The Shakespeare Authorship Question: Snobbery and Wishful Thinking

Shakespeare was a genius. His plots may have been stolen, his knowledge of the worlds about which he wrote flawed and incomplete, but his poetry and his genius as a weaver of narrative threads is unsurpassed, even four hundred years later.

How was it that a provincial glover’s son born in the early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I could rise to such staggering ability and translate his ambition into treasure for all time? How indeed.

This is not a puzzle which has gone unnoticed, and questions swirl around this jobbing actor with a second-rate education. How did he manage, amidst his fellows, to produce such masterpieces again and again?

There are plenty who believe his plays were not actually his, and we have no record that Shakespeare ever himself took credit for their writing in his lifetime, nor does it appear he ever received compensation for their composition, merely for his acting. Fingers have been pointed at other individuals, with more or less plausibility.

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Christopher Marlowe is sometimes suggested as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays, and Marlowe was certainly possessed of a similar genius. The early Shakespeare plays borrow heavily from Marlowe’s plays of the 1580s, and there is much else in common between the two bodies of work.

Of course Marlowe himself was murdered in Deptford in 1593, and Shakespeare would continue to write for fifteen years after his death. For Marlowe to be the true author he would have to have left behind a staggering body of unpublished work for Shakespeare to churn out regularly, including references to current events which had not even happened in Marlowe’s lifetime. Not really likely.

Various other brilliant men of the time, such as Francis Bacon, are routinely proposed as the “real” Shakespeare, for little reason other than their cleverness in other spheres. But there is one other major contender who is perhaps not so easily dismissed.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is the leading candidate for those who refuse to credit Shakespeare himself with his body of work. He was a court poet, a sponsor of acting troupes, and even wrote plays under his own name.

Could he be the real genius behind Shakespeare?

A Condescending View

The short answer is no. The very idea of Oxford as the “real” Shakespeare is heavy on reinterpretation and spotting supposed literary allusions to his role as author, which stretch credulity and skip over many inconvenient facts.

For a start Oxford died in 1604, and here again we have the Marlowe problem, still thoroughly implausible even if smaller in timescale. Shakespeare’s work appears over the course of his own life, not Oxford’s, and he was working as late as 1608: his body of work simply does not fit with anyone else.

There is also more than a whiff of snobbery about Oxford’s candidacy, the suggestion being that such soaring poetry and staggering craft could only come from a member of the aristocracy. Only a noble would have the free time, so the argument goes, and only a noble would have the refinement to write in such a way.

This is rubbish, of course, as the plays themselves will show. Shakespeare may have been a brilliant poet but he was comparatively unschooled in European geography and history, for a start, and his plays are littered with errors on this front. 

He gives Bohemia both a coastline and a desert, he has his characters travel from Verona to Milan by ship. He describes cliffs in Elsinore and billiards in ancient Rome, he finds turkeys in Europe two centuries before Columbus.

The problems even reach into the names of characters as embedded within Shakespeare’s lines. His knowledge appears to be from textbooks, and he would often include classical names in his verse which do not scan unless mispronounced, tying four centuries of theatre directors into knots trying to maintain historical accuracy without torturing the poetry.

Shakespeare’s mistakes are believable for an actor working to churn out plays for his performing partners. A gentleman of leisure such as Oxford, well schooled in classics and as ease to work at his own pace, would not make such errors.

The usual argument for Oxford not revealing himself as the author is also unsupportable. It is suggested that he did so out of modesty, it being unseemly for a nobleman to write in such a way. But of course we know that he did, and openly: the problem is not that Oxford did not write any plays under his own name, but that they did not survive.

Nor was there any doubt about the author of the plays during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The First Folio of his works was published in 1623, seven years after his death, and clearly attributes the plays to the man we know as Shakespeare: no pen name, no room for ambiguity. It would be more than two centuries before anyone questioned his authorship.

His surviving body of work, frankly, is a mess. Most of the high quality versions of his plays can be found in the First Folio (named for its high quality style of binding and intended as an expensive keepsake) including some 18 not found anywhere else. We would not have The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Macbeth or Julius Caesar but for this publication.

But not all Shakespeare’s plays are included. Several plays, such as Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsman were not in the First Folio, and survive in what is known as “quarto” versions. These cheaper and rougher copies were often, amazingly, published from the recollection of one of Shakespeare’s actors, producing a play verbatim for their own sale.

We can even tell which actor may have been responsible in some cases. There is a quarto version of Hamlet, for example, which differs significantly and contains whole sections not in the Folio version. It looks like the actor who played Polonius was behind this one: he gets more of his lines right than those of any other character.

Shakespeare’s body of work does not survive pristine, as one would expect a man of means such as Oxford to ensure were the plays his. We will take what we can get from the Bard of Avon, searching for everything from scraps to whole lost works to this day. 

What we have is what we have been able to piece together, and what we can piece together shows as a body of work which comes from Shakespeare, on top of a mountain of surrounding evidence that he, and no-one else, wrote his plays. The Earl of Oxford may have been a playwright, but no was no Shakespeare.

Header Image: Did Shakespeare write the plays attributed to him? Yes. Source: John Taylor / Public Domain.