Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship

• 1. Introduction

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  The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare. At its heart, it asks a simple but charged question: could the son of a Stratford tradesman really have written some of the greatest works in the English language? The theory has attracted Sigmund Freud, sparked moot court trials, inspired a Hollywood film, and earned the passionate devotion of amateur scholars for more than a century. And yet historians and literary experts reject it, almost without exception.

  How did a theory dismissed by specialists become the most popular alternative to Shakespeare's authorship? What does it claim, what evidence does it lean on, and why do its critics say it fails so decisively? The answers involve forgery allegations, conspiracy theories, a dead earl, a shipwreck in Bermuda, and a Bible held in a Washington library.

• 2. Origins of the Theory

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  J. Thomas Looney launched Oxford's candidacy in his 1920 book Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Before Looney, the first serious challenge to Shakespeare's authorship had appeared in 1857, when Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, proposing a committee headed by Francis Bacon and including Walter Raleigh. De Vere appeared once in that book, buried in a list of "high-born wits and poets". Through the rest of the nineteenth century, Bacon remained the preferred hidden author, and other aristocratic candidates followed, most notably Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.

  Looney changed the terms of the debate. He argued that the known facts of Shakespeare's life did not match the personality he inferred from the plays. He pointed to the absence of records about Shakespeare's education, his allegedly poor handwriting (evidenced by signatures), and what Looney called the "dirt and ignorance" of Stratford. Shakespeare had a petty "acquisitive disposition", Looney said, while the plays celebrated free-spending figures and portrayed middle and lower-class people negatively. Looney also relied on scholars who found evidence that the playwright was an expert in law, widely read in ancient Latin, and able to speak French and Italian.

  Oxford, by contrast, seemed to fit. Looney identified characters in the plays as portraits of Oxford's family and contacts. Hamlet and Bertram from All's Well That Ends Well were, he believed, self-portraits. Oxford's travels to France and Italy, he argued, explain the settings of many plays. And Oxford's death in 1604 lined up, for Looney, with a drop-off in Shakespeare play publications. Looney also introduced the argument that the phrase "ever-living poet" in the 1609 dedication to the Sonnets implied the author was already dead.

• 3. Rise and Stall

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  Freud found Looney's thesis persuasive, and Oxford soon overtook Bacon as the favoured alternative candidate. Looney attracted activist followers who published supplementary books, most notably Percy Allen, Bernard M. Ward, Louis P. Bénézet, and Charles Wisner Barrell. Mainstream scholar Steven W. May later acknowledged that some of these early Oxfordians made genuine contributions to Elizabethan history, citing Ward's biography of the Earl and Barrell's identification of Edward Vere, Oxford's illegitimate son by Anne Vavasour, as examples. In 1921, Looney and others founded The Shakespeare Fellowship to promote these views.

  The movement stalled during and after the Second World War. By 1968 the newsletter of The Shakespeare Oxford Society reported that the missionary spirit of most members was "at a low ebb, dormant, or non-existent". By 1974, membership stood at 80. In 1979, a fresh blow arrived: the Ashbourne portrait, long claimed to show Shakespeare and believed by Barrell to be an overpaint of a portrait of Oxford, turned out to depict neither man, but Hugh Hamersley.

  Charlton Ogburn Jr. was elected president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in 1976 and kick-started a modern revival. He sought publicity through moot court trials, media debates, and television, methods that proved effective at recruiting members of the general public. In 1985 he published his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough. McCullough called the book "brilliant" and described Oxford as "not just plausible but fascinating and wholly believable". Ogburn framed the issue as one of fairness in the post-Watergate atmosphere of conspiracy, using the media to appeal directly to the public over the heads of academics. Richmond Crinkley, the Folger Shakespeare Library's former director of educational programs, acknowledged that doubts over Shakespeare had a "simple, direct plausibility", even as he called Ogburn's thesis "less satisfactory than the unsatisfactory orthodoxy it challenges".

