Who Wrote Shakespeare?
 

Quick, before it goes. There is another gathering of the coven led by the grandson of Evelyn Waugh and some Hungarian over on The Spectator online. This one will just run and run.

The Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, they are all there. Myself, I think the plays were all written by Oscar Wilde when he was in Reading Jail.

I have no doubt in my mind that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. That is a fact.

The snarling dogfight over "who" Shakespeare "was" is a different matter entirely.

It's a bit like the visits of minority religious groups who come knocking and persuading and insisting that their version of the truth is truer than anyone else's. Sometimes I engage them on the doorstep with textual references and encourage them to explore logical extensions to their thinking. At other times I can't be arsed.

I am too busy following my conviction that the augury uttered by the weird sisters in the Scottish Play is based on folk memory, that the battle of Mons Graupius did, indeed take place - at Dunsinane - in the time of Agricola, and, moreover, that the first Tay Bridge disaster occurred as part of the subsequent withdrawal of the occupying troops.

Let me show you the relevant pages of William Stewart's metrical version of Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia ...

I'm with you. The anti-Shakespeare crew tends to have a dollop of class snobbery, and doesn't understand that a graduate of a quality "grammar school" in the late 16th century had a far more thorough schooling in the classics than today's undergraduate classics major. The alternate theories generally have to go through contortions to explain why their favorites wrote plays when they were dead or 12.

I do think, too, that he was raised in a Catholic household, although I am not persuaded he was a believer in any faith.

The book to read on Shakespeare's education is 'The Elements of Eloquence' by Mark Forsyth, which I wholeheartedly recommend. Ann and Michael, you would both love it.

I think the whole idea of Shakespeare not being Shakespeare is ridiculous, and can be filed alongside other claims such as how the moon landing was faked, or how Princess Di was assassinated by Arabs. It's pure, unfounded sensationalism.

I'd be curious, though, to see how the Shakespeare naysayers address the myriad "Will" puns throughout the Sonnets.

The problem is, the plays are too good for anyone to have written. Hence the skepticism that it could have been Shakespeare, and hence our own skepticism that it could have been someone else.

Stephen Greenblatt, author of the Shakespeare biography Will in the World, has said that while the author of Edward II might have been capable of writing Richard II, he cannot believe that the man who wrote The Jew of Malta could also have written The Merchant of Venice.

An English professor friend of mine gives her students some of Edward de Vere’s poems to let them see for themselves how vastly inferior to Shakespeare’s the earl’s writing was.

According to The Hackenthorpe Book of Lies, Chuck Berry wrote many of Shakespeare’s plays. That is my favorite among the alternative authorship theories.

Where is Mary Meriam when you need her?

In the interim, let me flog my own theory - the degree of depth, perception, and general understanding in Shakespeare's work clearly points to a Yeshiva education. That should narrow it down.

Plus, when Hamlet says "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will," he is clearly alluding to circumcision.

Not for you clowns, but for someone who might find this as inspiring as I did, I post a link to my piece.

Has anyone thought of doing it the other way about, listing all the things that Shakespeare didn't know, like that Bohemia doesn't have a sea coast, that Macbeth ruled successfully for eighteen years, that Romans didn't wear nightcaps or have clocks, Cleopatra couldn't play billiards, stuff like that? And he never quotes stuff in Latin, whereas Marlowe does it all the time.

Not a particularly educated man then, rather someone who picks things up, in many ways self-educated. No university for him.

But I find it extremely inspiring to think of a woman as the true author of Shakespeare, turning patriarchal literary history on its head and forever, completely and entirely, justifying the value of women writers.

As I've said before, Mary, I find that not only uninspiring, but actually anti-feminist. Women writers do not need a bogus Shakespeare authorship theory justify their value. Their value justifies itself. Women writers are not upstart crows who need to be beautified with pilfered feathers. They are accomplished artists in their own right.

