Of course as the cites show, that is not the only point they deal with, what you are doing here is the equivalent of cherry picking.
BTW, the reason why I brought that cite was to show the levels of the consensus that there is among historians and academics, you are welcome to bring evidence that that is not the case.
This would have been true a few generations earlier, but it is absolutely not true of Shakespeare’s day. The printing press had been invented for more than a century, and by the late 1500s there was a veritable explosion of cheap print. There were bookstalls all over London, and the prices would have been well within the reach of most middle-class people – e.g., it’s estimated that a quarto edition of a play would have sold for as little as sixpence. (See this link for a fuller discussion of Shakespeare’s reading, and of Elizabethan reading practices in general.)
There’s nothing particularly unusual or remarkable about Shakespeare’s life story or background. Most early modern playwrights were middle-class by birth. Some were university-educated, some weren’t. (Ben Jonson definitely wasn’t, and he was still a formidable classical scholar, despite being almost entirely self-taught. His remark that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek” should be put in context, by the way – it comes from a man who littered his Roman history plays with footnotes explaining exactly which bit of Suetonius or Tacitus he was adapting. This wasn’t Shakespeare’s style, and internal evidence from the plays suggests that he preferred to read the classics in English translations when such translations were available, but there’s no reason to think he wasn’t perfectly capable of reading Latin when he needed to.) Anyway, if you’re going to argue that Shakespeare was really a front for an aristocrat, you’d have to make the same argument about Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, Middleton, Chapman, Ford, and a whole slew of other guys. They all managed to write plays set in royal courts and to display a sophisticated knowledge of the classics, despite not being aristocrats by birth, and in many cases we know less about their lives than we do about Shakespeare’s.
There is a large body of work by scholars who question the authorship. But Stratfordians insist that the consensus among serious Shakespearean scholars is that William Shakespeare is the author. But this is sort of a “No True Scotsman” argument - Stratfordians define anyone who questions the authorship as not being a serious Shakespearean scholar so their views don’t get included in the consensus.
I’ve heard that exact same argument from Creationists about how a cabal of evolutionary scientists are keeping them out of the club of “serious” scientists.
Such things are theoretically possible, but the burden of proof is definitely on the person alleging conspiracy.
Don’t be disingenuous. They use the combined body of work ascribed to Shakespeare and compare it line by line to determine whether it can be considered all to be the work of one writer and whether any pieces of it need to be attributed elsewhere. Then they do that for the ascribed bodies of work of other writers. Then then compare one to the other. As I’ve said earlier, this has been done repeatedly and independently, always with one result. As I also asked earlier, and you have refused to answer: have you ever read any of the real literature by professional scholars? Or do you just read the loonies? If the later, then obviously you will only get one result yourself.
If there is such a large body, you should be able to name some. You gave cites in post #46, true. However, every book but one you name was written by an outsider, i.e. not a professional English scholar. The one exception is Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? But that book loudly and definitely asserts that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and contains a large amount of evidence for that proposition, while tearing the loonies a new one, albeit politely. That’s the opposite of your case. The entire profession of English professors contain about as many people who question the authorship as the entire profession of Physics professors do of people who doubt relativity. No doubt some exist somewhere. But a few outliers exist everywhere, and the world assumes relativity every minute of every day. It’s a lot easier to argue with English professors. But they only win by cheating: lousy scholarship; cherry picked facts; negative evidence built into positive “proofs”; and dependence on the ignorance of their readers to not catch them out on their outrageousness.
No, you have no evidence to compare the size, the educated experience of the majority is crucial. BTW this is one of the main reasons why something is a conspiracy theory in my experience, it needs to deny that there are good reasons why the consensus exists.
Ah, the Galileo gambit, as what I have seen in other conspiracy theories, you are not even right on this, skeptical views would be included as soon as good evidence is demonstrated by the deniers, as even skeptics (not deniers) would tell you, they remember Galileo because he brought good evidence to support what he was saying.
So far what I have seen is just demands that Shakespeare should be removed as the author using only circumstantial evidence, but there is a problem when not a good alternative to Shakespeare is brought forward, when one looks at history one finds that these conspiracy theories did not come from the times of Shakespeare, one important element for history is when and why a theory comes to be.
