#oxfordians

[shakespearenews]

Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi Set for 1-Night-Only Performance of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis

The evening will benefit London's Marylebone Theatre.

[everybody-dies-at-least-once]

I said whoever subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, your mom's a hoe

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

For my Shakespeare peeps!

[his-quietus-make]

It needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment - actually all of it, every bit - involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. [I]n the normally unimpeachable History Today, William D. Rubinstein, a professor at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, stated in the opening paragraph of his anti-Shakespeare survey: 'Of the seventy-five known contemporary documents in which Shakespeare is named, not one concerns his career as an author.' That is not even close to being so. In the Master of Revels' accounts for 1604-5 - that is, the record of plays performed before the King, about as official a record as a record can be - Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on the title pages as the author of the sonnets and in the dedications of the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. He is named as author on several quarto editions of his plays, by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia, and (allusively but unmistakably) by Robert Greene in the Groats-worth of Wit. John Webster identifies him as one of the great playwrights of the age in his preface to The White Devil. The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.

Shakespeare - Bill Bryson

[shakespearenews]

It Is Long Past Time to Retire the Oldest, Dumbest Debate in Literary History

Shakespeare truthers poison the discourse, just like every other kind of conspiracy theorist.

...Will in the World is a bestseller, and award-bedecked, and if you wish to learn about England during the life of Shakespeare, it’s not a bad place to start. But in terms of the Bard himself, the book is a house of cards in which every leaning laminated rectangle is printed with the word “maybe.”

...Waugh’s case relies less on doubt about chronology and more on what he believes to be coded references to Shakespeare being Oxford. These tend toward Dan Brown territory very quickly. According to Waugh, if you look at the famous portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio, you will see a “bright light on the forehead and the great rays coming out from his collar,” which must be references to the “great Phoebus-Apollo, the patron god, hiding behind the mask of a player.” That patron must be Oxford because he was often referred to as Apollo. 

[shakespiracymystery-blog]

The authorship question

The Shakespearean plays, poems and other works are nowadays an important part of our culture and still touch many people. But one question, the reason of many debates for over 150 years, remains: was William Shakespeare, son of a glove-maker, the real author?

This question first occurred in the middle of the 19th century when people began to worship Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all times and also developed an interest in his biography. However, they then noticed some aspects which did not always fit the author they had in mind. Because of that, some started to assume that he was not the one who really had written all the works but rather some of the aristocrats of Shakespeare’s time such as Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley and Sir Francis Bacon.

The aspects Shakespeare’s biography contains and make people doubt his authorship are the following: To begin with, he was son of a glove maker whose ancestors and descendants were illiterate and who only received an elementary school education. In addition to that, there is not a single letter found written by him or anything else. The things he left behind at his death in 1616 did not contain any books or other written material and there was not a single manuscript found written by his own hand. 

The most popular alternative Shakespeare authorship theory is called the “Oxfordian theory”. It presents Edward de Vere,17th earl of Oxford, as the true author. This theory relies heavily on the biography of both men for many aspects of Edward de Vere’s biography seem to be more coherent with the events in Shakespeare’s works. The places Shakespeare’s plays are located fit his travels. Many of them are located in Italy and Edward de Vere is proven to have lived in Venice and to have traveled Italy for one year. Moreover, in de Vere’s bible several passages and words had been marked by him. These can often be found in the shakespearean works as either a theme, allusion or quotation. Still, there are some arguments against this theory such as his date of death. De Vere died in 1604 and after that date, the publications have not stopped. 

Argumentations for William Shakespeare as the real author rely mostly on history. The shakespearean plays were performed by William Shakespeare himself together with his acting group and only by them. Moreover, the most evident of all arguments is of course the signature below all of his works which states William Shakespeare as the true author. The people supporting this belief call themselves “Stratfordians”.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question

https://heyprof.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/oxfordian-theory-of-shakespeare-authorship.pdf

Pathway advanced

http://mymodernmet.com/was-shakespeare-a-fraud/

[hamletthedane]

So apparently the prof I work for once pissed off an Oxfordian academic society, so now they send her a passive-aggressive fruit basket every year with various Oxfordian paraphernalia and journals

[megaparsecs]

like friends i think sometimes it sounds like exaggeration when i (or any of the other fine stratfordians on this site) say "the oxfordian theory is lit. just classist bullshit" but the first person who really put forward the case for oxford, j. thomas looney, in his book shakespeare identified, actually says ---

“There is a frequent assumption that the possession of what we call genius renders its owner capable of doing almost anything. Now William Shakespere [his spelling not mine] is the one stock illustration of this contention. In all other cases, where the whole of the circumstances are well known, we may connect the achievements of a genius with what may be called the external accidents of his life. Though social environment is not the source of genius, it certainly has always determined the forms in which the faculty has clothed itself, and even the particular direction which its energies have taken: and in no other class of work are the products of genius so moulded by social pressure, and even by class relationships, as in works involving the artistic use of the mother tongue. To what extent the possession of abnormal powers may enable a man to triumph over circumstances no one can say; and if a given mind working under specified conditions is actually proved to have produced something totally unexpected and at variance with the conditions, we can only accept the phenomenon, however inexplicable it may appear. It is not thus, however, that genius usually manifests itself; and, failing conclusive proof, a vast disparity or incompatibility between the man and the work must always justify a measure of doubt as to the genuineness of his pretensions and make us cast about for a more likely agent. 

Now no one is likely ever to question the reality or the vastness of ’Shakespeare’s’ genius. If he had enjoyed every advantage of education, travel, leisure, social position and wealth, his plays would still remain for all time the testimony to his marvelous powers: though naturally not such stupendous powers as would have been required to produce the same results without the advantages. Consequently, if we regard the authorship as an open question we shall be much more disposed to look for the author amongst those who possessed some or all of those advantages than amongst those who possessed none of them.” (73-74) 

he then goes on to argue for a "scientific" search for an author -- for erasing shakespeare and starting with a blank slate, and systematically using the plays as ways to look for connections and commonalities and similarities towards The Right Sort of Elizabethan/Jacobean Man, the Right Sort of Englishman.

The Oxfordian theory is actually and literally predicated entirely on the assumption that someone of lower birth could not write Shakespeare's works, it is literally a theory that is not created out of people noticing over the years connections between de Vere and Shakespeare and de Vere's writings and Shakespeare's writings but instead from a desperate comparison of the aspects of Shakespeare's writings (and the assumed character of Shakespeare, which Looney goes on to lay out) with the eligible men of that era. They developed their criteria for a genius, then found the earl to fill it. He had to invent conspiracies to make de Vere fit, but by God he was not going to let some middle class fucker from Stratford be The Englishman (which, he repeatedly states in earlier chapters, is what Shakespeare is destined to become -- the English person whose legacy will be most remembered). 

Other theories of authorship are silly, classist, nonsensical, and rooted in an utter lack of fact, but none are -- i think -- as systematically and as purposefully rooted in the rejection of a lower (or middle) class Genius Above All The Rest. Baconians are still classist but entirely laughable and the argument seems to spring up more organically, Marlovians at least have the decency to come about their conspiracy theories honestly, but Oxfordians are gross. They are gross. It is gross.