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... last twenty years, has made a comeback, especially in the United States, enjoying certain respectability even in some academic circles. Wells and Taylor were largely argued upon their trial to give a clear answer to the question ahead. So, if not Shakespeare of Stratford, then who? Probably the strongest candidate is Edward de Vere, 17 th Earl of Oxford (1550 - 1604), whose biography as the putative author of Shakespeare's plays appears almost too good to be true. Inheritor of the senior earldom in England, and as such hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain, he was educated at Cambridge and studied law at Grays Inn.
Brought up in the household of Lord Burghley (1520 - 98), his future father-in-law, with its library of nearly 3, 000 books, he was tutored by his uncle Arthur Golding, the translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from which many of Shakespeare's plays are derived. Oxford traveled on the Continent, spending a year in Italy. He was known in his lifetime as a successful playwright and poet, although little of his work survives, and the surviving poems in his own name stop soon after the name Shake-speared (as he was often known) first appeared in print. He held a lease on Blackfriars Theatre and had his own acting company, although much of his life remains a mystery. In 1605 Oxfords daughter was married to the Earl of Montgomery, to whom the First Folio was jointly dedicated (along with William Herbert, 3 rd Earl of Pembroke). The case for was first made in 1920 by a schoolmaster, John Thomas Looney, in a work entitled Shakespeare Identified.
Looneys book was praised by a host of enthusiasts who gradually made Oxford the most popular of the Shakespeare claimants, replacing Bacon. The most convincing evidence for the Oxford claim and what is really firming Wells and Taylors main argument emerges from the Sonnets, which seem to many to be related to incidents in the authors life, although precisely what these were is a complete mystery. The Sonnets were first published in 1609, in a limited edition with an inscrutable dedication about which more has been written than anything of its kind in the Shakespeare canon. Many historians believe that they were written in the early 1590 s (or even before). Certainly in 1598 a London schoolmaster commented on Shakespeare's sure Sonnets among his private friends.
The 1609 edition of the Sonnets includes a series of recommendations from the poet, apparently to an aristocrat, to marry and father children. Most historians believe that the addressee was Henry Wriothesley, 3 rd Earl of Southampton (1573 - 1624), to whom Shakespeare dedicated his poems Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. Sonnet 10 asks the man addressed to Make thee another self for love of me. Many of the Sonnets speak of the poet as old and lame, and as one who has recently suffered shame and ignominy. The homoerotic nature of some of the early Sonnets remains a highly controversial point. It is simply inconceivable that, in Elizabethan England, the actor son of a butcher would urge a powerful earl to marry and beget children for love of me.
Shakespeare of Stratford was plainly not homosexual: he was married at eighteen and had fathered three children by the age of twenty-one. Moreover, the tone of this Sonnet is utterly different from the flattery and abject self-abasement found elsewhere in Shakespeare's dedications to Southampton. The Sonnets repeatedly demonstrate a familiarity with a range of subjects from classical literature to the aristocratic high life. If they were written around 1592 - 94, as many believe, it is difficult to see why Shakespeare, who was twenty-eight in 1592, would describe himself as old There is no evidence from any source that he was lame, or that he suffered from shame and ignominy (apart from the attack on him in Robert Greene's posthumous 1592 work Groatsworth of Wit); his alleged close association with an earl is evidence that the opposite was true. Although Shakespeare of Stratford dedicated two of his works to Southampton, no direct links between the two men have ever been found, and there is no contemporary evidence (as opposed to anecdotes from much later) that Southampton ever heard of Shakespeare. Those who believe that the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare, however, argue that the Sonnets fit his life like a glove.
Oxford was born in April 1550, and was thus in his forties when the Sonnets were probably written (Sonnet 2 begins When forty winters shall besiege thy brow). He was, apparently, lame, knew the shame of having been banished from court and of being sent to the Tower (for his involvement with Catholics), and was accused in 1576 by the courtier Charles Arundel of being a buggered of boys. In 1590 he tried unsuccessfully to arrange a marriage between his daughter Elizabeth (who was also Lord Burghley's granddaughter) and Lord Southampton. Skeptics have suggested a number of alternative explanations to account for the Sonnets and the Oxford edition main argument.
Some historians-most notably Katharine M. Wilson, in Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets (1974) -have claimed that they were merely a series of imaginative poems on a number of themes, for whatever reason, proposed to him as subjects to write about. Others have claimed that the Sonnets were autobiographical, but were written as if by Southampton's mother (who could ask her son to marry for love of me), or were written in the 1600 s rather than in the previous decade, with one of the dedicated of the First Folio in 1623, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580 - 1630) in mind, not Lord Southampton. Proponents of Oxford as Shakespeare also claim his identity can be detected in Shakespeare's most famous play, Hamlet.
