enemy. Many scholars believe that Phillips was the actor who played Claudius in Hamlet, Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear. Shakespeare was reacting to changes in the personnel of his theater company when these plays were followed by the fallen hero tragedies Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra (1607) and Coriolanus (1608). Shakespeare had adjusted his fool from the physical, broad comedy of William Kempe, who left the company in 1599, to the more sophisticated comedy of Robert Armin. Kempe played Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594) and Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice (1596); Armin played Touchstone in As You Like It (1599) and Feste in Twelfth Night (1600). Shakespeare also changed his dramatic style to suit the more intimate setting of the Blackfriars Theater when the King's Men began performing there in 1609. Plays written for the Blackfriars include Cymbeline (1609), The Winter's Tale (1610) and The Tempest (1611). Prospero's final speech in The Tempest is often taken to be Shakespeare's farewell to the theater, but I think it was more likely the farewell speech written by Shakespeare for the retiring Richard Burbage, the actor who played all of Shakespeare's leading roles.

Now, of course, a dedicated follower of the Oxfordian theory could object at this point that Oxford could have as easily adjusted to changes in the King's Men, written references to the gunpowder plot into a play written in 1606 and his poetic style to an indoor theater in 1609. No, he couldn't have. Oxford died in 1604.

[EFerrari]

91. To get all wrapped up in authorship is to miss the point of the theater

in the first place, let alone that particular theater. It's projecting back the modernist's egoism on a completely different culture.

Plus, for most of Sh's career, the Privy Council was tightening up its control of playing spaces. I saw a map once of all the venues in London before it became illegal to mount play without a patron -- there were nearly a hundred of them. There was no need for any nobleman to write, staff or produce theater in London. The market was already overflowing with talent.

[PurityOfEssence]

106. There's a fella named Poquelin who might have contested this point...

...and he'd also have agreed. The working theatre for most of its history has been a mixed one of resident playwrights, player/writers, producer/writers and the smallest group, who were those who simply had their works paid for and performed. Those who see it as only the latter probably haven't worked in the field that much, and I do not consider academia to be the field.

Great filmmakers also tend to have kicked around a bit and risen through the ranks. The theatre is a craft, and the grubbiness of it is something not understood from those who see plays as merely literature. A properly crafted play is rarely issued forth from some far distant desk, and that's a peculiar concept to those with clean fingernails.

Still, authorship is extremely important due to the theatre's traditional star culture: individuals of great character and spirit are the seed crystals for theatres, and their personalities stamp things mightily.

The gainsaying of so much of this springs from individuals' need to be the big dog. The dark side of contrarianism stems from a need to rub others' noses in the droppings. There's also a critic's mentality at play: to admit the sheer ability and scope of feeling, poetry, pun-meistering, pox jokes and pageantry in one person of provincial middle-class obscurity strikes many as personally threatening to their own accomplishments. As a friend of mine likes to say: "a critic is a eunuch in a whorehouse."

[EFerrari]

107. I came at criticism from the theater and not the other way around

which made put me in the minority in my department, especially in the 90s' orgy of torturing long deceased French theory.

In fact, a group of us started putting on actual plays, with bodies and everything, as a way to ward off the abstraction.

Maybe I was lucky, though, because with one exception, I don't recall a single professor ignoring how the playing of the plays complicated our discussions. :)

[anneboleyn]

113. Amen, Jack Rabbit. Thanks for the excellent post.

[coalition_unwilling]

140. Silly wabbit, don't you know that de Vere was so omnipotent that

he was able to write from beyond the grave? Amazing new sub-text I just discovered for "The Tempest," eh?

:)

[Buns_of_Fire]

100. Of course not. Everyone knows it was Sir Kevin Bacon! nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

105. "Six Degrees of Shakespeare" would be a bit too easy

'Has this person acted in a Shakespeare play?' - probably, for most English-speaking actors. If not, they've acted with someone who has.

[anneboleyn]

108. I studied medieval and Renaissance lit in grad school for my Ph.D The Oxfordians are total nutjobs.

This issue happens to be one of my pet peeves. I can't really even get started.

