I write this blog on the heels of the new "Shakespeare" movie Anonymous, a historically inaccurate film containing at least five conspiracy theories. The protagonist is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, praised by literary "birthers" as the true author of Shakespeare's work. The Oxfordian theory has continued to be a popular theory, however easily dismissed.
In an effort to do my academic duty to save young minds from going astray, I present to you ten of the most obvious reasons that William Shakespeare is the author of the works of William Shakespeare.
1. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford was dead in 1604.
Thirteen of Shakespeare's plays date from 1604 until 1613, nine years after Oxford's burial in an unmarked grave. Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, the Tempest and Coriolanus are included among the thirteen.
2. The plays fit a post-1604 chronology.
Popular aesthetic tastes can change over time. The miracle plays, revenge tragedies and English history plays, popular to the Elizabethan theatre, eventually gave way to new urban comedies, tragicomedies, and masques of the Jacobean theatre. Additionally, Elizabeth's Scottish successor inspired British themed plays, whereas under Elizabeth, English history plays would do.
Just as the music of the Beatles changed in the course of their career, following popular tastes and their own personal development, thus Shakespeare evolved to fit his time and his artistic ambitions as well. In short, these post-Oxford plays were written and staged when they would have been marketable for the theatre company.
3. Shakespeare could have written great plays without a college education.
Many anti-Stratfordians point to Shakespeare's mere grammar school education as a reason to disqualify him as the author of his own plays. Many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Ben Jonson, arguably the more celebrated playwright during the era, did not receive a college education either. In fact, Jonson, a leading classical scholar of his age, became the first poet laureate.
Jonson was the son of a bricklayer and started out in that trade. Shakespeare came from a similar humble beginning. Both men went to local grammar schools as children and dominated the stage as adults.
4. The poems of the Earl of Oxford are buried under a sea of greater poets.
Oxford wrote plays, but no one cared to saved them. However, sixteen of Oxford's poems remain. Oxford's poems are nearly universally overshadowed by those of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Sidney, Daniel, Ralegh (or Raleigh), Greville, Watson, Drayton, Davies, Barnes, Campion, Donne and others. In fact, I have rarely come upon an Elizabethan anthology with any poem by Oxford. As Harold Bloom states in his Best Poems of the English Language, Oxford's "pale lyrics show that the great aristocrat could not write his way out of a paper bag."
5. Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia.
Meres wrote a discourse in 1598 comparing English poetry and plays to ancient Greek and Latin counterparts. Oxford and Shakespeare are among the many playwrights mentioned. As James Shapiro points out in Contested Will, this should be very convincing in separating their identities, as they are clearly distinguished from one another.
In the section, "best for comedy," we have Oxford mentioned first, followed by many other authors, including Shakespeare. In "best for tragedy," we have Shakespeare among the notables, but Oxford does not make the cut. In fact, Shakespeare is the only playwright singled out in both categories, while the rest seem to have their single area of competency. I surmise that the only reason Oxford tops the list on comedy is his noble rank. Perhaps, this might be the only reason Meres includes him at all.
6. Robert Greene dedicates a play to Oxford and attacks Shakespeare in a pamphlet.
I have not seen any scholars bring this up, but I noticed this the other day. College-educated playwright Robert Greene dedicated his Gwydonius to the Earl of Oxford. However, Greene had no qualms in attacking Shakespeare in a deathbed pamphlet, berating Shakespeare as an upstart bumpkin reaching beyond his station.
This fits in well with what we know about Shakespeare. Clearly an ambitious man of humble origins, he receives a coat-of-arms, becomes a part-owner of a player's company, eventually with King James as company patron, and buys the largest house in Stratford and the prestigious Blackfriar's gatehouse in London.
Again, Shakespeare and Oxford are separated. This attack by Greene would not be made on a nobleman.
7. Shakespeare had an imperfect knowledge of Latin and royal court life.
Oxfordians believe that Shakespeare's use of Latin and court life in his plays adds to the probability of a nobleman as the author of the plays.
To begin with, Shakespeare's Latin and Greek were imperfect. Ben Jonson mentions Shakespeare's scholastic failings ("and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek") in his dedicatory poem to his great peer's 1623 folio.
Secondly, John Dryden, a later playwright often at court, recognized Shakespeare's plays as ignorant of court life. Muriel St. Claire Byrne wrote an essay in A Companion to Shakespeare Studies enumerating Shakespeare's mistakes involving court life.
