The ironic thing is in a century or two there will probably be a movement pushing that Samuel Langhorne Clemens wasn’t Mark Twain. A riverboat pilot and confederate volunteer foot soldier is the father of American literature? Balderdash! 
Eh, soon enough we’ll have people claiming William Shatner wrote Shakespeare:
“To BE… or not to… BE THAT… is the question. Whether 'tis NOBLER… in the mind to suffer OUT RAGEOUS FORTUNE or to take arms against a sea of TROUBLES and by opposing end them TO DIE TO SLEEP NO MORE and by a sleep to say we end the HEART-ACHE and the thousand natural SHOCKS that flesh is heir to that is a consummation DEVOUTLY TO BE WISH’D.”
It’s a tragi-comedy in the Shakespearean sense that Thomas Looney pronounced his name Lone-ee. Why couldn’t the lunacy have been started by a certified loony?
The Oxfordians also need to remember that until his recent elevation, a majority of CTs thought Bacon wrote Shakespeare and were just as loud about insisting this must be so using exactly the same sort of “evidence” that the Oxfordians use. The latter are conspicuously quiet about this.
Wikipedia has a list of 87 candidates seriously proposed for the honor over the years.
This could just as easily be a list of 87 theories about what took down the twin towers instead of two jet planes.
The Oxford “theory” is nothing more than naked classism; Oxfordians simply can’t accept that the greatest writer in history grew up in a podunk town and went to a public school. Every Oxford fan I’ve met, without exception, has had a life of privilege. To them, a commoner being a genius is less plausible than a rich guy writing plays after he’s dead.
septimus brings up this nonsense over and over and over, and is annoyed that we still don’t take it seriously. Why should we? It’s the literary equivalent of being a flat-earther.
He’s mentioned the possibility of starting a Pit thread to school us; honestly, I wish he would. It would be fun (though probably not for him).
ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease
Oh my. Let me repeat my post from the other thread, but with some added emphasis. Note, by the way, that if Oxford were the author he probably had some collaborators.
Again, the challenge is not to find the weakest “anti-Stratford” claims, those which are easily debunked. The challenge is to look at the real evidence that intrigues serious scholars.
Please re-read the above paragraph until you see clearly the point it makes.
The case for Oxford and against the man from Stratford is too involved to summarize in just 7 pages, but some have tried. This is one such effort.
Here are three websites which discuss the controversy in much detail:
Note that these are websites, not webpages. You’ll need some clicking to find the best arguments.
If you get bored of clicking without finding anything of interest, that’s fine. As I said, it’s a fascinating topic to discuss, but I will avoid masochism!
Shakespeare wrote a large number of plays set in Italy, the country which (excepting England) Oxford was most familiar with. Anti-Oxfordians contend that, had Oxford written these plays they would show much more familiarity with these Italian cities. This is a claim particularly interesting to debunk.
The case for Oxford is MUCH stronger than most of you realize. Even if you ultimately decide that Oxford is not the author, intellectual honesty should force you to admit that the signs pointing to his authorship represent surprising coincidence.
I’ve enlarged a link above to a 7-page paper. If you don’t the time to review that, you’re not serious. Again, the challenge is not to find the weakest easiest-to-refute claim, but the one that gives most pause.
I’ll admit I think that it’s possible that Edward de Vere wrote the plays. There is some interesting evidence that while not conclusive, certainly points in that direction.
But Shakespeare defenders don’t want to look at the reasonable evidence. They want to only talk about the silly theories (which abound).
They also refuse to produce any evidence to support their position. Their argument generally is that Shakespeare is the author so they don’t have to submit any evidence that Shakespeare is the author.
Thank you, Little Nemo.
Let me be clear. The challenge for each of you is to read this 7-page paper and reference the 2 or 3 excerpts which make you most hesitant, which help you understand why many intelligent people find the case for Oxford strong. Again, don’t post the argument you find weakest and easiest to debunk; post the strongest arguments. Only Dopers who take the time to do this will be taken seriously.
That 7-page paper barely scratches the surface of the many arguments in favor of Oxford authorship. Feel free to Google, or to pursue the other websites I mentioned and research the case for Oxford.
Yes, I understand that there are strong arguments against an Oxford authorship. There are also very strong arguments against a Stratford authorship. These twin facts lead some to conclude that the plays and sonnets were written by neither Oxford nor Stratford, but by some 3rd person. I personally find the idea of Oxford plus collaborators to be most likely; it addresses most of the arguments against a solo Oxford authorship.
This thread can go in two directions. We might see open-minded Dopers read the 7-page paper, pursue the evidence which many intelligent people find to be very strong, and have an interesting discussion. (Even if we know a priori that Oxford was NOT the author, the relevant facts point to interesting mysteries.) OR, we can hear the usual whines from people who can’t even be bothered to read 7 pages.
I’m rooting for you, Dopers!
Which is a shame, because Keats - the son of a hostler - was twice the poet he was.
That’s a convenient sort of argument, septimus. Let’s say that someone goes to that page you linked in big text, and debunks some of the arguments. You’ll then just say that, see, they’re just debunking the weakest arguments and ignoring the strong ones, just like you said they would.
