Shakespeare authorship question

[1] Although the idea has attracted much public interest,[2][a] all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory, and for the most part acknowledge it only to rebut or disparage the claims.

[11] Supporters of alternative candidates argue that theirs is the more plausible author, and that William Shakespeare lacked the education, aristocratic sensibility, or familiarity with the royal court that they say is apparent in the works.

They often postulate some type of conspiracy that protected the author's true identity,[23] which they say explains why no documentary evidence exists for their candidate and why the historical record supports Shakespeare's authorship.

[37] Further, the lack of biographical information has sometimes been taken as an indication of an organised attempt by government officials to expunge all traces of Shakespeare, including perhaps his school records, to conceal the true author's identity.

[44] Some find that the works show little sympathy for upwardly mobile types such as John Shakespeare and his son and that the author portrays individual commoners comically, as objects of ridicule.

[50] Anti-Stratfordians also question how Shakespeare, with no record of the education and cultured background displayed in the works bearing his name, could have acquired the extensive vocabulary found in the plays and poems.

[72] The publication of the image failed to achieve its intended effect, and in 2005 Oxfordian Richard Kennedy proposed that the monument was originally built to honour John Shakespeare, William's father, who by tradition was a "considerable dealer in wool".

xij d[91]The other is dated 26 November 1607 and entered by Nathaniel Butter and John Busby: Entred for their copie under thandes of Sr George Buck knight & Thwardens A booke called.

Two of the three Parnassus plays produced at St John's College, Cambridge, near the beginning of the 17th century mention Shakespeare as an actor, poet, and playwright who lacked a university education.

"[109] An edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, expanded with an additional nine poems written by the prominent English actor, playwright, and author Thomas Heywood, was published by William Jaggard in 1612 with Shakespeare's name on the title page.

[115] Shakespeare's will, executed on 25 March 1616, bequeaths "to my fellows John Hemynge Richard Burbage and Henry Cundell 26 shilling 8 pence apiece to buy them [mourning] rings".

[127] Later critics such as Samuel Johnson remarked that Shakespeare's genius lay not in his erudition, but in his "vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which books and precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and native excellence proceeds".

The curriculum began with William Lily's Latin grammar Rudimenta Grammatices and progressed to Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, all of whom are quoted and echoed in the Shakespearean canon.

[133] The tests determined that Shakespeare's work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting patterns, suggesting that he was a single individual, not a committee, and that he used fewer relative clauses and more hyphens, feminine endings, and run-on lines than most of the writers with whom he was compared.

[147] The framework with which early 19th century thinkers imagined the English Renaissance focused on kings, courtiers, and university-educated poets; in this context, the idea that someone of Shakespeare's comparatively humble background could produce such works became increasingly unacceptable.

In 1857 the English critic George Henry Townsend published William Shakespeare Not an Impostor, criticising what he called the slovenly scholarship, false premises, specious parallel passages, and erroneous conclusions of the earliest proponents of alternative authorship candidates.

[168] In 1907, Owen claimed he had decoded instructions revealing that a box containing proof of Bacon's authorship had been buried in the River Wye near Chepstow Castle on the Duke of Beaufort's property.

On the basis of cryptograms he detected in the sixpenny tickets of admission to Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, he deduced that both Bacon and his mother were secretly buried, together with the original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays, in the Lichfield Chapter house in Staffordshire.

[181] In 1916, on the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Henry Watterson, the long-time editor of The Courier-Journal, wrote a widely syndicated front-page feature story supporting the Marlovian theory and, like Zeigler, created a fictional account of how it might have happened.

[185] Two years later Looney and Greenwood founded the Shakespeare Fellowship, an international organisation to promote discussion and debate on the authorship question, which later changed its mission to propagate the Oxfordian theory.

[192] Copious archival research had failed to confirm Oxford or anyone else as the true author, and publishers lost interest in books advancing the same theories based on alleged circumstantial evidence.

[203] In 1984 Ogburn published his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, and by framing the issue as one of fairness in the atmosphere of conspiracy that permeated America after Watergate, he used the media to circumnavigate academia and appeal directly to the public.

[207] Although Ogburn took the verdict as a "clear defeat", Oxfordian columnist Joseph Sobran thought the trial had effectively dismissed any other Shakespeare authorship contender from the public mind and provided legitimacy for Oxford.

Approaching the subject sociologically, Shapiro found its origins to be grounded in a vein of traditional scholarship going back to Edmond Malone, and criticised academia for ignoring the topic, which was, he argued, tantamount to surrendering the field to anti-Stratfordians.

[228] In the early 1960s, Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Roger Manners, William Herbert and Mary Sidney were suggested as members of a group referred to as "The Oxford Syndicate".

[240] This sparked a cipher craze, and probative cryptograms were identified in the works by Ignatius Donnelly,[241] Orville Ward Owen, Elizabeth Wells Gallup,[242] and Dr. Isaac Hull Platt.

Platt argued that the Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus, found in Love's Labour's Lost, can be read as an anagram, yielding Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi ("These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.").

[251] The first to lay out a comprehensive case for Oxford's authorship was J. Thomas Looney, an English schoolteacher who identified personality characteristics in Shakespeare's works—especially Hamlet—that painted the author as an eccentric aristocratic poet, a drama and sporting enthusiast with a classical education who had travelled extensively to Italy.

[264] His candidacy was revived by Calvin Hoffman in 1955 and, according to Shapiro, a recent surge in interest in the Marlowe case "may be a sign that the dominance of the Oxfordian camp may not extend much longer than the Baconian one".

[274] Apart from the 2011 Oxfordian film Anonymous, other examples include Amy Freed's 2001 play The Beard of Avon,[275] Ben Elton's 2016 sitcom Upstart Crow,[276] and the 2020 fantasy comic book The Dreaming: Waking Hours, based on the works of Neil Gaiman.