This would easily eliminate a Cambridge-educated nobleman from being Shakespeare.
8. Shakespeare's rivals, friends, and peers refer to Shakespeare as the great poet.
Ben Jonson, Francis Meres, Henry Chettle, Robert Greene, Richard Barnfield, Gabriel Harvey, Francis Beaumont (best-friend of John Fletcher, one of Shakespeare's collaborators) are among the many people known to have written about or alluded to Shakespeare.
9. An earlier Earl of Oxford fights in a battle he did not fight in.
James Shapiro mentions this in his Contested Will. In the third part of Henry VI, an ancestor of the Earl of Oxford fights at the battle of Tewkesbury, is captured and imprisoned as a traitor. If Oxford had written the play, he would have undoubtedly known that his ancestor was not in the battle nor would he have shown him in such an unfavorable situation. Shakespeare is likely to have made such base errors.
10. The Epilogue reveals the author of Henry IV as a social inferior.
Shakespeare wrote an epilogue to the end of the second part of Henry IV when the play was staged for Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall palace. As James Shapiro notes, the author addresses the aristocratic audience from a socially inferior position. An aristocratic peer would never address his equals in this manner. Therefore, the creator of Falstaff could not have been the Earl of Oxford; however, Oxford may have been an awe-struck fan of William Shakespeare at the palace of Whitehall.
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education. It's happened a lot in this world.
Thanks, Jon.
. 5) Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598) recognizes both Shakespeare (great) and Oxford (not as great). Look at the list of ancients versus moderns. There are sixteen ancient authors, seventeen moderns, Oxford #1, Shakespeare #9. Two of the seventeen modern were the same man to balance the riddle in the listing. Who? Oxford was known as EO, Earl of Oxford. IO in Italian is pronounced EO. Io looks like 10. 1+9=10, Earl of Oxford. Such were the secret games they played and we don't know, especially when the assumption is Shakspere=Shakespeare. (Robert Detobel's work solving this.) 6) Robert Greene attacks "Shake-scene" as upstart crow, a Tiger's heart wrapped in an actor's hide, etc. Wrong this was Shakspere. Edward Alleyn was the upstart and later got too big for theater even, started a college. He had spoken the Henry Vi, pt3 line 'Tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide'. He extemporized lines, another Greene complaint. Nothing to do with Shakspere. These wrong-headed references were scraps to somehow tie Shakspere into the literary scene. Apparently the pseudonym used for Venus and Adonis was transferred for play use too, since Burghley Oxford's arch censor had died the month before.
Greene's attack is obviously Shakespeare. It's in reference to someone, from a less prestigious background, in the same profession as Greene and his peers. The wordplay with the line from the play, and with Shakespeare's name, make this more probable that this was about Shakespeare. Later, you have an apology letter written by Chettle, for Greene who had died, and he mentioned the playwrights that had been attacked in Greene's pamphlet. Alleyn was a great actor, but wasn't a playwright.
Your "obviously" doesn't stand up. The information you need to be knowledgable is not in the usual curriculum, because mainstream biographical study of Shakespeare is discouraged.
Well if you were writing this as propaganda for the masses why wouldn't you want to pretend to be a social inferior. But I haven't heard of this comment before so can't really offer more of an opinion.
11. Geography mistakes
I added this as it is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. If this is about taking a boat between two landlocked cities, Verona and Milan, that wasn't a mistake. These two cities were connected by canal in the 16th century. It was the easiest and safest way to move goods at the time. The other popular "mistake" is Bohemia having a seacoast. For most of its history it was landlocked but when Oxford visited Italy Bohemia did have a seacoast. This lasted for a short period under the rein of Rudolf II from 1576-1609.
Bohemia never had a seacost, before or after Pangaea. Bohemia is approximately coterminous with the Czech Republic. Bohemia was ruled by Austria for much of its history, Rudolf during Shakespeare's time as you say, and Austria had a seacoast. I'm not sure if it did then, unless it possessed Dalmatia, but that may have been later. Even then, it would have been an Austrian seacoast. Bohemia and Austria were always separate kingdoms until the 1800s. That is a geographical error that courtier would have been unlikely to make. Look at Bohemia during anytime of it's history, including pre-history, you will not see a coast line.