I would agree with Chris that feminism doesn't need Shakespeare. And anyway, how many times does Emily Dickinson throw a glove at Shakespeare's feet and win the ensuing duel? Shakespeare is for everyone, and turning him gay or into a woman or a scholar wins points for no one's team.

Those who believe Shakespeare was not Shakespeare are snobbish and classist. They believe, based on their own insecurities and limitations, that a rather "uneducated" man could not be a genius. But genius needs no logic and certainly no formal education.

I'm glad you feel that women are accomplished artists, Chris. That has not been the prevailing attitude.

What Chris and Orwn said.

All this "Who-really-wrote-Shakespeare?" stuff has everything do with political or
social or cultural agendas and little or nothing to do with literature.

What Orwn said.

You're absolutely right, Mary, that women in the arts have had to contend with a whole lotta prevailing bad attitude. Same deal for women in science. But it would be a serious mistake to argue that we could completely and entirely justify the value of women scientists by asserting that Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein was really a woman.

John, W.S. does include Latin tags etc in his plays, particularly the early ones like Titus Androncus, e.g. Act IV, Sc 2 , Integer vita scelerisque purus/Non eget Mauri iaculis nec arcu which is a verse in Horace Chiron says he knows well having ,read it in the Grammar long ago', as no doubt had Shakespeare.

But he doesn't do it very often. And that's a very well-known tag that every schoolboy knows. Even me.

Who knows, perhaps old Shack was simply one out of the many hopefuls who had innate "possibilities" (Oh, and an infallible memory, of course):

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=237066

Comment re Mr. Whitworth's remarks below
 

"Bohemia doesn't have a sea coast, that Macbeth ruled successfully for eighteen years, that Romans didn't wear nightcaps or have clocks, Cleopatra couldn't play billiards, stuff like that? And he never quotes stuff in Latin, whereas Marlowe does it all the time.

Not a particularly educated man then, rather someone who picks things up, in many ways self-educated. No university for him."

I consider authenticating the author of the Shakespeare canon a significant cultural question and have tried to inform myself on the subject. I would have to differ with Mr. Whitworth, based on what I have read in recent years. Bohemia for instance did have a seacoast in the 13th century, the time of A Winter's Tale (III, iii, 2 and elsewhere), and it was within memory in Italy in the 16th century, the approximate writing of the play. Briefly in the 16th century it was regained and lost again. The writing date is based in part on the price of wool in the play being what it was in 1584 in England. The Shakespeare author did not seem to scruple much about anachronisms, as they, more likely than not, helped engage the interest of the public audience. One would have had to be in Italy to know a detail like Bohemia however. This is quite problematic for our traditional attribution to the Stratford figure, about whom it is generally accepted he never left England or so far as we know the road from Stratford to London in England. Another detail indicating the author's personal knowledge of Italy was the direct reference to Romano's name and statuary in Mantua, the type of marble even, which was not native to Mantua. It was not known that Romano was a sculptor until centuries later with the publication in English of Vasari's study of Italian artists. That is, unless one had been to Mantua and knew from eyewitness investigation. It is quite true that Shakespeare did not impose his knowledge of Latin except rarely as in the joking reference by the gravedigger to se offendendo, a burlesque on the legal term se defendendo. But it is well established that Shakespeare referred over 200 times to Ovid's Metamorphoses in Golding's translation, each time improving on it as though a grown man were improving unerringly on his own earlier work. So the Shakespeare author was as fluent and at ease in Latin as though it were his original literary language--which Latin was to the educated elite. I would therefore have to differ with the idea that the Shakespeare author was uneducated and haphazard in his classical references, as self-educated writers sometimes are uneven in their familiarity with a language or subject. Bullough and Muir have established beyond doubt that there were over 200 foreign authors, classical and Continental alluded to in the Shakespeare canon, which clinches the transcendent education of the author, since most of them were still in their original languages and unavailable in English or the expensive original editions at the time of the canon authorship.

