SHAKSPERE—THE OXFORD ARGUMENTS

From Philosopedia

SHAKSPERE—THE OXFORD ARGUMENTS

Tom Bethell, and others who have argued the Oxford Theory in Harper’s Magazine, April 1999, makes the case that no evidence exists to prove that Shakspere wrote anything at all, “let alone the erudite works of ‘Shakespeare.’ ” Yes, the man found work minding the horses of theatergoers, he became an actor as did his young brother Edmund, but he left London in 1604 at the age of forty and soon thereafter sued a neighbor for a malt debt of 35 shillings. Are we, at the height of his powers, led to suppose that “England’s greatest writer threw down his pen, perhaps in mid-play, and headed back to Warwickshire, preferring the milieu of Stratford’s small-claims court and its conveyance office to literary London [?]. Even his will makes no mention of any literary remains.

Daniel Wright agrees, pointing out that in the early 1780s, the Reverend Dr. James Wilmot, a friend of Dr. Johnson, researched Shakspere and found he had lived a fairly nondescript life, had no major connection to the literary world, and after an uneventful life was buried without ceremony in a grave that failed even to identify its occupant by name. It was an age during which writers anonymously published pamphlets, books, plays, essays, tracts, and other texts including unflattering satires under a pseudonym in order to escape being hauled before the Privy Council (as was Samuel Daniel for his Philotas). Some were imprisoned (as were George Chapman and Ben Jonson for Eastward Ho); others were mutilated (as were John Stubbs, Alexander Leighton, and William Prynne). Some may even have been assassinated (as was, perhaps, Christopher Marlowe). Princeton’s Gerald E. Bentley attests that “the large majority of all English plays before the reign of Elizabeth are anonymous, and even from 1558 to 1590 the authors of most plays are unknown.” For seven years after the Shakespeare plays began to be printed, they were published without any name at all affixed to them. Not until the end of the sixteenth century did any plays begin to appear in print under the name of “William Shake-speare,” a name that Wright points out “might have been adopted by almost any writer who desired to conceal his title, office, or baptismal name yet wished to assert his identity as a playwright.”

Mark K. Anderson points out that Orson Welles and Roger Stritmatter think Oxford wrote the works. Citing Hamlet, he notes that the Prince enacts entire portions of Oxford’s life story: “Oxford’s two military cousins, Horace and Francis Vere, appear as Hamlet’s comrade-at-arms Horatio and the soldier Francisco. Oxford satirizes his guardian and father-in-law, the officious bumbling royal adviser Lord Burghley (nicknamed ‘Polus’), as the officious, bumbling royal adviser Polonius. The parallels between Burghley and Polonius are so vast and detailed that even the staunch Stratfordian A. L. Rowse admitted that ‘there is nothing original’ anymore in asserting this widely recognized connection. Furthermore, like Polonius, Burghley had a daughter.” Anderson thoroughly advances similar “proof” that the details of Oxford’s life, not that of Shakspere, had similarly close connections with “Helena,” “Falstaff,” “King Lear,” and “Prospero.”

Joseph Sobran makes a convincing argument: Oxford was homosexual, had been accused of “buggering boys,” and he did not put his name to the love sonnets, for “no common poet would have dared make amorous advances to an earl, but another earl might.” The reference is to the Earth of Southampton. The Sonnets were published in 1609, five years after Oxford’s death, their cryptic dedication supplied by the publisher, the dedicatee described as “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H.” —the initials, reversed, of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. “By praising the poet in such terms while presuming to dedicate his poems for him,” Sobran continues, “the publisher invites the inference that the real author was no longer able to speak for himself: he was already dead. (William of Stratford still had seven years to live.) The poet’s self-revelations match Oxford and nobody else in Elizabethan England. If the Sonnets and the other works of Shakespeare had been ascribed to Oxford from the start, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would doubt his authorship today.”

Richard F. Whalen, developing the view that Oxford was an excellent writer and had connections with the theatrical world, mentions that research on Oxford has only recently begun, that although it is unlikely “that much more will be found about the Stratford man,” we are left with a choice as to the real author: “The Stratford merchant and theater investor, a simple man of mundane inconsequence? Or the recognized poet, patron of acting companies, and playwright, known at the time to be writing under a pseudonym,; a complex, mercurial nobleman in Queen Elizabeth’s court whose life is mirrored in Shakespeare’s works; a man with direct personal links to the publishers of the First folio? The choice seems obvious.”

(See entry for William Shakespeare.)