Was Shakespeare REALLY Shakespeare? Exploring the Shakespeare Authorship Question 

The English language was going through a period of great change. Doth or dost or does? You or thou? One's idiolect was like a literary fingerprint. Shakespeare's idiolect was quite distinct, to the point where we can fairly reliably spot where one poet put down his quill and another took it up again. I expect that the actors would occasionally grouse at a line they didn't like, and suggest changes. In the end, though, Shakespeare would have been the one to make those changes.

Yeah sorry about that. I didn’t have time to go back and get another take.

Thank you for your comments! I'm happy you discuss the shape of the authorship conversation as it stands amongst scholars and researchers today--that the questions asked are targeted at revealing the collaborative nature of playwriting in Early Modern England. And yes, while the scholarly consensus of THE question is over, the efforts of those who wish to push misinformation, poor research, inaccurate exegeses, and just plain old ignorance is still going strong (as you can see from the comments!). Hence, the impetus for my video. And, I would encourage all to check out the link you shared on the Prima Facie Case!

The colloboration theory = it was everyone! (except the Earl of Oxford!!!)

​@@vetstadiumastroturf5756 He was actually a player in the earliest collaboration theory, back when that meant "everyone but Shakespeare, himself." Really, though, if Oxford were collaborating with a bunch of professional poets, but had to hide his little hobby, why not give one of his co-authors the credit? For that matter, he sponsored several of them over the years. Why not use one of them for a front man? Instead he either uses an actor as a front man, or maybe even picks a pen name that is the same name as a known actor, whose company just happens to be the recipient of all his plays.

@@Jeffhowardmeade Um...Oxford took zero credit! Nearly everything he did was credited to someone else. Lily. Munday. Greene. Peele. Ignoto. Shakespeare... The question should be Why did Oxford refuse to take credit, choosing instead to give it all away to lesser talents and front men?

@@vetstadiumastroturf5756 No, the question should be why you think he did any of that when there's no evidence that he did. The works of all of those poets survive, and not one of them is like the others, and none of them wrote like Shakespeare.

If you mean the wastrel, murderer, pederast, mediocre poet, and winner of both Worst Husband and Worst Father awards, then yes. That was Edward De Vere.

@@Jeffhowardmeade not too bad of a guy; now, take a look at William Shaksper - a real POS.

@@wayneferris9022 There was that time he worked a side deal to protect his investment in tithes rather than supporting peasants who would have been displaced by farmland being converted to pasturage. That was kind of crummy. What else did he do that was so bad?

Spot on.

See the book: A Hundred Reasons why Shakespeare was the 17th Earl of Oxford. R

Yes, there is. He described it perfectly. Unlike Shakespeare, who got nearly everything about Italy wrong.

@@Jeffhowardmeade ...that’s because he never went there, perhaps.

@@djpokeeffe8019 Maybe because one does not simply walk into Italy.

Thanks!! Yes, ultimately-for me-single authorship fits best with the documentary and evidentiary records.

​@@TheTheatreHistoryProfessor I like how you say "for me" in the full knowledge that you actively avoid honestly or earnestly researching the subject at any reasonable depth. The wishy-washy shallowness of your stance here is bordering on cartoonish.

@@coolnamebro When it comes to superficial knowledge, you are the man.

Utterly mistaken in several ways. Sure, Camden knew of the Shakspere family for the reasons you describe. But, in his discussion of Stratford in Remaines Concerning Britain, he never says "BTW, the great author hails from here." Why not? And "Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems" is from the First Folio, written seven years after your candidate's death. A discussion of the reliability of the First Folio. a compendium curious in many ways, is beyond the scope of an internet thread. And as for your statement that "[w]hereas there is not a single item of tangible evidence favouring an alternative candidate. Anywhere." All I can say here is WOW. Have you kept up with the literature on the Authorship Question produced over the last century?

@@Jimeo722 "But, in his discussion of Stratford in Remaines Concerning Britain...." There was no discussion of Stratford in _Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britain_ . I've just double-checked the volume at the Early English Books Online site. "And 'Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems' is from the First Folio, written seven years after your candidate's death." So what? People don't immediately forget what they knew about a person when that person dies. "All I can say here is WOW. Have you kept up with the literature on the Authorship Question produced over the last century?" I have. They don't have any evidence. They have pettifogging, they have ahistorical normative arguments about what they think we "should" be able to expect from the historical record, and they have a boundless capacity for misrepresenting mainstream scholarship and ignoring the evidence, but what they don't have is any specific documentary evidence of their own or anything from a contemporary that clearly identifies an alternative "authorship candidate" as the author either before or after their death.

Undoubtedly? There wouldn't be an authorship issue if that was the case.

Thank you! Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare but Shakespeare was MISIDENTIFIED. He was not born and neither did he live or grow up in Stratford. His works were misattributed to Shakspere, a play broker.

Um. We are told hete that there is no evidence about the curriculum of the grammar school Shakespesre attended ..... wait! This is a red herring. There is plenty of evidence for the SORT of curriculum. What is lacking is evidence that Shakespesre ATTENDED THE SCHOOL. Judging by Shakespeare's very poor sgnatures, the ONLY samples of his writing, he was barely literate. but could write his name in copybook letters. In a manner thst was alresdy antiquated. His surviving daughtets were illiterate. Many women in Shakespesre's plays, includfing housemaids, read and write letters.

@@beaulah_califa9867 yes, the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the sonnets and plays attributed to Shake-Speare; in all probable fact, wrote Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece under that pseudonym

❤️ Thank you Cam!

IF this video actually touched on the real arguments in an honest way, then your history professor would never had recommended or even mentioned it to you. Ask him if there is a video that he wouldn't recommend, and that is probably the one you should check out. But definitely don't tell your professors anything except the opinions they already endorse. Open mindedness is not one of their traits.

@@vetstadiumastroturf5756 As if you have a clue what the words "real" and "honest" mean. Your whole shtick is that nothing from the Early Modern era was real, and that nobody was honest. Your goal is to create an imaginary world where nothing is as it seems, and where your narrative is therefore just as plausible as any other. No wonder Anti-Stratfordian gatherings look like the Mad Hatter's tea party.

Fair enough. But, if I may be so bold, to what degree do you think your feelings and perspectives are influenced by your very modern perspectives on education, literacy, and writing? Is a shaky hand or rough-hewn signature truly a sign of someone lacking dramatic prowess (esp. for the 16th century)? One of my biggest critiques of takes on the authorship question is the attempt to graph upon a 16th-century person the expectations and experiences of 20th/21st-century individuals.

If you could read 16th Century handwriting, it would look just fine to you. A tell of someone trying to copy out a signature is hesitation marks. Brief pauses where the pen lingers, leaving blobs of ink. This is even more pronounced on rag paper with gall ink from a quill. There are no signs of that in Shakespeare's signatures. They are hastily scrawled, such as someone with too much experience with a pen in his hand does.

Thank you! And best wishes on your PhD!

I'm looking for a graduate program. Where are you studying?

@@Jeffhowardmeade University of Auckland. Bit out of the way for many people.

@@jonathanlgill Strewth! That is a bit out of my neighborhood. Might as well try for the Shakespeare Institute if I'm going that far. Thanks for the response.

I'm curious...to what extent were you required to understand the Authorship Question in order to be admitted to the program? Is Authorship doubt allowed in program, or is traditional orthodox belief required? Would a person who doubts the traditional position on authorship be allowed in the program?

Since the John Dee Al Waugh presents is entirely made up, I highly doubt it.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is the man behind Shakespeare not John Dee. Alexander Waugh on utube decipher's the clues.

@@mariadange06 He doesn't "decipher" anything. He makes it up.

@@Jeffhowardmeade to an uneducated mind it goes over your head obviously.

​@@mariadange06Not at all. I perfectly understand his claims. I just fact-check them and discovered that he made them up.

It has been acknowledged for centuries they were written by Ben Johnson.

@@joecurran2811 It's funny how quick you people are to turn speculation into an established fact, and to elide the difference between the two sections attributed to John Heminges and Henry Condell. Edmund Malone proposed, based on parallels to Jonson's works, that "To the Great Variety of Readers" was authored by him. But even if the parallels are there, it's also possible that it went the other way and Heminges and Condell nicked phrases from Jonson, perhaps to flatter him into contributing two commendatory poems on his rival's behalf. And even if Jonson had written "To the Great Variety of Readers", it's clearly Heminges and Condell's voice since it includes a passage that Jonson certainly would have suppressed if the choice lay entirely up to him: the part about "we have scarcely received a blot in his papers". Jonson famously riposted in _Timber_ "Would he had blotted a thousand". Why would Jonson have included this praise where he believed Shakespeare was most at fault if it weren't their honest opinion he was providing? That's the key issue. It's not enough to show that Jonson wrote it, even if you could, but that Jonson shoved words into the mouths of John Heminges and Henry Condell that they would have never affirmed otherwise. And Malone did _not_ argue that the Epistle Dedicatory was also the work of Jonson, but this is the part that most explicitly ties Shakespeare the playwright to the actors and company, as he's described as their "Friend, & Fellow".

@@Nullifidian ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-O60uYDKTqJ0.html

Heminges and Condell are written into the will between the lines, possibly years later to connect S to the author

​@@rickfinder8952 Unfortunately for that false supposition of yours, there are _two_ copies of Shakespeare's will: the original with the interlineation and the registered copy that was made after the will was probated at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in London, where the will was proved on 22 June 1616. The bequests to John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell are in the registered copy too, showing that the provision was already there when the will was probated.

When you leave your mind too open, passersby use it as a rubbish bin. And stop calling me Shirley.

She WAS mistress to Lord Hunsdon. At least that part you got right. Sadly, nothing else.

1) There's no evidence that his two daughters were illiterate, and his eldest daughter left a surviving signature, which is presumptive evidence of literacy. 2) Who says he didn't bequeath any books? Wills are not inventories but are documents for recording specific bequests. If he had no intention of bequeathing any books to anyone _other_ than his residuary legatees-in this case, Dr. John Hall, his son-in-law, and Susanna Hall _née_ Shakespeare, his eldest daughter-then they wouldn't be mentioned. In order to demonstrate that Shakespeare owned no books at his death, you would need the inventory of his property. 3) Shakespeare does not quote from 5 different English translations of the Bible. 4) I'm not even sure you've ever read any Shakespeare from your description of what you think his oeuvre was. Suffice it to say, Shakespeare's sources have been exhaustively catalogued, and the majority of them come back to only a handful of books like Holinshed's _Chronicles_ , North's Plutarch, etc. and contemporary plays of the day (e.g., _The Troublesome Raigne of King John_ , The True Chronicle History of King Leir_ , etc.). Most of the books Shakespeare used came from the back catalogue of Thomas Vautrollier and Richard Field, who was apprenticed to Vautrollier and eventually took over the business by marrying his widow. Field gets a shout-out in _Cymbeline_ when Innogen, mourning over the headless corpse of Cloten (whom she thinks is her husband Posthumus Leonatus), is confronted by a Roman who asks her whom she's weeping for. She replies that his name was "Richard du Champ"-Richard Field in French. 5) There aren't any letters for the vast majority of people of Shakespeare's class and era. Letters get lost over time, rag paper was recycled or put to household uses, and in the absence of a postal service open to the public (the Royal Mail wasn't made available to the public until 1635) a steady stream of correspondence would either be hideously expensive or dependent on chance, because if you didn't want to pay a courier you'd have to wait until you found someone going where your letter was directed. Besides which, Shakespeare's last direct, lineal descendant died in 1670, so any letters that may have existed would have just been thrown out for want of anyone to take them. 6) There are no characters named "Basano". There is one Bassiano ( _The Merchant of Venice_ ) and one Bassianus ( _Titus Andronicus_ ) in the whole of the Shakespeare canon. That's it. 7) It's not clear that Shakespeare _didn't_ leave the country (not that it really matters either way), and we can infer that he knew at least some Latin and Greek from Ben Jonson's commendatory poem in the First Folio, plus he undertook marriage negotiations on behalf of his landlords, a French Huguenot family, with another French Huguenot refugee, so we can further infer that he knew enough French to fulfill the role of negotiator. 8) The play are not "full of many languages". There are a handful of Latin tags-though fewer and less extensive than Shakespeare's better educated contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe-and there is some French. But he would have gotten the Latin at the King's New School and he could have picked up French just about anywhere, including his residence in Silver Street with the Mountjoy family. Other than Latin and French, there are only a handful of common individual words and phrases in Italian and Spanish (which is actually closer to Italian in some cases) and doesn't imply any kind of fluency. The Irish, Scottish, and Welsh "languages" are just phonetic representations of these accents, sometimes exaggerated for comic effect (as in Sir Hugh Evans in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ ). You can find the exact same mix of languages in many plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, some with no more education than Shakespeare had. 9) There is absolutely no evidence that any passage in Shakespeare is related to Hebrew. 10) There is no translation of Dante in Shakespeare, but even if there were it would be well within his skill set to use his Latin background to infer what the Tuscan said. 11) There is absolutely no evidence of early modern impresarios being credited as the authors of the works. Otherwise Philip Henslowe's name would be on half the extant plays published in the early modern era. Nor is there any contemporary documentary evidence that shows Shakespeare had the function of an impresario in the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men. Furthermore, it doesn't explain why Shakespeare was _originally_ credited as the author of the narrative poems _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_ , the publication of _The Passionate Pilgrim_ with Shakespeare's name in 1599, nor the publication of the sonnets with Shakespeare's name in 1609. _The Passionate Pilgrim_ is an interesting case because it contains two early versions of sonnets later published in 1609 _plus_ three love poems extracted from _Love's Labour's Lost_ , thus showing that William Jaggard understood the sonneteer and the playwright to be the same person.

​@@Nullifidian The signature shows she was functionally illiterate which is the whole point.

@@joecurran2811 How does it show he was "functionally illiterate"?

@@Nullifidian because she could barely write her own name - something that you would need to write a lot.

It's very easy to see why you have a strong emotional attachment to the idea that the writer of the plays was from Stratford, but if you do a modicum of earnest, honest, non-blinkered research you'll assuredly find that was most definitely not the case. Part of growing up is accepting that the truth doesn't always feel good.

@@coolnamebro I've done honest, non-blinkered research and found that every extant piece of documentary evidence that gives the author of the works of the Shakespeare canon names Shakespeare as that author. I've done honest, non-blinkered research and found that every contemporary who bothered to comment on the subject said that William Shakespeare was an author. I've found that this includes several people who would have either known detailed information about him or knew him personally (William Camden, Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, etc.). On the distaff side, I've researched the arguments of the anti-Shakespearians and have come up with stuff like "Edward de Vere was captured by pirates and _Hamlet_ has pirates in it". I've seen them rely on the number 17 as a core element of their argument without knowing that Edward de Vere never thought of himself as the 17th earl and that the first genealogy that made him #17 was created after his death. I've seen them draw all sorts of pretty pictures over jpegs of early modern documents, but they're doing nothing that the Bible Code guys didn't do. In short, there is a _massive_ evidentiary gulf between what supports the authorship of William Shakespeare and that which supports any other authorship 'candidate' (if one can use the word for people who themselves never sought to be identified with Shakespeare's works and have only been dragged into that role hundreds of years after their deaths).

He's much better when he's acting than when he's conspiracy theorizing.

