Shakespeare authorship question

Based on Wikipedia: Shakespeare authorship question

In 1857, an American woman named Delia Bacon traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon with a shovel. Her plan was simple, if eccentric: dig up Shakespeare's grave and find proof that somebody else had written his plays. She never actually dug—losing her nerve at the last moment—but she did publish a 675-page book arguing that Sir Francis Bacon (no relation) was the true author of Hamlet, King Lear, and the rest. She died in an asylum two years later.

This was the beginning of what scholars now call the Shakespeare authorship question. And while Delia Bacon's particular theory has largely faded, the broader controversy she ignited has only grown. More than eighty candidates have been proposed as the "real" Shakespeare. The debate has attracted Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and even a Supreme Court justice. It remains one of the most persistent literary mysteries in Western culture—or, depending on whom you ask, one of the most persistent literary delusions.

The Problem of the Glover's Son

Here is what we know about William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the man traditionally credited with writing the greatest works in the English language.

He was born in 1564 in a market town about a hundred miles northwest of London. His father, John Shakespeare, made gloves for a living and served in various civic offices. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a family of local gentry. Both parents signed documents with marks rather than signatures—the standard indication, in that era, that someone couldn't write.

William married Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen. They had three children. At some point he moved to London and became involved in the theater, first as an actor and later as a shareholder in a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which eventually became the King's Men. He made money. He bought property. He invested in grain during a shortage. He sued people who owed him money.

Then he died in 1616, leaving a will that mentioned his second-best bed but not a single book, manuscript, or unfinished play.

That's essentially it. No letters survive. No diaries. No school records. No evidence that anyone ever saw him write anything, or that he owned any books at all. His surviving signatures—there are six of them—look, to put it charitably, unpracticed. Some scholars describe them as barely legible scrawls.

Compare this biographical sketch to the works attributed to him: plays demonstrating intimate knowledge of the law, medicine, seamanship, military tactics, falconry, tennis, and the inner workings of royal courts. Plays set in Italy, France, Denmark, ancient Rome, and fairy-haunted forests. A vocabulary estimated at somewhere between 17,500 and 29,000 words—the largest of any English writer. Sonnets of such psychological complexity that people still argue about what they mean four centuries later.

For those who doubt Shakespeare's authorship—a group collectively called "anti-Stratfordians"—this gap between the mundane life and the extraordinary work is simply too vast to bridge. How could a glover's son from a provincial market town, with no documented education and no evidence of any literary inclination whatsoever, have produced the most celebrated body of literature in the English language?

The Candidates

If not Shakespeare, then who?

The list of proposed candidates now exceeds eighty names, but four have attracted the most sustained attention.

Sir Francis Bacon was the favorite of the nineteenth-century anti-Stratfordians. A philosopher, essayist, and statesman who served as Lord Chancellor under King James, Bacon was indisputably brilliant and indisputably a writer. His advocates note coded messages they claim to find hidden in the plays—anagrams, ciphers, and elaborate wordplay that supposedly reveal Bacon's authorship. The theory peaked in the late 1800s but has since declined, largely because Bacon's known writing style differs so dramatically from Shakespeare's that most scholars find the attribution implausible on its face.

Christopher Marlowe presents a more intriguing case, at least superficially. Marlowe was a genuine playwright, author of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, and his influence on Shakespeare's early work is well documented. He was also a spy, a probable atheist, and a man who seemed to court danger at every turn. In 1593, he was killed in a fight over a bill—supposedly—in a Deptford tavern. He was twenty-nine years old.

But what if he wasn't killed? What if the death was staged, allowing Marlowe to escape prosecution for heresy and continue writing under the name of a convenient front man from Stratford? It's a theory with the appeal of a thriller novel, though it requires explaining how Marlowe could have written plays for another two decades without anyone noticing he was alive.

William Stanley, the Sixth Earl of Derby, has his partisans. He was known to have written plays, though none survive. A 1599 letter mentions that he was "busied only in penning comedies for the common players." He traveled extensively in France, which might explain Shakespeare's knowledge of that country. But the evidence is thin, and Derby never attracted the following of the leading candidate.

