Shakespeare Authorship FAQ

The reasons for doubt are many and varied. Primarily they spring from the complete misfit between the life of the alleged author and the character of the literary work that has historically been attributed to him.

The traditional view, articulated in recent biographies such as those by Park Honan or Katherine Duncan-Jones, requires a suspension of disbelief which a growing number of scholars are unable to accept as rational. As W.H. Furness, the father of the great Shakespeare editor H.H. Furness said many decades ago:

“I am one of the many who has never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare within planetary space of the plays. Are there any two things in the world more incongruous?”

Such doubts have been echoed by numerous perceptive readers, from Sigmund Freud to Walt Whitman, Orson Welles, and Sir John Gielgud. More recently, Sir Derek Jacobi, Michael York, and Supreme Court Justices Stevens and O’Connor have joined the growing chorus of skeptics of the traditional bardography.

No.

Other critics of the orthodox view of the bard have pointed to the absence of a paper trail to document a life, a famous case of the dog not barking in the night in Sherlock Holmes: where are the books, the letters, the table talk, of this “great spirit” of the age? As recent attempts to propagate an image of the bard suggest, we don’t even have a reliable physical likeness of “Shakespeare.”

Can we really believe that the man Ben Jonson called “the soul of the age” — who created such female characters as Cleopatra, Olivia, or Hermione — would allow his daughters to grow up illiterate? Yet there is no clear evidence for any literacy at all in three generations of Shakespere’s family — both his father and his daughter Judith signed their own names with a mark, and his daughter Susan could barely write her own name. If he owned any books, or ever wrote a letter, they have all disappeared into the wormhole of time. In her recent Shakespeare: An Unorthodox Biography, Diana Price documents how bizarre this absence of literary documentation is when contrasted with the “paper trails” of other 16th century poets and playwrights.

Others critics, such as Sir George Greenwood in a series of books written during the first decades of the 20th century, have in the past brought the spotlight to bear on the character of Shakespeare’s intellect. Greenwood cites the distinguished Editor George Wyndham:

“Whenever Shakespeare in an age of technical conceit indulges in one ostentatiously, it will always be found that his apparent obscurity arises from our not crediting him with a technical knowledge which he undoubtedly possessed, be it of heraldry, or law, or of philosophic disputation.”

Needless to say, this view of the bard as a serious thinker, who wrote to educate as well as entertain, is difficult to reconcile with orthodox beliefs. The traditional Shakespeare never went to college, never traveled outside of England, had no legal training, and so far as we are aware, never owned a book.  His parents and his daughters were illiterate (one daughter could, barely, sign her own name — the other was a “markswoman” who signed using a mark, not a a signature).

The evidence demonstrates that the author of the plays was a sophisticated legal thinker. He lampooned powerful insiders in the court like Edward de Vere’s own legal guardian and father-in-law William Cecil (at least according to most scholars who have considered the question). He was intimately familiar with Italian locales, geography, and manners. He must have read hundreds if not thousands of books — and yet not one survives that can be connected to him.

First, the topic is of interest from the point of view of intellectual history. Does it matter that for more than two hundred years students have been memorizing a point of view which now seems, to an increasing number of informed scholars, to have been false? It would certainly seem so! To say that the subject does not matter is merely to follow the ostrich and bury one’s head in the sand.

Second, the claim that “we have the works” is itself suspect. One implication of the authorship question is that we emphatically do not “have the works.”

A moment’s reflection helps to illustrate why this is so. If literary biography is a tool for providing insight into the significance of a text, then attaching the wrong author’s name to the work leads to a host of false assumptions which in turn spawn further misperceptions of the work.

The authorship question is therefore not just a matter of honoring the true author of the work – itself an important ethical obligation for readers – but also about restoring a sense of authenticity and truth to the work we study and enjoy under the name Shakespeare.

It is true that James Shapiro recently put forward this claim in his book, Contested Will (2010), and that many people believe it. It supplies a convenient coat of fresh paint to a tired myth. However, those persons might wish to acquaint themselves with the contents of Shake-Speares Sonnets (as they are titled), first published in 1609 but not widely available to readers until the late 18the century.

