SHAKESPEARE, SHAKE-SPEARE, SHAKSPERE

From Philosopedia

SHAKESPEARE, SHAKE-SPEARE, SHAKSPERE

Doubt continues as to the authorship of the greatest dramatic pieces and works in the English language—e.g., Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, the Sonnets, and others.

• Baconian Theory holds that the son of a Warwickshire husbandman would not likely have had the skill to write such magnificent works, whereas Francis Bacon (1561-1626) did. Doubters think such a view sounds like social snobbery.

• Oxfordian Theory holds that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550-1604), wrote some or all of the plays. T. J. Looney identified him in 1920, but doubters call his theory “looney.”

• John Fletcher (1570-1625) is thought to have been the collaborator on Henry VIII, Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the latter work which may have derived in part from a 1613 masque by Sir Francis Beaumont (1584-1616).

• Stratfordian Theory holds that William Shakspere (1564-1616 was the author. Charles Chaplin in My Autobiography (1964) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in a letter to Arnold Zweig (2 April 1937) are just two of many who do not think so. Henry James (1843-1916) wrote in a letter to Violet Hunt (26 August 1903) that he found it “almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.”

• Harper’s Magazine (April 1999), which describes the viewpoints:

• The Oxfordian Theory was advanced by Mark K. Anderson, author of Prospero’s Bible: The Secret History and Spiritual Biography of the Man who was “Shake-speare”; Tom Bethell, author of The Noblest Triumph; Joseph Sobran, author of Alias Shakespeare; Richard F. Whalen, author of Shakespeare: Who Was He?”, and Daniel Wright, co-patron with Sir Derek Jacobi of the De Vere Society of Great Britain.
• The Stratfordian Theory was advanced by Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare; Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; Marjorie Garber, author of Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers; Irvin Matus, author of Shakespeare, in Fact; and Gail Kern Paster, editor of The Shakespeare Quarterly.

To deal with the problem in a scholarly way, many use the following approach:

• Shakespeare refers to whoever really was the author of the greatest dramatic pieces and work in the English language (whether or not we ever determine for sure who wrote them.
• Shake-speare refers to Roger Stritmatter’s research, which indicates that the pen name for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), was Shakespeare, that he wrote under that name because as an earl he could not risk using his own name, and that he was the actual author of most if not all the works ascribed to William Shakspere. Stritmatter, in an eight-year study of an annotation by de Vere of the Bible, found that more than a quarter of the 1,066 annotations and marked passages in the de Vere work appear in Shake-speare. The parallels range from the thematic—sharing a motif, idea, or trope—to the verbal—using names, phrases, or wordings that suggest a specific biblical passage. Stritmatter found the correlation between Shake-speare’s favorite biblical verses and de Vere’s Bible is high: .439 compared with .054, .068, and .020 for Spenser, Marlowe, and Bacon.
• Shakspere"" refers to William Shakspere (1564-1616), whom most have come to think, perhaps erroneously, wrote the works.

The Chandos Portrait (named for the Duke of Chandos), attributed to John Taylor

What did the playwright look like? The Flower Portrait by an unknown artist was not painted until the 1820s. A portrait by Gerard Soest (who died in 1681) was not painted until the mid-17th century. A Grafton portrait bears a 1588 date. A Sanders portrait bears a 1603 date. A Gheerart Janssen prtrait bears a 1610 date (but may have been completed between 1616 and 1623). A Chandos portrait is dated c. 1600-1610. A March through May 2006 exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery showed the six oils, which are most frequently said to portray Shakespeare. Tarnya Cooper, the gallery's curator for 16th-century painting, concludes that the Chandos portrait is the strongest contender, although "It's not absolutely watertight, but the evidence has increased. It is a portrait that probably represents Shakespeare."

(See James Shapiro's Contested Will:Who Wrote Shakespeare?. The 2010 book continues his 2005 study about claims that Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, and Christopher Marlowe may have written parts of Shakespeare's works.)