I am turning off the comments on this one because too many of them are unconstructive.
If anyone writes a decent piece with the opposing view and send it to me, I will link to it, and probably write a response.
Decent means: don’t go on about who believes your theory or how scholars cover up the evidence. I don’t care what Justice Scalia or Mark Twain believe. I care about the archives! Just lay out the facts of the case. Nor am I linking to anything angry or offensive. If you want to yell about your opponents being assholes who don’t read your work, well, have fun.
My favourite [only] claim to fame is that I am related to Shakespeare. His sister Joan married my ancestor Thomas Hart, and the Hart line continued down to my Grandad, who had three daughters, none of whom kept the family name. So it is in my own personal best interest for Shakespeare to have written Shakespeare and I am therefore a fan of this piece.
I want my writing to be so good that in a thousand years people debate whether it really could've been written by the same person. If Shakespeare is watching us from somewhere I bet he is proud and amused. 😆
No one finds it mysterious that J S Bach, another middle class striver with a non elite education, wrote his works. In Bach's case it's accepted that he came from a musical family and learnt a 'craft' . Shakespeare didn't have the family background in theatre, but he presumably did spend many years learning the 'craft' of theatre as a young man in London. His grammar school Latin verse writing years would have been similar to Bach's transcribing of countless 17th century master works as a teenager. It's hard to see what is unbelievable about one but not the other.
That's because Bach's biography is consonant with his artistic production.
You say "His grammar school Latin verse writing years would have been similar to Bach's transcribing of countless 17th century master works."
See, there you go. "Would" is almost as good as "if" in this case. Shakespeare's books would also have been annotated with notes about his plays, and his letters would also have employed the syntax and vocabulary of the plays and poems.
They would have, but as we don't have any, your comment amounts to another special pleading hinged on the typical Stratfordian wishful think of couldawouldashoulda.
There's no evidence that the Stratford lad attended grammar school, and he clearly never went to college and did not study at the Inns of Court, which means that the manifest legal training of the plays -- once again -- came out of nowhere. And no, they did not teach law, music, or international statecraft at the Grammar school.
And people who don't know better call things they don't understand conspiracy theories, when hey, <<gulf war because weapons of mass destruction>> there are plenty of those that can and do happen like it or not.
Well reasoned and evidenced. I read in essay in the program for Simon Callow’s one man play about Shakespeare that said the only possible reason to even start to question whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare was classicism. It was one of those things that feels completely obvious once you’ve heard it, and I haven’t been able to respect any of the conspiracy theorists since. Though Jacobi is still an incredible actor.
While there are no doubt Americans and other non-Brits who believe the conspiracy, I’d say the anti-Stratford fantasy is rooted in the weirdness of the English class system. It just seems to be important on a deep level to some English people that only a toff could write such works of genius. Hence the contorted arguments which all boil down to ‘How could our national poet be an oik from the provinces?’
We don't argue that he couldn't, just that he more probably did not.
We would all love him to be the guy. But there is very little evidence that he was, and lots more that he was not. Are you saying that persons of noble birth are incapable of genius?
Let me guess. The research will involve diving down rabbit holes excavated by people in the 21st century who know more than Shakespeare’a contemporaries. Odd how it takes a lot of modern crossword solvers to alert us to something that any actor, player or poet in the small world of London in the early 1600s could have mentioned: that a revered contemporary writer was a fraud. But of course, ‘research’ in 2024 figures out this stuff all the time. The 400-year conspiracy can now be revealed.
It’s inconceivable that an outsider like Shakespeare could have pulled off the greatest deceit in cultural history and it taken 400 years for a sniff of it to emerge.
Writing plays was fiercely competitive business with large amounts of money at stake. Shakespeare was attacked for not being a “University Man”; Robert Greene venomously described him as an “upstart crow beautified with our feathers”.
How can anyone with an ounce of common sense believe that all the jealous and insecure rivals watching the ha’pence pouring into Shakespeare’s purse, not theirs every Saturday afternoon, would not have sussed out the deceit and exposed him at the very time when the evidence would have been freshest and most abundant?
Robert Green did not, "venomously" or otherwise, attack Shakespeare in his 1598 "Groatsworth of Wit." As multiple studies published over the last 25 years have shown, most recently Peter Bull in his English Studies (Routledge) article on this question, Green was attacking Edward Alleyn, the bombastic actor manager with whom he was then engaged in a public dispute.
The "Shakespeare" invention here is purely a result of the need to provide some sort of theatrical back-story. So you can give up that argument, or at least do some homework so you understand how wobbly it has become in recent years.
