Shakespeare authorship

Great Debates
1

We have a baptismal record for someone named Gulielmus Filius Johannis Shakspere from Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1564. We have plenty of other evidence that he was a real guy (marriage licence, children’s baptisms, tax documents, property documents, will, theatre playbills listing him as an actor, some letters mentioning that he owes people money). But there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest he didn’t write all or any of the works now attributed to William Shakespeare.

Maybe he didn’t have the necessary knowledge of law, maybe he didn’t have enough opportunity to learn Greek–whatever. There are many theories around, which tend to boil down to Francis Bacon/Walter Raleigh/Queen Elizabeth using a raunchy pseudonym (shakin’ the spear = strokin’ the salami…har dee har) to publish secret codes for receipt by government spies/revolutionaries/the Illuminati/the Rosicrucians/future seekers of occult knowledge.

If it wasn’t the humble Stratfordian actor who wrote the classic plays and poems, then who was it? What were their motives and how did the fraud come to be believed? What brilliant arguments have been advanced on both sides of the debate?

Furthermore, as to whomever did write Shakespeare, did (s)he have anything in mind besides entertaining playgoers and literature students? One convincing piece of evidence for the Bacon authorship is the bilateral font cipher which encodes his name in a few places–this is a code that Bacon admitted to, though its results are controversial. In conjunction with the mysterious printing codes used in many works published by Bacon (like the double A on the title page), some have suggested Bacon wrote the plays with an alchemical motive.

Here is a site maintaining Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Here is one for Bacon. Here is one for the Earl of Oxford. There are plenty more sites out there. I lean towards Bacon, myself. But then, I also believe Shakespeare is only part of a vast conspiracy that also includes the founding of the USA. I doubt that one will go far here, and it won’t go anywhere on the evidence I’m going to bring to the discussion.

I’m sure there have been threads on this in GQ or GD, but as a freeloader I can’t search the boards (terrible idea, by the way; it’s the new users who need the search function). Links to old threads would be just as nice as new answers. Thanks in advance to all readers and responders.

2

My interest has never been strong enough to lead me to my own independant research, but Edward de Vere has always made the most sense to me.

3

To quote an old article on the subject from The Atlantic, “There is no ‘grassy knoll’ in the Shakespeare authorship question.” Sorry, but the arguments that Shakespeare didn’t write the stuff himself boil down to “Commoners can’t possibly write as well as titled nobles.” I’ll believe it when Prince Charles writes anything as good as Alan Moore’s lesser efforts. And while it’s probably true that Shakespeare never traveled to the continent, his actors spent the off-season performing Commedia dell’Arte in Italy and France, and could easily have filled him in on street names in Milan and Padua and such.

I once read Bacon’s New Atlantis. At no time did it occur to me that it had a common author with Othello. Had I been him, and the author of all those wonderful plays, I’d have used the pseudonym for that and my own name for the good stuff.

4

None.

What however the Stratfordians have done is put forward the convincing commonsense argument that the Stratford-born actor and wealthy theatrical shareholder is, unsurprisingly, the most likely person by far to have written the plays performed and printed under his name.

If it is so improbable that Shakespeare should have written the plays, why did the secret author use his name as a cover? This is the contradiction at the heart of the anti-Stratfordian case. Either Shakespeare is an unlikely candidate, in which case his name would never have been used, or he did seem the sort of person who might well have written the plays, in which case you have to take seriously the possibility that he did do so after all.

In any case, if Bacon/Oxford/Elizabeth I/Anne Hathaway/whoever had been the real author and wanted their identity to remain secret, they would just have published them anonymously. Plenty of writers did. Why bother taking the risk of using the name of a real person as a pseudonym, with or without that person’s permission?

5

If the standards that the Oxfordians/Baconians/Whoeveritisthisweekians were applied to the other playwrights of the day, I could argue (as Kathman points out with www.shakespeareauthorship.com ) that Marlowe didn’t write Tamerlane, or, for that matter, that Kyd didn’t write The Spanish Tragedy (which, if I recall correctly, didn’t get attributed to Kyd in print until 1611 or so, nearly 20 years after his death).

What evidence do the Oxfordians/Baconians/Whoeveritisthisweekians have that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him, but that these authors did?