There's no evidence that _anybody_ attended the King's New School in Stratford for the first 250 years of its existence, but I don't think the Corporation was paying a succession of schoolmasters (whose pay records means their names are preserved) to stand in an empty building for a quarter of a millennium. There _is_ a surviving manuscript in Shakespeare's hand: Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ . Furthermore, the complete manuscript survival of public theatre plays in this era is _very rare_ and only happens when the play did not go on to be published, because once published the print version became the standard text and the manuscript was worthless. Of the latter sort, at most we only have scraps, like the one manuscript leaf of _The Massacre at Paris_ , and even that doesn't appear to be in Christopher Marlowe's handwriting. At the time Shakespeare died, there _was no_ "Poet's Corner". There were only three poets buried in Westminster by April 1616, and one of them was _Chaucer_ , who died in 1400. The others were Edmund Spenser (d. 1599) and Francis Beaumont (d. 1616). Incidentally, this was the theme of an elegy written by William Basse and titled in at least one manuscript copy "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare He Dyed Aprill 1616". Basse suggests that these three other writers in Westminster Abbey should scoot over for Shakespeare, whom he calls a "rare tragedian", and he makes an oblique reference to Shakespeare's own funerary monument in Stratford. This also addresses the false claim that other writers didn't take note of Shakespeare's death. So does the fact that within just a couple of years after Shakespeare's death, in preparing a book called _Ancient Funeral Monuments_ , John Weever copied down the Latin and English inscriptions on Shakespeare's funerary monument and noted in the margin that this was "William Shakespeare the famous poet". Weever was also the man who, in _Epigrams in the Oldest Cut and Newest Fashion_ , published an epigram to "honey-tongued Shakespeare" titled "Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare" that mentioned his _Venus and Adonis_ , _Rape of Lucrece_ , _Romeo and Juliet_ , and a "Richard" that is probably _Richard III_ given the internal evidence of the verse. So not only did Weever take note of Shakespeare's death, whom he called a "famous poet" and "honey-tongued Shakespeare" and whose authorship of four works he affirmed, but he did so by copying down the language of the funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon, which means that his "famous poet" is the one who was born and buried in Stratford. Also, Shakespeare was honored with a folio publication of almost all of his plays a mere seven years after his death. In the dedicatory epistle to the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell wrote that they "have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our S H A K E S P E A R E , by humble offer of his playes, to your most noble patronage." So they affirm that the author's name was Shakespeare, that these are "his playes", and that this author Shakespeare was their "Friend, & Fellow [i.e., fellow actor]", which is something that the list of principal actors confirms, as well as the other documentary evidence showing that Heminges, Condell, and Shakespeare were all members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men together. In this Folio edition, there are commendatory verses from four poets, at least two of whom and perhaps all four knew Shakespeare personally. Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare not only as a friendly rival but also as the man who acted in at least two of his plays (according to the cast lists in his 1616 _Works_ ): _Every Man in His Humour_ and _Sejanus His Fall_ . Leonard Digges was a Shakespeare fanboy, a fellow Stratfordian, and a stepson to Thomas Russell, who was one of the two overseers of Shakespeare's will. Digges was friends with James Mabbe, the probable poet who was "I. M.", and there's a surviving marginal note from Digges to Mabbe favorably mentioning Shakespeare's sonnets in Mabbe's copy of Lope de Vega's _Rimas_ . Hugh Holland also contributed commendatory verses to the Folio, and he contributed commendatory verses to the published quarto of Ben Jonson's _Sejanus His Fall_ . So if Holland had seen _Sejanus_ , then he would have seen Shakespeare among the cast. So the death of the author did _not_ pass unremarked. Instead, he was the subject of elegies and given the publication of a folio edition of his works. What more do you want? Of course, it's obvious what you want: you want the response to Shakespeare's death to be commensurate with your overinflated notion of his importance. You want the early modern people at the time to have psychically intuited Bardolatry, and since history didn't work out the way you insist it had to have happened, that means that the history is wrong. It can't be your expectations are unrealistic. Oh no. It's _them_ .

@@Nullifidian They recognized his a death a mere seven years later? That's timely.

​@@stevenhershkowitz2265The typesetting began five years later, in 1621, and by that time William Basse's eulogy to Shakespeare had been in circulation long enough that Ben Jonson felt confident in answering it in the First Folio. The funerary monument comparing him to Roman poet Virgil was in place within a couple of years of his death. But you know all of this, except when you choose not to.

@@stevenhershkowitz2265 As Caius Martius Coriolanus has pointed out, you're dishonestly ignoring things you've already been told countless times before. However, even if you were being sincere, I have to ask, so what? So what if the First Folio really _were_ the first posthumous notice of Shakespeare's death and it was instantaneously created in 1623 without any preliminary editing and typesetting (presumably by waving a wand in the air and saying "Bibbity bobbity boo!")? What would that _provably_ mean for Shakespeare's authorship?

@@Nullifidian I have no idea what you are talking about.

Thanks for watching!

Marlowe, in common with Bacon, has the great consolation that neither needed to be Shakespeare in order to be memorable and great. If Oxford wasn't Shakespeare, he should be justly forgotten, or at least remembered as a cautionary tale. Of the Anti-Stratfordian Trinity, Marlowe in the Holy Ghost primarily because he was the first to become a ghost. Despite his being just The notion that he had somehow faked his death was easier to accept when the details were scanty. The discovery of his coroner's inquest in 1923 should have ended the matter. And I'm aware of the arguments. He was under indictment but he was at liberty. You don't allow that for people in danger of being strung up. His required daily appearance before the Privy Council would make the involvement of the Queen's coroner completely reasonable. And dying in a tavern brawl was completely in keeping with the violent and dissolute way Marlowe lived his life.

Hard to do with those who have no living descendants, like Shakespeare.

Why is it "simpler" to posit a completely unevidenced secret author than it is to conclude that the actor was also a playwright in a time when the actor-playwright was a recognized figure (Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Nathan Field, Robert Armin, etc.)?

@@Nullifidian , Read the sentence. The video presumes that Anti-stratfordians believe that the Stratford man stayed in Stratford. They do not. They are well aware that the Stratford man went to London, etc etc etc. The fact that the Stratford man went to London etc etc etc, supports the Stratfordian beluef that he was the playwright. It ALSO supports tge case that he was the broker who handled the plays for another (the author), which he could hardly have done if he remained in Stratford. I was correcting the erroneous suggestion concernung what Anti-ratfordians generally believe about the Steatford man. Believe it or not, most confurmed Anti-Stratfordians have done a fair bit of homework. You will find a great number of ignorant people who blithely state "Of course Shakespeare wrore Shakespeare!" You would be hard pressed to find a confirmed Anti-Stratfordian who was not fairly familiar with Shakespeare's known biography, for example. Questioning and investigation are not the foundations of ignorance.

​@@arealphoney (Part 1 of 2) "Read the sentence. "The video presumes that Anti-stratfordians believe that the Stratford man stayed in Stratford. "They do not. "They are well aware that the Stratford man went to London, etc etc etc. " Actually, I've argued with anti-Shakespearians who _have_ claimed that Shakespeare was paid to remain in Stratford well out of the way and that was what the purchase of New Place was for (Shakespeare must have been very trusting to have lent his name out as early as 1593 but not had his reward until 1597), and I had to provide the evidence that he was on tax rolls in St. Helen's Bishopsgate, was called as a witness in a lawsuit over a marriage portion in his capacity as a lodger with the Mountjoys in Silver Street, Cripplegate, and that he was an actor with a London theatre company. (Naturally, my interlocutors ignored all of this evidence.) Not all of the anti-Shakespearians have an agreed approach to this subject. In fact, the general characteristic of anti-Shakespearianism is complete and mutually exclusive confusion. "It ALSO supports tge case that he was the broker who handled the plays for another (the author), which he could hardly have done if he remained in Stratford." And how does it support that, since the role of broker was _not a possible career path_ in early modern theatre? There were around fifteen playhouses in the London area not counting the ones associated with the royal court or the Inns of Court, which mostly got the plays of the public theatres secondhand, and there were half a dozen inn yards in which plays were performed by troupes without a dedicated London home. In order for a "broker" to be a viable career path, there has to be a large enough theatre community for a middleman to get his nose in. But public theatre was barely 15 years old by the time Shakespeare got to London. There is no evidence that the role of "play broker" existed in early modern theatre, because the playwrights could deal with the theatre companies themselves. Henslowe records many payments in his diaries, including payments to save playwrights from debtors' prison or advances on their promised plays, but none to any brokers acting for the playwrights. And if Shakespeare was a "broker", why on earth would he solely deal with _one company_ ?! The essence of an agent or broker's role is to query as many possible places as might be interested in what the agent or broker has to offer. But everything Shakespeare wrote after 1594 is all for one company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men. And why would Shakespeare's name be on the works at all? That was not necessary for a "broker". Most early modern plays were published anonymously, and playbills didn't carry the identifying information about the author until well into the Restoration era (we have an extant letter from John Dryden, a playwright himself, commenting on the change)..Even Shakespeare's own p[lays were published anonymously from 1594 through 1597, despite the fact that his name was already on _Venus and Adonis_ in 1593 (and that identification, as I've shown you, _had_ to predate Marlowe's legal troubles). It also makes a hash of the earliest recorded reference to Shakespeare as an actor and a playwright. Robert Greene's _Groats-worth_ was a wounded yawp from his deathbed because he was dying in poverty-he had to instruct his wife settle up with the couple who took him in, otherwise he would have died in the gutter without a clean shirt on his back-and he blamed the actors for their ingratitude. He called them "crows" or "puppets" who merely mouthed the lines the playwrights created. Shakespeare, therefore, was the summit of actorly ingratitude because he dared to think he could write plays as well as any of the rest of them and thus constituted an economic threat to the professional freelance playwrights Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, and Thomas Nashe. Greene warns this trio that they should turn aside from the actors, not letting them have any fresh material from their pens, and seek aristocratic patrons. But that would be absurd if Shakespeare were a mere "broker" because then the playwrights would be getting the majority of their fees through him, with Shakespeare taking only a percentage for bringing the theatre and the playwright together. He wouldn't be a threat to the playwrights, but a supposed aid to their activity. I can understand why you won't like this because _Groats-worth_ was written well before Marlowe's troubles and establishes that Shakespeare was a playwright then, and because Greene addresses Marlowe, and he would scarcely have gone out of his way to warn Marlowe against himself. Nevertheless, it is documentary evidence of Shakespeare's early career and it can't be ignored. "Believe it or not, most confurmed Anti-Stratfordians have done a fair bit of homework." Yeah, I can tell. When one of them claimed that _Henry VIII_ had to have been written in Elizabeth's reign because of the praise of her from Archbishop Cranmer, completely missing the fact that it was described as a new play in 1613 when the Globe theatre burned down; that John Fletcher, the co-author, didn't have an active career before 1606 or 1605 at the earliest; and that the passage also praises Elizabeth's _successor_ including an obvious reference to Jamestown, founded in 1607; it was obvious that this person had done their homework. Another one, and an Oxfordian of a certain prominence online, once claimed in one of her videos that fully _half of Shakespeare's plays_ are dismissed as "problem plays" by Shakespearians and are _never staged_ because they can't fit them in the 'orthodox' framework. This poses the question of how large she thinks Shakespeare's oeuvre is or how large the number of "problem plays" are, and where she got the impression that some of Shakespeare's plays are never staged is beyond me. Shakespeare is a popular enough writer that you can't afford to simply halve the number of plays you'll do without losing ones that people would pay to see. I've even seen all of the _actually identified_ "problem plays" on stage or on DVD. They are _Measure for Measure_ , _Troilus and Cressida_ , and _All's Well That Ends Well_ , with occasionally _Timon of Athens_ and _Coriolanus_ included because of their unsympathetic protagonists. This same woman also once, when stung by an observation about the De Vere Ball that ultra-conservative Curtis Yarvin )a.k.a., Mencius Moldbug) attended to the effect that nobody in the room had read Shakespeare since high school, asked her Twitter followers if any of them had read any Shakespeare since it had last been assigned. Like when I asked you, it was a universal negative. Only one person spoke up and said that she'd recently watched the teen comedy based on Shakespeare's _Taming of the Shrew_ , _10 Things I Hate About You_ . In reply, this woman admitted that she too hadn't read _any_ Shakespeare but had recently seen a movie of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ . And I once dealt with one of the top dogs in Oxfordianism, Alexander Waugh, when he claimed that Portia's name was spelled Portio in all editions of Shakespeare until John Payne Collier standardized the spelling in the 19th century. I had read the First Folio in its entirety (and I've since reread it, celebrating the 400th anniversary last year with a reread) so he _really_ chose the wrong person to lie to about that. He wanted to link it to the lost play _Portio and Demorantes_ , which Eva Turner Clark claimed was actually _Portia and the Merchants_ . It's an ingenious solution, but it's completely at odds with secretary hand, which Clark was evidently ignorant of. So I showed him the 1600 first quarto of _Merchant_ and the 1623 First Folio stage directions where Portia enters with the Prince of Morocco and his train, showing it was spelled with the "a" complete back in the 17th century.

(Part 2 of 2) I've also been informed that Shakespeare only wrote one non-British play set in a foreign country other than Italy, that Malvolio is a character in _Romeo and Juliet_ , that _Romeo and Juliet_ is entirely in blank verse (I think they got that from Roland Emmerich's _opus stultissimus_ called _Anonymous_ ), that Shakespeare wrote in Old English, that (conversely) there is no such language as Old English, that all English literature written up to the Civil War (I presumed the English, but given the person speaking it might have been the American) was written in "floundering" English-whatever that means, etc., etc., etc. But the best thing I ever saw was on the old IMDB boards for _Anonymous_ . One of the anti-Shakespearians there believed that they had got hold of a _Hamlet_ monologue that completely vindicated a point they were making, and copied and pasted it to the message board. It didn't even need examination to see that it hadn't come from _Hamlet_ . This person had stumbled on _Hamlet_ fanfic and confused contemporary [prose with Shakespeare's early modern verse, thus proving at a single instant that they'd never read the play they were arguing about. But yeah, they've definitely done their homework. Most of them haven't even read the works in full and are just going of half-remembered snippets they Sparks- or Cliff's Noted years ago. Nor have they read the works of the people they want to reassign Shakespeare's oeuvre to. They routinely make overblown claims for Shakespeare's expertise in law, in classics, etc., etc., etc. that could be easily fact-checked if they'd only read something by Shakespeare's contemporaries, but they never do. Shakespeare denial, as I said last time, is a venue for people who hate literature and can't understand it, but who nevertheless believe in the cultural cachet literature carries, and they want a piece of it by engaging with Shakespeare in the only way they know how: by arguing about the authorship instead of reading the works. They think that if they can fool themselves into believing that they've got a true line on the "real author" that suddenly the works will make sense for them. Plus, there's the all too human foolishness of wanting to believe that one is in on a "secret". "You will find a great number of ignorant people who blithely state "Of course Shakespeare wrore Shakespeare!" " On the contrary, I've found that the people who actually engage with Shakespeare-deniers in argument are the most knowledgeable about the early modern period, its theatre, and its literature. I'm fully willing to concede that there may be a large ignorant group that hasn't heard of Shakespeare authorship denialism at all or has paid it scant attention and just accepts the attribution to Shakespeare at face value, but they don't get into arguments with Shakespeare-deniers. Shakespeare-deniers are more ignorant than those who accept Shakespeare's authorship and are willing to make a case for it because the arguments of the Shakespeare-deniers are largely premised on falsehoods, and therefore only ignorant people can fall for them. That was how I was initially convinced of Shakespeare's authorship in the first place. As I mentioned last time, I've been into Shakespeare since I was 8 and the rest of early modern drama since I was 13. And I wanted a place to talk about this, so I visited a newsgroup that was half literary discussion of Shakespeare and the early modern era and half authorship. Though I didn't care that much about the subject of authorship, I couldn't help but have my inbox flooded with messages that were debating it. _Every single time_ a Shakespeare-denier floated a new argument, it got shot down with extensive documentary evidence and scholarship. It didn't take too many reiterations of this pattern before I saw that all of the evidence lay with Shakespeare and there was literally _none whatsoever_ for any alternative "authorship candidate". "You would be hard pressed to find a confirmed Anti-Stratfordian who was not fairly familiar with Shakespeare's known biography, for example." I've found that most of them are entirely ignorant of Shakespeare's _actual_ biography, and that the character who lives in their heads is an invented Shakespeare that pairs nicely with their invented alternative authorship candidates. According to them, Shakespeare was illiterate, which is impossible given his career as an actor-he at least had to be able to read the cue scripts-let alone the substantial evidence of his career as a writer and the six-I'd argue seven-extant signatures that are presumptive evidence for literacy, plus the fact that on the basis of the signatures, the imagery, style, substance, and internal evidence, Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ has been assigned to him. They also accuse him of hoarding grain in a time a famine, when Shakespeare's holdings were all in _malt_ , not grain (called "corne" in the early modern era), that his malt holdings were near the town mean despite the fact that he then owned the second-largest house in Stratford, and despite the fact that the list drawn up was an impartial survey of the holdings of "corne" and malt for the entire town, not just a list of those who were :"hoarding". They claim that Shakespeare's daughters were illiterate (in fact, they usually say "daughter" because they don't know he had more than one-they're experts on his biography) when we have quite a lot of evidence pertaining to at least Susanna Hall's literacy. She left two extant signatures, she probably wrote the Latin epitaph for her mother written from the perspective of Anne's children, she was capable of describing one of her late husband's books to a prospective buyer even though it was in Latin, and her own epitaph describes her as "witty [i.e., learned] above her sex". They do everything that they can to rubbish his reputation and make him look like a greedy, grasping, and flint-hearted man, none of which characteristics are in the least bit relevant to whether he wrote the plays or not. "Questioning and investigation are not the foundations of ignorance." By that standard, Holocaust deniers know more about the Holocaust than historians do; creationists know more about evolutionary biology than biologists do; 9/11 Truthers know more about engineering and aerodynamics than the National Academy of Sciences U. S. A.; HIV/AIDS deniers know more about the virus than virologists; anti-vaxxers know more about immunology than immunologists; relativity-deniers, geocentrists, Sitchinites, Velikovskians, and flat-earthers know more about the universe and planetary dynamics than physicists; proponents of Atlantis know more about geology than geologists; Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists and so-called "sovereign citizens" know more about the law than lawyers, etc., etc., etc. This would be a conspiracy theorists' charter: they could claim expertise merely by the act of denying the "orthodox" view.