Actually, as a scholar of this period, I can flatly say that the idea that there should be "masses" of documents is just totally wrong. We have very little "concrete" information connecting many major writers during the late medieval, Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean eras to their bodies of work. There is also true of major historical figures. For example, we don't even know when Anne Boleyn was born. There is much conflicting information about her biography. There is no clear information available on this matter. Church records were not always accurate, and the idea that "masses" of documents were being stored during the 1560s during Shakespeare's youth is just not historically accurate (or for that matter in 1590s London when he was hard at work on his plays). I strongly recommend reading one of the many excellent biographies available of the man and his work. His education in Stratford as a young man, and service to an aristocratic Catholic family (his father was a well-known recusant -- he refused to convert to the Church of England) fits perfectly with the knowledge that the Bard demonstrates in his plays. There have been numerous linguistic studies done of the plays that show extensive usage of slang terms very specific to the Stratford area. It all depends on certain circumstances and unpredictable document preservation. Keep in mind that paper documents of this period are notoriously fragile, unlike medieval vellum.

The argument has been around since the mid-nineteenth-century, and it should be noted that NONE of Shakespeare's contemporaries (including Marlowe and Jonson) thought there to be anything at all suspicious about the Bard of Avon and his plays. Trust me, everything the Oxfordians argue is tedious, class-based stuff, ahistorical nonsense to serious Renaissance scholars. I can't even begin to go into detail because the arguments take hours. But one detail they love to mention is that Shakespeare's name is spelled in a manner of ways on different documents. This was not at all uncommon during the time period. Anne Boleyn's family name was spelled in a variety of ways on different documents. The lack of documentation the Oxfordians cite was very common in the time period (even more so for medieval writers -- Chaucer would not have authored the Canterbury Tales according to their system). The real bottom line? The Oxfordians can't stand the notion that a playwright who was not educated at Cambridge or Oxford produced those plays. It really is that simple. There is no grand conspiracy.

[EFerrari]

112. What's really telling is they are more interested in who OWNS them

than in the material itself.

[anneboleyn]

115. yes, good point.

[EFerrari]

118. Where did you study?

No one at Cal gave this stuff the time of day.

[coalition_unwilling]

142. Even more annoying, I would argue, is the Oxfordians' grand

ignorance of British dramaturgy and the role of 'author' within it. The Elizabethan and Jacobean eras really represented the birth of British theater. Yes, there had been morality and mystery plays around in England before Elizabeth's reign, but you will search far and wide to find any significant corpus of drama prior to Elizabeth, because to my knowledge, there simply isn't any. Shakespeare and Marlowe were the Beatles and Elvis (or Elvis and Beatles, depending on your view of each pair :) of their day. They really were and all British dramatists who have come after have been a series of footnotes on them, imho.

Why is this important? Because drama was so new then, there were no 'playwrights' being graduated from Oxford and\or Cambridge. It's not like you could enter Oxford and declare that you wanted to be a "theater major" or "creative writing major". (I'm not sure you can do this at Oxbridge even today, but you certainly could not do it in the late 16th- and early 17th centuries.) So the Oxfordians' insistence that the writer of the Shakespeare oeuvre had to have been educated at either Oxforde or Cambridge is ridiculous in its ahistoricity and 'presentism.'

English drama was so new then, so outre, that I believe it far more logical to assume that the writer of the Shakespeare oeuvre came from a member of the new urban middle classes. i.e., the historical William Shakespeare, than from an aristocracy which, as many others have pointed out here, tended to view drama and dramatists with suspicion and scorn them as little better than criminals. The middle class of Shakespeare's day did not have the prejudices against scribblers and players so common to the aristocracy.

[Marr]

110. I don't understand how they believe a regular guy would be able to take credit

for the creations of some blue-blooded aristocrat.

[EFerrari]

117. It doesn't make any sense. It would be like Trump using Nora Ephron

to front his work.

[Motown_Johnny]

123. Are there documents showing someone else had connection with the plays + poems?

[EFerrari]

124. There is a shocking lack of documentation of Ed de Vere's authorship.

lol

[Forkboy]

130. Blackadder meets Shakespeare.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hDG40ZkmIg&feature=related

[quakerboy]

131. The REAL question implicit has not yet been asked.

In 2406 in the new republic of, lets speculate, East Africa, major superpower of the day, and center of scholarship of the world, will they be arguing about the *real* authorship of the movie "Demolition Man".

And will some brave soul step up and say "who the hell cares, it sucks anyway"

Take my implication for what you will.

[thelordofhell]

144. Gee, what a coincidence

"Anonymous" a movie about conspiracies of who wrote Shakespeare's plays comes out soon