Good point. The conspiracy theorists seem to think that every talkative jealous rival in the playwright business decided to keep their mouth shut instead of exposing the fraudulent Stratford man. Or perhaps they were all fooled by a conspiracy that a bunch of scholars and enthusiasts were somehow able to detect hundreds of years later. It beggars belief.
Um, no. Many persons knew that the authorship of the plays was a secret. They wrote about in multiple publications. The fact that you have not bothered to consult these sources attests to your own willingness to keep opening your mouth without bothering to consult the evidence.
If they knew it was a secret why did they not contest the many contemporary claims that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a patsy, a front? In reality, it was a bunch of Victorian snobs and random literary sleuths who decided, centuries later, that Shakespeare must be a front. Ben Jonson had no problem with the Stratford guy, but that’s hand waved away.
Fwiw, although I hear the argument for snobbery as the reason for their scepticism, it looks to me like the usual incentive to believe against the grain; to feel more insightful and separate from the crowd.
The best summary of this was a wonderful film monologue. I wonder if anyone can name the movie it appeared in?
"The Earl of Oxford published poetry. It wasn’t any good. Had Oxford been able to get a play put on, he would have broken a leg to do it. Can you think of any human being that would for any reason not put his name on “Hamlet”? The Oxfordian thing, the anti- Strafordian thing...what pisses people off...about Shakespeare... What lies behind every controversy...is...rage. Rage over the nature and distribution of talent.
The trouble with writing, if I may bring it up here in the English Department...instead of allowing you all to talk about sexual politics all fucking day long...is that we all do a little of it from time to time, writing, and some of us start to think that well, maybe with a little time, a little peace, a little money in the bank, maybe if we left the old lady and the kids, maybe if we had that room of our own, we might be writers, too. Why do we think that? We accept genius in sports, in painting, as something we cannot do, but it’s no more likely that you can be a writer than you can be an Olympic fucking pole vaulter. Because what you have to be before you try to be a pole vaulter, is a pole vaulter."
The circular argument framed as ‘Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’ arouses those who entire miss the point in uniquely illogical torrents of ad hominems. Minus actual arguments, steeped in the fear of revealing the nakedness of their everyman culture-hero faux-bard, they unpreparedly spout vitriol rather than sense.
The substantial theory that the Earl Of Oxford wrote Shakespeare that sparks purely emotional FU’s and “ludicrouses” and “rubbishes” clearly strikes the nerves of ostrich Stratfordian attack schnauzers because it represents the most evidence-based threat to the Stratford Industrial Complex, and has been developing its evidence in many reputable publications, despite the swarming merry olde England proponents’ efforts to ignore it ever since de Vere was praised by Meres. What seems like war is actually the establishment attempting to preventing a smart minority from pointing out that the sum total of what is known about who Shakespeare was is a house of cards strung together with emotional superglue, like a hollow wasp’s nest defended with neurotoxic troll-wasp. As in any unfair power fight, these provocateurs portray the opposition as prejudice terrorists and reverse-classist incompetents to be silenced, when their own Stratfordian boombox plays on so loudly the same lame tunes ad nauseum and at least some of the public chooses the alternative authorship theory that are both more cerebral and more interesting. Much ado about things the attack mutts know almost nothing about.
By the “Shaksper wrote Shaksper” way of thinking, only glorious Shakespeare among the genius writers was written sans applicable biography, without actual personal experience of his subjects, without a travel to environs used as settings, without education in the classical texts and languages that a Shaksper would have had zero access to. Instead we get a black hole where anything that doesn’t fit or make up the for the total lack of actual manuscripts, letters is denigrated per usual with the simplistic adjectives, “bad”, “lost” or “anonymous.” We all get sucked into the vague and vacuous nothing-burger discussion like this one on Substack that misrepresent the thousands of links between Oxford and Shakespeare wholesale, including the evidence that nothing new, save editorial revisions, happened to the Works after 1604 and ignoring key facts such as the 1623 printed tribute showing Oxford’s family helped make the First Folio happen. Oliver’s screed is just such a carnival of vague adjectives, sins of omission and tired arguments whose time is done.
What happened next is that someone thinking he was a scholar entered the conversation by calling people with a cumulative hundreds of years of experience and thousands of often enlightening publications on the topic in question "conspiracy theorists," proceeded to trot through a list of "facts" that are actually suppositions, and then concluded by quoting the humbug-in-chief Professor Bate and adding the p.s., "stop talking about this."
Maybe that's because you can't see the ground they already hold because you've not even tried to extend yourself enough to get beyond your pejorative defense mechanisms.