You are a century or more off here. Caxton introduced the printing press into England in the mid 1500s, about a hundred years before Shakespeare’s birth, and the technology spread very rapidly, because there was good money to be made from selling cheap printed books. The 1600s was not the middle ages, when books had to be copied by hand, and were indeed rare. By Shakespeare’s time there was a thriving book trade. As a literate and moderately prosperous man, he would have had ready access to them, as did other ‘commoners’ of his time.
Actually, the science boners (e.g. Julius Caesar referring to “the northern star”, which did not exist at the time) point in the opposite direction – mistakes of the sort that would be natural for a wide-ranging but somewhat gap-ridden self-education.
Just to nitpick, you’re off by a hundred years here, both with Shakespeare and Caxton. Shakespear was born in 1565 - the mid 1500s.
Caxton began printing in England in the 1470s - the late-mid 15th century.
You are right that I made a slip on Caxton’s date, but I correctly said that Shakespeare was born abut a century after Caxton introduced the press to England, and Shakespeare did live well into the 1600s, which was the century that aceplace had asserted that books were still to be found only in monasteries and schools. The point is, as I think we agree, that books were readily available to commoners in both Shakespeare’s youth (in the mid 1500s and his old age in the early 1600s.
First: I do want to thank Dopers in this thread for addressing the topic with civility, in contrast to the very annoying and condescending comments I got in the year-ago thread.
My question was sincere. Had the claim been “The works were by a single person and that person was not Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon or any of several other writers” I’d have had no objection. That’s not the way the page phrased its point. But you repeat what I already know without commenting on the peculiar non-factual phrasing. Perhaps I’m a pedantic nitpicker to find the non-factual phrasing peculiar, confusing and/or annoying, but I do.
And I know this was not the first such experiment, as I’ve read summaries of similar work at least a decade ago, and have always thought it one of the strongest arguments against Oxford as author.
Was there not a nearly 15-year gap between the writing of de Vere’s known poems and Shakespeare’s work? A gap which might be meaningful, given the unique character of the Works. Also, although I’ve not seen it argued, I do wonder if the Works involved some 2-party collaboration, e.g. Oxford as mentor, another man as writer.
But, to repeat myself, I acknowledge Oxford’s case as quite doubtful. At the same time, I note that no one in the thread has commented on the daughters’ illiteracy, Hall’s silence, the peculiarity of “never writer”, etc. etc.
I didn’t refuse your question, I missed it altogether. I did refuse a useless post asking me to provide cites “every one” of a dozen points, many of which aren’t in dispute. And everyone in this thread has “refused to answer” whether they’ve read anti-Stratfordian material (despite that the non-sequitur nature of two Stratford defenses in this thread show that some debaters didn’t even understand anti-Stratfordians argue there was a hoax).
To answer your question: Besides reading much of Shakepeare’s work itself, two magazine articles, and dozens of webpages on both sides of the debate, the only book-length work on Shakespeare I’ve read is (the virulently pro-Stratford) Ian Wilson’s Evidence. This is the book which spends just a single paragraph on de Vere, a paragraph devoted to the fictitious fart. Would it be rude to ask for your comments on that sort of “scholarship”?
In any event, I didn’t volunteer to play “Devil’s Advocate” on Oxford’s behalf just to be the butt of Looney jokes. There are parts of that case that might be interesting to discuss. I would like to learn more. In particular, I’d like to read details (or get software for) “Computational stylistics,” which I would find very interesting independently of this debate.
(First of all, “plays written by Shakespeare” and “plays performed by the King’s Men” are not synonymous.)
Which, if any, of the following points are in dispute?
[ul]
[li] De Vere did write plays.[/li][li] Without violating taboo, such plays could only be performed at the Royal Court.[/li][li] The Royal Household kept records of such performances, but mention no plays ascribable to de Vere.[/li][/ul]
Even stipulating Shakespeare as author, there are interesting mysteries raised in the debate; if I could get you guys to acknowledge that I’d claim victory! But I’m not holding my breath.