What actual evidence is there for any other candidate? Hypotheses and speculation are not evidence.

Weever does not call Shakespeare "a certain writer spurius". He's not referring to Shakespeare at all. Weever wrote that line in Latin, "In Spurium quendam scriptorem". In Latin, Spurium can be either one of illegitimate birth or female genitalia. In addition, Weever's epigram makes it clear that this b*****d or c**t writer is quite fond of Venus. Yet in Shakespeare's version, she is a pest to Adonis, who wants nothing to do with her. Fail on so many levels.

And you have to go to Venice to imagine a man wearing a hat? Truly this is amazing. I must be a genius, because I have no problem imagining that a man might wear a hat. It MUST mean I watched the film 'Casablanca' because people in that film wear hats.

Has it occurred to your that even if the kidnap by pirates was based on Oxford (it doesn't HAVE to be.Lots of people were kidnapped by pirates, including the writer Cervantes) then there's nothing to stop any playwright in need of a good sub-plot from using it in a play - in this case to get Hamlet back to Denmark in time for Ophelia's funeral?

And yet you still think Shakespeare was writing in The Middle Ages.

@@ethelburga Cultural transmittance depends on the arts. When we read Beowulf, we go all the way back to pagan Nordic culture. When we read Ovid, we return to Rome. Shakespeare built from these prior expressions, because he was fascinated by the poets who spoke about them in such entertaining ways. In the same manner, the history plays carry us up to Tudor times from Richard II to his own day. Was Richard II of the medieval era? You betcha. Are we made more aware of our ancestry through Shakespeare's plays? This is for all purposes a rhetorical question, but if you take a course from The History Professor he will elaborate.

Michelle K probably realized what a waste of time this all is and regretted her involvement.

@@Jeffhowardmeade We'll never know. For what it's worth, knowing that entire threads can be wiped at a whim, I've made a record of it in advance. As time goes on, the Elizabethan period has come into ever improved focus. Your contribution, intentional or otherwise, has been a help. Thank you.

"Both these men had good cause to disguise their identities as playwrights in the 1590s." Why? "And BOTH these possible authors were very much better qualified to have written the plays than tan the Stratford man who had left his older wife and three children, and run away to London to join the theatre." How so? Christopher Marlowe wrote in a completely different style to Shakespeare, with different interests, imagery, use of languages, etc., and Edward de Vere could barely write at all in any language. Very pretty handwriting, but the content was abysmal.

@@Nullifidian You asked a specific question. Why disguise their identities? 1. Marlowe had been accused of treason and was apparently dead, under circumstances that clearly involved a plot. This event was just weeks before the publication of Venus and Adonis under the name of Shakespesre The poem is remarkably similar to Hero and Leander by Msrlowe, but more mature, and in a different poetic format - verses not couplets. 2. The Earl of Oxford. People of his rank did not normally publish plays which were for the entertainment of the masses, unlike poetry which could be circulated in the court. Edward deVere"s poetry is pretty and bland. He could never have written the sonnets. As for your comments about Marlowe's style and content, I disagee. Tambourlaine is the sort of immature adventurous stuff you expect from a young writer. Marlowe's othrr works prefigure Shakespeare, end to end. The resolution of Two Gentlemen.... is badly conceived and nasty.... Shakespeare/Marlowe needed to think that one out again. The criticisms are that Marlowe couldnt write women .... and i go back to the catfight in Tambourlzine ... He could not write Humour? What nonsense! Different preoccupations? No. Developing style, becoming more sophisticated. Why had Marlowe not written romantic tragedies? Because he simply had not got to Romeo and Juliet yet? Why us the merchant of Venice more developed than the Jew of Malta? Age and experience. Why is Picasso's sentimental Blue Period different to his abstracted figure compositions of thirty years later?

@@arealphoney I'm going to have to break this into two sections. Part 1 of 2: "Marlowe had been accused of treason...." No, he hadn't been! Marlowe was under investigation, not accused, of potentially being the owner of a heretical pamphlet advocating Arianist opinions. He died before the investigation could be concluded. And the evidence that the Privy Council wasn't taking the charge seriously is that they let him roam freely on his own recognizance, only having to check in once a day with the Council to ensure that he hadn't skipped out. If they thought they were apt to punish him severely, he'd have been in prison. Had it been treason, he would _definitely_ have not been able to wander around at large. "...and was apparently dead, under circumstances that clearly involved a plot." That "clearly" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in lieu of evidence, but that's also one of the questions: why was he dead? This was not an era of Interpol and extradition treaties. Had Marlowe simply _left_ for the Continent, there would have been nothing the Privy Council could have done to touch him. Marlovians have to make excuses for why their candidate was a dead man, but I don't have to go along with their excuses as my operating assumptions. "This event was just weeks before the publication of Venus and Adonis under the name of Shakespesre" But _Venus and Adonis_ was already in the hands of the printers by 18 April 1593, when it was entered into the Stationers' Register. That's _before_ any of Marlowe's legal troubles, which were only pursuant to the raining of Thomas Kyd's lodgings on the suspicion that he had written a threatening and xenophobic anti-Dutch pamphlet. That didn't happen before mid-May, and by the end of the month Marlowe was dead. Now, under your hypothesis, in the heat of the moment of faking his own death, rather than just letting _Venus and Adonis_ go as a posthumously published work, as almost _all_ his works were other than the two parts of _Tamburlaine_ (and those had only been published anonymously), _Edward II_ , and _The Jew of Malta_ (and neither of these latter two early quartos survive from his lifetime, so we can't tell if Marlowe was credited there either, but probably not since most early modern plays were published anonymously), he decided to carve out an exception for _Venus and Adonis_ and have it published under the pseudonym that in the spur of the moment he decided he would commit to writing under for the rest of his life. He didn't want to publish _Doctor Faustus_ , _Dido_ , _The Massacre at Paris_ , or any of his acknowledged poetry-not his translations of _Amores_ by Ovid, not his translation of the 1st book of _Bello civili_ by Lucan, not _Hero and Leander_ , not "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"-but he did want to publish this and wanted it to be credited to his pseudonym for some bizarre reason, despite the fact that posthumous publication was nothing uncommon. And Richard Field, the printer, said, "Of course! We can disassemble all of the already printed sheets we've collated and bound and then reset up to eight pages of type by hand and then we have, of course, despite the scarcity and expense of paper, a thousand sheets just lying around idle that can be used to re-print the dedication with this name-what did you say it was?-"William Shakespeare" on it! Then rebind the entire print run and get it into the stationers' shops! And you want it all done in a fortnight? No problem!" Honestly, you can't possibly know _anything_ about early modern printing if you think this scenario is even remotely within the realms of possibility. This wasn't an era when you could change the dedication in your word processing program and then upload to a print-on-demand program on Amazon. Moreover, Shakespeare's name isn't on the title page, but on the dedication that was a request for patronage. Why would Marlowe do that, since it would only undermine the attempt to keep secret that Shakespeare was a false name? How was Henry Wriothesley supposed to send money to a non-person? Finally, we have notice of Shakespeare as both an actor and a playwright as early as 1592 in Robert Greene's posthumous pamphlet _A Groats-worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance_ , well before Thomas Kyd's and Christopher Marlowe's legal troubles. Greene died in September 1592 and the theatres were shut down due to unrest and kept closed by plague starting in July 1592, therefore the only way that Greene could have paraphrased the line from Shakespeare's _3 Henry VI_ and attributed it to a figure he identified obliquely as "Shake-scene" is if he had seen it staged sometime in the first half of the year. That places the composition of the _Henry VI_ plays sometime c. 1590 - 1591, or at a push the first few months of 1592. "The poem is remarkably similar to Hero and Leander by Msrlowe, but more mature, and in a different poetic format - verses not couplets." Considering that _Hero and Leander_ is incomplete because of Marlowe's early death, you're basically affirming that he couldn't have possibly written it. Either that or he achieved artistic "maturity" in a a few days. "2. The Earl of Oxford. People of his rank did not normally publish plays which were for the entertainment of the masses...." That's because they didn't _write_ plays for the public theatres. Why should they have? There was no status to writing plays and what an author was paid for a play in this era-about £6-wouldn't have kept de Vere in scented gloves for a fortnight. Writing for the public theatres involved knowing what forces were at the troupe's disposal and carefully dividing up the play to permit doubling and even tripling of roles, writing for the strengths of the various cast members, writing around the properties they owned, writing around their physical characteristics, etc. It is as impossible for Christopher Marlowe to have written for a company he had never clapped eyes on-the Lord Chamberlain's Men were created in 1594, a year after his death-as it is for Edward de Vere to have written plays for production in the public theatres from his armchair. This is why the dramatic form that aristocrats did write in was the closet drama. These were purely literary plays that did not require one to write for any specific number of actors, did not require scenery, did not require costuming, and were never meant to be staged and therefore did not involve stage dancing, singing, sword-fighting and other specialized skills. "...unlike poetry which could be circulated in the court." Which, of course, poses the question of why Shakespeare's first two attributed works were his narrative poems, while his plays went unattributed until 1598 even though they started being published in 1594. "Edward deVere"s poetry is pretty and bland. He could never have written the sonnets." That's not the only thing he couldn't have written. He couldn't have written the narrative poems or the plays either. He spoke, wrote, and spelled in an incommensurate rustic East Anglian dialect, far from Shakespeare's Midlands speech. He consistently spelled "you" as "yow" and "like" as "leke" and pronounced it like the vegetable, the leek, so if he'd had the writing of Shakespeare we'd be talking about the play _As Yow Leke It_ . "As for your comments about Marlowe's style and content, I disagee." Of course you do. You think if it uses "thee" and "thou" and goes ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM that it's Shakespeare. "Tambourlaine is the sort of immature adventurous stuff you expect from a young writer." That is not the point. "Marlowe's othrr works prefigure Shakespeare, end to end. The resolution of Two Gentlemen.... is badly conceived and nasty.... Shakespeare/Marlowe needed to think that one out again." So your evidence for a Marlowe work that prefigures Shakespeare is a Shakespeare play. Do you have any of these "prefigurings" that _don't_ circularly assume your conclusion?

Part 2 of 2: "The criticisms are that Marlowe couldnt write women .... and i go back to the catfight in Tambourlzine ..." That wasn't my point either, but if you think that flyting is a unique quality to Marlowe that shows his insight into women, then you haven't understood early modern theatre. "He could not write Humour? What nonsense!" And if you think that the encounter between Zenocrate and Zabina is funny, then your mind will be blown when you get around to reading early modern playwrights who could actually write humor like Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, and Middleton. ZABINA. Base concubine, must thou be plac'd by me That am the empress of the mighty Turk? ZENOCRATE. Disdainful Turkess, and unreverend boss, Call'st thou me concubine, that am betroth'd Unto the great and mighty Tamburlaine? ZABINA. To Tamburlaine, the great Tartarian thief! ZENOCRATE. Thou wilt repent these lavish words of thine When thy great basso-master and thyself Must plead for mercy at his kingly feet, And sue to me to be your advocate. ZABINA. And sue to thee! I tell thee, shameless girl, Thou shalt be laundress to my waiting-maid.- How lik'st thou her, Ebea? will she serve? EBEA. Madam, she thinks perhaps she is too fine; But I shall turn her into other weeds, And make her dainty fingers fall to work. ZENOCRATE. Hear'st thou, Anippe, how thy drudge doth talk? And how my slave, her mistress, menaceth? Both for their sauciness shall be employ'd To dress the common soldiers' meat and drink; For we will scorn they should come near ourselves. ANIPPE. Yet sometimes let your highness send for them To do the work my chambermaid disdains. Yeah, that's a laugh riot. "Different preoccupations? "No. Developing style, becoming more sophisticated." And becoming more sophisticated required dropping his interest in the figure of the overreacher that links _Tamburlaine_ , _Doctor Faustus_ , _The Jew of Malta_ , _Edward II_ , and _The Massacre at Paris_ ? The only play he ever wrote that didn't feature an overreacher was _Dido, Queen of Carthage_ , and there he was dramatizing Virgil probably for performance at Cambridge. Whereas Shakespeare's only overreacher character is Richard III, and that play was written in his youth when he was still under Marlowe's influence, probably while Marlowe was still alive, since it so clearly carries on from _3 Henry VI_ , which as mentioned was already on the boards by 1592. Furthermore, aside from the fact that their careers clearly overlapped while Marlowe was still alive and that Shakespeare showed little interest in the kind of characters Marlowe was interested in, there's also the fact that Marlowe's plays are richer in foreign languages, particularly Latin, richer in the depth and variety of classical allusions, and feature celestial metaphors and imagery, whereas Shakespeare's metaphors and imagery is frequently botanical. Marlowe would have had to have forgotten most of what he knew about classical literature and completely changed his manner of expression to have written the works of Shakespeare. "Why had Marlowe not written romantic tragedies? Because he simply had not got to Romeo and Juliet yet?" Yeah, I'm sure that Marlowe was just waiting to write a heterosexual love tragedy, once he also forgot that he was gay along with forgetting that he was knowledgable in classical literature. Even _Dido_ , which could be considered Marlowe's love tragedy, begins with Jupiter playing with his boytoy Ganymede in language that leaves no doubt about the nature of their relationship. Ditto _Edward II_ , which is shockingly blunt if you know even a little bit about classical mythology and history, in which Marlowe cloaks his references to homosexual love. And, of course, the early modern period was the great era of classical learning in grammar schools, so these allusions must not have passed by the understanding of much of the audience. "Why us the merchant of Venice more developed than the Jew of Malta? Age and experience." And the fact that it was written by a different playwright. One who wasn't dead at the time. Aside from the fact that death is bad for one's productivity, there's also the small fact that we've traced Shakespeare's sources, and they're inconsistent with a man writing in secrecy from the Continent after faking his own death. Take _The Comedy of Errors_ . On the basis of verbal parallels in the text to Shakespeare's play, it's likely that William Warner's translation was the source for Shakespeare's play. Though not published until 1595, and we know that Shakespeare's play was performed in 1594, the play was entered in the Stationer's Register on 10 June 1594 and the printer's address to the readers notes that Warner did these translations "for the use and delight of his private friends", so that the translation existed in manuscript before it was printed. Interestingly, Warner dedicated a prose tale called _Pan His Syrinx or Pipe_ (1585) and a long epic, _Albion's England_ (1586), to Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon and the Lord Chamberlain, who was the patron of Shakespeare's company at the time. Or take the plays _The True Chronicle History of King Leir_ and _The Troublesome Raigne of King John_ . Scholars accept that the parallels in these works are so close that Shakespeare must have had the plays at his elbow as he wrote them. The same thing is observed of the prose romances _Rosalind: Euphues Golden Legacy_ by Thomas Lodge (the major source of _As You Like It_ ) and _Pandosto; or, The Triumph of Time_ by Robert Greene (the major source of _The Winter's Tale_ ). And then, of course, there are all the works Shakespeare based on Holinshed's _Chronicles_ , the North translation of Plutarch's _Lives_ , etc., etc., etc. All of these works have clear publication histories _in England_ , but it's unclear how they could have found their way to Marlowe living in secret exile. Are you suggesting that when Marlowe faked his death, he also had the foresight to not only have his library shipped over but also to have new works delivered to him as they became available? And, of course, if I were exiled on the Continent, the first thing I'd think of to do would be to write plays not for any _local_ theatre performance, but for performance back home where I could neither see them nor benefit from their sale. After all, it's not like the Elizabethans cared what literature came over from the Continent and weren't constantly on the lookout for Catholic propaganda being smuggled onto their shores. And shipping by sail was absolutely 100% secure. There were never any shipwrecks, incidences of piracy either official (with letters of marque supplied by the government) or unofficial, or anything else that might interfere with the regular commerce between Marlowe and the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men. And when revisions were required, as they might be from the Master of the Revels all the way down to the individual actors, it was no problem at all for the scripts to be returned to Marlowe and then shipped again back to London. No doubt such quick correspondence was conducted by e-mail. And they doubtless sent Marlowe an e-mail about William Kempe leaving the company, which is why Marlowe knew not to write a clown's role in _Julius Caesar_ . Then the sent an e-mail attachment with Robert Armin's résumé and headshot, so he knew that his the new comic actor could sing, and therefore for the first time wrote a singing comic role in the First Gravedigger in _Hamlet_ , and then wrote more singing roles for him like Feste in _Twelfth Night_ and the Fool in _King Lear_ . If you look into it for longer than three seconds, anti-Shakespearianism involves one in an enormous number of absurdities.