That would be Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

The Oxfordian Theory

Oxford was, by any standard, an extraordinary figure. Born in 1550 to one of England's oldest noble families, he inherited his title at age twelve and became a ward of William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's most powerful minister. He was educated by the finest tutors in England. He studied law. He traveled through France and Italy for more than a year, visiting many of the locations that would later appear in Shakespeare's plays. He was a patron of the arts, a tournament champion, and—according to contemporaries—a poet of genuine talent, though only a handful of his verses survive.

He was also, it must be said, something of a disaster as a human being. He abandoned his wife for years over suspicions about the paternity of their daughter. He accused various former friends of treason. He spent his enormous fortune with such abandon that he eventually had to sell off most of his estates. He fathered an illegitimate son by one of the Queen's maids of honor, which landed both of them briefly in the Tower of London.

Oxfordians—as proponents of his candidacy call themselves—see in this turbulent biography the raw material for Shakespeare's plays. Oxford's troubled marriage becomes the source for Othello's jealousy. His spendthrift ways inform Timon of Athens. His time in Italy explains the detailed Venetian settings of The Merchant of Venice and Othello. His position at the heart of Elizabethan court politics gives him the insider knowledge that permeates the history plays.

There is one significant problem with this theory: Oxford died in 1604. A dozen of Shakespeare's plays, including some of his greatest—King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest—were written after that date.

Oxfordians have developed various responses to this objection. Perhaps the plays were written earlier and only published later. Perhaps Oxford left behind manuscripts that were revised and released posthumously. Perhaps the conventional dating of the plays is wrong. None of these explanations has persuaded mainstream scholars, but the Oxfordian movement remains the most organized and vocal faction within the anti-Stratfordian camp.

The Case for Shakespeare

Here is what mainstream scholars say in response to all of this.

First, the evidentiary record for Shakespeare's authorship, while not abundant by modern standards, is actually quite substantial by the standards of his era. Contemporary documents identify him as a playwright. His name appears on title pages. Fellow writers mentioned him as a colleague. The actors who published his collected works in 1623—the famous First Folio—knew him personally and identified him as the author. Ben Jonson, the greatest literary figure of the following generation, wrote commemorative verses for that volume addressing Shakespeare as the "Sweet Swan of Avon."

No comparable evidence exists for any alternative candidate. Not a scrap of paper connects Oxford, or Bacon, or Marlowe, or anyone else to the Shakespeare plays. The entire case for alternative authorship rests on speculation, circumstantial argument, and what scholars call the "rhetoric of accumulation"—piling up suggestive parallels without ever producing definitive proof.

Second, the portrait of Shakespeare as an uneducated provincial badly underestimates what his background could have provided. Stratford had a grammar school, and grammar schools in Elizabethan England offered an intensive classical education. Students spent years mastering Latin, studying Ovid and Cicero and Seneca—precisely the authors whose influence is most evident in Shakespeare's work. We have no attendance records for Shakespeare because we have no attendance records for anyone at that school; the documents simply don't survive. But there's no particular reason to assume he didn't attend.

As for Shakespeare's vocabulary and knowledge, scholars point out that much of it was available in books. The Elizabethan era saw an explosion of English translations, encyclopedias, and travel narratives. A curious and voracious reader could have absorbed an enormous amount of information without ever leaving London. The legal knowledge in the plays turns out, on close examination, to be the sort of general familiarity that anyone involved in business and property disputes would have acquired. The Italian settings contain errors that no native or long-term visitor would have made.

Third—and this is the argument that mainstream scholars find most decisive—authorship attribution in literary history works the same way for everyone. We credit Marlowe with his plays because his name is on them and contemporaries said he wrote them. We credit Jonson with his plays for the same reason. The methodology that confirms Shakespeare's authorship is identical to the methodology that confirms everyone else's. If we apply consistent standards, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

To believe otherwise requires a conspiracy of enormous scope and duration: dozens of contemporaries lying or being deceived, false documents created, the secret maintained for decades across an entire theatrical community notorious for gossip. And all of this must have been managed without leaving any trace in the historical record—no confession, no slip, no contemporary speculation that Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare.

The Psychology of Doubt

If the scholarly case for Shakespeare is so strong, why does the authorship question persist?

Part of the answer is simply that people love mysteries, especially mysteries involving famous figures and secret identities. The notion that history's greatest writer was actually a hidden aristocrat, or a spy who faked his death, is inherently more dramatic than the reality of a successful theater professional from the English Midlands.