6

Another argument against Shakespeare being the author is that the works have a fairly good understanding of the internal intrigues of the royal courts. However, Shakespeare could very well have had close friends that were nobility. No reason to think Shakespeare wrote all he did in a vacuum.

7

Y’know, every so often I go to Stratford and stand in front of Shakespeare’s house and a strange eerie calm overwhelms me. I feel like I’m in the presence of God. Other people go to churches or synagogues or mosques, I go to Stratford.

(I never actually go in the house because it costs £6 or something and I’m too tight to pay that. And also it would ruin the trance-like state if I ever went inside)

You can go and visit his grave in a nearby church (Trinity). There’s a curse on his gravestone directed at anyone who ever moves his bones. I don’t really believe in curses and suchlike but it occurs to me that, if ever there was a curse that would be better not to mess with, it would be a curse laid down by Shakespeare.

‘Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare,
Blest by the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.’

You religious folk can keep your bible, torah and quran. I prefer to go direct to the source.

Um sorry, thought we were in the mundane, pointless place for a minute there.

I think there’s also evidence that he was a member of the royal Court in London. Also the timing fits - the plays start when Shakespeare was the right age to write them and they finish when he decided he’d had enough of London and went home, back to Stratford and Anne.

Also I’ve studied a few of them at college level and they are distinctly the same style and that style is different from anyone else writing at the time, even a great writer like Marlowe. In fact, I seem to recall that there is written evidence somewhere of Marlowe tipping his hat to Shakespeare and saying something like “Man, you’re good” (or the 15th century equivalent of that which I suspect may be slightly different).

8

I had read an article about this some time ago and it put the whole idiotic contraversy on a bunch of Victorian morons who were trying desperately to preserve the “Byronic Ideal”.

Y’see earlier that century Lord Byron and his buds changed the whole face of poetry. No longer a field for the common author, now the poet must be flawed, tortured, and of noble birth. As English folks lionized their poetic ancestors, they found that one very prominent poet stood out as the most famous…yet the damned fellow was a mere…mere…son of a Glovemaker! (We now know Daddy had a few jobs, but they did not). This, they decided, could not stand. They immediately started scouring the era for “better” candidates.

The usual suspects listed above were the ones chosen. Of course, many of the promoters of these “real Shakespeares” rarely stopped with mere authorship. Often the candidate is put forth as being responsible for the English Rennaissance.

Some of the arguements for certain candidates get downright ludicrous. Some were very fond of playing cryptographic games, such as the number of times a word appears on a page, or the number of lines on a page.

One proponent went insane after getting the courts permission to dig up Shakespeare’s grave for “the final proof” determined from the crytography.

Another managed to get a high court of england to state that Shakespeare was not he author. Don’t know how that turned out in the long run.

The author’s basic point was that the “Shakespeare Skeptics” were actually revisionists trying to rewrite history to suit their modern tastes.

9

Man this thread is starting to freak me out. We’re all answering each others questions before we’ve seen them.

I hadn’t seen rfgdxm’s post when I posted mine and yet I answered his question about the royal court.

And Mr. Miskatonic couldn’t have seen my post (only one minute apart) and yet he volunteered the information that someone once went insane after digging up Shakespeare’s bones.

Wild.

10

One of my Shaekspeare profs in college was fond of making fun of these arguments and pointing out how they only proved how ignorant the anti-Stratfordians are of the topics under discussion. For instance, someone once found a passage in the folio where a five-line prose paragraph has lines ending with the letters f, o, c, b, and and ampersand (&). Naturally this brilliant person realized that if you replace the & with the letters ‘a’ and ‘n’ (but ignore the ‘d’) then you get six letters that can be rearranged to spell ‘F. Bacon’. Among the many problems with this argument, the folio wasn’t published until after Shakespeare (and Bacon) was dead. When Shakespeare originally wrote the plays, he wouldn’t have had a clue what column width would eventually be used to publish them years later, so there’s no way he could have set something like that up.

11

The De Vere people seem like the only revisionists with numbers these days. Bacon’s writing is so different than Shakespeare’s that I think few people take that theory seriously.

I’ve read some samples of De Vere’s poetry. It doesn’t sound anything like Shakespeare’s. (Uninformed people might think they sound alike since they are both from the same time period. But the emotional tone and sonics of De Vere’s work are both inferior to, and quite different from, those of Shake.)

