We’ve all seen odd claims made on the behalf of Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon, Rutland, et cetera.
Does anyone have any truly out-in-left-field claims made arguing that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare?
They are out there, but I can’t recall what they are, nor from whom they come. I’ve also heard tell that Shakespeare was bisexual. ::shrug:: More power to him.
The Oxfordian theory is currently held to be the most credible.
But I still don’t believe any of them.
Of course Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare! No one could be that brilliant! 
in the original Klingon!~Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp, The Undiscovered Country;)
Shakespeare was an Arab and plagiarized the plays from Arab folktales.
GAMES Magazine ran a “scholarly treatise” on this a while back. See, it seems that there was a book of illustrations published about 60 years after Shakespeare’s death, and you could draw a certain triangle on top of all of the illustrations! Gasp! And furthermore, if you drew that same triangle on top of Shakespeare’s supposed tombstone, it would cross the letters “E D V man is he”, which is clearly Edward de Vere “confessing” to being Shakespeare! Plus, the lost plays of Shakespeare are obviously hidden in what’s supposed to be his tomb, since the epitaph says that it’s where Shakespeare’s relics are buried, and what did he have besides his plays which were valuable enough to be considered relics?
Chronos on a possibly related note…technically, Shakespeare’s tomb has a curse on it. As it says in the epitaph…
"Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosèd here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones. "
:rolleyes:
Of course, people who make this argument (not you, Chronos; you’re just the messenger, I take it) tend to overlook the fact that a bunch of play manuscripts wouldn’t have been considered particularly valuable in 1616 – even Shakespeare’s.
In any case, don’t put too much stock in those anti-Stratfordian arguments; even the ones held to be most credible – Oxford tends to be the front-runner these days, while in the past Bacon was the favorite – are rather flimsy, resting largely on a few admittedly remarkable coincidences (and leaving out a lot of other important facts), as well as the ability of people to keep a secret for 400 years.
All that said, this one amuses the heck out of me.
Personally, I think the wackiest theory is a toss-up between Elizabeth I-was-Shakespeare and Bacon-the-secret-son-of-Elizabeth I-was-Shakespeare.
As always, the most sensible discussion of the issue is http://shakespeareauthorship.com/
The idea that Shakespeare was bisexual is hardly ‘out there’. Rightly or wrongly, the Sonnets have long been used as evidence of this and the idea is now accepted by many, perhaps even most, mainstream Shakespearean scholars.
Then they are fools.
Using the sonnets are evidence is absolutely absurd. Consider this quote:
“I’m in love with a wonderful guy.” – Oscar Hammerstein II
Does this prove Hammerstein was gay? Of course not. It was in the lyrics he wrote, just like the “evidence” (which isn’t really evidence at all) of Shakepeare’s supposed bisexuality was in the lyrics he wrote.
You can tell very little about an author by his fiction unless you can find corroborating evidence to support it. And there is no evidence to support the view that Shakespeare was gay or bisexual (just like there is no evidence to support the Oxonians).
In other words, no one has yet to come forth with a document or eyewitness testimony to prove this point. It’s all literary analysis, which can “prove” whatever the critic wants to prove (I once “proved” that Shakespeare’s sonnets proved he came from Mars, and that another was actually written by Bill Buckner).
A few years ago Harper’s ran an article on the pros and cons of the various anti-Stratfordian arguments as voiced by their main supporters and detractors (including, I think, Mark Twain). Harper’s website sucks, so you won’t find it there, but if you can dig up a back issue at your library, it might be an enjoyable read.
Well, the plays weren’t written by Shakespeare, but by someone else of the same name…
Which sonnet?
If you’re looking for the strangest anti-stratfordian, go back to the original. Delia Bacon actually had a credible reputation as a teacher and public speaker but at some point in her life she apparently became deranged. She developed an obsession that Francis Bacon was the real author of the Shakespeare plays. Plenty of sane people have since held the same opinion, but Delia wasn’t one of them. She believed there was an active conspiracy working against her efforts to reveal the truth and estranged all of the few supporters she had when they failed to live up to her standards of devotion. She eventually managed to write and get published a book which outlined her theories, but to call it rambling wouldn’t begin to do it justice. One recent reviewer has written that it’s possible that no one has ever successfully managed to read the book in its entirety.
Beyond this I’m not going to go. I’ve familiar with the main anti-stratfordian arguments, especially those Oxford camp. While I don’t feel it’s a closed case the evidence is real and a lot stronger than many want to admit. But the last time I tried to discuss the issue here I was subjected to an overwhelming argument, much of it based on various straw men I never used, and some of it being personal attacks. Since then, the authorship question has joined abortion, gun control, and religion in my mind as subjects where I do not expect rational discussion to prevail.
If you want a blow-by-blow account of every silly theory about the “real” authorship of Shakespeare, go to Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, which has a very long survey of theories from Delia Bacon to the 1960s. It’s depressing reading. Schoenbaum is probably the only person ever to have actually read the entirety of Delia Bacon’s magnum opus.
Actually, the the author of “Shakespeare’s” plays was an Arab, by the name of Abdul al-Hazrad. He is more famous for his book the Necromonicon, and used the pen name Shakespeare for his non-mythos works. Some claim he was devoured by an invisible demon, in broad daylight, but this was actually him faking his death using Illusion spells found in his works. He then travelled the world, using life extending spells to prolong his existance for centuries. Other famous people he used his illusions to be was Newton, Tolstoy, and Hemmingway. He was going a bit crazy at the end(look at Hemmingway’s writings) and got tired of life and killed himself.
I read a theory that stated that Shakespeare lent his name to the writings of a cloistered nun. He also spiced up the plays with bawdy jokes and lewd references. Said nun was in love with Will, and the sonnets were about the triangle between her, Will, and Anne Hathaway.
Quoth Katisha:
They also tend to overlook the fact that “relics” doesn’t mean “valuable things”, it means bits and pieces of a dead person. Remains. A corpse. You know, exactly what you’d expect to find in a grave. The only reason that relics came to be associated with things of value is that bits and pieces of saints were/are valuable.
My personal favorite bit of weirdness: cryptograms. I’ve seen people claim that they have found the word “Bacon” (in various different spellings) using a special key over 200 times in Shakspeare’s works.
Doing my own test, I found a varient of the word “Bacon” in the song “I Love Rock And Roll”, which is about half the length of “To be or not to be”. Based on that, the word “bacon” should appear around 1,000-2,000 times in the complete works of Shakespeare (counting the sonnets, “The Phoenix and Turtle”, “Venus and Adonis”, “Lucrece”, “A Lover’s Complaint”, and the parts of “Sir Thomas Moore” attributed to him, but not counting “A Funeral Elegy” or the parts of “Henry VIII” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen” attributed to John Fletcher). Since this isn’t the case, this makes it 10-20 times more likely, according to Baconian logic, for Bacon to have written a song around 350 years after his known death than any of the words of Shakespeare.