They argue that Polonius is a caricature of Lord Burghley, Oxfords father-in-law. As in the case of the Sonnets, it seems improbable that Shakespeare of Stratford would have dared to lampoon Burghley as occurs in the play (where Polonius is stabbed to death by Hamlet). Ernest Jones, the pioneer psychiatrist, attempted in 1910 to depict Hamlet as suffering from an Oedipus complex, and saw the date of Shakespeare's fathers death (September 1601) as significant in the writing of the play. But the differences between the story of Hamlet and Shakespeare's life are surely immense and his father was certainly not murdered. Furthermore, Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, referred in 1589 to whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches, indicating that a play by this name was performed in that year and probably at least a few years earlier. Known to scholars today as Ur-Hamlet, this lost play is often attributed to Thomas Kyd, a playwright mentioned by Thomas Nashe in the same paragraph, although there is no evidence that he was the author.
Shakespeare's Hamlet was first registered in 1602. He may have borrowed the theme for his play from this earlier drama, but this is unlike his working methods, and some believe that Shakespeare himself, rather than Kyd, was the author of the earlier play. The problem here is that Shakespeare was only twenty-five in 1589, and younger if the play was written earlier. Proponents of Oxford as Shakespeare argue that many of the plays were actually written much earlier than the normal chronology, beginning in the early 1580 s, and point out that there were many Ur plays in circulation, too early for Shakespeare (b. 1564) to have written them, but not too early for Oxford (b. 1550). Numerous other links between Shakespeare's plays and Oxford have been postulated. Oxford invested and lost 3, 000 pounds sterling with a London merchant named Michael Lok (or Lock), possibly the prototype of Shylock, which is unknown in Jewish nomenclature.
In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio posts bond for 3, 000 ducats with Shylock, with a pound of flesh as security. Yet, as viewed by many scholars who questioned Wells and Taylors document, a lot of obstacles also exist to accepting Oxford as Shakespeare. The most formidable is the fact that Oxford died in June 1604 while Shakespeare continued to write plays probably until 1613 - 14. According to most mainstream chronologies, as many as ten plays (as well as the Sonnets) first appeared after 1604. Oxfords supporters claim that no new play appeared between 1604 and 1608, and that no contemporary reference in any of Shakespeare's plays can be dated after 1603. They also point to the celebrated, mysterious dedication of the Sonnets by T.
T. (Thomas Thorpe, its publisher), which wishes all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever living poet to the enigmatic dedicated, Mr. W. H... Oxfordians (and others) point out that ever living was used by Elizabethans only of someone already deceased, which Oxford-unlike Shakespeare-was in 1609, when the Sonnets appeared. They claim that the plays first performed after 1604 were all written earlier and, as it were, released after Oxfords death. But is there anything that actually ties Oxford to Shakespeare's plays?
The Folger Library in Washington DC owns Oxfords 1579 Bible, which contains about 1, 000 underlined or marked passages and forty marginal notes, apparently in the Earls handwriting. In 1992 a detailed examination of these annotations was made by Roger Stritmatter and Mark Anderson, two American Oxfordians, who found that more than a quarter of the marked passages in the Wells and Taylor work turned up as direct references in Shakespeare's plays, among them more than a hundred references that had not previously been noted by Shakespearean scholars, but which are clearly or probably the sources of Shakespeare's phraseology. According to Oxfordians (and to proponents of other Shakespeare's), the William of Stratford was an actor, play broker, and businessman who was manifestly incapable of writing the plays attributed to him, but whose actual role was to serve as a front man and producer of the plays, lending his name to them because their real author, a nobleman or high official, could not write directly under his own name for the theatre. Hints that Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author were given at the time: for instance, the name of the alleged author appears as Shake-space in fifteen out of thirty-three plays published before the First Folio appeared, as well as in the first publication of the Sonnets and many other references. Shakespeare's name was never hyphenated in any legal or commercial document clearly relating to the Stratford man, while no other Elizabethan author had his name spelled in this manner.
Had the plays and poems been written anonymously, it seems likely that today Oxford would be the leading candidate for their authorship, and that no one would argue that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays. Many suppose that the authorship question is a relic of nineteenth-century autodidact ism and has been superseded by contemporary historical criticism several university courses in America now at least experiment with the proposition that Oxford wrote the plays. Balanced articles that came out in return to Oxfords edition on Complete Plays on the Shakespeare authorship question have appeared in recent years in mainstream American magazines and on American public television. A similar organized movement has grown up in Britain (headed by the Earl of Burford, a descendant of Oxford), although it has not yet wholly discarded its eccentric label, as its counterpart in America seems to have done.