It’s Shakespeare. I’ve never seen any good evidence to the contrary.

12

And I allus thunk it were them infinite monkeys with the infinite typewriters wrote Shaksper’s plays.

13

That was pretty one-sided, but thanks anyway everybody.

The arguments that Shakespeare didn’t know enough about courtly dynamics, legal matters, classic poetry, or continental life are pretty foolish. Stratfordians point to actual errors on all these matters. Shakespeare apparently was less knowledgable about most of these things than his contemporaries (including Jonson, who had a poorer childhood). Or maybe that’s all disinformation.

What about a group-authorship theory? I know the Stratfordians laugh loudest at this one. But Bacon’s code was in there, and he said so. Was Shakespeare part of a secret society of writers trying to take advantage of the newish technology of the printing press in order to mould the future? Even Harold Bloom (who, as far as I know, leaves the room whenever someone brings up the subject) has written a fat book with the tenuously supported thesis that Shakespeare’s plays created our current culture. Bloom realizes he’s not a historian, but he doesn’t realize he’s not a theologian.

14

All evidence suggests that he was writing for the paying crowds, not for the ages. There has been speculation that he was one of the–authors? Translators?–of the King James Version of the Bible. I guess that could be seen as a neffort to mold the future, although a more transparent motive was to legitimize the reign of the guy who paid for it for that purpose, James II.

15

True, but only in the sense that the Pentateuch contains an encoded prediction of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and that the works of Lewis Carroll contain encoded confessions to the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Just because you can find ‘messages’ hidden in a text does not mean that the writer put them there.

16

Faldage wrote…

Maybeso, Faldage, but it only takes one monkey with a keyboard to show that Shakespeare is Shakesper in fact. Follow…

Many people have dug extensively into the past to find conclusive evidence that proves
authorship of the plays that we to ascribe to Shakespeare; without luck.

Time erodes, so it is unlikely that new evidence will be found - either way.

The persona of Shakesper as Shakespeare is so entrenched in western Psyche that it matters not a low-life whit what saith reality.
Such is the way of myths.

If we were made as poor but honest folk it would be obvious that Shakespeare didn’t write the Shakespearian plays, no one man did. All works called “genius” are simply creations of the times, so a particular man, in this case Shakesper, is simply the embodiment of a memeic focus that gets the attention of the process of social evolution. What? You didn’t know that the lyrical beauty of the King James translation of the Holy Bible was written by a committee?

Lastly. The poems and plays of Shakespeare are vastly overrated. The story-lines of the thirty-seven plays surpass the epics and myths of the ancient Greeks, Celts, Germans, and Romans, but are not as subtle or intricate as the common soap operas of today.
Don’t get me wrong, the Shakespearian stories are charming in their own quaint, historical way but they are now merely curious literary artifacts, doomed to their own time, left today to the dusty scholastic minds of English Majors; gullible people who have invested too much time in the study of “classics” to see the works of the great Shakespeare in an objective perspective.

Hey, Faldage, don’t get me wrong, I love Shakespeare. I think his brilliant use of words is without question the most exciting and interesting juxtaposition of concepts seen thus far in the history of the English language. What I don’t like is those whose appreciation of Shakespeare is seeped in pretension.
You, the foremost descriptivist of all computerdom, must surely understand my feelings.

By the way Faldage, what does your Latin signature tag
*Non eandem arborem videt * mean in English?
__________________________________________:slight_smile:

17

Great. A hook for another wretched best-seller by Dan “Research Genius” Brown.

Seems to me the belief that Shakespeare is not the author of the plays he wrote approaches, for many people, the level of a religious cult. It’s something they’re going to hold on to regardless of how little sense it makes.

18

Milum said:

My God, you couldn’t be more wrong.

They delve so deep into the human condition (from every conceivable angle) that they are sometimes almost painful to read. But you really need to study them properly to appreciate this and I mean properly. Every line has several meanings, every word.

You could almost take one line of Shakespeare at random and it would hold more meaning than all of the world’s literary history combined.

Although not liking Shakespeare is itself an honourable tradition. I think Tolstoy didn’t think much of them either. But then who cares about the opinion of someone who could write such boring long-winded trash as “War and Peace”?

19

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/hidncode.htm

William Shakespeare wrote the works of William Shakespeare.