April 23, the 400th commemoration of the death of William Shakespeare, was a moment decorated by choruses declaring, “No, it wasn’t Will who wrote all that amazing stuff!” It was one — or two — or many other, candidates, dreamers say. Not Will.
There emerged a number of candidates for the English language’s king scribbler. Most popular with those who shun Will Shakespeare is an unlikely guy with money problems flourishing the bouncy moniker of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Grandly known by rigid fans, the Oxfordian Theory of Shakespearian Authorship emerges.
A scholarly-seeming assertion. And wrong by several years. To say nothing of a world-full of misplaced money management. Also, the Earl kneeled over in 1604. Shakespeare didn’t put down his pen until 1616, age 52. Still young for a wordslinger even at that time.
Contemporary critics praised De Vere-Oxford as a poet and playwright. Example: William Webbe named Oxford as “the most excellent” of Queen Elizabeth’s courtier poets. Such critics said that “highest praise” should be given to Oxford and Richard Edwardes for “Comedy and Enterlude.” Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia (1598) names Oxford the first of 17 playwrights who were “the best for comedy amongst us.” And Oxford appears first on a list of seven Elizabethan courtly poets “who honoured Poesie with their pens and practice” in a 1622 doctrine, “The Compleat Gentleman.”
“So he that takes the path to pen the book\ Reaps not the gifts of goodly golden muse;\ But those gain that, who on the work will look,\ And from the sour the sweet by skill doth choose,\ For he that beats the bush the bird not gets, But who sits still and holdeth fast the nets.”
C.S. Lewis was to write that De Vere’s poetry “shows a faint talent”, but is “for the most part undistinguished and verbose.”
Other candidates crowding to take Shakespeare’s place included friends Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. Kit Marlowe, in problems with authorities, was to fake his death in a 1593 bar-room brawl. Then he was to escape to Italy. He was killed before the plot took place.
Even Queen Elizabeth — unable to make her work public under her royal name because of her gender and position — did write some (quite mediocre) poetry.
Basic inquiry lurked behind this tangle. It dealt with how Shakespeare learned all he had to know about national and international complexities and wide-ranging behavior that populated the world...shaping his characters, providing them the complicity to deal with the demanding world they faced.
Shakespeare had little formal education. The education he did receive was offered by the village school of Stratford-Upon-Avon. His parents are considered illiterate. Many scholars still consider it difficult to explain how he was able to attain knowledge of the Queen’s courtly life, the art of sailing, matters of history, the problems of rhetoric, deftness in a cluster of languages. These are the reasons many questioned Shakespeare’s authorship: how could one man, the son of a glove-maker, who never went to university, manage to write a Prince Harry or an Anthony.
Interestingly, this argument is never brought against Ben Jonson, son of a brick-maker who somehow managed to be the most popular playwright of his time and wrote the erudite “The Alchemist and Volpone.” And he went on to gain a high reputation for his command of classical literature. Jonson, Shakespeare’s close friend, is a good example of how Elizabethan education differed from modern schooling.
Oddly, the argument that one needed to be a courtier to write convincingly about court life is never used against John Webster. Son of a merchant tailor, he nonetheless managed to compose effective dialogues about Italian courtiers in his plays The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.
It has been argued, even before the authorship question, that virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays are set among the upper classes, and seemingly most often written from that class’ point of view. Anti-Stratfordians also assert that the upper-class characters are more fully fleshed, and seem to have a greater touch of realism about them, while the lower class characters are more thinly drawn, with names such as Bullcalf, Bottom, Wart, or Shadow. In this argument, the lower classes are simpletons when in small groups. In large groups they are portrayed as an angry or dangerous mob — clearly an upper class concept.
This purely subjective view is opposed by Stratfordians and even those Anti-Stratfordians who argue for another lower-class author, such as Marlowe. This opposition points to deeply complex lower-life characters, such as Falstaff (Henry IV Parts One and Two, The Merry Wives of Windsor) or sympathetic lower-class characters, such as Twelfth Night’s Feste. In any case, Shakespeare was from a (thinly) propertied middle-class background, similar to Jonson.
As for the distinctly royal and rich trend of the plays’ subjects, it has always been true that writers have been fascinated by the high drama of the lives of the rich and powerful.
While a number of academics agree that Edward De Vere’s poetry was better than the Sir Francis Bacon’s, few believe it is close to proving De Vere wrote any of the 154 sonnets authored by Shakespeare, as some claim.
Keen-eyed contemporary observers clearly exaggerated De Vere’s talent in deference to his rank. By any measure, his poems pale in comparison with those of Jonson, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Donne.
De Vere’s known poems are “astonishingly uneven” in quality, ranging from the “fine” to “execrable,” said Steven W. May lauding De Vere as an Elizabethan era peer and courtier. May wrote De Vere was Elizabeth’s “first truly prestigious courtier poet...[whose] precedent did at least confer genuine respectability.” But just barely...for a few.