It also carries extracts from the works of Bacon and Shakespeare. Baconians naturally regard it as highly significant, but skeptics believe it is simply a list of works in a library, possibly, therefore, showing that Bacon was not Shakespeare. Baconians also point to one of the few contemporary sources which apparently question whether Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, the Satires of Joseph Hall (1597 - 98), which apparently claim that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Additionally, in 1985 a remarkable wall painting was discovered by workmen renovating an old inn in St Albans, where Bacon lived. Dated to about 1600, it apparently depicts the hunt scene in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Baconians have also pointed out that St Albans is mentioned fifteen times in Shakespeare's works, whereas Stratford never is. Had this wall painting been discovered in an old inn in Stratford-upon-Avon, it would, of course, be taken as strong evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays.
There are further candidates. William Stanley, 6 th Earl of Derby (1561 - 1642), has had his supporters since the publication of a 1918 work by a French scholar arguing the case for him, in part because of his intimate knowledge of the Court of Navarre, the scene of Loves Labor Lost. Roger Manners, 5 th Earl of Rutland (1576 - 1612), has his proponents. The candidacy of Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 93, ) has been argued for many years.
It became well-known in 1955 with the publication of a book by the American Calvin Hoffman, who argued, without a shred of evidence, that Marlowe was not in fact killed in a tavern brawl at the age of twenty-nine, but survived surreptitiously to write Shakespeare's plays. Among other suggestions is one that a group of authors, possibly headed by Bacon, wrote Shakespeare's works. Against this, however, is the fact that all of Shakespeare's works are similar in style. It is seen that Wells and Taylor have created a valid argument knowing that most historians of Shakespeare will, unquestionably, continue to believe the orthodox view, that the poorly educated man from the obscure market town was the author of the greatest works of English literature.
The fact that contemporaries apparently took for granted that Shakespeare was the author is crucial here, as is the fact that Shakespeare's dramatic style can be seen to evolve from the crude grand guinea of Titus Andronicus to the majestic tragedies of the 1600 s-Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. Yet the thesis that someone else was the author, and the Stratford man a front or agent of some kind, is not at all absurd. What is certain is that the authorship question is unlikely ever to be settled comprehensively, and may well become more heated in the future than it has been in 1986 and before. Bibliography: Schoenbaum, Scott. Shakespeare's Lives; John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1998. Honan, Park.
Shakespeare: a Life; Random House, New York, 2000. Michel, John. Who Wrote the Shakespeare? ; Milsbro Publishing, London, 1996. Price, Diana. Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography; Westport, Connecticut, 2001.
Sobran, Joseph. Shakespeare; Boston Inc. , Boston, 1996. Taylor, Henry. Shakespeare Reshaped 1606 - 1623; Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1987. Taylor, Henry. Wells Stanley.
William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion; OxformUP, Oxford, 1997. Boyce, Charles. Shakespeare A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Plays; Facts on File, New York, 1990. Campbell, Oscar James.
The Readers Encyclopedia of Shakespeare. ; Crowell Express, New York, 1966. Davis, J. Madison. The Shakespeare Name Dictionary; Garland, New York, 1995. Evans, Gareth. The Shakespeare Companion; Scribner's, New York, 1978.
Holman, Hugh C. A Handbook to Literature; 6 th ed. , Macmillan, New York, 1992. Dobson, Michael. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001. Andrews, John F. , ed. William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence. ; Random House, Chicago, 1985.
Davis, J. Madison. The Shakespeare Name Dictionary; Edwards, New York, 1998. Thomson, Wilfrid H. Shakespeare's Characters: a Historical Dictionary. ; De Galla Publishers, London, 1989. Baker, Arthur E.
A Shakespeare Commentary. ; Dutch, Boston, 1957. Barrett, John. Shakespeare: a Real Author? ; Scribner's, New York, 1996. Wells, Stanley. De Grazia, Margaret.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare; Oxford UP, Oxford, 2001. De Loach, Charles. The Quotable Shakespeare: a Topical Dictionary. ; Milsboro, London, 1988. Dominic, Catherine.
Shakespeare's Characters for Students. ; Academic Press, New York, 1997. Halliday, Frank E. A Shakespeare Companion. ; Irwin Mc Gro-Hill, Illinois, 2001. Palmer, Alan w. Whos Who in Shakespeare England. ; Penguin, London, 1998.
Kasten, David, ed. A Companion to Shakespeare. ; Minnesota Publishers, Minneapolis, 1995.
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