O, also, do you always say so much on behalf of your other readers? I realize its dangerous to think that you might have one or two, or even a handful, who wonder why you have to lead your argument with insults, how you skim over the surfaces of problems and issues long known and documented in the history of Shakespeare studies more times that any other but entirely ignored by those still peddling the myth.
I refer for example to the entire disappearance of Shakespeare's library, his correspondence, his personal or literary papers of any kind, dedicatory verses to poems of his literary colleagues, etc. not to mention the psychological implausibility of an author who was a commoner using the word "lord" in 3003 lines, in every one of his plays, and generally coming across as one the "wolfish Earls" that Walt Whitman told us he would be decades before Looney. Stratfordians suffer from an inherited failure to read the works they supposedly object to, or when they do read them, bring to the task such a load of prejudice that they fault the entire argument because they find a t that wasn't crossed or an inconsequential fact to controvert.
It's not an insult to call you a conspiracy theorist. You do believe there is a conspiracy to conceal the identity of Shakespeare. As for the missing library etc, you are committing the base rate fallacy.
Nice projection considering how much is missing on both sides of this argument. The statistical evidence, i.e. documents (the actual Shakespeare Documented texts) of the time do not actually support the Shaks mythos. No dedicatory verses which everyone else wrote.
Where are those?
Why do so many plays have "anonymous" precursor texts that just don't fit the fudged chronology? Because he didn't write them.
So much he did not write and maybe not even his own signature.
It is not a fallacy to expect that a man who created Portia, Lady Macbeth, and Juliet, would teach his daughters to write.
It is a not a fallacy to expect that a man who makes letters major plot elements in 31 of his 36 plays should have written a letter to someone that they bothered to keep.
It is not a fallacy to expect that the elder friend of Ben Jonson, whose surviving library numbers almost 400 books -- many annotated in his handwriting -- and who mentions books in 141 speeches in his plays, and read hundreds of books in preparation for writing his plays, and who writes about "subtle shining secrets" hid in the marginal annotations of books, would have left at least one or two books from his own library, not just the forgeries that have been trotted out by your team over the years only to be discredited on closer inspection.
It is not a fallacy to expect that the greatest living dramatist and poet of the age would have contributed at least one set of dedicatory verses to one work of one of his literary colleagues. 91 writers wrote dedicatory verses for Coryate's Crudities (1609), but again "Shakespeare" is MIA.
So, please cease and desist by doing some research before you persevere.
The logical fallacy is yours. You're arguing to defend an idea you don't understand against people whose work you have not read but persist in flinging insults at.
You may think that your brazen disinformation is not "insulting," but you don't get to make that call, any more than you get to speak for your readers, several of whom have already signaled, in one fashion or another, support for real discussion. Ultimately, your rhetoric is insulting not to others, but to yourself.
But do keep trying to end the discussion. The longer it continues, the more foolish you are going to look.
Michel De Montaigne (1533-1592) - holograph corrections in his own essays.
Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) - travel diaries, letters, etc.
Cervantes (1547-1616) - holograph juvenilia, etc.
Ben Jonson (1574-1638) - 400 books and at least a couple dozen holograph MS and letters.
Edward de Vere (1550-1604) - over 36 letters in his own handwriting, nearly a dozen books, many annotated with notes that later appear in the plays of "Shakespeare"
This is a very short list to which many more examples could be added. Shakespeare did not live in the age of Homer. He lived during the late 16th and early 17th century, eras highly documented from which many documents survive.
But this is merely to focus on the material record. The psychological problems with the orthodox attribution are in the end even more profound and more devastating -- but that is a subject for another day or another post.
I've always been unsympathetic to the claims that Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him. I recall a comment I read some time ago from a literary critic to the effect that the very fact that the supposed evidence against Shakespeare has been used to attribute the works to so many different people suggests that the evidence can't be worth much. And I also found the apparently snobbishness of saying the plays had to have been written by a noble to be grating.
However, I had cause to reconsider that assessment after reading Dennis McCarthy's books, "Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays."
What differentiates McCarthy from other non-Stratfordians is his use of linguistic analysis. It's long been known that Shakespeare lifted large chunks of North's Plutarch and used them in "Antony and Cleopatra." But North's Plutarch was publicly available. One of the odd things McCarthy discovered was that a number of plays show borrowing from North's private writings, like his travel journal, material that Shakespeare had no reasonable way of having even seen, much less the kind of access required for such extensive use. There are also instances of Shakespeare seemingly borrowing from works North hadn't yet published. Particularly with the travel journal, not generally studied in relation to Shakespeare until recently, this is largely new information.