Several people already noted that the literacy of his daughters is just not relevant. Shakespeare seems to have spent a great deal of his professional life away from his family and I’m not sure he was a candidate for father of the year. I can’t make very much of the lack of surviving commentary from Hall or a dedication to a play either. The meaning of the dedication is unclear, so how can it be evidence for or against anybody’s authorship?
The answer to the thread title is that the theory was resolved and not everybody heard about it. 
There is documentation that there was an actor named Shakespeare who was active the same time the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written, there’s enough evidence that he wrote the plays and had enough know-how to do so. He was educated and relied on a couple of sources for his stories and plot ideas, and I suspect there are plenty of things he was wrong about that contemporary readers wouldn’t know about. There’s no evidence anyone else wrote the plays (as opposed to suggestions that they could have done it) and no evidence anybody considered alternative authors for hundreds of years, i.e. time for everybody’s regard for Shakespeare to increase and more than long enough for his contemporaries, their children and grandchildren to die off, meaning there was nobody who could directly refute this kind of ridiculousness.
The immediate problem with any claim that the daughters were ‘illiterate’ is that it rather suggests that the person making that claim doesn’t understand that literacy isn’t an either/or skill. Especially in early-modern England. But then the point is counterintuitive.
The basic point that needs to be grasped is that reading and writing were taught separately in early-modern England. Children were taught to read and only then progressed to writing. Moreover, many children never progressed beyond the first stage, leaving them able to read but unable to write. This was especially true for girls.
The third skill was learning to sign one’s name. This could, in theory, be learnt without either being able to read or write, but was, unsurprisingly, usually acquired when first learning to write. The usual assumption is therefore that someone who could sign their name could probably read. So the fact that Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, could sign her name tends to suggest that she could read.
Of course, there is the claim by James Cooke that when he tried to buy her husband’s manuscripts off her, Susanna mistakenly disputed with him over whether parts of the manuscripts were in her late husband’s hand. But that is nowhere near as surprising as it might seem. The notes in question were all in Latin and no one is suggesting that she could read Latin. Moreover, educated men such as Hall - and no one disputes that Hall was highly educated - could often write in several different styles of handwriting, which they could switch between depending on the context. And one such context was often whether they were writing in English or Latin. It is therefore not at all obvious that Hall’s Latin notes would have been written in the same hand as any writings in English with which she might have been familiar. In any case, Cooke’s story doesn’t make a lot of sense unless he believed that Susanna could read; that’s why he found her mistake so surprising.
In any branch of history, primary evidence is given far more weight than conjecture. It’s not supposed to be a game of who can spin the most convincing tale. There is a place for conjecture and hypotheticals, but it should be labelled as such.
Indeed, there are many possible explanations for these points and others, and giving undue weight to one is pure confirmation bias. For example, Shakespeare doesn’t mention the supernova of 1604 in his work, which is used to support the Oxfordian theory. Maybe he couldn’t find a way of working it into a play, or simply didn’t want to. There are large gaps in our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and the time he lived in, and we should be cautious about the conlusions we draw.
It’s happened the other way around though - for example, I give you Franz von Walsegg, best known for commissioning a Requiem Mass from Mozart.
Mozart of course foiled his plan by cleverly dying before finishing the Requiem.
Where can we learn what the London theatrical world was talking about back then? Surely, there should have been an obituary in The Times–except there was no such paper. What was that age’s equivalent of Official London Theatre? Who has done research with the primary sources? Not among the conspiracy books or even the conspiracy debunkers–but in whatever dusty documents actually remain, after centuries of Revolution, Great Fire(s) & The Blitz…
I’m glad the timing of printing has been corrected. But I’d also like to point out that the English “monastery’s” were pretty much out of business by Shakespeare’s day.
(And most of the anti-Shakespeare advocates were, indeed, classists. How dare a member of the middle class actually excel?)
Even the Oxfordians now recognise that this is entirely untrue.
The claim was actually that his crest showed a lion brandishing a broken spear. That’s because this crest was associated in some books with the Bolebec family and Oxford did have some Bolebec connections, being a descendant of Isabel de Bolebec, as well as being the owner of Bolebec Castle. He also claimed (on rather dodgy grounds) to be either Baron or Viscount Bolebec.
