The people who believe Shakespeare did not write the works of Shakespeare, believe there was a hoax.
Hoaxes are hoaxes, and the non-Shakespearean authorship, if true, was not generally known. Greene was probably unaware of the hoax.
So your objection is that a noble author, pretending to be a commoner as part of a hoax, wrote prologs and epilogs in which he pretended to be a commoner?
I am aware that “It was just part of the hoax” gives the anti- side an easy out for many difficult questions. Just as with the other side, the anti- side sometimes resorts to special pleadings. But heavens! Surely you see that these objections don’t pass the Laugh test!
Only that, there is no good evidence that there was a hoax, really, the “hoax” you refer to is a teapot around mars, even if one is agnostic about this, the feeble evidence that points to the idea that there was a hoax and that the Oxfirdians are right is an idea that belongs in the very unlikely territory.
The reason why Shakespeare never tried to sell or bequeath the manuscripts of the plays is because there never were any manuscripts, and what he did write down he probably did not keep physical possession of. He never wrote down his plays as continuous texts, rather he would write out the parts, and cues, on individual sheets for each actor, and distribute these parts to the actors, ready to be memorized and then rehearsed together. What is more, these scripts would be frequently revised even once the play was in production. Shakespeare and his company were in the business of producing plays, performances, not texts, and, while they were active, they did not want texts to be available, for fear that their very popular plays would be pirated by rival theatre companies (which happened to some extent).
The texts we have of his plays were assembled by others (the First Folio after Shakespeare’s death by his colleagues, the earlier, pirated, quartos while he was still alive and working) either by collecting and collating these actors’ parts, or by coming to a performance (or several) and noting down lines as they were spoken (though I should imagine this latter method could only have been useful to supplement lacunae in material obtained the first way). Shakespeare himself never had them.
Sorry, I do not have a cite for the above, but it was what I was taught in college Eng Lit class (and not at all in the context of disputes about Shakespeare’s claims to authorship).
Indeed, it’s quite true. Incidentally, the actor-specific scripts are called sides and they would have all the lines for that part as well as about 3 words of the preceding line for cueing purposes.
That’s simply irrelevant and based on a basic misconception as to how seventeenth-century wills worked. Wills did not need to be an exhaustive list of the testator’s personal property. To be so would be utterly pointless. That’s because the presumption in law was that all the personal property passed to the executors unless stated otherwise. A will would therefore usually deal only with the property that was not to pass to the executors, which would often be only a small part of the overall estate. In Shakespeare’s case, he made this explicit by ending with the conventional requirement that, ‘All the rest of my goodes, chattel, leases, plate, jewels, and household stuffe whatsoever’ should pass to his son-in-law, John Hall, and his daughter, Susanna, whom he then named as the executors. Any manuscripts, books and business interests would have been covered by that. No need to make complicated what could be dealt with so simply.
For this reason, arrangements for disposal of books or personal papers are actually rather rare in seventeenth-century English wills, a fact that has been of immense frustration to those historians who have tried to use them as a source by which to measure literacy. (Probate inventories are an entirely different matter, but that doesn’t help as Shakespeare’s probate inventory doesn’t survive, just like almost all the other Prerogative Court of Canterbury probate inventories for that period.)
This offers a pretty good summary of reasons why the Shakespeare-wasn’t-Shakespeare idea is nonsensical any other over-excited conspiracy theory.
The most depressing part of the Oxfordian’s “argument” is that it’s based on sheer class snobbery - a mere grammar school boy like Shakespeare couldn’t have written such wonderful plays, so it must have been an aristocrat instead. Bollocks.
Stylometric studies suggest the plays were written in a consistent style, which is pretty good evidence of a single author. The same studies show a poor match with other suggested authors such as Bacon and De Vere.
The alternative authorship theories are interesting hypotheticals, but are pure conjecture. I think those that find them compelling are underestimating the power of confirmation bias. Once someone starts out with with an assumption, facts that seem to support it are given an inflated importance, and other possible explanations are dismissed. It’s notable that there are multiple candidates for authorship, and detailed arguments have been made for several of them, drawing on multiple line of argument to support their conclusion. This shows how easy it is to construct such an argument - even if there is an alternative author it cannot be both Bacon and De Vere.
There are many technical tests that the works have been subjected to. Computer scholarship is improving (Donald Foster’s 1995 identification of a poem as by Shakespeare has been conclusively disproven, e.g.), but it is only the latest technique in decades of word by word examination of the texts.