@@Nullifidian , I was not using the xat fight in Tambourlaine as indicative of humour. It was the interaction between women i was considering. The Jew of Malta is a piece of dark satirical comedy. There is comedy in Faustus. There are many comedic scenes in Tambourlaine. Marlowe could write comedy. That is the point, not whether the slab ofvtext uou have pasted is comedy. And, yes. I have no doubt that other writers wrote about women. However, one of the petsistent criticisism about Marlowe is that he did not. In discounting Marlowe as a possible author of Shakespeare, one must consider the usual criticisms whether YOU mentioned them or not. Other than his presumed, but highly suspicious death. These reasons that I have cited are those that are usually given.

I’m surprised to hear that it’s commonly surmised that William of Stratford received a Classical Education in a local grammar school. I had heard that there was zero evidence of that.

OK, so here I am AFTER having watched the video. First, thank you. I’m so grateful to be able to hear from people like you who have done years of reading, and study and thought. It’s quite a rare privilege to be able to enjoy content like this for free. Also, your video is very well done, the sound quality, and visuals are great, and you’re a very easy speaker to listen to. You are also a good teacher. This was a great presentation, and definitely would be a hearty affirmation for any “Stratfordian”. I do not want to offend you with criticism because I sincerely appreciate what you’ve given here, but at the risk of unintended offense, I’ll respectfully offer a little bit of respectful criticism. I did notice early on in the video your very subtly subversive word choices. In my opinion, very well done. But I did pick up on it. Ever so gently, a little straw here, a little straw there, but ultimately by the end we were beholding a neat and tidy straw man. Again, I thank you Sir, for defending the academic view. I can see why this view is held with such loyalty. I believe personally, for now, I’m going to consider myself a Shakespeare Authorship agnostic, well, I’ll admit it, a Stratford Authorship skeptic. What I do think I believe, for now, is that William of Stratford was a boy raised in poverty, with no evidence of any education whatsoever. He married a girl who gave birth to his daughter, and he left town for London a year later, having left zero evidence that he could read or write more than his signature for the Stratford season of his life. Once in London, it is evident that he joined players as an actor, and was very talented. He enjoyed a successful career as a famous actor, while still, not managing to leave behind a scrap of evidence that he could write more than a signature. During this season of his life, he worked and acted in the plays that would later be published under the title of The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare. These plays, like other works which were not contained in that legendary book, were attributed to an anonymous author under the pen name “William Shakespeare” (a word play on the Greek notion “to shake the speare” a nod to irreverence) to protect the anonymity of the author. A very punk rock artistic move, not unlike Iggy Pop. And a wise move considering how many playwrights were sent to the Tower of London if their work displeased the Crown. Also, of William of Stratford, the famous London actor, I believe the strongest piece of evidence he left to tell us anything about himself, is his last will and testament, not written in his own hand of course, because even by the end of his life, there was still zero evidence he could read or write (most likely having worked as a stage actor from oral memorization, like most actors at the time). And what can we learn of William of Stratford, the celebrity of the London stage from his will? We learn he wanted his wife to have his second best bed, and that among all of his worldly possessions, a single written word was not to be found. He left no journal, no correspondence, no contracts, not a poem, sonnet, or play. The medieval equivalent of a post-it note was not to be found. No grocery list, no to-do. Not. A. Word. That’s interesting. Because, you know, “Shakespeare”. As I said earlier, the strongest reason for my skepticism is tied up in that precious little illiterate granddaughter. I can’t buy that. As for where my Shakespearen Authorship skeptical mind tends to settle on who MIGHT have actually authored the published compilation under the title The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare, I’d have to say, for now, Sir Frances Bacon and his writers studio seems like the most likely company of men for the job. Thank you very much for the wonderful morning. I’m off to spend some minutes seeing what Mark Twain has to say about it before I get off the couch and go help my own precious little children not be illiterate, so they can read Shakespeare. It’s the least I can do.

Hi there! Thanks so much for watching and especially for keeping an open mind. I appreciate your perspectives and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don’t want to push back against anything specific that you’ve shared here, but I would like to make one overarching point that speaks to why a LOT of university/academic historians and literature specialists support the Stratford view. Treat the past as an alien world. That isn’t to say that people haven’t acted in similar ways throughout the entirety of human history, it’s a methodological “distancing” that helps us treat the subject(s) and material(s) we’re studying with *some* degree of objectivity. In other words, you cannot make any assumptions about why a person did or didn’t do something; left or didn’t leave a particular record; and/or, said or didn’t say something. Everything must be contextualized. So, when I’m reading scholarship on Shakespeare, I’m looking for information gives me a sense of the world he was working within in order to better understand both the evidence we DO have and also why it may be that we don’t have evidence of things we might *assume* to be there. Thus, not all scholarship is equal. Some scholarship just does a better job of tying the evidence to its contexts and building a more complete picture of the historical reality. I challenge you and all who take up the task of studying the Shakespeare Authorship Question to critically analyze the scholars you’re studying. What evidence are they building upon and why? How is this evidence set into its historical contexts (this is where removing your assumptions is REALLY important) and what is the further evidence of the accuracy of those contexts? What other scholars (i.e. interlocutors) does the work interface and intersect with? Who are those scholars and what is the depth of their scholarship? And finally, consider the picture that all this scholarship is building for you and ask yourself-have I done my best to treat this picture as its own world, separate from my own (i.e. not measuring the past by the present), and can I trust the work of the scholars I’m studying? I wish you the very best in your continued study of Shakespeare!

@@TheTheatreHistoryProfessor Thank you, these are all very thought provoking questions. Most of them never crossed my mind. I do agree about historical interpretation kept in context. I’m a Bible believer, as well as a person who likely would have sided with the Confederacy during the war of northern aggression, so yes, correct historical context is important to me. I strongly resist demonizing the past through modern glasses. Although, I do believe that when it comes to a case of asserted authorship, the burden of prove lies with the asserter. In other words, I don’t believe this is a case of “Prove he didn’t” but “Prove he did.”

"Especially since the man, himself, never claimed it did." You should read the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. They are literally (pun intended) Shakespeare claiming to be the author.

I agree. That is a dead give away.

"The SONNETS Dedication page, published in 1609, refers to 'OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET' -- the term 'ever-living' referring only to God and to deceased persons who live on in the works they left behind." False. In _Polimanteia_ , published in 1595, William Covell called Queen Elizabeth-still very much alive and still very much not a goddess-"our ever-living empress". However, I didn't need to point that out because the "ever-living poet" could well be God in this dedication too. You haven't excluded that interpretation, therefore concluding that the "poet" refers to the author of the sonnets and that this person is dead is doubly unsupported. "the person who wrote that Dedication (it was most probably John Dee)" The one who died in 1608 or his less famous cousin? Personally, I've always thought that the person who wrote the dedication, given that it's signed "T. T.", was the printer Thomas Thorpe. "THESE .. SONNETS ... ALL ... BY ... EVER ... THE ... FORTH ... T" "with "Ever" being an obvious anagram of VERE (or E. VERe, i.e. Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford)" The one thing Edward de Vere has going for him: his name contains some of the commonest letters in the alphabet so you can ring all sorts of illusory anagrams and other 'codes' out of it. Especially if you're willing to leave letters off arbitrarily just to make it fit. But it's just apophenia. "and "the 4th T" having all sorts of significance in esoteric circles" But it doesn't say 'the 4th T'; it says "THE ... FORTH ... T" according your own source. And "esoteric circles" are apt to find whatever they want to in whatever random data they have. "Watch Alexander Waugh's RU-vid videos for a full decryption of the Title and Dedication Page ciphers encoded in the 1609 SHAKESPEARES SONNETS, as well as what was said in the Stratford Monument, regarding where and with whom "Shakespeare" was buried." The fact that Waugh has consistently failed to find any evidence for his claim that Edward de Vere is interred under the Shakespeare statue in Westminster Abbey is clearly not denting your enthusiasm for his claptrap. "The only reason anybody today believes that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare is because the true author -- Edward de Vere -- intended for his own name to be forgotten, and for a front man to be given the credit." Actually, the reason I accept that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works is that this is supported by all the available evidence (not just the publications but also the Stationer's Register and Master of the Revels accounts) and by every single contemporary who bothered to write or speak on the subject. Since neither plays nor poems required a front man for their publication-anonymous publication was the norm-why on earth would Edward de Vere have bothered with one? And having decided to go through the bother, why enrich a rival theatrical troupe and hand his plays off to a man he couldn't control? Why not instead keep it in-house, having his plays performed by his own troupe, the Lord Oxford's Men, and ostensibly penned by either Anthony Munday or John Lyly, both of whom Oxford employed as his ostensible secretaries? And having so decided, why was there a gap of _five years_ between the publication of the first attributed narrative poem, _Venus and Adonis_ , and the publication of the first attributed plays in 1598 (the second quartos of _Richard III_ and _Richard II_ and the first [known] quarto of _Love's Labour's Lost_ ), even though Shakespeare's plays were printed as early as 1594? Did de Vere hit his head on exiting the stationer's shop and have an amnesic fit, only coming to himself years later and remembering the pseudonym scheme? Since publication was the objective of lining up the front man, why weren't _all_ of Shakespeare's plays published in authoritative quarto editions? Why did it take until the First Folio for 18 of them to be published, when de Vere couldn't have anticipated the development of folio publication of plays? That wouldn't happen until 1616 when Ben Jonson released his _Works_ , and even then it also included poems and masques. None of these questions make any sense at all if you posit a secret aristocratic author. "Stratfordian scholars recognized that the character Polonius in HAMLET bore uncanny resemblances to Queen Elizabeth's minister William Cecil...." Which he doesn't, actually, regardless of what of a few critics writing 100 years ago or more may have said. "and the series of parallels between Cecil and Polonius would inevitably lead to the other implied parallels -- " Yeah, like the implied parallel that Queen Elizabeth I was a murderer of her own close family member and a usurper of the rightful crown. That would really go down a treat given that Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin, was executed at Fotheringhay Castle to shore up Elizabeth's hold on the throne, wouldn't it? Therefore, the Master of the Revels would have _never_ allowed the play to proceed if _anyone_ thought that Polonius was modeled on Burghley. "equating Cecil's daughter Anne to Polonius's daughter Ophelia . . ." Ophelia went mad and drowned after being rejected by Hamlet, evidently having had premarital sex with him (which is the tenor of the mad songs Ophelia sings, and she hands out some abortifacients among her flowers). There's no evidence that Anne Cecil had premarital sex, went mad, or was even suspected of committing suicide (which was years after she was rejected by Oxford anyway-so if she died by drowning she must have floated for a long time, either due to water wings or very voluminous breasts, on which the records are sadly silent), and Ophelia never married Hamlet while Anne did marry Oxford. "It's rather astonishing, in retrospect, that nobody before John T. Looney ever connected the dots regarding the inter-relationships of Cecil, his daughter, and Lord Oxford and Polonius, Ophelia, and Hamlet." Possibly that's because nobody took the idea that Polonius was a depiction of Burghley seriously, and if they had they would have had no reason to assume that this meant the author was from Burghley's own household since early modern writers didn't indulge in autobiography. In any case, you're still left with fewer connections and more dots in relationship to Oxford and Anne Cecil as Hamlet and Ophelia. Your confidence that they can be connected seems to be based primarily on the fact that Anne Cecil married Oxford. In other words, you're assuming your conclusion. "He wrote what he knew, what his own life had experienced, and he selected as plots for his plays those stories which bore resemblances to his own life." How nice for him. It's just a shame that the late 16th/early 17th centuries are 200 years too early for him to have done so. "J. T. Looney 'profiled' the Author" In other words, he decided ahead of time that he didn't like Shakespeare as the author because Shakespeare didn't fit his ideal model of what a playwright 'should' be and therefore he went looking at random for someone more congenial to his preconceptions. Yeah, there's a reason why nobody takes that approach seriously in academia. "...and everything that has been discovered about Oxford that Looney himself didn't know at the time of his own passing only further bolsters the case for Oxford as 'Shakespeare.'" Of course it does when you only ever allow yourself to come to one conclusion. The fact remains that there is not a scrap of evidence, not even in Oxford's private notes and memorabilia, that shows that Oxford was at all interested in theatre or literature, let alone that he was publishing his secretly authored plays and poems (and why poems when he already had dire poems of his own published under his own name or initials?) under a front man's name, he wrote in an incommensurate dialect with that of William Shakespeare the author, he died c. a decade before William Shakespeare stopped writing, and the voices and skills of these two men couldn't be more different. Against considerations like these, arguments like "Cecil = Polonius, and therefore Oxford = Shakespeare" are worthless.