But that wasn’t the crest used by Oxford; that was instead a boar. (As in his father’s armorial bearings.) There is no evidence that Oxford ever used the lion-with-a-spear crest, which, as he was a De Vere rather than a Bolebec, is hardly surprising. But it gets worse, as there is actually no evidence that anyone used the lion-with-a-spear crest, which is probably no more than a later confection.
The Shakespeare Oxford Society used to use the lion-with-a-spear crest as its logo. But in 2006 they forced to admit that the idea that it had been Oxford’s crest was clearly spurious and so dropped it. Their newsletter then debunked the idea at some length.
Is it condescending of me to ask that you actually read the posts in this thread? Here are excerpts from my post #40.
Eminently sensible. That’s all de Vere deserves.
Contested Will: The Case for Shakespeare does go into this, for one. But a more general book on the subject, academic but readable, is Attributing Authorship: An Introduction, by Harold Love. He includes a chapter on Shakespeare, but mostly as an afterthought. He’s old school so he mentions stylometrics but doesn’t get deeply into it, and in 2002 computer tests were not as prevalent.
The modern argument for de Vere was sparked by a major article in the October 1991 Atlantic Magazine by Tom Bethell, The Case for Oxford. That generated dozens of long letters and a counterarticle, The Case for Shakespeare. (I’ve having trouble getting the Atlantic site to open beyond that one page. Maybe you’ll have better luck later.) As always, if you read nothing but the one side, it appears convincing. I read the rebuttals, however, and later read a great many books on all sides of the issue (yeah, including Wilson’s). Once I did that I realized how utterly bad the arguments were. They are all air and coincidence and suggestion. Conspiracy theories weren’t as major a deal in 1991 and it wasn’t until they spread across the Internet that I could see how similar they all were in the ways they made arguments and ignored facts. Today it’s trivial to look at birthers and truthers and moon-hoaxers and Paul is Deaders and anti-Oswaldians and see that any one of them can be swapped out for any other with only the details of the arguments changed.
You can read many, many long threads on these subjects here on the Dope alone, with people patiently explaining why the other side is dead wrong. I don’t have the patience for it, and besides I’m an interested amateur myself, not a professional. However, the issue is basic. When it comes to Shakespeare, as with all these other conspiracy theories, there is no other side. You cannot legitimately discuss the controversy. There is no controversy. Don’t ask us to take you seriously. You’re arguing Creationism, with an equal amount of anti-science. That’s why you’re being dismissed, and I’m sorry if it comes across as condescension. It should be anger.
I side with Nemo here–and would be so inclined even if I hadn’t researched the issue as thoroughly as I have. Attribution of* that* body of work to a parsimonious, grain-hoarding, wife-abandoning non-entity who barely shows up on the record, even after literally millions of hours of research, never made sense to me even as a teenager (check out Mark Twain’s “Is Shakespeare Dead?” for an entertaining extrapolation of that). I heard of the de Vere theories, and finally investigated them. While the evidence is circumstantial, there’s a lot of it; the more you dig, the more support the theory gets; and no matter which way you spin conjecture (such as de Vere’s relationship with Elizabeth, or his scholarship with Arthur Golding), the theory continues to add up.
Stratfordians have no argument and know it, which is why they resort to vituperative insult, circular reasoning, and misdirection before the discussion even gets started: Oxfordians are “snobs”; the guy who broke the theory had a funny name; Oxford died before plays were written (in a chronology determined by the life of William of Stratford); tradition is on our side; you can’t prove he didn’t; back it all up with more citations than anyone possibly has time for, every one of which will be dismissed; experts all agree, and if they don’t, they’re not experts… not to mention the liberal sprinkling of ridiculous, nonsense, codswallop, ballocks, etc. Even knowing nothing on a topic, I’m capable of recognizing the signs of a weak case, and they’re all here. (And on this site, of all places…!)
If people approach the issue from a standpoint of “Let’s look at the facts,” the mostly-plaster Stratfordian dinosaur skeleton Mark Twain spoke of becomes a full set of bones, missing only the skull when applied to Oxford. So that’s the theory I’ll stick with, while watching as more evidence becomes available.