But there's something deeper at work as well. The anti-Stratfordian argument, at its core, is about what kind of person could have written Shakespeare's plays. It assumes that profound art requires a certain kind of life experience—that the author of Hamlet must have been a courtier, the author of The Merchant of Venice must have visited Venice, the author of the sonnets must have had exactly the kind of romantic entanglements the poems describe.

Scholars call this the "biographical fallacy": the assumption that fiction directly reflects the author's own experience. It's an intuitive assumption, but it's wrong. Novelists write convincingly about murders without having committed them. Playwrights set works in places they've never visited. Imagination, research, and craft can substitute for direct experience—and in a writer of Shakespeare's ability, they evidently did.

There's also an uncomfortable class dimension to the authorship question. Many alternative theories rest on the implicit premise that a commoner couldn't have written works so intimately acquainted with aristocratic life. This is, frankly, snobbery dressed up as literary criticism. It assumes that social barriers are impermeable, that talent cannot transcend origin, that genius must be credentialed.

The historical record says otherwise. Shakespeare came from the middling classes—not poverty, but not privilege either—and he spent his adult life in the London theater, a demimonde where nobles, writers, actors, and rogues mixed freely. He had access to aristocratic patrons, court performances, and the gossip of a social world where everyone knew everyone else's business. The plays show exactly what you'd expect from such a life: an outsider's fascination with power and status, combined with an insider's practical knowledge of how the theater worked.

The Famous Doubters

The authorship question has attracted a remarkable roster of prominent skeptics, and anti-Stratfordians cite these endorsements as evidence that their position deserves serious consideration.

Mark Twain devoted a small book to the subject, arguing that Shakespeare's recorded life was inconsistent with literary genius. Sigmund Freud was convinced that Oxford was the real author, and he wove this belief into his psychoanalytic readings of the plays. Charlie Chaplin expressed doubts. So did Orson Welles, though he later recanted. More recently, the actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance have championed alternative authorship theories.

John Paul Stevens, who served on the United States Supreme Court for thirty-five years, was an enthusiastic Oxfordian. He even wrote a mock judicial opinion—for fun—finding Oxford to be the true author based on the preponderance of evidence. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was another prominent skeptic.

What should we make of these endorsements? They're certainly evidence that intelligent, accomplished people can find the anti-Stratfordian case persuasive. But they're not evidence that the case is correct. Brilliance in one field doesn't guarantee sound judgment in another. Stevens was a formidable legal mind, but he wasn't a literary historian. Freud was a pioneer of psychology, but his interpretive methods—searching texts for hidden meanings that confirmed his theories—are precisely the methods that mainstream Shakespeare scholarship rejects.

The scholarly consensus remains overwhelming. Among professional Shakespeare scholars and literary historians, the authorship question is considered settled. The tiny minority who dissent are vastly outnumbered by those who find the traditional attribution supported by all available evidence.

What the Debate Reveals

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Shakespeare authorship question is what it reveals about our relationship with literary genius.

We want genius to make sense. We want the creator of transcendent art to have a biography that explains the transcendence—a life of tragedy and triumph, privilege and persecution, secret knowledge and hidden depths. When the actual biography seems ordinary, we suspect it must be concealing something.

But genius doesn't always make sense. The historical record often fails to explain how a particular person came to produce a particular work. We don't know why an obscure patent clerk figured out the theory of relativity, or how a self-taught surveyor's assistant became Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes extraordinary accomplishments emerge from seemingly ordinary lives.

Shakespeare's plays themselves make this point repeatedly. His characters are not what they seem. The merchant's daughter turns out to be a legal scholar. The fool speaks wisdom. The prince disguises himself as a commoner. Appearances deceive; surfaces conceal depths; the world is stranger than it looks.

Perhaps that's the final irony. The works attributed to Shakespeare—whoever wrote them—teach us that identity is fluid, that human beings are more complex than their social roles suggest, that the apparent nobody might be the actual genius. The anti-Stratfordians, in their search for a more suitable author, seem to have missed the lesson that the plays themselves are teaching.

William Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays. That's what the evidence shows. It's a less romantic conclusion than a conspiracy of earls and spies, but it may be the more wondrous one: that genius can emerge from anywhere, explain itself to no one, and leave behind nothing but the work.