Whether or not Shakespeare could have had the education to write the plays has always struck me as ridiculous. A lot of early success stories were self-educated men. But McCarthy's evidence requires us to believe that Shakespeare was psychic--or that North let a total stranger search through his private papers--at a relatively young age.
Instead of such wild theories, McCarthy makes a plausible claim that North, having fallen on hard times, sold Shakespeare his plays, and Shakespeare later adapted them. That doesn't mean every single word is North's by any means. And it may be that we have some Shakespearian writing--some of the apocryphal plays dismissed as unworthy, even though Shakespeare's name was on the title page, and he never repudiated them. The fact that Shakespeare's own title pages often mention that the work is adapted (rather than written by) is also highly suggestive.
I can't really do justice to the full scope of his argumentation and evidence in a brief space. Instead, I'll refer you to the aforementioned book and to his substack at https://dennismccarthy.substack.com/.
If both of you had the time, it would be wonderful to see a debate between the two of you on this issue.
Actually if you do a numerological analysis of all the words and letters used in Shakespeare’s plays you come to the inescapable conclusion that all of the works attributed to him were actually written by Elvis Presley between 1972 and 1986, when Elvis actually died. (Except Coriolanus, that was written by Bigfoot.)
You jest, but linguistic analysis is a valid tool for considering authorship. Certain resemblances can be dismissed as coincidences, of course, but the more of them pile up, the more persuasive they are. And in particular, when you have long passages almost verbatim, that becomes hard to write off. This is particular true when those resemblances are unique to North and Shakespeare.
The theory isn’t as revolutionary as it might seem. Scholars have long argued for the existence of an Ur-Hamlet. McCarthy produced evidence that North is the author of the Ur-Hamlet text. We know Shakespeare adapted older material. His own title pages confirm that, though he never mentions what he’s adapting—or how much. Is it really that appalling to suppose that he’s adapting a play by North?
That said, I too clung to the notion that the plays had to be primarily Shakespeare’s work. I think it’s easier to accept the North alternative if one takes the full circumstances into account.
We don’t know that much about Shakespeare. We know the dates he did certain things, where he was at certain times, what the names of his family were, certain business transactions. But we know almost nothing about his personality. Hence, his life never really informed our appreciation of his plays.
McCarthy’s theory doesn’t deny Shakespeare any role. North wrote plays, but they never became famous. Presumably, North chose Shakespeare because Shakespeare was a popular writer. (Ironically, this may in part be due to plays that modern critics but consider unworthy but that were crowd pleasers at the time.) So North might be the primary author, But Shakespeare is the one who popularized the material—and eventually, who immortalized it. We would not have the plays if not for Shakespeare. This is true whether he is the primary author or not.
I’m no expert in methodology in this field. I have had some experience as a high school English teacher with textual comparisons.
Over the years, I had a lot of experience with Turnitin.com, which compares student work to a database to determine whether or not a student has plagiarized. Of course, the software only identifies resemblances . It’s up to the instructor to determine whether or not those resemblances are significant. Many are not. They are the result of the use of common words or phrases in some cases. In others, they are the result of the use of vocabulary connected to a specific topic or situation. So yes, the way the instructor interprets the data is critical if one is to draw accurate conclusions from it.
That said, the more resemblances there are, the less likelihood there is that they are coincidental. I’ve looked over the hundreds of resemblances that McCarthy identified in just one of his books. Some could possibly be coincidence, but there are too many and too extensive for coincidence to be a valid explanation for all of them.
The fact that many of them are from North’s private or at-the-time unpublished works considerably narrows the possibilities. I’m not sure what methodology could be applied to the available data that would produce a conclusion different from McCarthy’s.
But there’s no need to take my word for it. McCarthy himself is on Substack, and I know from an earlier email correspondence with him that he’s happy to engage in dialog, both on his evidence and on his approach to it. Certainly, he could defend his work more effectively than I can defend, particularly since I read one of his books some months ago.
I am turning off the comments on this one because too many of them are unconstructive.
If anyone writes a decent piece with the opposing view and send it to me, I will link to it, and probably write a response.
Decent means: don’t go on about who believes your theory or how scholars cover up the evidence. I don’t care what Justice Scalia or Mark Twain believe. I care about the archives! Just lay out the facts of the case. Nor am I linking to anything angry or offensive. If you want to yell about your opponents being assholes who don’t read your work, well, have fun.
My favourite [only] claim to fame is that I am related to Shakespeare. His sister Joan married my ancestor Thomas Hart, and the Hart line continued down to my Grandad, who had three daughters, none of whom kept the family name. So it is in my own personal best interest for Shakespeare to have written Shakespeare and I am therefore a fan of this piece.
