Good, nuanced take on the situation. I've engaged with a lot of Alexander Waugh especially and find it compelling. Although, I don't know how he reconciles the fact that de Vere died before the last few plays were published?
I know he does have theory for that - I forget the specifics but broadly - the plays were reworked after Oxford's death from earlier versions, which explains away the contemporary refs in plays like Macbeth and Tempest.
Many of the plays were not published prior to the FF 1623, after both Will of Stratford and Edward de Vere were dead. No one knows when any of the plays were written. The accepted chronology is based on the life of Will of Stratford, which if it turns out to be wrong renders the current chronology baseless. There are clues within the plays themselves. Many of the comedies refer to events happening in 1580, the trial of Edmund Campion and Malvolio in Twelfth Night is one example. There is nothing in any of the plays that precludes them from being written prior to 1604. Particularly the Tempest which I believe is an early play, it was first published in 1623. I also believe that the Pembroke family particularly Mary (Sidney) Herbert may have had a hand in editing the plays prior to publication. She died at her house near to Jaggard's print shop and work on the FF was halted for six months. There is a lot we don't know and to express certainty and limit discussion is foolish. By the way if you would like to see my take on Twelfth Night and The Tempest please click on my icon to take you to my channel. I always discuss the dating of a play in my presentations.
The full vocabulary found in the First Folio did not exist in the English lexicon until the publication of Queen Anne's World of Words in 1611. Observations. 1.Shakespeare expresses the finest sentiments of the English people so he must have been born in England. 2.Shakespeare has an easy familiarity with all things Italian so he must have grown up in Italy. 3. Shakespeare must have known many languages to have included so many foreign words in the plays. 4. Shakespeare must have been a linguist to have added some 2,000 words to the English language. So who best fits this description? Four observations about John Florio who was born in England but grew up in the shadow of Italy. 1. A strong written dedication by Leicester's Men in First Fruits by Florio, they did not talk shop, that would have been gouache. 2. No one else in the entire nation of England had a large enough vocabulary to write the published version of the First Folio except for John Florio and he only had the words in 1611 with the publication of his bilingual dictionary. 3. The Lord Cranfield letter asking for money to finish his "great and laborious work" which could only have been the First Folio because he was doing no other work in1623. 4. Unique Florio words in the First Folio which would not be in common use for 100 years. This is not to say that Florio wrote the First Folio all by himself but he was part of the genesis of the plays with Leicester's Men, he may have contributed from the sidelines for thirty odd years and then he collected his favorite plays and revised and edited them for publication in retirement. No one else has the linguistic qualifications to have written the First Folio along with a cast of hundreds of collaborators, or the usual suspects as I call them. The word Enskied only appears in two places in the English language in Elizabethan England, one is in the First Folio, the other is in John Florio's 1611 World of Words. Where does Oxford use this word in any non First Folio written context? Oxford may have read Dante but where did he write Dante? How many words are credited as being added to the English language by Oxford or Sidney or Bacon? None, they were not linguist, Shakespeare was, Florio was and is credited with contributing more than 1,500 words to the English language. You keep trying to stick a square peg in a round hole by failing to look for a linguist as the real Shakespeare. So yes, you must first write a bilingual dictionary just to have the necessary vocabulary to be able to write the First Folio. A simple test, compare all of the written words of Oxford with all of the words in the First Folio to check for overlap of word usage. An AI program should do it. I still think Oxford and Sidney were the chief collaborators. So the real Shakespeare went to a paupers grave in a plague pit, the Brits do love their fake tourist traps. Truth will out.
Since Florio was writing a translation dictionary from Italian to English, what would have been the point of translating words Englishmen didn't know into OTHER words they didn't know? Being the first to put a word into print isn't the same thing as creating it.
This might be an unsatisfying contribution but I think it's important to emphasise that there is no simple formula that the earth is round. All our knowledge, even many basic scientific facts we take to be unquestionably obvious, are more epistemically fragile than we generally acknowledge. This isn't, however, an invitation to utter scepticism or toward cementing convictions in unorthodox theories. I loved reading my supervisor Hasok Chang's Is Water H2O?, where he traces the history of how this simple scientific fact garnered consensus and specifies that it isn't an exhaustively true description. Hasok tells this history in order to inspire deeper scrutiny of the fundamental facts of our worldview and to expand and encourage inquiry. The spirit of this approach gives wind to an anti-Stratfordian inquiry. As you say, an insistence on settling the one last word on the Shakespeare question seems like anti-intellectualism, anti-inquiry, and anti-curiosity. On the other hand, given just how fragile knowledge is, we ought to be clever and quite discerning about which issues we dedicate our limited time and attention to. For me, on this pragmatic basis, I don't judge the Shakespeare question to promise an enriched relationship to these works. I was going to say that this is the best reason for the Stratfordian dismissal and frustration with this debate. But, actually, reflecting on what I've written, I'm not sure this is really a good enough reason to shut down the legitimacy of anti-Stratfordian inquiry. It actually would be fascinating if an anti-Stratfordian were to develop a really compelling argument. In the spirit of Hasok, let anti-Stratford flowers bloom. I suppose I just don't judge it especially likely that this has happened or will happen.
Not an unsatisfactory contribution at all! Yes I think it will be to the benefit of both arguments to stop acting as if there is a simple formula to start from - and that way avoid the time wasted on just ridiculing either side. Research into known Shakespeare forgeries has ended up casting light on the plays - theres no reason why solid anti-Stratfordian scholarship can't (at least) do the same
