Didn’t someone else (the name eludes me) write the scenes with Hecate in “Macbeth”? I actually read something about that in my English class.
Here is some info on that:
http://chass.uscolo.edu/english/syllabi/eng381rm/macb_lec.htm
No definitive conclusion, though. (Not as if I were expecting one.)
Sometimes scholars argue (as wrongly as the anti-Stratfordians, IMO), that anything they don’t like in Shakespeare’s plays (like the witches in MacBeth), were written by a collaborator. Their reasoning - Shakespeare wrote better than that.
I’m not saying he didn’t collaborate - certainly on Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More, etc., as others have pointed out - but the particular places like in MacBeth are just circular reasoning.
Similarly, arguing that the bad quarto of Hamlet is someone else remembering the play, rather than being taken from Shakespeare’s own early version of the play, is based on it not being as good as the ‘real’ Hamlet.
John Fletcher was the guy “under Shakespeare’s wing” toward the end, wasn’t he?
Yeah. He’s best known, too, for his partnership with Francis Beaumont. And Thomas Middleton is usually the leading candidate for author of the Hecate scenes in Macbeth, if they’re non-Shakespearean. Usually, as near as I can tell, these scenes are considered dubious not so much for their quality as for stylistic differences. And there’s certainly precedent for interpolations being added to older plays – there are records of extra scenes being commissioned for Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, both of which were hugely popular in their day. (In the editions I have, Faustus is presented as two separate texts, while the Spanish Tragedy addenda are given in an appendix.)
(Though I should say, too, that when making cases based on stylistic difference one should be careful, as ripping things off from fellow poets was expected, and influence doesn’t equal authorship. 
)
There has been, in the past, a tendency to disavow some of the works of Shakespeare that people find distasteful – witness the efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to expel Titus Andronicus from the canon, or Alexander Pope’s footnoting of passages which he found spurious on the grounds of their indecorum, but this sort of thing really isn’t current today. I imagine most scholars today will readily agree that not everything Shakespeare wrote was gold – I certainly know my favorite play contains a few lines that make me cringe! And since you mention bad quartos, there’s also something of a trend towards re-evaluating them, and not assuming that they’re automatically memorial corruptions (this is particularly true of the quarto editions of 2 and 3 Henry VI – they’re not called that in the quartos, obviously – which bear a really complicated relationship to the Folio texts).
There’s a brilliant P.G Wodehouse piece playing on this. Bacon as earnest young author, Shakespeare as “dramatic fixer”
Shakespeare: And the ending, laddy. I don’t like the ending. Too weak. What you need to have is something more exciting. Have the whole lot jump in and kill each other. Let’s say Laertes stabs Hamlet with a poisoned sword, Hamlet picks the sword up by mistake and stabs Laertes with it, Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine by accident, and then Hamlet forces Claudius to drink the rest.
Long pause
Bacon: Isn’t that a little unlikely?
Shakespeare: (coldly) It’s what the public want
There was actually a very briefly bestselling book on the Shakespeare-as-bastard-son-of-Elizabeth a few years ago entitled Oxford: Son of Elizabeth I .
Personally, I think Shakespeare was written by a committee consisting of Elizabeth I, Benjamin Franklin, Jack Webb, and Lee Harvey Oswald, all of whom were gay and incestuous relatives.
Seriously, another person sometimes posited as Shakespeare is Sir Lancelot Andrews, author of the prose in the King James Bible.
Cardenio is not lost. I have a copy of it myself. Andyes, it was written with John Fletcher, as was Henry VIII, in all likelihood.
Cardenio is not lost. I have a copy of it myself. And yes, it was written with John Fletcher, as was Henry VIII, in all likelihood.
Well, as I recall – I’ve seen that edition, and then I just went and looked it up – isn’t that a play known to exist under a different name, and it’s thought that it might be Cardenio? I haven’t read it, so I’m not sure what the case for and against it is…
Cardenio is also known as “The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.” The case for it is pretty strong.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve come to the realization that the movie Shakespeare in Love is the best proof yet of Shakespeare really being the author of the works credited to him.
Think about it. What is the movie about? It’s about a person writing.
Writing is a time-consuming - and mentally all-consuming - activity. Even for someone as obviously fast and facile as the person who wrote all those plays, the writing takes up a huge portion of one’s life. Plays must be researched, first drafted, written, rewritten, revised - and in those days of quill pens - rewritten as a fair copy in readable form.
And then over and over again. More than a play a year on average. Two and three many years.