No one wants to take that away from you. This will be and should be discussed with more integrity than social media can afford.
I want my writing to be so good that in a thousand years people debate whether it really could've been written by the same person. If Shakespeare is watching us from somewhere I bet he is proud and amused. 😆
THERES JUST NO WAY A SINGLE NORMAL HUMAN BEING WROTE ALL THOSE AMAZING SHITPOSTS
No one finds it mysterious that J S Bach, another middle class striver with a non elite education, wrote his works. In Bach's case it's accepted that he came from a musical family and learnt a 'craft' . Shakespeare didn't have the family background in theatre, but he presumably did spend many years learning the 'craft' of theatre as a young man in London. His grammar school Latin verse writing years would have been similar to Bach's transcribing of countless 17th century master works as a teenager. It's hard to see what is unbelievable about one but not the other.
Hi Richard,
That's because Bach's biography is consonant with his artistic production.
You say "His grammar school Latin verse writing years would have been similar to Bach's transcribing of countless 17th century master works."
See, there you go. "Would" is almost as good as "if" in this case. Shakespeare's books would also have been annotated with notes about his plays, and his letters would also have employed the syntax and vocabulary of the plays and poems.
They would have, but as we don't have any, your comment amounts to another special pleading hinged on the typical Stratfordian wishful think of couldawouldashoulda.
There's no evidence that the Stratford lad attended grammar school, and he clearly never went to college and did not study at the Inns of Court, which means that the manifest legal training of the plays -- once again -- came out of nowhere. And no, they did not teach law, music, or international statecraft at the Grammar school.
Spot on! Genius does attract conspiracies and jealousy!
I often wonder how many geniuses the world could have if we put energy into our own works rather than tearing down those of others.
Sorry that this still needs to be said, that people who should know better are still willing to ignore the evidence in favor of conspiracy theories.
And people who don't know better call things they don't understand conspiracy theories, when hey, <<gulf war because weapons of mass destruction>> there are plenty of those that can and do happen like it or not.
Do you suppose your comment should be classified as dramatic, or cosmic irony?
I love Shakespeare. He's my hero. I've never doubted his identity. And that's all I have to say on the matter!
Well reasoned and evidenced. I read in essay in the program for Simon Callow’s one man play about Shakespeare that said the only possible reason to even start to question whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare was classicism. It was one of those things that feels completely obvious once you’ve heard it, and I haven’t been able to respect any of the conspiracy theorists since. Though Jacobi is still an incredible actor.
While there are no doubt Americans and other non-Brits who believe the conspiracy, I’d say the anti-Stratford fantasy is rooted in the weirdness of the English class system. It just seems to be important on a deep level to some English people that only a toff could write such works of genius. Hence the contorted arguments which all boil down to ‘How could our national poet be an oik from the provinces?’
It’s definitely about snobbery, for sure.
We don't argue that he couldn't, just that he more probably did not.
We would all love him to be the guy. But there is very little evidence that he was, and lots more that he was not. Are you saying that persons of noble birth are incapable of genius?
Some strange ists and isms going on here.
Hmmm.... definitely, except that shoe fits your foot.
I'd say you need to do some research.
Let me guess. The research will involve diving down rabbit holes excavated by people in the 21st century who know more than Shakespeare’a contemporaries. Odd how it takes a lot of modern crossword solvers to alert us to something that any actor, player or poet in the small world of London in the early 1600s could have mentioned: that a revered contemporary writer was a fraud. But of course, ‘research’ in 2024 figures out this stuff all the time. The 400-year conspiracy can now be revealed.
It’s inconceivable that an outsider like Shakespeare could have pulled off the greatest deceit in cultural history and it taken 400 years for a sniff of it to emerge.
Writing plays was fiercely competitive business with large amounts of money at stake. Shakespeare was attacked for not being a “University Man”; Robert Greene venomously described him as an “upstart crow beautified with our feathers”.
How can anyone with an ounce of common sense believe that all the jealous and insecure rivals watching the ha’pence pouring into Shakespeare’s purse, not theirs every Saturday afternoon, would not have sussed out the deceit and exposed him at the very time when the evidence would have been freshest and most abundant?
Robert Green did not, "venomously" or otherwise, attack Shakespeare in his 1598 "Groatsworth of Wit." As multiple studies published over the last 25 years have shown, most recently Peter Bull in his English Studies (Routledge) article on this question, Green was attacking Edward Alleyn, the bombastic actor manager with whom he was then engaged in a public dispute.
The "Shakespeare" invention here is purely a result of the need to provide some sort of theatrical back-story. So you can give up that argument, or at least do some homework so you understand how wobbly it has become in recent years.