For example, let’s listen in on Sonnet 71:

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone. (71)

Orthodox Shakespeareans cannot explain why the author would warn against even “so much as my poor name” rehearsing. The theory that the authorship question is an anachronistic projection of the Romantics onto a world lacking in subjectivity can be maintained only at the expense of treating the sonnets as fiction, as Shapiro insists we must do. But look how the thought is extended in Sonnet 72:

O lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth (72)

Does that sound like a fiction to you? Why is this author making up a fiction that says “my name be buried where my body is”?  Stephen Booth in his (in many ways) outstanding edition of the poems clarifies that this is an exhortation. The author is exhorting his readers to bury his name along with his body!

Hello! The authorship question did not begin 150 years ago. It began sometime before 1609, when the sonnets were published.

During the 19th century, the most popular alternative to the orthodox view was that Francis Bacon, the great inductive philosopher and legal genius (1561-1626), was the “concealed author” of the plays. However, while sophisticated skeptics such as Walt Whitman refused to accept the orthodox view, they also reserved judgment on the question of what should replace it. As Whitman told his friend and biographer Horace Traubel in his table talk:

“I am with you fellows as far as saying ‘no’ to Stratford…as for Bacon, we shall see…”

In 1920 the retiring but brilliant English schoolteacher John Thomas Looney, after laboring for many years in obscurity, placed Whitman’s skepticism in proper historical context.   Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified forever transformed intellectual history, in ways that the modern Shakespeare industry has yet to recognize or admit.

Edward de Vere 1586 portrait showing boar icon also seen on de Vere Bible binding.

Looney did more than place the name of the Bard under postmodern quotation marks — he articulated for the first time a simple but sophisticated argument advancing the theory that the works were actually authored by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604).

Despite his “funny” name, Looney’s book persuaded many prominent intellectuals of his century — Sigmund Freud, Leslie Howard, and John Galsworthy, to name only a few — that Oxford was in fact the true author. Today the book, available in electronic format on this site, continues to exert an enduring influence.

Since Charlton Ogburn’s magnum opus The Mysterious William Shakespeare appeared in 1984, a groundswell of curiousity about de Vere’s life has led to a series of events which is inexorably undermining the conventional view of Shakespeare. Today Ogburn’s book, more than twenty years after its original publication, remains one of the most successful Shakespeare biographies sold on Amazon.

Popular awareness of the authorship question is growing at an exponential rate — directly or indirectly as a consequence of Ogburn’s book. More recent contributions to the authorship debate include books by Richard Whalen (1991),  Joseph Sobran (1997), and Mark K. Anderson (2005).

No. The authorship question asks not who could have written the plays, but who did. Common sense and all literary experience tell us that authors, even imaginative authors, write from real experience; their work reflects a set of life-experiences conditioned by such realities as gender, class, historical circumstance, religion,  and individual biography.

Everything about the Shakespearean canon, as observers like Charlie Chaplin and Walt Whitman have noted, suggests an author of an aristocratic background and bias- one quite different, for example, from the brilliant middle class author who was Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Benjamin Jonson.

It is not snobbery to recognize this – it’s realism.

The position advocated by the Oxfordians is that “Shakespeare” was a state secret, not a conspiracy. De Vere’s intimate and conflicted relations with powerful persons such as William Cecil or even Queen Elizabeth I, often dramatized or even lampooned in the plays, meant that the plays were a political tinderbox.

But Elizabeth and Cecil also needed de Vere’s dramatic talent to forge a sense of national consciousness through the history plays. At a critical turning point in the development of modern, Protestant England, “Shakespeare” loyally rewrote English history, but spiced it with his own blend of topical innuendo–innuendo which was sometimes regarded as offensive to public morality.

To avoid public scandal, the real name of the author could not be associated with the work. Loyal Elizabethan writers complied –at least nominally –with the ban on public mention of de Vere’s identity, only hinting at what they knew through word-play.

Unfortunately, some persons committed to the orthodox view of authorship avoid the huge accumulation of evidence supporting these conclusions with emotional red-herrings like the ad hominem use of the word “conspiracy.”