I don’t remember any of the denier literature ever going through the effort to run these tests; it’s almost certainly beyond them, just as relativity deniers never do any experimental physics themselves.
It’s simple. Shakespeare’s overall body of work is the work of a single author, although some plays, especially later ones, show evidence of collaboration. None of the candidates for faux-Shakespeare ever pass any of these tests. Remember, these are multiple independent tests, made by multiple independent scholars.
That’s why Shakespearians dismiss the other candidates out of hand today. All the talk of stuff that he didn’t do and didn’t happen pales compared to the positive evidence of textual analysis. Bacon, de Vere, Marlowe, Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, and J. K. Rowling all fail these tests. Unless you can explain that, nothing else you have to say will be convincing.
Well, I guess this debate is still going on. As I mentioned in the OP we discussed this in my Freshman English Lit class twenty-five years ago. Even then it was an old argument.
I’m aware of self educated men. It was actually very common in the 1800’s through 1950’s for men to spend a lifetime reading and learning. Louis L’Amour talks about this in his biography. He never got past middle school but spent his life reading the classics and studying books on many subjects. He became an educated man.
I’m not sure Shakespeare or other commoners had that sort of access to books in the 1600’s. They were still very rare and only available in schools and monastery’s.
FWIW I agree Shakespeare wrote his plays. The new computer analysis of his writings has helped confirm it.
Of course King James ordered a festival of Shakespeare’s plays on de Vere’s death. He was the company’s patron; they were the Royal Players. Whom else would he have had put on plays? What’s the point in spending all that money on a theater company, if they don’t perform for you on demand?
This also gets at the argument that Shakespeare knew too much about the court for a commoner. He probably did know more about the court than most commoners, because he interacted with them on a regular basis, performing plays for them.
Besides, Shakespear’s plays also feature commoners. A nobleman of the period would know even less of how commoners lived than an educated commoner would know about nobles.
Just to be clear: Are you now claiming that you knew all along the anti-Stratfordians believed in a hoax, yet made your thus-nonsensical objections anyway?
It may be true that a hoax theory is highly unlikely. But that is what the anti- crowd claims, so to argue against a different (“better”) theory of your invention makes no sense.
I read your link. It argues against the assumption that Shakespeare was uneducated, an assumption I’ve never made, and offers a total of two (2) arguments against the Oxford candidacy:
[ul]
[li] “Some did speak well of de Vere’s skill at poetry, but others have pointed out that reviewers might well be expected to give exaggerated praise to wealthy and respected men.”[/li][li] “Computational stylistics is a branch of computer science in which a “literary fingerprint” can be determined for any author, based on computational analysis of his writing. As detailed in their 2009 book, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship, professors Arthur Kinney and Hugh Craig proved during their 2006 research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, and nobody else.”[/li][/ul]
I understand the first point, but it is hardly probative.
The second is more interesting; I don’t have the book and would like to learn more. It is certainly one reason why, as stated above, I regard de Vere as a less likely candidate for the authorship than Shakespeare.
One part of the quote seems odd: How do they “prove Shakespeare was the author”? I can understand rejecting alternatives, but what do they use as the control text for Shakespeare? His tombstone inscription??
I am still an agnostic on the question, believe there are interesting related mysteries even if one stipulates Shakespeare as author; but what is almost more interesting to me than the Authorship question is to observe how people debate it.
Like some in this thread have done with the Authorship debate, I consider the 911 Truthers to be crackpots even though I’ve never read up on their claims. There is a difference however: I don’t enter in to the 911 Truther debates!
It seems that you are setting it up as a gotcha question, so it does not matter how I answer, you will continue playing. I already clarified, by saying that it is not likely (teapot in orbit of mars likely) that any of the oxfordian theories is correct. If you do not like that answer, then explain what evidence should be considered to increase the possibility that there is something there.
Oh, so it is a “lets you and him fight?” that is even more useless. What I do seek in discussion like this is to find out who are the sources of your say so’s, in reality it is not very useful to discuss items were the evidence points in favor of what scholars have pointed for hundreds of years when there are posters claiming to know that there is evidence to show otherwise, so out with the sources!
Fine, but it is really reckless to ignore what the vast number of academics and experts are reporting on this issue.
Another strawman. None of the points I raised have anything to do with William Shakespeare’s birth or education. But Stratfordians always want to pretend that’s the heart of the Oxfordian argument. It’s the equivalent of claiming any opposition to the Obama administration must be based on racism.
As I mentioned in the OP we discussed this in my Freshman English Lit class twenty-five years ago. Even then it was an old argument.