This argument is daft. Shakespeare was writing sonnets after Oxford was dead. Even after the book of his sonnets was published. Described as a 'new play' in 1613 when it was on stage as The Globe burnt down, there's one at the end of Henry VIII. The fact that people who follow The Earl of Oxford do not appear to know that there are more than 154 Shakespearean Sonnets is a warning not to listen to them. On anything to do with Shakespeare.

@@ethelburga Have you got any documentary/primary sources for these claims?

@@ethelburga There are only 154 sonnets in the 1609 publication titled "SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS." Only an idiot would insist otherwise. No Oxfordian has ever said that the Bard ever wrote ONLY those 154 sonnets -- and neither did I, so why would you imply that I was stating such a thing? In one of those 154 sonnets he mentions the fact that he "bore the canopy" -- i.e. he helped to carry the square-shaped canopy over the Queen during a procession, an honor which he, as the sonnet-writer, doesn't regard as being all that important to him in the moment. Only noble-born people were allowed the privilege and honor of bearing the Queen's canopy -- most certainly not a provincial commoner like William Shakspere! And HENRY VIII was written during the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth, as the laudatory passage concluding it shows. A play can be 'new' if it hadn't yet been staged -- which says nothing as to when it was actually written. How many plays made their first appearance in the First Folio, 7 years after the death of the Stratford Man? Weren't they 'new' plays never before seen in print prior to 1623, yet obviously having been written prior to 1616 -- indeed, as Oxfordians would insist, prior to 1604?

And none which has ever been refuted with evidence.

Why don't you present some of this "hard historical evidence to the contrary." I've been studying this matter for decades and I have yet to see even a single bit of it.

Just how would one strive for greater knowledge in a field where the evidence is entirely one-sided? To my knowledge no Shakespeare deniers are actively searching archives for evidence for their anti-Shakespeare or against the one who already had the title.

@@Jeffhowardmeade You are exactly correct. The catechism of the Authorship Question never changes. And 'Doubters' never doubt anything.

Yadder yadder. We have his signatures. They look dodgy if you don't look at the context and are not familiar with Secretary hand. And if you want to make points like this about necessary pre-existing knowledge .... you need ACT SCENE LINE. Just lazy to make evidence-free assertions. It's unthinkable that the son of a wealthy alderman didn't go to the school 100 yards from his door. He WAS an actor. This is not in dispute. That he is the same man as Stratford Shakespeare is proved because he appeared in a court case, and the clerk listed him as 'William Shakespeare Gent. Stratford on Avon in the County of Warwick.' I don't know how you think an illiterate actor could survive in the astonishingly demanding world of the Elizabethan stage. Stratfor Shakespeare was literate. It's true that there are no records of WS at the grammar school. But it's not that he doesn't APPEAR on the records. There simply ARE no records. Shakespeare's first publisher was also a Stratford man, Richard Field. He also presumably went to the same school. Just as there are no records for pretty much all the grammar schools of the time. The curriculums of these schools pretty much WERE Latin and Greek. Latin would CERTAINLY not be a problem. The source only available in Italian was 'Il Peccerone'. Their contribution to 'Merchant' could be summarised in three minutes, if you asked an Italian, such as John Florio, the secretary of Shakespeare's patron. The prof says all this much more eloquently than I can. Why didn't you bother to listen?

@@MrMartibobs Oxfordians are continually trying to prove people illiterate by analysing their handwriting. An "insurmountable problem" to understanding anything, I'd say.

"One being that Shakspere from Stratford could neither read nor write." And somehow his colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who affirmed that the author of the plays was their "Friend, & Fellow" (i.e., fellow actor) whom they named as "Shakespeare" couldn't read his scripts? In ~20 years of association between the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men and Shakespeare nobody ever figured this out? "Another is that he never left England while the author of the works most certainly did." And the source for this 'certainty' is? You need to establish two things to a certainty: that the author actually left England, and that Shakespeare did _not_ . The irony is that by making the argument, you can't merely rely on the claim that Shakespeare knew things about early modern Europe outside of England, because you too allegedly know these things, and yet _you've_ never been to early modern Europe. So if there is an alternative way one can know something about Europe in this period, as there must be if _you_ do, then why wasn't it equally available to Shakespeare? "Another is that the author knew Greek, Latin, French and Italian very well in that works in these languages (not yet translated into English) are referenced by Shakespeare." So what if he did? Grammar schools taught Latin, and many also taught Greek. And with a background in Latin, it becomes easier to read Romance languages like French and Italian. We also know that the historical Shakespeare roomed with a French Huguenot refugee family and even undertook a part in the negotiations over the marriage between the daughter of the house and Stephen Bellot, another Huguenot refugee. So if he could undertake to negotiate between native French speakers, then that implies his French was up to the task. And in point of fact, there are no Greek sources for his plays that weren't available in English. The Roman tragedies were based on Plutarch by way of Sir Thomas North's English translation of Jacques Amyot's French one, and _Pericles_ was based on a story of _Apollonius of Tyre_ that was translated into Old English in the 11th century and into Middle English by John Gower in the 14th. The original Greek text is _lost_ . "Then there's the little problem with Shakespeare's excellence and familiarity with the Law." How is that a problem? A) Shakespeare's father was a justice of the peace and a magistrate in Stratford-upon-Avon. B) He was, as anti-Shakespearians always like to remind us, involved in lawsuits in his lifetime, but they don't draw the obvious conclusion that he might have picked up a little law from these experiences in the law courts. C) There were numerous connections between the world of the Bankside theatre and the Inns of Court. The Inns of Court students loved the theatre and would often hire actors to perform for them at their annual Revels. It's thought that _The Comedy of Errors_ was written for just one such Christmas Revels performance at Gray's Inn. D) Numerous early modern authors had either been admitted to the Inns of Court or worked as legal scriveners (noverints). This number might have included Shakespeare himself, and even if it didn't he could have asked any of his early modern colleagues in the Bankside theatre who had that experience, including Thomas Kyd, John Marston, John Webster, etc. E) And there were books with legal information in them. One of the disputed signatures of William Shakespeare is in William Lambarde's _Archaionomia_ , a collection of Anglo-Saxon laws. Even if it's not Shakespeare's actual signature, though if it's forged it was strangely located in a place where it might have gone unnoticed, it still shows that these kinds of books existed and were as available for ownership by Shakespeare as anyone else. F) Shakespeare doesn't actually show that much familiarity with the law. He's about middling in his use of legal analogies, neither being the most nor least frequent user of them. In _Hamlet_ , he created the term "jointress" because he didn't know the legal term "jointrix". In _Merchant of Venice_ , he portrays a legally impossible case being presided over by the Duke himself, as if there were no judges in Venice (which there were-unlike any dukes, since Venice was a republic). It's a depiction that hearkens back to his father's days as both chief magistrate and high bailiff-the equivalent of mayor-of Stratford-upon-Avon. And since legal analogies were rife in early modern literature, it wasn't necessary for Shakespeare to have any firsthand familiarity with the world of law in order to use them. He could just pick whatever he wanted up as he went along, like blackberries off the brambles. "And with all manner of nuances concerning royal life." Yeah, like the way he completely omits the distinction between presence chambers and antechambers in all of his plays save his last. In almost all his histories, people just barge in and start speaking at the king. Indeed, in _Henry VI, Part 3_ , the Yorkist faction not only enter the throne room but take it over in the momentary absence of Henry, with the Duke of York ascending Henry's throne. John Webster got the distinction between the antechamber and the presence chamber right and he was the son of a coach-maker. Only _Henry VIII_ makes dramatic use of the antechamber, when Archbishop Cranmer is snubbed by the Privy Council by forcing him to cool his heels in the antechamber and wait upon their pleasure. That scene, however, is Act V, scene 2, so it's not even a scene Shakespeare wrote. It was written by John Fletcher, who knew all about court life because his father was the personal chaplain to Queen Elizabeth. And how about this nuance concerning royal life: in _Richard III_ , Richard (still the Duke of Gloucester) greets one man as if he were three different people: he greets Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl RIvers and brother to King Edward IV's queen, as if he were three people. How? By greeting the titles and family names individually: he greets Lord Woodville, Lord Rivers, and Lord Scales in the same passage. Woodville was the family name, Rivers the stately title, and Lord Scales was a subsidiary style of the earls of Rivers. But Shakespeare didn't know that. Clearly he was not an aristocrat or even familiar with the aristocracy beyond his sources and patrons. Now, Edward de Vere had the family name of de Vere, the title of Earl of Oxford, and the subsidiary styles of Viscount Bulbec, Lord Escales, and Lord Badlesmere. Do you think he would have gotten this wrong as Shakespeare did?

That Profligate Pederast Earl takes too long to say.

Honestly, I find it frustrating too. I’m a one-person show when it comes to making these videos and in the moment I make mental notes to re-shoot but, in my rush to finish filming, forgot to go back and get another take. And since I don’t edit right away, fixing it would require setting up for re-shooting by trying to match the original shot. I made a decision to just keep it in because it’s not crucial to the arguments I want to make. But yeah, I get what you’re saying.

De Vere spoke in an East Anglian dialect. Shakespeare was West Midlands. Neither De Vere nor Avon were pronounced then as we do today.

"...a fellow scholar who is an Oxfordian." Unfortunately, that is where he might run into difficulties.

@@Nullifidian exactly and he will never do it.

@@mstexasg6243 I think we might be talking at cross-purposes. I was referring to the difficulty of finding an academic colleague who was an Oxfordian. There are probably only a few thousand active Oxfordians of any kind, and those who have actual relevant expertise in some area of Early Modern theatre, literature, etc. are even rarer.

@@Nullifidian hahahaha go to Shakespeare Oxford...you will find more than a few. The problem is you don't know them because you travel in a small circle. If you held the truth you wouldn't be afraid of reading what others have written.

​@@mstexasg6243 I assume you mean the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. If that's the case, then no, I'm not finding any more than a few. For example, I'm looking at the Oxfordian of the Year list, and the only one in 17 years with anything even approaching real experience of Shakespeare in academia is Roger Strittmater. And even he needed to be taught how to use Early English Books Online by his critics _after_ publishing a book where his failure to note that the free EEBO used a much less extensive database than the premium EEBO fatally undermined his argument. There really isn't a lot of expertise on early modern theatre on this page. And I would say I travel in a fairly large circle considering that 99.99% of the world accepts that Shakespeare wrote his own works. Few people have heard of the so-called "authorship question", fewer still care, and of those very few a not insignificant number find it completely cracked and ridiculous. Nor am I "afraid of reading what others have written". I have no idea what could have possibly resulted in that inference. I suspect it's just wishful thinking. I've seen arguments against Shakespeare authorship and for a bewildering array of so-called 'candidates' (if it's appropriate to use the term for people who didn't seek to be identified with Shakespeare's works in their lifetime) for the past +20 years, and they haven't improved with age.

So then the fact that Christopher Marlowe spelled his only signature "Christofer Marley" means we should exclude him from having written his own works?

@@Nullifidian , Of course not. A variation in signatures by a person who signs their name frequently is normal. However. The Shaksper signatures are only one of many reasons why the doubters doubt that the Stratford man was the writer. The nature of the signstures snd lack of other written msterial is supporting evidence, not the whole case.

@@arealphoney It's a good thing for you, because the case of Marlowe is on all fours with that of Shakespeare. Marlowe left no other examples of his handwriting other than that one signature, since the sole manuscript leaf of _A Massacre at Paris_ is in a scribal hand, not Marlowe's handwriting. Whereas Shakespeare has six or seven signatures to his name and the three manuscript pages of Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ , so we actually have _more_ for Shakespeare than we do for Marlowe. Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ can be linked to Shakespeare not only by the paleographic analysis, but also the style, imagery, verbal habits, spelling, subject matter, and instances of self-plagiarism that connect this manuscript with _Coriolanus_ and a scene in _Henry VIII_ that scholarship independently identifies as Shakespeare's. It's also been identified as Shakespearian by corpus stylometry.

😊 You’re welcome!

You are aware that the only evidence we have that he could even write are six extremely shaky signatures. Do you really think this adds up for the greatest writer of all time?

@@joecurran2811 You act as it that is all the evidence of William Shakespeare having written those plays. Those signatures are not, Not by a long shot. So much more evidence does exist, meanwhile there is literally zero evidence of any kind to suggest otherwise. More you seem to be making the EXTREMELY shaky (no...not even that...utterly absurd) claim that in order for him to have been a great writer Shakespeare must have had a handwriting that wins your person approval. This is nonsense. Worthy of a flat earther, holocaust denier, or any kind of truther.

@@DavidMacDowellBlue You miss the point - you HAD to write neatly to be a playwright in those days, and it wasn't easy to do. The Startford man couldn't do that. What is this evidence that you speak of? The name? A pseudonym, common at the time, partly for reasons of safety (I'm sure you know what happened to Thomas Nash). And comparing me to a holocaust denier, do you know how low and ad-hominem that is? It that really the best you can do given all the "evidence"?

@@joecurran2811 "You miss the point - you HAD to write neatly to be a playwright in those days...." Thomas Heywood is by far the most prolific of early modern English playwrights and his handwriting is atrocious. In fact, you did not have to write neatly because every company employed a house scribe who would copy down the playwright's "foul papers" as "fair copy", including a full promptbook, and would create the cue scripts that actors used to learn their lines. Once again, you're just making things up about early modern theatre as you go along. "What is this evidence that you speak of? The name? A pseudonym, common at the time, partly for reasons of safety...." You can't just assert that "William Shakespeare" is a pseudonym and instantly have that assertion accepted. It requires evidence to back it up. "I'm sure you know what happened to Thomas Nash" You mean nothing? The one thing that _might_ have happened to him was imprisonment for co-authoring _The Isle of Dogs_ , but he left for the country and no one was interested in pursuing him or in jailing him once he got back from Great Yarmouth. Ben Jonson, who did get imprisoned, was nevertheless let out after a mere two months and he was later given a pension by James I and VI (despite having offended _that_ monarch too with the anti-Scots jokes and the jokes about new creations of knights in _Eastward Ho_ , for which Jonson and George Chapman spent some time in prison, but John Marston got off scot-free-pun fully intended), thus making him Britain's unofficial first Poet Laureate. So that's the extent of the worst case of early modern theatrical censorship on record: one of the two playwrights-whose name was not Thomas Nash-went to prison for a couple of months, while a few actors were arrested and released within days, and the play was suppressed. That's it. The crown simply wasn't as interested in coming down hard on playwrights and actors as you need it to have been for your argument to work. Also, there's no evidence about what the 'author behind Shakespeare' was allegedly seeking protection _for_ . This argument betrays a basic ignorance of what Shakespeare wrote, quite honestly. Shakespeare was not a political animal nor was he a stinging satirist. If he ever satirized anything, he satirized literary forms, like the elaborate Euphuism of Don Armado and the academic pedantry of the schoolmaster Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_ . Nobody in a position of authority would have given a tinker's dam about that kind of satire in the early modern era.

Both. Lack of knowledge of the early modern era made him a sucker for the claims of the Baconians because he wasn't informed enough to fact-check them.

Nor could be have. The first collection of documentary evidence relating to Shakespeare wasn't published until 1941. Before then it was all tucked away in half a dozen different goverment archives on the other side of the world from Twain. Now all the evidence can be had at the click of a mouse, but STILL some people don't bother to just look at it. I wonder if Twain would have been one of them.

​@@Jeffhowardmeade He might not have had the documentary evidence available with respect to Shakespeare, but there were many points in which he _could_ have fact-checked his sources if he wanted to. For example, the claims Baconians made that the number of legal allusions in the plays showed that their author was a legal expert could have been exploded, or at least significantly undermined, if he'd bothered to read plays by Shakespeare's early modern contemporaries and seen how many times they used legal language in their works. Instead, he just swallowed the claims of George Greenwood without demur. If he had bothered to fact-check more easily settled claims like that, he probably would have been cautious about the rest.