  The Oxfordian theory returned to public attention in late October 2011 with Roland Emmerich's drama film Anonymous. Its distributor, Sony Pictures, advertised the film as presenting a compelling portrait of de Vere as the true author, and commissioned lesson plans for high school and college teachers across the United States.

• 4. The Documentary Case

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  Oxfordian arguments rest on several categories of circumstantial evidence. Theatre connections are prominent among them: Oxford patronised adult and boy acting companies for much of his adult life, and in 1583 he was a leaseholder of the first Blackfriars Theatre in London.

  Family connections also feature heavily. Oxford's mother, Margory Golding, was the sister of the Ovid translator Arthur Golding, and his uncle Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, invented the English or Shakespearian sonnet form. The three dedicatees of Shakespeare's works, the earls of Southampton, Montgomery, and Pembroke, were each proposed at some point as husbands for three of Oxford's daughters. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated to Southampton, and the First Folio was dedicated to Montgomery, who married Susan de Vere, and Pembroke, who was once engaged to Bridget de Vere.

  In the late 1990s, Roger A. Stritmatter studied the marked passages in Oxford's Geneva Bible, now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Bible contains 1,028 instances of underlined words or passages and a few handwritten annotations. Stritmatter believed about a quarter of the marked passages appear in Shakespeare's works as theme, allusion, or quotation. Critics challenged whether any of the markings could reliably be attributed to de Vere rather than the Bible's other owners before the Folger acquired it in 1925, and also questioned the looseness of the standards used to count a Biblical allusion in Shakespeare's works.

  Oxfordians also point to Oxford's annuity. Queen Elizabeth I gave Oxford exactly £1,000 per year beginning in 1586, and a 1662 diary entry by John Ward states that Shakespeare wrote two plays a year "and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year". Documentary evidence, however, indicates the annuity was intended to relieve Oxford's financial difficulties following the ruin of his estate.

• 5. The Death That Divides

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  Edward de Vere died in 1604. The mainstream chronology of Shakespeare's plays places the composition of approximately twelve of them after that date. Columbia University professor James S. Shapiro describes this as the most compelling evidence against the Oxfordian position.

  Oxfordians respond on several fronts. They note that from 1593 through 1603, new Shakespeare plays were published at roughly two per year, and whenever a pirated text appeared, a genuine corrected version typically followed. After the Q1 and Q2 Hamlet in 1603, no new plays appeared until 1608. Mark Anderson observes that "After 1604, the 'newly correcting' and 'augmenting' stops." Oxfordians also note what they call "notable silences": Shakespeare wrote nothing to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the coronation of James I in 1604, the death of Henry, Prince of Wales in 1612, the marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1612, or the investiture of Prince Charles in 1613. Anderson contends that Shakespeare's works engage with scientific discoveries through the end of the sixteenth century but fall silent after de Vere's death, pointing specifically to the absence of any mention of the supernova of October 1604 or Kepler's 1609 study of planetary orbits.

  Professor Jonathan Bate presses a different objection: the plays written after Shakespeare's company began using the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608, such as Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, contain a carefully planned five-act structure that accommodates that indoor venue's need for candle-replacement intervals. The earlier plays lack this structure. If those works were written for the Blackfriars after 1608, they could not have been written by de Vere.

  The most concentrated debate surrounds The Tempest. The play has long been believed to draw on the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture, flagship of the Virginia Company, at Bermuda. The ship was captained by Christopher Newport and carried the fleet's Admiral, Sir George Somers. The survivors spent nine months in Bermuda before most completed the journey to Jamestown on the 23rd of May 1610. One account of the disaster, William Strachey's True Reportory, dated the 15th of July 1610, circulated privately before its eventual publication in 1625, and scholars argue Shakespeare had multiple contacts to the circle among whom the letter circulated. A detailed comparison shows Strachey's account and Sylvester Jordain's A Discovery of the Barmvdas as primary sources, firmly dating The Tempest to after Gates' return to England and before a recorded performance on the 1st of November 1611. Looney simply excluded The Tempest from the Oxfordian canon. Later Oxfordians argued the real-world accounts were themselves based on an earlier version of the play, a position that Alden Vaughan, writing in 2008, called a stretch "to the limits" of credibility.