Good point. The conspiracy theorists seem to think that every talkative jealous rival in the playwright business decided to keep their mouth shut instead of exposing the fraudulent Stratford man. Or perhaps they were all fooled by a conspiracy that a bunch of scholars and enthusiasts were somehow able to detect hundreds of years later. It beggars belief.
Um, no. Many persons knew that the authorship of the plays was a secret. They wrote about in multiple publications. The fact that you have not bothered to consult these sources attests to your own willingness to keep opening your mouth without bothering to consult the evidence.
If they knew it was a secret why did they not contest the many contemporary claims that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a patsy, a front? In reality, it was a bunch of Victorian snobs and random literary sleuths who decided, centuries later, that Shakespeare must be a front. Ben Jonson had no problem with the Stratford guy, but that’s hand waved away.
Fwiw, although I hear the argument for snobbery as the reason for their scepticism, it looks to me like the usual incentive to believe against the grain; to feel more insightful and separate from the crowd.
Contrarianism is definitely a common motivation, in many different situations.
Also so are mistakes, taboo erasures and misattributions.
The best summary of this was a wonderful film monologue. I wonder if anyone can name the movie it appeared in?
"The Earl of Oxford published poetry. It wasn’t any good. Had Oxford been able to get a play put on, he would have broken a leg to do it. Can you think of any human being that would for any reason not put his name on “Hamlet”? The Oxfordian thing, the anti- Strafordian thing...what pisses people off...about Shakespeare... What lies behind every controversy...is...rage. Rage over the nature and distribution of talent.
The trouble with writing, if I may bring it up here in the English Department...instead of allowing you all to talk about sexual politics all fucking day long...is that we all do a little of it from time to time, writing, and some of us start to think that well, maybe with a little time, a little peace, a little money in the bank, maybe if we left the old lady and the kids, maybe if we had that room of our own, we might be writers, too. Why do we think that? We accept genius in sports, in painting, as something we cannot do, but it’s no more likely that you can be a writer than you can be an Olympic fucking pole vaulter. Because what you have to be before you try to be a pole vaulter, is a pole vaulter."
The circular argument framed as ‘Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’ arouses those who entire miss the point in uniquely illogical torrents of ad hominems. Minus actual arguments, steeped in the fear of revealing the nakedness of their everyman culture-hero faux-bard, they unpreparedly spout vitriol rather than sense.
The substantial theory that the Earl Of Oxford wrote Shakespeare that sparks purely emotional FU’s and “ludicrouses” and “rubbishes” clearly strikes the nerves of ostrich Stratfordian attack schnauzers because it represents the most evidence-based threat to the Stratford Industrial Complex, and has been developing its evidence in many reputable publications, despite the swarming merry olde England proponents’ efforts to ignore it ever since de Vere was praised by Meres. What seems like war is actually the establishment attempting to preventing a smart minority from pointing out that the sum total of what is known about who Shakespeare was is a house of cards strung together with emotional superglue, like a hollow wasp’s nest defended with neurotoxic troll-wasp. As in any unfair power fight, these provocateurs portray the opposition as prejudice terrorists and reverse-classist incompetents to be silenced, when their own Stratfordian boombox plays on so loudly the same lame tunes ad nauseum and at least some of the public chooses the alternative authorship theory that are both more cerebral and more interesting. Much ado about things the attack mutts know almost nothing about.
By the “Shaksper wrote Shaksper” way of thinking, only glorious Shakespeare among the genius writers was written sans applicable biography, without actual personal experience of his subjects, without a travel to environs used as settings, without education in the classical texts and languages that a Shaksper would have had zero access to. Instead we get a black hole where anything that doesn’t fit or make up the for the total lack of actual manuscripts, letters is denigrated per usual with the simplistic adjectives, “bad”, “lost” or “anonymous.” We all get sucked into the vague and vacuous nothing-burger discussion like this one on Substack that misrepresent the thousands of links between Oxford and Shakespeare wholesale, including the evidence that nothing new, save editorial revisions, happened to the Works after 1604 and ignoring key facts such as the 1623 printed tribute showing Oxford’s family helped make the First Folio happen. Oliver’s screed is just such a carnival of vague adjectives, sins of omission and tired arguments whose time is done.
You complainan about ad hominem attacks, then spend your entire rebuttal attacking straw men with the most condescending tone possible.
You are a hypocrite. And, worse, you wasted all those words without actually countering the arguments in the original article. You failed.
What happened next is that someone thinking he was a scholar entered the conversation by calling people with a cumulative hundreds of years of experience and thousands of often enlightening publications on the topic in question "conspiracy theorists," proceeded to trot through a list of "facts" that are actually suppositions, and then concluded by quoting the humbug-in-chief Professor Bate and adding the p.s., "stop talking about this."
