Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this: I just finished reading this book, and found it fascinating. Also unsettling, as it has forced me back into the “I Don’t Know” column, after having been put there by Joe Sobran’s book…and then back into the conventional “Of course it was Stratford” column by rebuttals.
Anderson’s book pretty much takes the Oxfordian view as a default: he doesn’t so much “argue for it” as he bases his thesis on it. But he certainly goes into immense detail on why he is an Oxfordian. The main thrust of the book is that the plays and sonnets make perfect sense when read in parallel with Oxford’s life – and almost no sense at all in parallel with Stratford’s.
(Using the convention of “Stratford” for William Shakespeare as we conventionally think of him, and “Oxford” for Edward de Vere, to avoid confusion.)
Anderson’s book is a delight, even disregarding the controversy: he has written a biography of de Vere that is quite detailed, backed up by evidence, and quite moving. (The bloke seems to have been somewhat of a twit, actually: disobeying the Queen’s commands, spending away his entire estate, and constantly siding with the wrong people in times of high treason. Lucky to have kept his head!)
I won’t say that Anderson’s book has convinced me, but it has knocked me out of any possible complacency. He has answered, at least in speculation, every possible objection I’ve ever heard. And he is perfectly honest, all through his book, in noting those assumptions or speculations that cannot be backed by firm facts. He’s honest enough to say “It might be that…” when such disclaimers are warranted.
Damn big book, I gotta say. Took me two weeks to get through it. But a joy to have read, and an eye-opener.
I don’t understand what it means to answer in speculation every possible objection. Like, just make shit up? I understand how that could be entertaining, but I don’t see how it’s an argument for or against anything.
Agreed. Without something to back it up it might as well have been filed in historical fiction. I’m not sure why the writings of Shakespeare would need to “make sense” of his life, anyway. He was writing plays, not a biography.
The book I just reviewed consisted of almost nothing but. The primary argument is that the plays and poems make sense in light of Oxford’s life, but not in the context of Stratford’s life.
If you have an argument against this, why don’t you present it?
It’s quite difficult to argue against your previous post when you did not give any real specifics from the book.
I’d say the Plays make more sense when you consider they were almost all reworkings of previously popular works of fiction, history or poetry. That choosing to write Plays on Henry V and Richard III was an endeavour in box office populism not biography. When you have nearly 40 Plays to choose from you can do an awful lot of cherrypicking to find coincidences. Thousands of characters, a handful of which you can choose to associate Oxford with, whilst the characters and plots that cannot be linked to Oxford’s life are completely ignored.
The point is, that’s not really an argument. Why should Shakespeare’s writings “make sense” in terms of his life? If he wasn’t writing an biography then the entire argument is invalid. And that ignores the whole problem of many plays being published after De Vere’s death, which is tough to work around if you’re talking about a biography.
Anderson’s book deals with that quite handily: there is no evidence that the plays were written after de Vere’s death, only published after.
(He goes a little farther, and states that none of the plays refer to events that occurred after de Vere’s death.)
If the matter were as subject to trivial disproof as that, I honestly believe it would never have been taken up by anyone.
re biographical details, lots of writers use events from their own lives in their stories. Anderson notes that the Italian settings of the plays closely mirror de Vere’s tour of Italy. This might only be a coincidence, but, again, there seem to be a lot of them. No one is saying this is proof; it’s only suggestive to some degree. It may not be as strong a case as Thoreau’s trout in the milk, but it is more than can be easily dismissed by trivial evidence.
Much of the problem is that there isn’t much evidence. A lot of early plays were burned when the court censors banned them.
Except for the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture that most non-Oxfordians consider one of the inspirations for “The Tempest.”
If you believe “It can be trivially debunked” is gonna stop a conspiracy theory, then clearly you’ve never followed a GD debate with 9/11 truthers. Or Apollo hoax believers. Or Holocaust deniers. Or birthers. Or…
The very man who originated the Oxford argument, the appropriately named Looney, believed that “The Tempest” was so obviously dated after the Sea Venture wreck that he concluded that the play could not have possibly been written by Shakespeare/Oxford. The date is clear. The date is after Oxford’s death. Ergo, it obviously must have been written by someone else. Typical Conspiracy Theory thinking. It’s the newer Oxfordians who are willing to ignore the timeline in order to preserve the authorship of the play.
It’s the same bullshit “thinking”, again and again. When the date is acknowledged, the play must be wrong. When the play is acknowledged, the date must be wrong. The conclusion is already established in their heads, so the facts must be twisted to fit that conclusion. By the miraculous alchemy of ignoring inconvenient facts, “evidence everyone but them accepts” suddenly becomes “no evidence”. As if ignoring the historical record somehow makes it go away.
Then some poor sucker who doesn’t understand how confirmation bias works picks up one of their dumb books, and the whole thing starts over again.
The 17th Earl of Oxford died in 1604; indeed, there is a reason why Looney had to claim that, The Wreck of the Sea Venture blows a big hole in the hull of the ship of the proponents that Edward de Vere was the writer of the plays of Shakespeare.
Alexander does mention this; but he also notes other shipwrecks occurring earlier that might also have been inspirational.
If it helps any, Alexander doesn’t hide from stuff like this. He points it out, and then attempts to address it. He also is honest about it and says that the other shipwrecks might have been inspirations.
I don’t think then that he bothered much in reporting on the words, phrases, and themes borrowed from the letter of the wreck, what Alexander needed then was writings from earlier incidents that matched more to The Tempest than the letter from Strachey did.
In other words - too many things that match up to De Vere’s life to be coincidences, but ignore these coincidences because they don’t match up to De Vere’s life (or in this case, death). No matter how you look at it, it’s a house of cards being propped up by wishful thinking.
OK, so if we’re assuming that the publication dates of the plays can be a half-decade or more after they were written, then how can we match their dates of writing with events in anyone’s life? And again, what were some of these events?
We’ve already shown that a number of the plays have dates inconsistent with one major event in de Vere’s life (it’s hard to find an event more major than death), but that doesn’t stop the argument. If not that, then what?
Plus, we also have smaller inconsistencies with Oxford’s life and time frame. A number of later Shakespeare Plays were co-authored with John Fletcher. The earliest Fletcher Plays dated so far (co-written with Francis Beaumont)seem to have been from around 1606. Unless it can can proven Fletcher was writing Plays well before 1606 it looks as if those plays with Shakespeare were indeed written long after Oxford’s death. Im willing to admit that because Fletcher has not been proven to have written Plays before 1606 does not mean he couldn’t have written Plays before 1606. However, its another one in a long line of inconsistencies that Oxfordians cannot adequately explain. The best renaissance scholarship of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries point in one direction, anti-Stratfordians continually put their head in the sand and point in another.
Yes, I believe it is fairly widely accepted. At least two of these Plays have survived. Another play called Cardenio has not, or it’s existence is more debated. If Cardenio is ever conclusively shown to have been written by Shakespeare then this proves for certain Oxford was not the author. The Play’s source had not been written at the time of Oxford’s death. Unfortunately an element of doubt does exist over Cardenio. The other two Plays however have been generally accepted into the Shakespeare canon. Also, no matter when these Plays were written the fact that they are co-authored by at least one Playwright from the lower orders of society suggests the other author was not from the Nobility.