You need to tell us what you think the strongest arguments are. You don’t even need seven pages-- a paragraph for each should do.
Little Nemo, if you want evidence for the man from Stratford, let’s start with the simplest argument: Whoever wrote the plays put the name William Shakespeare on them.
Surely you should be the one doing the work of pointing out the strongest bit of evidence?
The author of that paper makes constant references to the conclusions of “scholars” without burdening the reader with pointless trivialities like “references” or “at least a name I can google to look for the evidence”. Pretty much the only time he gives sources is when quoting someone saying something nice about Oxford.
And there’s a weird double standard to how the author treats any lack of direct evidence: If we don’t have letters, or books owned by Shakespeare, he’s probably illiterate. If we don’t have direct evidence that he traveled, “William of Stratford never traveled farther from Stratford-Upon-Avon than London”. Not a single play or poem authored by “Shakespeare” was attributed to Oxford, Oxford totally wrote it. :smack: Is consistency too much to ask for?
Here’s my problem; there’s really, really good evidence that a guy named Shakespeare wrote a bunch of plays and poetry. They were all attributed to him at or around their time of writing. First, convince me that I should believe that Shakespeare isn’t the author, then we can start eliminating everyone on this list (assuming the ‘real author’ is even someone known to history)
This little factoid shows how impertinent so much of the criticism is!
First of all, Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368 - 1437) became King of Hungary and Croatia in 1387 and King of Bohemia in 1419. After that date, IIRC, the Kings of Bohemia and Hungary were always the same person (whenever both titles existed). And yes, as seen here Hungary controlled much of the former Serbian Empire for many years, including Shakespeare’s time. (Mark Anderson writes that Hungary had a seacoast from 1575 to 1609; I find it hard to Google the best maps.)
Oxford took a boat ride down the Adriatic and his guide may have mentioned that they were passing a coastline owned by Rudolph who was King of Bohemia-Hungary.
Did Oxford intend the “Bohemian seacoast” as a sort of joke about the political union between Hungary and Bohemia? I think it at least as likely that Oxford had borrowed the plot of A Winter’s Tale from another source, and the seacoast came with that. Still the insistence on this trivial and wrong geographical assertion by Oxford’s detractors helps us see how flimsy and desperate their arguments often are.
Nah – if that were true, the line would go “…a sea of TRIBBLES…”.
Here’s a challenge for you, septimus: Why don’t YOU tell us about the most compelling evidence for Oxford, instead of giving us homework assignments and making us go look for it?
I read that paper. There isn’t anything new or compelling in it at all. It’s the same old dog’s breakfast of coincidences, dot-connecting, unsupported generalizations, unsourced assertions, paeans to the awesomeness of de Vere, and repeated denigration of Shakespeare’s humble origins. There isn’t a shred of genuine historical evidence anywhere in it.
I’ll give the authors credit for being up front: they remind us in the *very first sentence * that Shakespeare was a dumb hick from a shithole town. That’s one thing I like about Oxfordians: they can’t hide what they’re all about. I also scrolled to the bottom of the last page, looking for a bibliography or footnotes, and found nothing. That’s the other thing I like about Oxfordians: they can’t hide the fact that they don’t understand how scholarship works.
But I have the feeling that septimus will just reiterate that this paper just scratches the surface, and there’s better evidence out there if we go on a scavenger and click this link and that link and read this and this and that. Well, I’m not playing that game.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show us the evidence—and by “evidence,” I mean something beyond “look at this weird coincidence,” “Shakespeare was a dumb yokel,” and “de Vere was a cool dude.” Don’t play games with us. I’m rooting for you, septimus! (Just kidding; I know you don’t have any evidence.)
And this, which IIRC was the same “argument” you made in the years-ago thread, shows that not only didn’t you read the 7-page summary, nor the 1-page summary, nor even a 1-paragraph summary, but you lacked the simple grace to even contemplate for a moment and imagine what the hoax hypothesis might even about.
Do you really believe that Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Ralph W. Emerson, Henry and William James, Walt Whitman, and as many as six Supreme Court Justices (Blackmun, Stevens, Scalia, Powell, O’Connor, and poss. Ginsberg) failed to note that “William Shakespeare” was the name of the author?
Wow! Y’all may think I’m a crackpot, but that’s some real nuttery there, Chronos.
As a nobleman, it was taboo and shameful for Oxford to write plays for public performane. This is a well-attested fact, both generally in that era and as applies to Oxford specifically. The 7-page article mentions further reasons he needed to keep his identity secret. Indeed he’d “painted himself into a corner” — with the freedom of anonymity he portrayed the royal court, and contemporary politics, in ways which might be scandalous were it known a court insider wrote them.
Publishing as “Anonymous” wouldn’t do. He was so famous as a playwright that “Anonymous” would have pointed straight at him. And so would a totally fake pen-name. He needed a front-man, a living breathing pen-name.
Wow! I’m startled to imagine someone so completely ignorant of the entire controversy would deign to post here!
And no, I won’t summarize the 7-page article. Above I wrote
After the final sentence I had “But I’d bet against you.” But I erased it before clicking Submit.