These are some results I have found in my personal study of the issue of who wrote Shakespeare. I do not think the subject can be dismissed with a quip and a snub. It mattered enough to Emerson that he said it was "the first of all literary questions". That this may discomfit the educational and political status quo does not change that importance. In addition, I endorse further study of Mary Sidney Herbert as a major, if not one of the two major, influences on the Shakespeare canon content and philosophy. Her son Philip was closely aligned with the Earl of Oxford by marriage to his youngest daughter. The elder son William Herbert almost married Mrs. Philip Herbert's sister, Bridget Vere. The Earl of Derby, who was known to have been highly active with the King's Men productions, married yet another Vere sister. Indeed the First Folio was dedicated to the two brothers in recognition of their sponsorship and financial support of the First Folio, the compendium of the Shakespeare play canon. There is much justification to learn more in this area and by doing so to re-evaluate an overlooked history of artistic truth versus political expediency in the still glorified and heroized model of that era. The victors make official history, but that does not mean we as individuals and citizens have to believe it just to be polite. Factuality is a good path to spiritual clarity and evolution.

I realy don't think, I really don't think that references to authors means a writer has read them, in the original, or perhaps at all. And I just don't think that Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists were scholarly.educated men. Unlike the poets they were writing, not for the applause of the few, but the money of the many. And they were writing quickly. Think Scott, Dickens, Balzac. Don't think Walter Pater, Flaubert, Mallarme.

Shakespeare is better than Webster, Kyd, Marlowe, but he is not essentially different. I don't think he cared whether Bohemia had a sea-coast, what kind of a king MacBeth actually was, when the game of Billiards was invented by the Romans, and neither did his audiences. If he was indeed thoroughly fluent in Latin, why did he use translations all the time? He made north better not by referring to Plutarch but simply because he was a better writer.

What Emerson thought is neither here nor there. What Ben Jonson thought is more to the point. He would have to have been privy to a very large-scale deception. He said Shakespeare wrote the plays. He would have to have been lying.

The few poems we have of Edward de Vere are poor stuff. This is not the man who wrote Hamlet.

John, just a thought with no claim to being a Shakespeare expert. Many of his bawdy jokes played to the audience's sense of humor, so might he not have joked to make the audience laugh--for instance the idea of Cleopatra playing billiards or Romans in nightcaps.

And my copy of The Yale Shakespeare (Cross and Brooke) which is so heavy I can hardly lift it these days, indicates that many typesetters, publishers, and others made corrections and made mistakes in the manuscript versions that have come down to us.

I am not a little in love with him, or rather with the portrait that hangs in the National Gallery, or rather with the fridge magnet of said portrait which adorns my refrigerator so I admit to being prejudiced against any and all ideas to chip away at his authorship. Somewhere there is a photo of the last meeting of Will and Jayne O. and myself which proves that he wrote it all, or at least that I am convinced that he did. The moony look on my face says it all.

As mentioned above, I believe the person who wrote all of Shakespeare's works is Shakespeare. Just because we don't know whether Shakespeare ever left England doesn't mean he didn't, nor does it establish that if he didn't, he couldn't have written plays set in Italy or elsewhere. Surely most of us have written about places we've never been...and surely we've simply read up on those places to get a solid idea about them.

Despite all of this, I wonder how much it truly matters. People seem to have no problem attributing The Iliad and The Odyssey to Homer, when most scholars agree that there is little possibility that both works are by the same person. What matters more than anything is the work, and if "Homer" is just a placeholder for some other anonymous orator, then so be it. The work is what matters. Likewise with Shakespeare. No matter who wrote the works (and again, there's little doubt in my mind that they were all written by a man named William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 RIP), their content is paramount.

William Ray also publishes as W.J. Ray. His further thoughts on Edward de Vere and other matters are available here:

http://www.wjray.net/

omg he died?

Well, re Ray, that rather disposes of that, doesn't it?

Died? Certainly not. What gave you that idea?

