Apart from any opinion on the question at hand (which I have little invested in), I think, overall, the rather blithely superficial treatment and condescending dismissal of Mr Ray's comments can't be denied. This thread sounds more like a snotty cocktail party than a poetry site.

Nemo

In what way are we snotty, Nemo? We have listened to Mr Ray's views. We have dismissed them.

As the Bard says, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

I am not the first to note that the magnum opus on the Shakespeare-was-somebody-else thesis was written by a man named Looney.

RHE

Perhaps supercilious is the word, John. And your dismissal seems to be based, as always, on lazily imperious whim.
Nothing I say will change that. So I will say nothing else.

Nemo

And don't forget our local hero Ignatius Donnelly, state senator, lieutenant governor, three-time U.S. Congressman, and author of The Great Cryptogram, advocating Bacon's authorship. There's nothing wrong with throwing rocks at elite icons, and it's to be expected elites will throw rocks at popular icons. Maybe there is an inconsistency between the wide berth poets claim for eccentricity and crankiness and the guild feeling that wafts around Father William, but that doesn't make the case any easier to accept on the merits. Contemporaries over decades thought he wrote his own plays. In the artificial world of law, if Herbert, Oxford, or Bacon perpetrated a fraud, their successors couldn't come along 300-400 years later and claim they were lying when they said Shakespeare did it.

William,

This is not said to attack your opinion in any way, and may instead be an example of my own frivolousness. But in the first place, I myself don't really much care who wrote Shakespeare: that the poetry and plays were written is enough for me -- the biographical information is very interesting, but I see it as icing on the cake. Secondly, I'd be a little saddened if the scholars settled, definitively, on one person: the dispute is entertaining, and I'd be sorry if it stopped. Besides, I kind of enjoy considering Shakespeare as different possible people -- it's like turning a jewel and viewing how different facets play with the light.

However long the battle rages in the ivory tower, though, we still have all that lovely work by the author, authors, or authoress; the man, the woman, the myth, the man moth. . .

Best,

Ed

Except that he doesn't seem like different possible people. He doesn't sound anything like Herbert, Bacon, or Marlowe. Though the fact that the ivory tower has decided in favor of Shakespeare may not be the strongest point in his favor.

The Alleged Author!
 

Our greatest writer? This person? From such a mediocre and undistinguished background? Something is amiss. Let the facts speak for themselves:

* born in an obscure village
* the sixth of seven children
* a sickly child who apparently stayed mostly indoors until age 9
* raised in a backwater river town
* grew up in poverty and near destitution
* fewer than six years of formal education in a country school
* apprenticed at age 11 to an older brother as a typesetter in a small print shop
* at age 18 left home to try his luck in a larger city, moving from job to job
* worked for several years as a boatman
* enlisted in a military unit and deserted after two weeks
* moved again to escape the war
* failed at various enterprises, including mining
* went to work for local newspapers
* started writing articles and sketches, but suspiciously under such odd names as “Josh” or “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” before settling on a consistent pen name

Obviously, a foul conspiracy is afoot. Who really wrote all of those novels and stories and sketches? Who is the real genius and author of these incomparable works? Who is the person William Dean Howells referred to as “the Lincoln of our Literature?” Certainly not the pathetic character whose early circumstances and life are outlined above. Let us pursue the truth, wherever it may lead. Let us ask the crucial question: Who really wrote the works ascribed to Mark Twain?

Richard

Seriously though, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Didn't Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, praise Shakespeare? Apparently, he was known as a master even in his own time.

I highly doubt the plays were the work of a commitee or company of writers. It is obvious to me that the majority of material attributed to Shakespeare was the work of a single hand, the work of someone with undoubtedly the finest ear of anyone writing in English.

To appreciate this superb ear outside the plays, one only has to read Venus and Adonis, one of his long narrative poems. He is far and away superior to any other author in English, from his time forward.

Marlowe, Herbert, and many others, were exceptionally fine poets, but they do not match Shakespeare. Not even Milton matched him, though he came admirably close, as did Keats in his Hyperion fragments.

There were other masters who came admirably close: Browning, Tennyson, and even Wallace Stevens, in his amazing The Comedian as the Letter C, which contains whole blocks of lines nearly on par with Shakespeare.

The opening of Richard III is, in my view, a perfect encapsulation of Shakespeare's unrivaled mastery: