I’m not sure if it’s possible to prove either way.
HOWEVER, your theory is wrong as far as the Supreme Court goes. Liberals John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun favor Edward de Vere. They are, however, joined by Scalia. Moreover, Souter and Ginsburg aren’t sure about the authorship.
Who are you talking to?
What is a fair characterization of a position scorned by virtually all professionals? Haven’t people asked repeatedly for believers or questioners to present some solid evidence to no avail? Isn’t the fact that the negative evidence can be used to support men as different as Oxford, Derby, and Marlowe a signal that it is the thinking itself that is incorrect, over and above the lack of facts? Is it not legitimate to look at actual statements by the Oxfordians and dispute them? We in fact have a link to what Alexander actually believes - posted by me, not the opposing viewpointers.
If you think there is any possible way to present a realistic case, then why not do so? But please remember that despite the accusations, the posters here already have looked at the case in detail and are commenting on their lifetime of reading, not to anything new said in this thread.
Some of us do not hold an opposing viewpoint. One side portrays Willie the Shake as sitting down at a desk and letting these plays and poetry come gushing out of his head; the other side wants to convince us that some person of class and breeding found it convenient to play Bill as a front for his or her art.
But good writing is never a solitary act. It is just as easy to believe that Shakespeare hung out with some pretty smart, well educated guys and either formed his work from their besotted ravings or actually brainstormed with them to create the content, upon which he painted his poetry.
It kind of depends upon what “writer/author” means. If others participated in contriving the points of the plots and the playwright then put the pieces together, at what point does authorship cease to be his own? It seems likely (to me) that the meter and the words were Will’s, and those things seem like the most important part, insofar has having a lasting impact.
There is also, of course, the undeniable fact that Edward de Vere was extremely dead when Shakespeare works were still being produced. De Vere died in 1604, which is almost certainly before the writing of at least eight or nine of Shaklepeare’s works.
So apparently de Vere was not only a much more gifted writer than any other evidence would ever have suggested, but he was also one of the undead.
Don’t be ridiculous. Clearly, he was a time traveller.
Actually, we’re all missing the simplest argument that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. The Stratfordian fellow is known to history solely for being the greatest author in the English language. All of the other claimants are known to history for other reasons, such as being members of the nobility. People who are known to history for some reason are vastly outnumbered by people who weren’t. Thus, even if I knew nothing at all about history or English authors or anything of the sort, if you asked me whether the greatest author of the English language were a commoner or a noble, I would say that it was overwhelmingly likely that said person was a commoner.
Hey, being dead didn’t stop V.C. Andrews or Robert Ludlum from cranking out books. No reason de Vere couldn’t have had the same stamina.
Ben Jonson, a contemporary rival, competitor and friend of Shakespeare doesn’t get all catty, but makes it clear that Shakespeare is the real thing and his superior. That isn’t the sort of thing you do if you aren’t certain. It is genuine admiration. There is no reason Jonson would cover for De Vere
This is one of those boring but very important points. Contemporary “eyewitness” testimony. Dozens of Shakespeare’s contemporaries said Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems. Some said this very openly, some only alluded to it. Some of these contemporaries would have been fairly close to him, some less so. But all agreed that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I would take the word of “intimate” contemporaries of Shakespeare over the word of Mark Anderson, Mark Twain, Justice Stevens, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Looney and Derek Jacobi.
I will also admit: outside of his name on the published plays and poems, the number of contemporaries who affirmed Shakespeare as the author is not impressively large(similar to many other writers of the period) but they are more than enough.
But famously that wasn’t Jonson’s only comment on Shakespeare and those other comments were very catty indeed.
So the one thing that Jonson and the actors had agreed on when they had discussed Shakespeare was the fluency of his writing abilities. Jonson well conveys how to him Shakespeare in person seemed indistinguishable from the man who wrote the plays.
This touches on one of the major circularities in the anti-Straffordian arguments. If Shakespeare was to be a plausible stooge, he needed to be someone who might plausibly have written the plays. Such as a fast witted, literate professional intimately involved in the London theatres. Someone who might fool the likes of Jonson. But to do so is to concede that Shakespeare was just the type of person who could actually have written the plays himself.
And why did Oxford/Bacon/Elizabeth I/whoever need a cover story at all? Why not just publish anonymously? Lots of writers did. Perhaps, so far as anyone knows, including Oxford…
Your experience is much like mine. I really do not have a strong position on the authorship. I’d estimate, crudely, the chance that Stratford wrote the plays and sonnets as somewhere between 10% and 90%; and the same for Oxford.
But even if one stipulates that Stratford was the writer 100%, there are interesting mysteries, connected with one man or the other. I feel people are close-minded if they don’t acknowledge the mysteries. Oxford was an important figure in the theater, but is dismissed in one biography of Shakespeare with a sentence mentioning a fart! The apparent fact that Oxford’s papers were seized upon his death seems interesting – regardless of any connection to the authorship – but was dismissed in an earlier thread.
Are we unallowed to mention books without detailed synopses? Those interested, but unable to buy the book, can read on-line reviews and summaries. I’ve never understood that SDMB is a “debate board” – I thought it was a place to exchange information. My contribution was to suggest Anderson’s book for anyone open-minded who’s curious about the Oxfordian side. Since then I was drawn into detailed discussion.
Anderson’s book has over 600 pages of text (including 156 pages of endnotes) and a list of 66 frequently cited sources. No, I won’t be summarizing it any time soon. It doesn’t even touch on much of the circumstantial evidence shown elsewhere, but emphasizes connections between De Vere’s life and his plays. For example, like King Lear, De Vere divided the principal part of his estate among his three living children (all daughters). This was before his 2nd marriage and son’s birth. Coincidence? Perhaps, but it’s the large assembly of similar coincidences that lead to statistical improbability. Could a different man have written the plays, but had some reason to incorporate parts of Oxford’s biography? Perhaps, but if so it should interest traditional scholars, not just be dismissed.
I may answer a few points, but I don’t have the time, patience, or knowledge to cover everything. I did notice that bup, though not an Oxfordian, responded to some of the more preposterous anti-Oxfordian posts. Thank you, bup !
That monument is generally believed to have been erected by person(s) outside of Stratford.
Who asserted that it was disreputable for a commoner to be a playwright?
It was taboo for a nobleman to publish poems (not taboo to write them). and taboo for a nobleman to have plays he wrote performed in public.
BTW, I’d like a cite for the claim, made elsewhere, that De Vere had poems published under his own name with his consent.
The dating of the plays is controversial. Tempest is the play whose date is most insisted upon, but it is disputed. Anyway, as far as my own beliefs, I think that even if De Vere were the primary author, he had at least one collaborator.
On the matter of Meres’ list, it should be noted that Meres was not a theatrical intimate and was likely unaware, at least at the time of his early book, that Oxford and Shakespeare were the same person, if they were.
A more interesting list is that of Henry Peacham, whose "Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (published as late as 1634) listed Edward Earl of Oxford among those “who honoured Poefie with their pennes and pradlice” in the Elizabethan golden age; the list includes some who were not knights or nobles but not Mr. Wm Shakespeare (unless the best poet/playwright of all is dispensed with among “sundry others”). Was Peacham’s a simple oversight? Perhaps, but I think it’s accepted that Peacham was a puzzle-constructor, cf. his Minerva Britanna, and some, including Anderson, suppose that Peacham’s peculiar omission of the greatest poet/playwright of all was a cryptic hint.
There are many little mysteries for which Stratfordians have no good explanation:
Stratfordians ridicule the claim that the playwright was familiar with European geography, citing the “Bohemian seacoast.” Something that I learned from Anderson is that the Kings of Bohemia and Hungary had been the same person for much time,and Hungary included a large Adriatic coast. Was the united Kingdom referred to as Bohemia"? Or was the playwright’s acknowledgement of the Bohemian coast an “inside joke”? I don’t know, but it’s one more example of how the ridicule directed against Oxfordians is itself, so often, ridiculous.
You would expect there to be unanswered questions about 300 year old manuscripts - every single one from that era has mysteries and unexplained pieces. But it’s not evidence of a hoax - it’s merely incomplete knowledge. They are not evidence for a hoax, they are not unexpected, and they are not particularly useful to the discussion.