@@Nullifidian Or he could have just read The Merchant of Venice. That should be enough to convince any reasonable person that no actual lawyers were consulted in the making of Shakespeare.

@@Jeffhowardmeade Indeed! My favorite part is where Portia reminds Shylock that he's incurred the penalty of execution by seeking the death of a Christian, even though the attempt didn't come off, but somehow nobody else in Venice knew this occult law., not even the Duke who was trying to convince Shylock to relent before the trial started. You'd think that if this penalty existed, it would have made a strong debating point for the Duke. Of course the dramatic reason for it is obvious: you want to keep the tension going and you want Portia to be the one who triumphs, not some secondary character. But in doing so, Shakespeare inadvertently created a legal absurdity out of Kafka. If lawyers can summarily declare a man guilty of a capital crime, even though nobody else knows about it, then suddenly we're in the world of Josef K. It reminded me of the "Corporal Punishment" episode of _Blackadder_ where Gen. Melchett is presiding over the court martial and begins by saying, "Before we get to the formality of sentencing the deceased - I mean the defendant, heh heh heh." Or perhaps the ending of _The Atheist's Tragedy_ by Cyril Tourneur where the scaffold for Charlemont and Castabella is erected before the court's ruling. Truly one of the most insane plays in all of early modern literature.

Nobody WAS challenging it, until the Oxfordians got greedy and decided to claim that Oxford wrote not just Shakespeare, but EVERYTHING.

@@Jeffhowardmeade Gee, why do I once again have to point out that Signor Coriolanus has admitted that I am correct. I.e., there is no evidence whatsoever that Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy.

​@@patricksullivan4329 That's a good point. Why DO you have to point it out, considering that it's not true? You really do operate in an alternate reality, don't you?

@@Jeffhowardmeade When it comes to alternate reality, I'd say you and what is 'true' are a perfect match.

@@patricksullivan4329 Not even going to try to decipher that. You claim that I admit there's no evidence, when I have not done so. Nor would I have, because there is evidence. You presented some of it yourself.

I have to agree. I think people fear being labelled a conspiracy theorist/crank if they come out against it.

​@@joecurran2811In other words, they fear others finding out that they are conspiracy theorists/cranks. I would certainly fear that as well.

Are you implying that an exploration should never result in anything being found? Because I think that's pretty much the _opposite_ of how most campaigns of exploration have been conducted throughout history. Imagine what would have been said of Lewis and Clark if they'd come back years later with no more informative answer when asked about what they'd found than a world-weary shrug.

When one sticks just to the evidence, it's done pretty quickly. Anti-Stratfordians go on for hours because they get to include everything they fantasize.

Shakespeare had about the same vocabulary as most poets of the era. You can thank a couple of Oxfordians at Claremont-McKenna College for setting that one straight. See? You guys ARE useful on occasion.

13:04 The timeline(s) for when each play was written is not grounded in hard evidence. We have evidence of when certain plays were performed but that only establishes a no-later-than date. The writing of The Tempest was commonly tied to incidents in the wreck of 'The Sea Venture' in Bermuda in 1609. That in turn was used to support the idea that play was composed between 1609 and Nov 1, 1611 when we see a documented performance. But we now know that the majority of the source material for The Tempest is a play performed in the winter of 1604/05 entitled The Spanish Maze. If the author of the Sonnets is "ever-living" in 1609 then they can't be writing, or rewriting, in 1610/1611. The Jaggard printing house attached the Shakespeare name to a range of works of varying quality; many of which contemporaneously declared apocrypha yet they continued. In 1619 Jaggard is printing the Javier quartos some of which are back-dated in what seems an attempt to escape claims by those who are the right holders as shown in the Stationers' Register. Four years later Jaggard is the printer of the First Folio and rights issues are resolved. Is it possible that Shakspere, who was then 7 years deceased, is used to claim the printing rights for the unpublished works that were included? His close-enough spelling and loose affiliation with London theater seems to have been enough to create the myth that lives to this day. For a deeper look at this issue I recommend this lecture by Thomas Regnier. He was a lawyer and presents his case very well. I believe that evidence shows that the plays and sonnets were written and rewritten by a variety of people. DeVere seems to have been one of them. Clearly Ben Jonson edits the works into the form we see in the First Folio but he is not one of the authors. Henslowe's Diary shows us that plays were written and rewritten by teams of writers, just as TV shows and movies are written today. The quality and quantity of the Shakespeare works is superior to those written by any individual writer because they were written, polished, rewritten and edited by many highly skilled writers. So on that part of the issue I disagree with "Oxfordians", "Marlovians" etc. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OpFXD07_NYg.html

So many things wrong in such a... okay, it wasn't short at all. Anyway, in order: The way things are pronounced today have no bearing on how they were pronounced in the 16th century. You are assuming that the medial E modified the previous vowel sound as it does today. It did not. The myriad different way people spelled Shakespeare's name reflect how it sounded to them. Many referred to Shakespeare the actor and gentleman as "Shakespeare", though actor Edward Alleyn wrote Shaksper Sonets in his notes.

In 1595, William Covell referred to Queen Elizabeth as "ever-living". She was not dead. In 1598, Richard Barnfield wrote an epigram declaring four living poets to be "ever-living". They were Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and William Shakespeare. It meant immortal, not dead.

In two cast lists of his plays, Ben Jonson included the actor William Shakespeare. Once spelled Shakespeare and once Shake-Speare. Ben Jonson did spell his name consistently, but others spelled it differently. Which other poets can you name who did? De Vere certainly didn't, though he wasn't much of a poet.

Henslowe didn't start commissioning plays until after Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, so using his accounts as some sort of evidence against Shakeapeare would be like checking the records of Johns-Hopkins and deciding that Jonas Salk was not a doctor. Shakespeare appeared along with Will Kemp and Richard Burbage to receive payment for a Christmas production by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It specifically said for "twoe seuerall Comedies or Enterludes shewed by them before her maiestie in Christmas tyme laste paste viz vpon St Stephens daye & Innocents daye." He was also listed second after King James's favorite actor brought with him from Scotland in the charter for The King's Men and first among them to receive scarlet cloth for the coronation. An Oxfordian found a reference in the margins of a description of Stratford where a Warwickshire vicar describes Shakespeare as "Roscius", after the Roman actor. Shakespeare was a performer, in addition to being a poet.

I prefer to be called 'beyond genius' but nobody does. Get over yourself.

Um...the evidence?

Yes, I say that in the video that we have no records young William ever attended.

@@TheTheatreHistoryProfessor No, you don't say that in the video. You say that Bate "'[explores] what a grammar school education, like the one Stratford Shakespeare would have received, would have entailed". Then: "though no information survives on the curriculum at the Stratford grammar school Stratford Shakespeare attended in his youth...". And you follow this with the conjecture that Stratford Shakespeare learned Terence and Plautus and that informed the plays of London Shakespeare (the discussion on his 'imagination'), thus removing the discursive firewall you erected between the two at the beginning of your video. This in a discussion that asks us to use our own imaginations to imagine this imagined connection. Having done the above, the line at 13:57 "the anti-Stratfordians try to explain away such facts with 'conjecture and speculation'" is pretty funny.

There's also no evidence that Richard Field attended the Stratford grammar school. Yet he left Stratford at age 17 and began an apprenticeship in London with the printer who held the monopoly on Latin texts and also printed in French, Spanish, and Italian. After inheriting the print shop, Field went on to print everything Shakespeare wrote specifically for publication. But since there are no attendance records at the free grammar school in Stratford, Field couldn't have actually done any of that, could he?

@@jeffmeade8643 This does not address the point I made, which is that the Professor erroneously said (twice) that Stratford Shakespeare attended grammar school. There is no evidence that he did. To your point, though, being a printer is a good deal easier than being Shakespeare. I suspect you are also capable of printing things in French, Spanish, and Italian.

@@BakerBritt There are no attendance records, true. There is no evidence? False. Not only was he the son of the guy hiring and paying for the schoolmaster, but Ben Jonson said he had precisely what a grammar school taught and Shakespeare's works bear this out, relying heavily on grammar school texts. The only schoolboy in the whole canon is named Will, fer cryin out loud! And not coincidentally, I just happen to be a hobby letterpress printer, so I know exactly how hard it is to set type in a language I don't understand. Hablo y leo español, and yet setting type in that language is muy difícil. I once set a wedding announcement in Polish, and had the proof sent back for correction twice. You read your line and from then on your eyes are on your type case and your hands into you move on to the next line. If you don't even know what your copy says, you have to have your eyes on it constantly, and that slows you down. The printer Vautrollier would have had no reason to take on a monolingual apprentice when grammar schools around the country were cranking out latinists by the thousands. Ironically, being a poet is much easier than being a printer, if one has the talent. The genius of Shakespeare is that he thought nothing of using a noun as a verb or vice-versa. The language skills were useful because a very few of his sources were not known to have been translated into English, but what made Shakespeare, Shakespeare was his LACK of education. He did things with words that would have been beaten out of any university student. Thank God for small favors.

"you fail to mention that most writers had a consistent signature" completely untrue-Marlowe's one surviving signature is spelt "Marley". Which of Shakespeare's plays lampoon contemporary court figures? Answer none of them. Maybe Osric. Will was never in trouble with the censors, though he wrote three pages for Sir Thomas More which, because of humanist themes which still resonate loudly today, never had the smallest chance of being produced in his lifetime (which is why the manuscript survived). He had to change the name 'Oldcastle' to 'Falstaff' but did so without protest even though the resemblance was fairly slight. The Elizabeth/Richard II story is apocryphal. And you can understand Shakespeare without understanding his sources but you will definitely misunderstand him if you start trying to attach real people to his characters then draw conclusions from what you think is their true identity.

@@ethelburga most writers of the time had a consistent signature you have mentioned one signature of Marley, how can you show consistency with one. Give me evidence of other writers of the time who had different spellings and handwriting. The evidence we have from extant documents shows most writers of the time showed consistency when signing their name. Lampoons of Sir William Cecil, Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Phillip Sydney, the Duke of Alencon to name but a few. As for real people and places, Orsino was the name of the dukes of Illeria, and it was a duke Orsino who visited Queen Elizabeth for Twelfth Night celebrations, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, were ambassadors from Denmark. The main hand in the Sir Thomas More manuscript was an employee of the earl of Oxford, and it was the Earl of Oxford's descendent who sold the manuscript to the British library. There is no proof whatsoever that Shakespeare's or Shaksper's hand are in that manuscript. The manuscript shows evidence of the work of scribes.

@@ContextShakespeare1740 Unsupported generalisations do not have to be rebutted in detail. You made such a generalisation, I gave you a relevant example which contradicts it. If you want to argue the point you need to advance the argument with evidential support. That's the way the SAQ works (or doesn't work). Claiming evidence exists only works if you show it. You have not. Likewise with your lampoons. Yes Shakespeare used the names of hundreds of real people in his plays. That's called source material. The idea that they are representations of those real people rather than dramatic creations is highly speculative, and in many cases such as the idea that Polonius is a lampoon of Burghley, extremely unlikely. Oxford's connections to the Hand D manuscript are weak and incidental. It's extremely unlikely that Munday worked for Oxford at the time his sections of it were produced. It contains the work of four other dramatists, all identified. The fact that it show the work of scribes is completely irrelevant. Every unproduced manuscript might be expected to show the work of scribes. To question the attribution by the BL (the British Library NOT the British Museum), you have to deal with the fact that stylometrists AND palaeographers attribute the Hand D additions to Shakespeare. Not just Shakespeare, but Shakespeare on good form. See Craig & Kinney. 2009, pp116 ff. Claiming there is no proof is utterly meaningless unless you address the evidence in detail and explain why it is inadequate for the purposes of attributing Hand D to Shakespeare. Does this not sound like Shakespeare to you? Can you tell where he takes over?? This is one of dozens of performances on RU-vid. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YaeDoTaYK5k.html

@@ContextShakespeare1740 did you know that Oxford spelled is name five different ways that I have uncovered: Oxeford, Oxnforde, Oxenford, Oxenforde and my personal favorite, Oxiford (See Richard Malim's, "The Earl of Oxford and the Making of 'Shakespeare' ". Take a spin through W.W. Greggs ELA and you will see several instances of a playwright spelling his own name differently - and on those occasions when they are confirming a pay-day loan from Henslow the handwriting is illegible.

If people who were referring to Shakespeare the author meant "whoever he may be", then why did they take the time to mention his membership in the gentry, or his profession of player? Why did they call him their fellow and say he was from Stratford? The claim that Elizabeth compared herself to Richard II was referring to the actual Richard II, not the play, and it is apocryphal. The person to whom it was supposedly said died soon after, yet the story was not written down for decades. The most common Oxfordian claim is that the lampooned and murdered character Polonius was based on William Cecil. Yet Oxford was receiving a welfare check from the crown. Though Oxford opposed James as king, William's son Robert, as head of the Privy Council, got Oxford's welfare check renewed by James. If you had done that to my father, I wouldn't have helped you. I would have done everything in my power to ruin you.

So is it your contention that anyone who happens to have set a play in a given location must have traveled there? Does this mean that John Fletcher went to Moscow for the _The Loyal Subject_ and all the way the Moluccas for _The Island Princess_ ? Also, unless you have conclusive evidence that Shakespeare _did not_ visit Italy, that leaves open the possibility of his authorship. So the argument is futile even if the premise is granted.

The city states of Italy had dukes, princes, marquises, doges, viceroys, and kings. Shakespeare never once gets the leader of anything correct. Now maybe a lowly performer following in the train of this traveling nobleman or that might get such things wrong, or even a poet sitting at home in London and imaging who ran the show on that faraway dot he espies on a map. But the toff who is expected to present his credentials to each and every one of these local potentates? How does THAT guy not know that Venice doesn't have a duke, or that Verona doesn't have a prince? How does he not know that the Marquis of Monteferrat was actually a duke who was also the Duke of Mantua? How does he have a duke in Milan and a king in Naples when both belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor? You would think he would have gotten at least one of them right by accident. Let's not even begin to get into his misunderstanding of Italian geography.

@@Nullifidian In regards to your first paragraph the answer is no. There is something more specific and interesting with Shakespeare though. In Venus and Adonis, there is a reference to Adonis wearing a bonnet. There was only one Venus and Adonis painting by Titian of here wearing a bonnet - this was in Titian's office in Venice. Oxford is documented as being there for 10 months. You would HAVE to visit Titian's office in Venice to see this painting - is there any other evidence of anyone other Oxford being in Venice. As to your second paragraph, that's a fallacious argument from silence. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

@@Jeffhowardmeade You are aware you are talking about literature aren't you? The person writing Shakespeare was not writing an encyclopedia of Italian geography. You'd expect creativity in a play, especially from someone as creative as Shake-speare.