Let’s see if any of you does deign to read the 7-page article. I’m not holding my breath.
Oxford was a fairly minor hanger-on in the list of 87 possible Shakespeare candidates until 1991. In their October issue The Atlantic magazine ran articles on the case for Oxford and the case for Shakespeare. For some reason, that sparked an Oxford revival. Since then Oxford has become the favored candidate of the loudest CTs.
Also since 1991, academic studies of authorship has benefited from modern computer databases and statistical analysis. Doing so has created a revolution in Shakespeare studies. Several plays have been added to the canon, but more importantly those plays as well as many earlier ones have been shown to be multi-authored. (17 out of 43 plays were multi-authored according to the New Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford the university, of course, not Oxford the minor Elizabethan playwright.) Shakespeare was indeed the lone (or overwhelmingly primary) author of most of his famous plays. There is now convincing evidence that he also worked with his contemporaries, including Kit Marlowe, often put forward as a candidate for the true Shakespeare.
Here’s the problem. For all the increased understanding of the collaborative nature of the play-writing community of the day and the attribution (not without some controversy, I acknowledge) of numerous other playwrights as co-authors with Shakespeare that is rampant today, nobody in the Shakespeare establishment lists Oxford as even the minorest of collaborators let alone as a primary author of any of the texts.
The situation is not that the establishment is zealously insisting that Shakespeare was the lone genius of geniuses. Just the opposite. They have been minutely studying the texts, the publications, the theatrical community of the day, and the lives of everyone involved to lessen the older notion of Shakespeare’s uniqueness, using the most modern and technical equipment available to them.
And they still don’t find a particle of evidence for Oxford.
You will not find any trace of these modern methods in any of the Oxfordian literature, certainly not in that silly seven! page! paper! linked to by septimus. Yes, that was by a real professor at a real, if incredibly tiny, university. A university with no graduate degree in English, I might mention. I might also mention that Prof. Dan Wright left the university and the Shakespeare Authorship Research Center in 2014 and that the Center went defunct when he did so, having lasted only four years. (He died in 2018.)
I read the seven-page paper. In fact, I read the 1991 Atlantic, which sparked my interest. Since then I’ve read many full books on the authorship controversy, along with many biographies of the real Shakespeare and many books on authorship scholarship.
My opinion is that amateurism is amateurism, whether it is on climate change, the moon program, the fall of the twin towers, eight-foot-tall humans, or authorship attribution. The amateurs proudly proclaim (sometimes tacitly, often in some many words) they know nothing about the actual state-of-the-art technical vocabulary or processes in the fields they are criticizing, but certainly aren’t about to let that stop them. All conspiracy theories have the same framework and argument types when you look at them closely. Oxfordianism shares that to a frightening degree. It’s pure nonsense and I feel I’ve done my due diligence in earning the right to say so.
How is this evidence of anything?
Shakespeare’s plays contain geographical errors besides this one. Are all of them de Vere’s political jokes? If the geographical blunders were in the source material, why didn’t that genius de Vere correct them? Oxfordians are always telling us what a smart guy de Vere was and how stupid Shakespeare was. You can’t have it both ways. If this is what you consider evidence, then this thread isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.
I’ll say it again, septimus: you’re playing games with us. You are claiming that the consensus of 400 years of Shakespeare scholarship is wrong. To upend that, you need something big—a smoking gun. But instead you’re trying to draw people into debating historical trivia. YOU are the one making flimsy and desperate arguments here.
Sorry. You failed the homework assignment. You deliberately chose a weak assertion to attack, not a challenging one.
And – " I also scrolled to the bottom of the last page" – you admit that you couldn’t be arsed to even read 7 pages.
I hold in my hand Mark Anderson’s book, which has 158 pages of endnotes, in a smallish font. Yes, that’s a Hundred Fifty-Eight pages with an H. And you complain that a summary chosen for brevity lacks notes. Wow!
I won’t even give you an F. You get an Incomplete on your homework. Please try much harder if you want to submit another effort.
Ah, yes, the “smart people are smart” argument you’ve made before.
What do you think would happen if a distinguished literary scholar—say, Harold Bloom—tried to argue a case before the Supreme Court? Would they say, “Smart people are smart,” and let him stay?
I read it, and so did The Lurker Above. As I’ve already noted, I did not find it compelling or convincing in the slightest.
That’s one of the interesting pieces of evidence I mentioned. Most of the works weren’t published under the name William Shakespeare. They were published under the name Shakespeare or Shakespear or Shake-speare.
Spelling was more flexible and phonetic back then. And the various spellings suggest that the name Shakespeare was pronounced like it is now; shake-speer.
William Shakespeare, the guy from Avon, generally didn’t spell his name Shakespeare. In public records it was more often spelled Shaksper or Shaxper, which would seem to indicate he pronounced his name similarly to Baxter.
There’s an obvious argument that Shakespeare is closer to Shaxper than it is to de Vere or Oxford. And that’s true.
But it’s also true that Edward de Vere’s crest was a lion shaking a spear. So de Vere can also claim a close connection to the name Shake-speare.