Again, nothing presented is positive evidence of a hoax. It’s all questions and incomplete knowledge. You can spin a web about anything old enough and with incomplete documentation. And it ignores all the positive evidence that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare with a hand wave.
With regards to Oxford dividing his will equally between three daughters and King Lear doing the same. Was this coincidence? Almost certainly, yes. How do we know? Because an earlier version of King Lear from 1594 was linked to earlier. Here’s the telling exerpt from the anonymous 1594 version:
"And I would fain resign these earthly cares,
And think upon the welfare of my soul:
Which by no better means may be effected,
Than by resigning up the Crown from me,
*In equal dowry to my daughters three. " *
The writer of the “Shakespeare” play King Lear simply kept the equal dowry plot twist from this earlier 1594 version. A play which is believed to have been written by another person entirely. It was nothing at all to do with the writer of Shakespeare’s King Lear using his own life experience as a plot twist. Shakespeare was doing what Shakespeare did best, pinching the work of 2nd rate authors and improving it.
Or perhaps de Vere wrote the same play twice and hired a forgotten hack to serve as a front for his first version and Shakespeare for his second version. (Hey, it makes at least as much sense as deciding that a 1604 eclipse not being mentioned in the plays is somehow damning to Shakespeare’s claim to authorship, while an entire play being inspired in part by a shipwreck that occurred five years after de Vere’s death is a mere technicality to be dismissed with a handwave.)
Mention? Sure. But when someone points out a flaw in one of your arguments, responding with, “Well, you clearly haven’t read the book,” isn’t just unhelpful, it’s actively frustrating. We’re trying to have a conversation here. If you can’t hold up your end of it without handing out reading assignments, maybe you shouldn’t get involved in the first place.
Six hundred pages? That’s certainly a very long book. But is it any good? The evidence you’ve provided so far seems to argue the opposite. For example, the idea that de Vere wrote King Lear based on writing his own will seems to ignore the fact that the legend of King Leir and his three daughters predates both Shakespeare and de Vere by about four hundred years, and was widely known to just about everyone of the era, where he was largely considered to be an actual historical figure. Does Anderson mention that in one of his one hundred and fifty six end notes?
Yes, that much is apparent.
It’s older than that. The story of King Leir, his two faithless and flattering daughter Regan and Goneril, loyal Cordelia, and a plan to divide his kingdom between them comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, written sometime around 1130.
Thanks for pointing this out. I knew the legend of Lear originated much earlier. The details of the original narrative I did not know.
See, this right here is pure, distilled essence of conspiracy theory thinking. The CTer says “Shakespeare couldn’t have been a commoner; his knowledge of geography was too good”. The debunker replies “What knowledge of geography? He made mistakes here, here, here, and here.”. The CTer counters “Ah, but one of those might not technically have been a mistake, from a certain point of view”. But even if that’s so, then it doesn’t explain the other mistakes, and the CTer never actually provides any evidence for the claim that his geography knowledge was any good.
No, he responded to your preposterous Oxfordian posts, as in “By the same token, the hoax hypothesis allows Oxfordians to dismiss any evidence as part of the hoax. They’re the ones making it circular.” You waxed wroth at this, as you should remember.
Probably not oversight but a dismissal:
Peachem apparently left out other known poets as well. Were they all pseudonyms? How does Alexander address this?
I agree it appears to be one of those “I win both ways” arguments, but it isn’t exactly a “conspiracy” thought pattern.
Anecdote. For years, my b.i.l. loved to joke about how Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is a redundancy, because “Escalante” means staircase. So, one day, I mentioned that to a third person, in my b.i.l.'s presence. The dirty rotten s.o.b. promptly corrected me, saying, “No, it’s not a redundancy, as it’s named for Sivestre Velez de Escalante. Since that’s a proper name, there is no redundancy.”
So…wonderful. I got sandbagged, by a “give it to you and then take it back again” rhetoritician. Nice bit of ambush work, but shabby, since he taught it to me one way, then yanked it out from under me the first time I repeated it.
I think that the business with the Bohemian Coast is more like that than like proper conspiracy reasoning.