We know that he managed an acting troupe called Oxford's Boys and that he held a lease on the Globe rival, Blackfriar's. We know that he COMPOSED, directed and acted in plays under his own name with that troupe. He published poetry under his own name. Why then, did he publish the sonnets (vastly superior to his surviving work) under the name Shakespeare? Why did he give his chief competition (this was a man always struggling for money) all of his plays- even the comedies- even though he was writing other plays under his own name? Shakespeare's plays were by and large not as controversial as many others of the period. He got in almost no trouble over them, so it's not the political content. I just don't buy DeVere's motivation and I do buy the signifcant evidence we have for Shakespeare. He is in fact, much more documented as a man and a poet/playwright than Marlowe, Webster, and a host of others.
Yes the Earl of Oxford at Tewkesbury is rather curious. What would have been the point of changing history that way although it wasn't unusual for the author. Maybe it could have been to hide the fact that the 17th Earl of Oxford was the author. In contrast we have Robert, Earl of Oxford who was responsible for many of the troubles Richard II had and was later executed. He was completely written out of Richard II except for brief mention of his execution.
2. He was an undergrad at Cambridge.
None of the allusions to Shakespeare can be proved to be anything other than a reference to a name on a title page. Again, saying Mark Twain wrote Mark Twain tells us nothing about the real person who wrote Huckleberry Finn. Same thing with these mentions of Shakespeare. It isn't until the First Folio that anything can be said to connect the man from Stratford to the name Shakespeare on the title page. Those are Jonson's "Sweet Swan of Avon" and Digge's "Thy Stratford Moniment". But even this is open to interpretation as there are several Avon around (avon is Celtic for river) and besides the Stratford we know there was a Stratford near London. The reference to a monument is curious too since we have evidence the monument in Stratford was tampered with years later to put a quill in the person's hand. Before that the monument looked like a man with a sack of wool. The Stratford man's father was a wool merchant. There is good evidence the monument was originally his and not William's.
There are at least two surviving letters mentioning visiting the monument within 20 or so years of Shakespeare's death. One refers to the famous Shakespeare, the other to the famous poet Shakespeare. No one at the time was confused. If there was such a huge conspiracy to cover up Oxford's authorship, why on earth would they have muffed this up so entirely?
Here's what Jonson said:
"I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell, how far thou didst our Lily out-shine,
Or sporting Kid, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou had small Latin, and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, "
It is possible that who is being referring to is Kid, Marlowe and Lily. Depends on how you interpret the "from thence" in the next line. Regardless, given the author's documented knowledge of untranslated Latin and Greek texts this one line doesn't really seem to mean what it says. Jonson is known for his ambiguity.
The page you reference from a long ago news group discussion on court life isn't at all conclusive. Byrne says: "What Shakespeare either did not know, or else deliberately rejected for dramatic purposes, was the circumstance and order of life in a royal household. By ignorance or design -- more probably a mixture of both -- he has given us a romantic picture. "
What Byrne says sounds pretty conclusive to me. It's saying that Shakespeare wasn't sure exactly how to portray court life.
Oxford lived in Venice for a year, where two plays, "Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice" are set. If you follow the plays when a character crosses a bridge on X street they come to Y Street and that is exactly how it is in Venice. Did Shakespeare write with a map of Venice?
Shakespeare never left England , and since Jews were not allowed there at the time he probably never met one.
Oxford married his wife on her 15th birthday. Romeo and Juliet are 14.
R. W. Emerson stated "I can not marry the man to the work."
Freud doubted Shakespeares authorship.
It is an interesting conundrum and I fall on the side of Oxford.
The movie was inspired by an article in the Atlantic Monthly from 1991, although the film goes off in directions that are for dramatic effect, and therefore loses it's way.
Emilia became a regular visitor to the surgery of Simon Foreman, a popular doctor/astrologer/analyst of his time and well-known in Shakespeare's theatrical circle.
There is less reason to believe that Hamlet had anything to do with Oxford's life story than with the life story of James I or the Earl of Southhampton (among others). Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, I could find striking similarities between events of my life and some of the plays with no trouble at all. The R&J comment has already been responded to, but I will add that nothing else in the play corresponds to Oxford and it was based on works that were originally written well before the birth of Oxford or Shakespeare.
I don't think it's necessary, but we don't know that Shakespeare never left England.
If this is the Upstart Crow stuff, there are credible interpretations of this that Greene is berating Shakescene (assumed to be the Startford man) for pretending that someone else's work is his own. That is consistent with the Stratford man being a front man for another playwright. I have read many interpretations of this Greene piece. All of it is too vague to know completely what it means. As evidence it is something desperate Stratfordians will hang their hat on but it isn't anything I would go to court with.