You'll have to do better than that, Henry Oliver.
I don’t see the anti Stratfordians winning any ground here…
Maybe that's because you can't see the ground they already hold because you've not even tried to extend yourself enough to get beyond your pejorative defense mechanisms.
O, also, do you always say so much on behalf of your other readers? I realize its dangerous to think that you might have one or two, or even a handful, who wonder why you have to lead your argument with insults, how you skim over the surfaces of problems and issues long known and documented in the history of Shakespeare studies more times that any other but entirely ignored by those still peddling the myth.
I refer for example to the entire disappearance of Shakespeare's library, his correspondence, his personal or literary papers of any kind, dedicatory verses to poems of his literary colleagues, etc. not to mention the psychological implausibility of an author who was a commoner using the word "lord" in 3003 lines, in every one of his plays, and generally coming across as one the "wolfish Earls" that Walt Whitman told us he would be decades before Looney. Stratfordians suffer from an inherited failure to read the works they supposedly object to, or when they do read them, bring to the task such a load of prejudice that they fault the entire argument because they find a t that wasn't crossed or an inconsequential fact to controvert.
It's not an insult to call you a conspiracy theorist. You do believe there is a conspiracy to conceal the identity of Shakespeare. As for the missing library etc, you are committing the base rate fallacy.
Nice projection considering how much is missing on both sides of this argument. The statistical evidence, i.e. documents (the actual Shakespeare Documented texts) of the time do not actually support the Shaks mythos. No dedicatory verses which everyone else wrote.
Where are those?
Why do so many plays have "anonymous" precursor texts that just don't fit the fudged chronology? Because he didn't write them.
So much he did not write and maybe not even his own signature.
No one wrote any dedications for Shaks either.
Henry,
Interesting theory.
It is not a fallacy to expect that a man who created Portia, Lady Macbeth, and Juliet, would teach his daughters to write.
It is a not a fallacy to expect that a man who makes letters major plot elements in 31 of his 36 plays should have written a letter to someone that they bothered to keep.
It is not a fallacy to expect that the elder friend of Ben Jonson, whose surviving library numbers almost 400 books -- many annotated in his handwriting -- and who mentions books in 141 speeches in his plays, and read hundreds of books in preparation for writing his plays, and who writes about "subtle shining secrets" hid in the marginal annotations of books, would have left at least one or two books from his own library, not just the forgeries that have been trotted out by your team over the years only to be discredited on closer inspection.
It is not a fallacy to expect that the greatest living dramatist and poet of the age would have contributed at least one set of dedicatory verses to one work of one of his literary colleagues. 91 writers wrote dedicatory verses for Coryate's Crudities (1609), but again "Shakespeare" is MIA.
So, please cease and desist by doing some research before you persevere.
The logical fallacy is yours. You're arguing to defend an idea you don't understand against people whose work you have not read but persist in flinging insults at.
You may think that your brazen disinformation is not "insulting," but you don't get to make that call, any more than you get to speak for your readers, several of whom have already signaled, in one fashion or another, support for real discussion. Ultimately, your rhetoric is insulting not to others, but to yourself.
But do keep trying to end the discussion. The longer it continues, the more foolish you are going to look.
missing correspondence? dude we don't have the majority of THOMAS CROMWELL'S LETTERS
Stop cherry-picking your evidence.
Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Notice any difference?
We have surviving literary documents from
Michel De Montaigne (1533-1592) - holograph corrections in his own essays.
Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) - travel diaries, letters, etc.
Cervantes (1547-1616) - holograph juvenilia, etc.
Ben Jonson (1574-1638) - 400 books and at least a couple dozen holograph MS and letters.
Edward de Vere (1550-1604) - over 36 letters in his own handwriting, nearly a dozen books, many annotated with notes that later appear in the plays of "Shakespeare"
This is a very short list to which many more examples could be added. Shakespeare did not live in the age of Homer. He lived during the late 16th and early 17th century, eras highly documented from which many documents survive.
But this is merely to focus on the material record. The psychological problems with the orthodox attribution are in the end even more profound and more devastating -- but that is a subject for another day or another post.
💯
I've always been unsympathetic to the claims that Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him. I recall a comment I read some time ago from a literary critic to the effect that the very fact that the supposed evidence against Shakespeare has been used to attribute the works to so many different people suggests that the evidence can't be worth much. And I also found the apparently snobbishness of saying the plays had to have been written by a noble to be grating.
