Apparently in responses to Ms. Winkler’s Guardian story about the Francis Meres analysis I published in Critical Survey a chorus of followers has taken it upon themselves to lecture the internet. A leading argument of this internet flashmob concerns de Vere date of death in 1604, as if it hadn’t occurred to Oxfordians that there is a popular claim among tenured professors with little time for critical inquiry, that several Shakespearean plays were written after that date.

At least since Edmond Malone’s !8xx chronology, most Shakespeare scholars have placed the composition date of several plays between 1605 and 1611 or 1613. What must be asked is whether these beliefs are based on fact or convenience. Professor Chambers, who begins by commenting that “as a rule the initial dates are much less certain than the terminal ones” (245). In other words, while it is easy to say that a play existed by a certain date, it is far more difficult to know how long before that time it may have first existed.

Continues Chambers:

“I have attempted to to bring together the results of chapter ix and to fit them into the facts of Shakespeare’s dramatic career as given in chapter iii. There is much of conjecture even as regards the order, and still more as regards the ascriptions to particular years. These are partly arranged to provide a fairly even flow of production when plague and other inhibitions did not interrupt it.” (269)

In other words, the “chronology” is not a fact; it is a hypothetical construct stitched together, as Chambers admits, on assumptions about the authorship of the plays. Using the chronology as a reason to avoid or condemn the Oxfordian argument without consideration is like trying to staunch deep wound in the thigh with a bandaid. It cannot have a happy outcome. While Sratfordian biographers need those “late” plays to fill in an otherwise unproductive, undocumented gap in the production of the plays, the empirically minded independent scholar will notice that between 1604 (and usually starting in 1604) and 1623, these things happen:

  • The author ceases revising plays. Earlier title pages are revised, but none after 1604.
  • Publishers begin using the name “Shakespeare” on plays not by the author of the Folio plays (1605, 1608)– apparently without complaint from “gentle will.”
  • Mr. Shakespere “goes back to Stratford” and retires from public life.
  • Stylistically early plays like Timon of Athens, Pericles, or Cymbeline are retrofitted into the gap merely because their prior existence has not been proven and their late dates are needed in order to fulfill Chambers desired “fairly even flow of production.”
  • Production of play quartos falls through the floor (c. 1604)
  • Shakespeare stops reading books on astronomy (1604)
  • Shakespeare stops reading new books on almost everything else (1604).

1604 isn’t a problem for the Oxfordians; it’s a quagmire for Stratfordians like Oliver Kamm.