#Stratfordian Theory

[vaguely-concerned]

after all these years of listening to his voice my nicholas boulton radar is so powerful that I clocked him one sentence into his role in this radio play adaptation of lady windemere's fan (he plays cecil graham and I'm fairly sure it's the naxos production, for anyone who might be interested! martin sheen is also in it as darlington and does a great job)

[secondjulia]

A recurring question

Hob, is that another anti-Stratfordian tract in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Fuck you. It's an anti-Stratfordian tract and I'm happy to see you!

[cto10121]

Reading Stalking Shakespeare by Lee Durkee and it’s a gift that keeps on giving

[thealogie]

Binge watching so much Shakespeare recently I now understand why people are making up anti-stratfordian conspiracy theories. Yes I know the conspiracy theories are classist but on another level I think it’s just that bitches mad that a single human being could do all that in the span of a single 52 year old lifetime.

[dnickels]

Academia has certain time-honoured rites of passage: defending your PhD, speaking at your first conference and going on strike. But for Shakespeareans, there’s a special baptism of ire: being shouted at online by a middle-aged software developer from Washington, D.C. In the field, the joke goes that you’re not a true Shakespearean unless you’ve received dog’s abuse from Alan Tarica, a staunch ‘anti-Stratfordian’ convinced William Shakespeare didn’t write any Shakespeare. [...] When Jonn Elledge, author of Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them (2022), ignored his emails, Tarica informed him: ‘[It] probably never occurred to you that you are actually an imbecile.’ ‘Because obviously,’ Tarica went on, ‘I’m “crazed” and I thought it would be thoughtful to let you know privately that one day I’m going to publicly excoriate useless, naive, semi-literate dipshits like you.’ ‘Dear Dipshit,’ another email to Elledge began, ‘you just have no concept of what a clueless dumb fuck you are. Which makes you an insanely clueless dumb fuck.’ You have to laugh at his commitment to profanity, finished up with an anodyne: ‘Best, Alan’.

[altocat]

Sorry for my ignorance but, what is Stratfordian?

An Anti-Stratfordian is basically someone who doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote all his plays. There's a science to it, and I'm not sure whether it's true or not. Honestly, I don't really think about it!

My mom studies Shakespeare as a hobby and is on the fence herself. There are some theories that hold weight and others that don't. I guess it all comes down to personal opinion.

[regallibellbright]

Bro: Yeah I ended up on Shakespeare Tiktok looking at the page of a teacher who was talking about how we know more about

Bro: *Looks at my beloved, bright green “Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays” tee shirt, the back of which lists several of the most common anti-Stratfordian candidates as a checklist with “Conspiracy theories” stamped overtop* I think it was the Earl of Essex?

Me: Yeah he’s a common one.

This is not an uncommon happening at 1 AM in our household, nor is it uncommon for us to then end up talking for like two hours about Shakespeare and pedagogy or something like that.

I’m gonna miss him when he moves out.

[semper-legens]

37. Contested Will, by James Shapiro

Owned: No, library Page count: 316 My summary: The Shakespeare authorship question, as told by someone who doesn’t believe in it. Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? (Yes.) Or were his plays written by someone else, like Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford? (No.) Find out the thrilling answer! (It was Shakespeare.) My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Ah, the Shakespeare authorship question. One that can be answered very simply. Did William Shakespeare write all the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Yes. Yes, he did. He did do that. Despite its ridiculousness, I've long been fascinated by the Shakespeare authorship question and exactly how it came about. After all, we've got no evidence that anyone doubted that Shakespeare wrote his plays at the time; it's only a few hundred years later that people began to doubt. And their evidence for that is...scant. Basically, the argument boils down to this - how could Willian Shakespeare, a glover's son from Stratford who was not university educated, write these plays that are obviously such proof of divine genius? How could he have knowledge of far-off locales, the workings of high society, falconry, history? Basically, in the immortal words of Kyle Kalgren, how can art if not posh?