However, I had cause to reconsider that assessment after reading Dennis McCarthy's books, "Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays."
What differentiates McCarthy from other non-Stratfordians is his use of linguistic analysis. It's long been known that Shakespeare lifted large chunks of North's Plutarch and used them in "Antony and Cleopatra." But North's Plutarch was publicly available. One of the odd things McCarthy discovered was that a number of plays show borrowing from North's private writings, like his travel journal, material that Shakespeare had no reasonable way of having even seen, much less the kind of access required for such extensive use. There are also instances of Shakespeare seemingly borrowing from works North hadn't yet published. Particularly with the travel journal, not generally studied in relation to Shakespeare until recently, this is largely new information.
Whether or not Shakespeare could have had the education to write the plays has always struck me as ridiculous. A lot of early success stories were self-educated men. But McCarthy's evidence requires us to believe that Shakespeare was psychic--or that North let a total stranger search through his private papers--at a relatively young age.
Instead of such wild theories, McCarthy makes a plausible claim that North, having fallen on hard times, sold Shakespeare his plays, and Shakespeare later adapted them. That doesn't mean every single word is North's by any means. And it may be that we have some Shakespearian writing--some of the apocryphal plays dismissed as unworthy, even though Shakespeare's name was on the title page, and he never repudiated them. The fact that Shakespeare's own title pages often mention that the work is adapted (rather than written by) is also highly suggestive.
I can't really do justice to the full scope of his argumentation and evidence in a brief space. Instead, I'll refer you to the aforementioned book and to his substack at https://dennismccarthy.substack.com/.
If both of you had the time, it would be wonderful to see a debate between the two of you on this issue.
Actually if you do a numerological analysis of all the words and letters used in Shakespeare’s plays you come to the inescapable conclusion that all of the works attributed to him were actually written by Elvis Presley between 1972 and 1986, when Elvis actually died. (Except Coriolanus, that was written by Bigfoot.)
You jest, but linguistic analysis is a valid tool for considering authorship. Certain resemblances can be dismissed as coincidences, of course, but the more of them pile up, the more persuasive they are. And in particular, when you have long passages almost verbatim, that becomes hard to write off. This is particular true when those resemblances are unique to North and Shakespeare.
The theory isn’t as revolutionary as it might seem. Scholars have long argued for the existence of an Ur-Hamlet. McCarthy produced evidence that North is the author of the Ur-Hamlet text. We know Shakespeare adapted older material. His own title pages confirm that, though he never mentions what he’s adapting—or how much. Is it really that appalling to suppose that he’s adapting a play by North?
That said, I too clung to the notion that the plays had to be primarily Shakespeare’s work. I think it’s easier to accept the North alternative if one takes the full circumstances into account.
We don’t know that much about Shakespeare. We know the dates he did certain things, where he was at certain times, what the names of his family were, certain business transactions. But we know almost nothing about his personality. Hence, his life never really informed our appreciation of his plays.
McCarthy’s theory doesn’t deny Shakespeare any role. North wrote plays, but they never became famous. Presumably, North chose Shakespeare because Shakespeare was a popular writer. (Ironically, this may in part be due to plays that modern critics but consider unworthy but that were crowd pleasers at the time.) So North might be the primary author, But Shakespeare is the one who popularized the material—and eventually, who immortalized it. We would not have the plays if not for Shakespeare. This is true whether he is the primary author or not.
If only McCarthy had any real methodology, he might be right.
I’m no expert in methodology in this field. I have had some experience as a high school English teacher with textual comparisons.
Over the years, I had a lot of experience with Turnitin.com, which compares student work to a database to determine whether or not a student has plagiarized. Of course, the software only identifies resemblances . It’s up to the instructor to determine whether or not those resemblances are significant. Many are not. They are the result of the use of common words or phrases in some cases. In others, they are the result of the use of vocabulary connected to a specific topic or situation. So yes, the way the instructor interprets the data is critical if one is to draw accurate conclusions from it.
That said, the more resemblances there are, the less likelihood there is that they are coincidental. I’ve looked over the hundreds of resemblances that McCarthy identified in just one of his books. Some could possibly be coincidence, but there are too many and too extensive for coincidence to be a valid explanation for all of them.
The fact that many of them are from North’s private or at-the-time unpublished works considerably narrows the possibilities. I’m not sure what methodology could be applied to the available data that would produce a conclusion different from McCarthy’s.
But there’s no need to take my word for it. McCarthy himself is on Substack, and I know from an earlier email correspondence with him that he’s happy to engage in dialog, both on his evidence and on his approach to it. Certainly, he could defend his work more effectively than I can defend, particularly since I read one of his books some months ago.