@@joecurran2811 You tease. You kept on dropping little hints about the "painting" to Caius Martius Coriolanus, and here you're presenting it as an argument not to him but me. Well, I won't spoil his fun by giving you a detailed rebuttal, but I will just point the tottering edifice of speculation you have to erect in support of it. A painting you _assume_ to be by Titian on the subject of _Venus and Adonis_ was supposedly in his studio. There's enough reason for doubt there, but for the sake of argument I'll accept it. You then _assume_ that Edward de Vere visited Titian's studio. (Not his "office"-would it kill you to refer to early modern things according to their proper names and not gross anachronisms?) You further _assume_ that the painting in question was there when Edward de Vere was. You then _assume_ that this was recalled vividly almost two decades later and formed the inspiration for a passage in the narrative poem _Venus and Adonis_ . You must _assume_ that Shakespeare, despite being the most gifted imaginative writer of his age, couldn't imagine a hat on a man going out hunting without seeing one. (Truly, this is an eye-opening exercise in how Oxfordians conceptualize creativity.) You must also _assume_ that no copies, engravings, drawings, or word-of-mouth descriptions got to Shakespeare and that the existence of a hat on Adonis' head was a more closely guarded secret than the atomic bomb program at Los Alamos. Thus this entire argument stands on _half a dozen_ layers of assumption and what you wish to be evidence. And this is supposed to amount to something that makes me doubt the attribution of Shakespeare's works to his own pen? Give me a break, please! Now that I've dealt with the illogic of it, Caius Martius Coriolanus can give you all the evidence about why the claim is pure horse droppings. "As to your second paragraph, that's a fallacious argument from silence." Please stop trying to identify fallacies; you are wretched at it. An argument from silence is an argument in which if something is _not_ mentioned then it's assumed it didn't happen. So I didn't commit the argument from silence, _YOU DID_ . You assumed that because there were no records of Shakespeare having been to Italy that therefore he did not go to Italy. Physician, heal thyself. "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Quite. Like the Earl of Oxford's completely unevidenced authorship of the works of William Shakespeare and your insistence that the name "William Shakespeare" was a pseudonym. Again, physician, heal thyself.

And yet paleographers don't see a problem. Maybe because they see someone who is VERY accustomed to writing with a pen and who has dashed off his signatures with very little care, and using a series of abbreviating conventions along the way. They can also read 16th Century handwriting, which you obviously can't.

"Do they look to you to be the signatures of one well accustomed to wielding a pen, with quick, fluent, confident loops?" Yes, they do look like that to me. They certainly don't contain any of the hesitation marks I would associate with a novice writing with a quill pen. The quill pen wasn't a reservoir pen: when you dipped the nib in the ink, it began to flow and couldn't be stopped. So if he had hesitated over all of his signatures, one would expect to see blotting and pooling all over each signature..

@@Jeffhowardmeade I'm sorry to respond to your question in the replies to a completely different video, but nothing I could do would make those comments of mine stick, so I suspect that my name may have been added to filter to prevent me from posting anything more, and I'm sure that won't have happened here. Anyway, this is what I tried to write to you: I checked the e-book edition of Smith's book that I have, and I'm afraid it was no help. She does say that "Hamnet Shakespeare is discussed by Graham Holderness in the group biography of Shakespeare and his associates, _The Shakespeare Circle_ , edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 2015)", but that reference provides nothing to support an earlier dating for King John than 1596 and it is rather more about how the death of Hamnet and Shakespeare's response to it has been imagined by various biographers. You could ask her yourself if you're on Twitter. Her handle is OldFortunatus. Other than that, I'm sure that an Arden edition of _King John_ would go into the subject of the dating. Unfortunately, I don't have an individual edition of _King John_ , and my Arden Complete Works merely has one-page summaries for each of the plays. The subject of dating is touched on in this summary, but only to say that it's very unclear when it was written. It had to be written by 1598, when Francis Meres mentions it, and it has to be after the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles , but it doesn't narrow it down any further than that, except to say that _The Troublesome Reign of King John_ is now regarded as the earlier play of the two, all of which I'm sure you already knew.

@@Nullifidian Thanks. I've only got one individual Arden, and it was comprehensive. I don't know why I haven't bought more. I'll try Twittering (or maybe it's Xing now) Prof. Smith to see if I can get more from her.

...raped boys, blew his fortune, called his daughter a bastard, killed a servant, abandoned his post during the Armada, and wrote mediocre poetry. It's not certain if he farted in front of the Queen. That one might just be a joke.

@@Jeffhowardmeade But it's not the only joke about de Vere. And like the fart story, the other joke gets less funny the more you hear it.

That's absurd. The so-called "Anti-Stratfordians" didn't exist in 1634. That's when _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ was published as being by "those memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher, gent. and Mr. William Shakspeare, gent." In 1653, Humphrey Mosley entered _The History of Cardenio_ as being by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Nor did the "anti-Stratfordians" have any input into Nicholas Rowe's proposal in 1709 that _Pericles_ was co-authored. And though this has been resolved in Shakespeare's favor, there was a concerted effort to eject _Titus Andronicus_ from the canon, which meant that a significant number of 17th, 18th, and 19th century authors and scholars thought that another man's play was falsely attributed to Shakespeare in the First Folio. It's now accepted that George Peele's hand is in the play, though his hand doesn't exclude Shakespeare's. And even though the "Anti-Stratfordian" position was just beginning to exist c. the mid-19th century, none of the historical "anti-Stratfordians" had anything useful to add to the identification of George Wilkins as the co-author of _Pericles_ or John Fletcher as the co-author of _Henry VIII_ . In fact, not having anything useful to add to Shakespeare scholarship has been the common "anti-Stratfordian' condition. The only one of you who has made any sort of genuine discovery related to Shakespeare is Paul H. Altriocchi, who discovered the marginal note in Latin in Camden's _Britannia_ from the Rev. Richard Hunt praising Shakespeare as "truly our Roscius". And the "anti-Stratfordians" are anti-Stratfordian because they reject William Shakespeare's authorship wholesale. To them, he had no part in any of the plays that are in the First Folio or the canonical plays and poems not included in the Folio. So to credit them with "winning the day" because scholars accept that William Shakespeare collaborated on a minority of his plays, primarily early and late in his career, is patently ridiculous. And we do know who wrote the works. William Shakespeare wrote them. We know this on the same basis that we know anyone wrote anything in the early modern period: because the documentary evidence shows it and every contemporary who bothered to make any comment on the subject said he was an author. That he is not the exclusive author does not mean he is not _an_ author of all of the canonical works. That would be absurd. Furthermore, the same stylometry that shows that Shakespeare did collaborate also shows that he wrote his own works and excludes any other alternative "authorship candidate" who left published writings that can be tested. The only exception to that generalization is Christopher Marlowe, but that's hardly good news for the Marlovians because Marlowe's hand has only been detected in the _Henry VI_ plays, all of which were on the stage by 1592, a year before he died, and _nothing_ else, which means by inversion that he is no more the "real Shakespeare" than any of the others. Finally, there isn't actually _any_ "single-author claim made in the First Folio". A single-author claim would be like Ben Jonson's claim in the prologue to _Volpone_ that "'Tis known, five weeks fully penn'd it, | From his own hand, without a co-adjutor, | Novice, journey-man, or tutor." By contrast, nowhere in the First Folio is the existence of any other authors _specifically_ disavowed. The plays are attributed to Shakespeare because they are his just as much as the co-authored works-a minority of the total number, and still less since the co-authored _Pericles_ , _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ , _Edward III_ , and _Sir Thomas More_ were *NOT* printed in the First Folio-also belong to their co-authors. If it's legitimate to say that _Titus Andronicus_ is George Peele's play, _Timon of Athens_ is Thomas Middleton's, and _Henry VIII_ is John Fletcher's, then it's also just as legitimate to say that these three and the other 33 in the First Folio are William Shakespeare's on the same basis that partial authorship entitles one to have the play considered one's own. P. S., If you don't agree with "making the same mistake with some other writer", then I can only assume that you have an evil alter-ego or the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship has published your writings without your consent, because the association certainly does make it appear that you're an Oxfordian.

​@@NullifidianThank you for that very succinct version of Brian Vickers' Shakespeare, Co-author (2003, OUP). You just saved me $131 plus shipping.

@@Nullifidian It is indeed disheartening to observe the rapid descent of this discourse into the realm of unsubstantiated claims and, regrettably, blatant falsehoods. Firstly, allow me to clarify that I have never had the privilege of having my work published by those adhering to the Oxfordian perspective, unless one were to consider content hosted on ubiquitous platforms such as RU-vid, which, it should be noted, is open to universal utilization. Furthermore, I have appeared at Oxfordian conferences as a paid performer, yet it is imperative to underscore that being hired as entertainment does not, by any logical extension, imbue me with the identity of an Oxfordian. I am not an Oxfordian. I disbelieve the mythical story of the man from Stratford. Addressing the matter of falsehoods, it is paramount to direct our attention to the First Folio, a seminal literary artifact that unambiguously proclaims a single author as the progenitor of these enduring literary masterpieces. The very nomenclature of the First Folio, "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies," leaves no room for equivocation. The omission of any reference to collaboration is conspicuously deliberate, reinforcing the singular authorship. The litany of dedicatory verses and commendatory poems celebrate Shakespeare's unique talent, attributing the works solely to his authorship. There is a conspicuous absence of any insinuation of shared authorship or collaborative effort in these tributes. Moreover, the First Folio itself contains passages that underscore the uniformity of authorship, with expressions like "perfect and as he conceived them" underscoring the notion that these plays were conceived solely within the confines of one man's imagination and creative vision. With regard to your assertion concerning stylometry, it is imperative to highlight its inability to definitively affirm Shakespeare's participation in collaborative efforts. Notably, we lack any authenticated examples of Shakespeare's personal writings, and, thus, your assertion that any unattributed authorship can be unilaterally assigned to the individual from Stratford is, at best, an exercise in wishful thinking. It is worth noting that the gentleman from Stratford left behind no written documents or compositions. I recognize that for some, the assertion that "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" may indeed resemble an article of faith. Yet, as the argument evolves, it appears to transform into "Shakespeare wrote the majority of Shakespeare," and subsequently into "Shakespeare surely composed some portion of Shakespeare," all of which, it must be acknowledged, remain speculative in nature. The only tenable standpoint is one of agnosticism, acknowledging that our knowledge is ultimately incomplete. To bring this discourse to a conclusion, I would like to present a decisive statement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as elucidated in their publication, "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt." In contemplating the future, they concede, "We may find that some passages, even some widely beloved sections of plays or favourite lines were not Shakespeare's work." Whether this is palatable or not, it underscores the prevailing uncertainty surrounding the compositions attributed to the man from Stratford. I extend my apologies if this position does not align with your convictions.

@@keircutler Part 1 of 2: "It is indeed disheartening to observe the rapid descent of this discourse into the realm of unsubstantiated claims and, regrettably, blatant falsehoods." Yes, it is, isn't it? But since you've chosen to lie to me straight off the bat, we'll just both have to deal with it on that basis, won't we? "Firstly, allow me to clarify that I have never had the privilege of having my work published by those adhering to the Oxfordian perspective, unless one were to consider content hosted on ubiquitous platforms such as RU-vid, which, it should be noted, is open to universal utilization." And that is your first lie. Your article "The Top Ten Reasons Shakespeare Did Not Write Shakespeare" is hosted on the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship website, and you certainly strike a more definite tone than mere "agnosticism" regarding Shakespeare's authorship in that. "Addressing the matter of falsehoods, it is paramount to direct our attention to the First Folio, a seminal literary artifact that unambiguously proclaims a single author as the progenitor of these enduring literary masterpieces. The very nomenclature of the First Folio, "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies," leaves no room for equivocation." So does _Comedies and Tragedies_ written by FRANCIS BEAVMONT and JOHN FLETCHER, gentlemen, thus also constitute a claim that _every_ single play in this edition is written by those two in collaboration and those two _alone_ ? Because if so, then it's just as 'dishonest' as you're attempting to paint the First Folio, since Beaumont was dead by 1616 and Fletcher lived for another decade writing plays for the King's Men. The first and second Folios don't explicitly attribute any plays to the collaboration of Philip Massinger, one of Fletcher's most frequent collaborators after Beaumont, nor to John Ford, John Webster, Nathan Field, William Rowley, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, James Shirley, or William Shakespeare. Indeed, three plays in the First B&F Folio and one (additional) play in the Second are not even by _either_ Francis Beaumont nor John Fletcher. They are _The Nice Valour_ by Middleton, _Wit at Several Weapons_ by Middleton and Rowley, _The Laws of Candy_ by John Ford, and (in the Second) _The Coronation_ by James Shirley. You're viewing this from the perspective of a time when there is authorial copyright and intellectual property is a recognized thing, but this was a different era and it can't be judged from your ahistorical and anachronistic perspective. They put Shakespeare's name on the Folio because that is who they wanted to honor with a Folio publication of his works. They didn't muddy the waters by naming any co-authors because that wasn't the point of the Folio, but neither did they specifically _disclaim_ the possibility of co-authorship as Ben Jonson did regarding the composition of _Volpone_ . "There is a conspicuous absence of any insinuation of shared authorship or collaborative effort in these tributes." You say that as if you expected the authors of the commendatory verses to _know_ that a minority of the plays were co-authored. What reason do you have for making that assumption? Let's look at the four authors of the commendatory verses. We have Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and James Mabbe (the proposal that "I.M." was John Marston is generally rejected because he was way off in Hampshire still pursuing his second career as an Anglican vicar). Three of these men weren't playwrights, though at least two of them and perhaps all were personally known to Shakespeare. Shakespeare had acted in two of Ben Jonson's plays and Leonard Digges was the stepson of Thomas Russell, whom Shakespeare named as one of the two overseers of his will, a role one would only give to a trusted family member or friend. Meanwhile, James Mabbe was a friend of Digges' and could have met Shakespeare through him, and Hugh Holland likely at least saw Shakespeare act in _Sejanus_ since he contributed commendatory verses to the publication of that play. But still, knowing Shakespeare personally would be no guarantee that they'd follow his career closely enough to know who his collaborators were. Even Ben Jonson likely wouldn't have cared. He was aware that collaboration was a fact of early modern life-he collaborated on many now mostly lost plays early in his career-so what need to make a big deal of discussing it? For all that Jonson wrote that Shakespeare was "not of an age, but for all time", they were still writing for their contemporaries according to what their background knowledge would have likely been and they weren't writing for _you_ . Even in modern times, we have works that were originally co-authored only going by one of the author's names. For example, _The Log from the Sea of Cortez_ is reprinted and condensed from _Sea of Cortez_ and published with only John Steinbeck's name on it, even though much of Ed Ricketts' portions still are contained within the _Log_ . "Moreover, the First Folio itself contains passages that underscore the uniformity of authorship, with expressions like "perfect and as he conceived them" underscoring the notion that these plays were conceived solely within the confines of one man's imagination and creative vision." No, that's just another expression of Shakespeare's authorship that you're trying to bootstrap into a denial of co-authorship while at the same time wanting to wrest credit from Shakespeare for having written anything. "With regard to your assertion concerning stylometry, it is imperative to highlight its inability to definitively affirm Shakespeare's participation in collaborative efforts. Notably, we lack any authenticated examples of Shakespeare's personal writings...." We don't _need_ examples of his personal writings. In fact, his personal writings might not be any help at all, at least for many of the stylometric tests that are based on aspects of verse writing, because I doubt he was writing in blank verse to his friends and family. We have his single-authored plays and we have his poems that constitute a unified stylometric signature. And to anticipate your objection, if these plays were co-authored, the data points wouldn't cluster around each other but rather the data points would be pulled this way and that by their various co-authors and there would be no consistency in the results. The idea that a sequence of co-authors could possibly write so uniformly in each other's stylistic markers-writerly tics that no author would pay conscious attention to-as to fool a stylometric analysis into concluding they were the same author would be to expect miracles. "It is worth noting that the gentleman from Stratford left behind no written documents or compositions." So then you have solid evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did _not_ write the solo-authored plays attributed to him in the First Folio (and all of the solo-authored plays are contained in the First Folio), as well as _Venus and Adonis_ , _The Rape of Lucrece_ , "Let the Bird of Loudest Lay", and the sonnets? Where might I find it? Because it certainly wasn't contained in that article on the SOF's website. "I recognize that for some, the assertion that "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" may indeed resemble an article of faith." It might be to you. To me and to anyone else who knows the facts, it's the only position backed up by any documentary evidence or contemporary testimony. Shakespeare was identified as the author by name, by his rank of gentleman (when the only William Shakespeare who was an armigerous gentleman was the one from Stratford-upon-Avon), by his profession of actor, and by his home town of Stratford. In fact, all of these references exist within the First Folio itself. As you so clearly pointed out, it is _Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies_ when "Master" or "Mr." is the proper honorific for a gentleman. All of the commendatory verses also address Shakespeare this way, and we also have Ben Jonson's reference to "gentle Shakespeare". We also have him identified by profession. Not only is his name first in the list of Principal Actors-I wonder what he could have possibly done to merit being placed above even the leading man, Richard Burbage-but he is identified as the "Friend,& Fellow" of John Heminges and Henry Condell, he's identified by Ben Jonson with a typically classical allusion ("when thy socks were on", referring to the socks and buskins of Athenian actors), and indeed all of the commendatory verses play on the imagery of the theatre. Hugh Holland works in a name-drop of the Globe, Leonard Digges explicitly refers to _Romeo and Juliet_ and indirectly to _Julius Caesar_ , and "I.M." speaks of leaving "the world's stage" for "death's tyring-room", an image also echoed by Holland's "death's publique tyring-house", and the fact that the image occurred to both suggests they both knew they were honoring an actor-playwright. Finally, Ben Jonson refers to him as the "Swan of Avon", and Leonard Digges, the local Warwickshire man, is even more direct in referring to "thy Stratford monument". You know as well as I do what that monument is and what it says and that it is located in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. He was identified as the author by people who would have known him personally and/or professionally (John Heminges, Henry Condell, Ben Jonson, John Webster, etc.) or by people who clearly knew a great deal about him as an author or about his antecedents (William Camden, Francis Meres, etc.). Unless you have specific evidence to undermine this mass of documentary evidence and contemporary testimony, then I think I'm perfectly at liberty to consider that William Shakespeare's authorship of the works that bear his name has been established. That in a _minority_ of cases it is part-authorship is neither here nor there.