The answer to this is obvious, of course. William Shakespeare was a writer, and came up with these ideas out of his imagination. Or he was adapting older, pre-existing stories. This talk of Shakespeare having intricate knowledge of subjects outside a glover's son's remit is muddied by his mistakes - he seemed to think clocks existed in Ancient Rome, Bohemia has a coastline, and gunpowder existed in Ancient Greece. Add that to the fact that Shakespeare worked in noble houses and had access to books about other places and experiences, and you explain how he could namedrop such details. That, and the fact that he was educated - not university educated, but there was a free grammar school in Stratford that would have taught the young Shakespeare Greek and Latin. Part of this misconception, of course, is our fault. As modern readers, we have a habit of mythologising Shakespeare's plays, to the point where we assume everything he wrote was a Work Of Pure Genius. And that then leads to the idea that only someone of noble blood could have possibly written such a work, with proponents of the idea bending over backwards to justify how a particular nobleman, usually Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, could have written all of the plays. Despite, in de Vere's case, having died before Shakespeare stopped writing.

Anyway, this book is a great overview of the 'anti-Stratfordian' movement, and the motives behind it. People just really wanna read conspiracy into everything, huh. The most ludicrous of the claims is that de Vere, as well as writing from beyond the grave, was the bastard child of the Queen who then fathered another bastard child, who was the real Prince Tudor who could have carried on the lineage. Which is of course simpler than 'some guy wrote some plays that people decided were good'. The why of this conspiracy is really what I was interested in, and this book certainly delivers. Shapiro delivers a pretty fair look at the concept, not shying away from debunking the claims of the movement, but also delving into what those claims actually are, as well as laying out a compelling case that Shakespeare did, in fact, write the works of William Shakespeare. It's certainly satisfied my itch for this particular conspiracy theory! I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested.

Next up - come on grab your friends, again!

[grandhotelabyss]

If it's so obvious, then why did this idea have to wait until the early 20th century, when a utopian socialist who idealized the Middle Ages devised it? Why didn't it occur to Johnson or Hazlitt or Coleridge? Why did anti-Stratfordianism only arise in the late 19th century in a literary culture that for various post-Industrial-Revolution reasons didn't want "the Bard" to have been a litigious capitalist? Why was its first manifestation, the Francis Bacon thesis, the ideological opposite of Oxfordianism, presenting a republican rather than an aristocratic "Shakespeare"? (See my larger critique of the Oxfordians here.)

Perhaps my least favorite feature of Oxfordianism, though, is the way it replicates on the margin of intellectual respectability the assumptions of the most boring "official" criticism: a dull, pedantic, antiquarian historicism that chains the plays down in their own era with no account of the retrocausality of influence discussed earlier on here, with no sense that, as Žižek once said, and I freely quote from an old Tweet, "There is more truth in the later efficacy of a text, in the series of its subsequent readings, than in its supposedly original meaning."

Shakespeare, as Borges said, is "everyone and no one," which is why, on the symbolic-poetic rather than the literal-historical level, the obscure and inauspicious man from Stratford makes the better avatar of that particular genius.

(As for National Book Critics Circle nominee Isaac Butler, I knew him slightly. We were in graduate school at the University of Minnesota at the same time. Once, in a bar upstairs of which the young Bob Dylan had briefly lived, we had a friendly quarrel about the film A Dangerous Method. He said a film about Freud should have a sexual subtext, which Cronenberg's film, though superficially erotic, plainly lacked. I replied that, since we as a society no longer repress sex, a sexual subtext would be supererogatory, and that the film's repressed subtext was a more controversial topic for us: Zionism. Then we traded Alan Moore impersonations. See, isn't court gossip fun? In retrospect, Isaac and I should have spent that time devising a theory that the works of Bob Dylan were actually written by Nelson Rockefeller Jr. or perhaps Marvin Bush.)