• 6. Scholars Strike Back

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  David Kathman writes that Oxfordian methods are "subjective and devoid of any evidential value" because they use a "double standard". He argues their arguments "consistently distort and misrepresent the historical record", "neglect to provide necessary context", and include in some cases "outright fabrications".

  The objections extend to the poetry comparisons at the core of the Oxfordian case. Steven W. May, an authority on Oxford's verse, attributes sixteen poems definitively and four possibly to de Vere. May describes Oxford as a "competent, fairly experimental poet working in the established modes of mid-century lyric verse", and in 2004 challenged readers to distinguish his poetry from "the output of his mediocre mid-century contemporaries". C. S. Lewis wrote that de Vere's poetry shows "a faint talent" but is "for the most part undistinguished and verbose."

  The comparison built by Looney ran into a concrete problem: for some of his "most crucial" examples he used six poems mistakenly attributed to Oxford that were actually written by Greene, Campion, and Greville. Louis Bénézet, another early Oxfordian, also used two lines from Greene that he thought were Oxford's. May wrote that this ongoing confusion of Oxford's genuine verse with that of other poets "illustrates the wholesale failure of the basic Oxfordian methodology".

  A computerised textual comparison developed by the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic found that the styles of Shakespeare and Oxford were "light years apart", and put the odds of Oxford having written Shakespeare at lower than those of being struck by lightning. The First Folio shows traces of a dialect identical to Shakespeare's, while Oxford, raised in Essex, spoke an East Anglian dialect. John Shahan and Richard Whalen challenged the Claremont methodology on several grounds, arguing the study had not compared like-with-like samples.

  Mainstream academics have further argued that the entire theory rests on a form of snobbery, rejecting the possibility that the son of a tradesman could produce the works. The Shakespeare Oxford Society called this an ad hominem attack rather than a response to evidence. Shapiro countered that any theory relying on the claim that absence of evidence proves a conspiracy is a logically fatal tautology.

• 7. Variant Theories and Schisms

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  Percy Allen and Bernard M. Ward developed a theory so extreme that Looney himself distanced himself from it in a 1933 letter, warning that their views respecting Oxford and Queen Elizabeth were "extravagant and improbable" and likely to "bring the whole cause into ridicule". Allen and Ward had concluded that Elizabeth and Oxford were lovers who had conceived a child. Allen developed this in his 1934 book Anne Cecil, Elizabeth and Oxford, arguing the child was given the name William Hughes, who became an actor under the stage name "William Shakespeare". Allen later revised his view and decided the concealed child was the Earl of Southampton, dedicatee of Shakespeare's narrative poems.

  Paul Streitz, in Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I (2001), pressed the theory even further, arguing that Oxford himself was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth by her stepfather, Thomas Seymour, making Oxford the half-brother of his own son by the queen. Streitz also credited Oxford with authorship of the Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

  Two professors of linguistics claimed de Vere wrote most of what is memorable in English literature during his lifetime, with names including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, George Peele, George Gascoigne, Raphael Holinshed, Robert Greene, Thomas Phaer, and Arthur Golding serving as dozens of further pseudonyms. In his 1921 edition of de Vere's poetry, Looney himself had already suggested de Vere was responsible for some works credited to Arthur Golding, Anthony Munday, and John Lyly.

  Even within the more restrained mainstream of Oxfordianism, group theories have been common. Looney was willing to concede that Oxford may have been assisted by his son-in-law William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, who perhaps wrote The Tempest. B. M. Ward also suggested Oxford and Derby worked together, and group theories with Oxford as a creative "master mind" appeared in Gilbert Standen's Shakespeare Authorship (1930), Gilbert Slater's Seven Shakespeares (1931), and Montagu William Douglas's Lord Oxford and the Shakespeare Group (1952).