Now imagine someone who is famous in that society hiding this much of an aspect of life from every single person in that society, Or that society engaging in a conspiracy of silence to avoid comment of what would have been seen as a bizarre predeliction. (Imagine Henry Kissinger writing every issue of Spirderman for the last 30 years and no one noticing or commenting.) Besides which, plays don’t just drop down from the sky into the actors’ hands. In the movie we watch the play being shaped by the interaction between Shakespeare and the players. Imagine trying to be a go-between and wring new lines and scenes on a daily basis out of someone while that someone is going about court business.
I’ve read a lot of comment on both sides of this war, but I don’t remember much explanation on how the simple physical act of doing so much writing and interacting could have been so completely hidden in Oxford’s daily life, let alone Queen Elizabeth’s.
Any antis want to take a stab at this?
I’ll see you, and raise you one. It’s often forgotten, but old Willy was also an actor himself. He’s believed to have been Lear’s Fool and Prospero, among others, and he’s listed in the casts for most of the plays. If Bacon, say, had appeared on stage regularly, would he really have gone unrecognized?
Not so – Lear’s Fool was in all likelihood played by Robert Armin, for whom most of the fool roles in later Shakespeare plays were written, and Prospero would certainly have been played by leading actor Richard Burbage. You’re right, though, that Shakespeare is known to have been an actor of minor but fun roles; the parts traditionally associated with him are the Ghost in Hamlet and Adam in As You Like It. (Some, as I recall, take the reference to “our bending author” in the epilogue to Henry V as an indication that the Chorus in that play was played by Shakespeare, which makes sense to me.)
Nonetheless, I do agree that the plays are manifestly the work of a man of the theater, and that’s as good an argument against most of the other candidates (okay, it doesn’t rule out Marlowe, but he’s got all sorts of other problems) as just about any…
Much of your argument could actually be used against the Stratfordian case. First off, no one disputes the fact that Edward de Vere was a writer. As a young man he wrote a number of poems and plays under his own name. At a certain point in his life, he stopped. Contemporary references by people who knew him say he continued to write but did so under a pseudonym (admittedly none of these references say he used Shakespeare was a pseudonym). The first Shakespeare works began appearing a short while after de Vere stopped using his own name.
If there is a bizarre conspiracy of silence it existed around William Shaksper. There are contemporary references to Shaksper’s family life, business dealings, and even his work in a theatrical group as an actor. But surprisingly, no one in Shaksper’s lifetime ever called him a writer. No one in the theatrical world, no one in London, no in his hometown, no one in his own family ever seemed to feel it was worth mentioning that Billy from the Block was the famous playwright. The first connection made identifying Willaim Shaksper the man as Shakespeare the author appeared seven years after his death and was made by Ben Johnson in the folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays which incidentally was financed by the de Vere family.
You may have noticed how I spelled Shaksper’s name in the previous paragraph. That was the most common way he spelled it. He used other variants as well (spelling being a much looser science back then) such as Shackspur and Shaxsper. The spellings reflected the way Shaksper pronounced his name - Shack-sper. The poems and plays on the other hand first appeared with no name on them. Later they had the name Shake-speare (No William and the hyphen appeared in print). Again there were variants but they were all pronounced as Shake-speer. The de Vere coat of arms incidentally was an arm shaking a spear and was a well known icon of the family. Several of de Vere’s early works included self-references to a shaking spear.
As you point out most authors research their subjects before writing about them. Most Stratfordians however regard Shakespeare as the exception to this rule. Given the fact that there is no evidence of William Shaksper ever studying any of the subjects that appeared in his play, they assign his abilties to genius. De Vere on the other hand could not claim such genius. There are ample examples in his life on him aquiring knowledge of subjects that later appeared in Shakespeare’s works. In fact, in de Vere’s library there are books which he annotated by underlining phrases and lines that later appeared in Shakepeare’s works.
As I have stated before, none of the above is smoking gun proof that Edward de Vere was the author of the Shakespeare poems and plays. At best, the above can be offered as circumstantial evidence and could conceivably be coincidence (along with other evidence I haven’t mentioned). But it is real evidence, not some bizarre decoding scheme or ramblings about class or politics, and should be addressed on that level.
Finally, let me mention in advance that I posted this at something of a disadvantage. The last time this topic was raised, I had at hand several works on the subject that allowed me to post the relevant quotes and sources and cross check all my facts. However, since my move of last autumn, most of my library has gone into storage and my Shakespeare books were among them. This time I had to work from memory. While all of the above is true to the best of my memory I probably have erred in minor details. If you wish to debate this, please don’t ask me for cites which I admittedly cannot give or ignore the forest in order to quibble about a few trees. Please also note that none of the above is intended as a personal attack on anyone including William Shaksper, Edward de Vere, or Shakespeare (whomever he might be) and hopefully any responses will be made with the same restraint.