Shaun, what do you think of the theory that The Odyssey was written by a woman? This is for you too, Mary. Samuel Butler and Robert Graves espouse it, an altogether higher class of person than Mr Looney et al. I am surprised to find the talented and witty Alexander Waugh among the Oxfordites, but I asssume he is mischief-making, like his father and grandfather before him.

I wrote her oft, but she is slack.
She never deigns to write me back.

I incline to the view that Shakespeare was the CEO and/or Creative Director of a highly successful writing corporation.
They had the occasional clunker, of course (eg Edward II and a few of the sonnets), but by and large the quality control was excellent.

I think David is correct. The play's the thing.

Also, FWIW, the real heroes of the story are Heminges and Condell. The first folio
is a work beyond genius, not only in it's scope but also by the very fact of its
existence. i've recently done some research on Condell. if he turns out to
be related to the Croydon/Epsom Condells, i will eat my laptop.




.

I had a dear friend who was an earnest Oxfordian and made the case to me many times, but I was never convinced. If you pursue the Oxford theory in detail, it ends up as a conspiracy involving too many people. It's rather like trying to prove that Paul invented Jesus.

Jesus invented Paul, at least through the paternal arm.

The Hoffman Prize
 

You probably know all about it already, but I've not seen it mentioned in this thread yet, so just in case ... the main prize of The Hoffman Prize is for an essay (5000 words+) providing "irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe". There are lesser prizes for less convincing attempts. Free entry. Up to 9000 pounds to win. Deadline 1st sept.

Irrefutable evidence. Marlowe told me himself at a seance.

Bugs Bunny wrote the Shakespeare plays. He also discovered electricity, not that Franklin person.

Calvin Hoffman sounds like an idiot. i'm sure the marlowe society
are nice well meaning people and all that, but it makes them look
rather foolish imo.





.

Is Mr. Hoffman interested in buying some oceanfront property in Arizona, by the way? A fool and his money...

It would almost be worth making up some seemingly convincing arguments just to deprive Hoffman of some money...

Conny, if you could polish up your statement at bit - change "idiot" to "genius", "foolish" to "learned" - that kind of thing - I could find a nice red folder for it, and submit it in the contest by September 1. It is 9000 quid, and possibly by now all the other learned geniuses have have their chance.

Thank you, Tim, for that Marlowe Society link.

The principal prize will be awarded to the person who "has in the opinion of the King's School furnished irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe."

. . .

However, it is difficult to see how it could actually be won. Even if The King's School were satisfied that a competitor had produced the irrefutable evidence required, how should Shakespearian scholarship be convinced? If evidence is "irrefutable", but highly inconvenient, it is normal practice to dismiss it with lofty scorn - not to try to refute it. It would surely take a generation or two, and possibly more than the value of the prize itself, before the sceptical world of Shakespearian scholarship - to say nothing of the interested world of Shakespearian commerce - would abandon its claims in the face of "irrefutable evidence".

Isn’t that the most delicious expression of the conspiracy theory mindset? The unprovability of the thesis becomes part of the proof.

It is indeed difficult to see how that principal prize might ever be won. But whoever laid out the conditions for the more modest annual prize was careful to hedge the bet a good deal:

Until the Principal Prize has been awarded, The Calvin and Rose G Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe is offered annually. This is awarded to the person who submits to The King's School prior to the first day of September in any year, an essay that, in the opinion of The King's School, most convincingly, authoritatively and informatively examines and discusses in depth the life and works of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, with particular regard to the possibility that Christopher Marlowe wrote some or all of those plays and poems, or made some inspirational creative or compositional contributions towards the authorship of them.

To win that prize, you don’t have to come up with incontrovertible evidence that Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare. You just have to examine and discuss the possibility that he might have inspired or contributed to some of it in some way. Since Marlowe was (like Shakespeare) a much better writer than de Vere, essayists should find plenty of scope for coaxing a few quid out of the Hoffman coffers.