Part 2 of 2: "The only tenable standpoint is one of agnosticism, acknowledging that our knowledge is ultimately incomplete." Or one could just base one's views on the evidence, rather than ignoring it all. "To bring this discourse to a conclusion, I would like to present a decisive statement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as elucidated in their publication, "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. 'In contemplating the future, they concede, "We [ _sic_ - you should have closed the first part of the quote before inserting your editorialization, and used a lowercase w, since it's just continuing the sentence] may find that some passages, even some widely beloved sections of plays or favourite lines were not Shakespeare's work." So what? Even if this were actually the "decisive" statement you wish it were, I'm fully entitled to take my own view regardless of what is ostensibly a "statement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust". Waving around a supposed 'authority' in my face and expecting me to dutifully submit is the way creationists argue. However, it _isn't_ even that. It's merely a quote from the essay "Theorizing Shakespeare's authorship" written by Andrew Hadfield, a professor from the University of Sussex, so unless the University of Sussex is unexpectedly an arm of the SBT.... Attempting to lie to me on this point was unwise because I've got a copy of _Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy_ and have read it in full. Also, you call this a "decisive statement", but doesn't say we _have_ found that, merely that we "may". Do you know what the word "decisive" means? "Whether this is palatable or not, it underscores the prevailing uncertainty surrounding the compositions attributed to the man from Stratford." No, it doesn't. It reflects that research is continuing into the subject of possible co-authorship, but also reflects the fact that further investigations of the canon may well not find any significant degree of co-authorship than has already been found. Personally, I think that's the most probable outcome, because as a profit-sharer Shakespeare was advantageously positioned for sole authorship. He didn't have to commit to eight or ten plays a year just to make ends meet like many freelance playwrights did (e.g., Thomas Dekker). "I extend my apologies if this position does not align with your convictions." To whom are you going to apologize for your position not aligning with reality?

1. The reports of his legal knowledge are totally overblown. In all of his plays, he has ONE courtroom scene, and it's a complete farce which gets all the law wrong. Shylock WINS his case, but can't collect. How is it HE gets fined? 2. His knowledge of medicine was nothing more than anyone of the era would know. He mentions herbal remedies and symptoms. One would think that a guy who had a doctor in the family would have known more. 3. How much education does one need to know about gardening? 4. He was literally a servant to the King. That said, what courtly manners are on display in Shakespeare's works? 5. England was constantly at war throughout most of his adult life. Soldiers were everywhere. That said, what knowledge of soldiering was on display in Shakespeare's works? 6. He gets nearly everything wrong about Italian geography. He thinks the river flowing past Verona is tidal. He thinks Padua is in Lombardy rather than Veneto. He completely distorts distances and doesn't seem to know what sort of ruler is to be found in any given city. 7. There is no evidence that anyone went to school in Stratford, yet they had a free school staffed by Oxford-educated schoolmasters. Shakespeare was the son of the mayor. 8. There's no evidence anyone in his family was illiterate and his older daughter demonstrably was not. 9. He died in a town two days' ride from London, where they quickly erected a monument to him declaring him to be a great poet. He received many eulogies. 10. His daughters never mentioned anything that survives, so how do you know they never mentioned it? 11. Half of the plays in the First Folio were not previously PRINTED. They were hardly unknown. We have performance records and contemporary references to them and allusions to them in other works. Only a few have no known footprint before 1623. 12. Almost no poets of the era mention wills, desks, or manuscripts. The purpose of a will is to make specific bequests to people besides your heir, not to list everything you own. Shakespeare's heir was his son-in-law, Dr. John Hall, to whom he would have left any books anyway. This fellow didn't mention any of this because they are all lies. Got any complaints that are actually true?

@Michelle K It became a sore point among Strafordians like @Caius Martius Coriolanus that lawyers and barristers found deep erudition in the legal mind behind the plays and poems, so now it is fashionable among Stratfordians to dismiss this particular facet of the canon with a passing wave of the hand by calling these prior observations about the legal mind of Shakespeare as "overblown." Perhaps in the future there will be 50 volumes meant to poke holes in the observations of the legal minds that predated the SAQ so as to make up the difference in ink spilled. The pressure grew as Oxford's background was studied. He was enrolled in Grey's Inn for three years and was expected to sit in judicial deliberation as required by his role as a Great Lord Chamberlain. His knowledge of case law appears in surprising ways such as in Act V Scene 1 of Hamlet where a comedy that amuses the illiterate is combined with an interesting ruling regarding inheritance and suicide law that is aimed at the well educated. The scene is at once both erudite and entertaining.

@@tomditto3972 So erudite that it was to be found in a popular law book of the day that Ben Jonson also used. So erudite that it exactly echoes a coroner's case from Stratford in 1579, where the decedent was named Katherine HAMLETT. So erudite that the only courtroom scene in the entire canon is a complete farce that even gets the law wrong! So erudite that he makes up his own legal term (jointress). Is it the wave of a hand to point out that inheritance and real estate law were both of supreme interest to people of Shakespeare's class? In a county where the monarch had no child and no siblings and had beheaded the closest heir to the throne, do ya think that maybe more than just lawyers had an interest in inheritance? Your 50 books don't actually demonstrate that Shakespeare had a deep understanding of the law. They just say "Here's a pun involving a legal term" and then in good lawyerly fashion going on for several pages explaining the legal concept, without ever demonstrating that Shakespeare had more than a rudimentary grasp of the term. I've pointed all of this out to you before, and whatever else is wrong with your brain, your memory isn't part of it. Therefore, I must conclude that you are intentionally lying when you say it is just a "hand waive"

@@tomditto3972 OH, and wherever Oxford was enrolled, he was back at Cecil House a couple of months later murdering the staff. Maybe they sent him packing for breaking too many windows the way Cambridge did. In 1569 he went with Sussex to Scotland. Where, anywhere in his actual biography, can you demonstrate that De Vere had any knowledge of the law?

@@tomditto3972 When did De Vere ever do any legal contemplation? Lord High Chancellor was an entirely ceremonial position. He was a juror in the Essex trial because an earl is entitled to a jury of one's peers, and De Vere was a literal peer. It was a kangaroo court and De Vere only contemplated the law through lunch before rendering his verdict. Afterward he tried to get a piece of the spoils and failed.

Shakespeare's handwriting is fine. You just can't read Secretary Hand. The 1605 eclipses were both visible in London, and were two weeks apart. The 1598 eclipses were six months apart, which astrologers would have considered to be of no importance. And the Stratford town goverment was paying schoolmasters for the grammar school, yet you think it might not have been open? On the contrary, I expect very little of you if that's what passes for a rebuttal on your part.

@@jeffmeade8643not a good place to go Jeff. 1604 was, by some distance, the brightest star ever witnessed. Where the heck is it ? I'll go back to my independent astronomy source but a total eclipse is more remarkable than two incidental ones, full stop. You really do love this grammar school idea. He's supposedly the greatest of letter writers. Not a single scrap. Bate says this is normal. Anyone who dares question this secretary had nonsense is just rubbished. One ridiculous theory I've been given is Will had Parkinson's, hence the crazy writing. Shall we do Francis Meres, the first third party use of the term and you can do a Shapiro and tell me that it says Oxford and shakes in the same list. This one is my favourite, because it's so simple.

@@T0varisch So you're complaining about what wasn't mentioned but not addressing what was? Typical Anti-Stratfordian. This wasn't a question of "Wow look at that" astronomy. We're taking about astrology. "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us." Astronomical events happen all the time. In an era when Copernican mechanics were relatively new and such events could not be predicted, conjunctions of such events were seen as omens. So yeah, 1604 is a great place to go, for me at least, because your boy was dead when a conjunction of eclipses occurred.

@@T0varisch And yes, I DO like the grammar school idea. Ben Jonson said Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek", which just happens to be what one learns at a grammar school. The works of Shakespeare are heavily influenced by the Latin classics taught in grammar schools, but bear almost no trace of the Greek classics taught at universities. While Shakespeare's father was wealthy enough to have engaged private tutors, I can't imagine why he would have bothered, with such high quality schoolmasters whom he helped select teaching at the local "free" school. I put that in scare quotes because, as an alderman and later high baliff, John Shakespeare was paying the schoolmaster's salary. One was not paid to be an alderman, one paid for the privilege.

@@jeffmeade8643 I don't think you could easily differentiate the two. Kepler's Star was the most significant astronomical event. Kepler's 1609 paper triggered Gallileo. It was Kepler who proved heliocentrism, not Copernicus or Brahe. It may have been the most significant paper in history. It was the first to use logarithms. Still no mention. Have you seen my Ligeti video, I'm sure you'll love it.

Of course you're ready to debate someone you've just decided isn't prepared. Yet you never seem to want to debate people who actually know the score. That's okay. I like picking low-hanging fruit as well. That's why I debate Oxfordians.

@@jeffmeade8643 I'd happily debate James Shapiro, but as you can tel if you've read Winkler's book, he runs away from Oxfordians, which makes sense since he isn't a real scholar. Put up your candidate, but he or she better know more than you do, Coriolanus "under another name.'

@@rstritmatter Sorry, but you wanting to debate Shapiro would be like me wanting a title bout with Conor McGregor. Great for us in terms of publicity, but what's in it for them? You can't even beat the lowly Oxfrauds, and you want a shot at the title?

@@rstritmatter And Winkler's butt-hurt book makes her look like a bully going after an old man, even in her own retelling. Reminds me of that time Michael Moore ambushed Charlton Heston, who was suffering from Alzheimer's. A $30 million movie by one of the most successful filmmakers of the era couldn't save Anti-Stratfordianism from the rubbish heap. You think one more regurgitation of the hypothesis is going to do it?

Of course that must explain Shapiro's cowardice and his lies. Who do you nominate?

And yet when he got a coat of arms from the College of Heralds, it was spelled Shakespeare. And when he was made a King's Man, and when he was deposed in Bellot v Mountjoy. And when he was mentioned in two cast lists by Ben Jonson, and when he got paid for performing a play at court. And when he was asked about a play by the Master of Revels. And when he bought the gatehouse in Blackfriars and...I would say you get the picture but that is unlikely. How anyone spelled his name in an era with no set spelling does not matter a damn.

@@Jeffhowardmeade It was John Shakspere that applied for and received the coat. William succeeded in not having it revoked. Re: the Bellot deposition, It is not clear at all how the clerk spelled the name, but it is not "Shakespeare", but like you said that doesn't matter. The spelling of the signature matters. The signature on the Bellot deposition does not say SHAKESPEARE. It says Shakspey. From the 1612 Mountjoy suit deposition: Willm Shackpey From the 1612 Blackfriars Gatehouse deed: (William) Shakspear From the 1612 Blackfriars mortgage: Wm Shakspea From the 1615 will, page 1: William Shackspere From the will, page 2: Wllm. Shakspere From the will, page 3: (by me William) Shakspear No two of the six signatures was written by the same person. The total available handwriting of Shakespeare doesn't amount two six unmatched signatures - it amounts to zero. But who knows...maybe the handwriting is all hidden in the same place that Edward de Vere's genealogies are to be found.

@@vetstadiumastroturf5756 The coat of arms was granted to John SHAKESPEARE. You're not certain how the clerk in Bellot v Mountjoy spelled Shakespeare's name, but you're sure how it's not spelled. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I PRESENT TO YOU OXFORDIAN SCHOLARSHIP AT ITS FINEST! There isn't a qualified paleographer in the world who agrees with you. Your imaginative deciphering of Shakespeare's handwriting is just one more lie you tell yourself so you don't have to ponder on your failing conspiracy theory.

No evidence exists that most people of the era attended the scores of grammar schools spread across England at the time. Does that mean none did? And his name, as declared in the records of the College of Heralds and the Royal Court was "Shakespeare". Why don't you explain how you came up with the name "Shaksper".

Edward De Vere WAS the poet...of a bunch of bad to mediocre poems. What does that have to do with Shakespeare?

"These may suffice for some Poeticall descriptions of our ancient Poets, if I would come to our time, what a world could I present to you out of Sir Philipp Sidney, Ed. Spencer, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben: Iohnson, Th. Campion, Mich. Drayton, George Chapman, Iohn Marston, William Shakespeare, & other most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages may iustly admire." -- William Camden, Remaines Concerning Britain, 1605. This was the same Camden who defended Shakespeare's right to his family coat of arms a few years earlier.

Was Jonson weak-minded? Is he likely to have forgotten who Shakespeare was by the advanced age of 50?

So Jonson's comments to William Drummond of Hawthornden about Shakespeare that he made in January 1619 were... what? Perhaps I've been ensorceled by the Orthodoxy, but I always thought that April 1616 to January 1619 was less than three years. "That Shakspear wanted Arte." "Sheakspear, in a play, brought in a number of men--saying they had suffered Shipwrack in Bohemia, wher ther is no sea neer by some 100 miles." He may have criticized Shakespeare's geography and want of art, but Jonson was very clear that it was _Shakespeare's_ inaccuracy and artlessness and not anyone else's.

@@Nullifidian First of all, thank you for adding to my vocabulary by your use of the word ensorceled. Once you look a word up, you never forget its meaning. But your reading comprehension impresses me less than your vocabulary. 1619 was NOT during the life of your candidate, and Jonson's remarks did not associate the name "Shakespeare" or "Shake-Speare (the names on the title pages of the plays) with "Shaksper" or "Shagspere," i.e. the Stratford businessman. So you fail to respond to my point. But keep trying.

@@Jeffhowardmeade Exactly! Thank you for supporting my position. Since Camden knew the Stratford family, why did he not, in his description of Stratford in his classic Remaines Concerning Britain, note that England's greatest author hailed from that town. As you note, he was aware that "William Shakespeare" was how the great poet/playwright was known. What a glaring omission!

You are clearly building a equivalent of a mountain range out of what you consider a strong hint of a molehill. Akin to the the famous observation that since we cannot see the surface of Venus, it must be inhabited by dinosaurs.