[julianworker]

The Edward de Vere Society (EdVS)

This is an extract from the book 40 Strange Groups which is currently on sale for 99p The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. It is recognized by Oxfordians and Stratfordians alike that writing about royal courts, Italy and law required a certain prerequisite level of…

[skitterjitter]

I cannot express how much I hate anti-Stratfordian theories on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. It feels too much like contemporary conspiracy theories and I hate them even more

[cesium-sheep]

seven shakespeares is hella dumb. it goes hard on the anti-stratfordian theory, claiming he's been given credit for poems written by........... a prophetic chinese immigrant who was an attempted sacrifice by her community, and taught herself english in a month. we spend 11 of the first 12 chapters learning about her. it's stupid and it sucks and I hate it, but at least I made it thru the whole first omnibus which is not something I can say for every manga I've hated, and at least it was free.

contains depictions of violent familial abuse, including trauma flashbacks, a literal racist hate mob, as well as several non-racist hate mobs, and a threat to human traffic a non-english speaker for the crime of not speaking english. also a disabled family member who was probably an asshole before he was disabled but just feels like a really unpleasant inclusion.

[farawayeyes4]

The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence That Some Author Other Than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him by William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman.

This book examines in exquisite and rational detail why and how every cipher (most often attributed to Francis Bacon) applied to the Works of William Shakespeare is invalid and null. The Friedmans were top cryptoanalysts in their day. Elizebeth Friedman is famous for being the codebreaker that decrypted Al Capone’s messages and less famous for being the cryptanalyst that broke the Nazi spyring in South America during World War II. Her husband, William Friedman worked for the government as a cryptanalyst and worked on Nazi spyrings in Europe. This book, written after the War, examines the cryptography often ascribed through the centuries to disprove Shakespeare’s authorship. They meticulously explain, provide historical reference, test, and debunk each method deployed by what they call Baconians who favor Francis Bacon as author of the Works. They delve into printing practices of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, also proving the ciphers used to be false. It is highly readable and understandable. The oddest elements of theories they debunk have more to do with who Baconians believe Francis Bacon to be and less to do with their belief in authorship of the plays, although that is intertwined into it. The Friedmans detail and address the ciphers also commonly believed to be hidden within the Works by Baconians that detail the parentage of Bacon. They believe, with no evidence whatsoever, that Francis Bacon was the product of a love affair between Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Not only is he royal, there’s evidence that he’s also the half brother of Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex and that the Earl conspired with the Queen to kill Dudley, their father while he was his own mother’s lover. That Baconians believe these notions makes the entire cipher element all the more implausible in its presentation. For the question of authorship and the examination in my book chapter, none of this is really relevant to the question save to be a counter to a documentary that relies on the very ciphers debunked heavily by the Friedmans nearly 60 years before the documentary was produced. In the end, it should not matter who wrote the Works of Shakespeare. After all, they still exist no matter what name is slapped on it. Rather, it matters most to those who have divided themselves into the camps of Baconians or Stratfordians. Personally, I find the cipher to be beyond ridiculous not because I believe that strongly in Shakespeare’s authorship, rather it’s because it is so beyond over complicated. Is it not simple enough that Shakespeare is Shakespeare and wasting precious time pouring over text to dig up some wild cipher to prove otherwise is just silly? And why Francis Bacon (who Baconians also believe wrote all of Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, and a handful of other notable Elizabethan authors on top of his own works)? It just seems tedious when one thinks it through, and it is clear by the end of the book that the Friedmands have found the exercise just so.

[cto10121]

You mentioned in the tags of one of your posts on Mercutio's (non-existant) sexuality that you're partial to the idea that he may have been inspired by Kit Marlowe; I want to hear all about this lol.

Also, do you have an Marlowe recommendations? I've heard good things so I would like to read some of his plays.

Oh, yeah, my Christopher-Marlowe-may-have-been-the-inspiration-for-Mercutio theory! Glad to talk about it.

