No Question
I wrote this for somebody as a favour, to fill some space. I thought I might as well post it here. It isn’t really a Shabgraff piece, but it exists.
William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. It wasn’t the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or any of the other candidates sometimes suggested. But how can we be so sure?
We have the accounts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. His rivals, detractors, friends and colleagues had no doubt. Ben Jonson wrote in his published diaries about his criticisms of the plays – right alongside his love and admiration for his friend Shakespeare, their author. Nobody questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his own work for centuries. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that a brilliant but eccentric woman called Delia Bacon wrote a book in which she heavily hinted that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon. She convinced a few people – including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud (who never believed anything silly, of course). The early-to-mid 19th century was an age still influenced by the Romantics, who had invented the idea of the Artist as a lone creator, driven by the spirit, scribbling away in a garret, listening to the Muse whispering in his ear and writing for the sake of Art itself. William Shakespeare – a professional actor, jobbing hack, and sharer in the going concern that was the Globe Theatre – didn’t fit this Romantic ideal. Delia Bacon preferred her more upper-class, better-educated, self-consciously intellectual namesake. Trouble is, aside from the total lack of any evidence at all connecting Bacon to any of the plays or poems, we also know Sir Francis Bacon’s writing style, his range, his concerns, and his opinions. They don’t fit the plays. At all. The same is true of the current most-favoured candidate, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the shy bard depicted in the recent (and very silly) movie Anonymous. We have extant examples of de Vere’s poetry. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t compare to the style and quality of even Shakespeare’s earliest and worst sonnets. The Earl also wrote a few comedy plays. None of them survive, but they are mentioned by a contemporary critic, Francis Meres. Meres also mentions Shakespeare. The context makes it perfectly clear that Meres thinks of them as different people. (This also rubbishes the notion that deVere would be precluded from writing plays by his social position – the excuse often used to explain the Earl’s theorised decision to use an actor as a front man.)
It’s often said by ‘Anti-Statfordians’ that Shakespeare lacked the education he would have needed to write the plays. But Shakespeare, as the son of a local alderman, would have been entitled to attend Stratford’s King Edward VI grammar school. Shakespeare’s plays are recognisably the work of someone with an Elizabethan grammar school education – a grounding that would look more like a Classics degree from Oxbridge today. Anti-Stratfordians often point out that, unlike other playwrights (Christopher Marlow, for instance) Shakespeare didn’t attend University.…
