As the thread heading asks, is there anyone on Straightdope who doesn’t believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? It’s a subject which interests me. I suspect there is perhaps any older thread on this subject, but am unsure on whether to bump an old thread.
Im very much pro Startfordian. Im just interested in how widespread this anti Stratforian belief still is. I think the anti Stratfordian cause peaked a year or two ago, or, is it still as hot a topic as it once was?
Apologies to mods if I am repeating an old topic. Feel free to delete this and point to another thread if you think appropriate.
I doubt you will find many. It’s pretty clear he wrote them. Geniuses exist today and existed then. Mozart was 150 years later or so and he also existed and wrote the amazing music no one else could.
It happens. Amazing when it does, but it does occur.
I was open-minded to the notion for a while, after reading Sobran’s “Alias Shakespeare.” It’s a brilliant book, and addressed every objection I could have thought of.
Worse, most of the rebuttals to that book were sneering and dismissive, and failed actually to address Sobran’s points.
I entered into that book with a huge chip on my shoulder against the idea. To begin with, I knew of Joe Sobran from other venues, and thought he was a horse’s ass. But his book was extremely persuasive.
Since then, I’ve fallen back into the camp of the traditionalists, but, to date, I’ve never seen a really solid rebuttal to what Sobran said. Most of the rebuttals have only been, “Well, that’s stupid,” and not, “No, he’s wrong about XYZ, and here’s a source.”
I don’t know any. I do know people who think Shakespeare stole everything he wrote and it’s only our paucity of writing from the era that obscures the fact. He also hated Jews and abandoned his countryside family for city whores and alcohol.
Of course, Marlowe was a gay, all-tolerant liberal whose works were destroyed after he was murdered, probably by Shakespeare’s goons. :rolleyes:
The most-often mentioned alternative authorship candidate is Edward de Vere. Computer analysis comparing known works of Shakespeare and de Vere makes it very unlikely de Vere was the author, if unassisted. IMO, to salvage the case for de Vere one has to assume extensive collaboration with at least one other master, e.g. John Lyly. However, it is the case that de Vere employed Lyly and surrounded himself with other writers.
Previous threads were frustrating; some of the most opinionated were obviously unfamiliar with the strong circumstantial case for de Vere. Since that thread, I’ve read Mark Anderson’s book making a case for de Vere as author.
Should this topic become current again at SDMB, I’d ask only Dopers who’ve read that book to address questions to me.
The other is to attack computer analysis of writing. I am pro-Stratfordian, but I don’t think computer analysis of writing styles is the be-all and end-all. Nobody much talks about Shaxicon anymore, though that was supposed to prove Shakespeare’s own authorship like a DNA sample at a crime scene.
sidenote: unless the OP changes their mind about the scope of this thread, I’m not looking to debate the validity of any arguments. I just didn’t see anything when I googled Sobran shakespeare that struck me as particularly noteworthy and I’m curious what Trinopus found.
Dont let me dictate what the scope of debate is. I did not word the op particularly well. To be honest I was unsure of whether or not to start another thread on something that had probably been discussed before(as Reno Nevada linked to). It’s simply a pet topic of mine. In part I was wondering how widespread the anti Strat theory still is a few years after Anonymous and after some recent pro Stratfordian books.
The thread can be used to discuss anything to do with the authorship debate.
I always suspect a correlation between a person’s general political philosophy (left versus right, roughly) and that person’s propensity to believe that Shakespeare either did or did not write the works of Shakespeare.
Specifically, I’d tend to think that a Shakespeare denier is statistically more likely to hold conservative political views, and a Shakespeare-wrote-Shakespeare believer more likely to hold progressive views.
Anything to it?
note: I just spent some time trying to find out the political affiliation of the aforesaid Sir Derek Jacobi, to no avail.
I think that may have once been the case but isn’t so true now. Undoubtedly there was a link between Looney advocating Oxford and Looney’s political beliefs. Some of the anti Statfordians probably came from this tradition. Today I think most anti Stratfordians are just attracted to conspiracy theories the same way many sections of society are today attracted to them.
One of the few disagreements I have with Startfordians is them labelling anti Starfordians as snobs. Some of them may be snobs, I doubt the vast majority of them are.
It’s been a long time… As I remember it, the key argument was that the plays show far more detailed knowledge of the lifestyles of the rich and noble than a country playwright should know. He gets details right that an insider would, but which even a competent researcher probably wouldn’t.
(This is per Joe Sobran, not my view.)
He also had a fairly detailed analysis of the sonnets, and claimed that they very closely reflect events in De Vere’s life, but have no resemblance of Will Shakespeare’s life.
Weaker arguments included the play’s detailed descriptions of Italy, where W.S. would never have gone. (But he could have hung around the docks and chatted with sailors who had.) Sobran also examined Shakespeare’s will, and noted how blunt and coarse and inelegant the language was; could the author of Hamlet’s soliloquy have written such a dull document? (But it’s a doggone legal document! Legal contracts are not supposed to be witty or eloquent, just accurate.)
septimus: I’ll try Mark Anderson’s book, and let you know.
Sherrerd: Dunno about the political correlation. I’m about as liberal as a Californian can get, and I’m still open to the De Vere hypothesis. I first learned of it from another flaming liberal, who gave me Sobran’s book.
I would say, alas, that the likelier correlation is that a Shakespeare denier is probably also susceptible to other conspiracy-theory beliefs. Has CT thinking ever been shown to have an ideological or partisan correlation?
Shakespeare’s insider knowledge of the lifestyles of the rich and famous is easily explained by the fact that he was, in fact, an insider. His company was the King’s Men, sponsored by both James and Elizabeth, and gave command performances in the palace. He might not have been a noble himself, but he saw many of them close up.
His insider knowledge of Italian geography, meanwhile, is explained by the fact that it didn’t exist (his knowledge, that is, not Italy). Italy, as presented in Shakespeare’s plays, is just Foreign Parts, that far-off and mysterious place so popular to writers throughout history. There’s very little actual geography in the plays, and most of what there is is just plain wrong.
The common characters are also written well. By your logic, if only a nobleman could write nobles, doesn’t that mean that only a commoner could write commoners?
This is largely my take on it too. Shakespeare deniers assume that the country born William Shakespeare was always the same country educated man. The Shakespeare who turned up in London in 1590 was likely a very different character(I mean experience wise) than the Shakespeare of a decade later. Deniers also assume that Shakespeare couldn’t obtain his knowledge of court life by simply reading other Playwrights. These guys were writing largely about the same court life, the same subjects, the same historical periods.