This line of argument is irrelevant because there are plenty of contemporary references indicating that the plays were assumed to have been written by Shakespeare the actor. You’ve already conceded that ‘William Shaksper’ of Stratford (who, incidentally, never himself used that particular spelling) was also the actor. QED.
Well almost. The chain of evidence linking the Stratford man to the person whose name appears on most of the titlepages of the plays is very strong. All that really remains is the question of whether Shakespeare was acting as a front for someone else and that depends entirely on disputed opinions about the internal evidence of the works. Orthodox scholars are right to insist that, as the plays were very obviously issued under Shakespeare’s name and that everyone at the time accepted this, the onus of proof for thinking otherwise rests with the anti-Stratfordians.
This argument is simply incorrect. (I’m sorry if this seems like a quibble over a few trees, but you asked for a discussion about ‘real evidence’.) While it is true that the Stratford-related documents show a slightly greater tendency to use spelling suggesting the ‘Shack-sper’ pronunction, variants suggesting either pronunction can be found in the Stratford and in the London documents. Note, in particular, that as early as 1597 the spelling ‘Shakespeare’ was used in the deeds relating to the purchase of the New Place in Stratford. The most famous of all the signatures, that on his will, uses the form ‘William Shakespeare’. The evidence might suggest that he had modified the pronunction after he moved to London - this is hardly unheard of, even today - but, as this means the new pronunction was then adopted back in Stratford, this argument would tend to reinforce the conventional account of his life. All the variant spellings can be found here.
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/name2.html
It is also incorrect to say that he was never identified as William Shakespeare on titlepages published during his lifetime. In fact, most of the titlepages gave his name in full and they were just as likely to spell his surname without the hypen.
No they don’t. What they do say is that we know almost nothing about how Shakespeare might have researched his plays beyond what can be inferred from the internal evidence. This is also utterly unsurprising. The same is equally true of almost every other writer of the period. Moreover, what can be inferred from the internal evidence tends to suggest that Shakespeare actually didn’t do that much research. Few Elizabethan playwrights did. Exhaustive searches for Shakespeare’s possible sources have only turned up a narrow range of books which the author can be assumed to have read.
What you are referring to is the Bible held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is less remarkable than some have claimed. That it belonged to Oxford is not really in doubt. (Admittedly, this depends on the identification of the armorial binding and I suspect that, given the nature of such things, it could equally have been re-bound at a later date for another member of the family, but let’s ignore that detail.) The argument is instead whether it was marked up by Oxford and whether those markings correlate to passages in Shakespeare’s works. Neither of those claims are especially convincing. Markings and underlining are almost impossible to date and can rarely be connected to a known individual. The annotations may be by Oxford but, then again, they might not. That some of them were alluded to by Shakespeare also proves little. This is the Bible, not some obscure publication read only by the most discerning of readers. We would expect both men to be familar with it. All this leaves is the question of whether the range of allusions is statistically significant. And the answer to that appears to be that it is not.
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/ox5.html
Another way of thinking about the whole authorship problem is ask what scholars would think if all the plays had been published anonymously. This would mean that any attributions would have to depend on the sort of indirect evidence used by the Oxfordians. Would their case be any more convincing? Well, no, because all the apparent allusions to events in Oxford’s life are very weak. Even if one thought that they were autobiographical (which would be highly debatable), one would still be left with the problem that they could apply to any number of Elizabethan courtiers. This is one reason why there are so many other alternative candidates. The only allusion which appears to be uniquely linked to Oxford is the argument that name ‘Shakespeare’ referred to his armorial bearings and that runs up against the very obvious objection that there was already an actor of that name, so, whatever one thinks, there must have been some sort of coincidence.
The reality is that, faced with the plays without the explicit attributions to Shakespeare on the titlepages, most scholars would still think that they were by a jobbing professional, just like the vast majority of other anonymous plays of the period. Finally, there are just enough contemporary manuscript references attributing some of the plays to Shakespeare - most obviously the 1598 list by Francis Meres - that they would also be able to say that most of them were probably by him.
Little Nemo - I’ve heard most of the arguments you present (and they are either refuted or shown to be irrelevant or applying a double standard at the site APB linked), but I’ve never before heard that the Folio was financed by deVere’s family. Got a cite for that?
Good post, APB – just a few things to add:
The first Shakespeare play to appear in print with his name on it was the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which claims that the play is “Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.” What exactly that means is up for debate – there’s an interesting instance in the quarto where a speech gets printed in two different forms, surely a sign of revision – but it’s nothing damaging to the Stratfordian cause.
For a look at the quarto texts, go here – it’s a great site and a really useful reference.