So I’m definitely not the only one with this theory—some scholars have mused as much and I did come across them. But the case for Mercutio-as-Marlowe stands roughly as follows:

One of Marlowe’s nicknames was Mercury (!!). Now, Shakespeare clearly did not come up with the name, as he got it from his source material in Brooke et al. But as the Mercutio there was just some random courtier, I have no doubt that Shakespeare got an eyeful of that name in the Brooke poem and just 😏 and seized that golden opportunity to honor his friend in this way

By all accounts Marlowe was charming, erudite, intellectually edgy (an avowed Arianist and homosexual), with a nasty bit of a temper. Mercutio is much along those same lines

Marlowe and Shakespeare may have been friends as well as theater rivals, with similar backgrounds but (I suspect) opposite personalities and sensibilities—the iconoclastic Marlowe with the much milder Shakespeare. You see that same push-pull dynamic in Romeo and Mercutio’s relationship.

Mercutio was killed during his duel with Tybalt. Marlowe was killed while fighting with his fellow spies at a tavern/government safehouse in Deptford. So Shakespeare making Mercutio’s death off-stage may be a reference to Marlowe’s out-of-London death (and perhaps how Will came to find out).

So yeah, not much evidence, come to think of it. Just general vibes. Mercutio does have lines about dreams that are a reference to Thomas Nash, who was also friends with Marlowe and perhaps Shakespeare as well. But of course Shakespeare would make Mercutio a composite of his friends and not just limit himself to any ~one thing.

Against this is the fact that there is no clear evidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe knew each other. That said, the theater world was tiny and Marlowe wrote for Strange’s Men; Shakespeare may have been a player for them at the time. But it’s logical for many fangirls scholars to believe they knew each other and were friends/rivals and so forth.

As for recommendations, I’ve only ever read Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which even got a Globe performance, and his Hero and Leander, a narrative poem along the lines of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. I’m ashamed to admit that in class I mistook a passage from Hero for Shakespeare’s, an ignominy that will live in me forever until my dying breath.

But while Marlowe was never as great at character as Shakespeare, his verse was very good (if a little too regular with the masculine endings) and nigh indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s in the beginning. Also, Marlowe is 1000x gayer, even writing about Edward II and his forbidden romance with his favorite Gaveston. Hence his popularity in fangirl circles. If you like Shakespeare but feel he could have been more violent, political, and gay, Marlowe will be right up your alley. There have been tons of fanfiction about him, some notable ones of which are:

The Marlowe Papers (Barber)—author is a stupid anti-Stratfordian, but her verse is legit

A Tip for the Hangman (Epstein)—not feeling the main romance, but it was fun and well-researched

The Secret Life of Shakespeare (Morgan)—actually focusing on Will/Anne, but this version of Marlowe is my favorite. He is just as I’ve envisioned him

[ladymetroland]

I'm not an anti-stratfordian but i do subscribe to the equally controversial 'two taras' theory of my immortal authorship

[fakespeare1616]

Who wrote Shakespeares plays?

And did he even lived? There are many different answers to these questions.

There are three main theories that I know. Every single theory is a anti-stratfordian theory. So the Shakespeare that everyone used to know was born in Stratford that's why these theory's which say that Shakespeare didn't wrote his plays are called anti-stratfordian theory.

One of these relies on „Shakespeares" complex language, that's why it says that the earl of oxford wrote all this plays and poems. These people who believe in this theory are called oxfordians. But there are the marlowens as well. They used to think that Christopher Marlowe, who lived at the same time as „Shakespeare" faked his death and continued his life as William Shakespeare. He faked this whole identity and started writing poems and plays. Most of these theories were very popular in the 19th century, but they were known till today as well. The politician Edwin Durning published his book „Shakespeare is Bacon" in the year 1910 in which he wrote about the author Francis Bacon, who lived nearly at the same time as „Shakespeare". So did he wrote everything know?

To sum everything up, there is no direct answer to this question. There is just one possibility now to satisfy your conscience. Believe what you think is the most realistic.

Julius

Sources: https://literaturen.net/hat-

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