There are, if I can remember where to look them up, some early modern references pointing out where Shakespeare gets things wrong. Some people today tend to assume that, for instance, Shakespeare’s various portrayals of life at a royal court shows inside knowledge; this was not, however, the prevailing opinion at the time he actually wrote, as far as I can recall. Will look into this (some of the references might be linked at shakespeareauthorship.com). In any case, though, the idea that he had a great deal of specialized technical knowledge is overstated at best.
Indeed. It’s also worth pointing out that Oxford also gets a mention by Meres; he’s referred to as a writer of comedies, in fact. Shakespeare is mentioned in the same passage; if the two were the same, why make separate entries?
Here’s the relevant quote:
The best poets for comedy among the Greeks are these, [list of Greek poets omitted for brevity’s sake] * so the best for comedy amongst us be Edward Earl of Oxford, Doctor Gager of Oxford, Master Rowley, once a rare scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Master Edwards, one of her Majesty’s Chapel, eloquent and witty John Lyly, Lodge, Gascoigne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Munday, our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.*
And, for kicks, the full text of Palladis Tamia. It’s a fascinating document if you’re into Elizabethan poetry, as you almost certainly are if you’re reading this thread.
As a side note, APB didn’t mention one of the big strikes against Oxford, which is that he died in 1604, while Shakespeare’s last works are usually dated circa 1613. The Oxfordian case would require radical re-dating of the canon, and that runs into various problems involving publication of sources (this is particularly true of The Tempest, an acknowledged source for which is an account of a shipwreck that happened in 1610, or was it 1609? I can’t recall offhand) and contemporary references…
Little Nemo, you completely avoid answering - or even acknowledging - the question that I asked.
I know the facts given on both sides. I know that Oxford is known to have dabbled in some formal poetry, whose publication appears to have stopped when the plays started.
My question is: given what we know of Oxford’s biography, how could he have gone from a known dabbler in poetry to someone who would have to spend every waking moment not already accounted for - and we have records of him writing letters, putting on masques, and getting embroiled in intrigues - to accomplish all the plays and poetry that Shakespeare is credited with – in a completely different style and in a much shorter time, since he died in 1604 - without someone - including his political enemies who could have used this against him* - noticing that he was spending every waking moment of his time churning out literature?
It looks to me that it would have been physically impossible for even the fastest writer to have turned out Shakespeare’s works in his spare time, and that it would be even more impossible for someone to do so and not have everybody who knew him or knew of him aware of it.
It’s this particular issue that I’d like addressed.
Well I know a couple-
In geography - Shakespeare didn’t know much about Italy - two whole plays were set in Venice with no indication he knew there were canals there. deVere lived in Venice for a year and a half. Also, Shakespeare places a town called Belmont 200 leagues from Venice. :rolleyes:
Also his courtroom scenes were nothing a commoner couldn’t know, especially if he’d ever been involved in a lawsuit 
- of course, the big legal tenet in Merchant - you can take a pound of flesh so long as you don’t harm the person - is both fake, and taken from the source story. A real judge would have said you can’t enter into illegal contracts; therefore, no contract existed.
Especially if Shakespeare really did hide his own name in Psalm 46.
This is another ‘fact’ that becomes less impressive once it is examined closely.
This claim derives from the First Folio’s Epistle Dedicatory, which dedicates the work to the 3rd Earl of Pembroke and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery (later 4th Earl of Pembroke). Both men were relatives of Oxford, in that Montgomery was married to Oxford’s youngest surviving daughter, Susan. This, however, is less remarkable than it may seem - there were only a limited number of noblemen of sufficient rank to make suitable husbands for the daughter of an earl. Given this, almost all the greater English peers of that period were interrelated to each other many times over. Exactly the same argument has been used by those who favour the Earl of Derby with just as much plausibility.
What is more, there is no evidence at all that the Herbert brothers financed the First Folio. Once one has cut through the very flowery language used by the Epistle, all it does is to thank them for having helped Shakespeare during his lifetime.
Assuming that the dedicatees of a book must have played some part in the book’s production is a very elementary mistake. Dedicatees were just as likely to be chosen because they were someone the author, editor or publisher wanted to flatter in the hope of future favours. In this case, there is no real mystery why Pembroke was chosen. As Lord Chamberlain, he was the person responsible for overseeing the London theatres. He was thus by far the most obvious person for Heminge and Condell to want to cultivate. Including Montgomery as well was a sensible precaution, as he was already the person in pole position to be his brother’s successor, as indeed it turned out that he would be, as he was appointed Lord Chamberlain when Pembroke was promoted to become Lord Steward three years later. Heminge and Condell knew precisely what they were doing.